# Forsaken Inn



## Arthur_Vandelay (Feb 20, 2004)

> "I don't know if the Road has ever been measured in miles beyond the _Forsaken Inn_, a day's journey east of Bree," [said] Strider.



What is the _Forsaken Inn_? Has it truly been forsaken (by the time of the War of the Ring)? Or does the italicization suggest that the Inn is still operational when Strider utters these words? Does Tolkien discuss the Inn anywhere else in his works?


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## Aulë (Feb 20, 2004)

It's a horrible place where people discuss religion, politics and other boring matters of life...

Honestly though, the Forsaken Inn was never mentioned anywhere other than that. Here's what it says about it at TolkienWiki:


> Easternmost inn at the Great East Road, a day's journey east of Bree.
> In The Fellowship of the Ring, _*Forsaken Inn*_ is italicised, suggesting that there was actually an Inn by that name on the Great East Road (but it could have been a clever nickname by the locals). It is not revealed whether the inn was functioning at the time of the WotR.


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## Arthur_Vandelay (Feb 20, 2004)

LOL I think I actually wrote that entry at TolkienWiki!! (Not that there's anything wrong with that).

Cheers anyway


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## HLGStrider (Feb 27, 2004)

The best I can say is that the entry in my Robert Foster's guide thingy seems to assume it is in opperation. . . I calls it the inn, not the closed inn.


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## pgt (Feb 27, 2004)

While I tend to be reluctant w/ respect to making Hobbit references I do recall that as Bilbo and the dwarves headed east there was a comment about how inns became fewer and further between until there were no more and then they had their first adventure. I later figured the Forsaken Inn was likely the last one in Bilbo's adventure.


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## Bucky (Feb 27, 2004)

Interesting....


_It's a horrible place where people discuss religion, politics and other boring matters of life..._

Not so.

_The Forsaken Inn_ is actually where WE discuss increasing trivial matters about Middle-earth....  

Another point:

In _The Hobbit,_ Thorin & Company are about to camp outside for the first time on the night they are captured by the three trolls.

This would indicate that: 

A. _The Forsaken Inn_ was still open at the time of _The Hobbit,_ and

B. Tolkien forgot about mentioning alot of Inns between Bree & the trolls or those ponies Thorin & Company were riding were faster than Secratariat was to cover that much ground in two days.


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## Aulë (Feb 27, 2004)

Bucky said:


> _It's a horrible place where people discuss religion, politics and other boring matters of life..._
> 
> Not so.
> 
> _The Forsaken Inn_ is actually where WE discuss increasing trivial matters about Middle-earth....


Well at the moment, people are discussing whether animals have souls, homosexual rights, the death penalty, evolution and post-war Iraq in _The Forsaken Inn_. None of them seem to be 'trivial matters' about Middle Earth.


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## Bucky (Feb 27, 2004)

Actually, having looked at the map after I posted, the inconsistency comes in as to how Thorin & Companny got from _ The Forsaken Inn_, which is "one day's march from Bree", about 20 miles I guess (and looks like that on the map), to the location where the trolls were turned to stone, which is a heck of alot of further past Weathertop & obviously well beyond what 13 ponies could trot in a day.......

Therefore, they must've stayed overnight at another inn or two or more likely, three or four.

Actually, it's more likely that Tolkien hadn't thought out the distances when _The Hobbit_ was written - there really wasn't any need to - and never bothered to correct as he probably never invisioned us sitting around _The Forsaken Inn_ nit-picking about such things.


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## Ardamir the Blessed (Apr 10, 2004)

*The origins of the Forsaken Inn*

TH, 'Roast Mutton':


> At first they [Thorin's company] had passed through hobbit-lands, a wild respectable country inhabited by decent folk, with good roads, *an inn or two*, and now and then a dwarf or a farmer ambling by on business.


 Maybe these two inns became the Prancing Pony and the Forsaken Inn?


