Ossiriand

Ossiriand is a Sindarin name meaning 'Land of Seven Rivers'. Its elements are laid out in the etymological appendix to The Silmarillion. The opening syllables go back to the stem of the numeral seven, which appears in Quenya as otso and in Sindarin as odo. The middle element is sîr, 'river', derived from a root meaning 'flow'. The closing -iand is the familiar land-ending that also shapes Beleriand. The name is therefore purely descriptive. It says nothing of a founder, a king or an event, and describes the country only by the waters that divide it.1

The count of seven is literal. The narrative names each river: Gelion, the great eastern stream that forms the border, and the six tributaries that come down to it from the Blue Mountains. These are Ascar, Thalos, Legolin, Brilthor, Duilwen and Adurant. The English form, the Land of Seven Rivers, simply translates the Sindarin, and the texts use it alongside the Elvish name. Because the rivers make the name, the country has an unusually firm geographical identity. Anyone who knows the name knows the shape of the land.2

The region carried a second name that came from its people rather than its waters. When the Noldor first came east into the woods of Ossiriand, they heard the voices of the unseen Green-elves singing among the trees. They therefore called the country Lindon, the land of music or song. The Green-elves themselves were known in Quenya as the Laiquendi, a name that refers to their green garb, which hid them in the forest. The two names thus record two different kinds of knowledge. Ossiriand describes the land as a surveyor would, while Lindon keeps the impression of those who entered it as strangers and heard it before they saw its people.3

Ossiriand lies at the far eastern edge of Beleriand. It is a long strip of country between the river Gelion on the west and the Blue Mountains, Ered Luin, on the east. Its six tributary streams rise in the mountains and run westward down to the Gelion, so the land is cut crosswise into a series of bands, each separated from the next by running water. West of the Gelion lies the wide expanse of East Beleriand. The mountain wall behind Ossiriand closes it off from the lands farther east. The country therefore has a clear frame, with mountains on one side, a great river on the other, and the tributaries laid between them.1

Gelion itself is described as a long river but a less mighty one than Sirion. In its upper course it is fed by two arms from the north, and it gains its full strength only in the south, where the streams of Ossiriand pour into it. The northernmost of these, Ascar, gave its valley to the road that the Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost used to come down out of the mountains. That road crossed Gelion at the ford of Sarn Athrad. In the far south the Adurant divides for a stretch and then rejoins, and the island it encloses is Tol Galen. The land between the waters was thickly wooded. That cover suited a people who preferred to stay out of sight.2

The published narrative of The Lord of the Rings still carries a memory of these woods. When Treebeard recalls the lands he once walked, he speaks of spending summer among the elm-woods of Ossiriand. The passage names the country without describing it, but it confirms two things: Ossiriand was known to the Ents, and its forests were remembered as a place of green abundance long after Beleriand had passed away.3

The settled history of Ossiriand begins with the Nandor, the part of the Teleri who under Lenwë had abandoned the westward march of the Eldar. They turned aside into the vales of the Great River rather than cross the Misty Mountains. Long afterwards a company of them, led by Lenwë's son Denethor, crossed the Blue Mountains and came down into Beleriand. This was during the long peace while Morgoth lay captive in Valinor. Thingol received these kinsfolk, and they made their home in the wooded country between Gelion and the mountains. For an age of the world they lived there under their own lord, loosely bound in friendship to the king in Doriath.1

That peace ended when Morgoth returned to Middle-earth and his Orcs began to range into Beleriand. One host struck eastward, and Thingol summoned Denethor to his aid. The Green-elves came out of Ossiriand, and the two forces caught the enemy between them. On the hill of Amon Ereb, however, Denethor was cut off and killed before help could reach him, and his people were overwhelmed. The Orcs were defeated in the end, but the loss shaped the Green-elves for the rest of the age. They took no new king and no longer went openly to war. They relied instead on stealth, woodcraft and the cover of their forests. Some of them left the eastern woods and were absorbed into the people of Doriath.2

The narrative names each river: Gelion, the great eastern stream that forms the border, and the six tributaries that come down to it from the Blue Mountains.

