Nahar

The horse ridden by Oromë bears a name that the Elvish loremasters explain by sound rather than by sense: they held that it was formed in imitation of his voice, so that the word itself carries the noise of his neighing. This is the only etymology the published tradition offers, and it is presented as an Eldarin opinion rather than as a settled derivation; no gloss is given in Quenya or Sindarin terms, and no alternative form of the name is recorded. Unlike his rider, who answers to several names among different peoples, the horse is known by this one designation alone, and later usage keeps it unchanged. The account of his voice is borne out in the narrative, where his call rings out at the waters of the East on the night the Elves are first found.

Of where the creature came from the texts say almost nothing. He is introduced already in his office, as the mount on which the Hunter rides through the woods of the world, and no begetting, breeding or first appearance is described; nothing indicates whether he was made or found, nor whether he belongs to Valinor or to the lands east of the Sea. What is given is appearance and habit: white of coat, silver under the stars, and shod so that his hooves are heard in the dark. He is bound to Oromë's journeys into Middle-earth during the long years when Melkor held it, and the sound of his passage is part of what the awakening Quendi first perceived of the Powers.

A second tradition, from a wholly different quarter, complicates the question of descent. The Men of Rohan, who called the Hunter Béma in their own speech, held that he had brought the sire of the mearas out of the West over the Sea, and traced the line of their great horses to that gift. This is reported as the lore of the Rohirrim, not as Elvish record, and the Elvish sources nowhere confirm it or connect any later horse with Oromë's own steed. The two accounts therefore stand side by side without joining: one names a horse and explains only his name, the other claims an ancestry for a mortal breed and does not name the ancestor.

Everything the tradition grants this creature is defined by the office he holds. He is a bearing-beast for one of the Powers, strong enough to carry a Vala through the woods and wastes of the unfinished world and to keep pace with a hunt that ranged over great distances, but no measure of that strength is ever given, and no feat is set down for comparison. He is not said to be swifter than other horses, only to be the one Oromë rides; no other rider is ever named, and no gear beyond the fact of riding is described. The single faculty singled out by the loremasters is his voice, and even there the texts claim nothing more than sound: it is loud, it carries, and it is remembered, but it works no compulsion and is never said to break anything or drive anything away by itself. Speech is not among his gifts. He gives no counsel, receives no doom, and holds no converse with his rider, which sets him apart from the hound of Valinor, to whom words and a foretold end were both granted.

One moment in the narrative credits him with perception of his own. At the eastern water he stopped of his own accord and gave tongue before his rider had marked anything, and the finding of the Quendi follows from that halt rather than from any searching. The account offers no explanation for it, and does not repeat it; nothing suggests foresight, and the incident is left as a beast's alertness that happened to serve. What follows shows the limits plainly enough. The Powers had to be told, and Oromë rode back across the world to carry the tidings, which took him away from the newly found people for a time; the horse's speed shortened that journey but did not abolish it. Neither did his presence protect the Quendi. Some had already been hunted down by Melkor's servants and taken away, and rumour turned the shape of horse and rider in the dark into a further terror, so that Elves who saw them from afar fled and hid. A creature whose approach could be mistaken for the thing it opposed was of no use against a fear already sown.

No year can be set against any part of this creature's story: the published chronicles begin their reckoning much later, and the ages in which he is most active are told in relative order alone. The earliest of them is the long time before the Elves were found, when the Valar had withdrawn to Aman and left the lands east of the Sea in Melkor's keeping. Oromë alone among the Powers returned there with any regularity, riding into the unlit forests to hunt down the monstrous things bred under Melkor's dominion, and it is in this office that his horse first enters the record. The Quenta gives no count of these journeys and no single episode from them; it establishes only a habit, sustained across an age, of a rider passing through darkened country with a beast beneath him whose approach could be heard before it was seen.

The one dated turning point of his life is undated in the very text that reports it. On one such hunt Oromë turned eastward and rode by the northern shores of the inland sea, past the country beneath the Mountains of the East, and there came upon the shores of the water where the first Elves had lately awakened. The horse's part in that arrival has been described above; what belongs to the chronology is that this is the moment at which he passes out of a Vala's private business and into Elvish history. Everything the Eldar afterwards knew of him dates from that night or from the years immediately following, and their account of his name is itself a memory of that first hearing. The Silmarillion supplies no figure for the year, and the annals that would later assign one belong to a different stratum of the writings.

