Dunlendings

Neither 'Dunland' nor 'Dunlendings' is a name the people chose for themselves. Both come from the Rohirrim, who described their western neighbours by appearance: the Dunlendings were swarthy and dark-haired, and the first element of the name is the old word for a dusky, brownish colour. Tolkien notes that this element has nothing to do with the Grey-elven word dûn, meaning 'west', although the country does lie west of the Mark. What the hill-folk called themselves or their land is not recorded in the published works. The name by which they are known is therefore a neighbour's description.1

The Dunlendings belonged to an old stock of Men with no share in the Edain. They were the remnant of peoples who had lived in the valleys of the White Mountains in earlier ages, and the oathbreaking Dead of Dunharrow were of the same kin. During the Dark Years part of this population moved north into the southern dales of the Misty Mountains, and some went further, into empty country as far as the Barrow-downs. The Men of Bree descended from those northern wanderers. Unlike the Dunlendings, however, they took up the Common Speech. The Dunlendings kept apart from other peoples, as the Wild Men of the woods did, and kept a language that was wholly foreign to the Westron, or at most very distantly related to the tongue behind it.2

Their speech also shows that they had once lived further east. During the assault on the Hornburg, Gamling of Rohan could follow the battle-cries of the besiegers. He explained that their tongue was an ancient human language, once spoken in many of the western valleys of the Mark. The Dunlendings therefore did not originate in the hill country beyond the Isen and the Adorn. Their language had been at home in lands that the Rohirrim later held. They had a name of their own for those horsemen, Forgoil, which the defenders understood as a jeer at their straw-pale hair. The Rohirrim named the Dunlendings for their dark colouring, and the Dunlendings answered with a name for the Rohirrim's fair colouring.3

The earliest traces of the Dunlendings' forebears lie in the Second Age, in the wide forests of Enedwaith and Minhiriath. When the Númenóreans began felling those woods for their shipbuilding, clearing great tracts from the coast inland along the rivers, the scattered forest-dwellers of the region came to hate the newcomers. Some of them took Sauron's side when the chance came. Tolkien presents these hostile woodland peoples as the ancestors of the later hill-folk of Dunland. The grievance that shaped their later history was therefore older than Rohan, and the Rohirrim inherited a mistrust first earned by the Men of the West.1

In the Third Age the decisive change came from the south-east. In 2510 the Steward Cirion gave the province of Calenardhon, a thinly peopled northern march of Gondor, to Eorl and his horsemen in reward for their help at the Field of Celebrant. The land became the Mark of Rohan. To the Dunlendings this grant disposed of country they regarded as their own, and the resentment it caused did not fade over the following centuries. It was deepened by their memory of an older presence in the western valleys that the Rohirrim now held.2

The feud first broke into open war under Helm Hammerhand, the ninth king of the Mark. Freca, a powerful lord in the lands by the Adorn, claimed royal descent but was said to have much Dunlendish blood. After he quarrelled with Helm and was killed by the king, his son Wulf became the leader of the Dunlendings' revenge. In 2758, while Gondor was held down by attacks from the sea, Wulf came into Rohan with a Dunlendish host, took Edoras and proclaimed himself king. Helm withdrew to the Hornburg and endured a siege through the Long Winter, which cost him his sons and in the end his own life. In the spring of 2759 his nephew Fréaláf recovered Edoras, Wulf was slain, and the invaders were driven back beyond the Isen.3

After that defeat the Dunlendings stayed in their hills for a long time. Their hostility survived, and it made them easy to recruit for a later master. Saruman had settled in Isengard in the years after Helm's war, on the doorstep of Dunland, and when he turned openly against Rohan at the end of the Third Age he stirred up the old claim to the western lands. He also promised the hillmen the goods and fields of the Rohirrim. Dunlendings fought beside his Orcs in the battles at the Fords of Isen and in the burning of the Westfold. In 3019 they came in strength to the assault on the Hornburg, where Helm's old fortress was besieged for the second time.4

The battle ended differently from the one their ancestors had fought. When the Orcs broke and perished in the forest that had appeared below the Deep, the Dunlendings who survived surrendered. They had been told that the Rohirrim burned their captives alive, and they were astonished to be spared. Théoden set them to bury the dead and repair the damage done in the Westfold. He then released them to their homes, after they swore never again to cross the Isen in arms against the Mark. With Saruman's fall their part in the War of the Ring was over. The published works say nothing more of Dunland in the Fourth Age, so how that oath fared, or whether the old enmity eased, is not recorded.5