In the centuries of the Siege of Angband, Ossiriand stayed outside the new Noldorin realms. The sons of Fëanor held the plains of East Beleriand beyond Gelion but did not claim the Green-elves' land. The first Men to enter Beleriand arrived here, more than three hundred years after the Noldor. Bëor and his kin crossed the mountains and camped in the hills near the springs of Thalos, and Finrod Felagund came upon them there while hunting in the east. The newcomers cut trees and cleared ground in a way the Green-elves resented, and they asked Finrod to have them moved. Bëor's people accordingly went west over Gelion into Estolad, and Ossiriand remained a country without mortal settlement.3

The country's last great chapter belongs to Beren and Lúthien. After their return from the dead they did not settle in Doriath. They went to the island of Tol Galen and lived there apart from the affairs of Elves and Men, and their son Dior was born there. When the Dwarves of Nogrod sacked Menegroth and carried off its treasure, their homeward road led past this retreat. Beren gathered the Green-elves, and with them he ambushed the Dwarves at the crossing of Gelion. The lord of Nogrod fell, and the Dwarf-host was destroyed or scattered on its way into the mountains. The recovered gold was thrown into the Ascar, which from then on bore the name Rathlóriel. Beren took from the spoil only the necklace set with the Silmaril, which Lúthien wore for the rest of her days on the island.4

After the second death of Beren and Lúthien, a lord of the Green-elves came by night to Dior, who by then was ruling in Doriath, and gave him the necklace. Ossiriand thus passed out of the main story of the Elder Days. It shared the fate of all Beleriand at the end of the First Age, when the War of Wrath broke the lands and the sea came in over most of the country west of the mountains. Only a remnant between the new coastline and Ered Luin survived. This eastern fringe, still called Lindon, became Gil-galad's realm in the Second Age, and from its havens on the Gulf of Lune many of the Eldar later took ship into the West.5

The people of Ossiriand were the Laiquendi, descendants of the Nandorin company whose arrival is told above. They belonged to the Eldar who never reached Valinor, and their nearest kin in Beleriand were the Sindar of Doriath. After the fall of their only recorded lord, their rule took no fixed form. No later king is named, no seat of government is described, and the texts mention no walled town or fortress between Gelion and the mountains. Their defence lay in watchfulness and concealment. The narrative says that a stranger could cross their land from one end to the other without seeing any of them.1

Ossiriand's neighbours pressed on it from several sides, but none of them governed it. To the west lay Doriath, whose king the Green-elves regarded as a friend and kinsman rather than as an overlord. Across Gelion, the sons of Fëanor held the plains of East Beleriand as a march against the north, and the river marked the edge of their claims. The Dwarves of the Blue Mountains came and went along their road through the north of the country. The texts record no conflict between them and the Green-elves until the sack of Menegroth. Mortal Men were tolerated as travellers but not as settlers, and the Green-elves had their wishes carried out through Finrod rather than by force.2

The nearest thing to lordship in Ossiriand's later history was the presence of Beren and Lúthien. The country around their island dwelling came to be called Dor Firn-i-Guinar, the Land of the Dead that Live. Beren held no title over the Green-elves. His leadership rested on their willingness to follow him when the need arose, and they acted under their own chief once that need had passed. No successor to that authority is recorded. The remnant of the eastern country later came into a Noldorin kingdom only after Beleriand itself had been lost.3

In the narrative of the Elder Days, Ossiriand is less a stage than a margin. The great events of the war against Morgoth begin in the north and west and are fought there, and this eastern country is rarely where a story starts. Instead, the story passes through it or withdraws into it. It works first as a threshold. Peoples coming from the east enter Beleriand here, the Dwarves along their mountain road and the first Men over the passes, and the Elves' first knowledge of mortals is gained in these hills rather than in any Elvish realm. Because the Green-elves prefer concealment to rule, the land seldom acts in the story in its own right. It watches, and it lets others move through it.1

Its second function is that of a refuge outside the war. After their return, Beren and Lúthien choose this country as a place apart, and the narrative treats their island dwelling almost as a brief afterglow of the Blessed Realm on mortal soil. For as long as Lúthien wears the Silmaril there, the jewel is out of the conflict that its fellows keep feeding. The text adds that the wise believed the jewel's brightness hastened her end. No one sees how the two of them pass from the world. The book leaves Ossiriand as the place where their tale ends in silence, not in a battle.2

The one episode in which the country turns outward, the ambush of the Dwarves, is completed by its forests as well as its people. Those Dwarves who escape the fight at the ford are overtaken by the Shepherds of the Trees and driven into the mountain woods, and none of them returns home. This gives weight to the Ent's later memory of Ossiriand, mentioned above. What Treebeard recalls as a summer country was also a place where his kind had once acted in the affairs of Elves.3