The Grey Mountains

The northern wall

The Grey Mountains branch away from the Misty Mountains at Mount Gundabad and run east for several hundred miles, forming the northern boundary of Rhovanion and the wild country beyond which lie the Northern Waste and the ice. Their southern slopes look down on the upper vale of Anduin, where the Greylin springs from the range to meet the Langwell, and on the northern eaves of Mirkwood, whose Forest River rises among them. Toward the eastern end the range splits into two arms with the Withered Heath between them, and beyond that it fades into the hills north of the Iron Hills.

The mountains were rich in iron, gold and gems, which made them a natural refuge for the Dwarves after Moria. Their curse was the dragons. The great worms of the north, cold-drakes without fire as well as fire-breathers, bred on the Withered Heath and hunted along the range, and the wealth of the Dwarves drew them as it later drew Smaug to Erebor. The dragon Scatha, slain by Fram of the Éothéod in the days when that people lived beneath the mountains, was one of them, and his hoard was the cause of a bitter quarrel between the Éothéod and the Dwarves who claimed it.

Thorin I left Erebor for the Grey Mountains in T.A. 2210 to join the Longbeards already gathering there, and for nearly four hundred years the range held the greater part of Durin's folk and its kings. Their prosperity ended when the dragons, multiplying in the waste, began to raid the mountain-halls. In 2589 a cold-drake attacked the halls of King Dáin I and killed him at his own door together with his second son Frór. The Dwarves gave up the range: Thrór, Dáin's heir, went back to Erebor in 2590 to refound the Kingdom under the Mountain, and his brother Grór led the rest to the Iron Hills. Smaug, greatest of the northern dragons, came out of this country in 2770.

The Éothéod, ancestors of the Rohirrim, lived in the vales beneath the mountains' western end from about 1977 until Eorl led them south in 2510. After their departure the country under the range was empty of settled people, and by the end of the age the Grey Mountains were a wilderness of orcs and worms; Gandalf noted at the Council of Elrond that many dragons still lived there, though none of Smaug's stature.

A range running east from Mount Gundabad along the northern edge of Rhovanion, north of the upper Anduin and Mirkwood, with the Withered Heath between its eastern arms and the Iron Hills beyond to the south-east.