Enchanted Stream
 

Remember the Enchanted Stream in Mirkwood? Bombur fell into it and slept quite a long time due to the enchantment. My question is was it ever explained anywhere why it was enchanted and who caused it? I can't seem to find and reference about it.

It may have been a defense mechanism of the Elves. But, that's just an uneducated and probably unlikely guess.
However, I'd be willing to bet that the stream being enchanted has something to do with the Elves though. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

The other possibilty is that the enchantment of the stream had something to do with Dol Guldur. Remember, Sauron was living in the south of Mirkwood at the time of The Hobbit.

I would say that it is likely that the enchanted stream was a river running north from Dol Guldur. If you remember, Dol Guldur is built on high land in the south portion of Mirkwood. So it makes sense that a stream would form flowing from South to North cutting along the elves path through the forest.

Why the stream makes you fall asleep, I dont know exactly for sure. But it is because of Dol Guldur I would say.

Umm, no. The Enchanted River springs up in the Mountains of Mirkwood, and hence is never anywhere near Dol Guldur.

I think it most likely that the Forest Stream enchantment had it source with the woodelves. The whole time Bombur was under its spell he 'slept on with a smile on his fat face.' When he awoke he described having dreams of singing and feasting in the forest with a Woodland King. I don't think any enchantment of the Necromancer would have been in any way pleasant.

Yes, I beleive you are both right. My theory was a little stupid now that I think of it.

Just to pose the question though, why would the elves want to make a seemingly evil stream. Beorn or Gandalf warns never to touch the black stream. Obviously it is not something that you want to do, so it seems a little harsh. I can understand why the elves wouldn't want people using there road alot, but why make a nice stream into something that could very well kill the unsuspecting fellow who drank from it or fell in.

In The Hobbit it talks about the Wood Elves as being unwise or something close to that. (I will have to find the quote later) Maybe Tolkiens view of them changed when he wrote LOTR because obviously Legolas is a good elf.

Well, sad to say, but war and politics and protecting the safety of the realm are serious questions involving life and death. They are not played by nice rules. If you can make what essentially amounts to a moat look like a nice inviting stream and put potential intruders to sleep or otherwise poison them, you do it.

That is assuming that my theory (and that's all it is, a theory [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] ) is correct. The above could be a reason behind it.

Hrmm it does seem to make sense. Thanks for your input guys. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

Why didn't the Elves make better use of these waters? What better than to spray opponents with the waters, rendering them senseless?

They could have sent Thorin a 'peace offering' of some food and casks of water when the Dwarf was holed up in the Lonely Mountain.

"Drink up!" ;)

My original thought was to somehow feed this water to Gollum when he was in captivity, as it might have made him more manageable.

Zzzzzzzz
 

The Wood Elves do seem to have been experts in what one might call a level 1 D&D sleep spell, had not Galadriel somewhat complicated our analysis of 'magic' in ME. A couple of times Bilbo et al chased after the elven parties, only to 'magically' fall asleep.

The enchanted stream isn't a particularly 'evil' defence system, as long as it gets patrolled frequently. Assuming the sleeper doesn't fall in the water and drown, I guess the next elven patrol just picks them up and then either despatches, imprisons or revitalises them (perhaps with a little Dorwinion vintage). From Bombur's experience I guess the sleeper would wake up before they starved to death or whatever.

I agree its more likely to be the elves' doing than the Necromancer's. IIRC MERP has it that the stream is enchanted by some noxious emanation from a secret Sauronic hideout in the Mountains of Mirkwood, but as Scapegoat says, this doesn't tie in at all with Bombur's pleasant dreams.

OH and maybe the sleep effect wears off when the water is removed fom the stream? Otherwise Thranduil would have a very nice little earner flogging sleep potions to all and sundry!

