With his Southrons from Harad, Tolkien had - in the view of John Magoun, writing in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia - constructed a fully expressed moral geography, from the hobbits' home in the Northwest, evil in the East, and imperial sophistication and decadence in the South. Magoun explains that Gondor is both virtuous, being West, and has problems, being South; Mordor in the Southeast is hellish, while Harad in the extreme South regresses into hot savagery.