Enedwaith

Enedwaith, the land of the middle folk, lies between the two great rivers that flow into the sea south of Eriador: the Greyflood or Gwathló on the north, and the Isen on the south. Its eastern boundary is the southern end of the Misty Mountains, where the highland of Dunland rises; its western edge is a long, empty coast. In the Second Age the whole region was one vast forest, continuous with the woods of Minhiriath north of the river, and it was inhabited by scattered Men of the same stock as the Folk of Haleth. The Númenóreans, coming up the Gwathló for timber, felled the forest on a huge scale and drove the natives into the hills, and the land never recovered; by the Third Age it was largely a country of moor and grass, with the road from Tharbad to the Fords of Isen running across it in decay.

Enedwaith was claimed by neither Arnor nor Gondor in the Third Age, though the road through it belonged to both. It was a border land, and its only settled people of note were the Dunlendings of its eastern hills.

The felling of Enedwaith's forests by the Númenóreans of the Second Age, and the resentment of the surviving natives, is described in Unfinished Tales as one of the roots of the later hostility between the Dunlendings and the Men of the West. In the war of S.A. 1700 the Númenórean fleet landed at the mouth of the Gwathló and at Tharbad, and Sauron's army was caught between the forces from the north and south. In the Third Age the region was part of the Númenórean road system but not of either kingdom, and it was ravaged by the Great Plague of 1636 and by the floods of 2912. When the Fellowship set out from Rivendell, Aragorn planned to follow the western skirts of the Misty Mountains south past Dunland, and Enedwaith's empty lands lay on their right hand as they went.

The country between the Greyflood (north) and the Isen (south), bounded on the east by Dunland and the Misty Mountains and on the west by the sea; the old North-South Road crosses it from Tharbad to the Fords of Isen.