As to bottling the water and using selling it on at an outrageous profit as sleep potion, well I guess maybe it doesn't work that way. Perhaps the effect 'goes off' when the water is removed from the river?
Remember they had left a boat. This could be a neat mechanism of only allowing 'goodly' folk across if it was only get-able by pulling on elven rope, because the evil types might be unable to touch the rope (from Gollum's reaction). Though it was old and rotten, so either the elves didn't expect any friendly travellers, or they had forgotten about it, what with their hectic partying schedule. ;)

Perhaps the river wasn't enchanted. but poisoned by Elven industry.

It could be the answer to the recent thread "Waste". :D

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Enchanted sleep is a pretty standard "Faerie" thing. Rip Van Winkle, &c. Sleep was sweet in Bombadil's house, though not quite enchanted. I forget whether Smith slept in Faerie; seems like he must have but I haven't read Smith in a while.

For Elves: Frodo fell asleep under the elven music in Rivendell; all three hobbits slept deeply and well under Gildor's care in Woody End; and Melian cast a spell of years over Thingol.

The elves of Mirkwood are a little wilder, I think, than the elves of Lorien or Rivendell. They party in the pitch dark, and hunt wild white stags through the black forest. Enchanting a stream doesn't seem beyond them at all.

Elves are good; but they are dangerous. I think we often forget that. "Perilous", said both sons of Denethor. Elves are not to be taken lightly.

Hmmm..... The Elves, of course, are always singing, as is Bombadil. Which makes me wonder if the "enchantment" on the stream in Mirkwood is "magic" as we tend to think of it, or something in the music of the water -- an echo of Ulmo's Music, perhaps, protecting the woodland Elves against the evil that began to spread from Dol Guldur. We do know that Ulmo was not completely withdrawn from ME of the Third Age, and something like an enchanted stream could be his subtle way of aiding the Elves of Mirkwood against the forces of the "Necromancer." The Elves might not have put the "enchantment" there themselves, but would surely have become aware of it and taken advantage of it (to the point that I could see the "Elven-king" incarnation of Thranduil in TH claiming to have made and control the "enchantment"). Being put to sleep is not necessarily dangerous; those familiar with Mirkwood would avoid the stream, those who were not would have a strong chance of encountering it, and thus give the Elven patrols time to find them and decide if they should be considered friend or foe. It would definitely be a thing to avoid for Dwarves trying to make their way through Mirkwood, as the Elves are hostile toward them.

Well, it's just a thought. The woodland Elves would not have been able to make certain that hapless travelers didn't fall asleep and drown in the stream, but Ulmo certainly could, I should think. It's a way of avoiding that little problem.

Ibri-- I really really like your point about the singing, but I have to spread some rep around first.

I'm not so sure about "Enchanted" but nobody really wants to touch, drink, or swim in our Rhode Island streams... today, or tomorrow, or the next day.

The Rhode Island Mall is drownded, Mister Frodo. Drownded.

enchanted stream
 

Thranduil comes to mind, but is he that powerful? Maybe Elrond came over to help him out.

Welcome, ecthelion. I think that's the main question here.

The more I think about this, the less likely I think it is that the stream's magic was the work of the Mirkwood Elves.
Think about the Lórien Elves: they crossed rivers with single ropes tied at either end over the water. Legolas told Haldir he had no trouble doing that. Wouldn't that have been a hallmark of the wood-elves in Mirkwood too? If they had enchanted that stream as a barrier to the entrance of the realm from the forest path (that according to Beorn was hardly used by anyone), wouldn't they have set up a way for them to cross it in the same way they did it in Lórien? As it was, all it took was a party with a small hook to grab the boat on the eastern bank and drag it to them. Every member of Thorin's group would have made it across, if not for a deer jumping out of the trees at the wrong time. Would the Elves, having taken the trouble to put a sleep-spell on that stream, really have been so careless as to have left a boat reachable by intruders that they could use to cross?

