Nowhere and Back Again: The Grey Mountains/Gundabad (Patreon)

Names: Ered Mithrin (Sindarin: “grey mountains”), Gundabad (Khuzdul: unknown)

Description: The Grey Mountains sit on Wilderland’s northern border, south of the Northern Waste. In the First Age, it’s settled by dwarves and men; the former have long-term on-and-off stints there.Mount Gundabad rules a valley between the Grey Mountains’ western end and the northern Misty Mountains. Traditionally, it is where Durin the Deathless, the first Longbeard Dwarf, awoke. As a holy site for the Dwarves, they hold summits here.During Sauron’s Second Age invasion of Eriador, orcs seize Gundabad and settle in the Grey Mountains. In the Third Age, dwarves settling in the Grey Mountains fight Forodwaith’s dragons; the dwarves ultimately leave the region.After the Dwarves lose Moria, they sack Gundabad and kill all of its orcs; yet not too long afterwards, the orcs take it (Tolkien has presumably given up on this location). Bolg’s orcs are based in Gundabad at the time of the Battle of the Five Armies. After the battle, not orcs are left.

Location in Wingnut Films’ adaptations: Stone Street Studios (Gundabad)

In The Peoples of Middle-earth, Tolkien writes “in the Dwarvish traditions of the Third Age the names of the places where each of the Seven Ancestors had ‘awakened’ were remembered.” The second, Mount Gundabad, is “revered by the Dwarves, and its occupation in the Third Age by the Orks [sic] of Sauron was one of the chief reasons for their great hatred of the Orks”.

This passage is interesting for a couple reasons. Firstly, it illustrates that Tolkien’s mythology contains internal myths which underpin and reflect its characters’ belief systems. Secondly, these internal myths concretely shape history within Tolkien’s external mythology. These myths aren’t treated like fictions but historical realities within a magical world that have real emotional and cultural currency for the characters. 

Some of Middle-earth’s locales only appear in characters’ recollections of history, The Lord of the Rings’ appendices, or Tolkien’s incomplete manuscripts. These places fall into a mytho-historical category, territories whose accompanying myths are merely details of other places’ stories. Piecing their story together is tricky, as they often don’t really have one. As with myth, we’re left to assemble a narrative from the disparate fragments of meaning that Tolkien leaves us.

Northernmost Wilderland offers fragments of storytelling, often repetitively. Sometimes the Grey Mountains are home to dwarves, sometimes orcs live there. Mount Gundabad is a holy site for dwarves, but sometimes it has orcs. Bits of myths pop up: Durin the Deathless, father of the Dwarves awakens here. At the Battle of Five Armies, Bolg the orc leads his troops, “around or beneath the great mountain Gundabad of the North, where was their capital, a vast host was assembled ready to sweep down in time of storm unawares upon the South” (The Hobbit, ‘The Clouds Burst’).  A dragon named Scatha gets got around here. 

These are all details in bigger stories. Some of them are fucked up; the dwarves settle the Grey Mountains, whose indigenous dragons lash out, probably defensively. Orcs and dwarves massacre each other again and again; after the Dwarves’ loss at Moria, they engage in what sounds like ethnic cleansing, as they “assailed and sacked one by one all the strongholds of the Orcs that they could find from Gundabad to the Gladden. Both sides were pitiless, and there was death and cruel deeds by dark and by light” (Appendix A, Durin’s Folk). 

In short, lots of violence happens in the Grey Mountains. Races hurt and die here; not many dragons are left in Middle-earth by The Lord of the Rings’ time. It’s difficult to construct a narrative out of the Grey Mountains’ history because it’s all repetitive war. It has few stories that can’t be transplanted elsewhere.

This makes the Grey Mountains and Gundabad an ideal location for talking about place as a fantasy trope. When role-playing games like Chainmail and Dungeons & Dragons were published in the Seventies, their debt to fantasy fiction was less to its plots than its locations, creatures, and MacGuffins. The trappings of fantasy already existed: players brought their own stories to them.

Tolkien was only one of RPGs’ many influences; the medium also sprang out of Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. P. Lovecraft, Michael Moorcock, and, crucially, Poul Anderson. As Jon Peterson points out in Playing at the World, his history of RPGs, “the sales and renown of The Lord of the Rings were modest at first, especially in the United States, where the trilogy only existed in expensive hardcover editions that sold one or two thousand copies a year”. It was only in 1966, when Ace Books and Ballantine Books published unauthorized American mass market paperback editions of Rings, that Tolkien’s masterpiece captured a popular audience in America.

Yet the influence took hold, not simply because of Tolkien’s hippie fans. Some of the earliest predecessors to RPGs were war-games; as Peterson observes “at a time when young Americans vocally, and sometimes violently, opposed militarism, wargaming harbored inescapable reactionary connotations.” 

Tolkien’s mix of reactionary politics and vehement (and doubtless trauma-spurred) antipathy to war doubtless captured some imaginations. It would have been during this era, when Tolkien took hold among American geeks, that George R. R. Martin discovered Tolkien. While Martin doesn’t appear to be a gamer (and God bless him for it), the fact his A Song of Ice and Fire books and their HBO adaptation Game of Thrones approach fantasy settings as a backdrop for a game is surely significant.

Through gaps and absences in his mythology, Tolkien invites his readers to find meaning in his work. His world grants readers permission to take from it willy-nilly, just as Tolkien copped elements from the Eddas and Kalevala and Beowulf and William Morris. The elements copped from Tolkien are often reactionary, but there’s still fundamentally an act of generosity at the core of his writing. Give readers an inch and they’ll take whole worlds from you.