The proto-geography of the Third Age

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Quote:Originally Posted by WCH

This might amount to a hijack (spin off thread?) but that's interesting - I had wondered if that was possible, myself. What evidence are you thinking of?

In The History of the Hobbit John Rateliffe makes I think a very, very strong case that in the early phases of writing The Hobbit he placed it in the geography of Beleriand.* Mirkwood was Taur-nu-Fuin (indeed a translation thereof), the Great River was Sirion (which translates, in effect, as The River), and the Misty Mountains were the eastern Mountains of Shadow. Hobbiton accordingly lay somewhere in Hithlum, and leaving sheltered Hithlum meant entering "the Wild." One might also note Amon Ereb, "Mount Lonesome", which is on all the Silmarillion maps but plays no part in the legends; and the "Withered Heath" to the north "from whence come the Great Worms:" Dor-nu-Fauglith?

(It's also interesting that in all versions of the Beren and Luthien story, after Thu/Sauron's defeat by Huan he takes up residence in- Taur-nu-Fuin).

However, T got stuck and left off working on Bilbo's adventures for a while, unsure of what to do next; this apparently came at the Beorn chapter. Plainly there was no room in the Silmarillion geography for Lake Town, the Lonely Mountain and its environs; and there wouldn't be any Elves of any sort, not even the Avari the wood-elves were originally conceived to be, in the grim forest on Dorthonion. (An alternative would be that Mirkwood was equated with Artanor > Doriath; but the rustic Elvenking and his rude caves certainly aren't lordly Thingol and wondrous Menegroth**, nor was Doriath ever black and evil).

This is where things get interesting; evidence is sketchy and I claim no more than one possible interpretation: that Tolkien shifted his concept of The Hobbit's geography so that the Mountains were now the Ered Lindon; crossing into The Wild now meant leaving 'civilized Elvish' Beleriand and striking out into the blank spaces: "Here There Be Dragonnes." Moreover, I suggest, this conception still informed his earliest writing in The Lord of the Rings., which was, after all, supposed to be a Hobbit sequel.

(Before going on, it should be pointed out that at this time, the early Thirties, the Second and Third Ages did not yet exist. Numenor would enter with The Lost Road (1936); and the Third Age was created with the LR. And yes, I'm aware of the end of QN with its distant germ of the Last Alliance).

The Ered Luin, remember, were called the Blue Mountains because of the bluish cast of the mists which shrouded them, rather like the Blue Ridge of the Appalachians and their neighbors to the south, the Smokey Mountains.

A great deal of this hypothesis, this 'Blue Mountains' phase if you will, keys on writings, contemporaneous with the early work on the LR, where Tolkien explicitly identifies Moria with ancient Nogrod: which along with Belegost had always been conceived as lying in the southern Ered Luin. In fact in an entry in the Etymologies Nogrod is translated (as should be plain) "Dwarfmine;" of which Dwarrowdelf is merely an antiqued form. (Only much later did Tolkien cover his tracks and re-gloss Nogrod as "Hollowbold;" and the new Sindarin name for Moria, Hadhodrond, just substitutes "hadhod" (dwarf) for "naug" (dwarf), and restores the elided N in -rond 'cavern, vault.')

There is then a later note in which Nogrod-Moria, still the same place, has been physically moved hundreds of miles to the east into the Misty Mountains. This belongs naturally to the final geography; but illustrates the persistence of the identity of Moria with Nogrod, and the Longbeard Dwarves with the Indrafangs.

But back to the traces of this intermediate 'Blue Mountains' phase: remember that as Tolkien wrote what we know as Book I the geography was entirely vague; the regions between Hobbiton and Rivendell had not been mapped , and T never did successfully square Frodo's journey from Weathertop with what had been said of Bilbo- how on earth did it take Aragorn the Ranger many days to cover ground Thorin & Co. managed in a couple of hours? He tried to rewrite it in the Second Edition but it still doesn't really work.

Anyway, it's important to remember that during the writing of what Christopher Tolkien calls the "first phase," in which Bingo Bolger-Baggins and friends reach Rivendell with the help of Trotter the hobbit-ranger, the geography remained vague and fluid. In notes for what would become the beginning of Book Two, T envisioned the Company crossing the Mountains by the Red Pass***, turning southward along the River Redway, and only then entering Moria which lay "in the mountains of the south." These could of course be a separate range; but, again, Moria at the time was identical to ancient Nogrod, which lay in the southern part of the Ered Luin on their eastern side.


There is, I think, further confirmation if one compares the "Wilderland Map" of the Hobbit (especially the draft form published in Artist & Illustrator) with the (original) Silmarillion Map. The curves and the watercourses in the First Map's Misty Mountains are remarkably like those T had already drawn for his Mountains of Blue Mist in the Silmarillion. Moreover the world-map in the Ambarkanta, which is certainly later than The Hobbit, includes no north-south mountain range between the Blue Mountains in the west and the Red Moutains in the far east. (It's worth noting that, as first made, the Lord of the Rings Map contained nothing west of the Shire; that region, including the Ered Luin, was pasted on later.)



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*Despite what T said in a letter many years later, TH *always* took place in the world of the Elvish legendarium; even the earliest drafts contain numerous references to things like the Three Kindreds, Gondolin, and even Beren and Luthien However the time-frame, while vague, seems to be not long after the events of what would later be called the First Age).

** Which were already fully described in The Lay of Leithian of the late Twenties.

***Could Caradhras = Mt Dolmed?