Do the Rohirrim of Rohan Use Boats?
ANSWER: There are no stories or essays where J.R.R. Tolkien mentions boats used by the Rohirrim. The Eotheod, the ancestors of the Rohirrim, lived in the upper Vales of Anduin for over 500 years. It seems logical to assume that they would have had many opportunities to learn how to use boats. But what is the importance of the question concerning whether the Rohirrim used boats?
The issue most likely began with my own essay, “How Did Tolkien Actually Portray the Rohirrim?” I wrote the article in late 1999 and it has been read by thousands of people both online and in my book, Visualizing Middle-earth. In the essay I pointed out:
To begin with, we are presented with boats. They are everywhere in the sagas and nowhere in Rohan….
In another essay written in the same month, “Tolkien’s Middle-earth Doesn’t Look Like Medieval Europe”, I also mentioned boats:
The key points of the argument include these facts: the Anglo-Saxons were a seafaring people, whereas the Rohirrim don’t even appear to use boats;…
I have said so little about boats but they are a critical issue when comparing the Rohirrim of Middle-earth to the Old English of ancient and early medieval Britain. Is it not sufficient to conclude that a people who live near rivers will take up the custom of using boats, especially given that there is a strong sea-faring tradition among their neighbors, the Dunedain of Gondor?
The problem with making assumptions about any fictional world is that the reader’s imagination becomes the authority for answering questions. This is perfectly fine when you’re reading the story. This is perfectly fine when you are adapting the story to your own needs, such as for the stage, a movie, or fan fiction. But if someone wants to know what the author wrote or intended then the readers’ imagination is not suitable for answering such questions. We can certainly try to infer things based on statements in the stories and essays, but sometimes Tolkien himself disagreed with such inferences. His implications were, after all, based on his own special knowledge of the sources he used to develop the stories and the world in which they were set — we are all quite naive in that branch of knowledge.
Still, we want to draw inferences and make logical deductions about the things Tolkien may have had in mind. And he does speak of boats and rafts when writing about some of the northmen of Middle-earth. For example, in the chapter “The Great River” in The Fellowship of the Ring, we find the following passage:
The day was now growing, and the fog had lifted a little. It was decided that Aragorn and Legolas should at once go forward along the shore, while the others remained by the boats. Aragorn hoped to find some way by which they could carry both their boats and their baggage to the smoother water beyond the Rapids.
`Boats of the Elves would not sink, maybe,’ he said, `but that does not say that we should come through Sarn Gebir alive. None have ever done so yet. No road was made by the Men of Gondor in this region, for even in their great days their realm did not reach up Anduin beyond the Emyn Muil; but there is a portage-way somewhere on the western shore, if I can find it. It cannot yet have perished; for light boats used to journey out of Wilderland down to Osgiliath, and still did so until a few years ago, when the Orcs of Mordor began to multiply.’
‘Seldom in my life has any boat come out of the North, and the Orcs prowl on the east-shore,’ said Boromir. `If you go forward, peril will grow with every mile, even if you find a path.’
So we know that either the Northmen or the Elves still living in the upper Vales of Anduin used boats to visit Gondor even in the last 100 years of the Third Age. We can infer that Aragorn may have seen one or more of these northern boats when he was serving in Rohan or Gondor during his travels. Boromir at least attests to a rare personal contemporary knowledge of such travelers.
We cannot be sure that the boats were used by Northmen. For example, Haldir the march-warden of Lothlorien tells the Company of the Ring that he is one of a small number of Elves who are sent out to gather news from other lands. Celeborn demonstrates his great knowledge of events outside the borders of Lothlorien by pointing out that Osgiliath’s bridges have been broken and thrown down. So because Tolkien doesn’t tell us whose boats were coming out of the north, we cannot say whether they were Elves, Men, or both.
In The Hobbit we find that both the Elves of northern Mirkwood and the Men of Lake-town use boats and rafts. Hence, we can be sure that Tolkien clearly envisaged at least some Northmen both having a knowledge of boats and making widespread use of them. It is important, when drawing inferences, to allow for different degrees of use and familiarity. For example, when Gandalf tells Frodo the story of Smeagol and Deagol, he says that the Stoors of the Gladden Fields used “little boats of reeds”. Reed boats are historically attested in river cultures like that of ancient Egypt and the Aztecs of Mexico, so Tolkien integrated a historical variant of “light boats” into his stories.
Reed boats would not have been used to travel from the upper Vales of Anduin to Gondor — they would not have withstood the journey. The Elves of Lothlorien clearly maintained many well-constructed rafts and boats, even though they were not engaged in extensive trade up and down the Anduin. Hence, reed boats would have been used for local travel in the weak currents of the Gladden Fields. But our sources for the use of boats among the peoples of Wilderland fails beyond these few references.
Incidental use of boats exists among many historical cultures that don’t rely primarily upon river or sea travel. After all, boats and rafts are simply too convenient to be ignored. Virtually all historical peoples who lived near major waterways developed boats or rafts. Even the Goths, upon whom Tolkien modeled some aspects of the Eotheod and Rohirrim, crossed the Danube river on rafts and small boats when they were fleeing the Huns (who had destroyed the Gothic and other east Germanic kingdoms in the late 4th century CE). We don’t really associate Goths with boats but their legends say they crossed the Baltic sea and followed great rivers south to the lands near the Crimea.
On the basis of both the historical and literary record we can therefore infer that the Rohirrim — having lived along the Anduin and other rivers for more than a thousand years — probably knew about boats. But there are no references to boats in Rohan. Tolkien doesn’t even mention a river guard. The Rohirrim preferred to use their horses to hunt down their enemies and defend their homelands. Hence, any boats in Rohan would have been used incidentally for local purposes. There is no indication that boats in Rohan would have been used for economic purposes such as trade or long-distance transportation or strategically.
Any question about the Rohirrim, Rohan, and boats therefore cannot be answered definitively but we can say with certainty that they played no significant role in the narrated culture of the Rohirrim, do not occur in the stories about Rohan, and therefore most likely don’t have an important role in the culture of the Rohirrim.
But does that mean that the Rohirrim were not modeled on the Anglo-Saxons? It seems fair to say that Tolkien used elements of Anglo-Saxon culture alongside elements of Gothic culture to synthesize the literary culture of the Rohirrim. He also drew upon Greek influences as well. The Rohirrim are a noble, semi-barbaric literary people who idealize all the better qualities of ancient cultures from across Europe.
See also:
- Why Did Sauron Need a Road from Barad-dur to Sammath Naur?
- Why Did the Fellowship Not Take any Maps with Them?
- Where Did the Old Forest Road in Mirkwood Lead To?
- Where Did Boromir Die in The Lord of the Rings?
- How Many Roads Led Into the Shire?
- Why are There So Few Roads in Middle-earth?
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