Emyn Muil

Emyn Muil is a Sindarin name, and its first element is transparent. Emyn is the plural of amon, the ordinary Sindarin word for a hill, so the name describes a cluster of heights rather than a single summit. The same element appears across the Sindarin geography of the region and beyond. Amon Hen and Amon Lhaw stand at the southern end of the hill-country itself, and the plural recurs in Emyn Arnen in Ithilien and in Emyn Beraid, the Tower Hills in the far west. Read against these parallels, the name fits a wider naming pattern in which a plural noun for hills is paired with a qualifying word.1

The second element, muil, is harder to pin down. Neither the narrative of The Lord of the Rings nor its appendices translates it, and this entry does not supply a meaning that the published texts leave open. What the text does provide is description. The hills are consistently characterised as grey, stony and desolate, and the English phrase that accompanies the name in some passages, calling them the bleak hills, reads as a narrator's or speaker's characterisation. It is not offered as a rendering of the Elvish, and it should not be treated as one.2

No separate name in the Common Speech or in the language of the Rohirrim is recorded for these hills. Characters of very different backgrounds use the Sindarin form alike: the travellers descending the Anduin, and later the hobbits who wander among the crags, all refer to them as the Emyn Muil. The name therefore belongs to the same stratum as the other Sindarin names along this stretch of the river, the naming tradition associated with Gondor and its Elvish-derived nomenclature. The text does not say who first coined the name, or when. It is simply the established name by the time of the story, and its speakers never explain it.3

The Emyn Muil are a region of rough, broken upland through which the Anduin cuts its way on its long course southward. Travellers coming down the river from the north pass first through the barren Brown Lands. The hills then close in on either bank, and the river runs between them in a narrowing channel. Within this stretch lie the rapids of Sarn Gebir, which force boats ashore, and farther down the passage through the Argonath. Beyond it the river widens into the lake of Nen Hithoel, whose flanking heights have already been noted. At the southern end of the lake the Anduin leaves the hills over the falls of Rauros.1

Although the river divides them, the hills belong to both banks. West of the Anduin they stand between the river and the open grasslands of Rohan, and their western rim falls away steeply toward the plains. The pursuers of the Orc-band descend there when they cross from the lake to the Rohirrim's country. The hill-country east of the river is larger and wilder, and it is here that the region shows its harshest character. It is a tangle of sharp ridges, blind ravines and sudden drops, where a walker can labour for days and find that he has made little headway. Water is scarce and cover is sparse, and the stone offers few natural paths in any direction.2

On their eastern side the hills end abruptly in a high, sheer edge. Below it the land sinks toward the fens and pools of the Dead Marshes, and beyond them lie the approaches to Mordor. The steepness of this border is the region's defining feature for anyone trying to leave it eastward. Descending from the heights to the lower ground calls for climbing gear or for knowledge of a way down, and neither is easily come by. The Emyn Muil therefore act less as a road than as a barrier: they shut off the river valley from the lands to the east and west. They also divide the eastward route toward the Black Land into a stony upper stage and a waterlogged lower one.3

The published texts record no founding of the Emyn Muil and no settled people there. The hills enter history only as a frontier, chiefly through the kingdom of Gondor. In the time of its greatness Gondor's reach up the Anduin stopped short of them; the river country beyond them lay outside the realm. The hills themselves became the kingdom's northern bulwark on the river. Most of what can be dated about them concerns the watch Gondor kept at this border, and much later the brief passage of the Fellowship of the Ring through it.1

The clearest datable act in the region's early history comes from the reign of Minalcar, who ruled Gondor first as regent and then as king under the name Rómendacil II. After his wars against the Easterlings in the thirteenth century of the Third Age, he fortified the western shore of the Anduin as far north as the inflow of the Limlight. He also forbade strangers to travel down the river past the Emyn Muil. The same account credits him with raising the pillars of the Argonath at the gateway to Nen Hithoel. This made the northern entrance to the lake a monument of the kingdom's claim as well as a physical barrier. The watch-seats on Amon Hen and Amon Lhaw date from the same era of the kings, although the texts give them no exact date. They show that Gondor did not treat the hill-country as empty wasteland. It was a guarded march, where the border could be watched and heard over.2

As Gondor declined, this frontier fell out of use. By the end of the Third Age the works of the kings survived only as relics. The old portage path beside the rapids was still usable, though long neglected, and the high seats stood on their hills with no one to occupy them. The texts do not describe any fighting for the hills themselves. Their history in this period is one of abandonment rather than conquest, and the lands north of them, the Brown Lands, had become a waste whose cause the travellers could only guess at. By then Orcs moved freely on the western bank, a measure of how far the kingdom's hold had slipped.3

The hills' one well-recorded crisis came at the end of February in the year 3019. The Company descended the river from Lórien, carried their boats round the rapids along the old portage, and passed the Argonath into Nen Hithoel. They camped at Parth Galen beneath Amon Hen. On the day the Tale of Years gives as 26 February the Fellowship broke apart. Frodo climbed to the Seat of Seeing and there resolved to go on alone. An Orc-band sent from Isengard and from the north attacked the camp. Boromir fell defending Merry and Pippin, and the Orcs carried the two hobbits away westward. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli set Boromir's body adrift in a boat toward the falls, then took up the pursuit across the western hills. Frodo and Sam meanwhile crossed the lake to the eastern shore.4

