The Other Way Round

When The Lord of the Rings was first published, some reviewers apparently decided that “all the good [peoples were] just good, and the bad just bad.” In indirect response to such complaints, Tolkien noted to one reader: “…the Elves were not wholly good or in the right” (Letter 154). Indeed, none of his characters were wholly “good” or “evil”; and Elrond acknowledged as much, telling the members of his council that “nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so.”

The Rohirrim are another example of a group who seem good but do evil (on occasion). The treason of Grima Wormtongue is foreshadowed by the rebellion of Freca and his son Wulf, who overthrows King Helm Hammerhand with the aid of Dunlendings, Easterlings, and Corsairs. But the Rohirrim engage in questionable behavior even as a people. When Theoden offers a great reward to Ghan-Buri-Ghan for leading his army to Minas Tirith, Ghan-Buri-Ghan only asks that the Rohirrim stop hunting his people like animals. The Rohirrim are thus not perfect, and sometimes readers have to be shown so. All too many people through the years have mistaken the Rohirrim for a pro-Fascist Nordic purity stereotype (completely unaware of Tolkien’s opposition to the German Fascists and their racist views).

Yet readers also focus on the Rohirrim for another reason: except for Eowyn, many people note, Tolkien put no strong women characters in his stories. Inevitably, people point to Galadriel and Luthien as counter-examples. Now, Galadriel does not play much of a role in The Lord of the Rings, and Luthien is barely mentioned. Even Eowyn’s role is covered in the space of a few chapters (none of which are devoted exclusively to her). On the other hand, The Silmarillion provides more active roles for women. And Unfinished Tales offers tantalizing glimpses into the lives of several women (most notably, Galadriel).

But in The Lord of the Rings, Eowyn is introduced as little more than throne-dressing for Theoden. She graduates to a promised reward for Grima Wormtongue, and then proceeeds to fall hopelessly in love with Aragorn, who (of course) rejects her for the noblest of reasons (his love is already given to another). Eowyn’s long empty life fills her with despair, which leads her to seek a glorious death on the battlefield, and thus Tolkien’s shield-maiden comes to life. Many an argument has swirled over the value Eowyn brings to what is mostly a “boy story”. She is, in some ways, the one redeeming quality about the Rohirrim, and in other ways their most damning attribute.

The Rohirrim inspire debate and division among Tolkien readers more than any other group, except perhaps the Elves. The Rohirrim are often compared to the Anglo-Saxons, and there are people who argue that the Rohirrim must be modelled on the Anglo-Saxons because Tolkien used Old English (Anglo-Saxon) to represent their language. It’s merely a silly fiction, after all, that he was translating a lost book into modern English, and needed to represent forgotten languages with documented languages. The fallacy in this line of thought is twofold: first, it contradicts Tolkien’s own admonition not to confuse the Rohirrim with Anglo-Saxons; and secondly, perhaps more importantly, it assumes that the Rohirrim make some sort of statement about Anglo-Saxon culture.

In effect, if the Rohirrim are based on the Anglo-Saxons, they are an allegory (and a thinly disguised one). Such an identification thus makes Tolkien a liar twice over, because he noted on more than one occasion (including in the book’s Foreword) that “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and have always done so….” And yet, he acknowledges that there is an ‘applicability’ factor, noting that “many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

He most certainly chose those final words carefully: “the purposed domination of the author.” The peril of the One Ring, for the world at large, is its ability to confer upon its wielder (who must first control it) the ability to dominate the wills of others. It was for this reason that Sauron made the Ring. The domination of the author eliminates all purposeful study by the reader, and Tolkien really cannot have been pretending he would prefer something so stringent and restricting. The chief beauty of The Lord of the Rings lies outside the story itself: it has become many things to many people.

And, in Eowyn, some of Tolkien’s readers have found an iconography of the ideal woman of action. She is both stern and enduring, yet forceful and decisive when need demands she be so. But Eowyn is also tragic; in fact, her original storyline resulted in her death. In revising the book (prior to its initial publication), Tolkien softened Eowyn’s part, and allowed her not only to live, but to find love and healing with Faramir. Her choices represent a combination of ideas which Tolkien synthesized only through multiple drafts. Eowyn became a refraction of several models blended into one unique character.

Eowyn is a complex character because she seems to require some justification. Tolkien received a letter from a reader in the 1960s who apparently objected to the speed with which Eowyn fell in love with Faramir. In reply, Tolkien said: “…In my experience feelings and decisions ripen very quickly (as measured by mere ‘clock-time’, which is actually not justly applicable) in periods of great stress, and especially under the expectation of imminent death. And I do not think that persons of high estate and breeding need all the petty fencing and approaches in matters of ‘love’. This tale does not deal with a period of ‘Courtly Love’ and its pretences; but with a culture more primitive (sc. less corrupt) and nobler.” (Letter 244)

Well. Tolkien might as well say the Rohirrim are not medieval. But wait. He did say that, in Letter 211: “…The Rohirrim were not ‘mediaeval’, in our sense.” Yadda, yadda, yadda. That citation gets dragged out at the drop of a chain mail reference, and is used on both sides of the fence. But if the Rohirrim were not medieval “in our sense”, what were they? Setting aside all comparisons to medieval sources for a moment (which are perfectly applicable in many cases), one can easily find other sources of inspiration Tolkien drew upon. And Eowyn is a perfect example of how Tolkien synthesized elements from both classical and medieval sources.

