Éomer

The names by which Éomer and his household are known in the narrative are not their own words but a rendering of them. In his note on translation Tolkien explains that the speech of the Mark, standing to the Common Tongue as an older and more archaic relative, is represented throughout by Old English, so that the reader meets these men in a language whose distance from the surrounding prose imitates the real distance between Rohirric and Westron. Éomer's name belongs to that represented speech and is built of two elements, the first of which, éo-, is the word for horse; it recurs steadily through his kindred and his people, in Éomund and Éowyn, and in Éothéod, the name of the horse-folk from whom the Rohirrim were sprung. Appendix E adds the small precision that the acute accent marks a long vowel and that the é and the o are sounded separately, as two syllables rather than a diphthong.

In Rohan itself he is named by descent, as Éomer son of Éomund, and it was through his mother rather than his father that he stood within the royal kindred, the House of Eorl. The style he carried at the outbreak of the war likewise names his country as its own inhabitants named it: the Riddermark, the mark or bounded land of the Riders. Rohan and Rohirrim are Sindarin words, given by Gondor to the land and the people it had settled on its northern border, and used of them by outsiders; among themselves the Riders were the Eorlingas, the followers or sons of Eorl. The by-name that attached to Éomer in later years, Éadig, is drawn from the same old stratum of speech, where the word carried the double sense of fortunate and blessed.

The people into which he was born were, by the reckoning of Gondor, recent tenants of their country. They were Northmen in origin, of the same stock as the men of the upper Anduin and the lands east of Mirkwood, and akin in remote descent to those houses of Men that had passed westward into Beleriand in the Elder Days, though their own forefathers never made that crossing and never came under the influence of Númenor. From the vales of Anduin the Éothéod had removed northward toward the river's sources, and from there Eorl the Young brought them south at the summons of Gondor; the empty province of Calenardhon was granted to them for their help, and the grant was sealed with an oath of mutual aid that bound both realms thereafter. Éomer's inheritance was therefore a young kingdom with a long memory, still counting its generations from a single migration and still speaking a tongue its southern neighbours could not follow.

Éomer was the son of Éomund of Eastfold, a marshal of the Mark, and of Théodwyn, Théoden's sister. When Éomund was killed by orc-raiders whom he pursued too far into the eastern wilds, and Théodwyn died soon after of grief, the king took the boy and his young sister into his own house at Edoras and raised them among his own kin. By the time the War of the Ring came upon Rohan, Éomer held the office of Third Marshal of the Riddermark and commanded the éored that watched the eastern plains. His standing at court, however, had grown difficult: Gríma Wormtongue had the king's ear, and Éomer's open distrust of Isengard and his readiness to ride against its servants were counted as insolence.

In late February of the year 3019 of the Third Age, Éomer left Eastfold without leave and rode north after a company of orcs that had crossed the Entwash bearing captives out of the Emyn Muil. His riders overtook and destroyed them at the eaves of Fangorn, though the hobbits they had carried escaped into the forest unseen. Returning southward, he came upon Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli hunting the same trail across the grasslands. The meeting was tense, for strangers were forbidden the Mark in that season and Gimli's answers gave offence, but Éomer chose to trust Aragorn's word rather than the letter of the law: he let the three go free and lent them two horses of his company, asking only that the beasts be returned. For this disobedience Théoden, prompted by Wormtongue, had him arrested and confined at Edoras.

Gandalf's coming to Meduseld ended both the king's long apathy and his nephew's imprisonment. Éomer was released, his sword restored to him, and he rode at Théoden's side to Helm's Deep, where the host of Isengard broke against the Hornburg through the night. He held the wall and the gate through the worst of the assault together with Aragorn, and at first light joined the charge that swept the enemy out onto the field and into the strange wood that had risen there overnight. From the ruin of Isengard he returned with the king to Edoras and then to Harrowdale, where the muster of the Rohirrim was gathered. When Théoden answered Gondor's summons, Éomer rode with the host by the mountain roads and through the Drúadan Forest to the Pelennor.

The battle before Minas Tirith on the fifteenth of March made him king. Théoden, mortally hurt beneath his fallen horse, named Éomer his heir before he died, since his own son Théodred had been killed at the Fords of Isen earlier that month. Coming upon his sister lying beside the king and taking her for dead, Éomer turned back into the fighting in a black and reckless mood, and led the remnant of the Rohirrim in a charge toward the river that might have ended them all. The arrival of Aragorn with the ships taken from the Corsairs turned the day instead, and Éomer met him again upon the field, this time as one king greeting another. In the days that followed he stood in the council that resolved to march on Mordor, and he led the Rohirrim at the Black Gate on the twenty-fifth of March.

After the crowning of Elessar, Éomer confirmed the ancient alliance between the Mark and Gondor and pledged himself anew to the oath of Eorl, undertaking that Rohan would answer any need of the southern realm. In high summer he escorted Théoden's bier home, and the old king was laid in a new mound among the barrows before Edoras. At the funeral feast Éomer gave his sister's hand to Faramir of Gondor, and there also settled his earlier quarrel with Gimli over the beauty of the Lady of Lórien by conceding the dispute in favour of Arwen. He afterwards married Lothíriel, daughter of Prince Imrahil of Dol Amroth, and their son Elfwine the Fair succeeded him.

