Ranger For Hire: Have Horse, Will Travel

were available but nomadic peoples don't normally wander through hill-lands. If the Dunedain were only semi-nomadic, then they could probably live comfortably in the hill-lands, but I think there are better possibilities elsewhere. Tolkien says that at the end of the Third Age "no other Men [beside those of Bree] had settled dwellings so far west, or within a hundred leagues [about 300 miles] of the Shire. But in the wild lands beyond Bree there were mysterious wanderers. The Bree-folk called them Rangers, and knew nothing of their origin." (Tolkien, "The Lord of the Rings", p. 161). These Rangers "roamed at will southwards, and eastwards even as far as the Misty Mountains; but they were now few and rarely seen." The lands south of the Shire are described as great plains in an essay published in Unfinished Tales: "...The wide lands divided by the Gwathlo into the regions called by the Numenoreans Minhirith ('Between the Rivers', Baranduin and Gwathlo) and Enedwaith ('Middle-folk') were mainly plains, open and mountainless....In the time of the War of the Ring the lands were still in places well-wooded, especially in Minhiriath and in the south-east of Enedwaith; but most of the plains were grasslands. Since the Great Plague of the year 1636 of the Third Age Minhiriath had been almost entirely deserted, though a few secretive hunter-folk lived in the woods....But in the earlier days, at the time of the first explorations of the Numenoreans, the situation was quite different. Minhiriath and Enedwaith were occupied by vast and almost continuous forests...." (Tolkien, "Unfinished Tales", pp. 261-2) The only significant forest in Minhirith is Eryn Vorn, which stood on the cape just south of the mouth of the Baranduin. Some of the Gwathuirim fled into those woods when Sauron destroyed the great forest in the War of the Elves and Sauron (S.A. 1695-1701). Tolkien never says these people accepted the rule of Arnor's kings, but they seem too few in number to have threatened Arnor. Only one of the High Kings, Valandur, died a violent death (in 652) and no details of the event are provided. But though he could have fought the Gwathuirim of Eryn Vorn, it seems more plausible he was engaged in wars with the evil men living in northeastern Eriador. Woodlands may have survived elsewhere in Minhiriath, particularly along the shores of the Gwathlo itself or as the Old Forest, but Eryn Vorn seems to be what Tolkien

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