In fact, Eowyn owes far more to Greek mythology than to the virtually non-existent Anglo-Saxon literary tradition. She is certainly comparable in her rebellious state to some women from Middle English literature. Eowyn seems to challenge the social fabric of Rohan in her dialogue with Aragorn, in which she complains there is no place for women in the coming war. But Eowyn is acknowledged as a shield-maiden by the narrative (and thus, through implication, by her people), a term familiar to the historical Germanic world. And yet her swift passage to glory reflects a much older tradition, a classical one. Eowyn is not concerned with either piety or sexuality, two themes frequently associated with women in medieval English literature. Medieval writers unfortunately decided that women were somehow responsible for sin (even though the Bible claimed that Adam was the source of all our woes). Classical writers gave women more faults than that.

Quintus of Smyrna was a late Classical writer. He lived in the 4th century CE, more than 1,000 years after Homer and the other poets who created the Epic Cycle of Greece. Homer and his fellow Cyclic Poets composed their verses in commemoration of the Trojan War. To them, perhaps, the war was very real, and they were preserving traditions which had been handed down for generations. Homer’s “Iliad” covers a period of only 50 days, but the whole ten-year war is supposed to have been recorded in the Cycle’s epic poetry. The Cyclic Poets established a Poetic Renaissance in Greece, which had only recently emerged from a centuries-long dark age that had begun soon after Troy fell to its enemies. (Archaeology has revealed that Troy was sacked several times, but Homeric Troy was destroyed just prior to the onset of the Greek Dark Age, circa 1200 BCE.)

Quintus is believed to have rewritten the work of Arctinus (who composed “The Coming of Memnon”, AKA “Aethiopis”, and “The Destruction of Troy”, AKA “Iliupersus”, around 776 BCE) and Lesches (who composed “Little Iliad” around 700 BCE). Our image of late Homeric Trojan (pseudo) history derives much from “The Fall of Troy”, which was Quintus’ epic, composed in the Homeric tradition. He is credited as having been so familiar with Homer’s work that he came very close to duplicating Homer’s style, although there are criticisms levelled against Quintus — he too often failed to match Homer’s details on specific events, or built up toward a Homeric climax which was never realized.

In 1916, while recovering from Trench Fever (contracted in the war in France), Tolkien began writing the first of his own mythological stories. In title, “The Fall of Troy” sounds very much like “The Fall of Gondolin” (the first of Tolkien’s mythic compositions). Indeed, like Troy, Gondolin was a city built on a hill-top, whose enemies struck at it through treachery (and despite a prophetic warning of impending disaster). Cassandra warned the Trojans not to accept the gift of the wooden horse from the Greeks, and her people ignored her. Tuor warned Turgon that it was time to leave Gondolin, and Turgon ignored him. And just as Greek warriors emerged from the wooden horse to open the gates to the city, the original Gondolin story included metal dragons who carried Orc soldiers inside them.

“The Fall of Gondolin” is firmly rooted in Greek mythological precedents, from the catalogues of Elvish lords and their houses, to sack of the city itself; and the story thus laid the groundwork for Tolkien’s mythology for England. “The Fall of Gondolin” was a shameless retelling of the Trojan myth in an Anglo-Saxon mode (or, what Tolkien felt might pass for one in 1916/7). Like Quintus before him, Tolkien looked back to the Epic Cycle for inspiration. But though Tolkien was not striving to create an epic poem in Homeric style, he was seeking to achieve something Homeric: the creation of an epic cycle for England, just as Homer (and others) had created an epic cycle for Greece. Tolkien wanted to translate Greek mythological achievements into Anglo-Saxon mythological possibilities.

Tolkien loved Greek mythology. It had a profound influence upon him. In fact, Middle-earth undoubtedly owes a great deal more to Greek mythology than shall ever be acknowledged by all the dusty, cobweb-laden artifices of higher scholarship which weigh down the library shelves of Tolkien research. Greek mythology is the uttermost foundation of Middle-earth, because Tolkien saw in Greek mythology that which he could not find in the scraps of Anglo-Saxon literature which he eventually taught about. Without Greek mythology, it is highly unlikely Tolkien would ever have dreamed of an Anglo-Saxon (or modern English) mythology.

