The Lord of the Rings: The Muster of Rohan (Part Three)

The Tale

‘The road now led eastward straight across the valley, which was at that point little more than half a mile in width. Flats and meads of rough grass, grey now in the falling night, lay all about, but in front on the far side of the dale Merry saw a frowning wall, a last outlier of the great roots of the Starkhorn, cloven by the river in ages past.’

There is a great host of men gathered on every level space, tents, booths, picketed horses, and piles of weapons. Although it is growing cold and dark there is not even a spark of fire; they do not want anyone, either lookouts or in the air (Winged Riders!) to know their numbers.

Merry can’t tell in the gloom how many men there are; many thousands, he thinks. The King’s troop (which he is with) starts to climb a road up the cliff side. Looking up, he sees a steep road, coiling back and forth up the steep hillside. Horses and slow carts can be driven up, but no enemy can approach it by land if it is defended from above. It seems to be a great work from ancient times. At each corner as the road turns are ‘great standing stones that had been carved in the likeness of men, huge and clumsy-limbed, squatting cross-legged with their stumpy arms folded on fat bellies.’ The Rider’s call them Pukel-men; they are hollow-eyed and crumbling, and no power is left in them. Merry gazes at them almost in pity, so old and sad they look.

Only Theoden and company are going up the road to the Hold; below them the riders who followed them are crossing the ford and joining the camp. The company comes to a brink and go up a cutting in the rock into a wide upland, called the Firienfield, a green plateau of grass and heath. Behind it looms the Dwimorberg, the Haunted Mountain like a black wall, the road to it guarded on both side by rough standing stones like rows of teeth, ending in the forbidden door into the mountain.

This was Dunharrow, built by men in ancient times before the Men of the West ever came to Middle-earth; whether as a town or a fortress or a tomb or a temple no one can say. The field is clustered with tents and booths, but they are set far from the road and the door and the dark trees that shroud them.

They turn to the larger camp on the right side of the road, and are met by a rider, a woman clad to the waist as a warrior, with helm on her head and a sword at her side. She welcomes the King with joy, and Theoden hails her as Eowyn (the first time Merry ever sees her) and asks if all is well with her. She says yes, but to the hobbit it seems that despite her stern face that she’s been weeping.

Eowyn says the road was weary and there were hard words from the people torn from their homes and forced to take refuge, but no evil deeds. And now Theoden’s lodging has been prepared; she’s had news of when he’d be arriving.

‘So Aragorn has come then,’ said Eomer. ‘Is he still here?’

She tells him that Aragorn has come and gone, leaving yesterday morning. She cannot tell where he is exactly, only that he’s gone. Theoden points to the mountain and asks if he spoke of the Paths of the Dead. Eowyn must confess that she was unable to persuade him against taking that way, and that he passed away into the shadows ‘from which none have returned.’

‘Then our paths are sundered,’ said Eomer. ‘He is lost. We must ride without him, and our hope dwindles.’

Notes

Pukel is an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning a goblin or demon; the name of Puck (a traditional figure) in the Shakespeare play comes from the same word. There is even an old term, Puck’s Penfold, as another name for Hell. It says there was ‘no power or terror left in them’, they were so old. It is told in Unfinished Tales that the ancient Druedain (Wild Men) would carve such ‘watch-stones’ and imbue them with their own energies to watch and guard, almost as a minor example of the same craft Sauron used to imbue the One Ring with his power.

Firienfield simply means ‘mountain-field’. Dwimorberg is indeed ‘haunted mountain’; dwimor meaning work of sorcery or phantom, and as we’ve seen the ghosts of the Dead literally haunt it.

We can start to see the emotions working away in Eowyn; she may already be becoming fey, or doom-laden, which leads to her reckless behavior. There may be a bit of wordplay, probably unintentional on Eomer’s part, when he says that their hope dwindles with Aragorn lost. Estel (‘hope’) was Aragorn’s name when he was growing up in Rivendell. When you are watching the Jackson films, notice Aragorn whenever someone mentions hope.