Derufin

Derufin belongs to that small class of figures in Gondor's muster whom the narrative names once and then leaves largely unglossed. No epithet is attached to him, no translation of his name is offered, and Tolkien nowhere in the published work sets out its elements. The form itself is Sindarin in shape, which is unremarkable for a man of his standing: the account of naming customs appended to the tale states that the Dúnedain and the folk who lived under their rule commonly bore names of Elvish form rather than in their own older speech, a habit that had long outlasted any daily use of the Elven-tongues in the southern kingdom. What can be observed without conjecture is the pattern within his own family. His father is called Duinhir and his brother Duilin, and all three names begin alike, so that the three of them are heard as a set when the roll of the incoming companies is read out. Whether that echo is deliberate within the story or simply an artefact of the naming style is not said.

His home country is named twice over, once in Elvish and once in the common speech: Morthond, and the Blackroot Vale. The first element of the Sindarin name is the familiar one for dark or black, met with in many names of places that lie under shadow, and the English rendering supplies the second as root. The valley takes its name from the river that runs through it, whose head lies in a shadowed place beneath the southern wall of the White Mountains, in country reckoned grim by those who lived near it; from there the water runs down and away southward through a long vale toward the sea.

Derufin is therefore a Man of Gondor, and more precisely one of the highland folk of an outlying province rather than of the City itself. He is a son of the lord of that vale, so that his place in the account is a filial one; he is introduced beside his father and not on his own account. The men who came out of that upland with them were archers, which suits a hill people whose strength lay in a weapon that could be carried far on foot. Beyond this the text is silent: it gives him no age, no household, no words of his own, and no history before the road to Minas Tirith.

The whole of Derufin's recorded history falls within a single week of the year 3019 of the Third Age. On the ninth of March, the day on which Mithrandir came up out of the north to Minas Tirith with the hobbit Peregrin, horns were heard on the southward road in the afternoon, and the companies of the fiefs came in through the Great Gate before it was shut. Derufin rode in that column with his father and his brother at the head of five hundred archers out of their own vale, and the crowd along the street named each lord aloud as he passed and cheered him. Of the contingents that came in that day only the prince of Dol Amroth led a larger body of men. The welcome, however, thinned as the last of them went by, for the whole muster of the Outlands amounted to a fraction of what the City had hoped for and less still than it needed, and the watchers said so where the newcomers could hear it.

After the muster the narrative loses sight of him for five days. The morning that followed brought no dawn, only the darkness that flowed westward out of Mordor and lay over the fields; the outer wall of the Pelennor was manned and then broken, Faramir was driven back from the causeway forts with heavy loss, and by the fourteenth the enemy had encircled the townlands and set fire to them. Whether the bowmen of the Blackroot stood on the Rammas Echor among those who were forced back across the fields, or waited under arms within the circles of the City, is not stated. No word or deed is attributed to Derufin in these days, and he is not among the captains whose counsel is reported. He reappears only in the account of the battle itself, and then only in the reckoning of the dead.

The Gate was broken at the hour when the horns of the Rohirrim sounded in the north, on the fifteenth of March. In the fighting that filled the Pelennor through that day the men of the south came up under the standard of the Serpent, and with them the great beasts of the Harad, before which the horses of the Riders would not stand and against which ordinary shot was of little use. The two sons of Duinhir brought their archers in close, seeking the one mark that could bring such a creature down, the eye; and in doing so they came within reach of the beasts and were trampled to death, the brothers together. The manner of it is told in a single retrospective passage, set among the other losses of the day rather than in the running account of the battle; there is no scene, no speech, and no sequel. It is the only action ascribed to Derufin anywhere in the published work, and it is also his death.

He fell in company with much of the leadership that had ridden in with him six days before. Forlong of Lossarnach was cut off and killed on foot, Hirluin the Fair never went back to the green hills of his own country, and among the northern and Rohirrim dead were Halbarad the Dúnadan, Grimbold of Grimslade, and the king of the Mark himself. The victory was won, but the cost fell heaviest on precisely those lords whose arrival the City had judged insufficient, and the fiefs that had sent them were left without the men who had led them. Nothing further is said of Duinhir, and the record does not report who brought the survivors of the five hundred home, or whether they were brought home at all.

