Lond Daer

[Eriol_Eandur]

I did some research about Lond Daer. First there is the famouns map of Pauline Baynes with annotations by JRR Tolkien himself. It shows Lond Daer is at the funnel-shaped mouth of River Gwathló between the areas of Minhiriath and Enedhwaith:

Spoiler: Map of Middle-earth

There is an essay in the Unfinished Tales with quite a lot of details:

at the end of the seventeenth century of the Second Age the Númenórean admiral Ciryatur put a strong force ashore at the mouth of the Gwathló (Greyflood), where there was "a small Númenórean harbour"
....
The wide lands divided by the Gwathló into the regions called by the Númenóreans Minhiriath ("Between the Rivers," Baranduin and Gwathló) and Enedwaith ("Middle-folk") were mainly plains, open and mountainless.
....
But some hundred miles below Tharbad the slope increased. The Gwathló, however, never became swift, and ships of smaller draught could without difficulty sail or be rowed as far as Tharbad.
....
In the time of the War of the Ring the lands were still in places well-wooded, especially m Minhiriath and in the south-east of Enedwaith; but most of the plains were grassland.
....
it was in origin a timber-port and ship-building harbour.
....
For long years these lands were their chief source of timber, not only for their ship-yards at Lond Daer and elsewhere, but also for Númenor itself. Shiploads innumerable passed west over the sea.
....
Sauron knew of the importance to his enemies of the Great Haven and its ship-yards. ... He had not enough force to spare for any assault upon the forts at the Haven or along the banks of the Gwathló.
....
the port vas called Lond Daer Enedh "the Great Middle Haven," as being between the havens of Lindon in the North and Pelargir on the Anduin
....
to the ancient port at tile head at the estuary of the Gwathló

From the second last quote I'd say it should be about the size of Pelargir.

 

[RubenPieterMark]

I did some research about Lond Daer. First there is the famouns map of Pauline Baynes with annotations by JRR Tolkien himself. It shows Lond Daer is at the funnel-shaped mouth of River Gwathló between the areas of Minhiriath and Enedhwaith:

Spoiler: Map of Middle-earth

There is an essay in the Unfinished Tales with quite a lot of details:

From the last quote I'd say it should be about the size of Pelargir.

I think Pelargir in the Second Age would be about half the size of Pelargir at its height. In the Second Age, Pelargir would have been quite an isolated port, at least it wouldn't have been the harbor city of the realm of Gondor. Also I think Pelargir would have grown when the capital moved from Minas Tirith to Pelargir, when Tarannor Falastur (iirc) became king. However it may be, Second Age Pelargir would have been smaller than Third Age, so I think Lond Daer would have been too.

 

[Eriol_Eandur]

As I understand it the quote compares Lond Daer at it's height at the end of Second Age with Pelargir at the same time (when it was still a quite new port). But I don't agree Pelargir grew a lot during Third Age. Gondor is a realm of exile. A nothing compared to the wealth and splendor of Numenor. In opposite I would suspect it lost much importance and size at the end of Second Age when Osgiliath, Minas Anor and Minas Ithil were build.
When King Falastur moved to Pelargir it would just regain some of it's former size (are you sure King Falastur moved the captial to Pelargir? I found in Appendix A 4. that "Eärnil I, his nephew, who succeeded him, repaired the ancient haven of Pelargir). Anyway Pelargir wasn't capital of Gondor for very long, and it was devastated during the kinstrife and later by raids of the Corsairs. Later the focus of Gondor moved to Minas Tirith.
Also I think in general the ports were much more important during Second Age with all the transports of resource to Numenor. Gondor wasn't really a realm of mariners like Numenor.
Considering all this my rough guess was that the Ruins of Lond Daer should have the same extend as the city of Pelargir at the end of Third Age. But of course this is very speculative.

 

[RubenPieterMark]

Sorry, it was Castamir and not Tarannon, and it isn't even definitively stated that he moved the throne:

(…) and there love for Castamir was further lessened when it became seen that he cared little for the land, and thought only of the fleets, and purposed to remove the king's seat to Pelargir.

Tarannon Falastur had a house a bit south of Pelargir, in the Anduin delta. I suppose that the other sea-kings had their throne there as well, or in Pelargir.

