Dark Land

Tolkien's maps of the whole world of Arda, published in The Shaping of Middle-earth, mark a continent about which the tales are almost silent. The Dark Land, also called the South Land, lies in the southern seas, far from the countries where the histories take place. The charts give it a long shape with mountains, sometimes identified with the Yellow Mountains of the early writings, but no tale enters it and no people of the Dark Land is named. It belongs to the cosmology of the legendarium rather than to its stories, part of Tolkien's account of how the seas and continents of the world are arranged in its deep past. For readers it stands as a reminder of how much of Arda lies beyond the maps of The Lord of the Rings, drawn but unexplored.