Brown Lands

South of Mirkwood and east of the Anduin, between the river and the far reaches of Rhovanion, lay a wide region of bare brown slopes where nothing grew but coarse grass and withered growths. The Fellowship, drifting down the river in late February 3019, saw the land on their left as a sunless waste in contrast with the green Wold of Rohan on the right, and Aragorn named it as the country that had once been the Entwives' gardens.

Treebeard told Merry and Pippin the story. The Entwives had loved orchards and tilled fields rather than wild woods, and in the Second Age they crossed Anduin to make gardens in the fertile lowlands there, where the Men of the region learned agriculture from them. When Sauron went to war with the Last Alliance his armies passed through those lands and burned them, and when the Ents crossed the river afterwards to seek their wives they found only desert. The Entwives were never found again.

The gardens of the Entwives flourished through the Second Age until the Dark Lord's war with Elendil and Gil-galad, in the course of which the region was laid waste. It stayed empty through the Third Age; the Northmen of Rhovanion and the Éothéod lived to the north and west of it rather than on it, and it lay on the route by which Easterlings and Wainriders came against Gondor. On February 23 to 25, 3019 the boats of the Fellowship passed along its western edge under the eyes of Gollum, who was following them along the shore, and Legolas shot the Nazgûl's flying steed from the eastern bank.

The Brown Lands stretched from the southern eaves of Mirkwood in the north to the northern edge of the Emyn Muil in the south, and from the Anduin eastward into the empty lands of Rhovanion.