Rohan, Middle-earth
Rohan is a fictional kingdom of Men in J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy setting of Middle-earth. Known for its horsemen, the Rohirrim, Rohan provides its ally Gondor with cavalry. Its territory is mainly grassland. The Rohirrim call their land the Mark or the Riddermark, names recalling that of the historical kingdom of Mercia, the region of Western England where Tolkien lived.
Tolkien grounded Rohan in elements inspired by Anglo-Saxon tradition, poetry, and linguistics, specifically in its Mercian dialect, in everything but its use of horses. Tolkien used Old English for the kingdom's language and names, pretending that this was in translation of Rohirric. Meduseld, the hall of King Théoden, is modelled on Heorot, the great hall in Beowulf.
Within the plot of The Lord of the Rings, Rohan plays a critical role in the action—first against the wizard Saruman in the Battle of the Hornburg, then in the climactic Battle of the Pelennor Fields. There, Théoden leads the Rohirrim to victory against the forces of Mordor; he is killed when his horse falls, but his niece Éowyn kills the leader of the Ringwraiths.
Etymology
Tolkien's own account, in an unsent letter, gives both the fictional and the actual etymologies of Rohan:Geography
In Tolkien's Middle-earth, Rohan is an inland realm. Its countryside is described as a land of pastures and lush tall grassland which is frequently windswept. The meadows contain "many hidden pools, and broad acres of sedge waving above wet and treacherous bogs" that water the grasses. The cartographer Karen Wynn Fonstad calculated Rohan to be 52,763 square miles in area.Borders
Rohan is bordered to the north by the Fangorn forest, home to the Ents led by Treebeard, and by the great river Anduin, called Langflood by the Rohirrim. To the northeast are the walls of Emyn Muil. After the War of the Ring, the kingdom is extended northwards over the Limlight to the borders of Lothlórien. To the east are the mouths of the River Entwash, and the Mering Stream, which separated Rohan from the Gondorian province of Anórien, known to the Rohirrim as Sunlending. To the south lie the White Mountains. To the west are the rivers Adorn and Isen, where Rohan borders the land of the Dunlendings. To the northwest, just under the southern end of the Misty Mountains, lies the walled circle of Isengard around the ancient tower of Orthanc; at the time of the War of the Ring, it had been taken over by the evil wizard Saruman. The area of the western border where the Misty Mountains and the White Mountains drew near to each other is known as the Gap of Rohan.Capital
The capital of Rohan is the fortified town of Edoras, on a hill in a valley of the White Mountains. "Edoras" is Old English for "enclosures". The town of Edoras was built by Rohan's second King, Brego son of Eorl the Young. The hill on which Edoras is built stands in the mouth of the valley of Harrowdale. The river Snowbourn flows past the town on its way east towards the Entwash. The town is protected by a high wall of timber.File:Viking longhouse - Borg 01.jpg|thumb|left|Mead hall at Borg, Norway
Meduseld, the Golden Hall of the Kings of Rohan, is in the centre of the town at the top of the hill. "Meduseld", Old English for "mead hall", is meant to be a translation of an unknown Rohirric word with the same meaning. Meduseld is based on the mead hall Heorot in Beowulf; it is a large hall with a thatched roof that appears golden from far off. The walls are richly decorated with tapestries depicting the history and legends of the Rohirrim, and it serves as a house for the King and his kin, a meeting hall for the King and his advisors, and a gathering hall for ceremonies and festivities. It is at Meduseld that Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, and Gandalf meet with King Théoden. Legolas describes Meduseld in a line that directly translates a line of Beowulf, "The light of it shines far over the land", representing líxte se léoma ofer landa fela. The hall is anachronistically described as having louvres to remove the smoke, derived from William Morris's 1889 The House of the Wolfings.
Other settlements
Upstream from Edoras, deeper into Harrowdale, are the hamlets of Upbourn and Underharrow. At the head of Dunharrow is a refuge, Firienfeld, in the White Mountains. Aldburg, capital of the Eastfold, is the original settlement of Eorl the Young. The Hornburg, a major fortress guarding the western region, is in Helm's Deep, a valley in the White Mountains.Regions
The kingdom of Rohan, also called the Mark, is primarily divided into two regions, the East-mark and the West-mark. They are each led by a marshal of the kingdom. Rohan's capital, Edoras, lies in a small but populous region in the centre south of the kingdom, the Folde. In an earlier concept, Rohan's capital region was called the King's Lands, of which the Folde was a sub-region to the south-east of Edoras. North of the Folde, the boundary between the East-mark and West-mark runs along the Snowbourn River and the Entwash. Most of the rest of Rohan's population is spread along the foothills of the White Mountains in both directions from the Folde. In the West-mark the Westfold extends along the mountains to Helm's Deep and to the Gap of Rohan. Beyond the Gap of Rohan lies the West Marches, the kingdom's far west borderland. The Eastfold extends along the White Mountains in the opposite direction. It is bound by the Entwash to the north. Its eastern borderland is called the Fenmarch; beyond this lies the Kingdom of Gondor.The centre of Rohan is a large plain, divided by the Entwash into the East Emnet and the West Emnet. These regions fell respectively into the East-mark and the West-mark. The northernmost region of Rohan, and the least populous, is the Wold. The Field of Celebrant, even further north, is added to Rohan after the War of the Ring.
