Edoras

The name Edoras belongs to the tongue of the Rohirrim, or more precisely to the English-looking form in which Tolkien chose to render that tongue. In the appendices he explains that the language of Rohan, which stood in a relation of kinship to the Common Speech somewhat like that of an older northern language to a younger one, is represented in the book by forms modelled on Old English. The names of the Mark's people, horses and places therefore appear in guises drawn from early English rather than in their supposed original Rohirric shape, which the book does not record. Edoras is one of the clearest instances of this method.1

Behind the name stands the Old English noun eodor, a word for an enclosure, a fence, or the bounded precinct of a dwelling; Edoras is best read as a plural of this word. The name is thus descriptive rather than commemorative: it means something close to 'the courts' and does not recall any founder, event or earlier people. It suits a settlement that the narrative presents as a cluster of fenced buildings and yards gathered within a wall on its hill, with the king's hall at the summit. The hall itself carries a name of the same kind, Meduseld, formed from Old English words for mead and dwelling, so that seat and settlement are named together in a single, plainly descriptive idiom.2

Within the story the name is introduced from a traveller's vantage. As Gandalf and his companions ride towards the hill, Legolas, whose sight reaches furthest, describes the walled place and the glinting roof above it, and Aragorn, who knows the speech and customs of the Mark, supplies the names of both the courts and the hall. The reader thus learns the name as the Rohirrim themselves would give it, spoken by one familiar with their land. No separate Elvish or Gondorian name for the city is attested in the published works, and the register records Edoras as its only form in every language.3

Edoras stands where the White Mountains meet the open grasslands of Rohan, on a solitary green hill at the foot of the range. Travellers coming from the north-west across the plains see it from a long way off, first as a walled height and then as a roof catching the sun above the grass. Behind it a deep valley runs back into the mountains, and out of that valley a swift stream, the Snowbourn, comes down past the foot of the hill before turning away across the lowland. The city therefore occupies a threshold: open country before it, the mountains at its back, and a single dale leading up into the heights.1

The hill is enclosed by an earthen dike, a strong wall and a hedge of thorn, and the only entrance is a guarded gate reached by a road climbing from the stream. Before the gate the road runs between green burial mounds, the resting places of the kings of the Mark, whose western slopes are thick with small white flowers. Within the wall a paved way climbs by steps and terraces among the houses towards the summit. Near the top, water springs from the rock and runs into a stone basin beside the road. The king's hall crowns the hill on a raised platform approached by a broad stair, with stone seats at its head, so that it commands the whole plain below.2

For all its wall, Edoras is a royal seat rather than a stronghold of last resort. When war threatens, the people of the capital are sent up the valley behind it to Dunharrow, the refuge high in the mountains, while the fighting strength of the western Mark looks to Helm's Deep. The road from the city up the dale to that upland refuge is a principal route of the Muster of Rohan, and the hill at the mouth of the valley serves as the natural gathering place from which the king's riders go out. Its value lies less in defence than in its visibility and its position at the meeting of mountain and plain.3

Edoras is not the first settlement of the Eorlingas in Rohan but the work of their second generation. After Eorl's people came south and received the plains of Calenardhon from Gondor in the year 2510 of the Third Age, it fell to his son Brego to secure the new realm. Brego drove the invaders out of the Wold, and the Mark was then left in peace for many years. In 2569 he completed the great hall of Meduseld on its hill, and the city that grew around it became the seat of the kings from that time forward.1

The founding of the hall was overshadowed almost at once. At the feast held to mark its completion, Brego's elder son Baldor swore a rash oath that he would take the Paths of the Dead, the way that runs beneath the mountains behind Dunharrow. He went and never came back. Brego died of grief the following year, in 2570, and the kingship passed to his younger son Aldor. The episode ties the first years of Edoras to the haunted road in the mountains at its back, a connection that the later history of the Mark would take up again.2

The gravest crisis in the city's history came in the reign of Helm Hammerhand. In 2758 Rohan was attacked from west and east at once, and the Dunlendings under Wulf, son of the Freca whom Helm had struck down in his own hall, overran the land. Helm was driven back and took refuge in Helm's Deep, while Edoras was captured and his elder son Haleth fell in its defence. Wulf took up residence in Meduseld and proclaimed himself king. There followed the Long Winter of 2758–9, during which Helm and the besieged Rohirrim suffered heavily and the king himself perished.3

Recovery came from the mountain refuge. In the spring of 2759 Fréaláf — Helm's nephew, the son of his sister Hild — rode down out of Dunharrow with the men he could muster, fell on Edoras without warning, killed Wulf and won the city back. With the aid of Gondor the enemy were then expelled from the Mark. Because both of Helm's sons had died, Fréaláf succeeded him and became the first king of a new line. The mounds of the kings before the gate accordingly came to reflect this break, with the kings who followed Fréaláf laid apart from those of the first line.4

At the close of the Third Age Edoras became a place of quiet decline rather than open assault. In the reign of Théoden the counsellor Gríma gained increasing influence in Meduseld, and the aging king withdrew from the governance of his realm. When Gandalf came there in 3018 after escaping from Orthanc, he met with suspicion and was allowed to take a horse only to be sent on his way; the horse he chose was Shadowfax. He returned on 2 March 3019 with Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, restored Théoden and broke Gríma's hold, and on the same day the host of the western Mark rode out from the city against Isengard.5

