Hildórien

Names and Etymology

Hildórien is the Noldorin (Quenya) name of the eastern land of the awakening of Men. The Silmarillion glosses it as “the place of the followers” — the Elves called Men Hildor, “the Followers”, for they came after the Elves in the purpose of the One; Hildórien is thus the “land of the followers”. No Sindarin or Mannish name of the region is recorded, for it lay beyond the reach of western lore.

Geography

• Hildórien lay far to the east of the lands known to the Eldar — beyond the great inland seas of the fledgling east and beyond the eastern mountain-walls; the Silmarillion describes it as the east of the world “whence Men came” in the dawn. The western histories never mapped it, and the east beyond the Sea of Rhûn is left as “little known”. Its only recorded character is that it faced the first light: when the Sun first rose in the west of the world, the eastern land of Hildórien saw it rise upon the earth — the story deliberately sets the human awakening at the first full dawn, in the far east.

History

• In the Years of the Trees, while the Elves awoke at Cuiviénen, Men did not yet wake; it was not until the first rising of the Sun (at the opening of the Years of the Sun and the First Age) that the One caused the Fathers of Men to awaken — “in the land of Hildórien in the farthest regions of the east”. From Hildórien the kindreds of Men set out, in measureless time, westward: across the east and the mountains, the long slow migrations of the Secondborn (the ancestors of the Edain among them) that brought them at last to the western coasts and, in the First Age, into Beleriand and the company of the Elves. Of the folk that remained behind, or of the east’s own fortunes, nothing more is written in the western books.

In the Texts

The geography of the far east is one of the legendary openings of the Silmarillion: the account of the awakening of Men follows the account of the Sun’s making, and Christopher Tolkien’s notes record how the east-lore (the eastern mountains, the great seas of the east) remained necessarily vague as “the unknowable East”. The term appears in the Quenta and its annals as the fixed point of the human beginning.

Significance

Hildórien is the dawn-place of the Secondborn — Men’s Cuiviénen, but of daylight rather than starlight. Its eastward position pairs with the west of the blessed realm: the world’s morning of Men begins at the world’s far eastern rim, and from it comes all the human race that the later tales (the Atanatári, Númenor, the realms of Men) flow from. As image, it is the land of the first human glance toward the Sun and the West.

Related

• Men
• Cuiviénen
• The Sun
• Arda
• Middle-earth Hildórien (the term)