Feudal Array 2

27 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, Fairy Tales and Myths, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth

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14th century, 15th century, Adventure, Agincourt, Anglo-Saxon, armor, Bayeux Tapestry, feudalism, Fyrd, Gerry Embleton, Huscarl, Luttrell Psalter, Middle-earth, N.C. Wyeth, tapestry, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Welcome, as always.

In this posting, we want to conclude what has turned out to be a kind of mini-series on Feudalism in Middle Earth. Two postings ago, we used the 14^th-century Luttrell Psalter to illustrate what working the plowland behind the Rammas Echor might have looked like. In our last, we used the Bayeux Tapestry to offer another possible visual influence on Tolkien’s depiction of the Rohirrim: the conquering Normans. In this final posting, we will look at the forces of Rohan’s ally, Gondor and will use a number of sources, both medieval and modern.

In the Jackson movies, there is a kind of regularity, from Osgiliath to Minas Tirith in what we are shown.

This is not surprising if the cue for costuming has come primarily from one description:

“The Guards of the gate were robed in black, and their helms were of strange shape, high-crowned, with long cheek-guards close-fitting to the face, and above the cheek-guards were set the white wings of sea-birds; but the helms gleamed with a flame of silver, for they were indeed wrought of mithril, heirlooms from the glory of old days. Upon the black surcoats were embroidered in white a tree blossoming like snow beneath a silver crown and many-pointed stars. This was the livery of the heirs of Elendil, and none wore it now in all Gondor, save the Guards of the Citadel before the Court of the Fountain where the White Tree once had grown.” (The Return of the King, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

We have no wish to criticize—in this respect, at least—the creators of the films for taking what might appear to be an easy out: uniformity being cheaper than individuality, since it’s clear that, when it came to dramatic effects in the films in general, the old theatrical advertising line, “No Expense Was Spared To…” is really true. Instead, we want employ our former method of consulting medieval manuscripts, as well as another passage from the same chapter, to offer another possible view, one which might have influenced the author in his depiction of the defenders of Gondor.

We’ll begin with the passage:

“Leading the line there came walking a big thick-limbed horse, and on it sat a man of wide shoulders and huge girth, but old and grey-bearded, yet mail-clad and black-helmed and bearing a long heavy spear. Behind him marched proudly a dusty line of men, well-armed and bearing great battle-axes; grim-faced they were and shorter and somewhat swarthier than any men that Pippin had yet seen in Gondor…

And so the companies came…The men of Ringlo Vale…from the uplands of Morthond…five hundred bowmen…From the Anfalas…a long line of men of many sorts, hunters and herdsmen and men of little villages, scantily equipped save for the household of Golasgil their lord. From Lamedon, a few grim hillmen…Fisher-folk of the Ethir…Hirluin the Fair…with three hundreds of gallant green-clad men. Imrahil…with gilded banners bearing his token of the Ship and the Silver Swan, and a company of knights in full harness riding grey horses; and behind them seven hundreds of men at arms, tall as lords, grey-eyed, dark-haired, singing as they came.”

There is actually not a lot of detail here, but there are a few hints. First off, there are those “great battle-axes”. Here are two images from the Bayeux Tapestry of the Anglo-Saxon king, Harold’s, bodyguards, his huscarl, armed with their characteristic long-handled axes.

And here is a modern reconstruction.

Next, we have those five hundred bowmen from Morthond. The Tapestry can provide a useful image of those,

but perhaps what JRRT really was thinking of were the famous longbowmen of Crecy and Poitiers and Agincourt, whose skill and courage knocked down whole waves of equally brave French knights. Here are a pair of modern images by the brilliant historical illustrator, Gerry Embleton, himself a medieval reenactor.

Besides the huscarl, King Harold’s army was made up of the fyrd, a kind of militia drawn from the freemen of the countryside, who had to provide their own weapons and equipment and were only required to serve for limited periods—they would have been farmers, most of them, after all, and couldn’t be off the farm for too long without threatening their own livelihoods. Perhaps these could suggest that “long line of men of many sorts”. Here’s an image from the Tapestry of what appears to be the fyrd fending off a mounted Norman attack. You’ll notice the lack of defensive armor.

