Rhûn

Rhûn is the great eastern region of Middle-earth, a land of shadowy distance and hostile peoples that stands as the perpetual eastern frontier in the minds of the free peoples of the West. Though never visited in the narrative, it functions as a crucial geopolitical and moral counterweight to Gondor and Rohan, its name evoking the vast, unknown expanses beyond the known world. The Easterlings of Rhûn are consistently aligned with the forces of darkness, serving Sauron in his wars against the West, and their presence underscores the scale of the conflict that engulfs Middle-earth in the War of the Ring.

Geography and the Eastern Frontier

Rhûn lies far to the east of the lands traversed by the Fellowship, beyond the great river Anduin and the desolate wastes of Mordor. It is a region of plains and distant mountains, largely unmapped in the chronicles of the West, and its very name carries an aura of mystery and menace. The narrative repeatedly gestures toward Rhûn as the ultimate eastern horizon, a place from which hostile forces march and where the shadow of Sauron finds willing servants. The hobbits, standing on the brink of a cliff in the Emyn Muil, gaze south and east toward the dark line on the rim of earth and sky, a vision of the forbidding lands that lie between them and their goal, and the direction of Rhûn is part of that looming, oppressive geography.

The Easterlings and Their Allegiance

The peoples of Rhûn, known collectively as the Easterlings, are portrayed as fierce warriors in the service of the Dark Lord. They are among the many nations that Sauron marshals against the West, their numbers swelling the ranks of his armies alongside the Haradrim from the south. The narrative treats them as a collective threat rather than as individuals, their identity defined by their allegiance to Mordor. This alignment is so complete that when Frodo Baggins confronts a ruffian in the Shire after the war, he declares that the Dark Tower has fallen and that the King's messengers will ride up the Greenway, not bullies from Isengard, implicitly contrasting the defeated servants of the West with the still-distant, though now broken, power of the East.

Rhûn in the War of the Ring

The war against Sauron draws upon the resources of Rhûn, whose warriors are counted among the enemies that besiege Gondor and threaten the free peoples. The Easterlings are part of the vast host that Sauron assembles, their presence a testament to the breadth of his dominion. The narrative does not depict any direct encounter with the people of Rhûn, but their participation in the war is implied through the general muster of Sauron's forces. The defeat of Sauron at the end of the War of the Ring thus also signifies the breaking of the eastern threat, though the land of Rhûn itself remains a distant, unresolved presence on the edge of the known world.

Symbolic and Narrative Significance

Rhûn serves as a powerful symbol of the alien and the unknown, the ultimate 'other' against which the West defines itself. In the postcolonial reading of the text, Rhûn and its Easterlings represent the orientalized East, a region constructed by Western discourse as static, irrational, and in need of domination. The narrative's perspective, centered on the free peoples of the West, inevitably frames Rhûn through this lens, its peoples reduced to a monolithic enemy. Yet the very vagueness of Rhûn's portrayal also reflects the limits of the Western characters' knowledge, a reminder that the world is larger than their maps and that the shadow, though defeated, once stretched far beyond the lands they knew. The name Rhûn thus carries the weight of all that lies beyond the familiar, a geographical and moral boundary that shapes the epic's sense of scale and stakes.