Haerandir (S. "Far-wanderer"), by his own boast the greatest traveler of his day, journeyed far and wide by both land and sea in search of a cure for the plague. The Great Plague decimated the peoples of northwestern Middle-earth from 1635 to 1637 of the Third Age, only a few brief years before Haerandir undertook his journeys, and its terror hovered as a silent shadow over all that he wrote. In the course of his wanderings, Haerandir acquired a vast storehouse of knowledge about the healing lore of the peoples he visited.
The Quentalë Nestadren Ardanómion (Q. "History [of] Healing [of the] Places of Arda"), an encyclopedic compendium and Haerandir's magnum opus, was by no means comprehensive. It reflected the incomplete state of ethnographic knowledge available to a Third Age loremaster – dependent, moreover, upon the limitations of mobility to which a mid Third Age Gondorian adventurer (even one so widely-traveled as Haerandir) was subject. Haerandir, for instance, apparently ventured little or no contact with any living Black Númenórean realms of the Far South (for obvious reasons, given the longstanding animosity that existed between the Faithful and the King's Men). At the same time, Haerandir possessed an extensive experience with the indigenous peoples of the Southlands – far more than his meager knowledge of the Easterlings and their tribes, to say nothing of the peoples of the Utter East, of whom nothing at all was known to him.
Notes[]
- Original form in MERP: Quentalë Nestalëo Ardanórion → Quentalë Nestadren Ardanómion (corrected Quenya form).
References[]
- MERP #2026: Hands of the Healer