The Ettenmoors

North of the Trollshaws the hills rise into a high, treeless moorland that runs north-east to the roots of the Misty Mountains and the borders of Angmar. This is the Ettenmoors, the troll-fells, and the deep valleys that cut into its southern edge, where the Hoarwell and other streams have their sources, are the Ettendales. The names come from an old word for giants, and the region deserved them: stone-trolls had their holes in its rocks from time out of mind and came down from it in bad years to raid the wooded hills and the Road. The moors are cold, wet and empty, with grey outcrops, pools and long ridges of heather, and no Man or hobbit had reason to go there. Even the Rangers crossed them only when hunting.

When Gandalf learned that trolls had been seen far south of their usual haunts in 2941, he took it as a sign that the mountains and the moors were growing more dangerous. The three trolls that Thorin's company met in the Trollshaws had come down from the Ettenmoors, and so, probably, had the cave-troll that the Fellowship fought in Moria's Chamber of Mazarbul.

The Ettenmoors lay on the southern edge of the Witch-king's realm and were part of the country from which his orcs and hill-men descended on Rhudaur and Arthedain. In T.A. 1975, when the army of Gondor and Lindon destroyed the host of Angmar at Fornost, the Witch-king fled north into the moors with the Elves and Men of the North pursuing him, and it was here, at the edge of the mountains, that Glorfindel foretold that he would not fall by the hand of man. After the fall of Angmar the moors were left to the trolls, and in the last years of the Third Age it was one of the few places in Eriador where their kind still multiplied.

A highland region in north-eastern Eriador, north of Rivendell and the Trollshaws, east of the Weather Hills and the North Downs, running up to the Misty Mountains and the border of Angmar; the Hoarwell rises in its southern valleys, the Ettendales.