Quote:
The road had been made in a long lost time, and for perhaps thirty miles below the Morannon it had been newly repaired, but as it went south the wild encroached upon it.....So they passed into the northern marches of that land that Men once called Ithilien....
TTT Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit
" that land that Men once called Ithilien.... "
Ithilien, at the time of the War of the Ring, had no borders because it no longer existed as an administrative region. It was depopulated, apart from Minas Morgal, and had effectively become part of Mordor.
Many of the lands mentioned in LoTR were empty, controlled by on-one, so defined borders would be meaningless. Some borders, like the one between Gondor and Umbar, would be constantly changing with the relative strength of the peoples on either side. The only fixed, acknowledged border in Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age was that between Gondor and Rohan.
As the new Gondor expanded under Aragon's rule, the borders of the Empire, and of the administrative regions within it, would be under constant review as the population grew and empty lands were occupied. The Shire, for example, expanded its boundaries to include the Tower Hills.
At the end of the Third Age, the names of most parts of Middle-earth and the positions of any borders they may have had in the distant past were of interest only to academic histoians in the archives of Minas Tirith.
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