The two hobbits then spent several days lost among the eastern crags, unable to find a way down. Gollum had been trailing the Company since before the river journey and followed them closely. They eventually lowered themselves down a cliff using an Elven rope from Lórien, and the rope afterwards came free as if of its own will. That night they watched Gollum creep head-first down the rock face, caught him at its foot, and made him swear an oath by the Ring. This bound him to guide them. Under his guidance they left the hills and began the crossing of the Dead Marshes toward the Black Gate. Nothing the texts record from the Fourth Age touches the Emyn Muil. The hills pass out of the narrative at this point, their last recorded role being the place where Frodo's guide was won.5

No people is recorded as living in the Emyn Muil, and no ruler is named whose seat lay among them. The texts mention no village, hall or farmstead in the hill-country, and no folk who took their name from it. Such works as stand there are the marks of a power based elsewhere, a kingdom far to the south that held these heights as a border rather than as a home. The only names attached to the region and its landmarks belong to that kingdom's Sindarin nomenclature, and no local name survives beside them. Once the southern realm withdrew from its march, nothing took its place. By the close of the Third Age the hills were a no-man's-land, claimed by no one and crossed by whoever needed to pass.1

On the west the hills border the Riddermark. Their steep western face, which the Rohirrim's country looks up to, is known as the East Wall of Rohan, and the grasslands beneath it belong to the horse-lords. The texts do not show the Rohirrim holding or garrisoning the heights themselves. Their concern was with what came down out of them. At the end of the Third Age Orc-bands moved over this border without hindrance, and the Riders of the Mark answered with patrols across the open plains below. One such company overtook and destroyed the band that had come down from the hills. That encounter shows how the Emyn Muil served the Enemy as a covered road into Rohan's eastern marches.2

The Emyn Muil therefore act less as a road than as a barrier: they shut off the river valley from the lands to the east and west.

The eastern hill-country faced a far more dangerous neighbour. Beyond the Dead Marshes lay the lands of Mordor, and by the time of the War of the Ring its power reached over the hills even where its servants were not seen. While the hobbits were among the crags, a winged shape passed overhead with a cry that filled them with dread. The only creature shown to be at home in this wilderness was Gollum, who had learned its ways during his long wanderings. He owed allegiance to no one there. His knowledge of the region was a solitary outcast's, not a people's.3

In the narrative the Emyn Muil mark the point where the story divides. The Fellowship reaches the hills as a single company and leaves them as separate strands, and the structure of the book follows this split. Book III takes up the pursuit westward across the hills, while Book IV opens in the eastern crags with Frodo and Sam alone. The region is thus less a destination than a hinge. Its landscape is where the collective journey of the Company ends and the smaller, more private journeys begin.1

For the two hobbits the hills work as a maze that makes their situation visible. They know their goal lies eastward, yet the stone keeps turning them back. The emptiness of the country leaves them nothing to rely on but each other and the few things they carry from Lórien. Sam's rope, taken almost as an afterthought, proves decisive, and the scene lets his practical nature show alongside Frodo's burden. The hills also expose the hobbits to the reach of the Enemy. A passing cry from the sky reminds them, and the reader, that even this wasteland is not beyond Mordor's notice.2

The deeper function of the setting is to make a guide necessary. Because the hobbits cannot find their own way out, the narrative gives Gollum a place in the quest that he could not otherwise have claimed. When they have him in their power, Frodo seems to hear Gandalf's earlier words about pity return to him, and he chooses to spare Gollum rather than kill him. In this way the barren hills become the setting for one of the book's central moral decisions, whose consequences reach to the end of the quest.3

Peter Jackson's film trilogy brings the hill-country to the screen across its first two instalments, with Elijah Wood as Frodo, Sean Astin as Sam and Andy Serkis as Gollum. The breaking of the Fellowship beneath Amon Hen closes the first film. This moves Boromir's death, which the novel reports only at the opening of Book III, to the end of the opening part of the story. The second film then begins with Frodo and Sam already lost among the eastern crags, and the winning of their guide follows early in its running time. The most consequential structural departure concerns the division the novel draws at this point. Tolkien keeps the western pursuit and the eastern journey in separate books. The film instead cuts back and forth between the two strands throughout, so the hills no longer mark a clean break between two halves of the narrative. The episode's moral core, Frodo's decision to spare Gollum and bind him by an oath, is retained, although the time spent wandering the crags is compressed.1

The BBC radio dramatisation follows the book's ordering far more closely. It sets Frodo and Sam's passage through the eastern hills and their encounter with Gollum within its account of the journey toward Mordor. The roles are taken by Ian Holm as Frodo, William Nighy as Sam and Peter Woodthorpe as Gollum. Because the medium carries the landscape through narration and dialogue alone, the hills appear there mainly as a described obstacle rather than as a visual setting. Of the other adaptations, none gives the region a recorded role that can be stated with confidence.2