Fréa

Fréa was born in the year 2570 of the Third Age into the ruling house of the Mark, the line descended from Eorl the Young, who had received the emptied province of Calenardhon from Gondor in 2510 and had settled his people there. Fréa's father was Aldor, third king and a son of Brego; through him Fréa stood in the fourth generation of the house, and he would likewise be reckoned the fourth to hold the kingship. He was the eldest of Aldor's sons, though several sisters had been born before him, so that within the family he was the fourth child rather than the first. His birth thus fell early in his father's long reign, in a kingdom still young enough that its founding was living memory rather than legend.

The name itself belongs to the pattern by which the speech of Rohan is presented in the chronicles. Tolkien explains in his note on translation that the Rohirric tongue, being archaic in relation to the Common Speech, is rendered throughout by Old English forms; the names of the kings are therefore given not in their true Rohirric shapes but in equivalents drawn from that older English. Read in this way, Fréa answers to the Old English word for a lord or ruler, a title-word pressed into service as a personal name. The same element recurs elsewhere in the house of Eorl, in such names as Fréawine and Fréaláf, marking a family habit of naming rather than a single coinage.

By people Fréa was one of the Rohirrim, the horse-folk who called themselves the Eorlingas after their first lord and who named their land the Mark. Their ancestors had lived far to the north in the Éothéod, in the lands about the upper waters of Anduin, before Eorl brought them south; among themselves they kept their own northern speech and their own customs, and their kings were buried in mounds before the gate of Edoras. Fréa was born into a court already established: Brego had completed the golden hall of Meduseld only the year before his birth, and the seat of the kings at Edoras was by then the fixed centre of the realm. He grew up, in short, as a prince of a settled kingdom rather than of a wandering people.

The year of Fréa's birth was also the year in which his father took the kingship, and that succession did not follow the ordinary course. Aldor had an elder brother, Baldor, who at the feast held for the completion of the new hall vowed to walk the dark road beneath the mountain; he passed the Forbidden Door and did not return. Brego did not long survive the loss of his heir and died in the following year, 2570, so that the crown came to a second son who had not been raised to expect it. Fréa was therefore born into a house whose order of inheritance had just been broken and reset, and he entered the world as the eldest son of a new king rather than as the grandson of a reigning one.

What followed was the longest wait for the throne in the history of the Mark. Aldor held the kingship for seventy-five years and lived to a hundred and one, so that he was remembered by the byname of the Old; no other king of either line approached that span. Fréa passed his entire adult life as heir, and when his father at last died in 2645 he came to the kingship at seventy-five, older at his accession than either Eorl or Brego had been at death — Eorl fell in battle in the Wold at sixty, and Brego lived only fifty-eight years. The pattern was not unique to him, for the same longevity in the house pushed several of his descendants into late accessions, but in his case it was extreme, and the chronicles register it plainly in the arithmetic of the dates.

Those seventy-five years of waiting were not empty ones for the realm. The reign of Aldor is remembered as the period in which the Rohirrim grew numerous and spread through the whole of the land granted to Eorl, occupying valleys and grasslands that had lain unpeopled since Gondor's northern province was emptied by plague and war. In the course of that expansion the last of the Dunlendish folk who still lingered east of the river Isen were driven out, and the western marches became fully the possession of the horse-lords. The record credits these things to the father, not to the son, and does not say what part a grown prince took in them; but Fréa lived through the whole process, and the settled realm he eventually inherited was in large measure the work of the reign he spent waiting out. The dispossession also left a grievance among the Dunlendings that did not fade with the generations, and which came to open war more than a century after his death.

Of Fréa's own kingship, which lasted fourteen years from 2645 to 2659, the surviving records preserve no event whatever. No campaign, no building, no embassy and no quarrel is set to his name. This is not a peculiarity of his reign alone: in the year-by-year chronicle of the Third Age the affairs of the Mark drop out of sight entirely after the loss of Baldor in 2570 and do not reappear until 2758, when Rohan was assailed from west and east at once in the days of Helm. Nearly two centuries of the kingdom's history, four full reigns among them, are represented only by the succession table. Whether that silence reflects genuine quiet or merely the narrow interests of the annalists cannot be determined from what survives, though the growth of the people under Aldor and the strength Rohan showed later both suggest the years were not troubled ones.

