Q: Who Were the Variags of Khand?
ANSWER: In October 2010 I wrote a lengthy essay, “Who Were the Variags of Khand?”, for the blog at Tolkien Studies on the Web which seeks to answer this very question.
In that essay I suggested two very realistic and plausible explanations for the Variags, who are only mentioned twice briefly in “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”. One possibility is that the Variags were renegade Northmen who settled among the Easterlings of Khand after Minalcar sorted out Gondor’s affairs among the Northmen, some of whom had gone over to the Easterlings. However, Tolkien only added some of the details of Northman history in the Second Edition (1965) of The Lord of the Rings.
The other possibility is that the Variags were Numenoreans who settled among the Easterlings of Khand. The name Variag originally referred to outsiders who had settled among the Slavic peoples of Russia. The Variags of Khand could, therefore, have been Black Numenoreans. If that is the case, they could have been the people from whom the Mouth of Sauron was recruited.
The Mouth himself entered the story as a renegade from Gondor, but his background was changed around the time that Tolkien introduced the Variags of Khand.
Unfortunately, J.R.R. Tolkien provided too little information in any of the currently published texts to either substantiate or disprove these guesses. We must for now remain ignorant of the true meaning of “Variag” in Tolkien’s stories.
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