RS, 'A Long-expected Party', the Professor's jottings:


> They [Bilbo and his three Took nephews Odo, Frodo and Drogo] walk all night – East. Adventures: troll-like: *witch-house on way to Rivendell*.


 Or then again, maybe the *witch-house* was perhaps the germ of what would become the Forsaken Inn.


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## e.Blackstar (Oct 25, 2004)

Thats a great question...I'm guessing that it was just a name, not actually Forsaken, and probably still open.


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## Valandil (Oct 27, 2004)

Bucky said:


> :
> :
> :
> In _The Hobbit,_ Thorin & Company are about to camp outside for the first time on the night they are captured by the three trolls.
> ...



Hmmm... to wiggle out of this one, I would suggest that perhaps 'The Forsaken Inn' was the last place they stayed where someone else fixed and sold them a meal and took some more money from them for a place to sleep... but that they found abandoned farmhouses or guardtowers or whatever to pass the night on subsequent evenings.


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## Halasían (Aug 25, 2010)

Ah.. The Forsaken Inn ... where many an RP collaboration & written tale has incorporated it into them. It has been anywhere between a fully functioning inn outside the confines of the laws of the Bree Town Council so had a seedy feel to it, to fallen down ruins.

The consistency of Tolkien's brief mentions of it in his writings leads to this sort of speculation. The mentions of an "inn or two" in the Hobbit likely points to a time passed when Arnor was a bit more prosperous and commerce flowed north and south, east and west?


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## Bucky (Aug 26, 2010)

No, I think it just points to Tolkien not having thought out The Hobbit to be in perfect consistency with TLOR because TLOR hadn't been written yet, nothing more or less than that.


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## Halasían (Aug 27, 2010)

Which is a good blunt and literal take on it. Most things can be answered so about Tolkien's writings, which if is to be taken as the be-all and end-all of it, then there is no point in even trying to have any discussion on what the possibilities are within the tales, is there..


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## Bucky (Aug 27, 2010)

That pretty much sums it up. 

Seriously though.....

In this case, one can not read too much into what The Hobbit says versus what TLOR says because of the discrepancies between the line about Thorin & Company having their first camp out at a point so far away from Bree - which would have been many days marching by pony away from Weathertop, let alone Bree to where the trolls were turned to stone, whwereas the Forsaken Inn was one day's march east of Bree (let alone still west of Weathertop)......

See?

Totally incompatable information to put together...Therefore all speculation is totally, er, speculative.

Yes, one must assume that especially before Angmar was in existence that a greater amount of traffic existed on the East-West road, meaning more Inns, but that was 1800+ years ago.

As for the Greenway, it is stated in the Appendix (A) that 'messages were sent' in 1975 I believe, when Angmar came to an end in the whole Glorfindel battle with Earnur. This would indicate that prior to that, there hadn't been any communication up & down the Greenway between Arnor & Gondor for a long time & they communicated by palantiri.

Actually, just checked The Tale of Years, it says 1940: that the 2 kingdoms 'renew communications'. Appendix A clearly states or infers that it's by palantiri, and that it had been a long time, but I don't have time to look it up now.
But, that means the Greenway had to have fallen into disuse for thousands of years by the time of The War of the Ring, except for an occaisional trip back & forth to Tharbad, and even that had stopped for over 100 years by Frodo's day after Tharbad was destroyed by flood in 2913.


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## Elthir (Aug 27, 2010)

Arthur_Vandelay said:


> What is the _Forsaken Inn_? Has it truly been forsaken (by the time of the War of the Ring)? Or does the italicization suggest that the Inn is still operational when Strider utters these words? Does Tolkien discuss the Inn anywhere else in his works?


