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Of Thegns and Kings and Rangers and Things

© Michael Martinez

Maybe only once have I ever seen anyone on the Internet ask how many Rangers would have been guarding Sarn Ford the day the Nazgul showed up. And then no one was able to provide a satisfactory answer. It's a tough question because, so far as we know, J.R.R. Tolkien himself never tried to answer it. And in trying to answer that question for ourselves, we quickly get drawn into digressions and tangents. Any attempt to figure out how many Rangers were stationed there inevitably gets bound up in an effort to calculate how many Rangers there must have been altogether. An interesting question which also occasionally gets asked is, where did they all go during the War of the Ring? And were the thirty Rangers whom Halbarad led to Rohan the last of their kind? Halbarad's words to Aragorn, "I have thirty with me; that is all of our kindred that could be gathered in haste," seem to imply there were more Rangers who stayed home. But if Halbarad couldn't gather them all in his haste, where were the other Rangers? They certainly weren't guarding the Shire any more, because Saruman's ruffians were in the process of taking over. They weren't guarding Bree, because Bree was having its own problems with Saruman's ruffians. The Rangers are a mysterious group. Tolkien never gives us an explicit history of the organization. Nor does he tell us how they managed to survive as a people. It seems most likely that the Rangers were merely a special group supported by the larger Dunadan tribe or nation. When Aranarth decided not to re-establish the Kingdom of Arnor, he took the title of Chieftain of the Dunedain, but he also retained the title of Lord of the Dunedain. Since Tolkien left no word unturned, but used them all in both innovative and traditional ways, it may help to examine where the words chieftain, lord, and ranger come from, or at least how they are integrated into Middle-earth's mythology. Tolkien believed that a good mythology was interwoven with the language which expressed that mythology. In Letter 180 he wrote:

...It was just as the 1914 War burst on 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. Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.) So though being a philologist by nature and trade (yet one always primarily interested in the aesthetic rather than the functional aspects of language) I began with language, I found myself involved in inventing 'legends' of the same 'taste'....

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