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It strikes me that perhaps in the descriptions of a wild and untamed forest we don't have a reflection of a much more modern European history: that of imperialism and colonial control. A recurring theme or motif in colonialist and imperialist literature is that of the "civilised" European entering into a landscape that in its sheer scale dwarfs the human. The "primitive" or "untamed" nature of such landscapes is a common idea in these accounts -- accounts which, of course, miss entirely the fact that these lands were not "untamed" or "wild" but very much in use by the inhabitants, just in ways and through methods that were different from the European models.
When the hobbits go into the Old Forest or Fangorn and see this foreign, frightening, and apparently uninhabited place, there is an unmistakable resemblance to the accounts of European travellers arriving in my own country way back in the day. The forests were thought to be 'unused' when, on the contrary, the native peoples had vast trading networks, large agricultural works and extensive hunting practices. They had not enclosed the land and subjected it to crop rotation, and so the Europeans saw it as "wild" -- by which they meant simply that it was different.
It's this same fear of difference or of otherness that really afflicts the denizens of the Shire. The Old Forest and Fangorn are inhabited, but they are inhabited by beings so different and "strange" from the hobbits that they are frightened by their "wildness".
I am not suggesting that Tolkien meant by these episodes to reflect in any conscious way on the nature of history of European colonial encounters, but there is an interesting analog possible. . .
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Scribbling scrabbling.
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