Adding to the people who said please post your Harad worldbuilding, I would love to read about it if you’re happy to share because I don’t think I can ever look at a Middle Earth map again with Harad as a big empty wasteland without thinking of this part from your fic
Harad is not waiting to be understood. We are not at the beginning of something you have already finished. We are not at the beginning of something you have already finished. We did not start late, and we are not behind, because late and behind are your categories and I am not in them. When I was thirteen, I had a teacher who said that the worst thing a mind can do is measure everything from where it is standing, as though the standing place were the centre of the world rather than just a place you happened to stop.
Thanks for your kind words! I will indeed post it but it’ll definitely take me at least a few days to type it up properly because it’s just pages and pages (and a map) of messy fragmented handwritten notes… however, here’s an excerpt from the part I typed up so far, which might be interesting for you since you mentioned the Middle Earth map… 👇🏽
On the name itself: Harad is a Sindarin word meaning, simply, south: it was what the Westerly men and elves called the region, and thus ended up in every map and administrative document produced across the Ages, which is why it is the word we have. The Haradrim city-states use approximately fourteen distinct names for their various homelands, none which translate as "south” because it is not common practice to name your home after its position relative to somewhere else entirely. This is the most important thing to understand about cartographical representations of Harad: most maps of Harad are maps of Gondor, not of Harad.
As we have already established, the astronomical tradition of the Zâri is the most sophisticated indigenous knowledge system in Near Harad and the one in most danger of functional extinction. Technically speaking, it is not being directly suppressed: it is more a case of resource reallocation. The old observatories in Upper Zârahêd are still standing and still used by the families who have maintained them for generations, but the apprenticeship structures that trained observers are eroding because the young people who would have entered them are instead entering the Gondorian administrative economy, where Westron literacy is what gets you employment. The astronomical tradition is predicted to survive in attenuated form for another two or three generations.
The language situation hits a similar note, wherein Westron is now the primary language of education in the schools that Gondor has built in Zârahêd's newer quarters, with Sindarin as an optional choice. The Zâri languages are not banned. However, they are also no longer the language of official communication, law courts, counting houses, or the administrative compound. As such, Zâri children learn Westron because children are taught what is useful, and their parents encourage them because parents want their children to have opportunities. For the Gondorian Outposts, it kills two birds with a single stone: the Zâri languages narrow their range of speakers one graduating cohort at a time, whilst no actual record proves the existence of such an intent.
