Drúedain

In The Lord of the Rings this people never appears under its later Elvish name. The Rohirrim speak of them as the Woses, or the Wild Men of the Woods, and regard them as survivors of an age older than their own, few in number and seldom seen. The stone figures that stand at the turns of the road climbing to Dunharrow were known to the Riders as the Púkel-men. The Riders gave these weathered carvings little thought, and did not recognise them as images of the same folk who still hid in the forests east of their realm. The novel thus offers only outside names, each shaped by the fear or indifference of neighbours.1

Tolkien's later essay on the people supplies the fuller nomenclature. Their own name for themselves was rendered in Sindarin as Drû, from which forms such as Drúath were made; the Eldar combined it with adan to produce Drúedain, a name that counted them among the Atani, the Men who had befriended the Elves. The Orcs, who hated and feared them, called them Oghor-hai. In an editorial note Christopher Tolkien explains that the English Woses stands in for a word of the Rohirric tongue, and that it is modelled on Old English wása, a word surviving only in the compound for a wood-dweller. The modern name is therefore a philological reconstruction rather than an attested English word.2

The same essay carries their history back into the First Age. There they are found in Beleriand in the company of the Folk of Haleth, having travelled west with them, yet they remained a distinct people in build, custom and speech. The Haladin did not count them as kin, though the two peoples lived together in peace. This account links the lurking forest-dwellers of the Third Age with the carvers of the Púkel-figures, and presents all of them as branches of one ancient stock.3

Tolkien's late essay on the Drúedain gives the earliest phase of their history. Its outline is sparse and was never worked into the narrative of the Elder Days. Before the Edain came into Beleriand, the Drúedain had already lived for a long time in the lands east of the mountains. There they had shared the forests with the ancestors of the Haladin, and the two peoples came over the Blue Mountains together, as noted above. In the West they settled chiefly in the Forest of Brethil, where they stayed with the Folk of Haleth through the wars against Morgoth. The essay treats them as a small people, but one the Orcs had particular reason to dread, and it credits much of Brethil's security to their watchfulness.1

The traditions preserved among the Haladin kept memories of that time. The best known concerns the Drúadan Aghan and the guardian stone he set before the house of his Haladin friend. While Aghan was away, Orcs attacked the house, and the stone drove them off. The tale reflects a belief that the Drúedain could put part of their own strength into carved figures, and that such watchers could act when their makers were absent. Tolkien presents it as a story told by others about the Drúedain, not as an event narrated for its own sake, and it is the only personal episode the essay records for them in Beleriand.2

When the First Age ended, the essay says, a few Drúedain went with the Edain to Númenor. They did not stay there to the end, and none of them remained when the island fell. The greater part of what survived of the people was in Middle-earth by then, in the region of the White Mountains. They had lived there long before the Númenóreans came to settle the coasts. Men who came into those lands later pushed them back and hunted them, and their numbers fell further. In the far west a remnant held on in the rugged promontory of Andrast. The land there was later called Drúwaith Iaur, the old wilderness of the Púkel-folk, and Tolkien suggests that some of them may have survived in its hills long after the Second Age.3

At the end of the Third Age another small group lived in the Drúadan Forest, the woodland at the eastern end of the White Mountains in Anórien. They lived apart from Gondor and Rohan and were treated by both as little better than game. The Rohirrim had hunted them in the past. This history came to light in the War of the Ring. The host of Rohan rode to relieve Minas Tirith and found the main road blocked by the enemy. The headman Ghân-buri-Ghân then came to Théoden and offered his help. His people led the Riders along the forgotten Stonewain Valley, a road built by Gondor long before and since overgrown, so that the host came down to the Pelennor unobserved. Ghân asked no reward except that the Rohirrim should stop hunting his people and should destroy the Orcs who were threatening his forest.4

The new order in the West kept that bargain. As King Elessar's company rode from Gondor to Rohan after the war, heralds proclaimed at the edge of the Drúadan Forest that the King gave it to Ghân-buri-Ghân and his people as their own for ever, and that no one might enter it without their consent. This royal grant is the last event in the recorded history of the Drúedain. After many centuries in which they had been displaced and hunted, the last known group received a protected home under the restored kingdom. Tolkien records nothing about their later fortunes.5

Tolkien's late essay describes the Drúedain as markedly unlike the other Atani in body and bearing. They were short and heavily built, with broad faces and deep-set eyes, and most had little or no beard. Their deep voices and rolling laughter could make them good company among those they trusted, but strangers found them grim and unlovely. The Haladin were most struck by their stillness. A Drúadan could sit motionless for a very long time, alert to everything around him, and this patient watchfulness is what made them valued as guards.1

