Ithilien

Ithilien is a Sindarin name meaning the land of the Moon. Its first element is ithil, the Sindarin word for the Moon, which corresponds to Quenya Isil. The ending -ien is a common Sindarin suffix for regions, and it recurs in other Gondorian place-names. The name belongs to the naming scheme of the Númenórean exiles who founded Gondor, in which Sun and Moon were set against each other. The Moon-land on the eastern bank faced the Sun-land of Anórien, and the pairing matched the two fortress-cities of Minas Ithil and Minas Anor. These in turn were tied to the brothers Isildur and Anárion, whose own names carry the Quenya words for Moon and Sun.1

In The Lord of the Rings the name is handled with some distance. When the hobbits first enter the country, the narrator presents Ithilien as a name Men once gave to that land. The phrasing suggests a title from an earlier age, still known but no longer matched by any settled population. Faramir uses the name with evident pride and describes the country as a lovely possession of Gondor lying beyond the Great River. The epithet of Gondor's garden, applied to it in the same part of the story, belongs to this register of loss. It names what the land once was to the realm, set against its present emptiness.2

The name was also divided along the land's length. The text distinguishes the northern marches, where the travellers first arrive, from South Ithilien farther down toward the roads that lead to Harad. The name also passed to the men who kept watch there. The company of Mablung and Damrod are known as the Rangers of Ithilien, a designation that joins the soldiers to the region rather than to a city.3

Ithilien was a long, narrow country on the eastern side of Gondor. The Great River bounded it on the west and the Ephel Dúath, the Mountains of Shadow, walled it in on the east, so the whole region formed a strip of slopes and valleys running down from the mountains toward the water. To the north it gave way to the desolate lands before the Black Gate, and travellers coming south from the Morannon noticed the change in the country within a few days. In the south it ran toward the Poros, where the crossings of that river marked the approach to the contested lands bordering Harad. Across the Anduin lay the heart of the realm, and Ithilien was therefore Gondor's outlying province, facing the enemy's own mountains.1

The land was crossed by a few old roads that tied it to the rest of the kingdom. A highway ran eastward from Osgiliath on the river toward the mountains and met, at a ring of trees, the long road that ran north and south along the foot of the Ephel Dúath. At this Cross-roads stood the great seated image of a king of Gondor, since defaced by Orcs. East of that meeting point the road climbed into the Morgul Vale, where the former Minas Ithil stood as a guard over the mountain passes and had become a place of dread. In the hills south of the river crossings lay the Emyn Arnen, which would later become the seat of a new lordship of the region.2

What set Ithilien apart was its combination of richness and neglect. The hobbits found aromatic shrubs and flowering herbs of a southern kind growing wild, and the land had a warmth that made its greenness stand out against the barren country to the north. Throughout it lay the remains of the older kingdom, such as a stream running into an ancient stone basin with a broken rim, overgrown and unused. Orc bands had left their marks of ruin in places, and the air grew foul near the valley of Morgul. The rangers kept a hidden refuge behind a waterfall, called Henneth Annûn, looking out westward over the river valley. It was one of the few places in the country where Men still sheltered for any length of time.3

Ithilien entered history with the Realms in Exile, which the annals place in the year 3320 of the Second Age, after the Downfall of Númenor. Gondor was then held jointly by Elendil's sons, and the eastern bank fell to Isildur, whose house was the fortress of Minas Ithil on the shoulder of the Mountains of Shadow. The region was a frontier from the start: its eastern wall was the range that fenced Mordor, and Sauron returned there after the Downfall. In the year 3429 he struck at Gondor, took Minas Ithil and burned the White Tree that grew there. Isildur escaped down the Great River with his family and a seedling of the Tree, while Anárion held Osgiliath against the invaders.1

The war that followed ended with the overthrow of Sauron in 3441, and Minas Ithil returned to Gondor's keeping. For much of the Third Age Ithilien was a settled and cultivated province. Faramir later remembered it as a land that had once been tended as a garden of the realm, and the stone basins and roads the hobbits found were the work of this period. Its watch on Mordor depended on the strength of the kingdom as a whole, and that strength declined over the following centuries. After the Great Plague of 1636 the guard on the passes into the Black Land lapsed. The fortresses built to keep the enemy's country empty were left unmanned, and evil things began to return to Mordor.2

The turning point came at the end of the second millennium of the Age. In 2000 the Nazgûl came out of Mordor and laid siege to Minas Ithil. In 2002 the city fell and its palantír was captured. It was renamed Minas Morgul and became a lasting stronghold of the enemy at the edge of Ithilien, facing Minas Anor across the valley. From then on the province lay exposed to raids from the vale behind it. Its settlements survived for many generations more, but under a constant threat that pressed hardest on the eastern slopes. In 2475 Uruks of Mordor attacked again. Osgiliath was left in final ruin and its bridge was broken, although Boromir, son of the Steward Denethor I, drove the invaders back and regained Ithilien for a time.3

The province's people left it in two recorded stages. In 2901 most of those remaining abandoned it under the attacks of Uruks from Mordor, and in the same year the hidden refuge of Henneth Annûn was made for Gondor's soldiers. In 2954 Mount Doom burst into flame again, and the last inhabitants fled west over the Anduin. From then on the land was held not by settlers but by armed companies who crossed the river in secret. When Sauron declared himself openly, Ithilien became a field of war. In June 3018 his forces attacked Osgiliath. In March 3019 the host of Minas Morgul marched out across the region toward the river crossings and Cair Andros, and in the same weeks Frodo and Sam passed through its northern parts on their way south to the Cross-roads.4

