Hriston
Dungeon Master of Middle-earth (He/him)
A point--Ithilien was almost completely deserted by that point, apart from a few Rangers.
The same is said of Harondor (minus the Rangers, of course). Harondor had been deserted for longer than Ithilien, however, which had been deserted in waves, but wasn't completely deserted until the eruption of Mount Doom in T.A. 2954. Harondor's population, on the other hand, seems to have been hit hard by the Great Plague of T.A. 1635-7, and any who were left probably fled when Gondor abandoned all its territories east of the Anduin, except Ithilien, in T.A. 1856, and resettled north of the Poros or west of the Anduin. After that it became a highway for the armies of Harad, yet [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] imagines a population oppressed by Gondor. As Ithilien is a similarly contested land at the time of the War of the Ring (T.A. 3018-9), it seems fair to make similar assumptions about the existence of its population, and their treatment by the armies of Gondor and Rohan.