 

Keeping in mind that Aragorn says that the _Forsaken_ _Inn_ was a day's journey east of Bree -- when Tolkien began a recasting of _The Hobbit_ (see _The 1960 Hobbit,_ Return To Bag-End, John Rateliff) he wrote:

_'Bree was as far as Bilbo's knowledge reached, even by hearsay. Beyond it the lands had been desolate for many long years. When in a day's journey more they came to the Last Inn, they found it deserted. They camped in its ruins, and next day they passed into a barren country with great marshes on their left as far as eye could see.'_

The Broken Bridge, The History Of The Hobbit


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## Daerndir (Aug 7, 2018)

Arthur_Vandelay said:


> What is the _Forsaken Inn_? Has it truly been forsaken (by the time of the War of the Ring)? Or does the italicization suggest that the Inn is still operational when Strider utters these words? Does Tolkien discuss the Inn anywhere else in his works?


They call it the Forsaken Inn because of the inhabitants of the Lone Lands, the Eglain (Sindarin for Forsaken people.)


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## Deleted member 12094 (Aug 8, 2018)

From History of ME 11:

_Eglan, mostly used in the plural Eglain, Egladhrim. The name that the Sindar gave to themselves ('the Forsaken') as distinguished from the Elves who left Middle-earth._​
The word "Eglain" appears neither in LotR not in the Silmarillion; I'm quite impressed that you found that! I'm not entirely sure if that is related to that inn though...


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## Daerndir (Aug 9, 2018)

Merroe said:


> From History of ME 11:
> 
> _Eglan, mostly used in the plural Eglain, Egladhrim. The name that the Sindar gave to themselves ('the Forsaken') as distinguished from the Elves who left Middle-earth._​
> The word "Eglain" appears neither in LotR not in the Silmarillion; I'm quite impressed that you found that! I'm not entirely sure if that is related to that inn though...



This appears in the videogame Lord of the Rings Online. It expands the lore quite a bit. The game shows that the Eglain are a people of men, probably a mixture of Arnorian descendants like the men of Bree and other immigrants, living in poor settlements in the lone lands from the Foraken Inn to the last bridge. They live in a constant struggle with Orcs, Goblins and more. You could say that the Forsaken Inn is like the link of the eglain to the people of Bree and therefore the closest you'll get to civilisation in the Lone Lands. However, there is a place that you could consider the capital settlement of the Eglain: Ost Guruth, an Arnorian fortress north west of the Last Bridge that lies in ruins. According to the game, Radagast the Brown settled here after his meeting with Gandalf in Bree in order to aid the Eglain.


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## Deleted member 12094 (Aug 9, 2018)

Euh, Daerndir... ! That's "just another" PC game, right!? Not sure if your map could really fit under the general title "The works of JRRT"; nor do I think JRRT ever played that game. 

But...

Your suggestion of that possible connection "Eglain"-"Foresaken Inn" is well worth staying! I'm still surprised, well found, even if only by some PC game.

A possible chance clue, I would call it, to conclude!


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Aug 9, 2018)

A couple of things:

Bucky was certainly correct, lo, these many years ago, in pointing out the main problem: the glaring discrepancies between the geography of The Hobbit and LOTR. However, he made a mistake here:



Bucky said:


> In _The Hobbit,_ Thorin & Company are about to camp outside for the first time on the night they are captured by the three trolls.



The Hobbit states clearly:

_In the Lone-lands they had been obliged to camp when they could, but at least it had been dry._

That's from the 1966 Longmans/Unwin edition. Douglas Anderson notes that the 1966 Ballantine edition inadvertently omitted "been obliged to" from the text.

Which brings up another, if minor, point: the quote from Ardamir of Blessed Memory about the "wild respectable country" never made sense to me, and for a reason -- "wild" was a typo for "wide" which crept into the 1966 American printings, and annoyingly enough, went uncorrected for decades (this was always the first thing I checked, whenever a new edition came out, to see whether it was really "new" or not).

Anyway, Fonstad went so far as to draw two alternate maps, to try to resolve the discrepancies, but concluded that neither they, nor Tolkien's various revisions, could ultimately solve the problem: compared to Frodo & Company, the Dwarves were "moving at a snail's pace". Tolkien seems to have envisioned the "hobbit-lands" as extending far to the east of what was later to become the Shire.