In a draft for a letter to one of his readers, Tolkien wrote in January 1956: “It was just as the 1914 War burst upon me that I made the discovery that ‘legends’ depend upon the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the ‘legends’ which it conveys by tradition. (For example, that the Greek mythology depends far more on the marvellous aesthetic of its language and so of its nomenclature of persons and places and less on its content than people realize, though of course it depends on both. And vice versa…).” (Letter 180)

Middle-earth still lay decades ahead of Tolkien, a distant glimmer on the horizon of his future, when he made his innocent discovery in 1914. There were stories which would soon burst from his hand, imaginative tales he hoped might one day constitute a mythology for England. In 1951, Tolkien confessed to the publisher Milton Waldman (of Collins, to whom he was hoping to sell the as-yet unpublished Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion books):

But an equally basic passion of mine ab initio [tr: from the beginning] was for myth (not allegory!) and for fairy-story, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world (accessible to me) for my appetite. I was an undergraduate before thought and experience revealed to me that these were not divergent interests — opposite poles of science and romance — but integrally related. I am not ‘learned’ [Footnote: Though I have thought about them a good deal.] in the matters of myth and fairy-story, however, for in such things (as far as is known to me) I have always been seeking material, things of a certain tone and air, and not simple knowledge. Also — and here I hope I shall not sound absurd — I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff….(Letter 131)

In December 1953, Tolkien noted to his friend Father Robert Murray: “Certainly I have not been nurtured by English Literature….I was bought up on the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer. Also being a philologist, getting a large part of any aesthetic pleasure that I am capable of from the form of words (and especially from the fresh association of word-form with word-sense), I have always best enjoyed things in a foreign language, or one so remote as to feel like it (such as Anglo-Saxon)….” (Letter 142)

Tolkien’s introduction to Greek language and literature began while he was still quite young, in Sixth Class at King Edward’s School (First Class was the senior-most level in the school). In time, Tolkien studied the New Testament in Greek as well, and Humphrey Carpenter quotes Tolkien as saying: “The fluidity of Greek, punctuated by hardness, and with its surface glitter captivated me. But part of the attraction was antiquity and alien remoteness (from me): it did not touch home.”

Yet though Greek played an important role in Tolkien’s education, and ultimately assumed a permanent place in his imagination, his love of philology (the study of linguistic change) was sparked by a teacher at King Edward’s who introduced Tolkien and his classmates to Chaucer and Middle English. Carpenter observes that the teacher’s recitation of Chaucer in the original Middle English “was a revelation, and [Tolkien] determined to learn more about the history of the [English] language.” King Edward’s curriculum focused on the study of Latin and Greek, and therefore it prepared Tolkien for a lifetime of study in other languages. He never forgot the Classics, though he is seldom associated with them any more.

Tolkien’s transition from the study of Greek and Latin Classics to the study of Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, Finnish, and other languages really began when he attended Oxford University. There he was introduced to new influences and he committed himself to the Philological field. But Tolkien credited the nearly two years he spent working on the Oxford English Dictionary in 1919 and 1920 with honing his linguistic skills more than any other phase in his life. The OED is famous for taking English words back as far as they can go. Modern English, like all European languages, extends back several thousand years through many periods of change. The earliest language common to all the European peoples is Indo-European (and it’s also common to non-European peoples, including Iranians, Indians, and a few other groups). Many of the OED entries include (postulated) Indo-European and intermediate (ex.: proto-Germanic) roots.

While “The Fall of Gondolin” proved to be the first of Tolkien’s Greek-inspired myths, Carpenter tells us that at the time Tolkien was working on the Oxford English Dictionary, he “began (on New Year’s Day 1919) to keep a diary in which he recorded principal events and his thoughts on them. After starting it in ordinary handwriting he began instead to use a remarkable alphabet that he had just invented, which looked like a mixture of Hebrew, Greek, and Pitman’s shorthand. He soon decided to involve it with his mythology, and he named it ‘The Alphabet of Rumil’ after an elvish sage in his stories.”

That alphabet evolved into the Tengwar of The Lord of the Rings, and it represents the first in a series of departures from the pseudo Anglo-Saxon tradition which Tolkien eventually abandoned. Officially, he did not abandon the Book of Lost Tales until about 1925 or 1926. Tolkien continued to write stories and devise notes concerning his mythological lost age for England up until that time. As Homer and his contemporaries memorialized Amazons, gods, sirens, cyclopes, and other mythological creatures and peoples, so Tolkien memorialized imaginary prehistoric inhabitants of England. He did not neglect the Anglo-Saxon element, but his stories were really about fantastic creatures who retreated before the encroachment of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.

