Greenwood the Great

The features shown on this map reflect the appearance of the forest at the end of the Third Age, though in fact several of these features did not appear until after the name Mirkwood became more generally used. (We have no canonical map for the appearance of the Greenwood during this earlier period.)

Most notably, the fortress of Dol Guldur did not exist at this earlier time, and indeed it was Sauron's settlement on Amon Lanc that drove many of the later changes (notably giving rise to the forest's new name of Mirkwood). The Elves of the Wood had at one time lived as far southward as Amon Lanc itself, but Sauron's growing power caused them to move northward. Even by the time Sauron came to the forest, they had already removed as far as the Mountains of Mirkwood, and they would move their realm further north still to its more familiar location in the far northeast.

It was in the years after Sauron's arrival that the Northmen of Rhovanion began their work cutting the trees in earnest. In the time when the forest was still known as Greenwood the Great, there would have been no East Bight (or, at least, it would have been much less pronounced). What's more, the Dwarves would not arrive at Erebor for several centuries, so there was no Dwarf-kingdom beneath the Lonely Mountain (nor a township at Dale) during the times of Greenwood the Great.