“gallant, green-clad men” is rather vague, but, suddenly, all we could see is Robin Hood and his Merry Men. And so we can’t resist including some of our favorite N.C. Wyeth illustrations.

rhood1 rhood2

And these could easily provide the model for the rangers in South Ithilien, couldn’t they?

Last, there is that “company of knights in full harness”. This presents a real problem. Knights from which period? The armor available at the time of the Bayeux Tapestry in the mid-11^th century

and which, we suggested in our last, might be good for the Rohirrim, was very different from that of later times. Here’s the armor of the days of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell,

in the early 14^th century—

and here’s what the English archers would have faced as worn by their valiant French opponents at Agincourt, in 1415.

This handy chart can give you a diachronic (through-time) view of changes in medieval armor.

If we look at something produced through the workshop of William Morris, that strong influence upon JRRT, we find this group of knights from a set of tapestries produced in the 1890s.

Holy_Grail_Tapestry_-The_Arming_and_Departure_of_the_Kniights.jpg

The armor is pretty vague (the systematic study of the history of armor was still in its childhood then—if you’re interested in the early days, google Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick to learn about its first great scholar), but one of the helmets—the one to the far left in the background, looks like a visored sallet, which could date what we see in the tapestry to the later 15^th century.

Sallet_helmet,_Southern_Germany,_1480-1490_-_Higgins_Armory_Museum_-_DSC05461.JPG

(Sharp-eyed readers who are Star Wars fans—we are—will recognize this general pattern from the technical people on the Death Star—

We might add that Morris and his friends were strongly influenced by pre-Renaissance and early Renaissance painters, so perhaps this picture, one of a set of 3 by Paolo Uccello from the middle of the 15^th century, might also provide a possible model (and we’re glad to show you the whole set because we think that they’re just magical).

Öèôðîâàÿ ðåïðîäóêöèÿ íàõîäèòñÿ â èíòåðíåò-ìóçåå Gallerix.ru

Uccello_Battle_of_San_Romano_Uffizi

Taken all together, these produce a very different image from the films, don’t they? Much more individual, often much less well-equipped, more actual medieval, as we would imagine the author had had in mind. So—contrast this

with this:

Which do you prefer, dear readers?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Feudal Array 1

20 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Economics in Middle-earth, Fairy Tales and Myths, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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Anglo-Saxon, Bayeux Tapestry, Embroidery, feudalism, Medieval, Middle-earth, Normandy, Peter Jackson, Rohirrim, tapestry, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In this posting, we would like to continue what we began in “Behind the Rammas Echor”. In that posting, we talked about using the illustrations from medieval English psalters (the wonderful 14^th-century Luttrell Psalter in particular) to try to visualize the feudal world suggested by certain aspects of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

In that posting, we said that feudalism could be broken down into two big categories, land and troops, and there we spent time looking at basic agricultural life, to imagine the look of the feudal world of Middle Earth.

Now we move on to troops. And, as much as we can, we would like to continue to use medieval images to help us.

In previous posts, we’ve praised Jackson’s depiction of the Rohirrim, both the architecture and the people. Edoras and Meduseld within it just look right—and, when you watch the material on constructing them in the extended version box set, we can only be absolutely bowled over by the care taken there, for all that we have difficulties with certain other parts of the films, both in look and in the changes to the text.

In one previous post, we suggested the kinds of models we both know and imagine Tolkien used to create the Rohirrim. These were primarily Anglo-Saxon, but combined with a horse people (which the Anglo-Saxons were not) of some sort, possibly Scythian (an Indo-European-speaking horse folk from north of the Black Sea).

As we’ve thought more about it (one, for us, of the great pleasures of solid adventure literature, new and old—is that you not only want to think more about it, but, as you do, you find more in it), we began to imagine that Tolkien might have had another visual source, based upon another famous set of medieval illustrations, the Bayeux Tapestry.

This is a roll of linen, some 230 feet (that’s about 70 metres) long and 20 inches (50 centimetres) high, into which are woven three bands of designs. The center is a long (very long!) series of adjoining panels covered in human figures, which have been stitched on with various colored woolen threads. Above and below the central band are two narrower ones which combine abstract figures (commonly on the upper panel) with human activities (on the lower one). Across the top of the central band are a series of captions in very simple Latin, describing what is happening below.

The caption here reads: “Here Harold the king has been killed.”

As it’s not through-woven, like this—

this isn’t really a tapestry, but an embroidery, in fact.

