Rhûn

The lands beyond the map

Rhûn is less a country than a direction. In the Common Speech and in Sindarin it means simply the East, and the Men of the West used it for all the lands beyond the Sea of Rhûn and the eastern plains of Rhovanion as far as rumour reached. The maps of Middle-earth stop at the inland sea, not because the world stopped there but because the loremasters of Gondor had nothing certain to draw. What is known is that the region held grassland enough to feed nations of horsemen and wain-folk, that it lay north and east of Khand and north-east of Mordor, and that in the Elder Days the sun first rose over the mountains of the far east, where the Elves awoke by the water of Cuiviénen.

The Easterlings

The peoples of the East are called Easterlings in the West, though the name covers many kindreds who had little in common but their direction. Men of the East appear in the histories from the First Age, when the Swarthy Men came over the Blue Mountains into Beleriand and some houses among them betrayed the Elves at the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. In the Second Age Sauron's dominion lay heaviest on the eastern lands, which had never known the teaching of the Eldar or the friendship of the Númenóreans, and after his fall in the Downfall of Númenor it was to the East that his spirit fled and where his worship endured longest. Khamûl, the second of the Nazgûl, was an Easterling king in life.

Against them stood the Northmen of the eastern marches, who were Gondor's shield in the north until the Wainriders overwhelmed them; the survivors of that ruin went north up the Anduin and became in time the Rohirrim. By the end of the Third Age the peoples about the inland sea were vassals of Barad-dûr, and their spearmen and axemen fought on the Pelennor and at the Black Gate. They were not destroyed with Sauron: King Elessar made war and then peace in the East, and the Fourth Age brought the eastern lands into the ordinary politics of the reunited kingdom rather than out of the world.

The long wars with Gondor

The first great assault came in T.A. 490, and in 541 King Rómendacil I was killed fighting the Easterlings. His son Turambar avenged him and won land eastward, and for centuries Gondor held the frontier; under Hyarmendacil I its bound was set at the inland sea. In 1248 Minalcar, later Rómendacil II, destroyed a host of Easterlings between Rhovanion and the sea, took Northmen into his service and fortified the Anduin.

The Wainriders and the Balchoth

From about 1851 a confederacy that Gondor called the Wainriders, for the great waggons in which they moved, attacked out of the east in wave after wave. In 1856 King Narmacil II fell in the Battle of the Plains and Gondor lost all its territory east of the Anduin; the Northmen were scattered or enslaved. In 1899 Calimehtar won a victory on Dagorlad, but the storm broke again in 1944, when the Wainriders in league with the men of Khand and the Haradrim attacked from both north and south at once. King Ondoher and both his sons were killed in the north, and the war was saved only by Eärnil, who destroyed the invaders' camp in Ithilien in the battle that bears its name. In 2510 a related people, the Balchoth, came over the plains in great numbers, and Gondor's northern army was trapped on the Field of Celebrant until Eorl and the horsemen of the north came down out of the empty lands; Cirion rewarded them with Calenardhon, which became Rohan.

The Blue Wizards

Of the five Istari sent from the West about the year T.A. 1000, two, called by the Elves the Ithryn Luin or Blue Wizards, passed into the East and never came back into the recorded history of the West. The published accounts differ on whether they went with Saruman on his one eastern journey or before him, and their errand and their fate are unknown; it is suggested that they may have failed as he did and become the founders of secret cults and magical traditions among the peoples of Rhûn, and also that their labours may have stirred resistance in the East that kept part of Sauron's strength occupied and away from Gondor. Both possibilities are left open.

The War of the Ring and after

In 3018 and 3019 Sauron drew his eastern subjects west. Easterlings crossed the Carnen in March 3019, killed King Brand and old Dáin Ironfoot before the gate of Erebor, and besieged the Mountain until the news of Sauron's fall broke them; others fought at Minas Tirith and before the Black Gate. With the Ring destroyed the eastern armies scattered or surrendered. In the early Fourth Age Aragorn as King Elessar led campaigns to the east and south and made the peace that his heir Eldarion inherited, and the history of Rhûn passes again beyond the edge of the record.

The vast lands east of Rhovanion and the Sea of Rhûn, north of Khand and north-east of Mordor, largely open plain and grassland in the parts the West knew. Dorwinion lies on the sea's north-western shore; the far mountains of the East, where the Elves awoke, are beyond all maps.