Q: Why Didn’t JRRT Expand on the East and South of Middle-earth?
ANSWER: I think there are two reasons why we don’t learn more about the eastern and southern regions that Tolkien mentioned. The first reason is that he told his stories from the viewpoints of the Eldar and their allies, and their civilizations were established on the northwestern shores (of the Old World, east of the Sea). Although today we have access to the histories and literatures of countries around the world through extensive library systems and the Internet, thousands of years ago people in Europe would have barely heard rumor of lands in far eastern Asia or southern Africa — and they almost certainly knew nothing of the Americas or Australia.
So Tolkien’s world histories are reasonably limited in scope to the experiences of the peoples about whom he was writing. One can assume, of course, that more information would have been possessed by the great loremasters than is conveyed in books like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings simply because those books are concerned with very specific events. You won’t learn much about European history by reading a biography of Ulysses S. Grant (focusing on his years as a general in the Union Army), although any decent history book dealing with the American Civil War should provide at least a little bit of historical background concerning the United States’ relations with the United Kingdom, France, and Spain.
But the other reason is that I think it was simply too big to fully describe. That is, Middle-earth is supposed to be our entire world, and Tolkien imagined a huge conflict drawing representatives of many cultures together. To any member of those cultures all the other peoples he or she encountered might seem mysterious, foreign, and almost inscrutable. When great armies are massing on the battlefield to settle differences that most people know nothing about the common soldiers are not really going to be in a position to sort everyone and everything out. So we can look at the memoirs of famous soldiers who did not lead their nations’ armies into battle and few if any of them attempt to provide much insight into world history.
Sir Winston Churchill wrote A History of the English-speaking Peoples, covering the history of England from the Roman period up to the First World War. His interest in history was lifelong and as a leader of Great Britain he was in a position to have lived through (and led his nation through) a very critical period. He might not have inspired Tolkien’s fiction in any way but I rather imagine him being comparable to a Dunadan king or Ruling Steward writing something about the history of Arnor and Gondor. But how many common people would know anything of that history? I have never read Churchill’s book, and I doubt many other people have. We know it exists. And that is similar to how Tolkien depicts the histories of Middle-earth.
The motif he chose for his fictional history was a realistic one: incomplete, compartmentalized, and sometimes containing contradictions (both intentional and otherwise). I’m not sure he would have done as thorough a job on the details he provided us had he devoted more of his time to informing us about those distant regions of Rhûn and Harad. I would very much like to read Tolkien’s histories for those lands but I don’t hold out any hope of ever being able to do so.
See also:
- Were All Easterlings and Haradrim in Middle-earth Evil People?
- Is All of Harad in Middle-earth a Desert?
- Is Rhûn a Part of Middle-earth?
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The info Tolkien gave about the peoples and lands are scarce but what we do know about semi nomadic tribes of Easterlings (Wainriders, Balchoth, the unnamed axe-men of Rhun short folk with beards, hmm maybe they were something else 🙂 ), plains and unexplored forests of Rhun, kingdoms and tribes of Haradrim, that they build many towns and walls of stone under guidance of Sauron, that he himself was there for so long (he presumably had a stronghold there), that Black Numenorean lords seizing power among Haradrim, the existance of four dwarven houses in the East, all of this would be source of countless stories :), the mysterious Variags of Khand, we don’t know even the full size of Khand, it may spread far and wide to the south-east of Mordor, surely this would be source of enormous amount of stories and acdventures, possibly dragons roam theses lands, some wandering Avari (hmm I’m interested whether any elves ever were in Harad), who knows what exotic animals would be there, and maybe Gondor in times of their imperial glory profited from conquest, spoils of war and increased trade, the great territory to the east belonging to Gondor plains of Dagorlad and lands north of Ered Luin would be probably like steppes, would they be fertile for farming so those numenorean settlers who were granted land could make great latifundiums like in ancient Rome, in fact I think that whole economy of Gondor was a bit like in Roman Empire (and even more so with Mordor in the years leading to War of the Ring) except the slavery of course, huge amount of goods would be brought: honey and mead from wilderland, incense, cosmetics, perfumes, rare dyes, fabrics like silk and cloth from Rhun, wool, grain like wheat would feed capital Osiliath (along with food from gondorian provinces grain brought up river by ships 🙂 like transports of grain from Egypt did for city of Rome :), great amount of pastures would allow for huge number of herds of cattle and sheep, so beef and dried fishes catched in Sea of Rhun, exotic animals would be imported, wines of all kinds especially those most expensive and best quality from mysterious land of Dorwinion (Dorwinion would presumably be close enough to the borders of empire or tributary to it, with elves and possible edainic population) and much luxurious goods, precious wood like ebony or mahogany, or teakwood (but there is also local precious wood of lebethron trees native to White Mountains, unique species of fair wood beloved by carpenters and woodwrights of Gondor), ivory from south, jewels and precious metals mined from far away lands maybe from mountains near Sea of Rhun, pearls and diamonds, tin, copper, lead, iron the artworks of different people would probably be exotic for gondorian nobility, scuptures, paintings, fantastically decorated robes and clothes, glass and ceramics produced somewhere in furnaces or of dwarven make (the trade exchange with eastern dwarves would be huge in that time), maybe also amber like in case of real world amber road, coffee (hehe it was even in Shire in The Hobbit so where it could come from? Khand or somewhere in Rhun? Who knows maybe when kings of Gondor subdued various kingdoms of Near Harad taking sons of kings and local chieftains as hostges they could get anything even from Far Harad like chocolate? Heheh, well definitely that far south there is tropical climate and jungles, ,,dark forests of the South” so cocoa beans), olive oil could be even produced locally in Ithilien also in one hobbit poem from Adventures of Tom Bombadil we have mentioned oranges so citrus fruits. It would be interesting to know more about Gondor in those imperial times as then contacts with far away exotic lands would be more prevalent, it would be no wonder that during the reign of king Atanatar Alcarin (the Glorious) wealth of the kingdom was so great that there was a saying ,,precious stones are pebbles in Gondor for children to play with” hehe.
I find it hard to imagine what Gondor would trade for all these goods. There doesn’t seem to be much industry/manufacturing/farming described in LOTR.