It’s linked to the cathedral at Bayeux, in Normandy, where it has been for at least 6 centuries. On the map, find Le Havre and look left and you’ll see Bayeux.

Where it really came from and who made it are two of those mysteries that it’s been fun to follow the scholarship of, but, as of 2015, there are lots of theories, some of them more convincing than others, but that’s all there are: theories. If you’d like to know more about them, go to: www.bayeux-tapestry.org.uk/whomadethetapestry.htm.

The tapestry is housed in an impressive museum in Bayeux, where its entire length is ingeniously displayed in a sort of wrap-around way.

We’ve given you lots of facts, but the one thing we haven’t mentioned is the subject of such an immense work. It is, in fact, a lengthy piece of propaganda justifying the Norman invasion and conquest of England in 1066AD. We know, then, one definite thing about it: it certainly wasn’t embroidered for the Anglo-Saxons! (Although there is at least one theory that it was made by them.)

As much as we are interested in the subject, what has caught our attention now is the look—here are soldiers from the same period as the Anglo-Saxon model for the Rohirrim, after all, but, although archers are depicted on the Norman side, and a few infantry, the Normans are mainly shown as horsemen.

WebPage-ImageF.00070.jpeg

Here is our first sight of the Rohirrim in The Two Towers, Chapter 2, “The Riders of Rohan”:

“Their horses were of great stature, strong and clean-limbed; their grey coats glistened, their long tails flowed in the wind, their manes were braided on their proud necks. The Men that rode them matched them well: tall and long-limbed; their hair, flaxen-pale, flowed under their light helms, and streamed in long braids behind them; their faces were stern and keen. In their hands were tall spears of ash, painted shields were slung at their backs, long swords were at their belts, their burnished shirts of mail hung down upon their knees.”

Minus the grey horses and the braids, what do you think, dear readers?

As ever, thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

That MTC will be Feudal Array.2, in which we consider the other forces opposing Mordor…

What’s In A Name?

26 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

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Anglo-Saxon, artefacts, Balin, Beaumaris, Bladorthin, Gandalf, Girion, Hadrian's Wall, Hoard, Middle-earth, Raedwald, Ship burial, Sigeberht, spears, Staffordshire Hoard, Stonehenge, Suffolk, Sutton Hoo, The Argonath, The Hobbit, Thorin, Thror, Tolkien, weapons

Dear Readers, welcome, as ever.

If you look for the name “Bladorthin” in The Annotated Hobbit (our standard source), you will find it only once, on page 287, where Thorin and Balin discuss what they can remember of the great hoard of the Lonely Mountain.

This includes not only the usual golden items and jewels, but also what appears to have been a military consignment, “the spears that were made for the armies of the great King Bladorthin (long since dead), each had a thrice-forged head and their shafts were inlaid with cunning gold, but they were never delivered or paid for.”

Who this king was and why he was arming his men with what appear to be deluxe weapons is a mystery and probably forever unsolved. This is likewise true for the original Bladorthin, who exchanges his name for that of the head dwarf in the first drafts, Gandalf, just as the head dwarf loses his name, Gandalf, to become Thorin. Why does Tolkien make the shift?

If neither of these can be answered, perhaps we can step back a little to wonder why Bladorthin, the king, is in The Hobbit at all?

A strongly-marked feature of The Lord of the Rings is the sense of age, of great time having passed. Part of this comes from Tolkien’s own sense of history, part from living in a place where things like stone circles

and Roman fortifications

let alone more recent things, like castles

are everywhere to be seen every day.

Part of it, too, comes from Tolkien’s seemingly-unquenchable desire to add to what he had created, providing more and more and more context practically per page.

What might be seen as obsessive, or nearly, however, adds what we might call convincing texture, and in two ways: on the one hand, it makes the story that much more vivid because it’s so much more detailed, and, on the other, it gives it weight: this is not a tale of yesterday, but of a long ago, even if not a long ago from the world of the Neolithic or Romans or Edward I.

This sense of age comes from a number of elements, including not only the idea that the text has been translated from a manuscript, a handwritten text from a pre-Gutenberg age, but also from the landscape which, like Tolkien’s own mid-20^th-century Britain, is full of visible reminders of the past–

In fact, not long after the publication of The Hobbit, in 1937, a major uncovering of the English Anglo-Saxon past took place near the coast, in Suffolk, at a place called Sutton Hoo. Here, a series of mounds

yielded a ship burial

with nothing short of a hoard, including such items as these pieces from a purse

and a helmet.

