Dorthonion

The land of pines

Dorthonion was a great highland plateau rising between the plain of Ard-galen on the north and the forests of Doriath on the south, some sixty leagues from west to east and the largest single upland in northern Beleriand. Its northern slopes rose in long swells out of the plain and were clothed in pine-forest, dark and cold and full of wind; its southern face was quite different, the sheer and terrible wall of the Ered Gorgoroth, the Mountains of Terror, which fell away into the poisoned valley of Nan Dungortheb where the brood of Ungoliant had spun webs since the beginning of the Age. Between these edges the plateau was moorland and pine-wood, high and thin-aired, with many tarns lying in hollows among the trees, of which Tarn Aeluin was the loveliest; its water was held to have been blessed by Melian in the days before the Sun.

On the west the land fell toward the Pass of Sirion and the island fortress of Tol Sirion; on the east it narrowed toward the pass of Aglon and the hill of Himring. Whoever held the highland held the middle of the northern front, for an enemy coming south from Angband had either to force one of those two passes or to climb into the pines.

The realm of Angrod and Aegnor

When the Noldor divided Beleriand after their coming, the northern slopes of Dorthonion were given to Angrod and Aegnor, the younger sons of Finarfin, who held them under their brother Finrod and their cousin Fingolfin as a watch on Angband through the four centuries of the Siege. Their strength was never great; what they had was the ground, and from the pine-slopes they could see the smokes of Thangorodrim across the whole width of Ard-galen. Aegnor loved Andreth of the House of Bëor, a wise-woman of the Men who came to live in the land, and would not marry her, because he would not leave a widow behind him in a war he did not expect to survive.

The Bëorians

In the fourth century of the Sun the House of Bëor, the first of the Edain to cross the mountains, were granted the highland by Finrod, and in particular the region of Ladros in the north-east, which no Elves had settled. Their chieftains Boromir, Bregor, Bregolas and Barahir ruled there as vassals of the sons of Finarfin, and the friendship between the two peoples was closer than anywhere else in Beleriand: the Bëorians were dark-haired and grave, quick to love the Elves and to take on their speech and lore, and Andreth's long conversations with the Elven-lords about the fate of Men belong to this land. Barahir saved Finrod's life at the Fen of Serech and received from him a ring in token of an undying debt, which outlasted the highland itself and came down at last to the chieftains of the Dúnedain.

The Siege years

Through the Long Peace Dorthonion was quiet in the way a frontier is quiet. Its lords rode out with the host in the Dagor Aglareb and in the lesser sorties, and orcs who tried the pine-slopes were driven back. The peace ended without warning.

The Dagor Bragollach

In the winter of F.A. 455 Morgoth loosed rivers of fire out of Thangorodrim over Ard-galen, and behind them came Glaurung full-grown, the Balrogs, and armies of orcs greater than any yet seen. The pine-forests of Dorthonion burned. Angrod and Aegnor were both killed in the fighting on the northern slopes, and with them Bregolas the chieftain of the Bëorians and the greater part of his warriors. The highland was overrun and never recovered, and the survivors who could flee went south to Doriath or west toward Nargothrond; Morwen, later the wife of Húrin, was one of the children taken out of the ruin. What remained of the pine-wood was left to the creatures of Sauron and to a darkness that grew in it year by year, until the Elves would not call it Dorthonion any more but Taur-nu-Fuin, the Forest under Nightshade, and Deldúwath, the shadow of deadly night; men who slept beneath its trees were said to wake maddened or not at all.

Barahir's outlaws

Barahir refused to leave. With his son Beren, his kinsman Gorlim and ten other men he stayed in the ruined land as an outlaw band, harrying Morgoth's servants from hiding places among the highland tarns, until they were the last free Men north of the mountains and Morgoth set Sauron to destroy them. Barahir's wife Emeldir had already led the women and children of the house out over the mountains to safety. The band's refuge was on the shore of Tarn Aeluin, where the open water and the blessing on it made a surprise attack difficult. Sauron took Gorlim, who had crept back to his own empty house hoping to find his wife Eilinel alive, and by the promise of returning her to him drew from him the place of Barahir's camp; then he had Gorlim killed. Orcs came at night and destroyed the whole company. Beren was away, and returning, learned of the massacre from a carrion bird and from the vision of Gorlim's shade; he recovered his father's hand and the ring of Finrod from the orc-captain who carried it, and buried the hand under a cairn.

Beren alone

For four years more Beren lived alone in Taur-nu-Fuin, hunted and hunting, until his name was a fear to the orcs and Morgoth set a price on his head that was greater than a king's ransom. At last the pressure and the horror of the wood drove him out. He would not go north, so he went south over the Ered Gorgoroth and through Nan Dungortheb, a passage no one had made before, and came into Doriath in the spring, where the story of the Silmaril begins.

The shadow after

Sauron fled to Taur-nu-Fuin when Lúthien and Huan threw him out of Tol Sirion in 466, and for a while it was his refuge. It was on the edges of the wood, some twenty years later, that Beleg and Gwindor overtook the orc-band carrying the captive Túrin, and there, cutting his friend's bonds in darkness and a thunderstorm, Beleg was killed by Túrin's own hand in a moment of confused terror. The highland stayed under shadow to the end of the Age, uncrossed and unclaimed, and went under the sea with the rest of the north when Beleriand was drowned.

Dorthonion rose between Ard-galen on the north and the woods of Doriath on the south, with the Pass of Sirion and Tol Sirion at its western end and the pass of Aglon, between the highland and Himring, at its eastern. Its southern boundary was the precipice of the Ered Gorgoroth above Nan Dungortheb, so steep and so haunted that it counted as no boundary at all until Beren crossed it. Rivers rose on the plateau and ran north into Ard-galen and south-west toward Sirion; Tarn Aeluin lay high among the pines in the eastern half, in the country of Ladros. The smokes of Thangorodrim were visible from its northern edge across the plain.