Rohan

Rohan is a Gondorian name, not a native one. It is Sindarin in form, built on the element meaning horse, and it fixed in speech the one thing that struck the men of Gondor most forcibly about their new neighbours in the north-western plains: that they lived by and for their herds. The same root gave the collective name Rohirrim for the people themselves, understood as the lords or masters of horses, and both words belonged first to the mouths of southerners rather than to those they described. Among themselves the newcomers used older and blunter terms: they were the Eorlingas, the folk of Eorl, and their land was simply the Mark, or the Riddermark, the march of the riders. Both usages survive side by side in the records, so that a single realm may be named in two languages within a few lines, according to who is speaking.

The fuller Sindarin form is given as Rochand, with Rochirrim beside it; the harder consonant was softened in the everyday speech of Gondor, where the aspirate was worn down and the shorter Rohan and Rohirrim became standard. Behind the translated Mark lies a native compound meaning the horse-mark, so that the Gondorian coinage and the riders' own name for their country in fact turn on the same idea, arrived at independently in two unrelated tongues. Before the grant to Eorl the region carried a wholly different Gondorian name, Calenardhon, the green province, a description of empty pasture rather than of any people settled on it; the change of name marks the change of tenant.

The names of places within the realm follow a deliberate convention set out in the appendices: because the speech of the riders stood to the Common Speech roughly as an older stage of English stands to its modern form, their names are given in archaic English dress. Hence Edoras, glossed within the narrative as the courts, and Meduseld, the hall of mead that outsiders knew as the golden hall. Travellers and allies, for their part, tended to name the land by its riders rather than its borders, speaking of the Riders of Rohan or the horse-lords, and it is under such descriptive by-names that the realm most often enters the accounts of those who merely passed through it.

The realm is a broad shelf of grassland lying between two natural walls. To the south stand the White Mountains, whose northern skirts rise steeply from the plain and shut the land off from the Gondorian province of Anórien beyond; to the east the Anduin runs down out of the north, and the cliffs at the western edge of the Emyn Muil look over the flats as a kind of eastern rampart. Westward the ground rises toward the Isen and the wide opening between the ends of the White Mountains and the Misty Mountains, the only easy road between the northern lands and the south. In the north the plain runs out toward the Limlight and the eaves of Fangorn, where the grass gives way at last to old woodland. The grant to Eorl was reckoned in just these terms, as the empty country lying between the two rivers, and the whole of it was pasture rather than tilth, wide, rolling and almost treeless, so that a traveller crossing it saw little but grass, sky and the long line of the mountains.

Its chief waterway is the Entwash, which gathers in the mountain glens and runs north and east across the whole breadth of the country before spreading into a maze of channels and fenland where it meets the Great River. The stream divides the plain into two halves, an eastern and a western emnet, and the northern angle between it and the Anduin is the Wold, high, bare and thinly held. Along the mountain feet lie the settled folds of the realm, east and west of the royal district itself, sheltered by the spurs and watered by short swift rivers that come down from the snows. The eastern boundary with Gondor is marked not by any great barrier but by a small stream running out of a wood below the mountains, a modest line for so old an agreement.

Because the country is open, its strong places are few and all of them lean against the mountains. The king's seat stands on a green hill at the mouth of a mountain valley, ringed by a dyke and a hedge, with a cold river running past below; above that valley, reached by a climbing road set with weathered carved figures, lies a high shelf used from ancient times as a refuge for the people when the plain could not be held. Further west, a deep gorge in the mountain wall is closed by a fortress and a rampart across its throat, guarding the western districts. Beyond the fords of the border river to the north-west lies a walled vale under the arms of the Misty Mountains, held apart from the realm by the terms of the old grant, and it is from that quarter, and from the hill-country of the Dunlendings west of the river, that the land is most easily entered.

