The Lord of the Rings: The King of the Golden Hall [Part One]

Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas ride far into the night, only pausing a few hours as Gandalf keeps watch and lets the others sleep. They get up and ride again under the cold moonlight. As the sun rises they enter a land of grass and glens, flowing down from the dark mountains. Far away under the tallest peak they catch a gleam like gold flashing in the morning sun. Gandalf asks the far-sighted Legolas to tell them what he sees.

‘I see a white stream that comes down from the snows … Where it issues from the shadow of the vale a green hill rises upon the east. A dike and mighty wall and thorny fence encircle it. Within there rise the roofs of houses; and in the midst, set upon a green terrace, there stands aloft a great hall of Men. And it seems to my eyes that it is thatched with gold. The light of it shines far over the land. Golden, too, are the posts of its doors. There men in bright mail stand, but all else within the courts are yet asleep.’

Those courts are Edoras, and that golden hall is Meduseld, where Theoden son of Thengel is king. Gandalf warns that it may seem a sleepy place right now, but the Rohirrim are near war, and they are watchful. Don’t draw any weapons or speak any haughty words, at least until they before Theoden, seat.

As they ride in closer, they notice many signs of spring already in this southerly land. The plain is green and close to the flowing streams the willows are showing signs of blooming. At the foot of the walled hill there are mounds covered with white flowers like snow, seven mounds on the left and nine mounds on the right. These are the barrows of the Kings of Rohan. The white flowers are Simbelmyne, or Evermind, that ‘grow where dead men rest’ and blossom all year round. It was five hundred years ago they were started, just a blink of the eye to Legolas, but it seems a dim and misty age to mortal Men.

Aragorn chants  part of an old song of the Rohirrim, laden with the sadness of Mortal Men at the passing of time. ‘It is like the land itself; rich and rolling in part and else as hard and stern as the mountains.’ They pass the silent mounds and come to gates of Edoras. Many guards sitting there leap up and bar their way with spears. They look at Gandalf darkly.

 

Bits and Bobs

Tolkien, of course, was for twenty years the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon. His lectures on Beowulf changed all scholarship on that epic poem ever after. Before that it had been seen as a rather childish primitive effort, good as a quarry for historical insights, but no comparison to Greek or Latin poetry.

Here in “The King of the Golden Hall” we get what Tom Shippey calls a ‘calque’ [‘loan translation’] on Anglo-Saxon culture. The Rohirrim are, of course, not Anglo-Saxon (this is feigned to be many years before that folk), but they are so close they can be ‘translated’ into that culture. Whenever you hear Rohirric names and language you are hearing Anglo-Saxon. Meduseld is the Old English for ‘mead-hall’; Edoras means simply ‘dwellings, houses’.

The song that Aragorn recites is in the form of the Old English poetry called by modern scholars ‘Ubi Sunt?’  “Ubi sunt (literally "where are... [they]") is a rhetorical question taken from the Latin Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?, meaning "Where are those who were before us?" Ubi nunc...? ("Where now?") is a common variant. Sometimes interpreted to indicate nostalgia, the ubi sunt motif is actually a meditation on mortality and life's transience.” – Wikipedia.