Dunland

Dunland is not a name the hill-folk gave to their own country. It comes from their neighbours, the Horse-lords of Rohan, who called the people of these uplands Dunlendings because they were swarthy and dark-haired. The first element is therefore an adjective of colour, the same dun that survives in older English for a dull, dark hue, and the land took its name from the look of its inhabitants rather than from any feature of the terrain. Tolkien stresses that this element has nothing to do with the Grey-elven word for 'west', despite the similar sound and the region's position west of Isengard. The likeness is a coincidence between two languages, not a hidden etymology.1

The form of the name follows from the way the Red Book is presented in translation. Tolkien renders the speech of Rohan in English of an older cast, so Rohirric words appear in the text through Old English equivalents. Dunland and Dunlending are therefore English forms standing in for Rohirric originals that the text never records. The same appendix treats the language of the Dunlendings themselves as alien to the Common Speech, or at most distantly related to it, and it gives no name that they used for their own land. What the reader sees is an outsider's label, passed from Rohirric into translation.2

In the narrative, the name works mostly as a point of orientation. The prologue uses the edge of Dunland, together with Tharbad, to fix a stretch of country where Stoorish hobbits lived for a time, and the phrase about Dunland's borders recurs as a boundary marker rather than as the name of a settled realm. The people-name Dunlending often stands beside the place-name, and in many passages the two are hard to separate: the land is known through the folk the Rohirrim named, and those folk are known through the land they held.3

Dunland is upland country at the southern end of the Misty Mountains, where the range falls away into foothills on its western side. Its main point of reference is Isengard, which lies to its east at the last spur of the mountains. Beyond Isengard is the open plain of Rohan, and the river Isen with its fords separates the Horse-lords' pastures from the hill-folk to the west. That position makes Dunland a frontier. It flanks the Gap of Rohan, the passage between the Misty Mountains and the White Mountains, and whoever holds the country west of the Isen can threaten the western marches of Rohan. The histories of the Mark show how real that threat was: in the reign of Helm, hill-men came over the Isen in force and took part in the fighting that overran Rohan.1

The narrative does not describe the land itself closely. It is a region of hills rather than a defined realm, and its edges are known more from what lies beyond them than from any drawn line. On its northern and western side, Dunland meets the lower country near Tharbad, where the old road crossed the Greyflood. The prologue places the Stoors in the stretch between that crossing and Dunland's margin, so the region's border was a recognisable limit even in early days. Its southeastern side meets land that the Dunlendings still thought of as theirs. During the defence of Helm's Deep, the Rohirrim learn that the hill-men have kept alive an old grievance, claiming that the plains beyond the Isen were taken from their forefathers. Dunland is therefore shaped as much by that disputed boundary as by its hills.2

Material published after Tolkien's death places Dunland within a wider geography. It belongs to Enedwaith, the broad and thinly settled country between the Greyflood and the Isen. Within Enedwaith it is the eastern, upland part, lying against the western foothills of the Misty Mountains. The Dunlendish folk lived mainly in these hills, while much of the land further west toward the coast remained empty or sparsely inhabited. The picture fits the published narrative: a hill-country held by a people apart, on the edge of lands that neither Gondor nor Rohan ever fully took in.3

Dunland has no recorded founding. Its history begins with the people who came to hold it, and the published account of them reaches far back. The Dunlendings were a remnant of the old folk who once lived in the valleys of the White Mountains, and the Dead who haunted the paths under Dunharrow were of the same stock. During the Dark Years some of this people moved north into the southern dales of the Misty Mountains. From there a part of them spread further into the empty country of Eriador, as far as the Barrow-downs, and the Men of Bree descended from them. Those who stayed in the hills west of the Isen alone kept their ancestral speech and customs, and they remained a closed people, cool toward the Dúnedain.1

Dunland appears in the dated record of the Third Age through the Hobbits rather than through its own inhabitants. The Tale of Years places the crossing of the Stoors over the Redhorn Pass around the year 1150. Some of them settled in the Angle, while others went south toward Dunland. As noted earlier, a number lingered between Tharbad and the edge of the hill-country before turning north again. The chronicle sets the Stoors' departure from the Angle, and a partial return to Wilderland, around 1356, which gives a rough outer limit for this period. Nothing suggests that the hill-folk took any part in these movements beyond being their neighbours.2

The decisive change came in 2510, when Gondor gave the depopulated province of Calenardhon to Eorl and his riders after the Battle of the Field of Celebrant. The land east of the Isen became the Mark of the Rohirrim. From then on the Dunlendings had horsemen on their doorstep, and they came to hate them. Open war followed in the reign of Helm Hammerhand. Freca, a great landholder of the Mark who was said to have much Dunlendish blood, was struck down by the king in 2754. Four years later, in 2758, his son Wulf came over the Isen with Dunlendish forces while Rohan was also attacked from the east. The Mark was overrun and Wulf seized Edoras. Helm and his people held out in the Hornburg through the Long Winter, and the king died there. In 2759 Fréaláf retook Edoras and ended Wulf's rule. In the same year Saruman took up residence in Isengard, on Dunland's eastern flank.3

Late in the Third Age the region's population declined further. In 2912 great floods swept Enedwaith and Minhiriath, and Tharbad, the old crossing on Dunland's northwestern side, was ruined and abandoned. The chronicle records no further settlement there. By the time of the War of the Ring the lower country beyond the hills was largely empty. Saruman was by then drawing on the hill-folk as a source of fighting men. He fed their old grievance against the Rohirrim and told them that the horsemen were cruel and would burn their captives alive.4

