The Withered Heath

The dragon-country

The Withered Heath lies in the far north of Rhovanion, where the Grey Mountains split into two eastern arms. Between them stretches a high, empty plateau of scorched ground and dead heather, blasted over the centuries by the creatures that lived on it. Thrór's map, the one Gandalf gave to Thorin at Bag End, shows it as a bare strip north of Erebor with a note that dragons came from there, and that was all most people of the North knew of it. No road led to it, and no one went there willingly.

The heath was the last breeding place of the dragons in Middle-earth. After the fall of Morgoth the surviving worms fled into the Northern Waste, and over the ages they multiplied in this remote country, both cold-drakes and the fire-breathing kind. From the heath they raided the mountain-halls of Durin's folk in the twenty-sixth century of the Third Age, killing King Dáin I in 2589 and driving the Dwarves from the range. Smaug, the last great dragon, came south from this country to Erebor in 2770. Lesser worms still lived there at the end of the age; Gandalf told the Council of Elrond that dragons remained in the North but that none was hot enough to melt the Rings of Power, and the ancient sword-fire of the First Age was long gone.

Between the two eastern arms of the Grey Mountains, north of Erebor and the Iron Hills, on the edge of the Northern Waste.