** Appendix A II The House of Eorl ** The Kings of the Mark

[Elizabeth]

The last section of this Appendix is a list of the Kings of the Mark, starting with Eorl the Young, who brought his people to Rohan, and continuing on to Éomer's son Elfwine the Fair in the Fourth Age. All the kings are listed with their birth and death years, and many have little vignettes about their lives. Some of these are quite charming.

1. My favorite of these is #13, Folca (2804-64). Which is yours? How do these snippets of history enrich the tale (or do they)?

The "lines" of the kings follow linear descent through male heirs. When this descent fails, as it does with Helm Hammerhand, whose sister's son Fréaláf succeeded him and Théoden, likewise, it starts a new "line" which is given physical representation by a new line of burial mounds or barrows near Edoras. Burial mounds have been found all over the world, in cultures ranging from bronze age peoples of Central Asia throughout Europe and Asia, including the Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Nordic peoples who share many cultural similarities with the Rohirrim. Wikipedia has a description of barrows in the Czech Republic that sounds as though they may have come from a similar culture: At places where barrows have been constructed, they are usually found in groups (10 to 100 together), often forming several clearly distinct lines going from the west to the east. As far as I know, though, there is nothing like Tolkien's Simbelmynë, which is a lovely touch.

This picture, from the Extended Edition of The Two Towers, shows the funeral of Théoden's son Théodred, which is not described in the book but which many people feel is a reasonable representation of what it may have been like. The scene is based largely on the description of Beowulf's funeral, but eagle-eyed fans report that the number and arrangement of mounds is correct.

2. We know that the Gondorians (and Numenorians before them) entombed their royals in marble tombs, and the Rohirrim these mounds or barrows. What, if anything, do we know about burial customs of other peoples of Middle Earth?

Finally, we learn some interesting background concerning Théoden, his sister Théodwyn, and her family, including a glimpse of the remaining years of King Éomer's reign.

3. Is this sufficient wrap-up for the Rohirrim? Would you like to have seen more of them?

4. Karl Urban, who played Éomer in the movies, described his character as "just an orc hunter" (i.e., not a lot of dramatic depth there). Since the noteworthy aspects of his reign seem to involve helping King Elessar subdue remaining pockets of unrest, is that a fair assessment of book Éomer as well?

5. Does the fact that much of King Elessar's reign appears to have been occupied in fighting imply a lack of diplomatic skills on his part, the strength of the residual evil, or just the level of civilization in many parts of Middle Earth?

6. Any other comments on the People of Eorl?

Thank you all for your patience with my tardiness! Now on to Pryderi!

 

[squire]

2. We know that the Gondorians (and Numenorians before them) entombed their royals in marble tombs, and the Rohirrim these mounds or barrows. What, if anything, do we know about burial customs of other peoples of Middle Earth?

Númenor. It’s not clear if Tolkien had thought this through at the time of writing The Lord of the Rings, but in his posthumously published work, A Description of Númenor, the royal tombs of early Númenor seem to resemble those of the Egyptian New Kingdom pharaohs:

…on the south-east [of the ridge leading to the Holy Mountain] the land went down into a shallow valley. That was named Noirinan, the Valley of the Tombs; for at its head chambers were cut in the rock at the base of the mountain, in which were the tombs of the Kings and Queens of Númenor. (UT, 166)​

It was a sign of the decadence of Númenor when this practice was changed to building mausoleums, in the time of Tar-Atanamir, 2000 years after the isle was founded:

But the fear of death grew ever darker upon them, and they delayed it by all means that they could; and they began to build great houses for their dead, (Sil, Akallabeth)​

Rath Dinen, the necropolis of Gondor (“Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living” – Faramir in TT) clearly repeats this failing. But it is not so clear whether the original Kings of Gondor had reverted to putting cave-tombs in the shadow of Mindolluin, as one might think Elendil would have preferred, or whether they simply continued the late-Númenórean practice of building mausoleums, which may only later have become too “splendid”.



Arnor. Of course we all know about the Barrows of the North Kingdom, where Frodo and his friends had their adventure. They are royal tombs, closely based on Tolkien’s first-hand knowledge of ancient and rather primitive British barrow tombs. I have never been able to figure out whether he particularly cared about “Numenorean” burial practices so much that he would have been able to reconcile these rough holes with the examples given above; I’ve always suspected he wrote the Barrow-downs chapter well before he had the slightest idea of “the Old Kings’” rather involved descent from Númenor.


