User:User:Hazad/The Men of Eriador, Wild Mutton and 100 Hobbit-sized Leagues

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One of the biggest lore-issues with Tolkien adaptations is the presence (or lack of) of Men in Eriador. Even that most faithful of popular adaptations, The Lord of the Rings Online,includes a number of Men living in Eriador outside of Bree-land. This is indirect contradiction of a line in ‘At the Sign of the Prancing Pony’, where it is written that ‘In those days no other Men had settled dwellings so far west,or within a hundred leagues of the Shire.’ In the passages below I shall go through apparent contradictions of this, and offer two ways in which these contradictions can be resolved.

Let us begin with the note regarding the location of the Rangers’‘hidden fastness in the wilds of Eriador’. In 2000 David Salo revealed that he had discovered a note in the Tolkien archives of Marquette university,indicating that Aragorn’s people had their stronghold in the lands between the Bruinen and the Mitheithel i.e. the Angle. Michael Martinez argued that a stronghold situated at the confluence itself would be roughly 300 miles from the Brandywine. The problem is that he’s wrong; the entirely of the Angle is within 300 miles of the Shire, meaning that the Marquette note contradicts The Lord of the Rings. Given, however,that this concept never entered the books published in Tolkien’s lifetime, wedo not have to accept it as cannon (though obviously it would be nice to).

Staying with the Rangers of the North, let us examine the way Aragorn speaks about the rangers’ charge, when responding to Boromir’s derision during ‘The Council of Elrond’. makes it sound as if their guard extends beyond Bree-land and the Shire. Aragorn says:

‘Peace and freedom, do you say? The North would have known them little but for us. Fear would have destroyed them. But when dark things come from the houseless hills, or creep from sunless woods, they fly from us.What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands,or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?’

The Aragorn of the books may not be quite as modest as that of the films, but it still seems unlike him to overemphasis his achievements. I would argue that he speaks rather too grandly to be referring merely to four villages of Men and a somewhat larger country of Hobbits. According to Appendix B, Orcs ‘renew their invasions of Eriador’ in T.A. 2740, one band making it as far as the Shire in 2747. If Bree-land and the Shire were all that was left of the population, what were the Orcs invading? Of course, it could have been these Orcish invasion that led to the end of the other communities of Men, but again it seems that Bree and Tharbad were not the only remaining Mannish settlements at this point.

Of the little traffic in Eriador, much of it seems to have been made up of Dwarves going between Erebor and the Blue Mountains. Men nonetheless appear to have travelled outside Bree-land, for indeed how did Butterbur even known of Deadmen’s Dyke, if there was no reason for Men to travel that way? We know that the Greenway was ‘little used’ but the point is that it was used. If it had not been then it would have disappeared in the millennium between the Fall of Arnor and the War of the Ring.

Aside from the Dunedain stronghold in the Angle, Rhudaur appears to have been mostly deserted. In ‘Flight to the Ford’, Aragorn tells the Hobbits that ‘no men dwell in this land’, as they pass ruined castles in the Trollshaws. The Hobbit chapter,‘Roast Mutton’ takes place in the same area, and the Tom complains that ‘Never a blinking bit of manflesh have we had for long enough’ and that he doesn’t know‘what the ‘ell William was a-thinking bringing us to these parts at all’.William however says ‘Yer can’t expect folk to stop here for ever just to be et by you and Bert. You’ve et a village and a half between yer, since we come down from the mountains’. Before sending Bilbo off to investigate, the Dwarves remark that ‘They have seldom even heard of the king around here*, and the less inquisitive you are as you go along, the less trouble you are likely to find’,implying the presence of an insular and hostile people. At the end of the chapter, Gandalf states that the trolls had ‘frightened everyone away from the district, and they waylaid strangers’. Here we have it from Gandalf’s own mouth that there were people in this part of Rhudaur, and clearly a permanent population as well as travellers. It is of course possible for sheep to be wild, but it seems far more likely that Tolkien meant for the trolls to be eating domesticated herds. If the area was deserted, then where did that roast mutton even come from? Of course, it could be argued that the area only became deserted again after the trolls frightened people away, but it seems unlikely that some would not have returned to their homes. There were evidently other Men between the Mountains and the trolls’ cave, and it would appear doubtful that such a large area could be entirely depopulated by only three trolls.