Nevertheless, Halasian's comments from eight years ago are still valid: the very discrepancies and ambiguous hints in the books ("_There were probably many more Outsiders scattered about in the West of the World in those days than the people of the Shire imagined") _open possibilities for a wide variety of speculations, fan-fic, role-play, and of course, video games.

Interesting post on LOTRO, Daerndir -- and welcome to the forum! In connection to the Lone-lands, you may find this note in The Annotated Hobbit of interest:

_In introducing the name _Lone-lands_ into the 1966 edition of _ The Hobbit,_ Tolkien was providing a linguistic equivalent of the Sindarin Elvish name _Eriador _("wilderness"), which in_ The Lord of the Rings _refers to the vast lands between the to the west and the Misty Mountains to the east. The Shire, where the Hobbits dwell, lies near its center.
_
Apparently, the Sindarin looked at them as being much more "lonely" than Hobbits would have! In any case, a landscape of small communities and groups of various peoples fighting orcs and monsters makes for a more interesting game than one almost entirely empty and deserted.

I'm reminded of the old MERP system from the 80's, which went to similar lengths in "filling in the blanks" of Tolkien's world, in the course of creating new adventures. Nothing wrong with that, of course, as long as it's clearly differentiated from the "real" Tolkien. I still sort of regret not getting into that, or at least buying some of the modules (try finding them now!), but at least we have the nice artwork they commissioned from Angus McBride, and that's a good legacy to have.


_





_


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## Barliman (Aug 9, 2018)

For anyone with a copy of Karen Wynn Fonstad's _The Atlas of Middle Earth_, 1992 revised edition, ISBN-13: 978-039553516, in the "Regional Maps" chapter the map of Eriador pp 74-75, shows the Forsaken Inn near the Midgewater Marshes. It doesn't actually have a location point.

There is some interesting commentary on p97, Bag End to Rivendell, talking about a number of the discrepancies between The Hobbit and The LoTR when it comes to distances. Fonstad was a cartographer so her focus would, of course, be on distances. She also mentions Barbara Strachey's Journeys of Frodo "dealing" with some of the discrepancy in the distance between the rushing river, probably the Hoarwell, and where Thorin & Co. found the Trolls. Probably taking them about an hour to get to the Trolls. Whereas Aragorn and company got lost and it took them 6 days, a bit far fetched.

Apologies for the digression.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Aug 9, 2018)

Yeah. That's what I was talking about.

EDIT, January 2019:

I'm resurrecting this thread, for the third or fourth time (started in 2004!), to note another one on this (to me) fascinating subject:

http://www.thetolkienforum.com/index.php?threads/forsaken-inn-theories.18776/

Any more hidden in the archives, I wonder?

I just realized that editing something into an old post doesn't really revive it! 

Plus, if you add another post like this, it will soon be "melded" with your previous one, causing the thread to once more sink into oblivion.

So if anyone's around who wants to chime in, better do it soon. I'm sinking!


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## grendel (Jan 22, 2021)

Well. I was going to post a question regarding the _Forsaken Inn_, but I had the presence of mind to do a search first, and found this thread, which provides some information I was not aware of.

My curiosity was as to whether or not the inn survived the War of the Ring, and the waves of footpads and thugs swarming up from the south; I mean, who would protect it, with the Dunedain all gone to war? Who was the innkeeper? Who the heck would have frequented that place?

Having enjoyed an ale or two in my day, and a big fan of the local small breweries here, I was witness to how the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns affected them. One or two unfortunately went out of business, but most of them adapted, shifting to a "to-go only" mode. Could the _Forsaken Inn_ have invented the growler? 🍻


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## Alcuin (Jan 23, 2021)

In their chapter on “Knife in the Dark”, Hammond and Scull in _Reader’s Companion_ cite Tolkien’s notes and gently speculate from there:
The _Forsaken Inn_ is located “where the East Road approached the old borders of the Bree-land” (_Index_). Aragorn probably means one day's journey on foot, not on horseback, perhaps about fifteen or twenty miles east of Bree. The name of the inn may be meant to indicate that it is now derelict.​“_Index_” refers to the “1966 _Index_ – Expanded index first published in the George Allen & Unwin second edition of The Lord of the Rings (1966; in America by the Houghton Mifflin Co., 1967, but not by Ballantine Books)”. 

