[ Daily Tolkien ] The Middle-earth Mysteries

Suite 101 ^ | May 19, 2000 | Michael Martinez

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The Middle-earth Mysteries

Part of the joy of reading about Middle-earth is finding out more about some obscure dude or tribe long after they show up somewhere else in the "canon". Take the Druedain, the Woses as they are called in The Lord of the Rings. When you read the book for the first time, they just sort of show up and lead the Rohirrim around an army of Orcs and Easterlings.

Do they have a point other than to move the story forward? Yes and no. They are there to give the Rohirrim a viable passage around the blocking force, and the purpose of the blocking force is to show the reader that Sauron is so powerful he can lob armies all over the map. But the Druedain also serve to remind the reader that Middle-earth is filled with all sorts of strange and mysterious creatures.

Maybe Tolkien was thinking, "And here it will be good to throw in another magical race of creatures" when he plotted that part of the story, but clearly he didn't stop there. Many years later he wrote a long essay which covered a great deal of history concerning Dwarves and Men, but it also covered the Druedain, and explained who they were, where they came from, and how they ended up in Druadan Forest. The choice of the name "Druadan" may have been convenient, or it may have been intentional.

Tolkien in fact started out calling Ghan-buri-Ghan's people the "dark men of Eilenach" and the wood was "Eilenach Forest". But then they became the Druedain of Druadan Forest, and in the published Lord of the Rings, they became the Woses but the wood remained Druadan Forest. The association of the word "adan" with a non-Edainic race is very peculiar, and had long puzzled many people. But in 1980 Christopher Tolkien published much of the Druadan material in Unfinished Tales and the mystery was cleared up.

These were a fourth tribe associated with the Edain, not numbered among the "houses" of the Edain, but nonetheless given access to Numenor as a reward for their service and suffering in Beleriand. And there is virtually no mention of them in The Silmarillion, because it was only in the late 1960s that Tolkien decided upon the origins and fate of the Druedain, long after most of The Silmarillion material had been brought up to the point where Christopher found it upon his father's death.

Tolkien liked the word "wose", by the way. He used it as one of Turin's nicknames (Saeros called him a woodwose in "Narn i Chin Hurin") and "woodwose" is the modern form of the Anglo-Saxon "wudu-wasa", "wild man of the woods" (another of Turin's nicknames). "Woses" is therefore intended to be a translation of the actual Rohirric word, "Rogin" (sing. Rog), with much the same meaning, "wild men of the woods". The Rohirrim were ignorant (as was Tolkien, when he wrote Lord of the Rings) of the Woses' ancient history.

There is much mystery bound up in the forests of Middle-earth. Tolkien loved trees, and he revered in a special way. He always seemed to think they had gotten the bitter half of the bargain in sharing the world with men. He was upset with "the shabby use of made in Shakespeare of the coming of 'Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill'". He wanted the trees to really march to war, and eventually this longing achieved fruition in the Ents.

One must ask how the Ents came to live in Fangorn Forest. Tolkien doesn't ever really say. Fangorn (Treebeard) himself speaks of having wandered freely in Beleriand, in lands largely untroubled by Morgoth even during the wars with the Elves. Clearly if the Ents had survived the destruction of Beleriand at the end of the First Age they must have wandered eastward, and in Eriador there was once an ancient forest where, Elrond said, "time was when a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard. In those lands I journeyed once, and many things wild and strange I knew."

Elrond's journeys aside, one must ask how the squirrels (and the Ents) crossed the mighty river Gwathlo. It was wide and deep enough that ocean-faring ships could navigate it as far inland as Tharbad, where, perhaps, the waters became shallow enough for the Ents to travel across.

But why should they do so? At what point in time did they leave the northern woods? Apparently they did so before the War of the Elves and Sauron, and in another text Tolkien notes that Fangorn himself met with the King of Lothlorien early in the Second Age and set a boundary between their realms. Did the eastward migration of Beleriandic Elves in the Second Age push the Ents eastward as well? Or did the Ents at one time become so numerous they had to spread out? There is much we'll never know about the Ents' history, alas.

Anohther woodland creature that has a mysterious past is the giant spider of Mirkwood. Where and when did these creatures show up? They are said to be the descendants of Ungoliant, and Mirkwood was Greenwood the Great until Sauron arose in the Third Age and established himself on Dol Guldur. He undoubtedly brought or induced some of Ungoliant's offspring to move north to the forest, but how did they get there? Why didn't anyone stop them? And where did Ungoliant live at the time? It doesn't seem likely Isildur would build a city right next to a monstrous spider which fed on Men and Elves.

Something that has always bothered me is who those mysterious Men were who traded with Laketown in The Hobbit. They lived south of the Long Lake and were apparently Northmen, but where did they live? The Old Forest Road, according to the book, "was overgrown and disused at its eastern end and led to impassable marshes where the paths had been long lost." The road was originally made by Dwarves. They used it to reach the Celduin and from there somehow passed northeast to the Iron Hills.

If there were men still living along Celduin (the Running River, which arose in Erebor), why didn't they settle at the point where the Old Forest Road met the river? Or perhaps they had at one time lived there but had been driven off.

Then there is the question of why Gandalf and Beorn decided to take Bilbo all the way around the northern skirts of Mirkwood when they returned to the west. There were, in fact, men living in those regions in ancient times, and probably still men living there at the end of the Third Age, but there is no indication of that on the Hobbit map or in the text. It just seems a very strange decision given that the Elvenking probably would have ensured their safe passage through the forest.

Turning south, we can look at Pelargir and ask what became of Gondor's fleet. Aragorn's raid on Umbar was the last time any Gondorian ships moved against an enemy in the Third Age. By the time of the War of the Ring the threat from Umbar and other southern havens was so great that Denethor was willing to leave 9/10ths of the strength of Gondor's forces near the coastlands to ward them against attack from the sea. Had he disbanded Gondor's fleet after becoming Steward, perhaps because it had been Thorongil, his rival, who had led the attack on the City of the Corsairs?

And why did no one attempt to recolonize Eriador after the destruction of Angmar? The presence of the Barrow-wights in Tyrn Gorthad, the Barrow-downs, explains why no one tried to settle there again. But where the plains south of Sarn Ford that uninhabitable? What about the South Downs? What prevented people from living there? What became of Tharbad's people when that town was finally deserted? Did they wander north to the Angle and join the Dunedain who lived there? It seems the Dunedain should have prospered, and either many of them left for other parts of the world (perhaps going south to Gondor), or many must have perished in the wilds of Eriador.

There are so many questions about Middle-earth that one can almost picture an "In Search Of..." going on year after year, proposing bizarre theories which attempt to resolve the various mysteries. These unanswerable questions lend a great deal to the perception of "depth" we often speak of in Middle-earth. They are like glimpses of mountains on the distant horizon which we'll never approach. The answers are there, beyond our reach, forever lost to us.

Author: Michael Martinez
Published on: May 19, 2000
Michael Martinez is the author of Visualizing Middle-earth

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The Daily Tolkien articles by various authors	The Tolkien Virgin articles by Mark-Edmond
ARTICLES 01-10	ARTICLES 01-10
ARTICLES 11-20	ARTICLES 11-20
ARTICLES 21-30	21) Of the Fifth Battle: Nirnaeth Arnoediad
ARTICLES 31-40
ARTICLES 41-50
51) And Now for the Other Love Story
52) Kryptic Tales of Middle-earth
53) The People of Eriador in the later Third Age
54) The Wild, Wild, Wood-elf West
55) The Middle-earth Mysteries

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