The realm's history begins with an emptiness. The province that later became Rohan had belonged to Gondor since the days of its strength, but it was thinned by war and then all but voided by the Great Plague that swept out of the east in the year 1636 of the Third Age, after which the Kings of Gondor could neither settle nor properly garrison it. In the same centuries a kindred people were moving in the opposite direction: the Northmen of the wide lands east of Mirkwood, long friendly to Gondor and akin to its own founding stock, were driven and dwindled by Easterling invasions until a remnant of them, the Éothéod, withdrew northward in 1977 under Frumgar to the upper vales of the Great River near its springs. There they lived some five centuries in a narrow country, breeding horses and holding a frontier of their own, while the southern grassland lay open and almost unpeopled. The founding of the kingdom was thus a meeting of two long processes, one of decay and one of migration.

The decisive year is 2510. A confederacy of Easterlings called the Balchoth, swollen by orcs out of the mountains, crossed the Anduin and overran the northern grassland, and the army that Cirion, Steward of Gondor, sent against them was cut off and driven back toward the Limlight. Cirion had already appealed north for help, and Eorl the Young, lord of the Éothéod, answered with a great riding that arrived unlooked-for on the Field of Celebrant and broke the invaders utterly. In return Cirion gave him the whole depopulated province to hold as a free realm, and Eorl swore in exchange a perpetual oath of friendship and aid to the Lords of Gondor, which the Steward answered with an oath of his own. Eorl became the first King of the Mark and ruled thirty-five years; he fell in 2545 fighting Easterlings in the northern angle of his own land, and his son Brego drove the enemy out and finished the work of settlement.

A fuller account of the grant survives in the later material, which sets the swearing on the summit of the beacon-hill at the eastern march, at the place where the tomb of Elendil had stood before Cirion removed it, and records the oath in the High-elven tongue, invoked before the One and held thereafter as the most binding form of words known in the South Kingdom. The same account names Borondir, the one errand-rider of six who won through the Anduin vales to bring Cirion's plea to the Éothéod, and who fell in the battle that followed. It also makes plain what the gift did not include: the great circular fortress at the western entry to the land, with its tower and its keys, remained Gondor's possession, as did the beacon-hills of the province beyond the eastern boundary stream. The terms mattered later, for Gondor's grip on that western stronghold slackened over the following centuries until its garrison had become half-alien to the kingdom that owned it.

The two centuries after the founding were the realm's growing time. Brego completed the great hall on the hill of the king's seat in 2569, and lost his eldest son the following year to a rash vow taken at its feasting; the crown passed instead to Aldor, whose reign of seventy-five years was the longest in the kingdom's history and saw the people multiply and spread west and south, pressing the hill-men who had drifted into the western districts back across the border river. That displacement left a grievance which the dispossessed never forgot. Later kings had quieter records punctuated by sharp losses: orcs from the mountains troubled the land repeatedly and killed one king outright in 2851; his successor died of a boar's tusks in the eastern woods; and in 2885 Folcwine, honouring the old oath, sent his twin sons south with an army to help Gondor against the Haradrim, and both were killed at the southern river crossings.

The near-destruction of the kingdom came in the Long Winter of 2758–2759. Rohan was invaded from both sides at once, by Easterlings in the east and by the hill-men under Wulf in the west, the latter aided by disaffected settlers within the realm; the royal seat was stormed, one of Helm Hammerhand's sons died defending the doors of the hall, and the king himself was besieged in the mountain fortress of the western gorge, which took its name from that defence. Famine and frost killed more than the fighting did. Helm's second son was lost in a sortie, and Helm died alone in the snow before the fortress wall; the war ended only when his sister-son Fréaláf came down unexpectedly from the mountain refuge, retook the royal hill and killed Wulf, with relief from Gondor arriving as the thaw opened the passes. Fréaláf began the second line of kings, and in the year of his crowning Saruman took up residence in the western fortress with the Steward's leave, a settlement that then looked like a strengthening of the realm's weakest flank.