Anglo-Saxon, of course, continued to influence Tolkien’s thought and fiction in many ways. In June, 1925, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Tolkien dutifully noted that he had specialized in Greek philology for his Classical Moderations, but he added Old Icelandic, Gothic, Old and Middle English, and Medieval Welsh to the category of languages in which he was expert. And it has oft been noted that Old Icelandic provided Tolkien with several sources for the new mythologies he developed. For while he worked on the new Silmarillion mythology (which began to emerge in 1925), Tolkien also began writing the story which eventually became The Hobbit. It shimmered across his thought briefly in 1925, when he wrote, “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit” on the back of a blank exam paper, and by 1930 Tolkien was entertaining his children with the adventures of Mr. Baggins. From The Hobbit there emerged the Norse/Icelandic names of Tolkien’s Dwarves, and the tantalizing history of Dale, the first of his Northman kingdoms, as well as the dark and perilous Mirkwood Forest. In fact, much of The Hobbit reads like a light excursion into Norse mythology, with giants, shape-changers, wizards, dwarves, and dragons.

From 1918 (or 1921) through 1925, Tolkien worked on “Lay of the Children of Hurin” (Urin). This poem was composed in alliterative verse, following Old English styles. But when Tolkien began working on “Lay of Leithian” (the story of Beren and Luthien) in 1925, he changed modes, preferring instead the octosyllabic couplets (pairs of rhyming lines with eight syllables each) which originated in French Romance (around the 12th century and introduced into Middle English in the 13th century). The transition represented another departure for Tolkien from the Anglo-Saxon tradition. But Romance afforded him a much friendlier (if more difficult) mode in which to work.

Homer worked with hexameter (six syllables per line), which doesn’t occur in any of Tolkien’s major poems (perhaps none of them). The octosyllabic form took root under Tolkien’s hand and flourished in his stories; he transformed it in some of his poems, such as Bilbo’s song of Earendil and Legolas’ song of Nimrodel. “Earendil” used the very difficult trisyllabic assonance form (the last three syllables of every other line rhyme). “Nimrodel” was more standardized, rhyming in every other line. Gimli, on the other hand, retained the older octosyllabic couplets for his song about Moria in Durin’s time. In The Lord of the Rings, therefore, Tolkien favored the Romance verse style, but he occasionally broke with the form and became experimental.

And as Tolkien well knew, experimentation was a hallmark of Greek poetry, which had so profound an effect on Western literature and lyric that we still describe our poetic forms in Greek terminology today. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Tolkien eschewed rigid adherence to Franco-English medieval poetic forms in all cases. In contrast to “Earendil” and “Nimrodel”, Galadriel’s “Namarie” seems to be composed in a ten-syllable blank verse (but some of the lines have eleven or twelve syllables — Tolkien may have used a Welsh form, or perhaps a Finnish form, and I am unfamiliar with both). Tolkien therefore experimented liberally with the verse forms in The Lord of the Rings.

Each poem sheds a little light on Middle-earth’s mythology. In true Greek fashion, Tolkien tells a story which is bound up with a name or word. For example, when the Fellowship comes to the river Nimrodel, Legolas tells his companions about the ancient Elf-maiden who gave her name to the river, and he sings the song about her ill-fated love for Amroth. The poetry is not simply window-dressing. It is part of a larger composite element, consisting of the name (Nimrodel) and the story (an Elf-maiden flees her land, is separated from her lover, and is ultimately lost), and the poem commemorating her story. Greek mythology follows the same pattern. Homer took the name of a city (Ilion, Ilium) and used it for the name of a poem which told part of the story of the destruction of that city. Troy passed into the canon of Greek myth which survives today through Homer’s poem. In his time, and for many centuries afterward, the events in the “Iliad” were regarded as historical.

In Letter 156, Tolkien said that the Numenoreans “were still living on the borders of myth”. His story “exhibits ‘myth’ passing into History or the Dominion of Men”. He was seeking “heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history” (Letter 131). He strove to provide a Homeric link between his contemporary audience and an imaginary past which seems as real as the legendary past Homer and the Cyclic Poets immortalized.

The Cyclic Epic, of course, does not concern itself with the battle between an incarnate evil being and free peoples. Instead, it details the moral struggles of the Achaeans and Trojans (and their allies) to come to terms with the choices they have made. Homer’s warriors are both noble and petty, gallant and petulant. Glaucus and Diomedes exchange armor and vow not to attack each other in battle; Achilles sulks in his tent over the loss of a slave-girl while the Trojans run down the other Achaeans. The Epic Cycle balances the struggles of men with the struggles of the Olympian gods. They know that Troy must eventually fall, but some of the Olympians sneak around and help the Achaeans, and Zeus waffles back and forth between favors owed to followers and family.

In much the same way, Tolkien’s Rohirrim are engaged in a struggle with other men, the Dunlendings, which has become swept up in the greater battle with Sauron (and Saruman, who is Sauron’s surrogate). The Rohirrim fight Orcs and live close to Ents, all creatures of fantasy, but they are mythologically equivalent to men. That is, the Ents and Orcs are what Tolkien would call “aspects of the humane”, and they represent human interests (isolationist communities and barbaric ravaging hordes). The Rohan-Dunland conflict only briefly rises to the surface in The Lord of the Rings, but it is the underlying reason for the peril which threatens Rohan. The Rohirrim, for their part, are ambivalent toward the Dunlendings; sometimes they intermarry with the Dunlendings, and sometimes they exchange brutal raids with the Dunlendings.