What follows the discovery is a war and a migration, and the horse is present in neither by name. The Valar took counsel and came upon Melkor in the north, threw down his fortress and led him bound to Valinor, and that campaign is narrated at length without a word of Oromë's mount. So too the long westward march of the three kindreds from the Waters of Awakening: Oromë guides it, the host follows through lands it does not know, and the animal that carried him is left unmentioned throughout. The same holds for the crossing to Aman and for the settlement of the Eldar there. Whether this silence reflects the compression of the chronicle or a genuine absence cannot be determined from the text, but the effect is that his recorded appearances end almost where they begin.

Through the remainder of the Elder Days he does not reappear. The darkening of the Two Trees, the pursuit that followed it, the exile of the Noldor and the long wars in Beleriand are told without him, and Oromë himself withdraws from the foreground of the narrative after the early chapters, so that the horse has no rider to accompany into the later story. He takes no part at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, is absent from the fall of the northern realms, and is not named among anything that crosses the Sea when the host of the West comes at last against Morgoth. His history, in the strict sense of recorded event, is confined to a single age and effectively to a single night within it.

The latest point at which he touches the chronicle is not an appearance at all but a memory held by mortals many thousands of years afterwards. In the Third Age the horsemen of the Mark preserved a tradition about the origin of their own breed and the Power they knew under a name of their own language, and that tradition, discussed in an earlier section, is the only place where anything belonging to Oromë's riding is carried forward into recorded mortal time. It is undated, attaches to no event, and names no horse; the connection to the creature treated here is one that the sources permit but never make. After it the record is closed, and no work assigns him an end, a departure, or a fate of any kind.

Within the Elder Days the horse of Oromë is very nearly alone in bearing a name of his own. The Quenta gives names to swords, houses, hounds and hills, but scarcely ever to a mount, and the one clear exception belongs to the last days of Fingolfin. When the High King of the Noldor rode north in his rage after the Battle of Sudden Flame, the horse that carried him is called Rochallor, and he is named only for that ride: he bore his master across the waste to the gates of Angband and out of the record. Nothing is said of his colour, his origin or his end, and no link of any kind is drawn between him and the beast that Oromë rode. The two names stand as the whole of the Elvish tradition's roll of individual horses.

The named horses of the great breed all belong to mortal record, and to the Mark. First among them is Felaróf, whom Eorl the Young claimed as recompense after the beast had thrown and killed his father Léod; he suffered no other rider, understood the speech of Men without being able to answer it, and lived out a man's span rather than a horse's. Of his descendants the chronicles name Shadowfax, greatest and swiftest of them, who would carry no one until Gandalf, and who went under neither saddle nor bit; and Snowmane, whom Théoden rode to the Pelennor and who died there of a dart, falling upon his master, so that a mound was raised over him apart from the graves of men. These are the only members of that line whose names the histories preserve.

Beyond that stock a handful of other horses are named without claim to any descent. Glorfindel's white horse Asfaloth carried Frodo over the Ford of Bruinen; Hasufel and Arod were lent out of Éomer's company to Aragorn and to Legolas; Firefoot was Éomer's own, Windfola bore Éowyn and the hobbit with her to the battle, and Roheryn came south with the Dúnedain for Aragorn's riding. None of these is given a voice, an ancestry, or a place in the older lore.

In the chapter that brings the Elves into the story, the horse functions as the narrative's hinge. The finding of the Quendi is not presented as a revelation granted from on high, nor as the fulfilment of a search: it happens in the course of an ordinary hunt, when a rider turns eastward on no particular errand and his mount checks beneath him. The chronicle, which elsewhere moves by councils, dooms and wars, here turns upon an animal's reaction, and everything that follows in the history of the Eldar proceeds from that interruption. Placing the discovery in a beast's ear rather than in a Power's foresight keeps the moment small at the point where it matters most, and the effect is deliberate: the greatest turn of the age is narrated as an accident of the road.

The mount also does something for its rider that the texts do without in the case of the other Valar. Where the Powers are otherwise described by dominion and disposition, Oromë is given equipment — a horn, a hound, a horse — and so becomes the one among them who can be pictured at all, and pictured in a form Elves and Men would afterwards recognise as a hunter of their own kind. All three of those attributes are things that make noise or move at speed, and in an age before Sun and Moon, when the eastern lands lay unlit, sound is the sense by which the narrative reaches its reader.

What the creature stands for, in the end, is the arrival of the Powers in a form that could be perceived rather than understood. The awakened Elves had already begun to make words and to name what they saw; the first thing belonging to the Valar that entered their speech was not a title or a doctrine but an animal, and they fixed it in language by the sound it made. That is the whole of the tradition's claim about him, and it is a modest one: an unspeaking beast, remembered for a noise, standing at the head of the record that the Eldar kept of themselves.