Éomer's authority in Rohan was an office rather than a gift. The Mark was governed for war by the Marshals of the Riddermark: the king held the first place and the muster of Edoras and the central lands, while the second and third marshals held the West-mark and the East-mark under him. Éomer's charge was the eastern province, seated at Aldburg in the Folde, and it obliged him to watch the crossings of the Entwash, the marches toward the Emyn Muil and the open plains where raiders came in from the East. The force at his immediate disposal was an éored, a mounted company reckoned at something near six score riders when complete; anything greater required the king's word and the calling of the full muster. This is the exact boundary against which he broke when he pursued the orc-band north without leave, and it is why the offence could be treated at Edoras as a matter for arrest rather than mere reproof.

His power in the field was entirely that of a horse-lord: speed, weight of charge and the handling of cavalry on open ground. He bore a sword named Gúthwinë and rode a horse called Firefoot, and the narrative credits him with no arts beyond arms and horsemanship — no lore, no craft, no long life, for the Rohirrim were of the Middle Peoples and unrelated to Númenor. The limits of that strength are shown as plainly as its use. Behind the Deeping Wall his riders had to fight dismounted, as footmen in a siege for which they were not made; before Minas Tirith the charge that broke the besieging lines could not by itself win the field, and the Rohirrim were left outnumbered by the fresh strength coming up from the south until the ships from Pelargir changed the reckoning. Against the terror of the Nazgûl, valour and discipline availed nothing at all; that fear was lifted by other means.

In the shape of the story Éomer serves as the point at which Rohan turns from decay back to its old fidelity, and afterwards as the guarantor of that fidelity in a new age. Even as king his reach was bounded: at the Black Gate he commanded the Riders under Aragorn's leadership, and his later campaigns in the East and South were fought in the service of an alliance in which Gondor held the greater place. What he could give was not power of any rare kind but the thing Gondor had lacked at need — a mounted host that came when it was called.

Of all Éomer's ties, the one with his sister is the most closely examined, and the text examines it chiefly through what he failed to notice. They were reared in the same hall and his devotion to her is never in question, yet he mistook her silence for composure and did not measure what the slow corruption of the court had cost her, shut in as she was with a failing old man and with Gríma, whose hopes of her Saruman had deliberately fostered. Gandalf put this to him without softening while she lay in the Houses of Healing: a man with a command and enemies to ride against has outlets that a woman kept indoors to tend an ailing king does not. Éomer took the reproach and turned it against himself. The exchange fixes the shape of his character in a way no battle does — loyalty entire and unhesitating, but an imagination that reaches only as far as the things he himself would want.

The household in which that blindness could form is described most fully outside the main narrative. Éomer and his cousin Théodred, the king's son and Second Marshal, were close friends and of one mind concerning Isengard, and Gríma's work at Meduseld was directed as much at keeping the two apart as at dulling Théoden himself, since Saruman's instructions required the king's son dead and his nephew discredited. The design very nearly succeeded: when Isengard moved in earnest, Théodred had been killed and Éomer confined, and the Mark for some days had no marshal free to answer for it.

Outside his kin, Éomer's attachments are formed almost entirely in the field and rest on what he has watched a person do rather than on what report or custom says of their people. He came to Aragorn with the ordinary suspicions of a Rohirrim captain toward the Elves and the Golden Wood, and to Gimli with none at all, and he revised both judgements by observation. The same instinct governed his dealings with Gondor: Imrahil, who found Éowyn still breathing among the fallen and who afterwards shared the command of the combined hosts with him, became first a colleague in arms and then, through marriage, kin. Rohan's ancient wariness of neighbours is present in him at the start and gone by the end, and the friendships he made in one campaign are what carried the alliance of the two realms into the next age.

In Peter Jackson's film trilogy Éomer is played by Karl Urban, appearing first in the second film and again in the third; he has no part in the opening film, which ends before the story reaches Rohan. The screen version keeps the encounter on the plains, where he meets Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli and lends them horses, but it alters the reason he is absent from Edoras afterwards. Where the book has him arrested and confined at the king's order, the films have him banished outright by Théoden under Gríma's influence, so that he rides into exile with a body of riders loyal to him. That change carries a second one: because he is not present in the fortress, the relief that arrives with Gandalf at dawn after the night battle is led by Éomer himself, taking over the function the novel gives to Erkenbrand of the Westfold. The death of Théodred, which the book reports at a distance, is instead shown on screen as a death at Edoras, and serves as the immediate cause of the banishment.

The films also simplify what surrounds him. Prince Imrahil does not appear at all, so it is Éomer who finds his sister among the fallen before Minas Tirith, and the marriage into the house of Dol Amroth that follows in the book has no place in the adaptation. Théoden's dying words are given to Éowyn rather than used to name an heir, and although Éomer is present at Aragorn's crowning, his own accession, his by-name and the long reign that follows are left outside the story the films tell. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of 1981, which runs to twenty-six parts and is by some distance the most complete of the earlier adaptations, has room for the sequence the films rearrange, and keeps his disgrace at court and his release in the form the book gives them. Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 breaks off after Helm's Deep and so reaches none of his later career; the intended second part that would have covered it was never made.