The proto-geography of the Third Age

[Aiwendil]

A very interesting hypothesis! I was quite fascinated to discover the apparent identification of elements of TH’s geography with Beleriand when I read Rateliff’s book. And I think there is a reasonable (though circumstantial) argument for an intermediate stage in which the Misty Mountains became the Blue Mountains. However, I think perhaps the situation is a little less clear than your post makes it sound. In particular, I have reservations on this point:

Despite what T said in a letter many years later, TH *always* took place in the world of the Elvish legendarium; even the earliest drafts contain numerous references to things like the Three Kindreds, Gondolin, and even Beren and Luthien However the time-frame, while vague, seems to be not long after the events of what would later be called the First Age).

Now I agree that, as Rateliff shows, the world of The Hobbit was in a sense equated with the Elvish legendarium from the outset. In a sense. For it is not really as simple as that. For all the correspondences between the two there are also significant discrepancies that are hard to explain away. For one thing, the geography is not an exact fit. Amon Ereb was always away in the south of Beleriand, whereas the journey toward the Lonely Mountain was always primarily an eastward journey. Rivendell on this view would be on the western side of the Ered Wethrin, but there is no corresponding place or Elvish dwelling in the Silmarillion. But more importantly, Bilbo’s world doesn’t seem to fit nicely anywhere in the timeline of the Legendarium. Both the 1930 Quenta Noldorinwa and the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion ended with the sinking of Beleriand; therefore if the events of The Hobbit are actually to have occurred, they would need to have happened before the Great Battle. If, further, the Necromancer is Sauron and he dwells in Mirkwood/Taur-nu-Fuin, then The Hobbit must take place after the defeat of Sauron by Huan and Luthien. But the world of The Hobbit clearly cannot fit in that timeframe for many obvious reasons. The alternative – that The Hobbit assumes Beleriand survived the Great Battle and is set after it – is not really tenable either, since all the contemporary Silmarillion accounts have Beleriand destroyed.

I think, rather, that it was only in a very vague sense that Tolkien in his mind equated Mirkwood with Taur-nu-Fuin or the Great River with the Sirion. All indications are that when he began to write The Hobbit he did not really think of it as a ‘serious’ work and that he had no compunction about using elements from the Legendarium haphazardly, without striving for any firm consistency.

This may actually make your hypothesis more attractive rather than less, though. At some point, he obviously did decide that The Hobbit was in fact set in the same Middle-earth as his Elvish material – usually this decision is placed around the beginning of his work on The Lord of the Rings, but it’s quite plausible that it could have come earlier, even if we don’t accept that it came at the outset of The Hobbit. So pushing things east, out of the lands that were, as was well established, destroyed in the War of Wrath, became necessary.

Nonetheless, I am not at all persuaded that the Misty Mountains were equated with the Blue Mountains in the early stages of The Lord of the Rings, even if they were so earlier. The argument from the identification of Nogrod with Moria is a strong one – but it must be noted that Moria was not associated with the Misty Mountains until LotR, that is, after the references to Nogrod as the ancient home of Durin’s folk. So it seems quite plausible that by the time Moria was encountered in LotR, it was no longer identified with Nogrod (unless perhaps I’m forgetting some further Nogrod-Moria identification in the post-LotR writings?)

And though it’s completely irrelevant to the topic:

how on earth did it take Aragorn the Ranger many days to cover ground Thorin & Co. managed in a couple of hours?

I may be mis-remembering, but I thought the problem was the opposite – the journey from Hobbiton to Rivendell took Bilbo and the Dwarves quite a long time while Frodo and company made it quite quickly (and without ponies).

[William Cloud Hicklin]

And though it’s completely irrelevant to the topic:
Quote:how on earth did it take Aragorn the Ranger many days to cover ground Thorin & Co. managed in a couple of hours?

I may be mis-remembering, but I thought the problem was the opposite – the journey from Hobbiton to Rivendell took Bilbo and the Dwarves quite a long time while Frodo and company made it quite quickly (and without ponies).

I was thinking specifically of the problem both Fonstad and C Tolkien bring up, the days taken between fording the river and the Stone-trolls (more glaring in the LR 1st Ed), whereas in TH both incidents occurred on the same night.

Response to the actual meat of your post when I have time.

[Kuruharan]

*Despite what T said in a letter many years later, TH *always* took place in the world of the Elvish legendarium; even the earliest drafts contain numerous references to things like the Three Kindreds, Gondolin, and even Beren and Luthien However the time-frame, while vague, seems to be not long after the events of what would later be called the First Age).

