The Encyclopedia of Arda - The Gore (original) (raw)
The secret heartland of Lórien
The Gore of Lórien (somewhat conjectural)
The Gore of Lórien (somewhat conjectural)
Haldir's translation of the Elvish name Naith, referring to the long pointed region of Lórien that lay between the river Silverlode and the Great River Anduin. 'Gore' is an old word, essentially meaning 'sharp point'. Its etymology goes back in time to Old English gāra (a word for a narrow triangular piece of land) so Haldir's translation is a very precise one.
It was within the Gore that most of the Galadhrim, the Silvan people of Lórien, dwelt. For the most part, the habitations of the Elves were to be found in the narrow southerly point of the Gore, where it approached the Angle between the two rivers.1 Galadriel's power of preservation, granted her by the Elven-ring Nenya, extended over the land of the Gore, so that crossing the Silverlode (or Celebrant, as the Elves named that river) into the Gore gave one the feeling of stepping into a different time. Few outsiders experienced this curious effect, however, as the Galadhrim were protective of their land, and allowed few strangers to visit the heartland of Lórien.
The maps included with The Lord of the Rings don't seem to closely match the description of the Gore as being narrow and spear-shaped. Rather, those maps show the land of Lórien as having a relatively rectangular form. Tolkien acknowledged this in a note reproduced in Unfinished Tales, where he says that '...the actual junction of the rivers was narrower and more pointed than can be shown on a small-scale map.' (Unfinished Tales Part Three I, The Disaster of the Gladden Fields, Note 16). While the map shows the Silverlode flowing into Anduin in an approximately eastward direction, the implication here is that it actually ran more toward the southeast, creating a longer and narrower stretch of woodland between the rivers than appears on the map.
Notes
| 1 | The narrow point of land at the Angle between the rivers is not given an Elvish name in the canonical texts. In draft work reproduced in volume VII of The History of Middle-earth, the word Nelen is given as the Elves' name for the Angle in their own tongue. It should be noted that the section in which that term appears shows Tolkien experimenting with various different names for the Gore and the Angle, and so Nelen might very well have not been intended to stand. |
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- Updated 25 January 2023
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