The only later thought that he gave them, as far as I know, reflects his interest in First Age history as it came down through Numenor’s rather obscure Second Age. Somewhere in his later musings (I don’t have the reference) he relates that the Arnorian barrow-tombs were mixed up with, or even re-used from, tombs of much greater antiquity: from the Chieftains of the Three Houses of Men who afterwards moved West to live among the Elves in Beleriand. This seems to tie the practices of Rohan rather closely to the practices of uncorrupted Numenor/Arnor, if not Gondor.



Men of the Darkness. No one could forget Denethor’s mad embrace of the incendiary royal funerary practices of the Dark Men of the Second Age, before Numenor (in the LotR, at least) reappeared to teach them proper piety:

“No tomb! No long slow sleep of death embalmed. We will burn like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed hither from the West.” (LotR, V.4)​

A disapproving Gandalf adds to this horrific tale of suicidal immolation the detail that these “heathen” kings also killed their kin, “to ease their own death”. Inevitably, it seems, he blames Sauron for this practice; and we also read in the Akallabeth that Sauron instituted human sacrifice by fire during his degradation of Númenor. Sauron credits Morgoth for the idea, and Morgoth is indeed said to have demanded the same of Men when he first corrupted them, in the apocryphal tale of Man’s origins given in Morgoth’s Ring (HoME X, Athrabeth).


A prohibition against burning corpses is never stated, but is implied several times in The Lord of the Rings. A burial for Boromir is all his friends can think of at first (‘We have not the time or the tools to bury our comrade fitly, or to raise a mound over him. A cairn we might build.’ –LotR III.1), and they never even think to burn him, consigning him to the water instead. Likewise Éomer and Gandalf and the Ents all agree that underground is the only place for a Rider of Rohan’s remains. Contrast that with the seemingly contemptuous burning of the orc bodies outside Fangorn – and even with the contrasting fates of Snowmane and the Dark Beast on the Pelennor fields, one buried under green grass, one burned on ever-blackened soil.


As far as the burial practices of Men in Tolkien’s legends, then, we can identify a hierarchical list:

1. Burial underground or in mounds, in modestly marked but revered graves. (BEST)
2. Embalmed remains elevated in elaborate mausoleums. (BAD)
3. Burning the dead. (DISRESPECTFUL)
4. Burning alive, even willingly. (THE ULTIMATE SIN)​

That Men’s burials are a religious matter – showing respect for the Valar and for Eru’s intention or saying something about the fate of their spirits – is typically hard to find any evidence of. The term “heathen” (referred to above) does suggests a religious alternative.



Dwarves. It shouldn’t be hard to understand that Dwarves are buried in elaborately carved rock chambers. We have both Balin’s and Thorin’s royal tombs as examples, in LotR and The Hobbit. The practice is declared universal in a footnote to the Appendices:

…they will lay their dead only in stone, not earth… (LotR, App. A.III)​

I remember somewhere a suggestion that they have a physical affinity to rock, having been made of that material by Aulë. There seems also to be a belief in reincarnation, realizable only if the body is preserved in a tomb rather than destroyed – this is probably connected to the belief that the first Dwarves “woke from sleep” in underground chambers. Death is in their eyes just a return to the state of being that preceded birth.

So the story of the Great Burning, after the Battle of Nanduhirion outside Moria’s East Gate, reveals quite a gap between Men and Dwarves on the option of cremation: although the Dwarves were “grieved” by the need to burn their massed dead, there was simply no question of burying them in soil or mounds of any kind. It was rock, or nothing. In compensation they made the burning into a point of pride in the stubbornly proud Dwarvish manner.

Another detail of Dwarvish burial practices is harder to make sense of: the note that Dwarves will not reveal their “real” names even to their posterity after death: “Not even on their tombs do they inscribe them.” (LotR, App. F) I have always suspected that this obscure note is just Tolkien’s way of excusing himself from having Balin’s tomb in Moria engraved with the Runes that read, even to a casual reader with access to Appendix E, “Balin, son of Fundin”, etc. “Balin”, of course, comes from the Norse sagas and has nothing to do with Tolkien’s conception of Khuzdul, his imaginary Dwarven language.



Elves. Elves are immortal, so a lack of information on “burial” practices is not strange. But there are a couple of exceptions to their immunity from death, briefly summarized as “For the Elves die not till tile world dies, unless they are slain or waste in grief (and to both these seeming deaths they are subject)” (Sil, 1). What do we know of the treatment of bodily remains in these two instances?


