OK, let’s get scholarly.

Tolkien treats The East as both a place and a direction in his Middle-earth tales. The more prosaic sense, that of direction, is actually the more interesting because of the symbolism he seems to invest in it. Today we’ll look a bit at The East as a place, as real lands with peoples. Tomorrow we’ll look into the symbolism.

1. The Geography across all Three Books. “The East: Location, explanation, discussion, and symbolism”, that was the assignment. Surely we can answer the first item: The location of The East is . . .  in the east!. Hah, that was easy!

OK, “explanation” is next. As I wrapped up my research in August, I prepared an outline of my article to help me get started in writing it. The following excerpt is the first two and a half sections, intended to explain what the place “The East” literally was in Tolkien.

1) The East in Lord of the Rings – specifically Rhun.
        a) Tolkien’s quote on how he conceived it, "where it is" on Earth
        b) Brief description of location and involvement in the action
                i) Source of much of the Dark Lord’s numerical strength
                ii) Little known to those from the West
                iii) Traditional enemy of Gondor
                iv) Armies at the Pelennor and at the Black Gate
        c) History
                i) Sauron occupies Mordor at beginning of the Second Age
                ii) Over time dominates all lands to the East as Morgoth did.
                         (1) Blue Wizards may have been corrupted or may have triumphed.
                iii) Sauron defeated by Last Alliance
                iv) Third Age, East remains the source of pressure on Gondor
                         (1) Incursions of Wainriders
                         (2) Plague
                         (3) Vast coordinated attack from North and South of Mordor
                v) Origins of the Rohirrim are to the East.
                         (1) The tribes of Rhovanion become Gondor’s allies
                vi) Sauron arises again, removes to Mordor from Mirkwood.
                vii) After War of the Ring, East is cleansed and pacified
                         (1) East still the site of battles into the future
2) Earlier appearances as a place in Tolkien’s works
        a) The Hobbit
                i) No apparent connection with the Silmarillion or Europe.
                         (1) The eastern journey belongs to the Sil’s basic geography.
                         (2) Wilderland, place of adventure, not inherently evil.
                ii) Dividing Line of East and West is Misty Mountains.
        b) The Silmarillion
                i) The East abandoned by the Valar in contest with Melkor
                         (1) Haunted by Melkor’s creatures before the Elves came.
                ii) Hunting ground of Orome, who thus discovers the Elves.
                         (1) Land of Darkness far removed from Valinor over the Sea.
                         (2) Lands go all the way to the Red Mountains and the Gates of the Sun
                iii) Birthplace of Elves, Men, and Dwarves, only some of whom come West
                         (1) Inland Sea representing life, birth.
                         (2) Dividing Line of East and West is Anduin the Great.
                iv) Not the home of the Dark Lord Morgoth, not inherently evil.
                         (1) The North is the ‘evil’ direction in the wars between Elves and Morgoth in Beleriand
                         (2) Just because he later connected them, does not mean the full sense of the evil East as epitomized by Mordor was present in the Silmarillion.
3) Interpretations
        a) Historic/geographic equivalencies
                i) Open plains, Inland Sea
                ii) Eurasian locations – Russia, Caucasus, Turkey, Persia.
                         (1) Saracens to Charlesmagne - Dey
                         (2) Huns and Goths under Attilla to Late Roman Empire
                         (3) Wainriders, Variags of Russia

Whew! That’s 370 words already. And frankly, most of this comes from the texts themselves; and most of it I knew before I started researching this project. I did do a fairly thorough text search of The Hobbit and The Silmarillion for “east” and “south”, just to make sure I had a feel for how they were treated in those less-familiar books.

In the end, I threw out almost every bit of what’s above. My second paragraph started with “The East as a geographic place serves several story functions in the mythological cycle.” I focused on the East as 1) the birthplace of the Elves and Men, as told in The Silmarillion and 2) the lands of enemy races and the locus of evil in Sauron of Mordor in LotR. And 129 words later it was time to move on to the symbolism and the scholarship.
A. From the outline, or from your knowledge of the books, how different or similar is the direction/location The East in the three books? Is Middle-earth the same world in the entire “legendarium”, as far as The East is concerned?