In 3019 the Dunlendings marched with Saruman's host. Men of Dunland fought beside the Orcs of Isengard at the Fords of Isen, where Théodred fell in the first battle on 25 February and a second assault followed on 2 March. They also took part in the night attack on Helm's Deep on 3–4 March, and in the fighting there one of the Rohirrim who understood their tongue interpreted their war-cries for the defenders. After the Huorns destroyed the Orcish army, the surviving hill-men gave themselves up to Erkenbrand. They were surprised to be spared. They were set to help repair the damage and bury the fallen, and then released after swearing never again to cross the Isen in arms against the Mark. With Isengard broken, the war in the west ended there. The published narrative gives no later history of Dunland under the new order of the Fourth Age.5

The published narrative presents Dunland as the country of a single people, and it records nothing of how that people governed itself. No king, chieftain or ruling house of the Dunlendings is named, and nothing suggests they ever formed a realm with fixed borders or a line of succession. When they act in the chronicles of the Mark, others lead them. Wulf, the son of a lord of Rohan, stood at the head of their host in Helm's time, and at the end of the Third Age Saruman did. Rohan called them hill-men or wild men and dealt with them as a hostile border folk, not as a neighbouring kingdom with which a treaty could be made. The one settlement the narrative records after the war, the oath taken before Erkenbrand, was sworn by the defeated men themselves and not by any lord speaking for Dunland as a whole. The Dunlendings' own view of these relations appears only through what their neighbours report. They held that the grasslands beyond the Isen were theirs by right, and that the horsemen were intruders.1

The posthumously edited material gives this hostility a longer background and a more tangled frontier. In the Second Age, the Númenóreans who came up the Greyflood felled the great forests of Enedwaith and Minhiriath for their shipbuilding, and the native folk of those woods, related to the later Dunlendings, became bitter enemies of the newcomers. Some sided with Sauron against them. The same writings show that the line between Rohan and Dunland was never as clean as the Isen suggests. The Mark claimed land west of the river as far as the Adorn, and the population there was mixed, with families of Dunlendish descent living under Rohirric rule. Freca's ancestry, noted earlier, reflects the same mingling at the level of the Mark's great landholders. Saruman used these ties in the years before the War of the Ring. From Isengard he worked on the hill-folk and on men of divided loyalty in the western marches, so that the old dispute over the Isen lands became part of his own war.2

Dunland is therefore felt mainly as a limit: the point where Rohan's authority ends and the reader's knowledge ends with it.

Dunland never becomes a stage in The Lord of the Rings. No viewpoint character enters it, and the reader never sees one of its homesteads or hill-paths described. It works instead as a presence at the edge of the map, and its first appearance in the main story is an omen rather than a scene. While the Company rests in Hollin on the way south from Rivendell, a flock of dark birds sweeps over the hills. Aragorn identifies them as crebain that have come from Dunland and Fangorn, and their presence tells the travellers that the country toward Isengard is watched. Long before the reader learns of Saruman's treachery at first hand, the region is associated with spying and unease.1

In the chapters set in Rohan, Dunland stands for the human side of Saruman's war. The Orcs of Isengard are shown as instruments without a cause, while the hill-men arrive with a complaint of their own, however much the wizard has sharpened it. The story tells this conflict largely from Rohan's side, yet it lets the other side be heard, if only through an interpreter on the walls. That choice gives the battle at the Deeping Wall a moral weight that a fight against Orcs alone would lack. The treatment of the prisoners afterwards turns on the same point: they had expected cruelty, and they are shown mercy, which quietly disproves what Saruman had told them.2

After the war, Dunland returns to the background it came from. On the long journey home, the travellers who leave Rohan pass through the Gap and turn northward through the hill-country west of the Isen. The Dunlendings keep out of sight, and the passage is uneventful. In the narrative's design, the region marks the seam between the southern war and the road back to Eriador. Its people are never given a spokesman, a history told in their own voice, or a place in the new order that follows the war. Dunland is therefore felt mainly as a limit: the point where Rohan's authority ends and the reader's knowledge ends with it.3

In Peter Jackson's film trilogy, Dunland appears only in the second film, and it is never shown as a country in its own right. Its people appear as the wild men of the hills, stirred up by Saruman to raid the villages of the Westfold, so that Rohan's troubles begin with fire and refugees before the siege itself. The extended edition adds a short sequence in which the hill-men bind themselves to the wizard, which states their allegiance openly where the book leaves it to report and rumour. The largest departure concerns the war in the Mark. In the films the host that assaults Helm's Deep is made up of Saruman's Uruk-hai, and the Dunlendings take no visible part in the battle. With them go the interpreted war-cries from the wall, the surrender to Erkenbrand and the oath not to cross the Isen again, so the films lose the book's point about the hill-men's grievance and the mercy shown to them. The first battle at the Fords of Isen is likewise not staged, and only its outcome reaches Edoras.1

Kenji Kamiyama's animated film of 2024 gives the region far more space, since its subject is the war of Helm's reign. Brian Cox voices Helm, Shaun Dooley voices Freca and Luke Pasqualino voices Wulf, whose grudge against the king drives the plot and who leads the Dunlendish host against Rohan. The film keeps the outline of the appendix account: the rejected marriage proposal, Freca's death at the king's hands and the siege of the Hornburg through a hard winter. Its main change lies in the king's daughter, who is unnamed in the book. The film names her Héra, voiced by Gaia Wise, and makes her the central figure, so that Wulf's campaign becomes a personal quarrel with her as much as a claim to land. As a result, Dunland is seen chiefly through its lord's ambition, and the hill-folk's older complaint against the Mark stays in the background.2