The War of the Rohirrim (2024 film)

Kenji Kamiyama's animated film of 2024 gives the region far more space, since its subject is the war of Helm's reign. Brian Cox voices Helm, Shaun Dooley voices Freca and Luke Pasqualino voices Wulf, whose grudge against the king drives the plot and who leads the Dunlendish host against Rohan. The film keeps the outline of the appendix account: the rejected marriage proposal, Freca's death at the king's hands and the siege of the Hornburg through a hard winter. Its main change lies in the king's daughter, who is unnamed in the book. The film names her Héra, voiced by Gaia Wise, and makes her the central figure, so that Wulf's campaign becomes a personal quarrel with her as much as a claim to land. As a result, Dunland is seen chiefly through its lord's ambition, and the hill-folk's older complaint against the Mark stays in the background.

Kenji Kamiyama's animated film The War of the Rohirrim gives them far more room, because its subject is Helm Hammerhand's war, in which the Dunlendish host under Wulf took Edoras. Wulf is the film's principal antagonist and is voiced by Luke Pasqualino; his father Freca is voiced by Shaun Dooley. The appendix account behind the film is brief, and the adaptation fills it out freely. Helm's daughter, who has no name in Tolkien's account, becomes the central figure as Héra. The film gives her and Wulf a shared childhood and develops Wulf's motives into a personal grievance, so that the conflict rests less on the Dunlendings' old claim to the land than on the enmity between two houses.

The animated film The War of the Rohirrim takes its story from the appendix account of Helm Hammerhand, so the seizure of Edoras by Wulf stands near its centre. Brian Cox voices Helm and Luke Pasqualino voices Wulf, and Miranda Otto returns as Éowyn to narrate. The film's chief departure is the invention of a daughter for Helm, Héra, voiced by Gaia Wise, who carries the story; the killing of Wulf, which the appendix gives to Fréaláf when he retakes the city, is transferred to her. The BBC's radio dramatisation, which covers the whole of the novel, keeps the book's sequence at Edoras largely intact, with Jack May as Théoden.

The older adaptations leave no room for it either, though for different reasons. Ralph Bakshi's animated film moves through Lothlórien briefly and breaks off after Helm's Deep, so the whole of the material in which the stone would matter lies outside it; John Hurt voices Aragorn there. The Rankin/Bass television film of the last part of the story opens with the Fellowship long dispersed and compresses the Gondor chapters severely, and no such token figures in it. The BBC Radio dramatisation, in twenty-six parts, is the most complete of the older versions and the one usually held to follow the book most nearly, with Robert Stephens as Aragorn; but a small brooch is the kind of detail a sound medium can only report, and the name rather than the object is what carries there. Nothing in the later films drawn from the appendices touches it, their material lying centuries earlier.

Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 reaches only the northern edge of the range, since it ends with the fighting at Helm's Deep and never takes the story south. The BBC radio dramatisation of 1981, the fullest of the older versions, keeps the book's course through Dunharrow, the road beneath the mountains and the ride to the city. The 2024 animated film The War of the Rohirrim, directed by Kenji Kamiyama, is the first adaptation whose centre is the range itself, telling the story of Helm Hammerhand's stand in the Hornburg through the Long Winter. Brian Cox voices Helm, and Miranda Otto returns as Éowyn to narrate. The film's principal figure is Helm's daughter Héra, voiced by Gaia Wise, who is unnamed in the appendices. Her story, together with the enlarged role of the Dunlending leader Wulf, is the film's own addition to the brief account in the book.