I don't agree with you that Pelargir would have been larger as an isolated Númenorean colonial harbor than as the chief harbor of Gondor, even though Gondor was quite isolated as well. Second Age Pelargir would just have been a connection between an almost uninhabited Middle-earth and Númenor, while Third Age Pela would have been the connection between a quite populous Gondor and other Gondorian harbor and probably also southern foreign harbors.
Anyway this is not very relevant to the size of Lond Daer lol, but an interesting topic nonetheless.

On another note, I found an interesting quote about Númenorean harbors in Middle-earth in the appendices.

In the years of their power the Númenoreans had maintained many forts and havens upon the western coasts of Middle-earth for the help of their ships; and one of the chief of these was at Pelargir near the Mouths of Anduin.

Maybe it would make sense to have another small harbor between Tharbad and Lond Daer, for river rafts to transport timber to Lond Daer? This quote kind of supports your idea Eriol and it contradicts my statement that Lond Daer and Pela were isolated, but still Gondor wouldn't have been nearly as populous as in the Third Age.

 

[Eriol_Eandur]

That last point is what I put in question. I believe many Numenoreans settled in Middleearth before the downfall. Probabyl not in all the lands but close to the huge harbors. Those harbors and the supply with resources were crucial for Numenor. All the timbering and mines needed workers.
Also Elendil and his sons escaped the downfall with only 7 ships. But within only a few years they built towns like Osgiliath and Annuminas. This always seemd a bit weird to me but best explanation I have is that there have been many Numenoreans at Middle-earth already when they arrived.

 

[Ardelenia]

This admittedly long post, written with help from @RubenPieterMark, considers how Lond Daer should be built. First, I shall expound why we believe Lond Daer should barely be a visible ruin, instead appearing as short walls (≤ 2 blocks ie a person) and grassy mounds. TLDR: because of the silt. This excludes any resettlement by the sparse fisherfolk etc. I've included some sources if you’re curious, and also because I'm in a school mindset so I feel the urge to cite things.

Let us start with how long the city has been ruined for. One of our friend Michael Martinez's many well-thought articles asks when Lond Daer was abandoned, and concludes "The city could have been abandoned by 1409 [TA]; or perhaps its last people died out in 1636 [TA]. It does not appear to have existed by 1975 [TA]." Having been founded before "nigh on" 800 SA, some semblance of the city has existed for over 5640 years, and it has been abandoned for at least 1025 years, probably centuries more. I would like to give a bit more of the footnote (written by JRR, not Christopher) from which Eriol drew the last two quotes, and which is also in the linked article, with an additional point of interpretation:

In the early days of the kingdoms the most expeditious route from one to the other (except for great armaments) was found to be by sea to the ancient port at the head of the estuary of the Gwathló and so to the river port of Tharbad, and thence by the Road. The ancient sea-port and its great quays were ruinous, but with long labour a port capable of receiving seagoing vessels had been made at Tharbad, and a fort raised there on great earthworks on both sides of the river, to guard the once famed Bridge of Tharbad.

This passage implies that in the last century of the Second Age (Downfall of Númenor ie founding of kingdoms 3319, end of age 3441), Lond Daer was dilapidated and unusable. We can theorize this was in part from the "general destruction of the coasts," as Martinez says, resulting from Númenor sinking. Following that event, the Arnorians seem to have preferred Tharbad over Lond Daer, and it is up to us to guess whether Lond Daer was left empty or repopulated. I'll concede that the cultured and productive Numenoreans could easily have kept the city in good repair for the majority of its inhabited lifespan, but as a now unimportant city, it seems unlikely it could have grown much from its ruined size or significantly rebuilt the ruins. Meaning we have an absolute minimum abandonment of 1025 years, but the relics of its greatness — large stone buildings, sea walls and harbor structures, grand defenses — are 3000 years old.

