“I started wisely with a map” is said to have been said by JRR Tolkien, that is, “I started wisely with a map”. So it’s no wonder that cards also feature prominently in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies — and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Amazon Prime Video. The walks of the Harfuss are particularly interesting here, as they are easy to understand on the maps that are displayed again and again.
The first stop on the annual Harfeet migration route we see in the series is at Rhovanion, east of the Anduin. That is the name of the great river in Middle-earth, which Frodo, Aragorn and Co. also descend into “The Fellowship of the Ring”. The lake with the Rauros waterfall can be seen on the left of the map:
In Rhovanion there seems to be the so-called Nordfeld gorge, where the harfeet spends the summer, as Nori (Markella Kavenagh) tells the Stranger (Daniel Weyman) in episode 5. The season in the series is good and we learn that the tastiest snails can be found in the Nordfeld canyon. This is where the harfoot scenes take place in episodes 1-3 of The Rings of Power.
But as soon as autumn starts, the harfites start their big migration, which is then shown in episode 5 alongside Poppy (Megan Richards) song. The route initially continues to the south in the Gray Marsheswho visit Frodo, Sam and Gollum for many years and a big battle later as Dead Marshes:
From there it seems to go further eastn, ie in the area north of the southern lands or Mordor, as it should now be called correctly. This area is not particularly well fleshed out on JRR Tolkien’s maps, therefore the names shown (such as “Thistledell”, i.e. thistle valley) are probably also an invention of those responsible for the series.
Where exactly the grove visits the harfeet in the fall is therefore only a matter of speculation in episode 5 (somewhere north of Mordor, but probably not too far east), but luckily there is a new clue in episode 7: The grove is clearly near the green forest. Saddoc (Lenny Henry) mentions this name in conversation with the stranger.
Legolas and the forest elven came from the Green Forest, which later became known as Mirkwood. Also in The Hobbit, Bilbo and the dwarves traverse the forest on their way to Lonely Mountain.
It also makes sense that their walk will eventually lead the harfeet back to the Grünwald/Bleak Forest environment, because as Nori tells the Stranger in Episode 5, they hibernate in the Old Forest. And it can really only be about the Grünwald . to gobecause it’s the only forest around (while the Old Forest in the Shire, as mentioned in The Lord of the Rings books, is way too far away)
In addition, the Grünwald or Düsterwald or Alte Wald is located directly north of the Nordfeld gorge. And if you put all the puzzle pieces together the harfeet apparently wander in a great circle from Grünwald to the south, then a little to the east, north to the forest and then west again to Grünwald and so on.
There will be more of the harfeet and the stranger in “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” Episode 8 – the Season 1 finale. The eighth and final episode will be released on October 14, 2022 on Amazon Prime Video.