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The Wild, Wild, Wood-elf West - Page 5

© Michael Martinez

Tolkien told Pauline Baynes to place Dorwinion on the northwestern shores of the Sea of Rhun, and every cartographer to follow her has accordingly done the same, though the name doesn't appear in any of the canonical LOTR maps. Christopher Tolkien was puzzled by this placement, since "Lay of the Children of Hurin" speaks of the "heats of the South", but it does seem logical that -- if Dorwinion is an Elven land -- it be placed somewhere near the path followed by the Elves on their westward journeys. They all seem to have wandered along the northern shores of whatever sea lay in the region (the old sea, Helcar, vanished in the turmoils at the end of the First Age, and all that remained of it was the sea of Rhun). So, if we assume that Dorwinion was an Elven land, it was probably populated by Penni, Nelyarin Avari. Most of the Penni, however, seem to have made it as far west as Anduin, and there they mingled or supplanted the Nandor who were still living in Greenwood and Lothlorien. From these groups came the Silvan Elves, or the Wood-elves of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. And as everyone who has read the appendices to LOTR knows, early in the Second Age some of the Sindar migrated east and settled in the forests and established kingdoms among the Silvan Elves. How many kingdoms were there? We don't know. Only two survived to the end of the Second Age: Oropher's realm in Greewood the Great, and Amdir's realm in Lothlorien. Oropher originally settled on the hill of Amon Lanc, and so was close to Amdir, but he eventually moved his people north to the Emyn Duir, the mountains in the middle of the forest, and they stayed there until Sauron built a fortress on Amon Lanc around the year 1050 of the Third Age, when Thranduil (Oropher's son) led them northward to establish his halls in a hill overlooking the forest river of The Hobbit. It doesn't seem likely there were many other places for Elven realms to exist, but one possibility would be along the Anduin near Rauros. The region was wooded in the late Third Age, at least, because the Fellowship of the Ring had to carry their boats through the woods. The Entwash provided sufficient water in the region for forests to arise, and farther south in the lands which became Anorien Elves would have been fairly happy in the woods as well. It may be that if any Sindarin "adventurers" (as Tolkien referred to them) settled among the Nandor and Penni south of Greenwood and Lorien, these would be the lands most likely to harbor their little kingdoms. They also would have been exposed and vulnerable to Sauron's forces when the War of the Elves and Sauron began.

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