Look up pictures of 1000 year old ruins, and you will see quite a range: from the tall and detailed towers of Angkor to fragmented and leaning wall sections. Pictures of 3000 year old ruins are more often walls less than a person tall. But we must also remember that these pictures are usually of excavated sites, and must consider in addition to age the climate and position. Lond Daer is at the mouth of a river, as we know, so it is affected by both the river and the ocean. From the latter, we get wind, waves, and storms battering down the buildings, plus erosion from salt air. There could even be corsair raids, though by my earlier reasoning it would not be important enough for this. We have in the past assumed or reasoned that the winds predominantly blow east across the ocean. This, along with the shape of the coast and ground underwater due to Lond Daer's location in an estuary (a river mouth), can also make the storms and tides worse. More significant, however, is the silt washing down the river for the entire 5640 years of the city (and millennia before that). We do know that the Gwathló would flood, and quite recently in 2912 TA “great floods devastate Enedwaith and Minhiriath. Tharbad is ruined and deserted” (LOTR App. B). If these were enough to destroy a city, they must have been pretty bad to an already-abandoned ruin with no one to clean it out afterwards. And we know that even in places with continuous inhabitation, people will let sediment accumulate and just build on top of it. A famous example is the Roman Forum, which is meters below current ground level. Before being excavated, it was used for grazing cows. So rather than focusing on the age, look up pictures of unexcavated ruins and you will see something much closer to my conception of Lond Daer. Some low piles of rubble perhaps marking the rectangle where a building stood, but mostly smooth and grassy mounds.

Spoiler: A few pictures

Excavation comparison (obviously jungle ruin so not quite the same)

This one and the next are from Lixus in Morocco, which is very close to the ocean.

And there is yet more we can deduce from the location of the city. We know it was the timber port of Numenor, and with so much wood going through how could it not have been diverted to build houses for the less wealthy? Especially since, as discussed in Lond Daer Terrain, the surrounding area is low and flat. Stone would not have been simple to quarry — without steep slopes, as far as I can tell, you need a pit quarry, and those are lots of work. Also they flood easily, which I already pointed out was a problem. This means great stone buildings would be expensive, even in the heyday of the city; presumably most of the stone was imported from other Numenorean holdings. After the fall of Numenor I doubt there would be many stone buildings constructed, and those that were would likely cannibalize the stone from ruins (as medieval people so often did). Furthermore, since the surroundings were so thoroughly deforested, there would be a general lack of building materials. So, we can expect ~1500 TA Lond Daer to be full of structures not meant to last, susceptible to rotting and sinking in mud and blowing down and more. Add to this other instances of destruction (@Ivan1pl mentioned at least one fire that swept through the city, and we can perhaps imagine raids by angry remnants of the native population as the city grew weaker) and this city, or really town now, is struggling to survive let alone flourish. To wrap it up and return to the main point, a settlement less strongly built and maintained by humans is more susceptible to nature, and it will disappear even more beneath the soils of the Gwathló.

So far I have employed an aesthetic perspective, but the practical perspective - in short, the time requirements - also demands consideration. Now, I want to be clear, I think the concepts Ivan has been building in freebuild look great. (Or I mean I have some critiques but they aren’t important here or as well at all reasoned out.) However, I ask if they are necessary, if we even need to build the city intact before ruining it. For what would be left of it? Could we not as easily go straight from wool outlines to dirt pile outlines? This leads us to an argument just as important as any historical considerations. Though we have long prided ourselves on fully building then ruining cities, it greatly increases the time and effort needed for such projects. It is questionable whether this process, meant to improve realism and visual appeal, will have any substantial effect or benefit for Lond Daer, when so much of the structures will be unbuilt. Instead we may be wasting a lot of time that could be directed towards the projects that frankly more new players (I shall not speak for old) care about than random ruins: Moria, Mordor, eventually Hobbit locations. These are all far from complete (or begun) in either case, but even so every day spent on Lond Daer will delay them.

Ruben and I welcome and look forward to any counterarguments, but I sincerely hope they will be respectable and have more thought behind them than "because it's what we're used to/traditional" or "because it's cooler/more fun/more interesting/looks nicer to build substantial ruins." Thanks for reading.

 

[Eriol_Eandur]

I agree in genral that after 1500 years there should not be much left of a town. I imagine it completely overgown with grass, bushes and trees.

Still I think there is one flaw in your argumentation about ruins and excarvations. Towns like Rome have been settled for more than almost 2000 years since the roman era. Afaik it's mainly the activity of humans which burries ruins underground. People are breaking useable stones from the old buildings and building their own houses with these stones on the remains of the old houses. That's how archaeologic layers in towns like Troja and Rome.
After Lond Daer was abandoned there were very few people around at that area, so the process of ruining and burying would be much slower there and mainly driven by vegetaition growing.

