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Cirashala
Valinor
Apr 16 2022, 7:17pm
Post #1 of 8
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Rhovanion demographics
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Hello all!
I have a question. We know that Dale existed, prior to Smaug's desolation, and again after his death. We know of Esgaroth, and Dorwinion. We know the wood-men existed, around the middle half of Mirkwood (though I think they're more on the west side by the Anduin, but am open to correction). It's possible, given Dorwinion wine being potent enough to make even elves drunk, that elves AND men may have both inhabited the Dorwinion region (perhaps a small sub-colony of the Woodland Realm?).
We also know that the great plague decimated the population, and that Wainriders at some point in the Second Age had terrorized the region. And that there are dwarves in the Iron Hills, where a smaller, secondary river originates to join the Celduin in the south on the way to the Sea of Rhun and Dorwinion.
So...what do we know of any other settlements? Was Rhovanion, outside of the aforementioned ones, desolate and wild? Or do you think there were various settlements scattered throughout the area?
Presumably, there was a trade road of some sort that likely followed the Celduin from the Woodland Realm to Dorwinion, to facilitate transport of the wine back in barrels, only for empty ones to sojourn south when their contents were emptied (the apples, etc may have also come from there, due to the scene in TH where Fili bemoans being trapped for three days in a barrel that smelled of apples, and being starving and unable to eat). Wild kine also supposedly roamed the land, as it seems the areas east of Mirkwood, aside from possible riparian zones around the rivers, was largely unforested, according to maps, thus causing some speculation that they were grasslands, not unlike the European Steppe, or the Great Plains of North America, or the Wolds of Rohan.
I say a trade road along the Celduin because access to water over an (I estimate) between 800-1,000 mile journey would have been needed, so it seems the most logical location for said road. We know that Esgaroth in particular was a trade hub. I imagine that it was a hub for not only the go-between with the Woodland Realm, Erebor, and Dale, but also outlying areas?
Overall, I'm wondering what else is known about the region, beyond what I listed above? Do you think there were scattered human settlements? A fully functional trade road with actual towns scattered along it (or, at the very least, inns and supply depots)? Nomadic, or permanent settlements (or a mix of both)? Do you think elves occupied Dorwinion, as well as Men, given the region's infamously potent wine? City-states? Small, minor kingdoms? Governments like Laketown, with an elected master? We know so much about Eriador, and yet so little about Rhovanion!
What was the region like??? In terms of demographics, climate, population dispersal, racial dispersal within the region, roads, trade routes, etc?
I'm open to both what we know via Tolkien, and also your own personal thoughts and speculations on the matter :)
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squire
Half-elven
Apr 16 2022, 7:36pm
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I think you've summed up what is known from Tolkien's writings.
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Although I may be forgetting some notes in one or another of the many source books, I feel like you've put out what Tolkien gave us.
Now, should we imagine other settlements, trading centers, transportation routes, etc., following the example of early medieval Eurasia? One can, of course, and I believe many have. For myself, I tend to stick to the story and attend to Tolkien's theory about the literary effect of what he called "distant vistas". The idea is not to tell all and show all about a subcreated world, whether in the writing or in things like accessory maps.
Hinting that there is more history or realms or such than can be included in the current story provides a frame for the story that gives it more life and resemblance to the real world, about which everything can never be known.
The reader's imagination can, if it likes, populate an empty map or invent a plausible trading economy, based on the occasional clues in the story. Examples that you've mentioned are, of course, the idea that the Elves of Mirkwood traded not just with Laketown, and earlier with Dale, but indirectly with a distant place called Dorwinion; and there is, if I remember, a brief reference to Laketown being just one of several petty warring kingdoms or city-states along the Long Lake and its environs.
But that's it. As Tolkien put it, to fill in more details whether by him or his fans is to require that new vistas be erected further back in time or further away in space. It's self-defeating, because the point is to have vistas, faint and hazy and indistinct, as a frame for the immediate story - in this case, Bilbo's adventure.
PS. Tolkien, famously, found it hard to bind himself to his own rule! His letters, and his notes and papers, show repeatedly that he loved to extend his subcreation in order to answer the questions or solve the hints. And so fans who enjoy inventing the 'missing parts' of Middle-earth can imagine themselves in good company - at least, part of the time.
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Otaku-sempai
Immortal
Apr 16 2022, 7:54pm
Post #3 of 8
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The ancestors of the Woodmen, Bardings and the Rohirrim all once dwelt in the lands between the Greenwood and the Sea of Rhun until invasions and plague drove many of them west to the Vales of Anduin. It's entirely that remnants of these people remain in East Rhovanion living in scattered settlements. I know that the first edition of The One Ring Roleplaying Game placed a fair-sized settlement at the crossing of the Celduin on the trade route between Dale and Dorwinion.
I actually do think that a community of Avari Elves could dwell in the woodland east of Dorwinion (much as I've placed a Dwarven settlement in the mountains on the coast of the Sea of Rhun).
