Ered Mithrin
the Grey Mountains; held by Durin's folk, haunted of dragons
Names and Etymology
Ered Mithrin — Sindarin, the Grey Mountains — is the great range of the far north of Wilderland. It is distinct in the legends from the Misty Mountains (which it meets near the north in the wastes where the “Mountains of Angmar” lie), and from the ranges of the far north beyond it; its name comes mostly from the later age in which the Dwarves of Durin’s line led their forlorn exile there.
Geography
The range runs east and west across the top of Rhovanion/Wilderland, south of the cold wastes and desolations (the “Withered Heath” of the dragons’ breeding), and north of the shadowed wood and the trackless lands. Its northern border meets the tundra where few beings went.
- About it lay the dragon-country: the Withered Heath between the Grey Mountains and the Northern Waste was remembered in later legend as the breeding-ground of the worm-kind, from which came the great dragons of the Third Age.
History
- After the plundering of Erebor by Smaug (T.A. 2770) and the wanderings of the homeless Dwarves, much of Durin’s folk — under their kings Thráin and Thrór — took refuge in the Grey Mountains, where the mines and halls of the Dwarves of the north were re-opened and a doleful strength gathered. Yet the dragons of the north assailed them, “and the Grey Mountains became wild and desolate”, until at last the Dwarves left and returned to Erebor’s rekindling. In that same north, the treasure-hoards of the older dragon-age had made the Grey Mountains and the Withered Heath the abode of many worms; the later lore remembered lordless dragons flying over them into the valleys.
In the Texts
The Ered Mithrin appear in The Hobbit’s geography of the north (the “Grey Mountains” of the dragon-names), and their role as the refuge of Durin’s folk is the backbone of the account of the Dwarves’ exile in Appendix A; the older legends of Fram and the dragon Scatha lie along their northern feet. The range serves as the fixed “northern wall” of the maps of Wilderland.
Significance
The Grey Mountains are the emblem of the Dwarves’ long, ageing exile — a refuge granted and then lost to the cold and the worm — and, geographically, the articulation of the far north from the rest of Wilderland. They are at once the last stronghold of the Longbeards and the home of the last dragon-age in the North.