What lies beyond the map...

In this video, we look at the lands that lie beyond our famous map of Middle-earth. What were they like, who lived there, and what ended up happening to them?

Thanks to my patrons - Hallimar Rathlorn, Habimana, Ben Jeffrey, Harry Evett, Mojtaba Ro, Moe L, Paul Leone, Barbossa, mncb1o, Carrot Ifson, Andrew Welch and Catherine Berry

[DarthGandalfYT]

In case anyone asks, "hey, what about the area to the north?" It's all snow, baby. Thanks papa Morgoth.

[untitled]

It so clear what happened do Dark Lands.. Ungoliant fled there, infested the island with giant spiders and thousands of years later, those lands became known as Australia.

[sammyhill]

If ever there were a human whom we needed to live forever, or at least 120-130 years, it would have been Tolkien. Imagine the additional stories and details of Middle Earth he would’ve brought to life for us.

[No_Relation_]

If the dark land is Australia then it makes sense that the huge nightmare fuel spider went there

[raf]

You’re so good at making videos about things that have not really been talked about in the YouTube sphere. You keep coming with gems. Lord of the Rings is never ending content lol

[laurencewinch-furness]

My fan theory - the dark land is the domain of Shelob-like giant spiders descended from Ungoliant, and is possibly ruled by Ungoliant herself (assuming she didn't really eat herself) Sauron stays the hell away from the place because it scares even him!

[CursedAnqxl]

I am a big geography fan in general and tolkien's world is no exception, I always think about what is there or what is here, who lives there, what lives there, and it is unfortunate that we know less and less about the world once you reach a certain point. of course the fan maps are not canon but I still think they are good maps, mostly because the lands beyond what we usually see are pretty open and a blank slate for people to come up with ideas on how to use the land in order to make fan maps or even things like game maps for the world where they create new stuff in the previously unused lands.

sure, we know things like the avari and four dwarven clans living in the east, but we don't actually know their fate or if they are still around, especially the avari. with the dwarves we did get the war of the dwarves and orcs and they still say the seven dwarven clans, so they seem to still be around, but the avari could have been killed by the easterlings because elves often live in the woods and sauron/easterlings probably wanted to destroy the forest and all the elves in it anyways because they are the bad guys who tear down forests to fuel their industry.

as for the south, we know there were other black numenorean colonies along the coast to the further south, but aside from the mumakil elephants that the haradrim use and that we know there is a deep jungle far south, we know very little about the place. and not to mention, the other continents of the world that may or may not exist, we know even less. were there prosperous civilizations of men in these places, or were they more primitive and nomadic? were there even men at all? if not, then what was there? etc.

ugh, there are just so many questions to ask, and I will basically get no definite answers for it, but the point is, the world tolkien has created is far more grand than we give it credit for, and that is only the stuff we know a lot of, yet alone everything else.

also, the fact that we simply call the eastern people "easterlings" and with the exception of certain groups like the wainriders and balchoth, we don't know the possibly many different groups of easterlings. same pretty much goes for the haradrim.

[JeremyB]

I always took the maps to be “in-world, ” meaning cartographers actually mapped these out, with the further areas using a lot of guesswork and hear say, much like real world historical maps.

[GuyTheSheep]

So few mentions of Dor-Winiön, the human kingdom that bordered the sea of Rhûn, their wine was supposedly the most potent, the stuff they were drinking in The Hobbit were barrels floated down the anduin and returned to the kingdom.

[BelegaerTheGreat]

One of the best videos from such a firm skeptic as Darth Gandalf!

7:00 I just want to point out, that while Wild Wood is an extremely cool name, I remember reading somewhere that it might not be an actual wood, rather the description of general woodlands in early Middle-earth.

[thunderstryken]

I'm fascinated by worldbuilding and sub-creation within Tolkien's world, and the videos on this channel really fuel that fire in me! Especially the ones about lesser know things and obscure references. Good work, love it!

[tobinbtm]

Not sure if you’ve come across this but there’s an amazing fanfiction known as the Lost Tales of Harad that explores and world builds in Harad in a Tolkienesque way. They’ve created an interesting map of Harad as well.

[GuineaPigEveryday]

Amazon could've so easily centred their new series on these completely unexplored worlds without pissing off the entire fandom with lazy shit that messes up all the canonical stuff every LOTR knows already about the main regions in the Second Age. Harad and Rhun and Khand are entirely unexplored and clearly hinting towards non-European equivalents of Africa, Russia and Central Asia. I mean the Numenorian colonisation of Harad's coastline would be a perfect way to also deal with the subject of diversified/modern casting. Harad and Rhun and Khand and also what we already know of the Easterlings are perfect ground for a more in-depth worldbuilding that can flesh them out past some orientalist stereotypes.

