La Taverne des Hobbits
Bassin de hautes terres
687.900 Kilomètres carrés
Le terrain de l'Ériador est marqué par des crêtes concentriques appelées des hauts. Le soubassement est essentiellement sédimentaire, avec le plus souvent du calcaire, du grès et de la craie. Le silex est abondant dans les Collines du Vent et l'Arthedain oriental. Des collines granitiques atypiques apparaissent dans la Comté.
L'Ériador n'est pas connu pour sa richesse minière, mais il s'y trouve quelques exploitations limitées. On peut trouver des filons de cuivre à travers toutes les terres qui composent l'Arnor. Les hommes de l'Arthedain tirent de petites quantités de minerai d'argent des Hauts du Nord, et une modeste industrie saline en Cardolan alimente le reste de la région.
Le terme d'Ériador décrit toutes les terres comprises entre l'Ered Luin, l'Ered Nimrais et les Montagnes Brumeuses, y compris les régions d'Enedwaith, Minhiriath et ce qui était jadis le royaume d'Arnor. Une grande diversité de peuples habitent l'Ériador, depuis les Dùnedains courtois de l'Arthedain jusqu'aux frustres Hommes des Collines du Rhudaur, en passant par les paisibles Hobbits de la Comté. Des millénaires d'occupation ont réduit les forêts jadis importantes de la région à des groupes éparpillés de bouleaux, hêtres et ormes avec parfois un grand bois, comme la vieille forêt. Les herbes courtes abondent dans les régions qui ne sont pas cultivées par les Humains ou les Hobbits, l'idéal pour les troupeaux d'herbivores.
The lands known as Eriador are no less ancient than any others in Middle-earth, and, like so many others, they have been much changed since the Song of Creation first brought them out the Void. Beleriand, which lay to the west of Eriador, foundered and sank into the sea. Other regions to the south were forested and grass-covered, but became deserts; and still others rose to become mountain ranges or fell to become bog and fenlands. The ire of Melkor, the first Great Enemy of the world, had a direct part in setting the bounds of Eriador. The Iron Mountains, which bordered it on the north, were raised to protect his frozen domain; the Misty Mountains, on Eriador's eastern side, were said to be raised by him also, to hinder the riding of Oromë, the Huntsman of the Valar, from Aman into the east of Endor.
The Essence, the Power of Eru's thought that flowed through that initial creation, ebbed and dwindled as the world passed through successive ages and events. While, in the hands of the Valar, it could produce great beauty, in the hands of Evil it could do great destruction. The dramas produced by these conflicting drives have faded and been obscured with the passage of time. The world as it exists in the Third Age is ruled, for the most part, by its own natural laws, chose of rain and wind, rock and soil, and life, growth, and death. "Magic," as Men call the ancient power, is a minor factor in the day to day working of Middle-earth in recent times, and natural forces have used the long ages to cover the scars it made in the past. The heart of Eriador is an upland plain, a great, shallow bowl of sedimentary rock, mainly chalky limestone, almost four hundred miles across. Settled between the Tower Hills and the Misty Mountains, averaging just under a thousand feet above sea level, it tends to be covered by only a thin layer of powdery soil. Rainwater, while relatively abundant here, seeps quickly clown into the rock layers, leaving little moisture for trees save where natural traps and dips in the bedrock hold dirt and nutrients eroded from the hills. Instead, most of the upland is a chalk prairie, a dry plain covered with tough grass ( heblas and sinblas) over dusty, whitish earth.
At the center of the bowl are the Weather Hills; from Weathertop, it is said, a Man with the eyes of the ancient Elves can see the sun rise over the Misty Mountains and set over the Blue; and, to travelers, that great h ill marks the mid-point of any journey between the two ranges. The flattest portion of the chalk prairies lies east of Weathertop. This Oiolad (Q/S. "Endless Plain"), not dark forest or jagged mountains, is what the Eriadorians first think of when they refer to "the Wild," and few of them have ever dwelt there.
West of Weathertop, the rock byers sag somewhat, and the resulting basins have been filled with better soil by the mighty Baranduin river and the myriad streams flowing off the Weather Hills. From the hi lis westward, these blessed, fertile, sometimes well-populated basins include, first, the Midgewater Marshes, then the Chetwood and Bree-land, and finally the Old Forest and the Shire. The western and southern edges of the Eriadorian upland are just beyond Bree and the Shire; the rock layers are here lifted slightly to form the rim of the bowl, but have eroded to form rings of clowns, the outward-facing bluffs that extend from northern Arthedain through the Shire and across northern Cardolan.
