The Heroes of Tolkien by David Day

Author:David Day
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

THE NORTHMEN OF RHOVANION

O f the Northmen of Rhovanion Tolkien wrote that they were of the “better and nobler sort of Men” who were kin to the Edain of the First Age. They were largely uncorrupted, but in the Third Age remained “in a simple ‘Homeric’ state of patriarchal and tribal life”. They were in fact very like those men celebrated in early Anglo-Saxon epic poetry. The Northmen of Rhovanion (or “Wilderland”) were essentially the heroic forebears of Beowulf who made their home for millennia in Europe’s trackless forests, mountains and river vales.

Rhovanion was intended to resemble what the ancient Romans called Germania: the great northern forest of Europe. Tolkien also gives them a wild eastern frontier comparable to the Russian steppes. And just as the Roman Empire and its Germanic allies faced wave after wave of Hun, Tartar and Mongol invaders, so the Dúnedain of Gondor and their Northmen allies faced the recurring hostile attacks of the Easterling Balchoth and Variag invaders.

Although most historians have traditionally viewed the early part of the first millennium CE as being dominated by the decline and fall of Rome, a few have seen the period more positively, as a time of change and renewal as vital and active peoples flooded into a weakened, if still-revered, empire. No invading nation wished to bring about the empire’s fall. Indeed, even its most barbaric conquerors believed that the Roman Empire would never be destroyed. In one form or another, it had existed for more than a thousand years. The men from the north saw themselves as simply part of another evolution of the empire, in the form of an even greater and revitalized German-Roman state.

In the Northmen of Rhovanion we see something of the Germanic tribes during the earliest stages of their migrations. They were a noble people who did not greatly diminish the forest or plough up the plains – rural people settled in only a few large towns and scattered villages. They dwelt in the forests, hills and vales of Rhovanion. Among the many tribes and races dwelling in Rhovanion were those later known as the Beornings and Woodmen of Mirkwood, as well as the Bardings and the Men of Dale. However, one other tribe that Tolkien “discovered” in the Vales of Anduin became a particular favourite. These fictional people were called the Éothéod and were linked in Tolkien’s mind to the historic Germanic nation of horsemen known as the Goths.

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