Haradrim

Haradrim is not a name this people is known to have used for itself. It is the form current among the Sindarin-speaking peoples of the west, above all in Gondor, and it describes the Haradrim purely by where they lived as seen from there. The first element is the Sindarin word for the south, which Tolkien's list of name-elements pairs with the Quenya word for the same direction. Attached to it is the collective ending also found in other names for peoples, such as Rohirrim. Taken together, the name means little more than the folk of the southern lands. No native name, and nothing of the Haradrim's own language, is recorded in the works.1

In The Lord of the Rings the Sindarin name appears alongside a plain English one. Faramir's rangers in Ithilien call the men marching north to join Sauron's armies Southrons as readily as Haradrim, and the two names are used interchangeably throughout the narrative. Gondor also distinguished degrees of distance within the south. Warriors are said to have come to the Pelennor from Far Harad, which suggests that the name covered many peoples across a wide area rather than a single nation. The name therefore reflects Gondor's view of the south, not any unity among the southern peoples themselves.2

The Haradrim came from the Men who never went west into Beleriand and so had no part in the history of the Edain. Like the Easterlings, they belonged to the Men of Middle-earth over whom Sauron gained influence during the Second Age, after he had established himself in Mordor. Their lands also drew the attention of Númenor, whose mariners established a presence on the southern coasts. Some of the Númenóreans who turned away from the Valar settled among the southern peoples and became lords over them, as the renegades named in the register did. The works describe the southern peoples mainly through these contacts with others and say almost nothing about their origins before Sauron's lordship began.3

Nothing is recorded of the southern peoples before Sauron's lordship reached them, and their history, as the works preserve it, begins with the coming of the Númenóreans. In the later Second Age the King's Men of Númenor built strongholds along the coasts of Middle-earth and ruled the local peoples as masters and tribute-takers rather than as teachers, and the greatest of their havens was Umbar, on the coast of the lands later called Harad. When Ar-Pharazôn set out to challenge Sauron, he landed his host at Umbar and marched inland from there. After the downfall of Númenor, the renegade lords already mentioned kept their seats in the far south, which left the region open to Sauron's influence as the Second Age drew to a close.1

In the Third Age, what is known of the Haradrim comes almost entirely from the annals of Gondor, and it is mostly a record of wars. Gondor's southward expansion under its Ship-kings brought the realm into conflict with them early. After King Eärnil I took Umbar and made it a fortress of Gondor, the Men of Harad fought to win it back, and King Ciryandil fell during their siege of the haven. His son Ciryaher defeated the kings of Harad and forced them to accept Gondor's overlordship, and he took the name Hyarmendacil, Victor of the South, in memory of the victory. For a time afterwards Gondor's power reached far into the southern lands, and Gondor held sons of Harad's rulers as hostages to secure their submission.2

Gondor's civil war, the Kin-strife, ended this dominion. The defeated followers of the usurper Castamir fled to Umbar and held it against the crown, and in the following centuries the southern peoples were often found fighting alongside the Corsairs who descended from them. King Aldamir was killed in a war against Harad and the rebels of Umbar, and his son, the second king to bear the name Hyarmendacil, later defeated the Men of Harad again. Umbar was retaken for Gondor by Telumehtar Umbardacil, but the realm soon lost the haven once more in the troubles that followed, and it then came under the control of the Men of Harad.3

The Haradrim's later wars against Gondor are increasingly presented as part of Sauron's designs. When the Wainriders attacked from the east, an army from the south moved against Gondor at the same time. Eärnil, who commanded Gondor's southern forces and later became king, defeated the southern invaders in South Ithilien before he turned north to meet the eastern host. Many generations later, agents of Sauron roused the Haradrim, who crossed the river Poros into Gondor's southern fiefs. Riders from Rohan came to Gondor's aid in that war, and the sons of King Folcwine were killed at the Crossings of Poros.4

In the War of the Ring the Haradrim marched openly at Sauron's call. Faramir's company attacked one of their columns in Ithilien as it moved north with a great war-beast of the south, and Sam, who witnessed the fight, was left wondering about the fallen soldier's home and whether he had come willingly. At the Battle of the Pelennor Fields their horsemen and war-beasts formed a large part of the enemy army, and Théoden struck down their chieftain before he himself fell. Southrons also stood in the host that met the Captains of the West before the Black Gate.5

Sauron's fall did not bring an end to the southern peoples. It only ended their subjection to Mordor. When Aragorn took up his kingship, he made peace with the peoples of Harad. The appendices also mention later campaigns in which he and Éomer rode far into the south and east. What became of the Haradrim during the Fourth Age is not told, and the works leave them as they found them, known mostly through their dealings with Gondor.6

What the works preserve of the Haradrim's customs is almost entirely what their enemies saw of them in war, and the most distinctive of it is their use of great beasts. In Gondor these animals were called mûmakil, while hobbits knew them only as oliphaunts from an old rhyme of the Shire, which Sam recites to Gollum half as a joke. When Sam at last sees one in Ithilien, it is a living beast of vast size, bearing a structure like a tower on its back and trampling through the fighting in a blind rage. At the Pelennor Fields the southern host brought many of these beasts into battle, each carrying a war-tower, and the horses of Rohan would not go near them. The Haradrim also fought as mounted troops, and it was their horsemen that Théoden's company met in open battle.1