Fréa's son Fréawine had been born in 2594, when his father was in his twenties and still four decades from the throne, and it was he who succeeded in 2659 at the age of sixty-five, continuing both the line and its habit of elderly kings. Fréa himself died in that year at eighty-nine, having outlived his own accession by a shorter time than his son would have to wait after him. He was laid, as the kings before and after him were, in the barrows that stand below Edoras beside the road climbing to the gate: his place is among the nine mounds of the first line, the row that begins with Eorl and closes with Helm Hammerhand, after whose fall the kingship passed to a second line descended from a sister's son. In the shape the chronicle finally took, Fréa is a name, two dates and a number in a list — the record of a reign that changed nothing and interrupted nothing, and which the annalists preserved precisely because the succession he transmitted mattered more than anything he is known to have done.

Whatever authority Fréa held was that of the office rather than anything personal to him. The king of the Mark was lord of the Eorlingas, master of the hall at Edoras and first among the riders of the realm; the kingship carried with it the leading of the full muster, which in Rohan meant a mounted host rather than a garrison, and the kings both before and after him are shown at its head in person. Nothing indicates that the office had grown ceremonial in his day, since later holders of it fought at the head of the same levy; the annalists simply set down no occasion on which Fréa is seen using it. His part in the legendarium is accordingly structural rather than active: he is the point at which the crown passed intact from the reign that filled the land with people to the generations that would have to hold it.

The clearest limit on that power was written into the founding of the realm itself. Calenardhon had been given to Eorl outright and the Rohirrim owed no tribute for it, but the gift was sealed by an oath of mutual aid that bound each people to answer the other at need. A king of the Mark therefore ruled a free country whose armed strength was pledged in advance to a neighbour, and could not regard the host as wholly his own to spend. No summons out of Gondor falls within Fréa's years, nor any war of his own making; the obligation lay dormant through his reign and was discharged only by kings who came long after him.

In any sense beyond the human he had no power whatever. The lords of the Mark were Men of the northern kindreds without Númenórean descent, and the long lives that run through the house of Eorl were natural vigour rather than a granted span; in his own case and his father's they produced late accessions rather than lengthened rule. Rohan kept no Elvish lore and no seeing-stone, and its kings governed a wide land through subordinate commanders, the Marshals who held charge of the muster in its several parts. That arrangement is set out in detail only for a much later period and cannot simply be assumed unchanged for the kingdom's second century; but delegated authority of that ordinary kind is the whole of what the sources permit him, and the sum of Fréa's recorded power is that he held the office and passed it on.

Almost everything that can be said of Fréa's ties to other people has to be read out of a genealogical table, and the table is sparing. His father Aldor and his son Fréawine are named; his mother is not, nor is any wife, nor any of the sisters who were born before him. This is not an omission peculiar to his generation. Through the whole first line of the Mark the chronicle registers women only where the succession turns on them, and no queen of Rohan is named until far down the second line. The result is that Fréa's closest relationships — the marriage that produced his heir, the household he grew up in among elder sisters — are known to have existed and are known in no other way. Even his uncle Baldor enters the record only by the manner of his loss.

Downward the connections are firmer, and they are the reason his name survives at all. Every remaining king of the first line stood in his descent: Fréawine, then Goldwine, Déor, Gram, and last Helm Hammerhand, five reigns carrying his blood to the winter in which the first line failed. Nor did the failure cut the descent, for the crown then went to Fréaláf, son of Helm's sister Hild, and so passed sideways within the same kindred rather than out of it. Théoden and his kin were thus Fréa's descendants as surely as Helm was. A king remembered for nothing he did stands at the head of the entire subsequent royal house of Rohan.

Outside his own people no connection of any kind is recorded for him. In Gondor the stewardship had by then descended from Cirion, who made the grant of the land, to his son Hallas — the man who devised the Gondorian names for the country and its riders — and thereafter to Hallas's successors in turn; but no meeting, message or common undertaking joins any of them to Fréa. The one relation his kingship certainly inherited was hostile and impersonal: the resentment of the Dunlendish folk driven from the western lands in his father's time, a grievance held against the house rather than against any particular king, and answered long after his death.