Sauron's fall renewed the land's fortunes. Aragorn, crowned king, made Faramir Prince of Ithilien, with his dwelling in the Emyn Arnen, so that the Steward's house now held a lordship of its own east of the river. The king ordered Minas Morgul to be destroyed and its valley cleansed, but ruled that it should stay unpeopled for many years. Legolas brought Elves out of Greenwood to settle in Ithilien, and under their care it was restored to beauty after its long desolation. The annals of the Fourth Age still reach it at their close. After the death of King Elessar in the year 120, Legolas built a grey ship in Ithilien and sailed down the Anduin and over the Sea, and Gimli is said to have gone with him.5

Ithilien was Gondorian land from the founding of the realm, and its people were Men of the South-kingdom under the rule of Isildur's house and then of the kings and Stewards who followed. The narrative gives no separate lineage of local lords before the end of the Third Age. The province was governed from across the river as part of the kingdom as a whole. In the time of the War of the Ring its only recognised holders were soldiers answering to the Steward Denethor. Faramir led them as a captain of Gondor, and Mablung and Damrod appear among his men. The book presents these Rangers as descendants of the families who had lived in Ithilien before it was emptied. The watch on the abandoned country was thus kept partly by its own dispossessed stock.1

Its neighbours were largely hostile. Orcs from Mordor ranged between the Ephel Dúath and the river, and the southern roads brought the Haradrim through the land. In the War of the Ring Faramir's company ambushed a column of Southrons marching north to join the Dark Lord, and Frodo and Sam saw one of their great beasts in that fight. The pressure from the south was older than this war. In 2885 the Haradrim crossed the Poros and attacked Gondor, and Rohan's help to its ally cost the lives of the sons of King Folcwine. By the time the hobbits passed through, the country also lay outside the wanderings of Elves, who no longer came there.2

From then on the land was held not by settlers but by armed companies who crossed the river in secret.

With the new lordship of the Fourth Age, rule in Ithilien passed for the first time to a resident house. Faramir went to live there with Éowyn of Rohan, whom he married. Beregond, who had saved his life in the Citadel, was named captain of his guard, the White Company, and sent with him to the Emyn Arnen. The Elves who came with Legolas became the land's other people, living in Ithilien under the prince's lordship rather than as a separate realm. The land was thus held by Men of Gondor and Rohan beside Elves from the north, a shared settlement it had not known in the Third Age.3

In the narrative, Ithilien is the first breathing space Frodo and Sam find after the Emyn Muil and the Dead Marshes, and the book slows down to match. The reader sees the country through the hobbits' senses: warmth, scent, running water, and growing things that answer the grey waste they have come from. The land also gives Sam his most domestic scene of the quest. He cooks a meal of rabbits that Gollum has caught over a small fire, and the smoke of that fire leads the Rangers to them. The episode turns the garden into a place of exposure, where rest and danger arrive together.1

Ithilien is also where the Quest meets Gondor for the first time on its own ground. Faramir questions the hobbits, learns what they carry, and chooses not to take it, so the region becomes the setting of a moral test that answers his brother's failure at Parth Galen. At the forbidden pool below the refuge, Frodo has to decide whether Gollum lives or dies, and he chooses to spare him again. When the travellers leave, the mood darkens toward the Cross-roads. There, at sunset, Frodo sees that the broken statue's fallen head wears a crown of flowering plants, and he takes it as a sign that the enemy's hold cannot last. The image gathers up what the land means in the book: a kingdom defaced but not effaced.2

The region returns at the close of the war as a stage for recovery. The host of the West passes through it on the march to the Morannon, and it clears away the Orcs' filth at the Cross-roads and restores the old king's head to its place. After the Ring is destroyed, Frodo and Sam wake in Ithilien and are honoured before the assembled army on the Field of Cormallen. The land where they once hid from Gondor's patrols thus becomes the place where Gondor receives them.3

Of the screen versions, Peter Jackson's trilogy gives Ithilien its fullest treatment. The region belongs to the second film, The Two Towers, and was shot in New Zealand along with the rest of the production. It is the ground on which Frodo and Sam first meet Gondor's soldiers. David Wenham plays Faramir, and the Rangers' clash with a Southron column keeps its place in the sequence. The films retain the outline of the book's Ithilien chapters: the hobbits' capture by the Rangers, their questioning, and the episode at the forbidden pool below the hidden refuge. Among Faramir's men, the film gives prominence to a lieutenant named Madril, played by John Bach, who has no counterpart in the book. He stands in the place that Mablung and Damrod partly occupy in the text.1

The most discussed departure concerns how the hobbits leave the region. In the book Faramir lets them go on their way from Ithilien. In the film he first takes them west across the river to the embattled ruins of Osgiliath, and only there sets them free. This moves part of the Ithilien episode off its ground and changes the character of Faramir's decision. The land's role at the end of the story is also reduced. The waking of Frodo and Sam is set in Minas Tirith rather than on the Field of Cormallen, and Faramir's lordship east of the river is not taken up. Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 does not reach this part of the narrative. Faramir does not appear in it, and it breaks off before the hobbits come into the country south of the marshes.2