Gap of Rohan

The name is descriptive rather than commemorative. It belongs to the Common Speech as the tale renders it in English, and it pairs a plain topographical noun with the realm in which the valley lies. A gap in this sense is a wide break in a line of heights. Here the break is the long, low-lying opening where the southern end of the Misty Mountains falls away and the ranges to the south have not yet risen, so that open country runs through from one side to the other. The name therefore records a practical fact: this is the way around the mountain barrier for anyone travelling between the northern lands and the south. The Company treats it in exactly those terms when it debates its road southward from Rivendell. There the Gap is weighed as an alternative to the passes, and the question is its nearness to Isengard, not its scenery.1

The qualifying element, Rohan, is itself a name that came from outside. It is the form used in Gondor, not the Riders' own word; they call their country the Mark. It goes back to a Sindarin word for the land of horses, built on the element for horse. Before the Riders held the region, the province bore the Elvish name Calenardhon. Its first element is the Sindarin word for green, which also appears in other names of the south such as Parth Galen. The linguistic layers of the name thus mirror the region's changing ownership. A neutral English noun is attached to a Gondorian Elvish label, and that label replaced an older Elvish description of the same grassland.2

Because the realm was named Rohan only after Gondor ceded Calenardhon to Eorl and his people, the name of the Gap belongs to the later Third Age. The narrative uses it without comment, as a familiar term on the maps of the West. Neither the Council nor the Company explains it, and none of the speakers treats it as needing a gloss.3

The Gap of Rohan is a broad, low-lying stretch of open country in the far west of the Riders' realm, bounded by two mountain systems that do not meet. To the north the long chain of the Misty Mountains comes to its final southern peaks. To the south rise the first northern foothills of Ered Nimrais, the White Mountains, which then run eastward across the continent. Between these two walls lies no pass in the ordinary sense, only a wide vale that a traveller can cross without climbing. Through it runs the River Isen, which rises in the valley of Isengard, flows southward past the mountain's end, and then bends west towards the sea. Where the river crosses the open ground stand the Fords of Isen, the chief crossing-place of the Gap and the point where the road from the west enters the Mark.1

Its neighbours define the Gap as much as its hills do. On its northern edge, tucked into the last spur of the Misty Mountains, lies Isengard, whose ring-wall and tower overlook the approaches. North-east of that valley the forest of Fangorn spreads over the mountain's feet. South of the vale, in the valleys of the White Mountains, lies the Westfold with the refuge of Helm's Deep. Westward the open land passes into Dunland, the hill-country of the Dunlendings, who had long disputed these grasslands with the Riders. The Gap is therefore a meeting ground of peoples as well as of landscapes, and in the War of the Ring its fords became a battlefield when the forces of Isengard struck into Rohan.2

The later writings explain why the place mattered so much to Gondor before it mattered to Rohan. The open ground was a weakness in the defences of the South, and it was guarded by two strongholds set on either side of it. Angrenost, later called Isengard, stood at the northern end, while Aglarond, the fortress of the Hornburg, stood at the southern end. The Isen marked the western limit of the province, and this boundary passed to the Riders with the land. When the watch over Isengard lapsed and that fortress came into other hands, the defence of the Gap depended increasingly on the Riders themselves.3

The recorded history of the Gap begins with Gondor. When the southern realm was at its height, the open country between the mountains lay within its province of Calenardhon. It was then a settled and guarded frontier, not a wilderness. The first great blow to it came with the plague that swept Gondor in 1636 of the Third Age. That sickness emptied much of Calenardhon of its people, and the province never recovered its former population. Over the following centuries the thinly held grasslands became exposed to raiders from the east and to the hill-folk of the west, and Gondor lacked the strength to fill them again.1

The turning point came in 2510, when Eorl and the Éothéod rode down from the north and relieved the army of Gondor at the Field of Celebrant. In gratitude the Steward Cirion granted the depopulated province to Eorl's people, as the section on the name has already noted. With that grant the western opening between the ranges became the concern of the new kingdom. The Riders settled the plains, but their hold on the far west of the land was always thinner than in the east. Gondor kept Isengard for itself, yet its keeping of that fortress weakened over time, and the tower's surroundings slowly fell into neglect.2

The Dunlendings never accepted the loss of the grasslands, and the Gap was the door through which their grievance entered Rohan. In the reign of Déor they crossed the Isen, and in 2710 they seized the deserted ring of Isengard, from which the Riders could not remove them. Their pressure culminated in the time of Helm Hammerhand. In 2758 Rohan was invaded from several sides at once, and a host under the Dunlending Wulf came over the Isen and overran the land. Helm was driven into the refuge of the Hornburg, and the Long Winter that followed brought famine to besiegers and besieged alike. Only in 2759, under Fréaláf, were the invaders expelled and the Mark restored.3

In that same year of recovery Saruman came to dwell in Isengard with the consent of the Steward of Gondor. The Riders welcomed a powerful neighbour at the western gate of their realm, since it promised protection against the Dunlendings. For nearly two centuries this arrangement seemed to serve them well. In 2953, however, Saruman claimed Isengard as his own and began to fortify it, and the guardian of the Gap slowly became its greatest danger. By the time of the Council of Elrond in 3018 the danger was plain. Gandalf reported his captivity in Orthanc, and when the Company later chose its road south, Boromir's preference for the open way through the Gap was set aside because it ran too close to Saruman's stronghold.4

