Ithilien
Ithilien is the fair, once-gardened region of Gondor that lies east of the Anduin, a land of climbing woods and swift-falling streams that the hobbits Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee enter with Gollum as their reluctant guide. It is a country of poignant contradictions: a garden of Gondor now desolate, yet still keeping a dishevelled dryad loveliness; a place of springtime fragrance and bloom that stands directly before the gates of Mordor. Its name and character mark it as the last outpost of the West's beauty before the desolation of the Enemy, and its role in the journey of the Ring-bearers is to be both a respite and a warning.
Geography and Character
Ithilien lies in the northern marches of the land that Men once called by that name, a fair country of climbing woods and swift-falling streams. The hobbits entered it after passing through the northern marches, having traveled south from Rivendell along a road made in a long lost time, which for perhaps thirty miles below the Morannon had been newly repaired before the wild encroached upon it. The handiwork of Men of old could still be seen in its straight sure flight and level course, cutting through hillside slopes and leaping over streams upon wide shapely arches of enduring masonry, until at last all signs of stonework faded save for a broken pillar here and there peering out of bushes, or old paving-stones lurking amid weeds and moss. The road dwindled at last to a country cart-road little used, but it did not wind: it held on its own sure course and guided the travelers by the swiftest way.
South and west, Ithilien looked towards the warm lower vales of Anduin, shielded from the east by the Ephel Dúath and yet not under the mountain-shadow, protected from the north by the Emyn Muil, open to the southern airs and the moist winds from the Sea far away. The long journey from Rivendell had brought the hobbits far south of their own land, but not until this more sheltered region did they feel the change of clime. Here Spring was already busy about them: fronds pierced moss and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf, and birds were singing. Many great trees grew there, planted long ago, falling into untended age amid a riot of careless descendants; groves and thickets of tamarisk and pungent terebinth, of olive and of bay; junipers and myrtles; thymes that grew in bushes or with woody creeping stems mantled in deep tapestries the hidden stones; sages of many kinds putting forth blue flowers, or red, or pale green; marjorams and new-sprouting parsleys, and many herbs of forms and scents beyond the garden-lore of Sam. The grots and rocky walls were already starred with saxifrages and stonecrops, with primeroles and anemones.
The Hobbits' Passage
It was the third evening since Frodo and Sam had fled from the Company, as far as they could tell, when they stood on the brink of a tall cliff in the Emyn Muil, bare and bleak, its feet wrapped in mist, staring south and east to where a dark line hung like distant mountains of motionless smoke, with a tiny red gleam flickering upwards on the rim of earth and sky. Sam Gamgee stood despondently with hunched shoulders beside Frodo, peering out with puckered eyes into the gloom, and declared that they were in a fix and no mistake. They had almost lost count of the hours during which they had climbed and laboured among the barren slopes and stones of the Emyn Muil, sometimes retracing their steps because they could find no way forward, sometimes discovering that they had wandered in a circle back to where they had been hours before. Yet on the whole they had worked steadily eastward, keeping as near as they could find a way to the outer edge of this strange twisted knot of hills, but always finding its outward faces sheer, high and impassable, frowning over the plain below; beyond its tumbled skirts lay livid festering marshes where nothing moved and not even a bird was to be seen.
When at last they descended into Ithilien, the night became fine under star and round moon, and it seemed to the hobbits that the fragrance of the air grew as they went forward; and from the blowing and muttering of Gollum it seemed that he noticed it too, and did not relish it. At the first signs of day they halted again, having come to the end of a long cutting, deep and sheer-sided in the middle, by which the road clove its way through a stony ridge. They climbed up the westward bank and looked abroad, seeing that the mountains were now much further off, receding eastward in a long curve lost in the distance. Before them, as they turned west, gentle slopes ran down into dim hazes far below, and all about them were small woods of resinous trees, fir and cedar and cypress, and other kinds unknown in the Shire, with wide glades among them, and everywhere a wealth of sweet-smelling herbs and shrubs.
The Garden of Gondor and Its Desolation
The description of Ithilien as "the garden of Gondor now desolate" captures the region's essential tragedy: it is a land of remembered beauty whose guardians have fallen away, left to untended age amid a riot of careless descendants. The great trees planted long ago speak of a time when Gondor's power extended fully across the Anduin, when this eastern march was cultivated and cherished. Now the land keeps only a dishevelled dryad loveliness, a beauty that persists despite neglect and the ever-present threat from the East. The contrast with what lies beyond is stark: where Ithilien offers fragrance and bloom, the lands toward Mordor are livid festering marshes where nothing moves and not even a bird is to be seen. The hobbits' passage through this garden is thus a passage through memory and loss, a reminder of what the War of the Ring is being fought to preserve, and of how close that preservation stands to annihilation.
Narrative Significance
Ithilien functions in the narrative as the threshold between the world of the West and the desolation of Mordor, the last place where the natural beauty of Middle-earth asserts itself before the hobbits must descend into the Enemy's realm. It is also the region where the Rangers of Ithilien operate, and where the encounter with Faramir will later take place, though the evidence of the hobbits' own passage shows it as a place of solitary wonder and dread. The land's character as a garden now desolate resonates with the larger themes of the book: the long defeat of the Elves and the fading of beauty, the encroachment of shadow upon fair things, and the stubborn persistence of life and growth even at the edge of darkness. For Sam, whose garden-lore is exceeded by the herbs of Ithilien, the region offers a glimpse of a natural world far richer than the Shire's, a silent testimony to the wide world that lies beyond the fences of home. The hobbits' journey through this fragrant, haunted land marks the final stage of their approach to the dark country, and the memory of its springtime beauty lingers as a counterweight to the desolation they are about to enter.