Their chief craft was carving. They worked in stone and wood, and they made likenesses of themselves that they set up as watchers over paths and dwellings. The Haladin believed that such figures shared something of their makers' power, a belief the tale of Aghan's stone, recounted above, was meant to illustrate. The essay treats the Púkel-figures of the White Mountains as work of the same tradition, which explains why a people with so little else to leave behind is best remembered through its images. In woodcraft they were the equal of any beast of the forest. They could read tracks and pass through thick country unseen. Their own speech remained their own and was not related to the tongue of the Haladin.2

The Lord of the Rings shows these traits from outside, through the eyes of the Rohirrim. Before the Riders ever see the Woses they hear drums in the forest, and Elfhelm explains that the Wild Men use them to send messages to one another. Ghân-buri-Ghân himself resembles the weathered carvings of Dunharrow. He is gnarled and sparsely bearded and wears only a covering of grass, and he speaks the Common Speech haltingly, reckoning numbers in a laborious way of his own. Yet his knowledge of the land is exact. He tells Théoden what lies on the road ahead and foresees that the wind will change. He also makes clear that his people do not fight in open battle, but hunt, and wage their own war on the Orcs in the woods.3

Neither Tolkien's novel nor his later essay divides the Drúedain into named tribes, houses or clans in the way the Edain of Bëor, Haleth and Hador are divided. What separates one group from another in these texts is place rather than lineage. The essay first presents the people as a single stock. It then follows the part of it that went west with the Folk of Haleth into Beleriand, while the rest remained in the lands east of the Blue Mountains and later in the White Mountains. These are not given separate names or distinct customs. The Drúedain are treated throughout as one people scattered into small, isolated communities.1

The essay also records no chieftains for the Beleriand group. Aghan is the only individual Drúadan it names in that age, and he appears as a friend and watcher in a single household, not as a ruler. How the Drúedain governed themselves in Brethil, or whether they recognised any authority beyond their own families, is left unstated. The absence is consistent with the essay's picture of a secretive people whose inner life the Haladin observed only from outside.2

He also makes clear that his people do not fight in open battle, but hunt, and wage their own war on the Orcs in the woods.

The only leader the texts identify is Ghân-buri-Ghân, headman of the group in the Drúadan Forest at the end of the Third Age. The novel shows his standing only in how he acts. He comes to the Rohirrim alone, speaks for all his people, and makes an agreement on their behalf. Nothing is said of how he came to lead them, whether his office passed by descent, or who might have followed him. The later royal grant of the forest is likewise addressed to him and his people together.3

Within The Lord of the Rings the Woses have a small but carefully placed part. They enter the story at a moment of deadlock, when the relief of Minas Tirith seems likely to fail on the road itself, and they resolve it without taking part in the fighting. Their help is practical rather than heroic: knowledge of the land, given by people who otherwise stay outside the affairs of kingdoms. The episode is short, and once the host has passed through the woods the Woses drop out of the action, leaving the decisive battle to others. Their contribution is essential to the plot but largely invisible to most of those it benefits.1

The novel prepares for this encounter some time before it happens. On the ascent to Dunharrow the carved figures are noticed chiefly by Merry, who regards them with wonder and something close to pity while the Riders pass them by. When he later sees Ghân-buri-Ghân, the stone images come back to his mind, and the reader recognises that the old carvings and the living forest-folk belong together. Because the scene is narrated through the hobbit's eyes, the Wild Men are met as the Rohirrim's own forgotten neighbours might appear to a stranger. The effect makes visible how much of Rohan's landscape its masters have ceased to see.2

In this way the Woses carry one of the book's recurring ideas: that aid in the great struggle can come from the small, the despised and the overlooked. Théoden accepts the help of a people his own folk have hunted, and the exchange tests the proud Riders as much as it serves them. The Wild Men ask for nothing grand, only to be left in peace, and their wish is honoured once the war is won. Their brief appearance also deepens the sense of age that runs through the narrative, showing that older peoples still live beside the kingdoms of Men.3

Peter Jackson's film trilogy, released between 2001 and 2003, leaves the Woses out entirely. Neither Ghân-buri-Ghân nor any other member of his people appears, and the drums of the Drúadan Forest are not part of the Rohirrim's march. In the films the host of Rohan musters at Dunharrow and reaches the Pelennor without the guided detour through the Stonewain Valley, so the problem the Wild Men solve in the novel never arises. The obstacle on the road, the bargain with Théoden and the headman's request that his people no longer be hunted all fall away. The royal grant of the forest after the war, which closes the Woses' story in the book, is absent as well. What the novel presents as a debt owed to a despised neighbour becomes, on screen, a ride that depends on the Riders alone.1

Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 breaks off after the battle at Helm's Deep, before the point at which the Woses would enter the story. Neither the Riders' ascent to Dunharrow, where the novel places the Púkel-figures, nor the ride to Gondor falls within its scope, and the people therefore has no place in it. This is a consequence of the film's unfinished state, not a choice to drop the episode, since the planned second part that would have covered the later chapters was never made. Other versions that take the story to its end are not recorded here, because their treatment of the Wild Men cannot be stated with enough certainty.2