Tolkien introduces the reader to the Rohirrim through a heroic procession as Eomer and 114 Riders pass by Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas. Protected by Elvish cloaks, Aragorn and his companions are nearly invisible to the Rohirrim, just as Achaeans and Trojans are occasionally hidden in clouds and whisked past each other by their meddling gods. When Aragorn and Eomer meet face to face, they nearly come to blows, but Aragorn reminds Eomer that they have a common foe, and he acknowledges a past relationship with Eomer’s father, just as Diomedes acknowledges a family connection with Glaucus’ family. The two do not exchange armor, but Eomer lends Aragorn and his companions two horses, a risky act which evokes the one-sided exchange between Glaucus and Diomedes: Glaucus’ golden armor was worth ten times Diomedes’ bronze armor.

But Tolkien also looks to the Anglo-Saxon poem “Beowulf” for inspiration, as some are quick to point out. The approach of Aragorn, Gandalf, Gimli, and Legolas to Edoras has been compared to Beowulf’s arrival in Denmark. Guardsmen at the gate of Edoras challenge the four tavelers, and a coastguardsman challenges Beowulf and his fourteen men. Both groups are accompanied to the halls of the local lords, and both guardsmen depart. Heorot, the golden hall of Hrothgar, serves as a convenient model for Meduseld, Theoden’s golden-roofed (but otherwise humble and mundane) hall.

Curiously, both Beowulf’s Danes and Geats and Homer’s Achaeans travel by ship, and they live on islands or on a peninsula jutting out into a small sea. Beowulf and his Geats, and Menelaus and his Achaeans, have crossed their local seas seeking war. Menelaus goes to retrieve his estranged wife, Helen, and Beowulf goes to help Hrothgar defeat a monster. The enemies in “Beowulf” are all monsters, whereas the Achaeans are fighting other men (though half-gods abound on either side, as Zeus and his family have been busily consorting with local families for generations).

There are no monsters threatening Rohan, although the wolf-riders and Orcs are certainly terrifying creatures. But they do not steal into Theoden’s hall at night and kill his warriors. Theoden, in fact, commands a very capable army, just as Priam of Troy and Menelaus command very capable armies. The war between Rohan and Isengard depends as much on morale as it does on strategy. Battles rage across the landscape and armies retreat as the fortunes of war scramble from side to side. And just as the Trojans mount an assault on the Achaeans’ camp, breaching the walls, so Saruman’s army mounts an assault on the Hornburg, in which the walls are breached. Patroclus, Achilles’ friend, helps to route the Trojans by donning Achilles’ armor and leading the Myrmidons in a counter-attack. But Patroclus is eventually slain, forcing Achilles to make peace with the other chieftains. Theoden and Eomer are estranged over Eomer’s breach of orders. But after word arrives of the death of Theodred, the king’s son, and Gandalf helps to heal Theoden of his despair, Theoden is reconciled with Eomer.

The striking similarities between the Rohirrim and Homer’s heroes are numerous. And Tolkien seems to have added more Homeric elements to the story of the Rohirrim after The Lord of the Rings was published. “The Battles of the Fords of Isen”, for example, recounts how Theodred was slain, and the Rohirrim defended his body where it fell much as the Achaeans defended the body of Patroclus.

In his letter (No. 131) to Milton Waldman, Tolkien notes: “The sequel [to The Hobbit], The Lord of the Rings, much the largest, and I hope also in proportion the best, of the entire cycle, concludes the whole business — an attempt is made to include in it, and wind up, all the elements and motives of what has preceded: elves, dwarves, the Kings of Men, heroic ‘Homeric’ horsemen, orcs and demons, the terrors of the Ring-servants and Necromancy, and the vast horror of the Dark Throne, even in style it is to include the colloquialism and vulgarity of Hobbits, poetry and the highest style of prose.” “The cycle”, as he calls it, extends from The Silmarillion (then still unpublished) through The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien would eventually add The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and The Road Goes Ever On. It would fall to his son Christopher to add a Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.

Unlike the Beowulf poet, Tolkien wasn’t simply telling a rollicking good story. He was creating a mythology. The Beowulf poet was codifying a popular tale, perhaps Christianizing it along the way, and quite possibly was introducing a few classical elements of his own. But the Danes and Geats of “Beowulf” bear little resemblance to the Rohirrim in style. The Rohirrim do not boast about their own deeds, whereas Beowulf proudly corrects the conniving Unferth by telling how he engaged in a contest of strength and endurance with Breca years before. The heroes of Beowulf live in a Germanic world which looks and feels like the Northman culture of Rohan: kings sit in halls, noble women serve drinking cups, warriors stand beside their lords, men value courage and trust in their convictions. The boasting is, in fact, a trait which “Beowulf” shares with the “Iliad”. Both Achaeans and Trojans often break into long-winded accounts of their genealogies and deeds. Poetically, the story-tellers must remind their audiences of who was whom, and how they were all related to each other.