It is of course possible that the region became deserted in the 80 years between the events of TheHobbit and The Lord of the Rings,though Aragorn’s language suggests that it has been a lonely land since the defeat of Angmar. The place where Aragorn makes his remarks could be as far as20 miles west of the trolls’ cave, which is arguably far enough for the Trolls’Cave to be in a different ‘land’. Furthermore, Aragorn’s companions are asking about the ruined castles they see before him, so Aragorn’s remarks may merely apply to those castles. The note in the appendices that refers to this page is an appendage to the line ‘no Manor Orc of that realm remained west of the Mountains’. The realm mentioned here is Angmar, so when writing Appendix A Tolkien may have meant Aragorn’s remarks to apply solely to the Men who inhabited the castles. Aragorn’s knowledge of the area also appears to be specific rather than vague, meaning that he may have only been referring to a small part of Rhudaur. It must be noted that Tolkien was not making a complete break with his earlier book, since Frodo and his companions come across the three trolls later in their journey. Given that he revised ‘Riddles in the Dark’, and made many additions to ‘Roast Mutton’itself, it seems likely that Tolkien would have made further changes if he believed it important that the land should be deserted. If there were no Men in the Trollshaws, how were the three trolls even cooking mutton at all?

Something that has puzzled readers is where the Men who came up the Greenway (who arrived in Bree the day before Frodo) were originally from. One we know was a half-Orc Dunlending in service of Saruman and later the Witch-king, but remarks by Barliman in ‘Homeward Bound’ tell us that many were indeed fleeing from trouble in the south. Importantly, Rohan was not yet at war,apart from horse-raids in the east by Orcs of Mordor. Gondor had seen fighting,but it seems unlikely that Gondorians seeking peaceful lands would have gone as far as Bree. Michael Martinez has argued that these refugees were probably from Rohan, based on the following passage from ‘The Hunt for the Ring’:

They (the Ringwraiths) rode then through Rohan in haste, and the terror of their passing was so great that many folk fled from the land, and went wildly away north and west, believing that war out of the East was coming on the heels of the black horses.

The phrasing used, however, is ‘north and west’, north coming first. The implication is not that people fled west, then north to Bree,but that some fled north and some fled west. This would appear logical, given that the south was closed off by the White Mountains. The Black Riders were clearly capable of inspiring great terror in those they passed near, but again it seems very unlikely that people would flee as far as Bree, given that the route passed through Dunland. More importantly, it seems very unlikely that they could have reached Bree so quickly. Appendix B states that the Black Riders crossed the Fords of Isen on the 18th September, with Frodo reaching Bree on the night of the 29th. Travelling fast on horse back by day and night, this was clearly achievable, since the Black Riders took only four days to reach Sarn Ford. Then again, it seems likely that they would have been driving their horses beyond their usual capabilities with dark magics. Let us use a more typical example of travel to consider the distance, this being the Hobbits’ return journey from Minas Tirith. Accounting for their pause outside Moria, it took the wedding guests around 23 days to get from Isengard to Rivendell, and they were well mounted. The refugees must have completed the journey from the Fords to Bree in no more than 10 days. Given that this is a distance of more than 400 miles, this seems doubtful, especially given that they may have had their families with them. What is also clear is that these incomers could speak Westron. Of course there were many Rohirrim, and even a few Dunlendings, who knew the Common Speech, but if their native tongue was not Westron we might expect some comment on this, as is typical in the Lord of the Rings. There remains the question of what they were fleeing from if not the Nazgul. On this matter we can but speculate: there may have been local conflict taking place in the area around Tharbad, or perhaps incursions by Dunlendings. The refugees could have been Dunlendings themselves,but were probably not Rohirrim, given that travelling to Bree would mean passing through Dunland.

The identity of these first newcomers links into the identity of Sharkey’s ruffians, with whom they appear to have shared origins. As Pippin observes some of them were half-Orcs, such as the Southerner in the Prancing Pony, and indeed at least some may have come directly from Isengard,for Saruman had a considerable number of Men serving him there (‘Flotsam and Jetsam’). Perhaps the ruffians were Dunlendings, but if they were then it is strange that Tolkien did not remark as such. Notably, their leaders did not issue them instructions in the Dunlending language, but in fluent and colloquial Westron. Again it would seem that there was a Westron-speaking population in Eriador outside Bree-land. When Tolkien was writing ‘At the Signof the Prancing Pony’ he had not fully realised the geography of Middle Earth,and therefore may have intended that there be Westron-speaking Men between Bree and Rohan, but still a long way from the Shire.

