The proto-geography of the Third Age

[William Cloud Hicklin]

I think, rather, that it was only in a very vague sense that Tolkien in his mind equated Mirkwood with Taur-nu-Fuin or the Great River with the Sirion. All indications are that when he began to write The Hobbit he did not really think of it as a ‘serious’ work and that he had no compunction about using elements from the Legendarium haphazardly, without striving for any firm consistency.

Quite so. The Hobbit wasn't 'official,' so to speak; certainly there's not much room in the 'canonical' legends for the Bourgeois Burglar with his mantlepiece clock and tea-kettle, and where roadside inns are common! Or, for that matter, comical Dwarves. And T never had any problem recycling his own ideas. If the Elvenking and his halls don't much resemble Thingol and Menegroth, they do rather resemble Tinwelint of the Lost Tales- and the image of a bridge over a river-gorge leading to the hillside gates of a great subterranean fortress was here used for the third time, having manifested twice before in Menegroth and Nargothrond.



Stll, he borrowed a lot. And while I think it's going too far to say that Amon Ereb "was" the Lonely Mountain in any direct sense, I think the association was present in an indeterminate way in Tolkien's mind, at least at some point. While the journey of Thorin & Co. turned out in the event to be roughly due east, this was not a given from the start (in fact, there's really no indication in the text in what direction Hobbiton lay relative to Rivendell); and Tolkien, once he got the party to the eaves of Mirkwood, clearly had little idea what he was going to do next (the early versions of Thror's Map give no indication of its location relative to 'world geography').

I couldn't in the space and time available do justice to the case JDR makes for the 'early' geography, which places TH in some-place-very-like-Beleriand. Read his book!

But as to my own supposition of an intermediate "Blue Mountains" phase: you say

I am not at all persuaded that the Misty Mountains were equated with the Blue Mountains in the early stages of The Lord of the Rings, even if they were so earlier. The argument from the identification of Nogrod with Moria is a strong one – but it must be noted that Moria was not associated with the Misty Mountains until LotR, that is, after the references to Nogrod as the ancient home of Durin’s folk.

Well, Moria only came into being with the Lord of the Rings, at least in any sense equating it with an ancient mansion of Durin's Folk. In The Hobbit itself the "Mines of Moria" is a reference-less and locationless name, merely the place Thror was slain (and which could easily be a goblin-mine). The earliest writing which says more is the 'third phase' continuation of Many Meetings, where Gloin states "Moria was the ancestral home of the Dwarves of the race of Durin." But of course the race of Durin is the Longbeards, and every text up to that time (and even some post-LR!) places their 'ancestral home' in the Blue Mountains.

The entry in the Etymologies is very suggestive precisely because it is contemporaneous with the early work on the Lord of the Rings. While the E were originally written just before Tolkien turned to the 'New Hobbit,' he continued for a while to insert additional entries regarding new names that developed in the early drafts of what we know as the Fellowship of the Ring. The Moria/Nogrod entry is one of these, and plainly was only made after Tolkien had embarked on Book II (late 1939).

It's perhaps instructive to note that though Durin himself only arose in The Hobbit the Longbeards, the Indravangs or Enfeng, had been an integral part of events in Beleriand from the Lost Tales onward. In The Hobbit (1st Ed.) there are two Houses of Dwarves, not seven, in accord with the Nogrod/Belegost meme. While their mansions were at Belegost in the Lost Tales, in QN and QS the Longbeards were the Dwarves of Nogrod (which in QS was actually named Khazad-dum), and Tolkien maintained the association Longbeards-Nogrod even to the extent of temporarily relocating Nogrod/Moria/Khazad-dum to the Hithaeglir, before finally deciding they were separate cities.

On the other hand there is an alternative and passing idea which appears in the first draft of The Ring Goes South- that Moria wasn't the ancestral home at all!

They were made by the Dwarves of Durin's clan many hundreds of years ago, when Elves dwelt in Hollin, and there was peace between the two races. In those ancient days Durin dwelt in Caron-Dun [Dimrill Dale]

In other words, Moria was founded after the War of Wrath- by Durin and his Longbeards apparently after departing their ancestral home.



(It's an odd fact that in the post-LR Annals (both sets), the Enfeng/Longbeards were re-associated with Belegost, rather than transplanted to Moria (although by this time of course the caverns above Mirrormere were clearly the home of Durin's folk). I can't explain this; the feeling I get, though, is that Tolkien was fumbling around with making the Belegostian Longbeards* the Elder Days' 'good' Dwarves, the builders of Menegroth and (according to the History of Galadriel and Celeborn) wholly innocent of its sack- and only these 'good' Dwarves would become an element of Moria's population at the beginning of the Second Age, since the host of Nogrod was said to have been annihilated at Sarn Athrad.).

*One wonders if therefore in the very late essay Of Dwarves and Men, the two named Houses of the Ered Luin are to be associated Firebeards-Belegost and Broadbeams-Nogrod, "Enfeng" reglossed to contain a fire-element rather than AN- "long."