Culture
People
The Rohirrim are distantly related to the Dúnedain of Gondor, having descended from the same place. Unlike the inhabitants of Gondor, who are portrayed as enlightened and highly civilized, the Rohirrim are shown as being at a lower level of enlightenment.The names and many details of Rohirric culture are derived from Germanic cultures, particularly that of the Anglo-Saxons and their Old English language, towards which Tolkien felt a strong affinity. Anglo-Saxon England was defeated by the cavalry of the Normans at the Battle of Hastings, and some Tolkien scholars have suggested that the Rohirrim are Tolkien's wishful version of an Anglo-Saxon society that retained a "rider culture", and would have been able to resist such an invasion. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey notes that Tolkien derived the emblem of the House of Éorl, a "white horse upon green", from the Uffington White Horse carved into the grass of the chalk downs in England.
While Tolkien represents the Rohirrim with Anglo-Saxon culture and language, their ancestors are given Gothic attributes. The names of Rhovanion's royal family,, include such names as Vidugavia, Vidumavi and Vinitharya, which are of Gothic origin. Vidugavia specifically has been seen as an synonym for Vitiges, king of the Ostrogoths in Italy from 536 to 540. Tolkien saw this as a parallel with the real-world relationship between Old English and Gothic.
In response to a query about clothing styles in Middle-earth, Tolkien wrote:
Horses and warfare
The armies of Rohan were largely horsemen. The basic tactical unit was the éored, Old English for "a unit of cavalry, a troop", which at the time of the War of the Ring had a nominal strength of 120 riders.In time of war, every able man was obliged to join the Muster of Rohan. Rohan was bound by the Oath of Éorl to help Gondor in times of peril, and the latter asked for their aid through the giving of the Red Arrow. This has a historical antecedent in the Old English poem Elene, in which Constantine the Great summoned an army of mounted Visigoths to his aid against the Huns by sending an arrow as a "token of war". Gondor could also call the Rohirrim in need by lighting the warning beacons of Gondor, seven signal fires along the White Mountains from Minas Tirith to the Rohan border: Amon Dîn, Eilenach, Nardol, Erelas, Min-Rimmon, Calenhad and Halifirien.
File:Beacon Hill, Leicestershire.jpg|thumb|Signal beacons like those between Gondor and Rohan were once used in England, as at Beacon Hill, Leicestershire.
At the start of the War of the Ring a Full Muster would have been over 12,000 riders. Among the horses of the Rohirrim were the famed mearas, the noblest and fastest horses that ever roamed Arda. It was because of the close affiliation with horses, both in war and peace, that they received their name.
Language
Tolkien generally called the language simply "the language of Rohan" or "of the Rohirrim". The adjectival form "Rohirric" is common; Tolkien once also used "Rohanese". Like many languages of Men, it is akin to Adûnaic, the language of Númenóreans, and therefore to the Westron or Common Speech.File:Linguistic Map of Middle-Earth.svg|thumb|left|upright=1.35|Tolkien invented parts of Middle-earth to resolve the linguistic puzzle he had accidentally created by using different European languages for those of peoples in his legendarium, pretending that he had translated the Middle-earth languages.
The Rohirrim called their homeland the Riddermark, a modernization by Tolkien of Old English Riddena-mearc, meaning, according to the Index to The Lord of the Rings, "the border country of the knights"; also Éo-marc, the Horse-mark, or simply the Mark. They call themselves the Éorlingas, the Sons of Éorl. Tolkien rendered the language of the Riders of Rohan, Rohirric, as the Mercian dialect of Old English. Even words and phrases that were printed in modern English showed a strong Old English influence. This solution occurred to Tolkien when he was searching for an explanation of the Eddaic names of the dwarves already published in The Hobbit. Tolkien, a philologist, with a special interest in Germanic languages, pretended that the names and phrases of Old English were translated from Rohirric, just as the English used in The Shire was supposedly translated from Middle-earth's Westron or Common Speech. Examples include éored and mearas. The Riders' names for the cunningly-built tower of Isengard, Orthanc, and for the Ents, the tree-giants of Fangorn forest, are similarly Old English, both being found in the phrase orþanc enta geweorc, "cunning work of giants" in the poem The Ruin, though Shippey suggests that Tolkien may have chosen to read the phrase also as "Orthanc, the Ent's fortress".
In The Two Towers, chapter 6, the Riders of Rohan are introduced before they are seen, by Aragorn, who chants in the language of the Rohirrim words "in a slow tongue unknown to the Elf and the Dwarf", a lai that Legolas senses "is laden with the sadness of Mortal Men". The song is called the Lament of the Rohirrim. To achieve a resonant sense of the lost past, the now-legendary time of a peaceful alliance of the Horse-lords with the realm of Gondor, Tolkien adapted the short Ubi sunt passage of the Old English poem The Wanderer.
| The Wanderer 92–96 | The Wanderer in modern English | Lament of the Rohirrim by J. R. R. Tolkien |
| Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago? Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa? Hwær cwom symbla gesetu? Hwær sindon seledreamas? Eala beorht bune! Eala byrnwiga! Eala þeodnes þrym! Hu seo þrag gewat, genap under nihthelm, swa heo no wære. | Where is the horse? where the rider? Where the giver of treasure? Where are the seats at the feast? Where are the revels in the hall? Alas for the bright cup! Alas for the mailed warrior! Alas for the splendour of the prince! How that time has passed away, dark under the cover of night, as if it had never been. | Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? Where is the hand on the harp-string, and the red fire glowing? Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow; The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning? Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning? |
"Thus spoke a forgotten poet long ago in Rohan, recalling how tall and fair was Eorl the Young, who rode down out of the North," Aragorn explains, after singing the Lament.