It is the poetic form where Tolkien borrows extensively from Anglo-Saxons for the Rohirrim, though. He uses the Anglo-Saxon (Old English) language as a model for the Rohirrim’s mode of speech. He depicts the Rohirrim as a more primitive, less sophisticated people in comparison to the rural Hobbits and Cosmopolitan Dunedain and Elves, who speak colloquial modern English or an affected archaic modern English. The Rohirrim play the role that an Anglo-Saxon tribe, living beside modern Englishmen, might be allotted. But whereas the Anglo-Saxons learned to write, and bequeathed to their descendants documents such as “Beowulf”, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Rohirrim did not write down their legends and laws. So, song and poetry are the hallmark of Rohirric culture.

Aragorn breaks out into song when he sees the tapestry with Eorl the Young in Meduself. When Legolas concludes that the song is in Rohirric, and is “laden with the sadness of Mortal Men”, Aragorn translates it for his companions. He starts out in an alliterative form but quickly loses meter and all sense of order. The song just sort of sputters out, indecisive regarding what form it wants to follow. Somewhat later, the rejuvenated Theoden summons his warriors: “Arise now, arise, Riders of Theoden! Dire deeds awake, dark is it eastward. Let horse be bridled, horn be sounded! Forth Eorlingas!” This verse does a pretty good job of preserving the simplistic Anglo-Saxon alliterative-stress meter.

Tolkien doesn’t simply park the Rohirrim in a 4-beat Anglo-Saxon poetic mode. He lets them wallow a bit in pentameter and other measures. But they retain the distinctive alliterative form. He is declaring in an unspoken way that the Rohirric poets are not hemmed in by poetic tradition. They are changing and experimenting with verse forms. They are “a culture more primitive” than the high medieval culture of Anglo-Saxon England. And yet, Anglo-Saxon poetry serves as Tolkien’s model for all the Rohirric experiments. There is something playful in Tolkien’s approach, a free spirited “what if” exercise.

And “what if” leads us to the most distinctive representative of the Rohirrim: Eowyn. She is unique not only because she is a woman warrior (the only one named in any of the stories); she also achieves more personally than any of her contemporaries. She even overshadows Eomer, her brother. It is Eowyn who strikes down the Lord of the Nazgul in an encounter of almost Beowulfian proportion. Whereas the Rohirrim do not confront monsters in their own land, they do have to contend with them in Gondor and Mordor. If the Rohirrim are truly an homage to the Anglo-Saxons of poetry, as Tom Shippey argues in The Road to Middle-earth, the highest tribute is paid to Anglo-Saxon women, not their men, through Eowyn.

There is little precedent for Eowyn in Anglo-Saxon England. Little, but not quite none. While Anglo-Saxon laws don’t mention women-warriors, how they are to be trained, and who is to equip or lead them, there is one outstanding woman in Anglo-Saxon history: Aethelflaed. The daugher of King Alfred, she married Aethelred of East Mercia. After the death of her husband, Aethelflaed ruled the Mercians by herself. She and her brother eventually defeated the Danes, and only Aethelflaed’s sudden death due to illness prevented her from seeing the culmination of their efforts. The only other warrior princess among the Anglo-Saxons was a dubious, unnamed woman whom the Byzantine writer Procopius claimed had led an army of 100,000 of her countrymen against the Varni after their king, Radigis, refused to marry her.

But though Tolkien had no Anglo-Saxon models for Eowyn, he would have found one in Quintus’ “The Fall of Troy”. Quintus, in Tolkien-like fashion, drew upon ancient Homeric sources as a model and inspiration. And he introduced (or preserved) the heroic Amazon queen Penthesileia for future generations to admire. Penthesileia accidentally killed her sister, Queen Hippolyte, and she fled the Amazon city of Thermodon with twelve companions. Quintus names all twelve, calling one “dark-eyed Harmothoe” and another “Thermodosa glorying with the spear.”

Penthesileia and her companions arrive in Troy soon after the funeral of Hector, which event ends Homer’s “Iliad”. Penthesileia has been driven mad by the Greek Furies as a punishment for the accidental murder of her sister, and she is seeking solace in war. Having heard about the prowess of Achilles, she decides that she is the one who will strike him down.