Oddly, the only account (that I remember) of a burial of Elvish war dead is the one arranged by the Enemy, Morgoth. After the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, in which a host of Elves and Men died, he had his orcs heap the bodies and their gear

…in a great mound in the midst of Anfauglith; and it was like a hill that could be seen from afar. Haudh-en- Ndengin the Elves named it, the Hill of Slain, and Haudh-en-Nirnaeth, the Hill of Tears. But grass came there and grew again long and green upon that hill, (Sil, 20).​

What was Morgoth’s purpose? Evidently to set a warning to his enemies, but it backfired by becoming a kind of sacred memorial hill where “no creature of Morgoth trod thereafter upon the earth.” The interesting aspect of this to me is that the grass arrives on its own – that Nature seeks the Elves out and inters them herself. And this leads to exception two: the various times where some heroically grief-stricken Elf just lays down and dies on the floor of the earth. Míriel, the mother of Fëanor, is the most memorable of these instances:

She went then to the gardens of Lórien and lay down to sleep; but though she seemed to sleep, her spirit indeed departed from her body, and passed in silence to the halls of Mandos. The maidens of Estë tended the body of Míriel, and it remained unwithered; but she did not return. (Sil, 6)​

What does it mean that her body was “tended”? According to what practice and with what end was the tending? Is it there still? We never learn. But the episode is recalled, ages later at the end of LotR, when Arwen does much the same thing:

‘There at last when the mallorn-leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come, she laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth; and there is her green grave, until the world is changed,…’ (LotR, App. A)​

Is Arwen buried by anyone? Or is her body just absorbed by the earth in such a way that a “grave” can be said to exist? It’s just not clear, and that’s the point, I think. The Elves are so strongly identified with Arda, the world, that when and if their spirits are forced to leave their bodies, their bodies rather mystically become indistinguishable from the Earth from which the originally awoke. Morgoth heaps the bodies high in the air, but the grass follows of its own accord. No grave is dug for Míriel or Arwen, but each body finds a grave nonetheless.


That’s my best interpretation of the question of Elvish “burial practices”. And yet. Fëanor remains an exception here in death, as he was in life.

Then he died; but he had neither burial nor tomb, for so fiery was his spirit that as it sped his body fell to ash, and was borne away like smoke; (Sil, 13)​

The uniqueness of his disintegration leads to him having neither burial nor tomb – but that statement surely implies that other Elves did. Which Elves? When? Where?



Ents. I don’t think the terms “burial practices” and “Ents” go together in Tolkien’s works.



Orcs. We see that Men are as inclined to burn dead Orcs as they are to bury them. However, we don’t know, I think, just what Orcs do with their own dead when they have the option to do something. They don’t eat them, despite the ghoulish hints – in fact, Orcs have a culture that includes tribal identity and racial pride, despite their slavery to their masters:

‘We have come all the way from the Mines to kill, and avenge our folk.’ (LotR III.3)​

In Cirith Ungol when the Orcs find Frodo’s unconscious body, Gorbag thinks he is dead and affects contempt for the way Frodo’s companion “just left him lying: regular elvish trick.” (LotR IV.10) Even allowing for Orcish hypocrisy and general evil, this statement could suggest that Orcs expect some kind of devotional treatment from their fellows after they die.

It’s an interesting, if slightly morbid, subject. Thanks for the chance to stretch out and use a new lens on some friendly old texts!

 

[Elizabeth]

of why we love you, squire! Thanks for this!

I found when researching burial mounds that historically it was, in fact, much more common for the dead to be cremated before being stored in the mounds. Heroes as diverse as Patroclus and Beowulf are burned before being buried in their mounds. The builders of the Czech mounds I described at some time switched from burials by fire to burying of unburned corpses, nobody knows why.

But I can't leave this topic without, um, resurrecting this oldie-but-goodie.

 

[sador]

May I add three notes?

Elendil. You have not mentioned his hallowed grave atop the Halifirien, as described in Cirion and Eorl. This was clearly a place of great reveremce, more in accord with what you describe as the ideal mode of burial. The tradition of Isildur which Cirion quotes there is that the Halifirien was chosen as the mid-point of the Southren Kingdom (which apparantly extended from Tharbad to the Mouths of Anduin), and therefore once Calenardhon is ceded to the Rohirrim, it makes sense to remove Elendil's body to Rath Dinen (of course, once you assume that Gondor is by now the only rightful heir of Elendil - see Faramir's question to Frodo at the beginning of The Window on the West).
However, as you indicate, this also exchanged Elendil's simple, pious grave to the splendour and magnificence of the later kings - I wonder what Elendil and Isildur would think of it?
(By the way - that's a nice connection between Numenor and Gondor in this respect! Another echo of which is what I've pointed out several years ago, that the king who signifies the moral decline of Gondor is Atanatar Alcarin, quite the same name as Tar-Atanamir!)
And once we are mentioning Unfinished Tales - at the end of The Disaster of the Gladden Fields Saruman is suspected of shamefully disposing of Isildur's body.