In the War of the Ring the Gap became the front of Saruman's assault on Rohan. On 25 February 3019 his forces attacked the Riders holding the Fords of Isen, and Théodred, son of Théoden, fell in that first battle. A second attack on 2 March broke the defence of the crossing, and the western Riders scattered or withdrew towards the Westfold. The host of Isengard then pressed on to Helm's Deep, where it was destroyed. Meanwhile the Ents fell upon Isengard itself and ruined its circle, leaving Saruman shut in his tower. The later account of these battles gives the dispositions of Erkenbrand and Grimbold at the Fords in greater detail.5

With Saruman's fall the Gap ceased to be a threat to the Mark. After the war the victors returned northward by way of Isengard, where Treebeard and the Ents now held the valley. Saruman had been released and was gone. The ruined fortress was given over to the Ents, and in the new age Isengard became a walled grove rather than a stronghold. The open vale itself continued as part of Rohan. With no hostile power at its northern edge it could once more serve as the plain road between the northern lands and the south.6

No single people ever held the Gap alone. In Gondor's day the open vale lay under the southern crown and was settled by its subjects, but the tale also records an older and more stubborn claim. The Dunlendings, hill-men of the west, were akin to folk who had once lived in the valleys of the White Mountains. They regarded the grasslands on both sides of the Isen as their own country, taken from them first by Gondor and then by the Riders. At Helm's Deep, Gamling recognises their tongue among the attackers and explains this old grievance. In his account it is inherited resentment rather than a present hope of plunder. Their enmity came from memory of the land, not from any wish for new conquest.1

Under the Riders the Gap was governed from Edoras, but held in practice by the lords of the western lands. In the War of the Ring, Erkenbrand was master of the Westfold, and the men of that country formed the nearest guard of the crossing. The later account of the Isen battles places the western half of the realm under a Marshal of its own. His chief stronghold was Helm's Deep. In 3019 this command lay with the king's son, Théodred, as Second Marshal. The same text treats the Fords as the natural line of that western command, and it shows how little the Riders' forces there could rely on Isengard.2

That sickness emptied much of Calenardhon of its people, and the province never recovered its former population.

Relations with the neighbours at the vale's northern edge changed with the masters of Isengard. As long as the fortress had a friendly lord, the Riders could treat it as an outpost of their own defence. Once Saruman turned, he enlisted the Dunlendings with lies and inflamed their old grievance against the Mark, and sent them to war alongside his Orcs. After the defeat at the Hornburg, the captured hillmen were astonished to be spared. Erkenbrand released them after they swore never again to cross the Isen in arms against Rohan, and they were set to work repairing the damage. That oath, rather than any conquest, was the settlement on which the western border rested at the end of the Third Age.3

For most of the first half of the tale the Gap is a place known only from counsel and maps. It is weighed and avoided, but no one sets foot there. The story reaches it only in the third book, after the victory at the Hornburg, when Théoden, Gandalf and their companions ride westward to confront the master of Isengard. At the Fords they find the evidence of the earlier fighting given a solemn form. The fallen Riders have been laid in a mound beside the crossing, and a ring of spears stands planted about it. The episode turns a strategic point into a place of mourning, and it is the reader's first direct view of the country that had so far existed only as a danger in debate.1

The Gap is also the setting for one of the book's quieter turning points. On the way back from Isengard the riders camp for the night at Dol Baran, a hill at the southern foot of the Misty Mountains, and there Pippin gives in to his curiosity about the seeing-stone of Orthanc. What follows sends a winged Nazgûl over the camp and Gandalf galloping east with the hobbit towards Minas Tirith. The open vale thus becomes the point where the narrative splits again. The posthumously edited account of the hunt for the Ring gives the Gap an earlier, unseen role as well. In that account the Nine come up from the south by way of the Isen, and from there they turn north in search of the Shire.2

At the close of the tale the Gap serves as a threshold of departure. The company travelling north after the war leaves Rohan through this country, and beyond it they overtake the fallen wizard, now a beggarly wanderer on the road. The encounter is brief but pointed. The power that had once stood over the vale is met again on open ground, stripped of tower and following. Across the whole book, then, the Gap marks passage between the northern and southern halves of the world, and the tale measures the fortunes of the West by whether that way stands open or shut.3

Peter Jackson's trilogy is the only adaptation in which the Gap has a role that can be stated with confidence, and there it serves mainly as a line in the planning of routes rather than as a landscape. The first film changes how the road south is decided. In the book the open way around the mountains is Boromir's proposal, and it is argued against during the Company's debate at Rivendell. In the film it is Gandalf who names the Gap as the intended course, and the Company is already travelling towards it when the threat of Saruman's watchers turns them to the high pass instead. The choice between routes therefore becomes a reaction on the road, not a matter of counsel. The Gap also loses its association with Boromir's wish to go home through the Riders' country, since the proposal is no longer his. The second film treats the western border of Rohan in a similarly compressed way. The two battles at the Fords of Isen are not shown as the organised defence of a river crossing. The death of the king's son is also moved away from the crossing. In the book Théodred falls in the first fight at the Fords. In the film he is brought back wounded and dies later at Edoras, so that the loss falls within the king's own hall rather than on the frontier. The later ride westward to the Fords, with the burial of the fallen there, has no counterpart in the films, and the Gap is never shown as a place the Company actually passes through.1