That's actually interesting and it makes sense. On top of that, if we take into account what kind of monsters one encounters in Mirkwood, the river is really not the best of a defense: spiders can climb trees and they can cross the river that way. Also, the river protects the Elves mostly from the west, not really from south, which is the direction of the strongest evil powers. Again, if it was aimed against intruders from outside Mirkwood, coming from the west, why to put that boat there. One could speculate that it might be used as defense against the Orcs, in case they would - for whatever peculiar reason - decide to travel weeks down from the mountains through the forest, and counting on that they will be stupid enough not to use the boat. But that's rather farfetched... well, it is true that it would stop an army from invading (I mean, carrying 1000 Orcs across the river would take a while with one small boat, and a few clumsy ones could fall into the water). But that's about the only thing the river would be good for. Even the most dangerous local "predator", the Nazgul, against whom the river would be very good defense by itself (although not sure if you can put Nazgul to sleep, probably not) cannot be driven back by it anymore when there is a boat there, in fact, putting a boat there is the only way (except for straightaway building a bridge) how to ensure a Nazgul can get past. So it really does not make sense to do such a thing unless you have stronger reasons to have the boat there.

As for ecthelion's question (and indeed, welcome to the Downs!), however, I think if Thranduil wanted, he could make something like that. I don't think it's such a big deal for an Elf of his kind, and he was powerful after all, at least relatively.

It is possible to hypothesize the stream was enchanted by
a few of the nazgul, on orders and directions from Sauron,
as part of a plan to isolate the elves (and collaterally the men
of Laketown) as part of a plan to prevent northwestern M-E collaboration
in defense. The stream to the west, giant spiders et. al. to the south,
Smaug to the east, and orcs in the mountains north of Mirkwood
would isolate the strongest single force in Rhovannion (the wood
elves of Thranduil). The stream's purpose could be seen not as an
absolute barrier but rather as akind of speed bump, together with
harassing evil creatures lurking around it. (All them eyes at night! :eek: )

Personally, I doubt that anybody enchanted the stream at all. You might say that the presence of magical beings in the forest rubbed off on the stream, but I doubt it was anything that direct in Tolkien's mind. The Hobbit is much more of an old faerie story than LotR (which is more complex and mythological), and in faerie stories things frequently do not have any clear reason for the way they are.

Tolkien's thought process probably went something like this: Elves and other magical creatures live in the forest. Therefore, it is a magical forest. Therefore, the stream in the forest is magical.

The stream emanating from the Mountains of Mirkwood, the Necromancer might have been behind it, but what of the pleasant dreams of Bombur, as noted by the earlier posters? Would 'magic' which had its source in Sauron have been able to foster any good feeling in its victims? Maybe earlier on Sauron's incarnations, but by the Third Age I would doubt it.
Maybe the stream had something to do with the spiders? Being the (probable) offspring of Shelob, herself the child of Ungoliant, a likely Maia, they might have had the power to enact something like that. It would make for an easy meal, and maybe the boat was placed by the Necromancer's servants to enable them to cross when necessary. Maybe Orcs from Mt. Gundabad? That still wouldn't explain Bombur's nice dreams though.

x/d with Gwath, who may well be right. But then again, it is fun to conjecture about things like this. ;)

Very interesting idea about the spiders. But the pleasant
dreams could be a deliberate ploy by the spiders to lure
the victim into nonresistance and a disinclination to wake up.

I'm slowly coming around to a course parallel with Gwathagor's.

Basically, I would agree with Gwath as well. At least I am strongly opposing any idea that there was any evil being behind the forest river's enchantment. The magic just seems more "elvish" (not in the sense that it would necessarily have to be made by Elves, but as the type of good or light-and-shade magic of Middle-Earth). It has obviously all the qualities Tolkien ascribes to Faërie, and to the Elves (see On Fairy-Stories), this kind of enchantment which is dangerous to mortals and stuff like that, also similar to what happened to Thingol when he met Melian and stuff like that. So, in other words, I believe that if the Stream was enchanted by anybody in particular, it had to be the Elves, or some local not-directly-evil power, like some local Bombadil or even better some local River's Daughter (how fitting indeed! After all, we don't know about the hidden corners of Middle-Earth, do we, and somebody like that would fit here really well!!! And you may try to disagree!!!).