Balin. Just an aside - do you know of any Norse source for this name? It is not in the Dvergatal like the rest of the dwarves', and does appear in Arthurian legend. If I remember correctly John Rateliff did try to establish this name as a Norse one, but did not reach a satisfactory conclusion - or did he?

Elves and Dwarves. Just to quote from The Departue of Boromir:

'What is to be done now?'
'First we must tend the fallen,' said Legolas. 'We cannot leave him lying like carrion among these foul Orcs.'
'But we must be swift,' said Gimli. 'He would not wish us to linger. We must follow the Orcs, if there is hope that any of our Company are living prisoners.'
'But we do not know whether the Ring-bearer is with them or not ' said Aragorn. 'Are we to abandon him? Must we not seek him first? An evil choice is now before us!'
'Then let us do first what we must do,' said Legolas. 'We have not the time or the tools to bury our comrade fitly, or to raise a mound over him. A cairn we might build.'

I note that Legolas is the one in greatest horror of leaving the dead (incidently, a sentiment echoed by Jackson in the fabricated warg attack in TTT), while Gimli is ready to honour him in the speediest way so as not to lose time (cremation? I'm sure he realised that Legolas would cry out against this), and Aragorn wavers, until he comes up with the mystical solution of sending Boromir down the River.

 

[squire]

Whoa, I totally forgot (if I ever really knew) that Balin is the one dwarf-name from The Hobbit that is not found in the Norse list that Tolkien took the others from. Looking at Rateliff's note, I see that he is upset by the mystery, and after wondering if Balin was changed from the name Vali that is in the list, he concludes that Tolkien most likely reached into the Arthurian grab bag for the well-known knight Sir Balin. The objection that Balin the dwarf has a kindly personality quite opposed to Sir Balin's grumpiness seems immaterial. The advantage of Balin is that it rhymes with the authentically Norse Dwalin, in keeping with the cutely rhymed pairs and triplets that make up the roll-call of Thorin's company.

But my original point remains: Balin's name on his tomb is Balin which, wherever it comes from, is not from the Dwarves' language. At the time of the writing of The Hobbit, Tolkien had barely conceived of a Dwarvish language for his Silmarillion legendarium - he had only said that one existed and that no one really knew it except the Dwarves. (HoME IV, Lhammas 9). So his later note about not putting real names on tombs seems to me to refer entirely to what he saw as a kind of boo-boo: the name "Balin" on the tomb in the Chamber of Mazarbul.

 

[sador]

At the time of the writing of The Hobbit, Tolkien even wrote the legends on Thror's Map in regular English!
I guess he even saw the runes as separate from the Elvish scripts, another system he developed as a pastime; but I'm not quite sure of that.

 

[PhantomS]

George Romero, can you hear me...?

Rath Dinen, the necropolis of Gondor (“Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living” – Faramir in TT) clearly repeats this failing. But it is not so clear whether the original Kings of Gondor had reverted to putting cave-tombs in the shadow of Mindolluin, as one might think Elendil would have preferred, or whether they simply continued the late-Númenórean practice of building mausoleums, which may only later have become too “splendid”.

Gondor's slip back into decadence is largely during Atanatar Alcarin's rule, when Aragorn's crown was made. However, Minas Tirith's tombs are sealed off from the public and governed by specific rules (i.e no blood) and are considered hallowed ground, so even if they were decadent this was not a symptom of the masses as it seemed to be in Numenor, but rather a way of reverence of the rulers by their heirs. Elendil himself is buried on a holy hill in the center of Gondor during his reign- the others are buried within a walled city in an enclave of silence; Aragorn lies on a 'bed' made of stone and is entombed himself, along with Merry and Pippin later- so it's not really a bad thing.

The only later thought that he gave them, as far as I know, reflects his interest in First Age history as it came down through Numenor’s rather obscure Second Age. Somewhere in his later musings (I don’t have the reference) he relates that the Arnorian barrow-tombs were mixed up with, or even re-used from, tombs of much greater antiquity: from the Chieftains of the Three Houses of Men who afterwards moved West to live among the Elves in Beleriand. This seems to tie the practices of Rohan rather closely to the practices of uncorrupted Numenor/Arnor, if not Gondor.

