Eregion

Eregion is a Sindarin name, and its meaning is transparent to anyone who knows the Grey-elven vocabulary. It joins the element ereg, glossed by Tolkien as 'thorn' or 'holly', to a suffix denoting a land or region, so that the whole may be rendered 'Land of Holly'. The same element appears in Region, the name of the dense holly forest that formed part of Doriath in the First Age, which shows that the Noldor settling west of the Misty Mountains named their new country with the tongue of Beleriand rather than their own Quenya. This fits the wider pattern by which the Exiles adopted Sindarin for everyday use and for the naming of places in Middle-earth.1

Among Men the land was known as Hollin, and this is the form that dominates The Lord of the Rings. It is an English rendering of the Elvish name rather than an independent coinage: holly is the plant, and Hollin echoes an older English word for it. Within the fiction it stands for the name used in the Common Speech, and it is the one Gandalf and Aragorn use when the Company crosses the region on its way south. The posthumously edited account of the Rings of Power makes the pairing explicit, naming the realm Eregion and noting that Men called it Hollin.2

The name was not merely descriptive. At the West-gate of Moria, Gandalf explains that holly was the emblem of the Elves of that country, and that they had set the trees there to mark the limit of their land. The two forms also meet on the gate itself: the Elvish inscription names Celebrimbor with the Sindarin form of his country, while Gandalf's translation for the Company gives it as Hollin. The holly that gave the realm its name thus served both as its sign and as its border.3

Eregion lay in the eastern part of Eriador, on the western side of the Misty Mountains, where the foothills fall away toward the lowlands. Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings reckons Hollin, together with Rivendell, among the lands that lay toward the Greyflood and the Loudwater, which places it in the same eastern country as Elrond's valley but further south. Travellers from Rivendell reached it by following the line of the mountains southward, so that its eastern edge was set against the range itself. At that edge stood the western entrance to Khazad-dûm, and an old road ran out of Hollin toward it, following the valley of the Sirannon, the stream that once flowed down from the gate in a line of falls.1

By the end of the Third Age the country was empty of inhabitants. The Company, coming into it after a long march, found a region of low hills and ridges with holly growing thickly, the peaks of the mountains standing close above them to the east. Aragorn judged it a wholesome land with clean air, where evil things did not easily settle, and the weather there held fair at first. Yet the silence was unusual, and Legolas sensed that the very stones still remembered the Elves who had worked them and felt their absence. The quiet was broken only by the flocks of crebain that swept over the hills, which Aragorn took to be spies.2

The accounts published after Tolkien's death fill in the realm as it was in its day. Its situation was chosen for the nearness of the Dwarves: the Noldor were drawn there by the report of mithril found in Khazad-dûm, and the closeness of the two peoples bred the friendship on which Eregion's craft rested. Its chief city was Ost-in-Edhil, and to the south the Glanduin, flowing down from the mountains, marked the boundary of the realm.3

Eregion was founded about the year 750 of the Second Age, when a company of the Noldor who had remained in Middle-earth after the end of the First Age went east from Lindon and settled at the feet of the Misty Mountains. The Tale of Years records the founding only briefly, but the posthumously edited accounts supply more detail. They make Celebrimbor, a descendant of Fëanor, the foremost lord of the new realm, and present its people as a guild of smiths and jewel-workers — the Gwaith-i-Mírdain, a name meaning People of the Jewel-smiths — whose skill in the working of metal and gems surpassed that of any other Elves then living east of the sea. The later writings also associate Galadriel and Celeborn with Eregion in its early centuries, though Tolkien's versions of their part there do not agree in every point.1

The turning point in the realm's history came around 1200, when Sauron, who had lain hidden after the overthrow of Morgoth, set out to win the Eldar to his purposes. He came among them in a fair guise, calling himself Annatar, the Lord of Gifts, and offered his knowledge and help. In Lindon, Gil-galad and Elrond distrusted him and would not admit him. The smiths of Eregion judged otherwise: eager to increase their craft and to make Middle-earth as fair as the lands they had left, they took his counsel and learned much from him.2

The gate itself showed the partnership: the Dwarf Narvi built the doors, and Celebrimbor traced the letters on them.

