Théoden

He was the only son of Thengel, sixteenth king, and was born in the year 2948 of the Third Age in Gondor, where his father had long lived apart from Rohan before the crown fell to him. His mother was Morwen of Lossarnach, a woman of Númenórean descent though not of the royal house, tall and remembered by the byname Steelsheen; of her several daughters the youngest, Théodwyn, was the sister Théoden held dearest. Something of that southern upbringing stayed with the household after Thengel's return north, for the speech of Gondor was used in Thengel's house, which not all his people welcomed. Théoden's own wife, Elfhild, died in bearing their son Théodred in 2978, and he took no other; two years later, in 2980, he succeeded his father as Lord of the Mark.

The names of the Rohirrim are given in the chronicles in Old English forms, a device of translation matching the archaic relation their tongue bore to the Common Speech. Théoden accordingly renders a word meaning the lord or chief of a people, formed from the element for folk or nation, so that the king's personal name and his office are effectively the same word; the initial consonant is the voiceless sound of English thin, and the accented first vowel stands apart as its own syllable. In the usage of his court he was addressed simply as Théoden King, the order of words itself a mark of that older speech, and he bore the styles King of Rohan and Lord of the Mark. To this the annals of his house add the byname Ednew, the Renewed, given for the recovery of his will and vigour in the last years of his reign; later readers know him also by the golden hall of Meduseld at Edoras, from which he ruled.

The first decades of Théoden's rule fell in a period when Rohan's borders held, though never without cost. In 2989 his sister Théodwyn married Éomund of Eastfold, then chief Marshal of the Mark, whose charge was the eastern marches where Orc-bands came down out of the Emyn Muil; their son Éomer was born in 2991 and their daughter Éowyn in 2995. In 3002 Éomund was drawn too far in pursuit of one such raiding party and killed, and Théodwyn fell sick and died not long after him. Théoden took the two children into his household at Edoras and raised them with his own son Théodred, calling Éomer son and Éowyn daughter. Théodred, grown, was set over the defence of the west of the realm, where the pressure from Isengard and from the Dunlendings beyond the Adorn was already gathering.

In the last years before the War of the Ring the king's vigour failed him far faster than his age warranted. The chief cause was Gríma son of Gálmód, called Wormtongue, who had risen to be his closest counsellor while secretly in the pay of Saruman, and who worked to keep Théoden housebound, doubtful of his own captains, and deaf to warnings that Isengard had turned openly hostile. Éomer, who pressed those warnings hardest, was distrusted at court in consequence, and Éowyn was left to wait upon a king she watched dwindle. When Gandalf came to Edoras in the autumn of 3018, newly escaped from the pinnacle of Orthanc, he was received coldly and told to take a horse and be gone; he chose Shadowfax, and the loss of that horse was long held against him. By then the Mark stood effectively without a policy of its own.

The blow that broke this stagnation came from the west. On the twenty-fifth of February 3019 Saruman's forces attacked the crossings of the Isen, and Théodred was killed holding the eyot in mid-river; the survivors under Grimbold and Elfhelm withdrew and could do no more than screen the fords, which were lost outright in a second assault a week later. The fuller account of these actions records that news and decision alike were delayed at Edoras, so that no fresh command reached the west while there was still a defence to command, and that Éomer's own following was held back. Rohan thus entered the decisive month with its heir dead, its western defence broken, and its king still shut in his hall.

On the second of March Gandalf returned to Edoras with Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, and in the space of a single morning the situation reversed. Théoden was brought out of the hall and his will restored to him; Gríma was exposed, offered the choice of riding to war or leaving, and fled; Éomer was released from arrest, and the king took up his sword again and called out the muster of the Westfold. Éowyn was given charge of the people and led them to the refuge of Dunharrow. Riding west, Théoden was cut off and turned aside to the Hornburg at Helm's Deep, where he sustained a night-long assault and at daybreak on the fourth rode out from the gate with Aragorn at his side; the enemy who fled from that charge was destroyed in the strange wood that had come down from Fangorn. On the fifth he rode north to Isengard, found it ruined, and there refused Saruman's parley from the window of Orthanc.

Within the War of the Ring Théoden's function is that of the one man who could commit Rohan. The bond between the Mark and Gondor was not a matter of shifting policy but of the oath sworn when Eorl received the northern province, by which each realm undertook to come to the other's aid at need; the oath, however, bound the king, and only the king could act upon it. Saruman's design accordingly aimed less at defeating Rohan in the field than at ensuring that no decision was taken at Edoras at all, and for some years this succeeded well enough. Théoden's place in the story is therefore defined by the exercise, loss and recovery of authority rather than by any singular gift, and the weight of his intervention lies in its timing rather than in its scale.

The standing organisation of the Mark's forces divided the levy between an eastern and a western command, each held by a Marshal, with the Riders of Edoras and the lands about it reserved to the king himself; in Théoden's last years his son held the west and his nephew the east. The account of these arrangements notes that no other man was appointed to discharge the king's own share of that command while he sat inactive, so that the centre of the realm was left without direction precisely when direction was wanted. The system gave a competent king wide reach, but it assumed his fitness to use it, since the marshals looked for his word before acting beyond their own wards. Nor could the whole strength of the Mark be gathered quickly, the Riders being spread across a wide and thinly settled country.

