The Sea of Rhûn

The inland water

The Sea of Rhûn lies far east of Mirkwood and south-east of the Iron Hills, a broad landlocked sea that closes the eastern margin of every map made in the West. The Celduin, the River Running, which rises at the gate of Erebor and gathers the Carnen from the Iron Hills, flows down across the eastern plains and empties into it. On its north-western shore lies the warm vine country of Dorwinion, whence wine came north by the river road to Lake-town. Wooded hills stand along parts of its coast, and the grasslands about it were open range: the great wild white kine, the kine of Araw, ranged the fields near its waters, and the horn that Boromir carried to his death was taken from one of them.

Some loremasters have supposed that this sea is a last remnant of the vast inland Sea of Helcar of the Elder Days, on whose bay of Cuiviénen the Elves awoke; the published histories do not say so, and the connection is inference rather than record.

A frontier and a boundary

For the kingdoms of the West the sea marked the end of knowledge as much as the end of territory. At the height of its power under Hyarmendacil I, Gondor reckoned the inland Sea of Rhûn its eastern bound, and Rómendacil II drove the Easterlings back to its shores again in T.A. 1248 after they had come raiding into Rhovanion. But no garrison could hold a frontier so far out, and the sea was less a border than a gate: every great eastern invasion of the Third Age, the wars that killed two kings of Gondor and nearly broke the realm, came around or from beyond its waters. What people dwelt on its far side, and whether ships ever sailed it, the Men of the West never learned.

The Sea of Rhûn enters the histories chiefly as a measure of how far Gondor's arm once reached. In the days of the Ship-kings and of Hyarmendacil I it was named as the kingdom's eastern limit. Northmen allied to Gondor held the lands between Mirkwood and the sea until the Easterling assaults of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of the Third Age; Rómendacil II defeated a great invasion in 1248 and pursued the enemy east to the sea's shores, then took Northmen into Gondor's service. Two centuries later the wains of the Easterlings came west again, and in 1856 and 1944 the Wainriders destroyed Gondor's northern province and killed King Narmacil II and King Ondoher before Eärnil broke them at the Battle of the Camp. In 2510 the Balchoth crossed the plains from these lands and were destroyed on the Field of Celebrant by the riders of Eorl. In the War of the Ring men from the eastern shorelands marched again for Sauron, fought on the Pelennor and at the Black Gate, and afterwards made peace with King Elessar, who is said to have carried his campaigns eastward in the early years of the Fourth Age.

A large inland sea at the eastern edge of the mapped lands, east of Mirkwood and Rhovanion and north-east of Mordor, receiving the River Running from the north. Dorwinion lies on its north-western shore, and the open plains of Rhûn lie beyond it to the east and south.