Gram

Gram is set down under a single bare name. No by-name follows it in the roll of the kings, as one follows Eorl the Young or Aldor the Old, and nowhere is its sense explained. What can be said of the word belongs to the form in which the speech of the Mark reaches the reader rather than to any statement about the man: the tongue of the Rohirrim is presented throughout in the guise of Old English, so that the names of persons, halls and lands appear in shapes an English reader can construe, standing in for forms that were not English at all. In that language gram is an adjective of anger — fierce, wrathful, hostile — but the equivalence follows from the rendering, and the chronicle itself offers no gloss.

He was the son of Déor and stood eighth in the line begun by Eorl the Young, a descent that had passed from father to son in every generation since the founding of the realm, though not always to an eldest son. His birth fell in the year 2668 of the Third Age, rather more than a century and a half after the land itself had come into the keeping of his house. By then the kingship had long been seated at Edoras, in the hall raised by Brego, second of the kings. The genealogy of the House of Eorl fixes him securely between his father and the king who came after him, and adds nothing beyond that placement.

The people into which he was born were the Rohirrim, so called in the speech of Gondor, which named them for their mastery of horses; among themselves they were the Eorlingas, the folk of Eorl, and they called their country the Mark. They were Men of northern kindred who had come south out of the upper vales of Anduin, where they had been known as the Éothéod, and their language belonged to the older speech of the North, distantly related to the words that survived in the naming customs of the Shire. Their land had been granted by Cirion, Steward of Gondor, in return for the ride to the Field of Celebrant, so that Gram was born into a kingdom not yet two centuries settled, with the memory of that northern origin still close.

The kingship came to Gram at his father's death in 2718, when he was fifty years old, and he held it for twenty-three years until he died in 2741. Late accession was by then the rule in his branch of the line rather than the exception: after the long rule of Aldor the Old, who kept the throne for the better part of a century and outlived two generations of his own house, each king in turn waited into or past middle age, and Fréa, Fréawine, Goldwine and Déor each ruled for about two decades or less. Measured against that pattern Gram's reign was of ordinary length, and a little longer than his father's. He died at seventy-three, close to Déor's span and well short of the ages reached by the earlier kings.

The realm he took over was under pressure along its western border. The Dunlendings, the older inhabitants of the lands about the Isen and the Adorn whom the Rohirrim had subdued or driven out during Aldor's long reign, had not forgotten the dispossession, and in Déor's time they crossed the river in force and raided the Westfold. In 2710 they took possession of the ring of Isengard, an ancient stronghold of Gondor's building at the northern approach to the Gap, which Gondor could no longer man and which the Rohirrim had not the strength to besiege. That occupation was not undone in Gram's lifetime. His whole reign therefore passed with a hostile people seated in the fortress that commanded the way between the mountains, though the chronicle attributes to him no campaign against them and no loss to them.

The years between 2718 and 2741 fall in one of the emptier stretches of the annals of the Third Age. What the Tale of Years sets down for that period belongs mostly to the north and to Eriador, and nothing in it is fastened to Rohan or to its king. The storm that the western situation had been preparing broke seventeen years after Gram's death, when the Mark was invaded from east and west at once, Edoras was taken by Wulf son of Freca, and the king who then reigned was driven into the refuge in the White Mountains that afterwards bore his name; the Long Winter of 2758 and 2759 finished what the invasion began. Gram's reign is thus a lull before that crisis, and the chronicle treats it accordingly, recording no event within it at all.

This silence is a property of the record rather than a judgement upon the man. The account of the House of Eorl is a table of names and years with narrative attached at intervals, and the narrative fastens only where something needed explaining: how the realm was founded and how its first king fell in battle in the Wold; how the second king's heir was lost when he took the road under the mountains and did not return; how the land west of the Isen was settled; how the ninth king came to be remembered as he was. Kings whose reigns raised no such question appear only as a name between two dates, and Gram is among them. No violent end is noted for him, which the chronicle is otherwise careful to record when it occurred, but that is an argument from silence and carries no more weight than such arguments usually do.

