Northmen

Northmen is a descriptive name, not the name of a single nation. It came into use from the southern viewpoint of Gondor, the name the realm gave to the many Men who lived north of its borders in the wide lands of Rhovanion, the Wilderland east of the Great River. The appendices to The Lord of the Rings do not record a common self-designation, and they do not describe these peoples as one polity; the princes and communities they mention seem only loosely joined. In the chronicles the name therefore serves more as a classification drawn up by Gondor's historians than as a word spoken by the peoples it covers.1

Gondor explained its favour toward them by descent. Its chroniclers held that the Northmen, more than any other of the lesser Men, stood closest in kinship to the Dúnedain, because most of them came from the same peoples that had once produced the Edain of the First Age. In this view they were the part of that ancient stock that stayed behind in Middle-earth, having never crossed the mountains into Beleriand and never received the gifts given to the Men of Númenor. The appendices treat this shared ancestry as the ground of a trust that Gondor extended to no other people beyond the Anduin, though it was also a source of tension, as the royal house would later learn.2

Their personal names had a sound of their own, separate from both Sindarin and the Westron of Gondor. The names Vidugavia and his daughter Vidumavi belong to this tongue, and the prince later known in Gondor as Eldacar first bore the northern name Vinitharya, taken from his mother's people. Later peoples of the north carried on the same descent. The Éothéod of the upper vales of Anduin, from whom the Rohirrim came, are counted in the appendices as a remnant of the Northmen, and the Men of the Anduin vales are grouped linguistically with the peoples of Dale and the Long Lake. The name thus reaches past its first bearers to cover a whole family of northern Men.3

The early history of the Northmen is known almost entirely through their dealings with Gondor, and the record grows clear only from the time when the southern kingdom began to look beyond the Anduin for allies. In the long peace that Gondor's power secured over the lands east of the river, the Northmen multiplied and prospered. The kings came to value them as a shield. Lands beyond the Anduin, south of the Greenwood, were given to them so that they might stand between Gondor and the Men of the East, whose raids had most often come across the open plain between the Inland Sea and the Ash Mountains. The arrangement was not always secure. When the Easterlings began to press westward again in the reign of Narmacil I, some Northmen proved unreliable and went over to the invaders, drawn by plunder or by feuds among their own lords.1

The decisive turn came with Minalcar, who governed Gondor as regent and was later crowned as Rómendacil II. In 1248 of the Third Age he defeated a great Easterling host in the lands between Rhovanion and the Inland Sea. He then fortified the western shore of the Anduin and forbade strangers to pass down the river beyond the Emyn Muil. He was short of soldiers and wished to bind the Northmen more closely to his realm, so he took many of them into service, and some rose to high command in Gondor's armies. Among their lords he favoured above all Vidugavia, who had helped him in the war. Vidugavia was the strongest of the northern princes, though the lands he ruled lay only between the Greenwood and the Running River. About 1250 the regent sent his son Valacar to live at Vidugavia's court and to learn the speech and customs of the Northmen, and there Valacar married the prince's daughter.2

That marriage drew the Northmen into Gondor's gravest internal crisis. When Eldacar, Valacar's son, came to the throne in 1432, many of the southern nobility refused a king of mixed blood, and the rebellion that followed became the Kin-strife. Osgiliath was besieged and largely burned, and in 1437 Eldacar was driven out. He took refuge among his mother's kin in Rhovanion, and there he gathered strength for ten years. In 1447 he returned with an army of Northmen. Many in Gondor joined him, and the usurper Castamir was killed at the Crossings of Erui. The episode showed both what the alliance could achieve and how deeply it could divide the kingdom it was meant to protect.3

The power of the northern princes did not survive the coming of the Wainriders, a confederacy of Easterlings who travelled in great wagons. From 1851 they attacked Gondor. In 1856 King Narmacil II fell in battle beyond the Anduin, and Gondor lost its eastern territories. The Northmen who lived there were overrun and subjected, and the realm that Vidugavia's line had held beyond Mirkwood came to an end. The later tales in Unfinished Tales add that a remnant escaped westward under a leader named Marhwini and settled in the vales of the Anduin. These refugees were the forefathers of the Éothéod, who still traced their descent from the old kings of Rhovanion long after that kingdom had fallen.4

The Northmen lived on through these descendants rather than as a people of Rhovanion. In 1977 the Éothéod moved north under Frumgar into the lands between Mirkwood's northern eaves and the Grey Mountains. From there, in 2510, Eorl rode south to rescue Gondor on the Field of Celebrant, and in reward his people received Calenardhon, which became the realm of Rohan. In this way the old bond that Rómendacil II had made with the northern Men was renewed, now as the alliance between Gondor and the Rohirrim. It lasted until the War of the Ring and beyond.5

Little is recorded of the daily life of the Northmen, and what survives comes mostly from the southern historians who dealt with them in war and alliance. The later account of Cirion and Eorl presents them above all as a people of open country and of horses. Their strength in battle lay in mounted warriors, and the skill with horses that the Éothéod later carried into Calenardhon appears there as an inheritance from the older northern peoples, not as something new. The same account shows them living in scattered communities under their own chieftains, with no single government. That looseness made them a flexible frontier for Gondor, but it also left them exposed when a united enemy came out of the East.1