In the reign of Théoden, seventeenth king, that flank turned hostile. Saruman's raids, his cultivation of the old hill-country grudge, and his hold over the king's counsellor left Rohan half-paralysed until Gandalf's intervention; in the spring of 3019 the crown prince Théodred fell at the crossings of the western river in the first of two battles there, and the invading host was destroyed only at the mountain fortress, in the same week that the Ents unroofed the enemy's own stronghold. Théoden then honoured the founding oath in person, mustering at the high mountain refuge and riding the length of the realm to break the siege of Gondor's capital, where he was killed on the Pelennor on the fifteenth of March. His nephew Éomer, hailed king on the field, took the army on to the final battle at the Black Gate. Théoden was brought home and buried among the mounds of his forebears that August, and at the funeral feast Éomer and the new King of Gondor renewed the alliance in the terms Eorl and Cirion had used. Rohan therefore did not fall: Éomer reigned sixty-five years into the Fourth Age, longer than any of his predecessors save Aldor, and the line continued in his son Elfwine.

The men of the Mark were northerners by descent, and by Gondor's own reckoning they belonged to the Middle Peoples, men of the twilight: akin from afar to the stock from which the Númenóreans had come, but never sharers in the gifts of the West. Their nearest surviving kindred lay far to the north, the Beornings and the woodmen along the western eaves of Mirkwood, with whom they still had much of their speech in common. Tall and fair-haired, they kept that ancestral tongue for every ordinary purpose and used the Common Speech chiefly in dealings with outsiders. Rule belonged to the House of Eorl and passed from father to son wherever it could; twice, when the direct heir was killed, it went instead to a sister-son. Nor was authority within the house confined to men, for when the king rode to war his niece was set over those who stayed behind, proposed by his own doorward and accepted by the people.

The later material sets out the ordering beneath the crown. The riders were commanded by Marshals of the Mark, an office at once military and territorial: the first ward, comprising the royal district and the valley behind it, fell to the king himself or to a marshal of his household, while the second and third commands answered for the western and eastern halves of the realm and were seated away from court. In Théoden's last years those two charges were held by his son and by his sister-son, so that the whole armed strength of the country stood in the hands of a single family. The eastern seat was Aldburg, in the fold under the mountains, which had been Eorl's own dwelling before his son raised the hall on the green hill and moved the court there.

Toward Gondor the tie was personal as well as sworn. Thengel, father of Théoden, passed much of his life in the south and brought back a wife from Lossarnach, so that the speech of Gondor was current in his house; a generation later the king's niece married the Steward of the reunited kingdom, joining the two ruling families by marriage as their forebears had joined them by oath. Other neighbours were kept at a distance. The riders spoke of the golden wood on their eastern march as a place of sorcery and would not enter it, and the halflings of the north lived among them only as figures in old tales, until wood and halflings alike proved substantial. The wild men of the wooded hills beyond the eastern boundary had long been hunted by the Mark as vermin; their headman nonetheless guided the muster through those hills to the relief of the besieged city, and the wood, which lay on Gondor's side of the line, was afterwards granted to his people by Gondor's new king.

Rohan enters the narrative first of all as ground to be crossed. After the Fellowship is broken at the Great River, the plains carry the longest pursuit in the book: three companions running west across open grass on the trail of an orc-band, sleeping little and gaining slowly, with nothing to mark their progress but the swell of downs and the distant mountain wall. It is here that the story sets out most plainly the problem of trust between peoples long out of contact. A patrol of riders rings the pursuers with spears, and their captain, acting without warrant and against the standing orders of his king, must decide on the strength of a few words whom to believe; he lends horses and lets them go. The realm thereafter works as a hinge in the plot. The roads to the wizard's tower, to the old forest in the north and to the southern kingdom all run through it, and companions separated at the river find one another again on its soil.

The king's seat supplies the book's most sustained encounter with a heroic-age court, and the episode is built as ceremony rather than action. Visitors are challenged at the gate, questioned by the doorward and made to leave their weapons on the steps; inside, the hall is dim, hung with woven histories, and the business transacted there is not a battle but the recovery of a man, an aged king bent under a whisperer's counsel who is led out into the light and given back his sword. The approach is framed by an elegy: on the road up to the barrows Aragorn repeats verses out of the riders' own tradition that ask after vanished horse and rider and answer that they have gone by like wind in the grass. The realm is thus introduced already conscious of its own transience, and much of what it stands for in the narrative — courage held without hope of lasting — follows from that song.

