Fréawine

Fréawine belonged to the first line of the Kings of the Mark, the house descended from Eorl the Young, who had led the Éothéod south out of the northern vales and received the grassland between the Isen and the Entwash from Gondor. He was born in the year 2594 of the Third Age, the son of Fréa, and thus stood in the fourth generation of that house, his grandfather being Aldor, called the Old, whose unusually long life had kept the kingship in one pair of hands for the better part of a century. The chronology preserved in the genealogy of the house shows that Fréawine was already a man well advanced in years by the time his father succeeded, since Fréa himself came to the throne late; the family was one in which sons waited long. By people he was of the Rohirrim, horse-lords of Northman stock whose speech and customs remained distinct from those of Gondor to whom they were bound in alliance.

The name itself is transparent within the convention Tolkien adopted for rendering the tongue of the Mark. Because the language of Rohan stood to the Common Speech roughly as Old English stands to modern English, he represented Rohirric names by Old English forms, and Fréawine is composed of the elements fréa, 'lord', and wine, 'friend' — a lord's friend, or a friend who is himself a lord. The first element repeats his father's name exactly, a straightforward instance of the practice by which sons of the house carried forward a syllable from the preceding generation. The same element recurs much later in the name of Fréaláf, so that the sound persisted in the royal line long after Fréawine's own generation had passed.

One later consequence of the name deserves notice here, since it bears on lineage rather than on deeds. A man named Freca, prominent in the Mark generations afterwards, asserted that he was descended from Fréawine and evidently rested some claim to standing upon that descent. The assertion was received with reserve: Freca was dark-haired, and it was commonly said of him that his blood was in large part Dunlending. Whether the connection was genuine is nowhere settled in the records of the house, which preserve the claim without endorsing it.

Fréawine's life falls almost entirely within a stretch of the Mark's history in which the chroniclers found little to set down. He was born in 2594, when his grandfather Aldor the Old had already held the kingship for some fifty years and would hold it for fifty more; Aldor did not die until 2645, by which time Fréawine was a man of fifty-one and his father Fréa was seventy-five. Fréa's reign proved short by the measure of that house, lasting fourteen years and ending with his death in 2659. Fréawine came to the throne in that year, in his sixty-fifth, the second king running to inherit as an old man, and he held it until his own death in 2680, a span of twenty-one years.

The realm he received had been shaped chiefly by his grandfather. Under Aldor the Rohirrim had grown greatly in number and had pressed their settlement into the mountain valleys behind Edoras, Harrowdale among them, while the last of the Dunlendish inhabitants who still held land east of the Isen were driven out or brought under the rule of the Mark. That expansion left the kingdom consolidated within the borders Gondor had granted to Eorl, and left beyond the Isen a population with a long memory of dispossession. Fréawine's reign thus fell in the interval between the work of clearing and the reckoning for it, and the alliance with Gondor, which bound each people to come to the other's aid at need, was not called upon in his day so far as the records show.

What the annals say of the kings who followed Aldor is that little is told of them, because in their time the Mark had peace and grew prosperous. This is the whole of the direct testimony concerning Fréawine's rule, and it is worth reading as evidence rather than as a gap: no war, no invasion across either river, no summons from Gondor, and no quarrel within the house is entered against his years. The Tale of Years, which records the wider troubles of the Third Age closely enough, passes over the two decades of his kingship without an entry. He died in 2680 at the age of eighty-six and was succeeded by his son Goldwine, who had been born in 2619 and so came to the throne at sixty-one, continuing the pattern of long-lived fathers and elderly heirs that marked the first line.

One tangible trace of him survived into the events of the War of the Ring. The kings of the first line were laid in barrows before the gates of Edoras, ranged in a row on the western side of the road that climbs to the hall, and by the time Théoden's riders brought Gandalf and his companions up that road there were nine such mounds, grown over with the small white flower the Rohirrim called simbelmynë. Fréawine's grave was the fifth of them, counted outward from Eorl's. The arrangement is the plainest statement of what his reign amounted to in the memory of his people: a name in the correct place in a line, marked and tended, with no deed attached to it.