The dead of both peoples were buried in mounds beneath the walls where they had fallen, and afterwards the song-makers of Rohan composed a lay of those mounds which was still sung in the Mark long after. That lay runs through the fallen by name and by homeland, and the two brothers of the Blackroot Vale are set in it side by side, with the observation that they returned no more to the uplands they came from. This is the last mention of Derufin in the tale, and it is characteristic of how he is handled throughout: he is named in a list on the way to the war, named again in a list of the dead, and commemorated in a third list made of verse. Six days, one march, and one charge against the mûmakil constitute his entire attested history; everything else about him belongs to inference rather than to the text.

Derufin's function in the story is structural rather than personal: he is one of the lesser captains of the provincial levy by which Gondor's Stewards drew soldiers from the fiefs beyond the Pelennor. He holds no office that the book names. He is not a lord, since his father lives and rules the vale; he is not a knight of the household, nor an officer of the Guard, nor a member of any council. Whatever authority he exercises over the men of the Blackroot is delegated from Duinhir and is shared with his brother, and it reaches no further than the five hundred who marched with them. In this he is representative of a whole rank of men in the account of the war, named so that the muster reads as a gathering of real districts rather than an abstract army, and given no independent standing beyond that.

The strength he brings is of one kind only. His people are archers, not horsemen and not heavy foot, and they arrive without the mounted retinue that came from the coastlands to the south. Set against a total muster of the outlying provinces that fell short of three thousand, five hundred bowmen were nonetheless a considerable share of the reinforcement, which measures how thin the whole reserve had become rather than how great his own command was. Yet nothing in the defence of the City is decided by him. The dispositions on the wall and the field are made by the Steward and, after him, by Mithrandir, Imrahil and the captains of the Rohirrim, and no order or opinion is credited to Derufin at any point.

The single tactical use to which that strength is put also marks its limit. Against the war-beasts of the Harad the bow was nearly useless at any ordinary mark: shafts stuck in their hides without stopping them, as had already been seen when Faramir's rangers met one such creature in Ithilien, and the eye was the only target worth the shot. Bringing archers close enough for that meant giving up the advantage of distance on which their whole value rested, and the text does not record that the attempt succeeded before the two brothers were ridden down. Derufin possesses no attribute beyond the ordinary compass of a mortal Man of Gondor. He works no craft, carries no named weapon or heirloom, and is nowhere credited with the longer life or particular sight that the tale elsewhere ascribes to men of purer Númenórean descent.

Almost everything the tale allows Derufin is relational. He is never introduced as himself but always as a term in a family of three, and both of his appearances place him last in that sequence, after the father who commands and the brother who is named before him; whether this marks him as the younger is not said. The bond that carries the most weight is the fraternal one. Duilin and he share a command rather than divide it, act as a single unit in the one deed attributed to either, and are killed in the same moment by the same cause. Where other men of the muster are given a district, an appearance or a manner, these two are given each other, and the narrative treats them so consistently as a pair that neither is ever shown doing anything alone. Their subordination to Duinhir is equally plain: the archers are his men, the vale is his lordship, and the sons exercise what authority they have on loan.

Outside the family he has companions but no acquaintances. He rides in with Forlong, Golasgil, Hirluin and the prince of Dol Amroth, men whose companies came up the same road on the same afternoon, and he shares with them a common summons from the Lord of the City; yet no meeting between Derufin and any of them is reported, and he is never brought into the presence of the Steward whose call he answered. Nor does he encounter any of the chief persons of the story. Mithrandir, Aragorn, Éomer and Imrahil all fight in the battle that kills him, and none of them is said to know his name. His closest tie to the Rohirrim is formed on the field, where their horses recoiled from the beasts his archers went in to blind, and it is a comradeship of circumstance rather than of speech.

His enemy is likewise impersonal. No captain of the Haradrim is named as his opponent, and the creature that kills him is one of a kind rather than an individual; the hostility runs between peoples and not between men, and nothing in the account suggests he knew who or what he was going against before he closed with it. The one relationship that outlasts him is unlooked-for, since the memory of the brothers is preserved not in their own vale, of which nothing more is heard, but by the poets of a distant people who counted the enemy's dead alongside their own. That his commemoration comes from strangers, and that it names him only with his brother, is the last and most exact statement of how the tale holds him: never quite separate, and known chiefly by whom he stood beside.