In the film adaptation of the Two Towers we see an army of ‘wicked men’ marching through Sauron’s gate. They were kind of oogy looking, but I’m curious about where they are from and such. The books seem kind of vague on this last time I checked, all I can remember is that they allied with Sauron, and had elephant-ish creatures.
Do the people of Gondor know about these people? Or are they just total strangers who came out of the frontier? Why did they decide to join Sauron? Perhaps one of the ringwraiths is a former leader of theirs?
They are simply various other people’s in Middle Earth. Sauron had sort of taken them over, or at least gained the cooperation of their cheifs, though I think his control was not really tight. The Gondorians certainyl do know of those people. No one knows exactly what Sauron gave them, but they are feirce and skilled warriors.
They’re nations that have been deceived by Sauron. To them, Gondor and Rohan and their Elven allies are the bad guys, and Sauron is the good guy. I think at one point it’s revealed that Sauron had led them to believe that the Rohan burned their captured enemies alive, and that this was just once example of Rohan’s brutality.
They’re not necessarily bad, they’ve just been misled.
Since Middle-Earth is implicitly ancient Europe, and the Southrons are from south of Middle-Earth and have elephants, it seems fair to presume they’re ancient North African equivalents. Sauron wooed them to his side with false warnings about the treachery of Gondor.
The Easterlings are from lands not depicted in Tolkien’s map but presumably somewhere east of Rhun. ISTR their garb described as comparable to Arabic fashion, but I may be making an unwarranted inference. I don’t remember how Sauron got them to work for him, but it may have been a story about yellowcake uranium.
I’d guess from the sound of their name that the Haradrim would be the Middle Eastern analogs. That would make the Easterlings a Slavic/Scythian equivalent, or perhaps an analog of the Mongols. The Southrons would indeed be North African, perhaps Carthaginian-inspired.
You have to remember as well that the men of the West were generally (except for the Dunlendings and the wild men) descendants of the Numenoreans and through them, the Dunedain. The Rohirrim were descendants of the ancestors of the Dunedain, who’d never gone west across the Hithaeglir.
Much of the antagonism is also due to the pride of the Gondorians. They’d never forgotten their descent from the Numenoreans and classified the other Men in the world in three groups: Men of Numenor (themselves), Men of Twilight (the Rohirrim and the men of Dale), and Men of Darkness (everyone else, including the Dunlendings, Southrons, Easterlings, and Woses). When a king of Numenor married an Easterling bride, their son was exiled when he succeeded to the throne, after a bloody civil war begun by the “pure” Numenoreans.
In addition, the Southrons had been under the influence and rule of the Black Numenoreans (not a matter of skin color, but “soul color”…these were the escapees of the cataclysm who still adhered to the principles of Sauron’s corruption of Numenor) for much of the Third Age, so they were prepared to both hate the descendants of the Faithful and follow Sauron’s lead.
Sauron really didn’t have to do a lot of convincing…
Also, it should be added that many of these races aren’t necessarily “bad”, just mislead. There’s a passage in The Two Towers where Faramir reflects on what sort of lies they must have been told to be in the services of Sauron.
In “Unfinished Tales”. one of the Nazgul is described as an Easterling. Although the UT aren’t quite canon, being that they were, you know, unfinished, they’re pretty close. Three are supposed to have been Numenoreans and we know nothing about the others.
Although LOTR, as a pseudo-history of the West, depicts Southrons and Easterlings mostly as hostile invaders, it’s not completely black and white. There is a reference to Aragorn meeting “good and evil” men in the South and East. Sam looks at a fallen enemy soldier and wonders what brought him there and if he would rather have stayed at home. And immediately after the fall of Sauron, some of the invaders snap out of it and go home.
The costumes in Two Towers (the movie) do a nice job of reflecting their origin – the Easterlings (marching through the Black Gate) look Asian, almost like samurai; the Haradrim (ambushed by Faramir) look North African.
If by “Woses” you mean the Druadain, Ghan-buri-ghan’s people, they’re sort of honorary Numenoreans or Twilight-Men. There were a few Druadain who went over to Numenor itself, but they were rather uneasy there (especially shortly before the Fall), and most returned to Middle Earth. I believe that one of them even tried to warn the King of the upcoming disaster, but by that time the Kings of Numenor were far too arrogant for anyones’ warnings to do any good.
I thought the Gondorian attitude toward the Druedain was that they were little better than animals. Now, after the War of the Ring and Ghan-buri-Ghan’s aid, Elessar did autonomize their territory.
It would make sence that the army marching through the Black Gate are Easterlings purely because at the LOTR exhibiton in London it had one of the reddish costumes (those worn by the men who attacked Faramir & his Rangers) and it said they they were the clothes of the Haradrim