I find this rather curious. What in particular makes you think that TH was originally not very long after the events of the First Age? That's an impression that I never had myself.

I may be mis-remembering, but I thought the problem was the opposite – the journey from Hobbiton to Rivendell took Bilbo and the Dwarves quite a long time while Frodo and company made it quite quickly (and without ponies).

Actually, both problems existed.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Quote:*Despite what T said in a letter many years later, TH *always* took place in the world of the Elvish legendarium; even the earliest drafts contain numerous references to things like the Three Kindreds, Gondolin, and even Beren and Luthien However the time-frame, while vague, seems to be not long after the events of what would later be called the First Age).

I find this rather curious. What in particular makes you think that TH was originally not very long after the events of the First Age? That's an impression that I never had myself.

Well, my statement was perhaps over-definite- what I should have said was that at one stage the time-frame was quite early. Very telling is this, from the second draft of "An Unexpected Party:"

[Bladorthin (> Gandalf):] "... but I found him a prisoner in the dungeons of the Necromancer."
...
[Gandalf (> Thorin, confusingly):] "We must give a thought to the Necromancer."
"Don't be absurd" said the wizard. "That is a job quite beyond the powers of all the dwarves, if they could be all gathered together again from the four corners of the world. And anyway his castle stands no more and he is flown to another darker place - Beren and Tinuviel broke his power, but that is quite another story."

Which implies very strongly that Thrain was imprisoned in Tol-in-Gaurhoth, before it was thrown down! And that, remarkably, this conversation takes place less than a century after that event.

But T quickly revised this thinking, since already in the first draft of Chapter 3 Elrond says that Gondolin was destroyed "ages and ages ago." (Elrond's very existence of course postdated the Fall of Gondolin).

[William Cloud Hicklin]

I think, rather, that it was only in a very vague sense that Tolkien in his mind equated Mirkwood with Taur-nu-Fuin or the Great River with the Sirion. All indications are that when he began to write The Hobbit he did not really think of it as a ‘serious’ work and that he had no compunction about using elements from the Legendarium haphazardly, without striving for any firm consistency.

Quite so. The Hobbit wasn't 'official,' so to speak; certainly there's not much room in the 'canonical' legends for the Bourgeois Burglar with his mantlepiece clock and tea-kettle, and where roadside inns are common! Or, for that matter, comical Dwarves. And T never had any problem recycling his own ideas. If the Elvenking and his halls don't much resemble Thingol and Menegroth, they do rather resemble Tinwelint of the Lost Tales- and the image of a bridge over a river-gorge leading to the hillside gates of a great subterranean fortress was here used for the third time, having manifested twice before in Menegroth and Nargothrond.



Stll, he borrowed a lot. And while I think it's going too far to say that Amon Ereb "was" the Lonely Mountain in any direct sense, I think the association was present in an indeterminate way in Tolkien's mind, at least at some point. While the journey of Thorin & Co. turned out in the event to be roughly due east, this was not a given from the start (in fact, there's really no indication in the text in what direction Hobbiton lay relative to Rivendell); and Tolkien, once he got the party to the eaves of Mirkwood, clearly had little idea what he was going to do next (the early versions of Thror's Map give no indication of its location relative to 'world geography').

I couldn't in the space and time available do justice to the case JDR makes for the 'early' geography, which places TH in some-place-very-like-Beleriand. Read his book!

But as to my own supposition of an intermediate "Blue Mountains" phase: you say

I am not at all persuaded that the Misty Mountains were equated with the Blue Mountains in the early stages of The Lord of the Rings, even if they were so earlier. The argument from the identification of Nogrod with Moria is a strong one – but it must be noted that Moria was not associated with the Misty Mountains until LotR, that is, after the references to Nogrod as the ancient home of Durin’s folk.

Well, Moria only came into being with the Lord of the Rings, at least in any sense equating it with an ancient mansion of Durin's Folk. In The Hobbit itself the "Mines of Moria" is a reference-less and locationless name, merely the place Thror was slain (and which could easily be a goblin-mine). The earliest writing which says more is the 'third phase' continuation of Many Meetings, where Gloin states "Moria was the ancestral home of the Dwarves of the race of Durin." But of course the race of Durin is the Longbeards, and every text up to that time (and even some post-LR!) places their 'ancestral home' in the Blue Mountains.

