Welcome back to everyone’s favorite www.isleyunruh.com Monday feature! Middle-earth being the land of enchantment and wonder that it is, each month I will use my love of fictional cartography to transport you to another time and place. So, why not take a moment to fill your head full of knowledge that will have no bearing at all on the real world?
This month I discuss the undead infested burial mounds of the Dúnedain:
They hastened up the last slope, and stood breathless beside her. They bowed, but with a wave of her arm she bade them look round; and they looked out from the hill-top over lands under the morning. It was now as clear and far-seen as it had been veiled and misty when they stood upon the knoll in the Forest, which could now be seen rising pale and green out of the dark trees in the West. In that direction the land rose in wooded ridges, green, yellow, russet under the sun, beyond which lay hidden the valley of the Brandywine. To the South, over the line of the Withywindle, there was a distant glint like pale glass where the Brandywine River made a great loop in the lowlands and flowed away out of the knowledge of the hobbits. Northward beyond the dwindling downs the land ran away in flats and swellings of grey and green and pale earth-colours, until it faded into a featureless and shadowy distance. Eastward the Barrow-downs rose, ridge behind ridge into the morning, and vanished out of eyesight into a guess: it was no more than a guess of blue and a remote white glimmer blending with the hem of the sky, but it spoke to them, out of memory and old tales, of the high and distant mountains.
The wide swath of ridged hills that made up the land known as the Barrow-downs had been a burial site as far back as the First Age of the Sun when the forefathers of the Edain first crossed them on their way to Beleriand. There they laid their dead to rest on their great journey into the setting sun, and there, thousands of years later, the Dúnedain returned to bury their dead beneath great mounds atop the hills. Some mounds rose up, high above the highest hilltops, others stretched out in a ring, forming disc-like depressions. Piles of rock, carved markers, and great standing stones from a time beyond the mists of memory stood watch over the desolate mounds.
They were once a place of reverence and honor, where many great heroes of the North Kingdom were laid to rest. And, in T.A. 1409, when the Witch King’s armies swept out of Angmar and turned the green fields of Cardolan red with blood, the last of the Dúnedain of Cardolan held out in the Barrow-downs behind their naturally defensible terrain and a great dike that had been erected along their northern border.
However, during the reign of Argeleb II, the storied hills and their burial mounds finally came under the sway of the northern evil. In the aftermath of the great plague that swept into Eriador upon black winds from the South, Cardolan was decimated and the last of the Dúnedain finally left the hills they had come to call “Tyrn Gorthad.” In their absence, fell spirits from Angmar came to inhabit the countless burial chambers.
No burial chamber was safe from the evil barrow wights, beings of pure death and malice. Frodo Baggins himself awoke in the burial chamber of the last Lord of Cardolan, a burial chamber that had long been under the sway of undying evil. Who knows what other chambers lay among the maze of ridges and hilltops, forgotten beneath standing stones thousands of years old, hiding great treasures and greater evil beneath the soft green grasses upon their roofs.
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