The Rohirrim are descended largely from the House of Hador, the largest and most famous house among the Three Houses of the Edain, so it's not surprising that they follow similar customs. The Hadorians were also the largest group in Numenor, and included the noble houses to a great extent- including the Kings line, who were descendants of Tuor through Elros.


A prohibition against burning corpses is never stated, but is implied several times in The Lord of the Rings. A burial for Boromir is all his friends can think of at first (‘We have not the time or the tools to bury our comrade fitly, or to raise a mound over him. A cairn we might build.’ –LotR III.1), and they never even think to burn him, consigning him to the water instead. Likewise Éomer and Gandalf and the Ents all agree that underground is the only place for a Rider of Rohan’s remains. Contrast that with the seemingly contemptuous burning of the orc bodies outside Fangorn – and even with the contrasting fates of Snowmane and the Dark Beast on the Pelennor fields, one buried under green grass, one burned on ever-blackened soil.

The Dundelings were told that the Rohirrim burned their captives to death by Saruman, which seemed to really scare them. The Mumakil bodies are burned as well
but the bodies of the Haradrim, Variags and Easterlings seemed to have been spirited away after the Pelennor- some in the River drowned but one wonders how the Gondorians and Rohirrim cleaned that mess up.

Given the showpiece funerals people seem to get in LoTR universe, it's not a surprise that a quick burning of a corpse doesn't happen ,as it doesn't allow for Tolkien to teach us about any particular custom.

The Orcs and the Fell Beast are considered animals beneath contempt- were the WK slain riding his black horse, the Rohirrim might have buried the horse.

So the story of the Great Burning, after the Battle of Nanduhirion outside Moria’s East Gate, reveals quite a gap between Men and Dwarves on the option of cremation: although the Dwarves were “grieved” by the need to burn their massed dead, there was simply no question of burying them in soil or mounds of any kind. It was rock, or nothing. In compensation they made the burning into a point of pride in the stubbornly proud Dwarvish manner.

They were short on time; the non-Longbeards wanted to go home, but no one there wanted the Orcs to get all the cool Dwarf-weapons and armor left behind, or even to maim the dead Dwarves like they did Thror. They would need years to build suitable tombs for those Dwarves and there was not enough to convince the other six (four? the Broadbeams and Firebeards lived with the Longbeards) houses to stay. Carrying them home like Azaghal is impossible, hence they can only burn the dead, with great reluctance.

Fire is also associated with the Dwarf; the forges burned in Aule's workshop to make them, and they are made of stuff so stern it took the Balrog's fire and Smaug's Dragon fire to defeat them. It turns Dwarfs to ash- which is a kind of rock, in a sense.

The Dwarves were proud of the 'burned Dwarf' army, but not because they were burned rather than buried, but because they died there fighting for the eldest Father in the greatest Dwarf battle of all time and had to be burned on the spot.

"Not even on their tombs do they inscribe them."

[size 2]Memory length isn't what is described about Dwarves; perhaps they remember these names personally, as a carefully guarded set and as a strictly oral history. The tombs are for outsiders to know who is in there, and since the Dwarves give reverence even to 'outer names' there is no need for the real name. It's similar to Popes before the modern era- people remember their official names instead of their birth names.

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Is Arwen buried by anyone? Or is her body just absorbed by the earth in such a way that a “grave” can be said to exist? It’s just not clear, and that’s the point, I think. The Elves are so strongly identified with Arda, the world, that when and if their spirits are forced to leave their bodies, their bodies rather mystically become indistinguishable from the Earth from which the originally awoke. Morgoth heaps the bodies high in the air, but the grass follows of its own accord. No grave is dug for Míriel or Arwen, but each body finds a grave nonetheless.
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Someone had to tell this story, since she travelled a long way seemingly alone. It's likely she told her children where she would go, and they are the ones telling us the story- but it's told in a way that seems to indicate someone saw her lie down and die.

As for the grass and bodies, they would merely sink and disappear into the ground andd then allow grass to grow on the new topsoil- Miriel doesn't rot because she is in the Undying Lands, where no flesh can corrupt. Feanor just burned away into dust, while Beleg at least got buried by Turin.

[/size] Even allowing for Orcish hypocrisy and general evil, this statement could suggest that Orcs expect some kind of devotional treatment from their fellows after they die.

No one seems to complain that wolves and carrion birds eat the Orcs as well. We don't see evil men get chomped on, do we?

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