 

[barteldvn]

This admittedly long post, written with help from @RubenPieterMark, considers how Lond Daer should be built. First, I shall expound why we believe Lond Daer should barely be a visible ruin, instead appearing as short walls (≤ 2 blocks ie a person) and grassy mounds. TLDR: because of the silt. This excludes any resettlement by the sparse fisherfolk etc. I've included some sources if you’re curious, and also because I'm in a school mindset so I feel the urge to cite things.

Let us start with how long the city has been ruined for. One of our friend Michael Martinez's many well-thought articles asks when Lond Daer was abandoned, and concludes "The city could have been abandoned by 1409 [TA]; or perhaps its last people died out in 1636 [TA]. It does not appear to have existed by 1975 [TA]." Having been founded before "nigh on" 800 SA, some semblance of the city has existed for over 5640 years, and it has been abandoned for at least 1025 years, probably centuries more. I would like to give a bit more of the footnote (written by JRR, not Christopher) from which Eriol drew the last two quotes, and which is also in the linked article, with an additional point of interpretation:

This passage implies that in the last century of the Second Age (Downfall of Númenor ie founding of kingdoms 3319, end of age 3441), Lond Daer was dilapidated and unusable. We can theorize this was in part from the "general destruction of the coasts," as Martinez says, resulting from Númenor sinking. Following that event, the Arnorians seem to have preferred Tharbad over Lond Daer, and it is up to us to guess whether Lond Daer was left empty or repopulated. I'll concede that the cultured and productive Numenoreans could easily have kept the city in good repair for the majority of its inhabited lifespan, but as a now unimportant city, it seems unlikely it could have grown much from its ruined size or significantly rebuilt the ruins. Meaning we have an absolute minimum abandonment of 1025 years, but the relics of its greatness — large stone buildings, sea walls and harbor structures, grand defenses — are 3000 years old.

Look up pictures of 1000 year old ruins, and you will see quite a range: from the tall and detailed towers of Angkor to fragmented and leaning wall sections. Pictures of 3000 year old ruins are more often walls less than a person tall. But we must also remember that these pictures are usually of excavated sites, and must consider in addition to age the climate and position. Lond Daer is at the mouth of a river, as we know, so it is affected by both the river and the ocean. From the latter, we get wind, waves, and storms battering down the buildings, plus erosion from salt air. There could even be corsair raids, though by my earlier reasoning it would not be important enough for this. We have in the past assumed or reasoned that the winds predominantly blow east across the ocean. This, along with the shape of the coast and ground underwater due to Lond Daer's location in an estuary (a river mouth), can also make the storms and tides worse. More significant, however, is the silt washing down the river for the entire 5640 years of the city (and millennia before that). We do know that the Gwathló would flood, and quite recently in 2912 TA “great floods devastate Enedwaith and Minhiriath. Tharbad is ruined and deserted” (LOTR App. B). If these were enough to destroy a city, they must have been pretty bad to an already-abandoned ruin with no one to clean it out afterwards. And we know that even in places with continuous inhabitation, people will let sediment accumulate and just build on top of it. A famous example is the Roman Forum, which is meters below current ground level. Before being excavated, it was used for grazing cows. So rather than focusing on the age, look up pictures of unexcavated ruins and you will see something much closer to my conception of Lond Daer. Some low piles of rubble perhaps marking the rectangle where a building stood, but mostly smooth and grassy mounds.

Spoiler: A few pictures

Excavation comparison (obviously jungle ruin so not quite the same)

This one and the next are from Lixus in Morocco, which is very close to the ocean.

