Unfinished Tales - J. R. R. Tolkien [163]
The Gwathló was one of the few geographical names that became generally known to others than mariners in Númenor, and received an Adûnaic translation. This was Agathurush.
The history of Lond Daer and Tharbad is also mentioned in this same essay in a discussion of the name Glanduin:
Glanduin means ‘border-river’. It was the name first given (in the Second Age), since the river was the southern boundary of Eregion, beyond which pre Númenórean and generally unfriendly peoples lived, such as the ancestors of the Dunlendings. Later it, with the Gwathló formed by its confluence with the Mitheithel, formed the southern boundary of the North Kingdom. The land beyond, between the Gwathló and the Isen (Sîr Angren) was called Enedwaith (‘Middle-folk’); it belonged to neither kingdom and received no permanent settlements of men of Númenórean origin. But the great North-South Road, which was the chief route of communication between the Two Kingdoms except by sea, ran through it from Tharbad to the Fords of Isen (Ethraid Engrin). Before the decay of the North Kingdom and the disasters that befell Gondor, indeed until the coming of the Great Plague in Third Age 1636, both kingdoms shared an interest in this region, and together built and maintained the Bridge of Tharbad and the long causeways that carried the road to it on either side of the Gwathló and Mitheithel across the fens in the plains of Minhiriath and Enedwaith. * A consierable garrison of soldiers, mariners and engineers had been kept there until the seventeenth century of the Third Age. But from then onwards the region fell quickly into decay; and long before the time of The Lord of the Rings had gone back into wild fen-lands. When Boromir made his great journey from Gondor to Rivendell – the courage and hardihood required is not fully recognized in the narrative – the North-South Road no longer existed except for the crumbling remains of the causeways, by which a hazardous approach to Tharbad might be achieved, only to find ruins on dwindling mounds, and a dangerous ford formed by the ruins of the bridge, impassable if the river had not been there slow and shallow – but wide.
If the name Glanduin was remembered at all it would only be in Rivendell; and it would apply only to the upper course of the river where it still ran swiftly, soon to be lost in the plains and disappear in the fens: a network of swamps, pools, and eyots, where the only inhabitants were hosts of swans, and many other water-birds. If the river had any name it was in the language of the Dunlendings. In The Return of the King VI 6 it is called the Swanfleet river (not River), simply as being the river that went down into Nîn-in-Eilph, ‘the Waterlands of the Swans’. *
It was my father’s intention to enter, in a revised map of The Lord of the Rings, Glanduin as the name of the upper course of the river, and to mark the fens as such, with the name Nîn-in-Eilph (or Swanfleet). In the event his intention came to be misunderstood, for on Pauline Baynes’ map the lower course is marked as ‘R.Swanfleet’, while on the map in the book, as noted above (p. 339), the names are placed against the wrong river.
It may be noted that Tharbad is referred to as ‘a ruined town’ in The Fellowship of the Ring II 3, and that Boromir in Lothlórien told that he lost his horse at Tharbad, at the fording of the Greyflood (ibid. II 8). In the Tale of Years the ruining and desertion of Tharbad is dated to the year 2912 of the Third