(And, since then, it turns out that the area is an extensive cemetery, which, though much plundered, has yielded many other finds.)

Although Tolkien doesn’t mention this discovery in his selected letters, it would be difficult to imagine that he hadn’t seen something about it: it was even featured in the US National Geographic, in the year of discovery, 1939. Unfortunately, who the man buried there was appears impossible to say, leaving one aspect unknown, and all of the valuables simply generic Anglo-Saxon. (The theory now is that he is the early 7^th-c AD ruler, Raedwald, or his son/step-son, Sigeberht.)

The Hobbit, written earlier in terms of years and even earlier, perhaps, in terms of literary sophistication, has, in comparison, much less depth. Much of the backdrop is, particularly in comparison, fairy-tale flat, without all of those levelsl of history.

But then there is Bladorthin.

That mound of wealth, extending beyond the sleeping Smaug is initially described as:

“…on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light.” TH 270

This is impressive enough to wake a kind of primal greed in Bilbo:

“His heart was filled and pierced with enchantment and with the desire of dwarves; and he gazed motionless, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, at the gold beyond price and count.” TH 271

Imagine, then, that such a hoard—like Sutton Hoo, or the more recent—and astonishing—Staffordshire Hoard (see the link here)

could have names attached to some of its pieces, if not to the hoard in general. Thorin and Balin, in their reminiscing, combine general description with some specific detail, as well as identifying several one-time object owners:

“…shields made for warriors long dead; the great golden cup of Thror, two-handed, hammered and carven with birds and flowers whose eyes and petals were of jewels; coats of mail gilded and silvered and impenetrable; the necklace of Girion, Lord of Dale, made of five hundred emeralds green as grass, which he gave for the arming of his eldest son in a coat of dwarf-linked rings the like of which had never been made before, for it was wrought of pure silver to the power and strength of triple steel. But fairest of all was the great white gem, which the dwarves had found beneath the roots of the Mountain, the Heart of the Mountain, the Arkenstone of Thrain.” TH 287

Just as places in Middle-earth, by having history, are deepened, the same would be true for artefacts: not just a necklace, but Girion’s necklace, not just a golden cup, but Thror’s cup, and not just spears, but spears commissioned by Bladorthin, a king of long ago.

Thus, although Bladorthin’s history may remain a mystery outside The Hobbit, what history there is gives greater depth, narrative texture, to this early vision of Middle-earth and to the story of Bilbo, in particular.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Ringed In

05 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien

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Anglo-Saxon, Bilbo, Deagol, Dwarves, Elves, Faramir, Frodo, Gandalf, Gollum, Gondor, Isildur, Kenning, Lorien, Men, Nazgul, Ring, Ring-bearer, Roman senator, Romans, Sam, Sauron, Silmaril, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Tom Bombadil

Dear Readers, as always, welcome!

Everyone at all interested in the works of Tolkien knows this passage (and many could recite it by heart, we’re sure):

“Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,

Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,

Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,

One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.” LoTR 50.

But why a ring? Since the Ring is about power, why not something which looks like power:

a sword, for example

or a crown

or even, considering Tolkien’s own mythology, a silmaril.

In The Hobbit of 1937, the Ring was originally simply a magic ring right out of folk and fairy tales, with apparently one gift, invisibility, for which Gollum treasures it.

As is well known, Tolkien reconsidered its powers and, as The Lord of the Rings grew, the ring became the Ring, and the central focus of the sequel to the earlier book. By the beginning of the 1950s, he states (in a letter to Milton Waldman dated by Carpenter/C. Tolkien as “probably written late in 1951” LTR 143):

“the primary symbolism of the Ring, as the will to mere power, seeking to make itself objective by physical force and mechanism, and so also inevitably by lies…” LTR 160.

(by “mere” we imagine that Tolkien is using the word here in its original Latin—merus –a –um— sense of “pure/unmixed”)

Although this tells us something about the force within the Ring, it doesn’t really explain why a ring.