Its second narrative office is to arrive. Rohan fights the first great defensive battle of the war at the mountain fortress, holding a gate through a night of storm and being relieved at sunrise; later the whole strength of the country gathers in the high valley and rides south under a darkened sky, and the turn of the siege before Gondor's capital is announced by horns at cockcrow. Two outsiders carry the reader through this. A hobbit, taken into the king's service by an oath sworn in the hall and then left behind as too small to ride, is smuggled to the field by a rider who is not what he seems; the king's niece, forbidden the war and set instead to govern, goes disguised among her own people. Rohan is therefore the place where the story tests what service and duty look like when they are refused, and where a horse-borne rescue that is at once wholly practical and slightly beyond expectation gives the war its first plain victory.

Rohan came late into the writing and came almost whole. The manuscripts printed in The Treason of Isengard show the horse-people taking shape only as Tolkien worked out the long pursuit across the grassland, and once they appeared the riders, their king, their hall and the archaic English dress of their speech followed within a few pages, as though a single idea had brought all of it with it. The name was the slowest part to settle. The Sindarin form fluctuated in spelling before Rohan was fixed, and the collective name of the people was tried with an ending in -oth beside the -rim that finally stood, so that draft and later note disagree over a word the finished book treats as long established. Names inside the realm were equally provisional: the town on its green hill is written Eodoras in the earlier text, and the golden hall bore the name Winseld before Meduseld replaced it.

The royal house was less stable than the land. The rider who halts the three pursuers on the plain first bore the name Eomund, which was afterwards shifted back a generation to serve as his father's, and roles among the king's kindred were distributed differently before the published arrangement of son, sister-son and niece was reached. The niece's part changed most of all. Outlines sketching the story ahead from Fangorn have Aragorn marry her and reign with her in the South Kingdom, a plan set aside only when Arwen was given that place; and a later projection of the war before the city, written while the battle was still being foreseen rather than narrated, has her killed on the field beside the king she had followed. What survived into the book is the disguise, the ride and the wound. The marriage and the death were both abandoned, and with them a considerably bleaker ending for the last royal generation of the Mark.

Peter Jackson's trilogy gives the realm more screen time than any other adaptation, most of it in the second film. Théoden is played by Bernard Hill, his niece by Miranda Otto, his sister-son by Karl Urban and the king's counsellor by Brad Dourif; the royal seat was built as a standing set on an isolated hill in the South Island of New Zealand and dismantled again after shooting. The departures are substantial and much discussed. The king's release from his counsellor is staged as a possession broken by force, with Saruman inhabiting him directly, rather than as the persuasion of the book. The muster is rearranged so that the whole population of the capital is evacuated to the mountain fortress instead of to the high refuge in the valley, and the sister-son is banished from the realm beforehand, which allows him to take over the dawn relief that the book assigns to Erkenbrand. An elvish contingent is sent south to fight at the fortress, an addition with no basis in the text, and the second battle at the western fords is dropped. In the third film the king hesitates over Gondor's summons out of resentment at past neglect, where the book has him answer the founding oath at once.

The older adaptations treat the country more thinly. Bakshi's animated film reaches the fortress and stops there, so the realm appears only as a hall and a siege, with the riders among the sequences traced from live-action footage; Théoden is voiced by Philip Stone, and the king's niece is cut from the story altogether, which removes the whole strand of service refused and duty disguised. The Rankin/Bass television film takes up the last part of the war without continuing from Bakshi, and compresses the horsemen's part in it to a brief intervention. The BBC radio dramatisation, in twenty-six half-hour parts, has room the others lack and follows the book's order closely through the Rohan chapters; Jack May speaks Théoden, and the court scenes are carried by dialogue and horns rather than by the visual ceremony the films favour.