A wide and windswept upland region that lay between Fangorn Forest and the Great River Anduin, bordered to the north by Anduin's tributary Limlight running down from the Misty Mountains. The high grasslands ran west to east for some hundred and fifty miles, and on their eastern borders the Great River ran through shallows to form two looping Undeeps, beyond which, in the Third Age, the lifeless Brown Lands stretched away into the east.

Throughout most of the Third Age, this land lay at the northern extent of Gondor, forming a part of the Gondorian province of Calenardhon, separating that land from the marshy Field of Celebrant beyond. In III 2510, Steward Cirion of Gondor gifted Calenardhon to the people known as the Men of the Éothéod, in gratitude for their help in defeating the invading Balchoth. Through this gift, the Rohirrim of Rohan came into being, and the Wold formed the northern borderland of their new realm.

The Wold had in fact played a small part in the founding of Rohan, because Eorl of the Éothéod had defeated the invaders in the Battle of the Field of Celebrant, just beyond Limlight and the northern fringes of the Wold. Less than forty years later, in III 2545, a new wave of invaders entered the Wold itself, and they were once again met by Eorl, but the King was slain in the battle that followed. Eorl's heir Brego was able to rally the Rohirrim and drive the invaders back out of the Wold, and thereafter the land was not troubled for many years.

We are not told what name the Gondorians had originally given to this remote corner of their realm, but the Rohirrim chose a name for it in their own tongue: Wold was their name for a region of untamed wilderness. This small land belonged, formally, to the Eastemnet, that part of Rohan that lay eastward of the river Entwash, but few of the Rohirrim settled here. Those who did brave the untamed highlands were considered to have a special weather-sense (Wídfara, who is named among those who rode to the Battle of the Pelennor, was one of these people of the Wold).

In the last years of the Third Age, the Wold had a small part to play in the War of the Ring. In the summer of III 3018 (the year before the War began in earnest), the Nazgûl passed invisibly through the Wold as they journeyed in search of the Ring, and were sent north and west on their way to the Shire.

A year later, during the War itself, a host of Orcs crossed the shallows of the Undeeps into the Wold, but at this time the massed army of the Rohirrim was travelling to Minas Tirith, and could do nothing to prevent the invasion. It was later learned that Ents out of Fangorn Forest had met the Orcs and despatched them.² This was a minor skirmish in the annals of the War of the Ring, but it ensured that the Wold remained a free land and part of the realm of the Rohirrim.

The word wold had a special significance for Tolkien. Between 1918 and 1920, he worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, and there he was assigned a number of words beginning with 'W' to research. Wold was one of these, and he spent considerable effort investigating its tangled etymology (he proposed that it shared a common ancient root with the word 'wild', thus explaining its sense of 'wilderness'). So, when he later came to need a name for a wild and untamed region of Middle-earth, it would have been natural for Wold to suggest itself to him.