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(This post was edited by Otaku-sempai on Apr 16 2022, 7:57pm)
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Felagund
Rohan
Apr 16 2022, 9:38pm
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G'day Cirishala. There was a short thread that ran August-September last year, started by Victariongreyjoy that covered some of the ground you're interested in. Asger also participated. My snappily titled post there had a brief crack at understanding the settlement patterns of the so-called 'Middle Men' of Second and Third Age Middle-earth, including in Rhovanion, as per:
"low rates of urbanisation, by comparison, but advanced societies nonetheless"
I told you it was snappily titled...! Anyway, the quote snippet in the title of this current post is from the "Cirion & Eorl" chapter, in the context of the Northmen, who "lived mostly in the open and had no great cities." My point in the earlier post was that "no great cities" didn't necessarily mean no villages or towns at all. I had to go searching around the Second Age, via the regular go-to HoMe 12 essay, 'Of Dwarves & Men', to flesh this out, just to caveat my hypothesis.
Regarding Dorwinion, there was a fun sub-thread even more recently on that, with Otaku-sempai, Eldy and others piling in with some great analysis and thoughts. I think you were in there somewhere too but it started off with ElanorTX's 'Questions that may have been answered' thread, in March of this year.
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Eldy
Tol Eressea
Apr 17 2022, 1:12am
Post #6 of 8
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The ancestors of the Woodmen, Bardings and the Rohirrim all once dwelt in the lands between the Greenwood and the Sea of Rhun until invasions and plague drove many of them west to the Vales of Anduin.
Do you by any chance know if this idea comes from a direct quote in the texts? It's entirely possible I am forgetting, or was never aware of, something important, but my instinct is to think this isn't the full story. In "Of Dwarves and Men," we first hear of the Proto-Northmen (not called that in the essay) being "scattered in the lands between the Iron Hills and the Sea of Rhûn eastward and the Great Forest [i.e., the future Mirkwood], in the borders of which, northward and eastward, many were already settled" by the end of the First Age (HoMe XII, p. 306). The lands between Greenwood and the Sea of Rhûn are only one part of this area, though possibly the largest part (the eastern portion, bounded to the north by the Iron Hills and to the south by the Inland Sea, is at a minimum a respectable second place). I'm inclined to think it wasn't the most populous or important part, though, at least not in the very early days.
ODAM describes the alliance of the Longbeard Dwarves and Proto-Northmen which arose in the early Second Age, but the Hadorian language—and its better-attested descendant form, Adûnaic—displays obvious Khuzdul influence, so I think this Dwarf/Man interaction and cultural exchange must have begun in the First Age, before the Folk of Hador split off from their cousins who never made it to Beleriand. (This implicitly assumes that the awakening of humanity took place much earlier than in the traditional chronology reflected in the 1977 Silmarillion's timeline, an idea Tolkien seems to have taken for granted by the end of his life.) This linguistic innovation presumably occurred in regions near Dwarvish settlements, which in ODAM's version of the First Age included the Grey Mountains and the Iron Hills. If I had to guess at a common homeland for the Hadorian-related peoples of Rhovanion, I'd put it in the northern part of the region, near the mountains, with their wider distribution at the end of the First Age being a relatively recent development. But this is, of course, speculation.
(This post was edited by Eldy on Apr 17 2022, 1:18am)
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Otaku-sempai
Immortal
Apr 17 2022, 2:48pm
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There's a fair amount about the self-styled "Princes of Rhovanion" in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings. It tells of how Valacar of Gondor was sent by his father Romendacil II to the court of Vidugavia in Rhovanion in order to improve relations between Gondor and the Northmen. Valacar married Vidumavi (Vidugavia's daughter, their union producing a son, Eldacar, leading in turn to the rebellion in Gondor known as the Kin-strife.
We learn of how the Northmen carved the East Byght out of Mirkwood; how they survived Easterling invasions only to be driven out of Rhovanion by the Great Plague, settling in the Anduin Vales as the Eotheod. It was as the Eotheod that they developed their distinctive horse culture.
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Eldy
Tol Eressea
Apr 17 2022, 4:33pm
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I'm familiar with that part of Appendix A, and with the much lengthier discussions of the Northmen and the Éothéod in "Cirion and Eorl," but they deal with events thousands of years after the Hadorian-related peoples settled in that area. The ancestors of the Woodmen already inhabited Greenwood and the Vales of Anduin before the end of the Second Age (UT, The Disaster of the Gladden Fields; p. 276). The ancestors of the Bardings also lived in the vicinity of Erebor before the Northmen confederation was broken up: some Northmen survivors of the Wainrider invasion "fled over the Celduin (River Running) and were merged with the folk of Dale under Erebor (with whom they were akin)" in c. III.1856* (UT, Cirion and Eorl, p. 289). So any search for the common homeland of these peoples must look further back into history.
* This predates the founding of the Kingdom Under the Mountain in III.1999 (LOTR, Appendix B). Read in light of ODAM dating Longbeard settlement of this area to the First or at most early Second Age.
(This post was edited by Eldy on Apr 17 2022, 4:34pm)
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