So peerless amid all the Amazons
Unto Troy-town Penthesileia came.
To right, to left, from all sides hurrying thronged
The Trojans, greatly marvelling, when they saw
The tireless War-god’s child, the mailed maid,
Like to the Blessed Gods; for in her face
Glowed beauty glorious and terrible.
Her smile was ravishing: beneath her brows
Her love-enkindling eyes shone like to stars,
And with the crimson rose of shamefastness
Bright were her cheeks, and mantled over them
Unearthly grace with battle-prowess clad.
(Translation by A.S. Way)

Quintus includes an anacronistic reference to mail (an armor type which first appeared only about 6-700 years before he lived, long after Homer and the Cyclic Poets had died). Nonetheless, the image fits Eowyn well enough: “Very fair was her face, and her long hair was like a river of gold. Slender and tall she was in her white robe girt with silver; but strong she seemed and stern as steel, a daughter of kings.” (From, “The King of the Golden Hall”)

Penthesileia is welcomed by the grieving king Priam:

Into his halls he led the Maid,
And with glad welcome honoured her, as one
Who greets a daughter to her home returned
From a far country in the twentieth year;
And set a feast before her, sumptuous
As battle-glorious kings, who have brought low
Nations of foes, array in splendour of pomp,
With hearts in pride of victory triumphing.
And gifts he gave her costly and fair to see,
And pledged him to give many more, so she
Would save the Trojans from the imminent doom.
And she such deeds she promised as no man
Had hoped for, even to lay Achilles low,
To smite the wide host of the Argive men,
And cast the brands red-flaming on the ships.
Ah fool! — but little knew she him, the lord
Of ashen spears, how far Achilles’ might
In warrior-wasting strife o’erpassed her own!

The Amazons’ arrival is very similar to that of Beowulf and his men. They arrive unlooked-for and seek out the king, promising to rid him of his greatest foe. As Hrothgar bestows gifts and praise upon Beowulf, so Priam showers Penthesileia with favor, and both hero and heroine are treated to a royal feast. Eowyn is given short shrift in the catalogue of heroic introductions. She stands silently beside Theoden and is then dismissed when Gandalf and the boys arrive at Meduseld. In fact, the only time she is treated with distinction is when Theoden leaves her in charge of Edoras. Then he gives her a mail shirt and sword.

Nonetheless, the procession of Penthesileia sleeps in Priam’s hall on the eve of battle, just as Beowulf sleeps in Hrothgar’s hall to await Grendel’s nightly attack. But whereas Beowulf seeks out Grendel in order to help Hrothgar’s beleaguered people, Penthesileia acquires her ambition to slay Achilles from a dream. And Eowyn only seeks death in battle, because she has become so filled with despair she has lost her will to live. At this point, Beowulfian foreshadowings vanish from Quintus’ poem, but Tolkien continues to walk in Quintus’ and Homer’s footsteps. As Homer’s Achaeans don helms with horse-hair plumes, so Quintus has Penthesileia take up a helmet with a golden-haired plume. And Eomer, when he greets Aragorn for the first time, rides forward wearing a helm adorned with a white horsetail crest.

The “horse-taming Trojans” also wear horse-hair plumes in Homer’s “Iliad”. Horses are important to both the Achaeans and Trojans, for the great beasts draw the war-chariots of both armies. Yet Penthesileia merely rides her horse into battle (a classical trait of the Amazons, according to centuries of Greek artwork).

…Swiftly all
Hearkened her gathering-ery, and thronging came,
Champions, yea, even such as theretofore
Shrank back from standing in the ranks of war
Against Achilles the all-ravager.
But she in pride of triumph on she rode
Throned on a goodly steed and fleet, the gift
Of Oreithyia, the wild North-wind’s bride,
Given to her guest the warrior-maid, what time
She came to Thrace, a steed whose flying feet
Could match the Harpies’ wings. Riding thereon
Penthesileia in her goodlihead
Left the tall palaces of Troy behind.

Penthesileia rides through the Achaean forces like an unstoppable force. Even as her Amazonian companions are struck down, one by one, she decimates the Achaean warriors, so that they fall back before her in terror. Seeing his men dispersed and their morale broken, Achilles turns his attention upon the Amazon. The confrontation between Achilles and Penthesileia is both long and thrilling, and quite sad. She is the daughter of Ares, but Achilles is invulnerable to all her weapons. As the Amazon attempts to ride him down, Achilles pierces both horse and rider with a spear, and Penthesileia takes a mortal wound. Her fall disheartens the Trojans, who to this point have all but routed the Achaeans and are (once again, as happens in the “Iliad”) on the verge of burning the Achaeans’ ships. The Trojans thus flee back to their city, and Achilles gloats over his kill. But he does not enjoy his victory for long. For Achilles removes Penthesileia’s helmet, and seeing her beauty, he falls in love with her, even as she lays dead before him:

So spake he, and his ashen spear the son
Of Peleus drew from that swift horse, and from
Penthesileia in death’s agony.
Then steed and rider gasped their lives away
Slain by one spear. Now from her head he plucked
The helmet splendour-flashing like the beams
Of the great sun, or Zeus’ own glory-light.
Then, there as fallen in dust and blood she lay,
Rose, like the breaking of the dawn, to view
‘Neath dainty-pencilled brows a lovely face,
Lovely in death. The Argives thronged around,
And all they saw and marvelled, for she seemed
Like an Immortal. In her armour there
Upon the earth she lay, and seemed the
Child Of Zeus, the tireless Huntress Artemis
Sleeping, what time her feet forwearied are
With following lions with her flying shafts
Over the hills far-stretching. She was made
A wonder of beauty even in her death
By Aphrodite glorious-crowned, the
Bride Of the strong War-god, to the end that he,
The son of noble Peleus, might be pierced
With the sharp arrow of repentant love.
The warriors gazed, and in their hearts they prayed
That fair and sweet like her their wives might seem,
Laid on the bed of love, when home they won.
Yea, and Achilles’ very heart was wrung
With love’s remorse to have slain a thing so sweet,
Who might have borne her home, his queenly bride,
To chariot-glorious Phthia; for she was
Flawless, a very daughter of the Gods,
Divinely tall, and most divinely fair.

