Drúedain

Origins

The Drúedain were among the oldest of Men and among the strangest. The lore preserved in Unfinished Tales tells that they came west in the First Age in company with the Haladin, the people of Haleth, and lived among them in the forest of Brethil, where the Elves called them Drúedain and honoured them as a separate people. They were hated by the Orcs and hated them in turn, and they were held to have a gift of watchfulness and a kind of foresight that made them valued as guards; the Haladin told tales of a Drûg who sat unmoving for days as a carved figure while he watched. Some of them went to Númenor with the Edain, but they were unhappy there and left it before the Downfall, sensing the shadow.

In Middle-earth their kin had already spread through the White Mountains and along the coast to Andrast, and it was there that the Númenórean settlers of Gondor found them. They were driven back by the Númenóreans and later by the Men of the Mountains, and by the end of the Third Age they survived only in the Drúadan Forest at the eastern end of the mountains in Anórien, and perhaps in the far western cape of Andrast.

The Púkel-men

The road that climbed from Harrowdale to Dunharrow was lined at each turn with squat, heavy, worn stone figures with crossed legs and stumpy arms folded over fat bellies, which the Rohirrim called Púkel-men and passed without a second glance. These were the work of the Drúedain of a much earlier age, when the White Mountains were their country, and they showed the same short, thick-bodied people with small eyes who still lived in the forest below. To the Rohirrim they were curiosities; to the Drúedain they were ancestors.

Wild Men and Horse-lords

The Rohirrim and the Men of Gondor did not regard the Drúedain as Men in the full sense. The Rohirrim hunted them as beasts in earlier days, and the Drúedain answered with poisoned arrows from the trees; the two peoples had no dealings and no common speech, and the Drúedain's drum-signals in the forest were a thing of dread to travellers on the road to Minas Tirith. In Gondor they were counted among the Wild Men, and it was barely remembered that they had once been counted among the Edain.

The War of the Ring

On 13 March 3019 the Rohirrim under Théoden, riding to the relief of Minas Tirith, halted in the Drúadan Forest with the road ahead of them blocked by the enemy. The drums of the Wild Men sounded, and their headman Ghân-buri-Ghân came to the king's tent. In his broken Westron he offered a bargain: the Wild Men would show the Riders a road the Orcs did not know, the old wain-road through the Stonewain Valley by which the men of Gondor had once carried stone to the city, if in return the Rohirrim would kill the Orcs and leave the Wild Men in peace and stop hunting them. Théoden accepted. The Drúedain led the host through the hills by night and brought them to the Grey Wood above the Pelennor undetected, and Ghân-buri-Ghân's last service was to report that the enemy had left the wall of the Pelennor unguarded. Without the Wild Men the Rohirrim would have met the enemy on the road, and the charge that saved the city might never have been made.

When the war was won and King Elessar rode north with Théoden's body, the drums sounded again in the forest, and the king proclaimed that the Drúadan Forest was the Wild Men's own for ever and that no one should enter it without their leave. The Drúedain, having asked only to be left alone, had it granted by the highest authority in Middle-earth.

Relations with other peoples

The Drúedain were friends of the Haladin in the First Age and were remembered among the Edain as kin, though the memory was lost in Gondor. They hated Orcs beyond all things and were hated by them. Their relations with the Rohirrim were those of the hunted and the hunters until 3019; with Gondor they had no relations at all until Elessar's proclamation. They had no known contact with Elves in the Third Age.

The Drúedain were short, broad and heavy, with thick legs and arms, deep chests and fat bellies; their faces were wide, flat and inexpressive, with small dark eyes that could nonetheless glint red when they were angry, and their hair was sparse and their skin dark. They wore only a grass skirt in warm weather, and they moved silently and could sit motionless for hours. They aged slowly and were tough beyond their size, immune to many poisons and skilled in making them for their arrows. Other Men found them ugly, and the Orcs called them Oghor-hai; the Elves of Beleriand had called them the Drúedain and honoured them.

The Drúedain lived in the forest in small settlements, hunting with poisoned arrows and communicating over distance by drums whose language no outsider learned. They spoke a tongue of their own, unrelated to any other speech of Men, and Ghân-buri-Ghân knew only a little Westron. They were carvers of stone and wood, and the Púkel-men of Dunharrow and the watch-stones of Brethil were their work; they had a reputation for a sort of magic in their carvings, so that a stone set to watch a house was said to watch indeed. They counted heads in their own way and their arithmetic was different from that of other Men, but Ghân-buri-Ghân knew to the Orc how many enemies stood before Minas Tirith. Their customs were of peace: they asked nothing but to be left alone in their woods, and they went to war only against Orcs.

The Drúedain were a separate kindred of Men from the awakening of the race, and they came west into Beleriand in the First Age alongside the Haladin, whose friends and guards they became. After the drowning of Beleriand they lived in the White Mountains and along the coasts of the south, from which the Númenóreans and the later Men of the Mountains slowly pushed them into the corners of the land where they survived at the end of the Third Age.

By the end of the Third Age the Drúedain were reduced to a few hundred living in the Drúadan Forest, ignored or hunted by their neighbours. Their guidance of the Rohirrim in 3019 won them the recognition of King Elessar, who gave them their forest as their own for ever. In the Fourth Age they lived there in peace, protected by the Reunited Kingdom, one of the oldest peoples of Middle-earth secured at last in the last of their homes.