Eregion

[bunn]

I have ended up writing more about Eregion again: specifically its fall, in Speak Friend and Enter.  And I have another Second Age Eregion work slowly underway.

To help with all of this, I made a map of Eregion, aiming for the period around 1600 when the Ring was forged.  

Here's the thinking behind it: 

Eregion is largely a wooded landscape.  Some of the trees have been felled to build the city of Ost-in-Edhil, and to provide fuel, but I think the woods would be preserved. Celeborn and his people came with Galadriel to establish Eregion, bringing Doriathrin forest agriculture skills with them.  

Perhaps Galadriel has even tried planting mallorn trees here, though they did not take as well as they did in Lorien later, and vanished when there were no longer Elves in Eregion to look after them. The woods would be a source of materials, fuel, and bark, but also a place where the Elves would hunt, particularly deer. 

At the end of the Third Age, when the Fellowship walked through Eregion, they noticed ancient remains, paved roads and worked stones.  I am inclined to think some of these may have been Numenorean remnants from the early Third Age, rather than remains of Eregion, simply because of the 4760 years between the Fall of Eregion and the War of the Ring. Eregion/Hollin doesn't seem to be mentioned as being part of Arnor, but it is quite close to the Numenorean settlement of Tharbad.

(On the other hand, Eregion did specialise in the technologies of preservation, if the Rings are anything to go by.  Still, a nearly 5000 year old road still recognisable as such tests my imagination somewhat.)

I am not sure if Elvish Eregion would have had the wide paved roads mentioned in Lord of the Rings.  I think the roads I have marked on the map above were probably green roads, used for walking routes, occasional horse riders, and perhaps livestock droving, and that the paved roads may have come later.   

Of course, the paved leading to Khazad-dûm with its wide climbing loops as described in LOTR,  may have been a dwarf-road. The creation of loops to reduce the climb suggests that perhaps it was designed for use by heavy carts.  There is no wide lake before the Doors, of course.  That was created by damming the Gatestream, Sirannon, some time in the late Third Age. 

At any rate. Tharbad does exist in 1600SA, but it's fairly new, and primarily a fort defending Numenorean timber extraction operations: there's no bridge yet, and the bogs and marshes along the line of the Swanfleet river are wide and shallow, with several small islands.  

This land will all be drained later, either by Numenor, or perhaps by the new powers of Arnor and Gondor, building the road through Tharbad to connect Northkingdom and Southkingdom.  But not yet.   The forests that used to lie around the river Gwathlo have mostly been felled by Numenor, but there are some left, and most of those will be burned during Sauron's campaign. 

I've given Celeborn a house outside Ost-in-Edhil. Given his well-documented distrust of Dwarves, I feel that he probably wouldn't be very comfortable in the city with the greatest friendship ever known between Dwarves and Elves. Also, during the fall of Eregion, Celeborn was present and joined Elrond's rescue force that was swept away into the north, to found Rivendell, and that would be more likely if Celeborn's usual haunts were at the northern end of Eregion.  I've drawn his house with two long wings and a tower, and I'm inclined to think that the tower was Galadriel's idea, and was made of stone, but the wings were made of carven wood.  There are other settlements scattered across northern Eregion through the woods, but no cities of any size: these are homes for Elves to use particularly in winter. 

When the Fellowship stopped on the road from the Redhorn Gate, they stopped at a hill topped by a few trees, and ringed with large rocks.  I've decided this was probably a way-meet, where two paths originally passed, and the trees are distant descendents of those planted by the Elves. The rocks might be remnants of late fortifications from the siege, perhaps linked to real-world myths about crossroads and waymeets. 

The wide shallow bird-haunted Swanfleet is probably a useful food source for Tharbad, as well as the elves of southern Eregion and the Men of the great woods of Eriador.  All of them hunt in the marshes for birds and eggs.  

I think perhaps the Numenoreans of Tharbad (they all call themselves Numenorean, though even at this early date, some of them have never seen Numenor) mostly hunt on land, in the reedbeds. They are more comfortable with deep water ships than small boats. 

The Elves of Eregion make long shallow punts that are driven with paddles or long poles, which allows them to hunt birds in season on the water with bows or falcons. 