[raphaelargus]

A lot of people miss the point, which you make, which is that Middle-Earth is actually supposed to be OUR world, our real Earth, albeit about 12, 000 years ago, before massive geological changes, which is why it looks different now. In an interview with Tolkien, the interviewer placed Mordor at about the present day Balkans, and Tolkien agreed.

Interestingly, this would put the end of the events of the novels at just before the real-world Younger Dryas event.

[MerkhVision]

I think the explanation (or at least the excuse) for the lack of knowledge available on the rest of the world is because the writing is supposed to be a translation of books written by in-universe characters, and so naturally just like in our own history, they would know very little of places distant from them (other than small snippets of hearsay) until much later in time (i.e. our own Age of Exploration and the Early Modern Era). Look at really old maps of our world, and writings like those of Herodotus for a comparative example.

[Uncle_Fred]

There is a few things not mentioned in this video that we can say about these lands in the Third Age from most certain to least certain:

1. There are nomadic tribes directly to the east of the Sea of Rhun.

2. There's the wild white Kine of Araw, a type of Oxen that likely lives directly east of the Sea of Rhun.

3. At the start of the Third Age, Eru enclosed Arda with a sea and substituted Valinor with new lands (a proto-North and South America?).

4. The Blue Wizards entered these lands in the Second Age. It is unknown if they survived to the end of the Third Age.

5. Morgoth Worship was practiced in some parts of these lands. There might have been some adapted version of this promoted by Sauron as well.

6. There are additional unknown kingdoms of men to the south and east. Some of these people appeared at the battle of the Pelinor as vassals of Sauron like the short axe-wielding men and the dark-skinned men believed to be from 'South Harad.' Great roads lead east from Mordor. It can be speculated that his vassal territories are vast, stretching far to the east and south.

7. Aragorn and Saruman visited these lands to the east. Gandalf, Aragorn, and to some minor extent Smeagol visited the lands to the south. It is likely that Denathor also knew much of these lands and sent emissaries abroad.

8. There are stone cities of men to the south.

9. There is one or more sources of Mithril in the east. It is likely these are Dwarven sources. By the end of the Third Age, these sources appear to have either dried up and are no longer actively mined or traded abroad. This lines up with the accounts of the issues faced by the eastern dwarves.

10. There are one or more domains of Black Numenoreans to the south. These are Numenorian settlements established before the end of the Second Age. Some of these kingdoms are likely overrun or have otherwise blended with non-Numenorean men by the end of the Third Age. One or more of the Nazgul are likely from these kingdoms.

11. There are four tribes of Dwarves in the east. How many strongholds these dwarves operated is unknown. All we know is that by the end of the Third Age, the dwarves were under pressure from conflicts, with some fleeing west.

12. There are forests in the deep south of Harad, possibly inhabited by Ape-men (gorillas?).

13. Sauron had additional domains or fortresses he directly ruled in the east. This is mentioned in an offhand passage by Tolkien. What these bases of Sauron's power looked like, when he ruled these lands, and what the nature of this rule looked like is unknown. It's likely these were primarily mannish realms that Sauron used as a base of power before returning to Dol Guldor to search for the Ring.

14. The Avari elves are a branch of elves that inhabited the East. Their numbers and strongholds are unknown.

15. Somewhere in the east is likely the remains of Utmno. Tolkien mentions that the deepest pits of Utmno survived the assault by the Valor. These are likely buried deep underground or perhaps beneath some body of water. There may be something like the equivalent of the underdeeps of Moria out there where nameless things or other creatures of Morgoth exist.

16. Sauron probably used local Mannish servants plus some level of magical control to ensnare the minds of Eastern rulers. Saruman copied Sauron in all things, and Grema Wormtongue's control of Theoden was likely an imitation of what Sauron was doing with nearby mannish realms. I have a feeling that combating this control was one of the chief roles of the Blue Wizards during the Second Age.

17. The lands to the east and south roughly mirror Earth by the end of the Third Age. We see this in geography (Eurasian steppe in Rhun), human ethnography (Southrons), and naming (Khan = Turkish). Bilbo's "Last Desert" is probably a cryptic reference to a proto-Gobi Desert.

[Procopius]

Look at late medieval maps, and you can see things that look like transitional stages between Arda and the current world.

[nemisous]

For some extra context it widely accepted that Mordor, the Sea of Ruhn, and Ruhn itself are the dried up lake bed of the Sea of Helcar.

[cal]

There’s a few great tolkien content creators but this guy 👆 don’t miss

[stegura]

3:35 I've always thought of the Dark Lands as Madagascar on steroids!!