Gondor's rangers describe the southern warriors as proud and richly adorned, and their own view of them is marked by long hostility more than by knowledge. The dead soldier whom Sam sees in Ithilien wears a golden collar at his throat, and at the Pelennor the chieftain of Harad rode under a scarlet banner bearing a black serpent. One of Faramir's men observes that Gondor once had dealings with the kingdoms of the far south, in the days when its borders lay much farther south than they did at the end of the Third Age, but that these dealings never became friendship. Beyond such glimpses of dress, arms and heraldry, nothing is told of how the Haradrim lived in their own lands, what they made there, or how they were governed apart from the kings whom Gondor fought.2

The Haradrim's language may have left one trace. Among Gandalf's names, the one he says he bore in the South is Incánus, and the editorial notes on the Istari record Tolkien's suggestion that this might be a word from a southern tongue rather than an Elvish one. The same notes show that he also considered a Quenya origin for the name, so the evidence remains uncertain. It does show, however, that Gandalf's journeys once reached the southern lands. How the Haradrim regarded death, what they believed about the world, and how they reckoned time are not recorded anywhere in the works.3

The works never set out the Haradrim as a people of named tribes, houses or clans, and no kindred among them is given a name of its own. The only division the texts draw is geographical, and it runs through Harad itself. The map of Gondor and Mordor marks the nearer part of the southern lands as Near Harad, and the account of the Pelennor sets apart a contingent from Far Harad, which the narrative describes separately from the other southern warriors in the host. Beside the southern peoples stood others whom the same account keeps distinct, such as the Variags of Khand and the Easterlings. Whether Near and Far Harad were separate peoples, separate realms, or only different distances from Gondor is not explained.1

The Haradrim were also not ruled by a single crown. Gondor's annals speak of kings of Harad in the plural, both when Hyarmendacil I compelled them to acknowledge his overlordship and when Aldamir fell fighting against them and their allies from Umbar. None of these kings is named, and the texts do not tell whether they ruled neighbouring kingdoms or were lesser lords under a greater one. The chieftain who led the southern horsemen at the Pelennor likewise goes unnamed.2

They were therefore not native chieftains but foreign lords set over the Haradrim, and nothing is said of any house or line descending from them.

The only rulers of the Haradrim whose names survive came from outside the people. In the account of the Rings of Power, Herumor and Fuinur appear as Númenóreans who had already turned to Sauron before the Downfall and who then won great power among the southern Men. They were therefore not native chieftains but foreign lords set over the Haradrim, and nothing is said of any house or line descending from them.3

In The Lord of the Rings the Haradrim are almost never seen close at hand, and the narrative seems to intend this. They first enter the story as rumour, in Gollum's report of armies marching up from the south, and they are always seen from outside, first by hobbits and then by the soldiers of Gondor. Nobody among them speaks, and none of them is given a name or a point of view. They mark how far Sauron's reach extended beyond the borders of Mordor. The war therefore appears less as a struggle between Men and monsters and more as one in which Men fought on both sides, many of them drawn from lands the western characters barely knew.1

The encounter in Ithilien, already described above, gives the southern people their most important moment in the story. By letting Sam, rather than a captain of Gondor, look at the fallen warrior, the narrative briefly shifts from the view of a soldier to that of an ordinary onlooker. Sam's questions are left unanswered, and that silence is part of their effect. The story does not decide whether the dead man was wicked or misled. It only reminds the reader that the enemy host was made up of people with homes and reasons of their own. The same scene has a lighter side, because the beast Sam had known only from a fireside rhyme proves to be real, and his view of the world grows larger in that moment.2

The ending gives this reading its full shape. Once Sauron was overthrown, the new king made peace with the south instead of taking revenge on it. The Haradrim had served the Dark Lord as subjects, and his fall freed them rather than condemning them. In this way the book presents enmity between peoples as something Sauron had exploited, not as a permanent condition, even though it never tells the story from the south's side.3

Of the adaptations, only Peter Jackson's film trilogy gives the Haradrim a real presence on screen. As in the book, they remain a people without individual characters: no Southron is given a name or a credited speaking role. They appear in the second and third films, first in the ambush in Ithilien and then among Sauron's forces at the Pelennor Fields. The Ithilien episode contains the most frequently noted change. In the book the wondering about the fallen warrior is Sam's and stays within his own thoughts, but the film gives a similar reflection to Faramir, who speaks it aloud. The scene therefore takes the point of view of a captain of Gondor rather than that of an ordinary onlooker, which is the very shift the book avoids.1

At the Pelennor the films present the southern contribution to the battle mainly through the war-beasts. The mûmakil become the chief obstacle to the charge of Rohan, and Legolas brings one of them down alone, an episode that has no counterpart in the book. The films leave out the Southron horsemen whom the book sets against Théoden's riders, and with them Théoden's slaying of their chieftain. The earlier adaptations add little to this picture. Ralph Bakshi's animated film breaks off with the battle at Helm's Deep, before the story reaches Ithilien or Gondor, so the Haradrim never appear in it.2