On the Corruption of Beleriand

Ange1e4e5

Ange1e4e5

Well-Known Member
So as the forces of Morgoth take over the realms of Beleriand one by one, it’s mentioned that the land itself is corrupted, that sacred lakes are defiled. How do we portray that onscreen? Tangled roots? Gnarled bark? And how does Morgoth affect the water as he does with the Pools of Ivrin? Is he like the Night King from Game of Thrones, who brings blizzards and cold wherever he goes?
 
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Ange1e4e5 said:
So as the forces of Morgoth take over the realms of Beleriand one by one, it’s mentioned that the land itself is corrupted, that sacred lakes are defiled. How do we portray that onscreen? Tangled roots? Gnarled bark? And how does Morgoth affect the water as he does with the Pools of Ivrin? Is he like the Night King from Game of Thrones, who brings blizzards and cold wherever he goes?
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Making the water look like sewer-water. Unfortunately it is hard to convey stench onscreen, but that is an obvious way to tell that the water is despoiled.
 
Some of rick brands fotografies are really morbid, i could think a similar aesthetic could work as a singn of the corruption in a screenplay.
 
That looks really gloomy...

I can't decide in my mind if I'd imagine the Desolation of Morgoth (If you will) as very foul and sick or so bleak and sterile as in that picture.. (of fiery?) Or maybe it depends from place to place. It can't be just Mirkwood or Mordor all over the place.
 
The woods would be like Mirkwood, especially Taur-nu-Fuin. But what is the Mirkwood look? Do the trees change shape? They don’t all die. Beren survived a little while in there, as a vegetarian, so there must be living edible plants.

Anfauglith is fairly easy: it was burned to dust and nothing ever grew there again. Some combination of a barren sandy desert with Gorgoroth in Mordor. But frozen and snowy, with burnt bones and whole skeletons.

For the rest, somehow we want to convey spiritual pollution. One technique might be to make colors less saturated on screen, just enough to look greyish without being really obvious.
 
Yeah that sounds cool (well, also depressing), a real hopelessly grim, grey forest with very few flowers or fruits.

When I think of corrupted trees, I think of trees that are sick, whose leaves have turned partly into unnatural colors, there are lots of parasites (plants, animals, funghi) sucking out the energy, there is standing foul water in all the basins.. (I've been playing the Witcher 1 lately, there's a really cool murky swamp in there, my description just made me think of that). It is also very desaturated and nebulous like you said.

Or the typical Mirkwood thing where everything is very dark and twisted and absolutely no space to breathe. Although I wonder how anything grows in there, when only the treetops get any light. Are there symbiotic/parasitic relationships between the undergrowth and the trees?
 
i think for hithlum and large parts of northern beleriand we could go for tundra landscapes..

images


for anfauglith, one could go with volcanic deserts..

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or maybe grey , dusty moon-landscape looking places
the-lunar-landscape-of-los-hoyos-the-grey-desert-part-of-colombias-M12DY3.jpg


as for taur nu fuin, i guess we can find morboid looking forests..

aokigahara-forest-1.jpg


Aokigahara-Suicide-Forest-Japan.jpg
 
The first one may have a bit too much "high-landish" charm for me but I get the cold feel you're going for, the volcanic and barren landscapes and the sick forests are very good too. (I am a bit amused by the third one though, as those stonemen very characteristic of popular hiking spots so I'm associating middle aged elves with backpacks hiking through every so often. xD

Here is what I referred to with the Witcher thing, not even that dark or dead, but just permanently twilight-ish, cold and wet swamplands, and everything is rotting away very slowly. There are also a lot of places where it's very foggy and disorientating and in-game you're really happy to get out of the swamp again after a while because it's kinda depressing.

swamp_witcher.JPG
 
For every landscape except Anfauglith, I think the change is at least somewhat gradual.


For forests, I'm reminded of a line somewhere, describing Mirkwood or perhaps Taur-nu-Fuin. The trees strive darkly against each other, or something like that.

In pictures of European forests, the trees often appear to grow well apart from one another. I don't know if those are natural forests or plantations. But anyway, picture a clean forest with trees of all different sizes, including a lot of enormous old giants, but none are too close together, or tangled with each other. The forest floor is dim but not pitch dark, sprinkled with rosebushes and flowers and herbs and wholesome mushrooms. Beleriand was touched by the Valar and probably blessed by Melian, so imagine there's very little disease or parasites. It's all clean, bright greens and flowers.

Morgoth spreads his influence and green things "fell sick and rotted", as at the end of the Spring of Arda. So imagine in that forest, the old trees start getting dead limbs, rotting holes, parasitic fungi, black cankers, discolored and misshapen leaves. Insects start swarming and overeating. At the same time they're starting to rot, the old trees start growing new limbs at crazy angles, tangled with each other or hanging down like grasping hands, while new trees sprout up too close to each other and seem to fight. Poisonous plants and mushrooms, thorny stuff, and vines that strangle trees replace a lot of the flowers. The whole scene also becomes a bit greyer.

And we shouldn't forget how ambient music, and bird sounds, can help set a scene.


On grasslands, I imagine one of the distinctions is between abundant herds, and very few surviving animals. In a lake or wetland, lots of happy noisy birds vs. lots of rot and flies.
 
Ange1e4e5 said:
And how does Morgoth affect the water as he does with the Pools of Ivrin?
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I forgot to respond to this earlier. The Pools of Ivrin were defiled by Gaurung stomping and wallowing in them and oozing poison into them. I have no doubt Morgoth could dump physical and spiritual pollution into any water to defile it. Perhaps the volcanic ashes from Thangorodrim's eruption, in Dagor Bragollach, are such a pollution.
 
We won't be able to show stench on screen, so I agree that we have to have images of death and disease creeping in.

Trees being 'spread out' and far apart is typical of old growth forests. The canopy blocks out the light, so there are few opportunities for underbrush to grow. The ground is clear and open.

Once you cut down an old growth forest, what grows back is a 'young' forest, with dense undergrowth, lots of stickers/thornbushes, and small trees all right on top of each other. Most forests on the East Coast of the US are new, young forests. There are very few old growth forests left. But you can see one in the Great Smokey Mountains National Park.

Here you can see a very new 'forest' with a dog for scale. The trees very much grow on top of one another. This is a narrow strip of trees between two cornfields that has been allowed to grow up because the land is swampy. The land in the foreground is mowed, which explains why there are no trees there.
New Growth Forest - Fawn Grove.jpg

Here are some trees in Shenandoah National Park. As you can see, sunlight reaches the trail through the forest floor. Most of the trees are young/skinny.
Shenandoah - young trees.jpg

An old growth forest feels 'clean' and 'open'. The forest floor is not covered in brush, and the rather large trees are well-spaced from each other. This example is from Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

C42-213HDR_HDRMcovenature.jpg



So, practically speaking, a blight or forest fire that kills off most of the trees would result in a young forest, with trees vying against each other and brush and thorns underfoot to make traversing it difficult.
 
There could also be different plants affected by different parasites/or dying visibly. I like the undergrowth vs. treetops distinction. I was also reminded of a place we went hiking once where all the bushes of the undergrowth had lost their leaves and were covered by white webs.. some kind of parasite had probably overtaken just those bushes. The rest of the woods were still healthy but it still was kind of eerie. Maybe the woods can suffer from different illnesses but all together just deteriorate with time.

woods_saorge.jpg
 
I think Anfauglith could well have a touch of WWI battlefields, esp. the Somme. This completely blasted landscape with only the dead remains of former life (trees et. al., although not too many).
And having a visual tie to WWI does obviously fit biographically.
 
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