In ‘The History of Galadriel and Celeborn’, we learn of ‘a few secretive hunter folk’ living in the woods of Minhiriath and that ‘a fairly numerous but barbarous fisher-folk dwelt between the mouths of the Gwathló and the Angren’. This was at the ‘time of the War of the Ring’, with both areas falling within 100 leagues of the Shire. It could be argued that the secretive hunter-folk did not live in settled dwellings, but the fisher-folk must have,since such populations are not nomadic. When referring to settled dwellings,Tolkien contrasts the Bree-landers with the rangers, them being the example of what it is not settled. It would therefore appear that by ‘settled dwellings’,what is mean is simply staying in one place, rather than a particular level of comfort. Either way, Enedwaith was clearly inhabited in T.A. 3018 since ‘The Huntfor the Ring’ tells us that, when the Nazgûl rode through Enedwaith, ‘lonely men fled away’.

Some readers may wonder why I have not yet touched upon the Lossoth. This is, quite simply, because they clearly did not live in what Tolkien would have called ‘settled dwellings’. Arvedui found them ‘in camp bythe seashore’, and Appendix A also tells us that they ‘live mostly… on the great Cape of Forochel… but they often camp on the south shores of the bay at the feet of the Mountains.’ Interesting, their lands are described as ‘lying hardly more than a hundred leagues north of the Shire’. This is obviously not the case on the standard map, if we are using the standard three miles for a league measurement. The implication is that, even in the published Lord of the Rings, the geography of the Westlands is incomplete, and distances in the text are not necessarily consistent with the maps.

There are, however, two potential explanations for all these apparent inconsistencies. The first is simply that Frodo, the ‘in-world’ author of The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King, was not aware the other settlements of Men in Eriador. Generally, we who study Tolkien take The Lord of the Rings before his other published works, viewing posthumous texts as unfinished notes, and seeing the setting of The Hobbit as an earlier version of that of The Lord of the Rings. In this case however, we would have to dismiss the essential premise of an entire chapter of The Hobbit in order to give primacy to a few lines in The Lord of the Rings. Frodo, as author of the latter, was a very well-educated Hobbit but still a member of an insular society. Given that the Dúnedain settlement in the Angle was a ‘hidden fastness’, it makes sense that Frodo would be unaware of it. We can therefore resolve the discrepancies between The Lord of the Rings and other writings on the grounds of an uninformed narrator. Tolkien (as himself) makes the point in Appendix F that Denethor would have found Pippin’s familiar style of address amusing, something that is obviously not remarked on in the main text, this being an example of an omission by Frodo. This position is supported by a comment the author makes regarding Hobbits living outside the Shire. ‘There were probably many more Outsiders scattered about the West of the World in those days than the people of the Shire imagined.’ If there were communities of Hobbits that Frodo did not know of, then surely there might have also been similar communities of Men?

The second explanation concerns the very meaning of ‘100 leagues’. Our source is ‘The Disaster of the Gladden Fields’, which tells us that a Númenorean league was not 5280 yards, but 5277 yards, 2 feet and 4 inches, this being 5000 rangar. A ranga was originally ‘the length of a stride, from rear heel tofront toe, of a full grown man marching swiftly but at ease’. Hobbits are said to be half the height of a Númenorean, and this would naturally make their strides half as long. Going by this, a Hobbit league would be around 1.5 miles, and 100 Hobbit leagues would be 150 miles. And guess what, this distance is just slightly shorter than that between the Shire and the Icebay. It also allows for populations of Men in Rhudaur, and indeed in the area north of Tharbad. This explanation is not fool proof, especially since Frodo seems to use Mannish leagues when talking to Sam in ‘The Land of Shadow’. It does however allow us to reconcile writings in The Hobbit and Unfinished Tales with ‘Frodo’s’claim that Bree-land was the other Mannish settlement within 100 leagues of the Shire.

Personally, I prefer to take the view that there were a few scattered villages and hamlets in Eriador in the late Third Age. I believe that this fits with ‘At the Sign of the Prancing Pony’ if the settlements were small and distant enough for Frodo to be unaware of them, or if we take the view that he was giving the distance in Hobbit-sized leagues. This allows for a Westron speaking area south of Bree, and means that we don’t have to disregard the basic premise of ‘Roast Mutton’. It seems backwards to disregard what Tolkien wrote about the fisher-folk of Enedwaith (who clearly lived in settled dwellings), or the Dúnedain stronghold, since it adds to our knowledge of Middle Earth. Furthermore, an Eriador with a remaining Mannish population provides far greater opportunities for video gamers, role-players, war-gamers and fan-fic writers who wish to avoid lore-breaking.



  • In ‘Concerning Hobbits’, Tolkien tells us that ‘the Hobbits still said of wild folk and wicked things (such as trolls) that they had not heard of the king. For they attributed to the king of old all their essential laws’.