The entry in the Etymologies is very suggestive precisely because it is contemporaneous with the early work on the Lord of the Rings. While the E were originally written just before Tolkien turned to the 'New Hobbit,' he continued for a while to insert additional entries regarding new names that developed in the early drafts of what we know as the Fellowship of the Ring. The Moria/Nogrod entry is one of these, and plainly was only made after Tolkien had embarked on Book II (late 1939).

It's perhaps instructive to note that though Durin himself only arose in The Hobbit the Longbeards, the Indravangs or Enfeng, had been an integral part of events in Beleriand from the Lost Tales onward. In The Hobbit (1st Ed.) there are two Houses of Dwarves, not seven, in accord with the Nogrod/Belegost meme. While their mansions were at Belegost in the Lost Tales, in QN and QS the Longbeards were the Dwarves of Nogrod (which in QS was actually named Khazad-dum), and Tolkien maintained the association Longbeards-Nogrod even to the extent of temporarily relocating Nogrod/Moria/Khazad-dum to the Hithaeglir, before finally deciding they were separate cities.

On the other hand there is an alternative and passing idea which appears in the first draft of The Ring Goes South- that Moria wasn't the ancestral home at all!

They were made by the Dwarves of Durin's clan many hundreds of years ago, when Elves dwelt in Hollin, and there was peace between the two races. In those ancient days Durin dwelt in Caron-Dun [Dimrill Dale]

In other words, Moria was founded after the War of Wrath- by Durin and his Longbeards apparently after departing their ancestral home.



(It's an odd fact that in the post-LR Annals (both sets), the Enfeng/Longbeards were re-associated with Belegost, rather than transplanted to Moria (although by this time of course the caverns above Mirrormere were clearly the home of Durin's folk). I can't explain this; the feeling I get, though, is that Tolkien was fumbling around with making the Belegostian Longbeards* the Elder Days' 'good' Dwarves, the builders of Menegroth and (according to the History of Galadriel and Celeborn) wholly innocent of its sack- and only these 'good' Dwarves would become an element of Moria's population at the beginning of the Second Age, since the host of Nogrod was said to have been annihilated at Sarn Athrad.).

*One wonders if therefore in the very late essay Of Dwarves and Men, the two named Houses of the Ered Luin are to be associated Firebeards-Belegost and Broadbeams-Nogrod, "Enfeng" reglossed to contain a fire-element rather than AN- "long."

[Aiwendil]

Good points, all. I certainly do agree that Amon Ereb seems likely to have been associated with the Lonely Mountain in some general way, as many features of Beleriand were with The Hobbit's geography. (I have read Rateliff's History of the Hobbit and was quite struck by the correspondences and particularly by the reference to Beren and Luthien). My point here was just that Tolkien didn't really, seriously, consider The Hobbit part of the Elvish Legendarium when it was begun (although, for all its bourgeois clocks and tea-kettles, he did decide later that it was).

Well, Moria only came into being with the Lord of the Rings, at least in any sense equating it with an ancient mansion of Durin's Folk. In The Hobbit itself the "Mines of Moria" is a reference-less and locationless name, merely the place Thror was slain (and which could easily be a goblin-mine). The earliest writing which says more is the 'third phase' continuation of Many Meetings, where Gloin states "Moria was the ancestral home of the Dwarves of the race of Durin." But of course the race of Durin is the Longbeards, and every text up to that time (and even some post-LR!) places their 'ancestral home' in the Blue Mountains.

Yes, it's certainly true that Moria didn't really exist until The Lord of the Rings. Consequently, as you point out, the ancestral home of the Longbeards was not associated with the Misty Mountains until that time (except perhaps indirectly, if as you suggest we assume a stage when the Blue Mountains = the Misty Mountains and ancestral home of the Longbeards = Blue Mountains).

The question I was considering was whether this is true:

Originally Posted by WCH

Moreover, I suggest, this conception still informed his earliest writing in The Lord of the Rings

My argument was just that, even if the Misty Mountains were intended to be the Blue Mountains at one time, we have no particular evidence that this was still the case by the time LotR was begun in earnest. It may be that, at some time prior to the early work on LotR, Tolkien had decided that the Misty Mountains were a distinct range east of the Blue Mountains; then either in the 'third phase' or earlier he decided that the home of the Longbeards was not Nogrod but instead was in the Misty Mountains. Or he decided that Nogrod, while still the home of the Longbeards, was actually in the Misty Mountains.

