The Black Squirrel of Mirkwood.
 

Apparently this animal is on the rise in The South and East of England. It was first sited in England around 1912. When Anborn first mentions them, I thought them to be another Tolkien creation (I was 11 at the time). I'd never seen or heard talk of them. They now seem to growing in population again, ironically around the same area that the Grey was introduced into England around the 1870's. So keep your eyes peeled, one day you may well be closer to Eryn Lasgalen than you think.

My alma-mater's unofficial mascot is the Black Squirrel. :p Story goes, a guy from the university seeking to run wild-life tests on black squirrels and the environment, went into Canada and brought back 10 of the black squirrels to Kent State, here in Ohio.

Long story short, they've taken over and exerted their dominance among the indigenous squirrels. They're all over my part of Ohio now.

We even have an Annual Black Squirrel Festival for them...it's kind of weird. The part of Wiki about the black squirrels driving out the native squirrels in Kent, is no joke. All the students who go there can tell you stories of the wars between the black and underground rebel grey squirrels. :p

They are having the same effect here in England, however I don't feel sorry for the Grey, it has done enormous damage to the Red.

What a racially squirrelophobic thread this is! ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_squirrel

They are very cute though!

Might be a waste anyway– black squirrels are just greys with darker fur, apparently, not a separate species. So it's more like a hair colour becoming more common:

Incidentally– what a surprise– it seems the black fur gives a survival advantage in deep forests...;)

I live in the iddle of Toronto city, and black squirrels are more dominant then the grey ones here as well. I don't think that forests have to do a lot with it.

Also, red sqierrels have been dominant in quite a few places, including western Europe, a couple of decades ago. Red doesn't really fit for camouflage, so there has to be soething else.


P.S.: isn't this site supposed to be about Tolkien and not about the squirrel demographics?

No, the point I'm making is, it's perfectly logical that the Mirkwood squirrels should be black. I don't think forests get deeper than that.

See above.

Also... you're not suggesting we're about to be visited by the chat... you-know-what?:eek:

How meta.

I wonder what exposure Tolkien had to the Black Squirrel in his youth, as it was predominately in the South and East of England, was it anywhere else?

I am so happy to hear that I cannot be held accountable for inadvertently transporting a black in my luggage and releasing it in the UK. :p ;)

Black squirrels, like crows, have a bad rep in Lotr. We know that Tolkien had a fear of spiders from an early childhood incident in South Africa. Perhaps that mill in Sarehole harboured black squirrels?

I don't think Tolkien include anything in his works without knowing what he was talking about. The Black Squirrel caused quite a fuss when it was first seen in 1912, the young 20yr old Tolkien would surely have heard of it. By the 1940's it had spread to the Cambridgeshire/Hertfordshire border, the wandering Tolkien may have seen it on his travels?

That's true. Except for maybe Fangorn or the Old Forest, but they don't seem to have a lot of animals.


[/QUOTE]Also... you're not suggesting we're about to be visited by the chat... you-know-what?:eek:

How meta.[/QUOTE]


I really don't get what you're talking about. If you mean that I've reported this thread, then no, I didn't. I don't even know how to do this yet.

It is about Tolkien, and where he got the idea of Black Squirrels to populate Mirkwood with, why not Black Rabbits or Black Foxes. It is to with Anborn and his desciption of Gollum, who scales trees and walls like a squirrel.

These forums are haunted by a vicious monster known as the Chat Squirrel (or Skewrl, to some). Beware!

Two thoughts I'd like to share:

1. Tolkien needn't have seen or even known of real black squirrels to write about them - this is fantasy, remember, and the forest that went dark would naturally have animals that went dark as well. Weren't there black butterflies too?

Yes, I just looked Mirkwood up in the Hobbit, and Tolkien describes So if he could change the colour of butterflies to suit their surroundings, he could easily do the same with squirrels.

2. The "skwerlz" are various warning pictures that I have used when necessary to remind posters of proper forum behaviour. Since members have been quite good about staying on topic for the most part, I haven't needed any recently. Here they are, just for your enjoyment:

http://forum.barrowdowns.com/images/chatskwerl.jpg

http://forum.barrowdowns.com/images/skwerl01.jpg

http://forum.barrowdowns.com/images/skwerlz02.jpg

...and here are the rest:

http://forum.barrowdowns.com/images/skwerlz03.jpg

http://forum.barrowdowns.com/images/skwerlz04.jpg

http://forum.barrowdowns.com/images/skwerlz05.jpg


These delightful images were created by The Barrow-Wight Himself.

ad 1. Oh, but there actually are black butterflies; see e.g. here. No idea though whether any of these occurred in Britain in Tolkien's lifetime.

ad 2. Oh yes, the Green Squirrel, fiercest of all variants, feared by the forces of darkness. When Mirkwood was cleansed after the War of the Ring and became Eryn Lasgalen again, it repopulated its ancient haunts in the forest and drove the Black ones out, scattering them all over the rest of Middle-earth... or so the rumour goes;).

Well, it's not the topic of this thread, but I'd like to correct the statement about Tolkien's supposed arachnophobia:
I found the spider rescue particularly endearing.(I do the same, with the help of a glass) That's why I remembered this quote.:D

Squirrel recipe
 

In The Guardian newspaper of Sunday, 11th May 2008, there's a squirrel recipe:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandsty...s.foodanddrink

Admittedly, these are grey squirrels, which one commentator said taste like wild boar.:)

Even writers can be in denial sometimes, Guinevere. ;)