Under this instruction the craftsmen of Eregion reached the height of their art around 1500 and began to forge the Rings of Power. The Three Rings of the Elves were completed about 1590, and Celebrimbor made them without Sauron's hand, which is why they were not directly subject to him. About 1600 Sauron forged the One Ring in the fire of Orodruin, and in the same period Celebrimbor became aware of what he intended. Elrond later told the Council at Rivendell that the smiths of Eregion had been deceived rather than careless, and that it was in their workshops that the many Elven-rings had been made.3

Once the Elves had discovered the deceit and withheld their rings from use, Sauron turned to open war. The Tale of Years dates the outbreak of the War of the Elves and Sauron to 1693, the year in which the Three were hidden away. In 1695 Sauron's armies entered Eriador, and Gil-galad sent Elrond eastward to the aid of Eregion. The help came too late: in 1697 the realm was destroyed and Celebrimbor was killed. In the same year the Dwarves shut the gates of Moria, and Elrond withdrew with the survivors of the Noldor to found the refuge of Imladris in a hidden valley further north.4

The posthumous narratives fill in the fall itself. Sauron stormed the capital and took Celebrimbor prisoner, putting him to torment to learn where the rings were kept. Celebrimbor gave up the places of the Nine and the Seven but would not betray the Three, and after his death Sauron carried his body before the army as a banner. The Dwarves of Khazad-dûm came out against the invaders and delayed them, and Elrond's force was able to rescue part of the realm's people before being driven north. Celebrimbor had earlier heeded Galadriel's advice to send the Three away, so none of them fell into Sauron's grasp.5

Sauron moved on from the ruin of Eregion to overrun most of Eriador in 1699, but he did not hold it for long. In 1700 Tar-Minastir of Númenor sent a great fleet to Lindon, and by the following year Sauron had been defeated and driven out of Eriador. Eregion was never rebuilt. Its surviving people and much of its lore went to Imladris, which became the chief refuge of the Elves in the eastern lands. Through the Third Age the country remained without inhabitants.6

The people of Eregion were Elves of the Noldor, Exiles who had stayed in Middle-earth after the First Age. The Lord of the Rings gives them a single named lord, Celebrimbor, and remembers them chiefly through their dealings with the Dwarves across the mountains. Gandalf describes the West-gate of Moria as a door built for friendly traffic between Khazad-dûm and Hollin. He treats the ties between Elves and Dwarves in that period as unusual, a closeness between different kinds that the Third Age did not know. The gate itself showed the partnership: the Dwarf Narvi built the doors, and Celebrimbor traced the letters on them. Each people put its own craft into the one work.1

The posthumous writings say more about how Eregion was governed, though the picture changes from one text to another. In the Silmarillion account, Celebrimbor is the lord of the realm. In some of the texts collected in Unfinished Tales, however, Galadriel and Celeborn hold authority over the Noldor of Eregion in its first period. In that version the guild of the Mírdain, led by Celebrimbor, grows steadily in standing until it outweighs them. Under Annatar's influence the smiths throw off Galadriel's rule, and she leaves by way of Khazad-dûm for Lórinand, while Celeborn stays behind. The population was therefore not wholly Noldorin. Celeborn himself was of the Sindar, and the Grey-elven speech was in daily use there.2

The same later accounts describe the bond with Durin's folk as the closest friendship Elves and Dwarves ever reached, and as useful to both. The Dwarves' mining and the smiths' skill each fed the other's wealth and craft. Eregion never produced a line of rulers. No successor followed Celebrimbor, and after the ruin of the realm its surviving people came under Elrond's leadership rather than forming a lordship of their own.3

In The Lord of the Rings the reader meets Eregion only as a ruin. Its history reaches the story through speech: first in Elrond's account of the Rings at the Council in Rivendell, then in the fragments Gandalf recalls on the road. The realm thus enters the narrative as memory rather than as setting, and the Company walks through the country where the chain of events they are trying to end began. Tolkien uses the empty land to make the past felt without staging it, and the old workshops of the Rings stand unseen behind the whole southward journey.1

Structurally, Hollin is a threshold. It is the first open stage of the march after Rivendell, a place of brief rest where the Company travels by night and weighs its route. From there the attempt on the Redhorn Pass is made, and when the mountain turns them back, the travellers come down again into the same country to face the choice of Moria. The night attack of the wolves on the hill, which Gandalf beats off with fire, falls in these borderlands and settles the matter. The land that had once opened toward the Dwarves now serves the plot as the ground from which the Company is pushed underground.2

In the posthumously edited account of the Rings, Eregion carries a different weight. There it is the scene of the Elves' central temptation: the wish to hold back change and keep Middle-earth as fair as they remembered the Blessed Realm. The smiths' readiness to accept instruction from a stranger who promised exactly that is presented as the opening Sauron needed. The realm stands in that narrative less for folly than for a good desire misdirected, and its fall marks the point from which the long diminishing of the Elves in the later ages is traced.3