Khand

Khand is a land of the far south-east, lying beyond the southern reaches of Mordor and the Sea of Rhûn. In the Third Age it was a region of which the peoples of the West knew little, save that it was a source of fierce warriors who served the will of Sauron. The Variags of Khand, as they are named in the chronicles, were counted among the most terrible of the Dark Lord's allies, a people whose very name carried an echo of dread in the tales of Gondor.

Geography and Position

The precise boundaries of Khand are nowhere defined in the records of the West, but its location is consistently placed to the south-east of Mordor, beyond the Ephel Dúath and the land of Near Harad. It lay in that vast, uncharted region of Middle-earth that the men of Gondor called simply "the East" or "the South," a realm of rumour and legend rather than of certain knowledge. The lands of Khand were separated from the western kingdoms by great distances and by the hostile territories of Mordor itself, making it a remote and mysterious domain in the eyes of the Free Peoples.

The Variags of Khand

The people of Khand are known in the text only as the Variags, a term that appears to designate both their race and their martial calling. They are listed among the diverse hosts that Sauron mustered for the great battles of the War of the Ring, fighting alongside Easterlings, Southrons, and Orcs. In the climactic Battle of the Pelennor Fields, the Variags are specifically named as part of the forces that poured into Gondor from the east, described as fierce and war-hardened men who asked for no quarter. Their presence in the Dark Lord's armies underscores the vast reach of Sauron's power, drawing warriors from lands so distant that even the lore-masters of Minas Tirith could only guess at their origins.

Role in the War of the Ring

Khand's only direct appearance in the narrative is as a source of troops for Sauron's war machine. When the Captains of the West debated their final strategy, they reckoned with the Variags as a known element of the enemy's strength. In the last desperate battle before the Black Gate, the Variags were among the forces that surrounded the army of the West, fighting with the grim determination of those who had long served the Shadow. Their presence, alongside the Easterlings and the men of Harad, completed the ring of foes that seemed destined to crush Aragorn's host. Yet with the destruction of the One Ring and the fall of Barad-dûr, the power that had bound these distant peoples to Sauron's will was broken, and the threat from Khand, like so many others, passed away into the twilight of the Third Age.

Narrative Significance

Khand functions in the story as a marker of the sheer scale of the evil that opposed the Free Peoples. It is a name that conjures the image of a world beyond the maps, a land of unknown terrors that had been drawn into Sauron's orbit. The Variags are never individualized; they remain a collective, faceless enemy, their culture and history deliberately left obscure. This obscurity serves to emphasize the isolation of Gondor and Rohan, standing as the last bastions of light against a darkness that could summon warriors from the very edges of the known world. In the broader geography of Middle-earth, Khand represents one of those shadowy regions that Tolkien sketches with a few strokes, suggesting a vast and complex world that the main story only glimpses from afar.