Green Hills

A range of rolling hills and downs that ran for some hundred and fifty miles through Western Gondor. They occupied the ground between the valleys of the rivers Lefnui to the west and Blackroot to the east. On their long southern side, the Green Hills ran down into a seaward plain, a region of coastal flats on the shores of the Bay of Belfalas known as the Langstrand or Anfalas. Northward of the hills, a broad land broken by occasional heights ran to the feet of the White Mountains.

The Green Hills were known in Elvish as Pinnath Gelin, meaning 'green ridges' or 'green downs'. These ridged uplands formed their own fief or region of Gondor, separate from the Anfalas that lay on the coasts to the south. Together the Green Hills and the Langstrand were the most remote of Gondor's provinces, westward even of Erech and the river Blackroot, and far from the more populated regions in the east of the land.

Distant from the cities of the east, the Green Hills had little part to play in the history of Gondor, but the people of Pinnath Gelin lent their aid to Minas Tirith during the War of the Ring. Hirluin the Fair, who was apparently the lord of the hills at the end of the Third Age, led three hundred of his people, all clad in green, to aid in the defence of Minas Tirith, some four hundred miles eastward of their homeland. During the Siege of the City, Hirluin was among those who rode out to aid the Rohirrim after their arrival at the Battle of the Pelennor. Hirluin fell in that battle, never to return to the hills of his home. News of the great victory over Sauron that followed, however, did find its way even to the far distant province of the Green Hills.