B. Since The East article is listed in the Encyclopedia’s topic organization under “places”, like Rohan or Gondor, do you think I was supposed to limit myself to The Lord of the Rings’ Rhûn, and ignore The Hobbit and The Silmarillion? I mean, I know it’s too late! But as a potential reader/researcher, would you have preferred more about Rhûn, the wainriders etc., to the exclusion of the Silmarillion etc.?

2. The Blue Wizards. My assignment explicitly asked for an account of the Blue Wizards. That famous duo of Istari was last seen heading East around 1000 T.A., and never heard from again, least of all in LotR. I did check them out to be sure I wasn’t missing anything, and here is what I found. Frankly, I didn’t think they rated the one or two lines I would have had to devote to recounting two divergent but unpublished traditions about characters who are barely even in the published canon. I chose to ignore them.
C. Was I wrong? Are the Blue Wizards more important to Tolkien’s East than I thought? Why did Drout ask for them? Is there a general fascination among Tolkien readers about the Blue Wizards? If so, why?

3. The East as Eurasia. Tolkien has been accused ever since the LotR was published, of putting his evil Mordor in the East to represent various specific nations that have warred with or threatened England and western Europe, such as Nazi or Imperial Germany, or Soviet Russia.
D. In LotR, do you associate The East with eastern Europe or Eurasia? Do you see the East and/or Mordor as symbols for Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia?
Here is a selection of critical angles on this question, taken from my notes. Summaries of the various points are here:
       Day: Who are the Easterlings in Europe?
       Schwarz: Tolkien fosters a racist hatred of non-Aryan eastern peoples
       Tolkien: Why he set his tales in the North-west.
       Markova: Soviets saw LotR as saying West=good, East=evil.
       Rosebury: the specifics of M-E are different, but the generalities are similar, to our world. The complexity suggested by having “unknown” times and places like the East and South, makes LotR novelistic rather than fantastic. Additionally, there are real reasons to reject allegorical readings of the East as modern eastern Europe—
citing a Russian critic who agrees with this.
       Kilby: Tolkien’s ready identification of M-E with England undercuts his rejection of allegories regarding geography.
       Chism: Tolkien saw Germany as part of the North, not East. Mordor is not Nazi Germany.
       Shippey: Tolkien draws from East and West undiscriminatingly when outside his story.
E. Who do you think has the best take on this? Is there in fact a debate here? Isn’t Brian Rosebury cool!

F. How much did Tolkien assume an English audience, with an English or Western European feeling about The East? Do you wish we were able to read more European and Russian criticism on Tolkien – do different nations read him differently, because of their own national literary and historical traditions? For instance, where would Americans, or Chinese, or Australians, place the “land of evil and/or enemies” in a fantasy based on their homelands a la Tolkien?

G. Would Lord of the Rings have worked as well, or at all, had the evil place been in the North, or South, of Middle-earth? Would it still be Tolkien’s “imaginative” Europe of an earlier era? What if where the Ring had to be destroyed was in a different direction from where the Enemy’s hordes came from?

H. What do I mean by “evil place”: Mordor, or Rhûn? Are they the same?  Do the critics above conflate the two?

4. The Easterlings. EASTERLINGS!!! YAY!!! Critics have perceived in Tolkien’s moral geography a racist attitude towards Slavs, Turks, Huns, or even the oriental peoples of East Asia as expressed in his characterization and location of Rhûn (and Harad too, but that’s for Thursday).
I. Do you think the Easterlings are the Huns or the Goths? Do they ever change between The Silmarillion and the War of the Ring? Are the Easterlings evil, or just “enemies”, as Tolkien puts it?

Under the delusion that the Encyclopedia had assigned the Easterlings as a separate topic under Peoples of Middle-earth, I barely mentioned them in my article, although there is extensive material about them in the LotR Appendices. I’m particularly fond of the Variags of Khand, myself.
J. No EASTERLINGS??! BOO!!! Is that bad, in a piece about The East?

Link to squire’s adventure