Rhunquest: The Mysterious East of Middle-Earth
"Wide uncharted lands, nameless plains, and forests explored". This is the description we get of Middle-Earth's mysterious east, when Frodo looks that way from the Seat of Seeing at the end of FOTR. The East and South of Middle-Earth are some of the most mysterious and least-developed of Tolkien's world, but we've had bits and pieces trickle in, and with the recent publication of The Nature of Middle-Earth, we've gotten some new information that allows us to make some inferences. While it is interesting for comparison, Tolkien's earlier works on the world, the Ambarkanta , were developed prior to LOTR and it is clear there are a number of incompatibilities, so we'll put that aside for now. The Near East isn't so mysterious; we have the Sea of Rhun near the edge of the map, with its highlands to the southwest and forests to the northeast; at one point, Gondor's armies under Romendacil destroyed Easterling camps and settlements to the east of th...
