Anduin

The course of the river

Anduin rises from two streams, the Greylin and the Langwell, in the angle between the Misty Mountains and the Grey Mountains, in the country where the Éothéod once lived. It flows south through the upper vale, past the Carrock and the Old Ford where the Great East Road crosses, and past the lands of Beorn and the Woodmen with Mirkwood always a day's walk to the east. Below the Old Ford it receives the Gladden from the mountains and spreads into the reedy marshes of the Gladden Fields. Farther south the Silverlode comes in from Dimrill Dale through Lothlórien, and the river runs on between Lórien and the eastern forest, past the wide bare Brown Lands, and receives the Limlight, which marked the northern edge of Rohan.

Below the Field of Celebrant the Anduin narrows and quickens. It passes through the rocky hills of the Emyn Muil between the pillars of the Argonath, opens into the long lake of Nen Hithoel with Amon Hen and Amon Lhaw on either shore and Tol Brandir in the middle, and then plunges over the Falls of Rauros. From there it crosses the Wetwang, with the Dead Marshes to the east, is joined by the Entwash out of Fangorn, and enters Gondor. It flows round the island fortress of Cair Andros, through ruined Osgiliath beneath Minas Tirith, past the great port of Pelargir, and at last empties through the many mouths of the Ethir Anduin into the Bay of Belfalas.

Peoples of the river

The Anduin vale was a cradle of peoples. The Nandor who would not cross the mountains settled along it in the Elder Days, and from them came the Silvan Elves of Lórien and Greenwood. Hobbits lived on its banks before their westward wanderings, the Harfoots in the foothills and the Stoors in the marshy Gladden country, and it was in the river that Déagol found the Ring. The Northmen who became the Éothéod dwelt in its upper vale, and their descendants became the Rohirrim. In its lower course the river was the lifeline of Gondor, and its crossings at Osgiliath and Cair Andros decided the defence of the realm.

The Disaster of the Gladden Fields

In the second year of the Third Age Isildur, marching north to Rivendell with the One Ring, was attacked by orcs above the Gladden marshes. He put on the Ring and tried to swim the river, but it slipped from his finger and the orcs shot him as he rose from the water. The Ring lay in the river-bed for nearly two and a half thousand years until Déagol drew it out in 2463 and was murdered for it by his friend Sméagol, who became Gollum.

The river as frontier

For most of the Third Age the Anduin was the boundary between the shrinking realm of Gondor and the wild. Gondor's power once reached to the Field of Celebrant, but after the Plague and the wars with the Wainriders the northern marches emptied, and in 2510 the Balchoth crossed the river on rafts to invade Calenardhon. Eorl and the Éothéod rode down its eastern bank from the far north to win the Field of Celebrant, and the land between Anduin and Isen was given to them as Rohan. In the south the Corsairs of Umbar sailed up the river again and again, most terribly in 1634 when they killed King Minardil at Pelargir, and Osgiliath was fought over and finally ruined in 2475.

The War of the Ring

The Fellowship left Lothlórien in Elven boats on February 16, 3019, and rowed south for ten days past the Brown Lands, an orc ambush at Sarn Gebir and the Argonath to Parth Galen beneath Amon Hen, where the company was broken on February 26. Boromir's body was sent over Rauros in one of the boats, and Frodo and Sam crossed to the eastern shore. Three weeks later Aragorn came up the river from Pelargir in the captured ships of the Corsairs and landed at the Harlond to decide the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. In the Fourth Age the river became once more the highway of the Reunited Kingdom, with Osgiliath rebuilt as its crossing.

From its sources in the far north between the Misty and Grey Mountains the Anduin flows some nine hundred miles south, past the Carrock, the Gladden Fields, Lothlórien, the Argonath and Rauros into Gondor, and reaches the sea at the Ethir Anduin in the Bay of Belfalas. Chief tributaries: the Gladden, Silverlode, Limlight, Entwash, Morgulduin, Erui and Poros.