The Other Way 'Round - Page 12
© Michael Martinez
Aragorn breaks out into song when he and his companions approach Edoras, passing by the mounds where Rohan's kings are buried. 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.
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