The marshes are also grazing land for cattle, the herds of the original inhabitants of the land along the Gwathlo river. They have been here for a very long time, long before Eregion was established, trading cheese, milk and leather with the dwarves of Khazad-dûm in return for metal: mostly in the form of knives, pots, pans and needles. 

Comments

[anna_wing]

I did wonder how much reforestation there had been in Eregion by the time of LOTR.

[bunn]

When I re-read the LOTR chapter specifically for the map, I was surprised that it made the land sound more wooded than I remembered. I remembered the land of bare red stones where they had problems finding the Sirannon, and the mention of holly trees, of course: I'd forgotten the wooded ridge that they climb to get into Eregion and all the trees mentioned.

But it doesn't sound like a forest, exactly, so I'm inclined to think that the burning of the trees by Sauron, followed, perhaps, by Numenorean log-harvesting, depleted the soil somewhat and that grazing by deer has been enough to keep the hilltops and ridges a more moorland environment rather than the trees entirely regaining their domain.

It's a bit of a puzzle really across Eriador, why there isn't more natural regrowth forest at the end of the Third Age. It's been nearly a thousand years since the Plagues wiped out most of the human population, you'd think there would be vast woodlands again. Maybe its down to orcs, somehow. Orcs seem like they might just randomly spend time uprooting saplings and felling trees, and there do seem to be lots of them.

[anna_wing]

The Sauronic equivalent of radiation poisoning, perhaps, which was always my mental explanation for the Brown Lands.

I'm used to the concept of scrubland coming back in about two years, a secondary forest in ten, and full-scale jungle within fifty. The close-to-species rampant white bouganvillea of my childhood showed imperialist tendencies when left alone for two weeks.

[bunn]

Yes, even land covered in concrete will begin to crack and develop first shrubs and then trees in far less than a human lifetime, unless a dry desert or regularly swept clear by the sea. Even the arsenic-contaminated sands of Cornwall's old mines have trees growing after a hundred years or so, though not huge ones. A bit of a puzzle to explain, that one!

[hhimring]

I am not at all sure whether it is actually historically correct, but hasn't karstification in the Balkans sometimes been attributed to the Roman Empire felling trees? Which isn't quite that long ago, but still a long time.

[bunn]

Oh, good one, that could apply to the bare red stone country around the Sirannon, perhaps, that certainly sounds rather like a limestone pavement.

I suspect that the general treelessness of Eriador is inspired by the Bronze Age deforestation of Britain, but of course the thing about Britain is that there were a lot of people living, grazing livestock and generally weeding the place... I guess there could be more people (or at least sheep) in Eriador than meets the eye?

[mindstalk]

I didn't pay attention but I thought of northern Eriador, like Frodo's route, as still wooded, vs. Minhirath and Enedwaith. Unlike Eriador as such, those two do have Dunlendings or such, so maybe indeed sheep, if you posit the Fellowship's empty route was empty due to transhumance (mobile herds, naturally in the lowlands for the winter) rather than total desolation.

(Can you get the same effect with migratory wild herds? Explosion of wild goats changing the ecosystem?)

The Bree chapter is quite explicit about no other humans being settled within 300 miles of the Shire...

[bunn]

The existence of the Old Forest as a Noteable Woodland, and Treebeard's references to the way that Fangorn is just a remnant of the great forest that used to spread all the way to the Sea, along with the way that woods are shown on the maps make me think that mature woodlands are a bit thin on the ground. Though ISTR that there are pine woods mentioned around Rivendell.

You can definitely get plains and moorlands created and maintained by wild herds, so that might be the answer. Wild horses? Aurochs? Deer? The wolves must be eating something, after all!

ISTR that the trolls mention having eaten a village and a half since they arrived in the area, and a lot of mutton, so presumably there were previously at least a couple of sheep-farming villages in the area.

[hhimring]

Boromir seems to find at least some people to ask where Rivendell is, even if they can't tell him. It doesn't sound to me as if at least some of those aren't in Eriador itself.

[bunn]

I think Boromir comes up the Greenway from the Gap of Rohan, doesn't he? There are definitely refugees on the Greenway at that time, since we meet them in Bree. Maybe also people shipping pipeweed from the Shire to Isengard.

I rather like the idea that Boromir's 'few knew where it could be found' disguises an increasingly frustrated interview with Barliman Butterbur, where Butterbur keeps being called away to serve drinks and doesn't actually know where Rivendell is anyway. :-D