Théoden held no power beyond what belonged to a Man of his people and station: no lore, no arts, and no length of life unusual among the kings of his house. The nearest thing to a marvel in his keeping was the breed of horses descended from the mount of Eorl, which would carry none but the king or his sons. His restoration is described in terms of will rather than of body; he rose an old man still, and what he recovered was the ordinary vigour of a soldier. When Saruman spoke to him from the tower, what held him was memory and plain judgement, not any defence of his own contriving. Against the Nazgûl even that availed nothing, for the terror of the winged shadow struck at the one thing on which the Rohirrim wholly depended, their horses; and it was there, rather than in any trial of courage, that the limit of his power was reached.

Among the Eorlingas the bond between a man and his sister's son carried particular weight, and after the death of his own heir it was that bond which determined the succession; Éomer stood to Théoden as kinsman, subject and adopted child at once, and the sharpness of their estrangement in the last years drew its force from all three relations together. Éowyn's place in the household was harder and less visible. Gandalf, reckoning afterwards what had brought her to the state in which she was found, set the cause not in any single hurt but in the long attendance upon an old man she loved as a father while he sank into something dishonourable, with no outlet of her own and the whispering of Gríma always at her ear. Where Éomer could ride out with his anger, she was kept at the source of it, and the king to whom she gave that service was for years unable to perceive what it cost her.

The relation with Gríma was in form the ordinary one of a king and his counsellor, and it worked upon Théoden because he had granted it in good faith. The fuller account of Saruman's designs indicates how deliberately the king's circle was hollowed out: his son and his sister-son were bound to each other in close friendship and confidence, and the removal of the one was set as a first object of the attack in the west, while at Edoras the other was kept discredited and idle. What remained was a lord whose nearest advisers had been reduced to a single voice. That Théoden, once free of it, still refused to have Gríma cut down, and left him the choice of riding to war or going his way, belongs to the same disposition that had made him trust the man at all.

Toward those outside his house his conduct is more evenly drawn. Gandalf had long been unwelcome at Edoras, arriving with hard tidings often enough that Gríma could name him a herald of ill news without much contradiction from the hall; the reversal of that judgement was among the first things Théoden's recovery produced. With Aragorn the acquaintance was brief and the regard immediate, and the king took the parting at Dunharrow as a real loss rather than a matter of numbers. His dealings with Meriadoc began as a formal acceptance of service and became something less official: at Isengard he wished aloud for leisure to hear the herb-lore of the Halflings, a leisure the campaign never allowed. The clearest instance is Ghân-buri-Ghân, whose people the Rohirrim had once hunted; Théoden took his guidance, dealt with him as with a lord in his own country, and pledged him his forest undisturbed thereafter. The faculty for such recognition was precisely what the years of counsel had suppressed.

The Rohirrim entered the narrative comparatively late, and the king's household passed through several forms before it settled. In the earliest drafts of the ride to the Golden Hall the town below the barrows appears as Eodoras, and the hall itself is for a time called Winseld rather than Meduseld; the king who sits in it is named Thengel, a name afterwards moved back a generation to become his father's. Éowyn was first conceived as his own daughter rather than his sister's child, and beside her in the drafted hall-scene stands an elder daughter, Idis, who is present at the reception of the travellers and given nothing to do there. Idis was struck out as Éowyn's part grew, and with her went the whole conception of a king with daughters of his own; the household was then rebuilt around the orphaned children of his sister, with the succession running to a sister-son.

The role has been recorded twice in the older adaptations. In Ralph Bakshi's animated film Théoden is voiced by Philip Stone, in a much-shortened treatment of the Edoras material: the counsellor's hold is broken and the king rides west, but because the film halts after the battle at the Hornburg his part ends there, with no parley at Isengard, no muster at Dunharrow and no ride to Gondor. Since neither the companion television film of 1980 nor any later production continued Bakshi's, that half-told version was never completed. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation, in which Jack May takes the part, is by contrast the fullest older rendering of the role, following the king from the arrival of the travellers at the hall through the recovery of his will, the dealings with Saruman after Isengard's fall, and the ride to the Pelennor and his death there; the twenty-six-part length allows the sequence to run in something close to the book's order.

In Peter Jackson's trilogy Théoden is played by Bernard Hill, appearing in the second and third films. The best-known departure is the treatment of his decline: where the book gives a man worn down by years of poisonous counsel, the film makes the affliction a direct possession by Saruman, visible in the king's aged appearance and reversed in a single confrontation from which he emerges physically restored. Around this several other changes follow. Théodred is brought home wounded and dies at Edoras, so that the king's grief is placed before his healing rather than reported from the Fords; Éomer is exiled rather than imprisoned and is absent from the defence of the Hornburg, his riders standing in for the force that the book brings up under another captain; and the withdrawal to Helm's Deep is presented as a policy the king chooses against Gandalf's advice. The films also make Théoden reluctant to answer Gondor's summons until the beacons are lit, in place of the errand-rider and the token sent from Minas Tirith. At the end he dies with Éowyn beside him rather than with his esquire, and the naming of his successor is not part of the scene.