Kryptic Tales of Middle-earth - Page 3
© Michael Martinez
How real would the tales of wolf-Sauron and Draugluin, father of were-wolves, and Thuringwethil the bat-hamed messenger of Sauron, and Gorlim the Unhappy's ghost have seemed to the generations of Men and Elves who grew up early in the Second Age? Their world was changed. Most of Beleriand was gone. The great kings who had led the Elves and Edain in the war against Morgoth were all dead. The western Edain sailed over Sea to build a great civilization and the eastern Edain receded to the plains and woods where they would slowly forget that once some of their kinsfolk had departed over the mountains.
Yet after Sauron began stirring again in the Second Age, and gathering once more evil creatures under his control, as evidence of the return of evil crept toward the Elven lands Men might have dusted off the old legends of were-wolves and vampires and orcs and demons and recounted how once there had been a dark lord against whom only a few Elves and Men stood defiantly.
Yet evil eventually took on a clearer face, and the War of the Elves and Sauron brought an end to many Elf and Mannish realms, and there would be long centuries of warfare afterward. The Second Age may have given rise to new legends of horror, especially when the Nazgul appeared in Middle-earth, but it may also, like the First Age, have brought the evil too close to home for people to develop a weird fascination for it. We only dream of vampires and were-wolves when we know they are not real and cannot hurt us.
But the final war of the Second Age laid the foundation for one of the greatest legends of horror in the Third Age. Isildur called upon a mountain people to march against Sauron, and they refused, for they had once worshipped Sauron as a god. These faithless men Isildur condemned to fade away as a people. They dwindled and died, lost and alone in the highlands, doomed to haunt their old lands until the day when they could redeem their oaths to an Heir of Isildur.
The hardy mountain-folk of Gondor lived beside the Dead Men of Dunharrow, and one must wonder if they didn't spend their long winter nights swapping tales of unwary travellers who became lost in the paths of the Dead, or who came upon a conclave of ghosts the great stone of Erech in times of trouble. No one knows how the Elven lady Nimrodel was lost in the mountains, but did the local people adopt her as a victim of their legends? Did they picture her lost and terrified, pursued by the ancient ghosts?
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