The Road to Middle-Earth

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The road was older than the kingdom it led toward.

So at least the lore-masters of that country had long said, and in this thing they were
nearer the truth than they knew; for though the walls of the king’s town were high,
and its towers fair in the morning, and though men spoke proudly of its line of
captains and masons, of its courts, its armouries, and its ancient trees in the
guarded fields below, yet the white road that climbed to it out of the north had been
laid in an elder time, when no trumpet had ever been blown upon those heights, and
no crown had been forged for mortal brow within the compass of that land.

It came out of the dark pines, winding with a strange surety, as if it remembered a
purpose that the living had forgotten. Grass grew thick upon either side of it, and in
places between the stones; but the middle way remained bare and smooth, save
where the roots of the beeches had thrust under it like the veins of old hands. Far
off, beyond the green shoulders of the hills, there shone in clear weather the pale
mountains, sharp as broken spears against the sky; and in spring the thawing waters
ran down from them in silver threads, crossing under the road in culverts of forgotten
craft, still sound when newer works had cracked and fallen.

There were few now who travelled that way. The traffic of the realm had turned
eastward in later years, where the river was bridged and the land flatter, and
merchants went more gladly with many wheels and loud company than by the old
road under the trees, where the sound of hoof or foot was swallowed, and the light
was broken into green shafts by day and into wavering silver by night. Yet shepherds
still named it in their fashion, calling it the King’s Way, and woodmen, if pressed,
would call it the Elder Path; but among themselves they had another name for it, and
spoke of it seldom after sunset.

For it was said that the road did not wholly belong to the kingdom at all, nor even to
the race of Men. In the first making of it there had been no thought of walls or
markets or barracks, but of going and returning between hidden places: from a
valley now drowned in leaf and silence, where once a people of greater skill than
strength had dwelt beside clear waters, up toward the western marches, and beyond
them—so some guessed—to watchtowers whose stones were now no more than
grey humps in the turf. Whether Elves first marked the line of it, or Men learned it of
them in years of friendship, no one could say with certainty.