Rings are an ancient status symbol, certainly. The Romans used them as one of the ways to show the class of a person: senators wore gold ones (although there is an old story that, originally, Roman senators wore rings made of iron)

and the other free classes wore any metal they chose. Tolkien would have had a vivid idea of the inherent status in a ring from Old English, as one of the kennings (poetic metaphorical phrases) for a great lord was “ring-giver”

—just as Sauron gives rings to the ancient kings and so holds their allegiance long after their natural lives should have ended.

This is echoed in “and in the darkness bind them” , which brings us back to those verses with which we began.

In them, the Ring’s powers are clearly laid out (rather like Saruman’s claimed goals, “Knowledge, rule, order”): rule, find, bring, bind.

As Gandalf tells us, the primary reason for the creation of the Ring was, in fact, to rule, both the other rings and, through them, Middle-earth and its peoples: Elves, Dwarves, Men. To do so, Sauron endowed the Ring with much of his own power, a perfect example of his arrogance, depriving himself of power he might need, clearly convinced that he would suffer no harm from its lack.

As he endows the Ring, it seems that he—intentionally?—passed on to it a small bit of his self-will. Unlike inanimate objects in our world (and we presume in Middle-earth, too), the Ring not only shows purpose, but can act upon it.

As Gandalf tells Frodo:

“A Ring of Power looks after itself…It was not Gollum, Frodo, but the Ring itself decided things. The Ring left him…The Ring was trying to get back to its master.” LotR 55.

To do so, it uses another of its powers, it brings people to use as vehicles, discarding them when they have served its purpose.

“It had slipped from Isildur’s hand,” says Gandalf (a hand already under the Ring’s control, as it couldn’t force itself to destroy the Ring when it had the chance) and betrayed him; then when a chance came it caught poor Deagol, and he was murdered and after that Gollum, and it had devoured him. It could make no further use of him: he was too small and mean…So now, when its master was awake once more…it abandoned Gollum, only to be picked up by…Bilbo.” LotR 55-56.

To acquire such vehicles, the Ring uses a third power, finding. Gandalf’s list suggests that that power entails some innate ability to sense who will be most attracted to it. They appear to be rather a wide assortment, from the heir to the throne of Gondor to two proto-hobbits. And there are also those not on Gandalf’s list: Saruman and even, to some degree, Galadriel. As for Gandalf himself, he, like the Lady of Lorien, is wise enough to avoid the ultimate temptation, as is Faramir, perhaps because, as his father accuses him, he has been Gandalf’s pupil and has acquired some of his awareness both of events and of himself.

Our list would not be complete, however, without Frodo and Sam. It is hard to imagine that the Ring has picked them: Frodo, after all, has inherited it. This doesn’t mean that he is not influenced by it, even, at the end, sounding more like Isildur than himself in his refusing to destroy it, suggesting that, even by inheritance, someone can be found, brought, and ruled. And Sam? He holds it only briefly, but surrenders it so easily that it appears to have little ultimate power over him, something which he shares with Tom Bombadil, perhaps because both are grounded—quite literally—in Middle-earth. It is no surprise that Galadriel gives him a gift for growing things and that, in his consolation of Sam, Frodo says that he will be “the most famous gardener in history” (LoTR 1029). As for Bombadil, it would appear that the same sort of protection which keeps Sam from being found, brought, and ruled keeps him safe. When he holds up the Ring and looks through it, for a moment we might see that, for him, the symbolism of the “will to mere power” means nothing and, instead, he sees it only as an empty metal band.

For others, from the Nazgul to Frodo, who never feels whole again, the fourth power, binding, has done its job and also perhaps, in doing so, answers the question, why a ring?

What better binder than a perfect circle, seemingly blank, but with a hidden message, almost a spell, and which, when put on, pulls you from the daylight world and, which, worn too long, can keep you there forever?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Where From the Rohirrim?

10 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, The Rohirrim

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Amazons, Anglo-Saxon, Bayeux Tapestry, Burial mounds, Cavalry, Charge of the Light Brigade, descendants, Edoras, Eotheod, Horse people, Indo-European, Kurgan, language, Middle-earth, Normans, Rohan, Rohirric, Rohirrim, Scythians, The Lord of the Rings, The Mark, Tolkien, Tom Shippey

Dear Readers, welcome!

In this post, we want to think out loud a bit about the Rohirrim.