In Gondor's own classification of mankind the Northmen held a middle rank. Faramir, explaining the lore of his people, sets the Rohirrim and their distant northern kin among the Middle Peoples, the Men of the Twilight. In his account they stand below the Númenóreans in lore and length of life, yet stay apart from the Wild Men who served the Dark. He admits that Gondor learned from them, and his judgement is double-edged. Their valour and plain speech were admired, but in his view the southern kingdom also took from them a love of war and of prowess for its own sake. It had once held such skills to be means rather than ends.2

What most clearly divided the Northmen from the Dúnedain was their mortality. They lived the ordinary span of Men, without the long years granted to the house of Elros and its followers. The appendices treat the waning of the Dúnedain's lifespans as bound up with the mingling of their blood with that of lesser Men. This helps explain why a marriage that Gondor had made for political reasons could be felt as a threat to the realm's inner nature. For the northern peoples themselves the difference seems to have carried no such weight. Their memory of the past rested on lineage and on descent from their former kings, not on any hope of lengthened years.3

The published record does not divide the Northmen into named tribes or clans. It speaks instead of a number of princes, each ruling his own people, and singles out only one of them by name. Vidugavia is presented as the most powerful of these lords, but not as the overlord of the rest; his claim to the title of King of Rhovanion was his own, and the appendices give no sign that the other princes acknowledged it. His house is the only northern lineage whose members are named: through his daughter Vidumavi it was joined to the line of Gondor's kings. Of the other princely families, their seats, and how they were related to one another, nothing is recorded.1

After the fall of the eastern lands, the lordship that the appendices follow is that of the Éothéod. Frumgar led them north, and his son Fram became known for slaying Scatha, a great dragon of the Grey Mountains. Fram then refused the Dwarves' claim to the dragon's hoard, and the quarrel that began there was long remembered. After him came Léod, a tamer of horses, who was killed by a wild stallion he tried to master, and then his son Eorl, who first rode that horse and later founded the House of Eorl in Rohan. This is the one continuous succession of rulers that descends from the northern Men, and it passes directly into the royal house of the Mark.2

His house is the only northern lineage whose members are named: through his daughter Vidumavi it was joined to the line of Gondor's kings.

Beyond the Éothéod, the appendices name related peoples of the north but do not assign them leaders or places in any hierarchy. The Beornings and the Woodmen of western Mirkwood in the upper Anduin vales, and the Men of Dale and the Long Lake further to the north-east, are presented as kin by speech, not as branches of one people. Any finer division of the Northmen into houses is not found in the texts.3

The Northmen never appear in person in the main narrative of The Lord of the Rings. No character of the War of the Ring calls himself one, and the name does not belong to the living world of the story at all. Their place is in the appendices, where they supply the depth behind a people the reader already knows. When the Rohirrim ride into the tale, their customs, their loyalty to Gondor and the respect Gondor gives them in return already rest on a long history, even if the reader learns of it only later. The Northmen are therefore a past that the narrative assumes and does not tell, which gives the northern horsemen a pedigree comparable in age to that of the Dúnedain themselves.1

Within the chronicle of Gondor they serve as the measure by which the southern kingdom tests its own ideas of worth. The dispute over Eldacar, recalled here only in outline, turns on whether descent from Númenor alone should decide who may rule. The appendices do not settle the question in favour of purity. The king whose northern mother made him unacceptable to his enemies is the one who returns and holds the throne, while the pride of his opponents ends in civil war and lasting division. The Northmen thus stand for kinship that is real but unequal, a relation Gondor can either honour or resent, and the appendices describe both responses.2

The main story quietly repeats the patterns set down in their history. Riders from the north come to Gondor in its hour of need once again, when the host of Rohan arrives at the Pelennor Fields, and the old bond is honoured by action rather than merely remembered. After the war a lord of Gondor's Númenórean line, Faramir, marries a woman of Rohan, Éowyn, and this time the union is treated without the old fear of mixed blood. In this sense the Northmen give the book one of its quieter themes: an alliance between high and lesser Men that proves, over many centuries, to be a source of renewal rather than decline.3

The fullest treatment of the northern Men outside the appendices is in Tolkien's late philological essay on Dwarves and Men, written long after The Lord of the Rings was published and edited in The Peoples of Middle-earth. There Tolkien sets out how the tongues of the north were related, which the appendices had only hinted at. He derives the speech of the Men of the upper Anduin, of Dale and of the lands later held by the Rohirrim from the same Mannish stock whose western branches became the Edain, and so relates it at a distance to the Adûnaic of Númenor. The essay also explains why the Dwarves of the north bore names drawn from northern Mannish speech: they used the language of their human neighbours in dealings with outsiders and took personal names from it, keeping their own names secret. The Norse-derived names in The Hobbit are presented in this light as a rendering of that northern tongue into forms familiar to an English reader. The Old English of the Rohirrim reflects the same device, a chain of translation meant to mirror real kinship between the languages. The essay adds nothing to the political history of Rhovanion, but it gives the linguistic grounding for the family of northern peoples that the published texts only sketch.1