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Originally Posted by Rhod the Red
Rhun is North of Mordor. Or North-East if you want. No offence, but what next? Will you deny that Harad is South of Mordor?
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If you're trying to be insulting, you're doing a rather good job of it...
Of course Harad is South of Mordor. Harad also happens to mean South, so that is a rather logical conclusion.
Your problem, I think, is that you are looking at the placement of the word "Rhûn" and taking Rhûn to be right where that word is, whereas Rhûn (and I reiterate here, it means East) is the ENTIRE portion of Middle-Earth that lies to the East. Only the very western edge of Rhûn butts up with the North-West of Middle-Earth, which is the part shown on the map.
Rhûn, it is safe to assume, is as at least as large in itself as the entire portion of Middle-Earth with which we are familiar. This is made apparent by one line from Tolkien regarding the Dwarves, that the forefathers of the easternmost houses of the Dwarves were as far east, or more, from the Iron Hills as they were from Gundabad (I'm going off of memory here, so my mentioning of Gundabad-to-Iron Hills may not be the correct comparison, but it is a distance in that ballpark)- telling us that Rhûn (the East) must extend at least that far.
Rhûn lies East of ALL of North-Western Middle-Earth, from the Iron Hills, past the Sea of Rhûn (which gets its name from the fact that it borders those lands known in Gondor as Rhûn, or the East), and down past Mordor to Khand. South of Khand, I do not know if the lands to the East would be considered Harad, since they lie South, or Rhûn, since they lie East. Possibly, they would be Rhûn-Harad. In any event, the name "Rhûn" is placed where it is on the map, because that is the centre of the lands known as Rhûn.