Everyone knows where their language is from, as Tolkien says in a letter to “one Mr. Rang”:

“…’Anglo-Saxon’…is the sole field in which to look for the origins and meaning of words and names belonging to the speech of the Mark.” LT 381

And yet they are horse people (their own name for themselves, in fact, is Eotheod, “horse people”), which the Angles and Saxons who went to make up the Anglo-Saxons, were not. Tolkien was well aware of this difference, saying in Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings:

“…this linguistic procedure does not imply that the Rohirrim closely resembled the ancient English otherwise, in culture or art, in weapons or modes of warfare, except in a general way due to their circumstances…” L1136

Tom Shippey, in The Road to Middle Earth, suggests that

“The Rohirrim are nothing if not cavalry. By contrast the Anglo-Saxons’ reluctance to have anything militarily to do with horses is notorious…How then can Anglo-Saxons and Rohirrim ever, culturally, be equated? A part of the answer is that the Rohirrim are not to be equated with the Anglo-Saxons of history, but with those of poetry, or legend.” (112)

Or, could there have been other models?

Tolkien may have been suggesting one when, in a letter to Rhona Beare of 14 October, 1958:

“The Rohirrim were not ‘mediaeval’ in our sense. The styles of the Bayeux Taptestry (made in England) fit them well enough, if one remembers that the kind of tennis-nets [the] soldiers seem to have on are only a clumsy conventional sign for chain-mail of small rings.” Ltr 280-281.

The Bayeux Tapestry depicts both Normans and their allies, on the one hand, and the Anglo-Saxons, on the other, but Tolkien doesn’t appear to distinguish between them. The Normans themselves are mounted, the Anglo-Saxons on foot, as was their custom (they did use horses to move rapidly from place to place, as in the race north to Stamford Bridge and then back south to face the Normans).

Here, to the left, we see those mounted Normans and, to the right, the Anglo-Saxons behind their shield wall. The “tennis-nets” are clearly visible and would actually have looked like this:

In this further illustration, by the way, it’s easy to see the consequences of having the shield wall crumble: men on horseback can have a significant advantage when their opponents lose cohesion.

This, however, is only their look . What about those horses and an entire culture based around them?

For a clue, we look to another element in the culture of the Rohirrim, the use of burial mounds. Here they are at Edoras.

(We can’t resist, by the way, saying that our absolute favorite part of the Jackson movies is anything to do with the Rohirrim—to us, absolutely inspired and we see the depiction of the charge of the Rohirrim against the army besieging Minas Tirith as being right up there with the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854 and the charge of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba in 1917–

One might say, in reply, that there are Anglo-Saxon mounds—like the famous Sutton Hoo ship burial.

But that leaves us where we started, in the land of foot soldiers.

So, let’s go farther afield, to the north of the Black Sea.

Here, we see the so-called “Kurgan Culture”, with its burial mounds

[This, by the way, is not to be confused with The Kurgan from the first Highlander movie

The Kurgan]

These were a people who:

are believed by many linguists (and some archeologists) to be the direct ancestors of the Indo-Europeans who gradually invaded Asia Minor and western Europe (including, eventually, the Anglo-Saxons) as well as moving east, to India and beyond
buried their dead (at least what appear to be the high status ones) in mounds
were a horse culture

And, in fact, were seemingly the forerunners of the Scythians, a later well-known Indo-European horse people

And the Scythians, in turn, may have been the model for those mythical horse folk, the Amazons.

In the 19^th century, when the idea of Indo-Europeans began to circulate, there was a preference for a northern European origin (a theory no longer held), but the idea of an eastern home was also circulating and we would suggest that Tolkien would have known about this, as well as, from his early classical training, Scythians and Amazons, their actual and mythical descendants.

Imagine, then, that what we see in the Rohirrim is, in fact, an interesting mixture of people sprung from an earlier people (as Tolkien tells us, the Rohirrim were descended from the Edain of the First Age—see LOTR, Appendix F 1129), both in our world and in Middle Earth, who based their culture upon horses, and bury their dead in mounds, combined with people who may also bury their dead in mounds, who speak a version of Anglo-Saxon and who dress like the Normans and Anglo-Saxons of the 11^thcentury AD.

What do you think, dear readers?

Thanks for reading, as always.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Anglo-Saxon

Feudal Array 2

Feudal Array 1

What’s In A Name?

Ringed In

Where From the Rohirrim?