Quote:
Originally Posted by Zigûr
And yes the information in Rivers and beacon-hills of Gondor does somewhat spoil the mystery of the death of Baldor. The idea that his legs were broken by the inhabitants of the Dwimorberg suggests that the Men of Dunharrow still hadn't died out 2,500 years after the end of the Second Age, which seems odd.
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It comes down solely to taste whether or not one likes the
Rivers and Beacon Hills story. It is very "late Tolkien" if that makes any sense as an aesthetic judgment. That said, I don't find it immediately implausible that there would be descendants of the Dead still living and active in the White Mountains 2500 years later, because we know there were.
Thing is though, we call them Men of Gondor and refer to the hinterlands
south of the Mountains. And the same people still dwelt west of the Gap: the Dunlendings. The idea that there was still some remnant of the White Mountain "Deadlendings" seems very Tolkienesque. And, certainly, with the Dúnedain in Calenardhon being few, it's easy to imagine Gondorians living mostly near the Great Road and either Angrenost or Aglarond--plenty of possibility for remnants of the Mountain people to survive further up, who could have possibly still had some sort of contact with their more-assimilated kin across the White Mountains.
Certainly, we know that the Dunlendings still harbour bitterness at the time of the War of the Ring toward the Rohirrim for usurping "their" land. While this could have specific reference to areas closer to Dunland (I'm thinking especially of the angle between the Adorn, which is a point of contention in Helm's day), it seems to be Calenardhon in general, and it seems more plausible to me that they'd resent the Rohirrim specifically, who are latecomers, if they still had some sort of presence in the White Mountains.
I suppose they needn't be LITERAL descendants (i.e. father to son to son) of the Deadlendings. Perhaps the Curséd Ones literally died out, but whatever lands or homes they had, I doubt they were abandoned completely, and we know Gondor never occupied the area in great numbers, which to me implies a native population. We know that the Dunlendings were willing to live under Gondorian rule as a mixed population retaining some of their culture (c.f. the state of Isengard just before Saruman is given its care--is that part of the "Cirion and Eorl" section of UT?), and a better-integrated version of the same happened south of the White Mountains as Gondor reinforced itself with the men of the Mountains--i.e. cultural kin of the Dunlendings and the Deadlendings.
So I can easily imagine that the Calenardhon-side of the White Mountains was (probably lightly) settled by a folk akin to the Dunlendings and Gondorian hinterlands, and these probably dwindled and thinned even as the Dúnedain did: probably never a great population there, and exposed to dangers like the Wainriders and Balchoth. When Cirion gave away that land to the Rohirrim, there were probably few enough left to think of it as "none," but the idea that there might have been a small sect that, instead of fleeing to Gondor or Isengard or Dunland holed up behind Dunharrow, seems possible.
If so, maybe there was a long chain of hidden continuity with the Dead, but there needn't have been: the Paths of the Dead wouldn't have had any terror if the Dead couldn't influence the living, and the idea that the Dead might have corrupted or used some embittered near-Dunlendings driven to anger at the loss of THEIR land in the service of, as they'd see it, their own kin, to maim and kill Bregor as a sort of dark revenge ritual... well, I'm enjoying the idea.