At his death in 2741 the kingship passed to his son Helm, who was then fifty years old, exactly the age at which Gram himself had received it; Helm had been born in 2691, some twenty-seven years before his father came to the throne, and so had spent his whole youth and middle life as the heir of a reigning or an expectant king. Gram also had a daughter, Hild, whose son Fréaláf survived the disasters of 2758 and 2759 and took the crown when Helm and both of Helm's sons were dead. The first line of the kings therefore ends with Gram's son and the second begins with Gram's grandson, and every later king of the Mark, down to those who rode to the wars at the end of the Age, descends from him through his daughter. Whatever his reign contained, his place in the succession is the reason his name is kept.

The office Gram inherited was defined by the terms on which his house had been given its land. The kings of the Mark ruled as lords in their own right, owing Gondor no tribute, and were bound instead by the oath of friendship and mutual aid sworn when the grant was made: an undertaking that each realm would come to the other's help at need, which both sides still acknowledged many generations later. Within his own borders a king's authority was undivided. He was head of the folk, keeper of its law and leader of its host, and that host was mounted almost entirely, so that the strength a king of Rohan could exert was in practice the strength of a muster — riders called up from scattered settlements of a herding people and brought together into a field. Nothing in the chronicle suggests that Gram's authority differed in kind from that of the kings before or after him.

The limits of that power show in what the Rohirrim could not do rather than in any statement about it. They were Men of ordinary span, without share in the long life granted to the Númenórean houses, and the kings of Gram's line lived out lifetimes hardly longer than those of the men they ruled. No instrument or attribute of power is attached to them: no seeing-stone stood in their keeping, no counsel of the Wise sat in their hall, and their dealings with the wider world ran through the single channel of aid asked or given. Against stonework their weakness was structural — a mounted people can break an enemy in open country but can neither garrison nor reduce a fortress — which is why the stronghold at the Gap remained in hostile hands for the whole of his time. The command of the muster was in later days divided among marshals set over the marches, with the king keeping the central lands himself; how far back that arrangement reached is not recorded.

Of the outward marks of the kingship little survives in the record, and none of it is fastened to Gram in particular: an ancient blade kept among the treasures of the kings, still in the hoard at the end of the Age, and the green mounds ranged in two lines before the gates of the capital, where each king in turn was laid and where a small white flower blooms in every season. Nine mounds stood in the western line and seven in the eastern, the division falling exactly where the first line of kings ended. Gram lies among the nine, eighth of them, and that placement is the only physical trace of him the narrative preserves. What can be set out under this heading is therefore the office rather than the man: the powers described belong to the kingship of the Mark, and the chronicle assigns Gram no recorded exercise of any of them.

Almost everything the chronicle preserves about Gram is a matter of kinship, and yet it names only the kin it has use for. No wife is recorded for him, and neither is his mother; through the earlier generations of the House of Eorl the roll sets down fathers and sons and leaves the women unnamed, admitting one only where a line of descent must pass through her. Queens of the Mark become visible only at the far end of the record, in the entries for the last kings, and even there they are named in passing. Gram's daughter is an exception of the first kind, and the exception is made without comment.

A second pattern shows in the names themselves. Within a single generation the children of a house were commonly given names beginning alike: Gram's son and daughter both bear names in H, as do the two sons born to that son, and the same habit appears at the end of the Age in the brother and sister who were the children of Éomund. Across generations no such rule holds — Gram's name answers neither his father's nor his children's — so the alliteration marks siblings rather than descent. It belongs to the northern manner of naming in which the speech of the Rohirrim is presented, and it is one of the few things about Gram's household that can be read straight off the page.

Beyond the direct line stood collateral kin whom the table does not carry. The man whose son afterwards seized Edoras claimed descent from the fourth king of the Mark and held wide lands on both banks of the Adorn, with much Dunlendish blood in him by common report; he was already rich and powerful when Gram's son succeeded, so the growth of that half-foreign lordship on the western march falls within Gram's own years, though no dealing between them is recorded. That lord's demand that his son be given the new king's daughter was an attempt to bind himself to Gram's descendants by marriage rather than by force, and its refusal opened the way to force instead. Gram himself is left with no named ally and no named adversary: every relation the record grants him runs vertically, back to Eorl and forward to the kings descended from him.