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How did Tolkien actually portray the Rohirrim?

© Michael Martinez

It appears from my email and comments posted after last week's article that more discussion of the Rohirrim would be appropriate. It is impossible to address the subject fully in this space, and as each essay itself may raise new questions and challenges, there will come a point where I have to say enough and move on. To begin, a counter point has been raised to my explanation of the Rohirrim in last week's article: "Tolkien chose to represent the Rohirrim in a fashion HIGHLY influenced by Anglo-Saxon-Danish culture." The argument provided in support of this statement is that the plains of Rohan are similar to the northern seas. And yet the northern seas were traversed by diverse peoples such as the Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes, Swedes, Norwegians, Franks, Celts, et. al. while the Rohirrim generally do not seem to have permitted foreign peoples to wander through their lands (in fact, they had few neighbors who would even be so inclined). The Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes were originally groups of related tribes. The Angles were in fact a Danish people, originally living in Jutland. But the world of the Danes, Anglo-Saxons, Continental Germans (Franks, Saxons, Alemanni, et. al.), Norwegians, and Swedes, with all their many diverse tribes, was considerably different from Tolkien's world of Northmen. The details provided in THE LORD OF THE RINGS demonstrate the Northmen were unlike the Scandinavians and West Germans of medieval history, but a wealth of additional information has come to light through Christopher Tolkien's work in Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-earth. Did Tolkien ever say the Rohirrim visually resembled any of these peoples? Not at all. What he said was that "the styles of the Bayeux Tapestry (made in England) fit [the Rohirrim] well enough" (source: Letter 211, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien) -- the same Rohirrim whom in the preceding sentence he said were not medieval, "in our sense". And Tolkien cautioned his readers in Appendix F against identifying the Rohirrim with the Anglo-Saxons: "This linguistic procedure [of using Anglo-Saxon to represent the language of Rohan] does not imply that the Rohirrim closely resembled the ancient English otherwise...." Despite such clear admonitions from the author not to mistake the Rohirrim for a medieval people, however, the argument they must have been modelled on medieval peoples persists. "Read the [Icelandic/Norse] sagas," I am admonished, "and you will see quite a similar culture." I do have two sagas handy for reference: Orkneyingasaga and Nyal's Saga. Let's see how well the cultures portrayed in these sagas compare to what we know of the Rohirrim.

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