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Something Wicked This Way Comes - Page 3

© Michael Martinez

But sourthern Greenwood was not entirely safe. During the War of the Last Alliance, Sauron had occupied one or more regions of the forest. The two thousand or so Orcs who waylaid Isildur's column in TA 2 were a remnant of those occupying forces. And though the Woodmen are said to have scattered the Orcs who survived the battle with Isildur, some of the Orcs survived the counter-assault by the Woodmen. In one of his essays, Tolkien noted that most of the Orcs would have been barely capable of fending for themselves in the wake of Sauron's downfall. The attack on Isildur was compelled, he suggested in "The Disaster of the Gladden Fields", by the Orcs' proximity to the One Ring, which at that time was still actively seeking to return to Sauron (oblivious to his inability to join with it physically). Hence, after the attack on Isildur, those few Orcs capable of surviving on their own must have withdrawn to the deeper forest. There they would have dwelt alone, slowly developing their own sense of independence and community. Sometime in the centuries following Sauron's death, the Hobbits made their way to the Vales of Anduin. They settled in small groups near the homes and villages of Edainic Men, gradually entering into a Bree-like coexistence with those Men (according to "Dwarves and Men"). The arrival of the Hobbits must have been prior to the first invasion of Gondor by the Easterlings in TA 490. At that time, Gondor would have extended along the Anduin as far as the Undeeps (near the field of Celebrant). The lands between Greenwood and Mordor were not a part of the kingdom. These earliest Easterlings (in Gondor's Third Age experience) seem to have dwelt in the lands between Mordor and the forest. Turambar, the son of Romendacil I, conquered those lands sometime after his father's death in TA 541. The entire region must have been extremely hostile and impassable for the Hobbits at that time. And though they could have passed through Greenwood itself in order to reach the Vales of Anduin, the ancestors of the Stoors and Harfoots may have passed around the forest's southern edge. The Fallohides, being the northernmost group, are the likeliest to have passed through Greenwood. A Hobbit migration might, in fact, have encouraged the Woodmen of Greenwood to colonize the open grasslands along the Anduin, and to cross the river itself. The Dwarves would have provided the Men with opportunities for trade and skilled labor in building roads and fortifications. The friendship between the Woodmen and Thranduil's people (then living in the Emyn Duir, the mountains in the middle of the forest) ensured a stable eastern frontier for the expanding mortal population. Men became an important part of the upper Anduin community.

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