The quiet did not outlast his grandson. In the days of Déor, the seventh king, Dunlendish raiders crossed the Isen with increasing boldness, and the Mark discovered that the old ring of Isengard, held in trust for Gondor, had passed out of friendly hands. From there the pressure grew until it broke over the kingdom in the time of Helm Hammerhand. It was in that reign, and not in his own, that Fréawine's name returned to the record: in 2754 a man of the Mark named Freca, who traced himself to Fréawine and pressed a suit at Edoras on the strength of it, was struck down by Helm in the quarrel that followed. Four years later Freca's son Wulf led the Dunlendings into Rohan, took Edoras, and drove Helm to the refuge in the western dales that afterwards bore his name. Fréawine had been dead seventy-four years by then, and had no part in any of it; his name served only as the pedigree by which another man argued for standing.

The office Fréawine held was that of a king in the older northern manner rather than that of a sovereign administering a state. The records of the Mark name him fifth in a succession that passed from father to son without break from Eorl onward, and they preserve no trace of election, acclamation or any body whose consent was required; the kingship was simply inherited and personal. Its seat was the hall at Edoras that Brego had raised and completed, and what the king principally did there was hold his household, receive his men, and command the Riders when they were called out. Beyond leading in war and disposing of the land his people had settled, no formal power is attributed to any king of the first line, and none whatever to Fréawine in particular.

Of ability apart from office there is nothing to record. The Rohirrim were mortal Men of Northman descent, without the long life or the foresight ascribed to the Númenórean line, and no artefact, heirloom or hallow attaches to the kings of the Mark in the sources; the great horn of the house and the arms of Eorl figure in later reigns, not in his. The one prerogative peculiar to the royal house was equine: the mearas, the horses descended from Felaróf, would carry no one but the King of the Mark or his sons. That is a right of possession rather than a power, and it marks the limit neatly — what distinguished the king from other lords of the Mark was the horse he might ride and the muster he might summon.

His tenure of the land was itself conditional. Eorl had received the plain from Cirion under an oath of mutual aid, sworn to bind the heirs of both houses, so that every king after him held the Mark as a grant answerable to Gondor at need; Fréawine could no more renounce that obligation than he could have claimed the land without it. The internal ordering of the realm is likewise beyond recovery for his time: the division of the Mark under Marshals, with their fixed charges and musters, is set out only in accounts belonging to reigns long after his, and nothing permits it to be read back into the seventh century of the Third Age. Even the strongest fortress within his borders, the burg at the mouth of the Deeping-coomb, was old Gondorian work inherited rather than built by his people.

Every tie the records grant Fréawine runs vertically. In the genealogy of the first line he stands between one name above him and one below, and the table gives him no wife, no brother, no sister and no daughter; not even an unnamed queen is implied, though a son plainly required one. This is a fact about the document rather than about his household. The same table widens readily in later generations, where the sons of Helm are set down together with the sister whose son followed them, and where Théoden's sister Théodwyn appears with her two children named beside her. The house kept collateral names when it had cause to; for Fréawine's generation it kept none, and what survives of his kin is therefore a chain rather than a family.

Outwards, the one standing bond belonging to his office was with Gondor, and it is worth noticing what sort of counterpart that gave him. No king had sat in Minas Tirith for centuries before Eorl ever rode south; the man who answered for Gondor in Fréawine's lifetime was a Ruling Steward, holding authority in trust for a line that had failed. The compact between the two peoples had been sworn between houses and was inherited by both parties, so that neither prince had to renew it and neither could set it aside. It was thus a relationship in the fullest legal sense and an empty one in practice: two rulers bound to each other's aid who, so far as anything is recorded, never had occasion to meet or to write.

What the later history of the Mark shows, and what gives Fréawine's name its only afterlife, is that descent itself functioned as a form of standing among the Rohirrim. When the direct male succession finally broke in the ninth reign, the crown passed to a sister's son and the second line began, which means that kinship reckoned through women was good enough to carry a throne when it had to be. Against that background the claim pressed at Edoras by a man asserting Fréawine as his forefather was not an absurdity but an argument in the ordinary idiom of the country, and its rejection turned on doubts about his blood rather than on the principle. Fréawine himself was by then long past being anyone's contemporary; he had become an ancestor, which in the Mark was a position with consequences.