The enchantment could also have been there for quite a long time, and who's to say Bombadil or Goldberry themselves didn't live in that part of Mirkwood at one point? Gandalf said Bombadil had 'withdrawn' into the Old Forest, indicating he once could have lived elsewhere.

Of course it's possible, but really, why are we always limiting ourselves so much? :) I mean, of course we are not supposed to make it a Dungeons&Dragons setting and fill the map with spiders' lairs in every forest and dragons in every cave from Lindon to Rhun (let us leave that for the creators of LotR computer RPG games who actually need to do that in order to cope with the expectations of their genre), but why to think of Bombadil - or Goldberry, which seems a bit more illogical by itself, as she seems to be one of the many River's Daughters, and she seems to be this River's Daughter - and especially if the enchantment has been there for a long time, who knows how many Melians have traveled Middle-Earth in its early days, and how many other spirits unknown wandered there in these immesureable halls of Arda! That's nothing against you, Inziladun, but I feel like I should say this - in opposition to all the raving fanfiction-madness, there is the opposite extreme of making Middle-Earth a mechanised world which is cathegorised and there is basically nothing unknown for us inside it. While the opposite should be true! Why not to give our imagination the space, here, where it is appropriate and not forced at all (in contrary to, in my opinion, forcing for example Bombadil or another known creature there and filling it with "the known" just for the sake of filling it)? "And the world being after all full of strange creatures beyond count" (LotR Prologue).

Well, certainly in this case (and in many cases while discussing these works) nearly anything is possible. However, the rather distinct nature of my makeup forces me to focus on the likeliest explanations first, even though they may not be correct ;). In any case, I think Gwathagor probably has the right of it here.
But if you're going to speculate on other possibilities, what is there to work with but the known quantities in the books? Imagination can't be allowed too free of a rein. Otherwise, we might say Hobbit-legend was correct about the Tooks, that one had indeed 'taken a fairy wife', and that one of them had enchanted the stream back when Hobbits lived near the Anduin. :p

Well! Have you not been reading what I just said? I think I answered to what you say just here. I think I was pretty clear about "too free imagination" and as for "likeliest", if you meant Gwathagor, fine enough, but perhaps a bit too "limited view" in this case - there is nothing preventing us from seeing an agent behind all this. If you meant your Bombadil hypothesis, then once again, see above - that's not likeliest in any case, that, if anything, is far more far-fetched than my Forest River-Daughter theory (forcing the poor fellow in his big boots yellow enchant random streams illogical seems, hmm?).

Basically, what I meant was that I look for common threads in the books, and that allowing for multiple 'River-daughters', for example, when there doesn't seem to be any evidence of it, seems improper to me. Speculation is free though, and I'm not saying anyone else is bound to 'limit' their thinking (if that's the way you want to consider it) the way I do. Like I said, that's just the way my mind works; I want to make things fit in ME. Maybe they don't, as an intention of the author, but that doesn't stop me trying. ;)

Could it possibly be Thranduil (or his father)? Thranduil was of the Sindar who ruled the Silvan of Mirkwood. If he was Sindarin (with his father, former ruler of Mirkwood), then most likely a close associate of Thingol and Melian. And is it too far-fetched to suppose that Melian taught some enchantments to Thranduil (or his father)? After all, she did hallow Esgalduin, though the Girlde was the primary defense of Doriath. But the enchantment on the river seems too potent to cast even for a Sindarin elf. But what about Eol and his "enchantments" at Nan Elmoth? Or were those magicks already present before he took his abode there? I remember him casting some spell to snare Aredhel, a Calaquendi!
As said above, it's hard to associate Thranduil for the enchantment. Perhaps if he bore one of the Three Elven-rings... it could be possible. After all, Vilya allowed Elrond to enchant Bruinen, barring the Nazgul. The "sleep enchantment" could've been useful for Lorien, though, being nearest to Dol Guldor.