Achilles’ bittersweet vengeance leaves him wracked with love and loss. It is an eery scene, disturbing and deeply tragic. Tolkien seems almost determined to set right this ancient wrong when, as Prince Imrahil rides out from Minas Tirith to support the Rohirrim on the Pelennor Fields, he comes upon the carnage where Theoden and his knights have fallen before the Lord of the Nazgul:

Then the prince went from his horse, and knelt by the bier in honour of the king and his great onset; and he wept. And rising he looked then on Éowyn and was amazed. ‘Surely, here is a woman?’ he said. ‘Have even the women of the Rohirrim come to war in our need?’

‘Nay! One only,’ they answered. ‘The Lady Éowyn is she, sister of Éomer; and we knew naught of her riding until this hour, and greatly we rue it.’

Then the prince seeing her beauty, though her face was pale and cold, touched her hand as he bent to look more closely on her. ‘Men of Rohan!’ he cried. ‘Are there no leeches among you? She is hurt to the death maybe, but I deem that she yet lives.’ And he held the bright-burnished vambrace that was upon his arm before her cold tips, and behold! a little mist was laid on it hardly to be seen.

‘Haste now is needed,’ he said, and he sent one riding back swiftly to the City to bring aid. But he bowing low to the fallen, bade them farewell, and mounting rode away into battle.

There are other images Tolkien probably lifted from the Greek poets: the omens and portents represented by eagles, as when an eagle drops a snake over the Trojan army in the “Iliad”, and Legolas sees an eagle (Gwaihir) flying far off over the fields of Rohan. The Greek gods assume mortal forms and join Achaeans and Trojans in combat, and their presence immediately restores the morale of warriors; Gandalf, an angelic Maia, has come to Middle-earth in the form of a Man, and when he and Prince Imrahil make their rounds in the besieged city of Minas Tirith, men take heart and sometimes break out into song. And Tolkien delights in describing siege after siege: Helm’s Deep, Minas Tirith, and Aragorn’s last stand around the two knolls just north of Mordor.

But though some will undoubtedly argue that applicability says far more about Tolkien’s connection with Greek mythology than Tolkien himself, Tolkien himself spoke passionately about Greek history and literature on numerous occasions, as in a letter (No. 94) he sent to his son Christopher during the Second World War:

Mr. Eden in the house the other day expressed pain at the occurrences in Greece ‘the home of democracy’. Is he ignorant, or insincere? [Greek word for ‘democracy’] was not in Greek a word of approval but was nearly equivalent to ‘mob-rule’; and he neglected to note that Greek Philosophers — and far more is Greece the home of philosophy — did not approve of it. And the great Greek states, esp. Athens at the time of its high art and power, were rather Dictatorships, if they were not military monarchies like Sparta! And modern Greece has as little connexion with ancient Hellas as we have with Britain before Julius Agricola….

Well, perhaps the modern Greeks would take exception to Tolkien’s last comment, but it is completely ironic and somewhat tragic that modern Anglo-Saxonists might take exception to any attempt to document his extensive connections to ancient Greek literature, language, and myth. Even in The Book of Lost Tales, the “mythology for England”, Tolkien could not help but rely upon the Greek word “Gnomos” (thought, intelligence) as the root for his “Gnomes”, the precursors of the Noldor of Middle-earth (Letter 239).

There is certainly no denying the strong connection between Tolkien’s work and the Anglo-Saxon language, poetry, and literature. He also drew extensively upon Middle English poetry and literature. But, as Tolkien might put it, the Anglo-Saxonists are not wholly correct or in the right because, to their great detriment and the diminishment of those who seek to learn from them, Tolkien owed a great debt to Greek language, myth, and literature. Nothing is Anglo-Saxon in the beginning, not even Middle-earth.

If the reader perceives only an echo of Aethelflaed or, worse, no more than a shadow of Brunhild in Eowyn, and fails to note the tragic beauty and strength of Penthesileia in the fair maiden lying amid the carnage of battle, did Tolkien succeed in creating his mythology, or has his work only been mythologized?

…The other way round seems rather like describing a place (or stage in a journey) in terms of the different routes by which people have arrived there, though the place has a location and existence quite independent of these routes, direct or more circuitous.(Letter 209)

This article was originally published on June 26, 2002.

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