Talk:East Road

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Latest comment: 29 January by Akhorahil in topic History of the road

Names of the road[edit source]

Great East Road: unless the name appears in The History of Middle-earth it doesn't appear anywhere. In The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, or in The Hobbit it doesn't appear; in The Lord of the Rings there is only one mention of "the great East Road" where the G in the word "great" is not capitalized, thus not part of the name: "Northward, where they looked most hopefully, they could see nothing that might be the line of the great East Road, for which they were making." (The Fellowship of the Ring, ch. 6 "The Old Forest"). --Tik 14:59, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

I checked The History of Middle-earth and it isn't there either, prefers "East Road" as the primary reference. I have changed all appropriate references throughout this wiki to "East Road"; I think "Great East Road" is fanon. --Mith (Talk/Contribs/Edits) 18:49, 15 December 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
On the same note, Great Road seems to be never used in reference to this road. "Great Road" is mentioned in UT, but refers to North- South Road. Olthar 22:09, 20 February 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
It is mentioned as "Great Road" once in the Appendix A. Sage 08:51, 21 February 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The name "Great East Road" is used as a label for the road on the "General Map of Middle-earth" that was drawn by Christopher Tolkien and is the oldest map that was published with The Lord of the Rings. The uncapitalized term "great East Road" is used once in The Lord of the Rings in the chapter "The Old Forest". The uncapitalized name "great road" is used once in the narrative of The Lord of the Rings in the chapter Three is Company while the capitalized name "Great Road" is used four times in the section (I) (iii) Eriador, Arnor, and the Heirs of Isildur of Appendix A. The capitalized term "East Road" is used in the chapters A Conspiracy Unmasked, The Old Forest and In the House of Tom Bombadil, At the Sign of the Prancing Pony, Strider, Homeward Bound, The Scouring of the Shire and The Grey Havens. The capitalized term "East Road" is used once in version (i) of thd chapter The Hunt for the Ring in Unfinished Tales. Christopher Tolkien used the label "East-West Road" on the "Map of Middle-earth at the End of the Third Age" that was first published in Unfinished Tales. J.R.R. Tolkien used the capitalized name East-West Road in note 6 of the chapter The Disaster of the Gladden Fiels in Unfinished Tales. From a purely quantitative point of view Great Road is used most often. My subjective view is that East Road probably is the best remembered term by readers and fits the recognizability criterion of the naming policy for the names of pages on Tolkien Gateway best. For readers who look at the maps a lot it depends which map that was drawn by whom they use, but redirect pages will help to find the right page. --Akhôrahil (talk) 11:44, 29 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

History of the road[edit source]

There is some speculative content that the East Road was built by the dwarves and when it was built. The only reference that I could find was the statement by Gandalf about Thorin's view about Hobbits "As far as he was concerned they were just food-growers who happened to work the fields on either side of the Dwarves’ ancestral road to the Mountains." in typescript B of the earlier version in the appendix of the chapter The Quest of Erebor in Unfinished Tales. How can this statement by interpreted according to normal variations of the use of the adjective "ancestral" in the English language and shouldn't it be overinterpreted since it comes from an earlier version of an unfinished text? In my opinion it does not clearly state that the Dwarves built the East Road and certainly does not say when they built it, but it could also be interpretated that generations of Dwarves before Thorin had already used the road to get to the Blue Mountains (or the Misty Mountains), but not necessarily constructed it. In note 6 of the chapter The Disaster of the Gladden Fields J.R.R. Tolkien mentions that the only two "Númenorean Roads" in Isildur's time were the East-West Road and the Noth-South Road. This could imply that the East Road was built by the Númenoreans. Maybe there was a path or a track before that had already been used by Dwarves before the settlement by Númenorean colonists. --Akhôrahil (talk) 11:44, 29 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]