I would assume that, followed the refounding of Arnor at the beginning of the Fourth Age, the _Forsaken Inn_ was repaired and reëstablished, or some similar successor accommodation for travelers in a new building erected, for the rest and revitalization of those moving along the Great East Road. 



Deleted member 12094 said:


> From History of ME 11:
> 
> _Eglan, mostly used in the plural Eglain, Egladhrim. The name that the Sindar gave to themselves ('the Forsaken') as distinguished from the Elves who left Middle-earth._​
> The word "Eglain" appears neither in LotR not in the Silmarillion; I'm quite impressed that you found that! I'm not entirely sure if that is related to that inn though...


Merroe (otherwise referred to as “Deleted member 12094”, who is missed (can we not forgive a single instance of intemperate irascibility?)) is correct: the _Eglain_ were the Sindar of Beleriand who lived in Doriath, Nan-tathren, Neldoreth, and the surrounding region; the rest of the Sindar were the Falathrim who lived along the coastlands of Beleriand and owned Círdan as their lord. The whole of the Sindar and the Nandor in Beleriand (the “Green-elves”, those that had wandered into Beleriand but had not set out on the Great Journey to Aman under the guidance of Oromë) held Elu Thingol to be the High King of all the Elves (of any sort) in Beleriand; the arrival of the Noldor, and their choosing a “High King” for themselves from among their own House of Finwë, was a matter of political dispute and a point of some jest between the Eldar (particularly the Noldor), but until the Second Kin-slaying, never a matter of conflict. The _Eglain_ had remained behind to search for Elwë (Elu) after he met Melian and fell into an age-long enchantment: they were “forsaken”, left behind, while the rest of the Teleri, save the Falathrim, whom Ossë convinced to remain along the coasts of Middle-earth, followed Elwë’s (twin?) brother Olwë to Eldamar.


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## Halasían (Mar 10, 2021)

Alcuin said:


> In their chapter on “Knife in the Dark”, Hammond and Scull in _Reader’s Companion_ cite Tolkien’s notes and gently speculate from there:
> ​The _Forsaken Inn_ is located “where the East Road approached the old borders of the Bree-land” (_Index_). Aragorn probably means one day's journey on foot, not on horseback, perhaps about fifteen or twenty miles east of Bree. The name of the inn may be meant to indicate that it is now derelict.​​“_Index_” refers to the “1966 _Index_ – Expanded index first published in the George Allen & Unwin second edition of The Lord of the Rings (1966; in America by the Houghton Mifflin Co., 1967, but not by Ballantine Books)”.
> 
> I would assume that, followed the refounding of Arnor at the beginning of the Fourth Age, the _Forsaken Inn_ was repaired and reëstablished, or some similar successor accommodation for travelers in a new building erected, for the rest and revitalization of those moving along the Great East Road.
> ...



When did Merroe become 'deleted member 12094'?

Anyway, it is a well known fact that in the 4th Age, the site of the former inn that was known as 'Forsaken' was rebuilt as the 'Wayward Roadhouse' with a big new brewhouse attached. The land was deeded by Aragorn to a couple of his Dunedain comrades-in-arms, and a stout young Hobbit named Harvey Kegbarrel came from Oatbarton in the Shire to establish some very nice ales. They weren't quite as good as his uncle Freddy Largebarrel's Shire ales that were made for the Green Dragon but they were good indeed.


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## grendel (Mar 17, 2021)

Halasían said:


> ...and a stout young Hobbit named Harvey Kegbarrel...


lol brilliant!!


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