The Etymologies may indeed suggest (though very indirectly) that Nogrod was still the Longbeards' home at the time LotR was begun. However, we have no indication that the Longbeards' home was associated with the Misty Mountains at this time (not until the third phase, as you point out), so this doesn't establish the identity of the two ranges.

I don't remember the 'later note' you mentioned in which Nogrod is identified with Moria and placed in the Misty Mountains (it's been too long since I've read HoMe VI-IX). Where exactly is it found? In any case, this blows a big hole in my first idea - that Tolkien decided to make Nogrod distinct from the Longbeards' home at the time of the 'third phase'. However, my second suggestion is still intact - that the two mountain ranges were already distinct by the beginning of LotR and that he decided in the 'third phase' to place Nogrod in the Misty Mountains rather than the Blue.

This really is a trifling point though. On the whole, I think your idea is a good one and my only quibble is with the point at which the two mountain ranges were made distinct.

The association of the Longbeards with Belegost in AAm and GA is indeed strange, and I think you may be onto something when you suggest that he was trying to distinguish the good Longbeards/Belegostians from the not so good folk of Nogrod. Your Firebeards-Belegost, Broadbeams-Nogrod idea is also interesting; but is there any evidence for ‘en-’ meaning fire (my Sindarin is rusty, but I can’t think of any suitable root)? I had always leaned toward Broadbeams-Belegost and Firebeards-Nogrod based solely on the order in which they are named matching the usual formula ‘Nogrod and Belegost’, but that is scant evidence indeed.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

I don't remember the 'later note' you mentioned in which Nogrod is identified with Moria and placed in the Misty Mountains (it's been too long since I've read HoMe VI-IX). Where exactly is it found?

War of the Jewels, p. 201. Pencilled emendations to the old QS manuscript, so that above "Nogrod, the Dwarfmine" is written "Dwarrowdelf;" and then in the margin

Dwarrowdelf Nogrod was afar off in the East in the Mountains of Mist; and Belegost was in Eredlindon south of Beleriand.

And, marked for insertion after "Belegost, the Great Fortress,"

Greatest of these was Khazaddum that was after called in the days of its darkness Moria, and it was far off in the east in the Mountains of Mist; but Gabilgathol was on [the] east side of Eredlindon and within reach of the Elves.

(Khazaddum was already the Dwarvish name of Nogrod in QS as written).

-----------------

However, my second suggestion is still intact - that the two mountain ranges were already distinct by the beginning of LotR and that he decided in the 'third phase' to place Nogrod in the Misty Mountains rather than the Blue.

Well, the notion I suppose arises in part from the fact that, when the name first arises in the LR papers, Moria is not envisioned as the route through the mountains; rather, the Co. crosses the mountains by a pass, travels south, and then encounters Moria.

This is perhaps ameliorated by the fact that in the same note the adventures are sequenced Red Pass-Fangorn Forest*-Moria; and it's entirely possible that Tolkien saw Moria as being in the Black > White Mountains, perhaps a distant precusor of the Paths of the Dead.

But if so then why give Moria the established name of Nogrod (Khazad-dum, translated Dwarfmine and Dwarrowdelf), and at least for a time identify the two? Whereas it gives Occam a better shave if Khazad-dum/Moria/Nogrod, for a moment at least, was located in Nogrod's traditional position.

*Fangorn in these August 1939 notes (the beginning of the Third Phase) was seen as lying about the confluence of the Redway (> Silverlode) and the Great River; i.e. conceptually the later position of Lorien.

[Aiwendil]

War of the Jewels, p. 201. Pencilled emendations to the old QS manuscript, so that above "Nogrod, the Dwarfmine" is written "Dwarrowdelf;" and then in the margin

Ah, thanks. I'd thought you meant a LotR-related note.

But if so then why give Moria the established name of Nogrod (Khazad-dum, translated Dwarfmine and Dwarrowdelf), and at least for a time identify the two? Whereas it gives Occam a better shave if Khazad-dum/Moria/Nogrod, for a moment at least, was located in Nogrod's traditional position.

Well, it seems to me equally parsimonious to posit that the view expressed in the note on the QS manuscript had already been reached. We know that at some point the idea was Belegost in the Blue Mountains and Nogrod/Moria east in the Misty Mountains. Is it so implausible that this was the conception that underlay the third (and subsequent) phase(s) of LotR? There's apparently no hard evidence, but this seems to me just as likely as your alternative, that the Blue and the Misty Mountains were at that time one and the same.