And there is yet more we can deduce from the location of the city. We know it was the timber port of Numenor, and with so much wood going through how could it not have been diverted to build houses for the less wealthy? Especially since, as discussed in Lond Daer Terrain, the surrounding area is low and flat. Stone would not have been simple to quarry — without steep slopes, as far as I can tell, you need a pit quarry, and those are lots of work. Also they flood easily, which I already pointed out was a problem. This means great stone buildings would be expensive, even in the heyday of the city; presumably most of the stone was imported from other Numenorean holdings. After the fall of Numenor I doubt there would be many stone buildings constructed, and those that were would likely cannibalize the stone from ruins (as medieval people so often did). Furthermore, since the surroundings were so thoroughly deforested, there would be a general lack of building materials. So, we can expect ~1500 TA Lond Daer to be full of structures not meant to last, susceptible to rotting and sinking in mud and blowing down and more. Add to this other instances of destruction (@Ivan1pl mentioned at least one fire that swept through the city, and we can perhaps imagine raids by angry remnants of the native population as the city grew weaker) and this city, or really town now, is struggling to survive let alone flourish. To wrap it up and return to the main point, a settlement less strongly built and maintained by humans is more susceptible to nature, and it will disappear even more beneath the soils of the Gwathló.

So far I have employed an aesthetic perspective, but the practical perspective - in short, the time requirements - also demands consideration. Now, I want to be clear, I think the concepts Ivan has been building in freebuild look great. (Or I mean I have some critiques but they aren’t important here or as well at all reasoned out.) However, I ask if they are necessary, if we even need to build the city intact before ruining it. For what would be left of it? Could we not as easily go straight from wool outlines to dirt pile outlines? This leads us to an argument just as important as any historical considerations. Though we have long prided ourselves on fully building then ruining cities, it greatly increases the time and effort needed for such projects. It is questionable whether this process, meant to improve realism and visual appeal, will have any substantial effect or benefit for Lond Daer, when so much of the structures will be unbuilt. Instead we may be wasting a lot of time that could be directed towards the projects that frankly more new players (I shall not speak for old) care about than random ruins: Moria, Mordor, eventually Hobbit locations. These are all far from complete (or begun) in either case, but even so every day spent on Lond Daer will delay them.

Ruben and I welcome and look forward to any counterarguments, but I sincerely hope they will be respectable and have more thought behind them than "because it's what we're used to/traditional" or "because it's cooler/more fun/more interesting/looks nicer to build substantial ruins." Thanks for reading.

Ivan and I have already discussed this and will ruin most the houses down to the foundations. There are ideas to still fully build the old, rich part of the town/ the main buildings. Though we have not yet decided upon anything. I'm excited to see what Ivan comes up with, as he's currently making a minature of the town, so we can get a full understanding of the layout.

 

[Ivan1]

With the level of ruining we're going to have, it would indeed make no sense to build the whole thing intact first, and so the majority of the city will probably be built as already ruined. However, I still think the city center, or at least the main, most important buildings there, should be built intact, and for several reasons:
- the most important, large buildings would be built with wider, stronger walls and more solidly in general, and also would be much better maintained later, and so they would be better preserved than simple houses - and such ruins will look better when they're made from actual buildings
- there are not that many of them, so building them will not take that much time - but will fill a lot of space
- it will help us better develop the new Eriador pack
- it is simply much more fun to do it this way

As for the lack of stone in the area, such a large port city would have no trouble getting all the stone they need, and not just by sea - as it was also a river trading port. After the fall of Numenor that would change but by then the city would no longer be growing and wouldn't need much.

Thank you for this post, I will definitely look back to it when the time comes to develop the ruining style.

 

[Ardelenia]

However, I still think the city center, or at least the main, most important buildings there, should be built intact, and for several reasons:
- the most important, large buildings would be built with wider, stronger walls and more solidly in general, and also would be much better maintained later, and so they would be better preserved than simple houses - and such ruins will look better when they're made from actual buildings

Yes, the large important buildings would have stronger structures, but I'm not entirely sure they would be better maintained. Any buildings not used after the Fall of Numenor, no matter what the previous importance, I doubt would be maintained. As for buildings that might be used, like a courthouse for instance, it seems unlikely -- this is just an opinion, no research or anything -- that "civic/cultural pride" or something similar would be powerful enough to induce them to keep using it and keep it intact after a long enough decline of the city. In any case, I realize I should wait to see a more detailed and definite plan before offering further criticism.

As for the lack of stone in the area, such a large port city would have no trouble getting all the stone they need, and not just by sea - as it was also a river trading port. After the fall of Numenor that would change but by then the city would no longer be growing and wouldn't need much.

I completely agree there would be no problem getting stone while the city is important; I was just saying that afterwards I wouldn't expect any new stone structures. And many of the old ones might well be dismantled to provide stone for the maintenance you mention above.