Upon the west, where Beleriand met Eriador in ancient times, the Blue Mountains crumpled against the upland to make the Tower and Twilight Hills, both pressed against the edges of the outermost rows of clowns. Within the bounds of the upland itself, irregular intrusions of granite arose to form smaller clusters of hills, such as the Pinnath Gelin and the Pinnath Ceren.
These irregularities, hints of ancient conflicts between spirits of fire and earth, were only a foretaste of the power that forced up, on the opposite frontier of Eriador, the mighty peaks of the Hithaeglir, the Misty Mountains. They compose what resembles a great wall of rock. The wall runs nearly nine hundred miles from north to south, marking where the earth split along a long fault line and was thrust upward in a last great cataclysm back in the Deeps of Time, in the waning years of the ages when such power could still be easily raised by the Great Enemy.
The Hithaeglir present their steeper face on the east, standing against the foretold birthplace and migration of the Firstborn Elves. The force of the uprising of this mighty slab of rock, however, which created peaks two miles high overlooking the Yale of Anduin, also lifted and wrecked the lands to the west of the mountains. Indeed, a great expanse of white limestone and red sandstone of the Eriadorian upland was pushed up, broken, and split by this event. They form a series of rugged fells along the western flanks of the Hithaeglir.
The fells are composed of rugged, boulder-strewn, jagged landscapes, deeply eroded by the many sources and tributaries of the mighty Gwathlò river, running from Angmar at the northern end of the Misty Mountains through Rhudaur and Eregion to Dunfearan at the southern end. Thin-soiled and almost impassable, they have never been thickly settled at any time in Eriadorian history, and then only along narrow river valleys.
In the south, where the rock layers of the upland fall towards the sea, lies the best land in Eriador. Here a coastal plain, covered by the forest called the Taur Enyd, once carried the Gwathlo for hundreds of miles through wooded lowlands. Yet another cataclysm, released by Morgoth in the War of Wrath, sank Beleriand into the sea and also dropped the Eriadorian coastal plain some hundreds of feet, drowning much of it. The remainder of the coastal lands, hilly or rolling country for the most part save near the mud and shoal-choked estuaries of the Gwathl6 and Baranduin, are known to the Men of Cardolan as Minhiriath (S. "Between the Rivers"), and still show the effects of the catastrophe after thousands of years.
The sudden change in the pitch of the land caused massive erosion wherever the earth was unprotected by thick growth. The drowning of the old coastline and the flow of mud from the erosion inland ruined most of the harbors along the coast. Ships can only find anchorage in dor in a few carefully chosen ports, most either heavily dredged and sea-walled or far up the estuaries. The "Forest Wars" of the Second Age aggravated these problems; cutting and burning the ancient forests of Cardolan left nothing to keep the soil in place; so much of it ran to the sea that the forest never regrew and its loss became part of the laments of Men and Elves.
On the northern and western edges of Eriador, where few Men dwelt either in the Eider Days or now, the effects of Morgoth's final agony were felt even more severely. There the River Lhûm had once flowed with a cold current from the Blue and the Iron Mountains into the beautiful Lake Evendim and thence into the Baranduin. The War of Wrath saw power released that split the Blue Mountains a part, and the Lhûn turned to flow down through the jumbled wreckage of peak and forest to the sea. The Iron Mountains were wracked by a titanic convulsion that tore their roots away and cast the peaks down almost to sea level, leaving a jagged ridge of cloven foothills ,the Rammas Forrnen (S/Q. "Great Wall of the North"), to mark a new boundary of Eriador. The remains of the mightiest range of mountains on the planet became the edge of the Northern Waste, a bog, dust, and boulder-strewn tundra plain, covered with snow and ice much of the year as the cold of Morgoth's northern realm swept south to afflict Eriador with regular frosts and winters.
Against such twisting and rending of the continent, the natural powers of Middle-earth fought a slow, patient battle. Rain, seasons and generations of it, washed the dust down towards the sea and spread it along and over the banks of the rivers. Grass and heather crept over barren hills and plains to replace the forests and hold what was left of the soil; moss and lichen covered the tundra, and herbs and flowerings shrubs sought out the crumbling rock precipices and brought life back to them. Lakes filled with clean water, deer and sheep grazed on the clowns, and Men and Hobbits learned to till the land and care for it. Despite the anger of powerful spirits and the folly of Men, Middle-earth prevails.
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