Théoden did not return to his hall alive. After the War of the Ring his body was brought back from Minas Tirith in the summer of 3019 and laid in a new mound before the city, and Éomer held his first great feast in Meduseld as king; on that occasion the betrothal of Éowyn to Faramir was also made public. Edoras remained the seat of the Mark in the Fourth Age under Éomer, whose long reign was bound in friendship to the restored kingdom in the south. Late in his life he sent for his old companions from the Shire, and Meriadoc and Peregrin travelled to Rohan to be with him before his death.6

The people of Edoras were Rohirrim, the Eorlingas who traced their descent to the Éothéod of the upper Anduin vale and who called their land the Mark. The book presents them as a nation of horsemen, tall and fair-haired, whose speech was their own and not the Common Speech of Gondor, although many could use the latter. The city was above all the king's town. Its gate was held by warders who questioned travellers first in the language of the Mark and only afterwards in the Common Speech, and the door of the hall had its own warden, Háma in Théoden's day, whose duty was to see that no stranger entered bearing arms without the king's leave.1

Government in the Mark rested with the king, who ruled from Meduseld, and the appendices record his succession in three lines: the first from Eorl to Helm, the second beginning with Fréaláf and ending with Théoden, and the third opening with Éomer. Beneath the king stood the Marshals of the Mark, who commanded its riders in the field; in the last years of the Third Age Théoden's son Théodred and his nephew Éomer held that office. When the king rode to war, someone had to be named to govern in his absence. On the day the host set out for Isengard, Théoden entrusted his people to his niece Éowyn, choosing her at the urging of his household because she was of the House of Eorl.2

Edoras is not the first settlement of the Eorlingas in Rohan but the work of their second generation.

The kings of Edoras stood in a sworn alliance with Gondor that went back to the grant of the land to Eorl, and each side was bound to aid the other in need. Toward the west relations were far worse: the Dunlendings nursed a long grudge against the incomers who held the plains they had once claimed, and in Théoden's reign Saruman of Isengard turned that enmity to his own ends. After the War of the Ring the alliance with the south was confirmed anew, when Éomer and Aragorn renewed the oath of their forefathers before the parting of the Company.3

In The Lord of the Rings Edoras is the stage for a single long chapter of arrival, trial and recovery, and much of its weight in the book comes from how carefully that sequence is paced. The companions are stopped at the gate, questioned again at the door, and asked to lay down their weapons before they may enter. The pause over Aragorn's sword, which he gives up only reluctantly, and over Gandalf's staff, which the wizard is allowed to keep as the prop of an old man, turns an act of courtesy into a test of trust. The whole approach, with its warders, challenges and stacked arms before the hall, recalls the reception of strangers in Old English heroic poetry and gives the Mark a texture distinct from the stone courts of Gondor.1

Inside the hall the narrative turns from ceremony to crisis. Gandalf speaks against the counsel that has darkened the king, and Théoden, leaving his seat, goes out onto the stair and looks again over his land. The reader meets Éowyn here for the first time, standing silent beside her uncle's chair. Gríma is offered the choice of riding to war or departing, and flees towards Isengard. Théoden takes up his own sword once more, hears of the death of his son, and gives gifts of war-gear to his guests before the host rides out. In a few hours the hall passes from torpor to action, and the city becomes the point from which Rohan re-enters the war.2

Edoras returns near the close of the book as a place of mourning and leave-taking. The king's burial is marked by a lament made by his minstrel Gléowine, and at the feast that follows, Merry is given an ancient horn of the Mark as a token of honour before the company rides on. The city thus frames Rohan's part in the tale: the hall where the king is roused at the beginning and where he is remembered at the end.3

In Peter Jackson's film trilogy Edoras is a principal setting of the second film and returns in the third. For the production a full set of the town and hall was built on Mount Sunday, an isolated hill in the Canterbury high country of New Zealand's South Island, which gave the films a standing location rather than a studio interior alone. Bernard Hill plays Théoden, Brad Dourif plays Gríma and Miranda Otto plays Éowyn. The films depart from the book in several ways that bear directly on the city. Théoden's decline is shown as an enchantment worked on him by Saruman and broken by Gandalf, not as the effect of Gríma's counsel on an aging king. After his recovery the king leads the people of Edoras to Helm's Deep, whereas in the book they are sent up the dale to Dunharrow and the host rides first toward Isengard. The third film adds a victory feast in Meduseld after the battle at the Hornburg, an occasion the book does not contain.1

The animated film The War of the Rohirrim takes its story from the appendix account of Helm Hammerhand, so the seizure of Edoras by Wulf stands near its centre. Brian Cox voices Helm and Luke Pasqualino voices Wulf, and Miranda Otto returns as Éowyn to narrate. The film's chief departure is the invention of a daughter for Helm, Héra, voiced by Gaia Wise, who carries the story; the killing of Wulf, which the appendix gives to Fréaláf when he retakes the city, is transferred to her. The BBC's radio dramatisation, which covers the whole of the novel, keeps the book's sequence at Edoras largely intact, with Jack May as Théoden.2