Gladden Fields

The Gladden Fields are a marshy stretch of the upper Anduin River, lying between the Misty Mountains and the southern eaves of Mirkwood. In the history of Middle-earth, this unremarkable landscape holds a catastrophic significance: it is the place where the One Ring passed out of all knowledge for nearly twenty-five centuries, and where the chain of events that would culminate in the War of the Ring first began.

Geography and Setting

The Gladden Fields are named for the yellow irises and flowering reeds that once grew thickly along the riverbanks. The region lies near the point where the Gladden River flows into the Anduin, at the foot of the Misty Mountains. In the Third Age, the area was a quiet, watery landscape of pools and marshes, inhabited by a small, clever-handed people whom Gandalf later guessed were of hobbit-kind, akin to the Stoors. These river-folk lived in holes on the banks, made little boats of reeds, and were ruled by a wise grandmother. It was here, in the deep pools among the iris-beds, that Déagol, while fishing, was dragged underwater by a great fish and discovered a beautiful golden ring gleaming in the river-bed.

The Fall of Isildur

The Gladden Fields entered the great histories centuries earlier, at the end of the Second Age. After the defeat of Sauron in the War of the Last Alliance, Isildur, heir of Elendil, took the One Ring as a weregild for his father and brother. He did not cast it into the fires of Orodruin as Elrond and Círdan counseled. Instead, he kept it. Marching north along the east bank of the Anduin with a small company, Isildur was waylaid near the Gladden Fields by a large force of Orcs from the Misty Mountains. In the ambush, almost all his folk were slain. Isildur leaped into the river, but the Ring slipped from his finger as he swam, and the Orcs killed him with arrows. The Ring sank into the dark waters among the reeds and mud, and there it lay, lost and forgotten, while Sauron's spirit slowly gathered strength again in the East.

The Finding of the Ring

Long after, but still very long ago, the Ring was found. Sméagol, a curious and inquisitive member of the river-folk, was out on the Gladden Fields with his friend Déagol. When Déagol pulled the Ring from the river-bed, Sméagol was overcome by its beauty and by a sudden, murderous desire. He strangled Déagol, took the Ring for himself, and called it his "birthday-present." The Ring gave him power according to his stature, making him invisible and sharpening his senses for all that was hurtful. But it also twisted him, driving him from his family and into the dark caves beneath the Misty Mountains, where he became the creature known as Gollum. The Ring remained with him for nearly five hundred years, until it abandoned him—and was picked up by Bilbo Baggins in the tunnels of the goblin-mines, an event that Gandalf later called "the strangest event in the whole history of the Ring."

Narrative Significance

The Gladden Fields thus serve as the hinge between two ages of the Ring's history: the heroic age of Isildur's failure and the long, secret age of Gollum's possession. It is the place where the Ring was lost to the Wise and where it was rediscovered by the very kind of creature—a hobbit-like river-dweller—that would ultimately carry it to its destruction. The marshes themselves, with their dark pools and flowering reeds, become a symbol of hidden peril and buried history. When Aragorn later hunted Gollum, he followed his trail along the skirts of the Dead Marshes and finally caught him lurking by a stagnant mere near the Gladden Fields, covered with green slime. The region remains a haunted borderland, where the past refuses to stay buried.