Forochel

The bay and the cape

North of the Hills of Evendim and the northern moors of Eriador the land runs out into a vast, cold bay of the sea, sheltered on its western and northern sides by a great cape of ice-bound mountains. This is the Ice-bay of Forochel. The waters freeze for much of the year, the shores are barren, and the cold is said to be a lingering remnant of the winter that Melkor laid on the North in the elder days. Beyond the cape lies the Northern Waste, of which the histories say nothing.

The Lossoth

The only people of Forochel are the Lossoth, the Snowmen, a strange folk descended from the Forodwaith of the First Age. They live on the ice itself in houses of snow, travel on bone runners and in carts without wheels, and are wary of strangers. They were never subjects of Arnor, and they knew the Witch-king of Angmar only as a power that could command the cold and the ice.

Forochel's one entry in the annals is a tragedy. When Angmar took Fornost in T.A. 1974, King Arvedui held out for a while in the North Downs and then fled north with a few of his guard, carrying with him the palantíri of Annúminas and Amon Sûl. They hid in the old dwarf-mines at the northern end of the Blue Mountains until hunger drove them to the shore, where the Lossoth, moved by pity and perhaps by the king's jewels, took them in and fed them through the winter. In March 1975 a ship sent by Círdan from the Grey Havens found its way through the ice to fetch the king. The Snowmen's chief warned Arvedui not to sail, saying the winter-wind still held the sea and that the Witch-king could make the cold do his will; but the king went aboard. The ship was caught by a storm and crushed in the ice, and Arvedui drowned with the two Seeing-stones. Before leaving he had given the Lossoth the Ring of Barahir in gratitude, and it was later ransomed back by the Dúnedain. The news of the wreck reached Círdan only after the Battle of Fornost had already been won, and with Arvedui died the last king of Arthedain.

The great bay and cape at the north-western corner of Eriador, north of the Hills of Evendim and the northern end of the Blue Mountains; the Northern Waste lies beyond.