Almost everything recorded of Dunlendish life comes from their enemies, and it is little. The Rohirrim thought of them as a wild people of hillmen and herdsmen. They kept flocks and herds in the uplands that fall from the southern end of the Misty Mountains towards the Isen and the Adorn. Nothing in the published works describes their dwellings, their crafts or the organisation of their clans. The narrative shows them only in the field, as fighters in Saruman's host. The picture is therefore partial and seen from outside, and it tells more about how Rohan regarded Dunland than about how the Dunlendings lived.1

Their language is their best-attested trait, and its influence reached further than their own borders. Scarcely any of its vocabulary survives in the published works. Its effect on others can be traced, however. According to Tolkien's account of the hobbit dialects, the Stoors who lingered in the south of Eriador spent a time in and near Dunland before they moved north again. There they took up a speech related to Dunlendish. Some traces of that period were said to persist in the names and words of the Stoorish families who later settled in the Shire. A people who otherwise kept apart from their neighbours thus left a mark on the speech of the hobbits.2

The Dunlendings are the outward counterpart of what Wormtongue did at Edoras: a people led astray by persuasion rather than driven by terror.

The sources give no account of Dunlendish beliefs, burial customs or ideas about death, and nothing may be supplied in their place. What the story does show is a long communal memory. A claim to land lost many lifetimes earlier stayed alive among the hill-folk strongly enough to bring them to war more than once. Their separation from other peoples also left them exposed to rumour. The prisoners taken at the Hornburg had readily believed what Saruman's agents told them about the cruelty of the Rohirrim, because they knew little of the horsemen beyond their old grievance. Isolation kept their own tongue and tradition intact, and it also made it easier for others to lead them astray.3

In The Lord of the Rings the Dunlendings occupy only a short stretch of the narrative, the chapters of the Westfold campaign and the day after it, yet they carry a weight out of proportion to that space. Until then the forces ranged against the Company have been Orcs, wolves, wraiths and a corrupted Wizard. At the Hornburg the reader meets, for the first time in open battle, ordinary Men fighting on the Enemy's side. They are not presented as creatures of the Shadow. They are a people with a history and a complaint, and the defenders recognise them as such even while they fight them.1

Their presence in Saruman's host also shows how the Wizard works. Sauron is shown ruling chiefly through fear and domination. Saruman looks for real grievances and bends them to his purpose, and he adds lies where the truth is not bitter enough. The Dunlendings are the outward counterpart of what Wormtongue did at Edoras: a people led astray by persuasion rather than driven by terror. The story thereby frames them less as villains than as the misled, and it places most of the blame on the voice that stirred them.2

The way their part ends gives the episode its meaning. The earlier sections of this article recount Théoden's clemency after the battle; in narrative terms it answers Saruman's slander with conduct instead of argument. The falsehood that had bound the hillmen to Isengard is undone by the plain experience of being spared, and a quarrel of many generations is, at least for the moment, set aside by a king's decision. The episode belongs to a pattern that runs through the book, in which mercy towards a defeated enemy is shown as a strength and not a risk. Because the tale does not follow Dunland further, it leaves open whether that mercy lasted, and it does not smooth over the old wrong at the root of the feud.3

In Peter Jackson's film trilogy the Dunlendings appear only in the second film, and there only briefly. They are shown as the wild hill-folk whom Saruman rouses against Rohan with the old claim to the western lands, and who then raid and burn the settlements of the Westfold. The films never call them Dunlendings on screen with any emphasis, and they have no named individuals. The most noticeable departure concerns the Hornburg. In the book Men of Dunland make up a large part of the besieging host and survive to be spared by Théoden, but the film's assault is carried out by Saruman's Uruk-hai alone. As a result the surrender of the hillmen, their oath and their release are absent, and so is the reconciliation that ends their part in the book.1

Kenji Kamiyama's animated film The War of the Rohirrim gives them far more room, because its subject is Helm Hammerhand's war, in which the Dunlendish host under Wulf took Edoras. Wulf is the film's principal antagonist and is voiced by Luke Pasqualino; his father Freca is voiced by Shaun Dooley. The appendix account behind the film is brief, and the adaptation fills it out freely. Helm's daughter, who has no name in Tolkien's account, becomes the central figure as Héra. The film gives her and Wulf a shared childhood and develops Wulf's motives into a personal grievance, so that the conflict rests less on the Dunlendings' old claim to the land than on the enmity between two houses.2