The Gladden Fields

The marshes

The Gladden rises in the Misty Mountains south of the High Pass and runs east to join Anduin roughly midway between the Carrock and Lothlórien. Where the two rivers meet the land is flat and sodden, and the Great River spreads into a maze of pools, islets and slow channels choked with reeds and with the yellow flag iris that gave the place its name; the Elves called it Loeg Ningloron, the pools of the golden water-flowers. Beyond the marsh on the eastern bank the ground rises toward the wall of Mirkwood, and across the river to the west the slopes climb to the mountain foothills.

It was quiet, fertile and easily overlooked, which made it a home for a people who wanted no attention. The Stoors, the riverside kindred of the Hobbits, lived here in the middle of the Third Age in holes and huts along the banks, fishing and boating, ruled by the grandmother of the family in the manner of their folk. It was also the northern limit of the country in which Sauron, once he had guessed where the Ring was lost, set his servants to search, and by the end of the age the fields were watched by orcs from Moria and Dol Guldur.

The Disaster of the Gladden Fields

In the autumn of the second year of the Third Age Isildur, returning north from Gondor with two hundred men and the Ring he had cut from Sauron's hand, was ambushed on the eastern bank above the marshes by a force of orcs ten times his strength. His three elder sons fell in the fighting, and Isildur, seeing the end, put on the Ring and slipped away to the river. The Ring betrayed him. It came off in the water, and orc-archers on the bank killed him as he surfaced. Only three of his company survived, one of them the esquire Ohtar, who carried the shards of Narsil to Rivendell. Unfinished Tales tells the disaster in detail and adds that Isildur's body was never found, though his helm-jewel, the Elendilmir, was recovered by Saruman from the bed of the river long afterward and hidden in Orthanc.

The Ring found

The Ring sank into the mud of the river-bed and lay there while Sauron slowly regained shape and the North-kingdom rose and fell. In 2463 Déagol, a Stoor of the Gladden, was pulled from his boat by a great fish and came up with the Ring in his hand. His friend Sméagol, who was with him, demanded it as a birthday gift and strangled him when he refused. Sméagol hid the body, took the Ring, and used its invisibility to spy and steal until his family drove him out. He crept away up the Gladden into the mountains and became Gollum.

After

When Gandalf at last pieced together the Ring's history in 3017 and 3018, the Gladden Fields were the key to it. Sauron had learned from Gollum's torment in Barad-dûr where the Ring had been, and the fields were searched by his servants, but by then it had been in the Shire for sixty years. The Stoor settlement had long since vanished. The marshes themselves remained in the Fourth Age much as they had always been, a place of reeds and irises where the road from the Carrock to Lórien skirted the water.

Marshland on both banks of the Anduin at the mouth of the river Gladden, between the Carrock to the north and Lothlórien to the south, east of the central Misty Mountains and west of the southern half of Mirkwood.