Rhovanion

Two names stand for this country in the sources, and they belong to different registers of the text. Rhovanion is the term used in the more formal historical material collected in the appendices, where the record concerns Gondor's wars and diplomacy toward the east; there the land is treated as a broad geographical sweep, measured outward from the kingdom's own borders in passages recounting conflicts with the peoples beyond the Anduin. Wilderland, by contrast, is the name used in the narrative proper, in the plainer English of the tale-teller rather than the chronicler, describing the same country from the vantage of travellers who crossed it rather than of scribes who charted it against Gondor's frontiers.

Wilderland is by far the more familiar of the two names, and it is the title printed across the large map of the eastern lands that accompanies The Hobbit, fixing it early in readers' minds as the common designation for the country beyond the Misty Mountains. The same name recurs through the Tale of Years and the body of The Lord of the Rings whenever a report or a journey carries the action east of the mountains, while Rhovanion stays confined to the appendices' more formal historical entries and is absent from the narrative chapters themselves. The two names are thus complementary rather than competing, each proper to a different layer of the text.

As a compound, Wilderland reads as a plain description rather than a name coined by any people native to the region: it marks the land as wild and largely unsettled, in contrast to the ordered realms west of the mountains from whose perspective the name is given. No single people of the country is credited with the name in the text, which suits a land shared, in different parts, by several distinct peoples rather than governed as one realm; the word describes how the country appeared to those who travelled through or bordered it, not how its own scattered inhabitants might have named their several homes.

Rhovanion occupies the whole breadth of country east of the Misty Mountains, stretching from the mountains' feet across the vales of the Anduin toward the Sea of Rhûn far off in the east. Its southern reach is not sharply marked but merges into the Brown Lands and the marshy country below the Emyn Muil, where the region shades into the borderlands of Rohan and Gondor; its northern extent likewise fades into country the sources leave largely undescribed. It is thus less a bounded realm than a broad stretch of country defined by what lies around it: the mountains on one side, the inland sea on the other, and the ordered kingdoms of the south below.

A vast forest, standing in an earlier age untainted and known then as Greenwood the Great, rises near the middle of the region and effectively splits it in two, so that travellers making their way east from the river's western vale must skirt its northern or southern eaves rather than pass through the heart of it. West and south of this wood lie the open vales of the Great River, watched in the later years of the Third Age by the Beornings near the crossing called the Carrock; east and north of it lie the Long Lake, the River Running, and the Lonely Mountain, with the Iron Hills standing further off still.

At the height of its power Gondor extended its rule into the southern part of this country, holding ground east of the Anduin that later fell away from the kingdom's grasp; by the close of the Third Age no single power governs Rhovanion as a whole, and its various tracts belong instead to the separate peoples settled within them. The land is accordingly better understood as a patchwork of neighbouring holds loosely gathered under one name than as a realm with a single seat or border.

In the earlier centuries of the Third Age the vales of Rhovanion were home to Northmen who counted themselves kin, distantly, to the Edain of old, and Gondor found in them ready allies as its kings pushed the bounds of the realm eastward. Under Rómendacil II, in the ninth century of the Third Age, the southern marches of Rhovanion east of the Anduin were brought under Gondor's watch and its people bound to the crown by treaty and by marriage, so that for a time the country between the River and the inland sea stood as an extension of the kingdom's power rather than a land apart.

That ascendancy did not hold. A great plague swept out of the east in 1636 and emptied wide stretches of Rhovanion along with Gondor itself, and into the weakened land came the Wainriders, a people of charioteers who harried Gondor's eastern allies for a full century. King Narmacil II fell in battle against them in 1856 and Gondor's authority east of the Anduin collapsed with him; only after further hard fighting, including King Calimehtar's victory near Dagorlad in 1899 and Eärnil's rout of a Wainrider host at the Battle of the Camp following King Ondoher's death in 1944, was the threat broken and the eastern peoples driven back or scattered.

A new danger gathered in the great forest itself well before these wars had run their course. A shadow crept over Greenwood from a fortress raised at Dol Guldur in its southern reaches, and by the twelfth century of the Third Age the wood had darkened enough that men had begun calling it Mirkwood instead, the old name falling out of use as the evil at its heart spread and would not be dislodged for an age and more. Later, in 2510, the Balchoth, another people pressed out of the east, swept into Rhovanion and across the Anduin into Calenardhon, and were broken only at the Field of Celebrant by the combined strength of Gondor and the horsemen of Eorl who rode to its aid.

