The Disaster of the Gladden Fields
the death of Isildur and the loss of the Ring
Nature
The Disaster of the Gladden Fields is the fullest account, given in Unfinished Tales (Part Three, I), of the ambush that destroyed Isildur in the second year of the Third Age, at the reed-beds of the Gladden on the upper Anduin — the death of the king and the loss of the One Ring in the river.
Contents
The narrative tells of Isildur’s march north after the War of the Last Alliance, bearing the Ring as geat (heirloom) of his house; the small company passing along the Vale of the Anduin; and the sudden onslaught at the Gladden Fields by Orcs that had escaped the final war. His elder sons fell with him in the fight, and Isildur himself, seeking to flee across the water with the Ring at his neck, was overtaken and slain — the Ring slipping from his finger as he dived, and so lost in the depths of the Anduin. One of his squires, Ohtar commanded to flee, escaped bearing the shards of Narsil, and carried them at last to Imladris. The Ring lay hidden in the river-bed until its finding by Déagol and the murder of Déagol by his kin Sméagol in the later Third Age, when the long history recorded in “The Hunt for the Ring” begins again.
Composition
Written as a late “special” explanation of how the Ring was lost (and how it came to be found), and published by Christopher Tolkien with a note on the source; the shorter references in the Appendices record the death “at the Gladden Fields” and the finding of the Ring in the Great River’s shallows.