Other suspects would be Tom and Goldberry, as mentioned by other posters. Another aforementioned is Melian herself who probably travelled far and wide in Middle-Earth during the "Sleep of Yavanna."

But Tolkien himself says that there were more things that he has written about! So that fits.

And for multiple River-daughters, well, I always thought about it that way that she was just one of many daughters of her own mother, and in any case, if we take her mother as a real character, as specifically said especially in the Adventures of Tom Bombadil, that would imply that there is just a "race", we could say, of these river-sprites, who procreate and therefore one could assume there being more of them. Probably less than in ancient times, but still... something like Ents, for instance, or a good counterpart to the Spiders, possibly traceable to some Maia of Ulmo or something like that as their originator. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. And I don't know how about your local mythology, but at least in the fairy-tales and myths of my country some sort of sprites in woman form who live in the water is perfectly normal, so I am sort of associating Goldberry with them (she has basically the same traits) - I am assuming that some similar concept exists more widely, and therefore, Tolkien would likely use this as a basis for Goldberry's character. And such a kind of beings can easily exist throughout the Middle-Earth, not in every stream (especially if it's associated with Ulmo, the explanation is easy: Ulmo himself said that already in the First Age, his powers were withdrawing from the waters of the world), but somewhere - just like the Ents (with possibly even a bit more "isolated" social structure).

Yes, he did say that, but we don't know what he had in mind for those creatures that were in his head, but he didn't tell us about.

I've certainly heard of nymphs and sprites like that in other stories. My interpretion of 'River-daughter' has been that Goldberry was 'the daughter of the River', the river being the Withywindle specifically, and that she was attached to that place in Middle-earth. Tom said he 'found' her at that particular river, so it seems clear she was connected to it somehow. That could indeed fit the criteria for her being a sprite or something similar. Or maybe she was a daughter of another Maia. Yes, I know. The tendancy to go back to the Maia well for explanations can be tiring. ;)

I've always seen Goldberry and Tom as both being unique in Middle-earth, a matched pair, and without further evidence in the books, there being a race of similar beings is difficult for me to accept. As much as we do get to hear of legends and myths held by the denizens of ME, I just have to think there would be a mention of other Golberries somewhere if they were around. I have the Adventures lying around here somewhere, but it's been missing for quite a while, and I don't remember the reference you cite.

Of course she did.

Well, let me just note that while I really dislike all the attempts to make Tom a Maia (like some disgusting David Day did), I think with Goldberry it would work to make her a Maia of Ulmo, if it came to that. There is still the possibility to have her as something else - although effectively I think it makes little difference.

Anyway, in the Adventures of TB there is an explicit mention of her mother as a different being, Goldberry is taken away from her and she weeps somewhere around there. Therefore it seems only logical to me that there will be more of them.

In any case, if Tolkien says that the world was "full of strange creatures beyond count" (and he says that in the context of mentioning that nobody knew about Hobbits until Third Age), it implies that there have been many creatures around. After all, LotR is just one random tale taking one year in a history longer than several thousand years as far as the Elven dating goes, and even further in the earlier ages. We aren't told all the legends and bedtime stories of the Rohirrim, or Gondorians, or Hobbits or Elves or whoever, not to speak of Rhun and Harad, and I am pretty sure you will find some tales of Goldberries somewhere, as well as many other tales, some based on reality, some not - or maybe all of them based on reality to a certain extent. There are many uncharted parts of Middle-Earth and places not mentioned in the books and not explored, one does not even know what all sub-species of Trolls there were, and yet you'd dare to assume that our knowledge ends with Tom and Goldberry - if there is such a pair living in the Old Forest, why couldn't, of all places, something similar live in Mirkwood, or far in Rhun? I am not speaking about Tom, who seems to be really unique, but Goldberry or something similar... why not?