The northern part of the country suffered its own catastrophe in 2770, when the dragon Smaug descended on the Lonely Mountain, drove out the Dwarves of Durin's line, and laid waste to the town of Dale beside it, leaving the region a blackened waste remembered afterward as the Desolation of Smaug. For over a century and a half the dragon held Erebor and the ruin around it, until his death at Lake-town in 2941 allowed the Kingdom under the Mountain and the town of Dale to be refounded, drawing Men, Dwarves, and before long the Beornings of the Vales into renewed settlement of the north.

Rhovanion was not spared in the War of the Ring. In 3019 forces of Sauron struck out of the east against Dale and Erebor, and King Brand and King Dáin Ironfoot fell together defending the Mountain, while further south Thranduil's woodland realm was assailed and its people fought beneath the trees against the armies of Dol Guldur. The tide turned only with Sauron's fall, whereupon the remaining enemy forces broke and fled or were destroyed, and the fortress at Dol Guldur itself was thrown down soon after, lifting the shadow from the forest for good.

In the peace that followed, the Kingdom of Dale and the restored Kingdom under the Mountain continued under Bard's and Dáin's heirs, holding their lands in friendship with the renewed realm of Gondor and Arnor under King Elessar, while the Woodland Realm, the Beornings, and the Woodmen kept their older places in the vales and forests without any single power again claiming lordship over Rhovanion as a whole, much as had been true through most of its history.

Beyond the ruling houses named in the chronicles, Rhovanion's inhabitants were reckoned in loose kinships rather than a single people. In the north the Éothéod, a hardy branch of the Northmen, held the country about the sources of the Anduin below the Grey Mountains until, pressed by the growing power ranged against them, they removed south under Eorl to Calenardhon in the year 2510, becoming in time the Rohirrim; the vales they left behind passed to smaller bands of kindred Northmen descent. The Woodmen who dwelt along the forest's western eaves and the Beornings who held the crossing of the Anduin were likewise akin to these Northmen, each living under its own headman rather than a common lord, and each keeping wary but generally friendly relations with the Elves and Dwarves who bordered them.

The great forest was governed apart from the peoples around it, by an Elvenking whose halls lay in caves in its northern reaches. His folk were Silvan Elves, joined and led by Sindar out of Doriath who had settled the wood in an earlier age under his father before him, and their realm shrank steadily as the shadow spreading from the south encroached upon it, until by the end of the Third Age they held only the northern part of what had once been a single great wood. Relations between the wood-elves and their Mannish and Dwarvish neighbours were often guarded, coloured by old grievances over trade and treasure, though need in the end drew them into common cause against a shared enemy.

In the north, authority after the dragon's fall rested in three distinct hands bound by alliance rather than a shared crown. The slayer of the dragon founded a line of Kings of Dale that endured to the war's end in his descendant; the restored realm under the Mountain passed among the heirs of Durin's line, ruled at that same time by Dáin Ironfoot; and the Men of the Long Lake governed themselves under an elected Master, a magistrate answerable to the townsfolk rather than a hereditary lord. Toward Gondor and the western kingdoms these northern peoples stood as friends and allies rather than subjects, a bond of mutual aid rather than of overlordship, much as prevailed among the other peoples scattered across the country in the Third Age's later centuries.

Wilderland is where Bilbo Baggins stops being a homebody and becomes someone with a story to tell. The company's crossing of the great forest is the ordeal at the centre of his journey: the loss of the path, the giant spiders, capture by the wood-elves and escape by barrel, and then the descent by boat to Lake-town before the final approach to the Lonely Mountain. Smaug's hoard and the quarrel it provokes among Elves, Men, and Dwarves outside Erebor's gate, resolved only by the arrival of Wargs and Goblins and the battle that follows, all play out on this same ground. For a hobbit whose furthest ambition had been a comfortable supper, Wilderland supplies every test the tale requires.

In the later story the region is felt more than travelled: the Fellowship follows the Anduin along its western edge, and Lothlórien, where the company finds shelter after Moria, stands at its border rather than within the wild country proper. It is here, too, that Gandalf's account of his dealings with Radagast and of Gollum's capture near the Dead Marshes locates events the reader has not witnessed directly, so that Rhovanion works as much through report as through scenes played out on the page. Aragorn's own earlier wanderings under other names, recalled rather than shown, likewise place a formative stretch of his hidden life in this same country before the tale proper begins.

Across both books the land functions as the wide, unclaimed country between the sheltered Shire and the shadow-bound East, a place where old dangers and old survivals sit side by side rather than being sorted into settled kingdoms. Its forest hides a hidden enemy for a hundred chapters before anyone names him outright, its lake-town and mountain hall belong to peoples the story has to introduce from scratch, and its rangers and skin-changers answer to no crown at all. That unsettled quality is precisely what the narrative needs of it: a stretch of the map where the plot can still surprise its characters.