Drumlins in Arnor: Glacial Geomorphology in Middle Earth

Ian Smalley & Sally Bijl Geography Department, Leicester University, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK (ijs4@le.ac.uk)
The whole country is a turbulent democracy of little hills; C.S.Lewis

We have been proposing that the region of the Shire, the land of the Hobbits in Middle Earth, was more or less covered by a particular soil/sediment called loess (Amon Hen 122; Scribd.com), and we will try to extend our physiographical speculation from this point. No part of the lands of Arnor is well described in the texts, from a geomorphological point of view. Neil Holford (in Mallorn 29) has given an overview of the geological structure but we have little information to provide the basis for a descriptive physical geography. We think that describing the landscape is helpful because it adds to the complexity and completeness with which we view the Tolkien World and, after all, it is the completeness of the view that attracts, that renders the texts so acceptable and popular. But this is not an essay of criticism, it is a long-shot attempt at landscape construction. The loess landscape idea is well supported, the key observation being the yellow-brown colour of the Brandywine river. Loess soils tend to be associated with cold climate phases, and with glacial action, and there is a certain northern-ness, a coldness about the mapped landscapes shown in the text appendices. So the possibility
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that the northern parts of Arnor were a once glaciated landscape might be acceptable, and it follows from that that the landscape might contain various relic structures of glacial action. The classic glacial landform is the drumlin, a low streamlined hill found in clusters or swarms. We see them in the Vale of Eden, near Carlisle, and in many parts of Ireland; we see them in southern Ontario and in up-state New York; see them in Finland, and in Poland, and in Where the northern hemisphere ice-sheets went they left drumlins, elegant and characteristic landforms. If there was a large scale glaciation in the north of Arnor, suffiicient to grind up enough rock material to provide the Shire loess, then there should be drumlin fields. Are there any indications in the texts? Are all the barrows really barrows, or might they be drumlins? One would expect Tolkien to be attracted to drumlins; the word (its a grand word!) comes from the Gaelic druim meaning a mound or rounded hill, used by J.Boyce in 1833 and first used in the glacial literature by M.H.Close in 1866. There is a Gaelic aspect to drumlins that should have appealed to Tolkien but one suspects that as they do not appear in ancient tales he would not have been aware of them. Tolkien was good at detail, the fantastic detail of the Elven languages, the amazing intricacy of the family trees of the important people of Middle Earth.. but his interests did not really extend to landscape description. Our task is to detail the nature and history of the landscapes to underpin the action that takes place in them. But, for all his ignorance of geomorphology Tolkien managed a good description of a loess landscape, and this knack of describing a landscape you know nothing about is worth investigating. The most amazing example is provided by C.S.Lewis (this is from Surprised by Joy) describing the Plain of Down in Northern Ireland. It was K.. who first expounded to me what this plain of Down is really like. Here is the recipe for imagining it. Take
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a number of medium sized potatoes and lay them down (one layer of them only) in a flat-bottomed tin basin. Now shake loose earth over them till the potatoes themselves, but not the shape of them, are hidden; and of course the crevices between them will now be depressions of earth. Now magnify the whole thing till the crevices are large enough to conceal each its stream and huddle of trees. And then, for colouring, change your brown earth into the chequered pattern of fields, always small fields (a couple of acres each), with all their normal variety of crop, grass and plough. You have now got a picture of the plain of Down, which is a plain only in this sense that if you are a very large giant you would regard it as level but very ill to walk on- like cobbles. Now this is as good a description of a drumlin field as you are likely to get, and we think that similar plains may have existed in the north of Arnor, as they now exist so characteristically in the north of Ireland. We can offer a possible picture, but its a coincidence (and hard to find). The Grauthner-Fraser picture at the head of chapter eleven of book one of The Fellowship of the Ring in the Folio Society edition looks remarkably like a drumlin landscape. And its setting is right, the hobbits and Strider are in the right place, between Bree and Rivendell, perhaps a little too far south. We wonder if Weathertop, a prominent hill, might actually be a moraine remnant, placed by glacial action right at the edge of the glacier. If Weathertop is moraine then the drumlins need to be to the north, but possibly quite near. The location of Bree provides a bit of a puzzle, a reason appears if we assume that Bree is built on a morainic deposit. This would make sense, the moraines would provide good locations for settlements. Moraine material was often called boulder clay in Britain, something Tolkien (and Lewis) might have heard of. Why did Lewis and Tolkien know nothing about geomorphology? Obviously no geography in their educational background,
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and they had both adopted a position of great antagonism to any aspect of science. Lewis stated this with awful clarity in That Hideous Strength and one feels that their close friendship suggests that they shared this view. Tolkien certainly disliked modern technology and most aspects of the modern world, and yet we know that he liked landscape. He had a view of an ideal Middle England, it was the Shire writ large (a bit like rural Leicestershire). But he was not really interested in its recent geological history and in the comings and goings of glaciers. We can speculate about the position of the glacier that caused the drumlins (and contributed to the loess deposits of the Shire). We envisage a substantial glacier flowing south over Arnor. It was bounded in the west by the Blue Mountains and in the east by the Misty Mountains. The major glacier flow direction was almost due south but one west flowing lobe shaped the Gulf of Lune. The river Lune appears to flow into a fiord; the formation of a fiord requires glacial action (if Slartibartfast is not around) and the Llun fiord looks like a classical fiord. It is interesting that the Brandywine does not flow out into a fiord suggesting that the mouth of the Brandywine lies to the south of the ice limit. We put the limit of southward flow in the region of Bree. The direct indications of glacier cover and the glacierization of the landscape are few but there are various second order indicators, or regions where the speculation is not unreasonable. For example, the track from Bree to Fornost runs north-south, in difficult, once glaciated terrain. In such terrain it makes sense to use eskers, ridges of glacial gravel, as tracks; the Bree-Fornost track could easily follow an esker, the orientation is just right. Lake Evendim looks like a glacial lake.. The cumulative indications are that we are looking at a glaciated landscape, and we know that there is a large ice bay, Forochel, to the north.

A final voice; one of great authority; at the council of Elrond in Rivendell, Elrond speaks: In the north after the war and the slaughter of Gladden Fields the men of Westernesse were diminished, and their city of Annuminas beside Lake Evendim fell into ruins; and the heirs of Valandil removed and dwelt at Fornost on the high North Downs, and that now too is desolate. Men call it Deadmans Dike, and they fear to tread there. For the folk of Arnor dwindled, and their foes devoured them, and their lordship passed, leaving only green mounds in the grassy hills. The grassy hills of Fornost the drumlins of Arnor. (original version in Amon Hen 127, pp.13-14, 1994)