~:~|~:~ Brown Lands West ~:~|~:~
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Project Leader: @Wyattrox03
Co-Leader: idk
Project Staff:
Terrain Council: @barteldvn,@TheSweViking, Mithrilled
(screenshot by Mithrilled)
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OVERALL PROGRESS AND STATE
Approximate Overall Progress Percentage: 100%
Current Progress State: Sitting on a beach with a Margarita
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Project Leader: @Wyattrox03
Co-Leader: idk
Project Staff:
Terrain Council: @barteldvn,@TheSweViking, Mithrilled
(screenshot by Mithrilled)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OVERALL PROGRESS AND STATE
Approximate Overall Progress Percentage: 100%
Current Progress State: Sitting on a beach with a Margarita
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Introduction
Hello, we recently have done some terrain work north of the Emyn Muil including the brown lands. Until recently this area was basically untouched world painter terrain and was a real eyesore on the fellowship path. So about four days ago we started redoing it at @TheSweViking s instigation. Thank you to swe @Mithrilled and @barteldvn in the last part getting the veg in order and @dahllen123 for fixing some tree roots and @TheStephen whose lore document I cannabalized for this post and who provided the dirt gradients. Take a look at the new areas at /warp brown lands and /warp fields of celebrant. I might continue the brown lands east at some point but for now its good to have the banks of the anduin retouched
Project Sections
Lore:
On the eastern bank to their left they saw long formless slopes stretching up and away toward the sky; brown and withered they looked, as if fire had passed over them, leaving no living blade of green: an unfriendly waste without even a broken tree or a bold stone to relieve the emptiness. They had come to the Brown Lands that lay, vast and desolate, between Southern Mirkwood and the hills of the Emyn Muil. What pestilence or war or evil deed of the Enemy had so blasted all that region even Aragorn could not tell.
The Brown Lands rose into bleak wolds, over which flowed a chill air from the East. On the other side the meads had become rolling downs of withered grass amidst a land of fen and tussock.
FotR, Book II, Ch 9, The Great River
Sam looked from bank to bank uneasily. The trees had seemed hostile before ... [but] now he wished that the trees were still there. He felt that the Company was too naked, afloat in little open boats in the midst of shelterless lands, and on a river that was the frontier of war. ...
Soon the River broadened and grew more shallow; long stony beaches lay upon the east, and there were gravel-shoals in the water, so that careful steering was needed. The Brown Lands rose into bleak wolds, over which flowed a chill air from the East. On the other side the meads had become rolling downs of withered grass amidst a land of fen and tussock.
The Fellowship of the Ring, LoTR Book 2, Ch 9, The Great River
Then when the Darkness came in the North, the Entwives crossed the Great River, and made new gardens, and tilled new fields, and we saw them more seldom. After the Darkness was overthrown the land of the Entwives blossomed richly, and their fields were full of corn.
Many men learned the crafts of the Entwives and honoured them greatly; but we were only a legend to them, a secret in the heart of the forest. Yet here we still are, while all the gardens of the Entwives are wasted: Men call them the Brown Lands now.
TTT, Book III, Ch 4, Treebeard
‘I remember it was long ago – in the time of the war between Sauron and the Men of the Sea – desire came over me to see Fimbrethil again. Very fair she was still in my eyes, when I had last seen her, though little like the Entmaiden of old. For the Entwives were bent and browned by their labour; their hair parched by the sun to the hue of ripe corn and their cheeks like red apples. Yet their eyes were still the eyes of our own people. We crossed over Anduin and
came to their land; but we found a desert: it was all burned and uprooted, for war had passed over it. But the Entwives were not there. Long we called, and long we searched; and we asked all folk that we met which way the Entwives had gone. Some said they had never seen them; and some said that they had seen them walking away west, and some said east, and others south. But nowhere that we went could we find them. Our sorrow was very great.
TTT, Book III, Ch 4, Treebeard
I think that in fact the Entwives had disappeared for good, being destroyed with their gardens in
the War of the Last Alliance (Second Age 3429-3441) when Sauron pursued a scorched earth policy and burned their land against the advance of the Allies down the Anduin (vol. II p. 79 refers to it 2 ). They survived only in the 'agriculture' transmitted to Men (and Hobbits). Some, of course, may have fled east, or even have become enslaved: tyrants even in such tales must have an economic and agricultural background to their soldiers and metal-workers. If any survived so, they would indeed be far estranged from the Ents, and any rapprochement would be difficult – unless experience of industrialized and militarized agriculture had made them a little more anarchic. I hope so. I don't know.
Letter 144, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
Of their journey nothing is told until they had passed over the Dagorlad, and on northward into the wide and empty lands south of Greenwood the Great.
The Disaster of the Gladden Fields, Part III, Unfinished Tales
The Undeeps
The wide lands south of Mirkwood, from the Brown Lands to the Sea of Rhûn, which offered no obstacle to invaders from the East until they came to Anduin, were a chief source of concern and unease to the rulers of Gondor.Unfinished Tales, Part 3, Ch 2, Cirion and Eorl and the Friendship of Gondor and Rohan: The Ride of Eorl
In later days Gondor built a bridge over the upper Limlight, and often occupied the narrow land between the lower Limlight and Anduin as part of its eastern fences, since the great loops of the Anduin (where it came down swiftly past Lórien and entered low flat lands before its descent again into the chasm of the Emyn Muil) had many shallows and wide shoals over which a determined and well-equipped enemy could force a crossing by rafts or pontoons, especially in the two westward bends, known as the North and South Undeeps.
Unfinished Tales, Part 2, Ch 4, Appendix C, The History of Galadriel and Celeborn: The Boundaries of Lórien
But during the Watchful Peace the forts along the Anduin, especially on the west shore of the Undeeps, had been unmanned and neglected. After that time Gondor was assailed both by Orcs out of Mordor (which had long been unguarded) and by the Corsairs of Umbar, and had neither men nor opportunity for manning the line of Anduin north of the Emyn Muil.
Unfinished Tales, Part 3, Ch 2, Cirion and Eorl and the Friendship of Gondor and Rohan: The Ride of Eorl
In this peril Cirion's thought turned at last in desperation to the Éothéod, and he determined to send messengers to them. But they would have to go through Calenardhon and over the Undeeps, and then through lands already watched and patrolled by the Balchoth before they could reach the Vales of Anduin. This would mean a ride of some four hundred and fifty miles [from Minas Tirith] to the Undeeps, and more than five hundred thence to the Éothéod, and from the Undeeps they would be forced to go warily and mostly by night until they had passed the shadow of Dol Guldur.
Unfinished Tales, Part 3, Ch 2, Cirion and Eorl and the Friendship of Gondor and Rohan: The Ride of Eorl
'And these same foul creatures were more than surprised to meet us out on the Wold, for they had not heard of us before; though that might be said also of better folk. And not many will remember us, for not many escaped us alive, and the River had most of those. But it was well for you, for if they had not met us, then the king of the grassland would not have ridden far, and if he had there would have been no home to return to.'
The Return of the King, LoTR Book 6, Ch 5, Many Partings
