So basically I am fairly new to this place so I hope this is where everything needs to be. I am writing a story set in Middle Earth (a few hundred years before LOTR and Hobbit) and my main characters, an uncle and his nephew, are journeying on a cart through an empty forest. The forest's name is Stilcumbe which in Old English means "Quiet Forrest". The forest is sort of a crossover between Fangorn and the forests of Buckland where the fellowship meet Tom Bombadil and have troubles with Old Man Willow. The trees are very old and I want to highten a sense of being watched by the trees and that the trees are not happy with their presence in the forest and will do everything in their mysterious ways of getting them out of the forest. Any help would be much appreciated !
The level of personification you give the trees in such a setting is going to ride a fine line between being creatively descriptive and crossing into creating a fantasy mode for the trees. I get your meaning perfectly, but since your setting is in a predesigned world where walking talking trees (Ents) are perfectly acceptable, you'll have to decide where the line is - for you. From an ancient WIP of my own: He stopped the bicycle and looked back at his cart, which now appeared rather empty. The gasoline slopped noisily within the plastic container. Whispered conversations between the wind and the trees came to a stop and both seemed to turn their attention downward. Just as Manolo was turning his head back down the road there came a smell. Gardenia. Manolo inhaled the sweetness. In the world of my story there is no reason to believe that the wind and the trees are sentient motile beings. The story takes place in the almost real world. The reader knows this is only the writer waxing poetic. In a story taking place in Middle Earth, this level of personification might lead the reader to think the wind and the trees really, actually do this. You have to decide if this is something you want to convey or not.
Thanks for replying so fast and with such a knowledgeable response! If you have read the Fellowship of the Ring, I am basing the wood on the woods outside Buckland where they are semi-alive. So like Ents but they don't really get up and move. However, with this (short) story I am putting it in a region of Middle Earth that Tolkien never really went into great depths about so it does give me a certain freedom. Because where there is nothing on the map of Rohan there would be something. I intend to fill in the map. Thanks again for you great advice; you are a very talented writer.
