The Lord of the Rings: The Ride of the Rohirrim (Part 1)

The Tale

Merry is having a restless night, bivouacking with the Rohirrim army in the pine woods around Eilenach Beacon, a hill rising out of the Druadan Forest next to the great road in East Anorion. He cannot rest, though they have been on the road four days. All around him are the sighing of trees, the smell and shifting of horse, and a strange throbbing in the air that comes and goes.

The hobbit wonders why he is even there. He certainly didn’t have to come; in fact, King Theoden had positively ordered him not to come. Even so all the Riders ignore him as if he wasn’t there. There seems to be some arrangement between Dernhelm, his ride, and Elfhelm, the leader of this part of the army. Merry longs to have Pippin to talk to and wonders how his friend is faring alone in a city of stone, no doubt under siege.

The host is anxious, because they are only a day’s ride from Minas Tirith, and already the road is being held by enemy forces of men and orcs. Theoden and Eomer are holding council on how to proceed. And the strange throbbing drums seem to be moving nearer.

But suddenly he sees men moving vaguely in the dark, carrying covered lanterns. One trips over him, cursing, and he recognizes the voice of Elfhelm. He dares to ask the marshall what is going on, and is told that there are orders for the host to prepare to move out at a moment’s notice. Merry asks nervously if the enemy is moving, if it has anything to do with the strange drums in the hills.

No, he is told, the enemy is on the road, not in the hills. What he hears are the Woses, the Wild Men of the Wood. They are remnants of an older time, secretive and wary as beasts, using poison arrows rather than swords. But it seems they fear the Dark Years are coming again, and are willing to aid Theoden and his men. One of their leaders is being taken to Theoden for counsel even now. But Elfhelm must go and get his men ready. Merry should get ready to move, too.

Merry is quite ready for action; simply waiting is unbearable. He doesn’t like the sound of poison darts, but feels he must know more about what’s going on. He follows the last lantern to where the counsel is taking place.

He comes to an open space where Theoden’s tent has been set under a great tree. A lantern hangs, shedding light on a strange meeting. Theoden and Eomer are there, and before them sits a strange figure, ‘a squat shape of a man, gnarled as an old stone, and the hairs of his scanty beard straggled on his lumpy chin like dry moss. He was short-legged and fat-armed, thick and stumpy, and clad only in grass about his waist.’ Merry thinks he has seen such a figure before, then remembers the old Pukel-men carved at Dunharrow. This could be one brought to life, or a distant descendant of the models for the statues.

Notes

The Woses sound like some kind of cavemen, but they are based on an old medieval story, the wood (wild, frenzied, crazy) wose (being, person) who lived in the wood. They were seen either to be creatures of their own race, like satyrs, covered with hair; or men who had run crazy out into the wild and gone au naturale, as it were.

The idea of hairy wild men goes back as far as Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh or Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel. Sir Lancelot once went through a period where he went mad and lived as a Wild Man in the woods. The term woodwose survives in the modern English surname Wodehouse (as in P. G. Wodehouse).

The element of wood (in the sense of frenzied) may be related to Woden, who drove men mad in battle … and also into frenzies of poetic inspiration. But anyway, the term and idea of the woses were very popular in old heraldry and art, especially during the Renaissance.

The Bal des Ardents (Ball of the Burning Men), or the Bal des Sauvages (Ball of the Wild Men), was a masquerade ball held on 28 January 1393 in Paris, France, at which King Charles VI had a dance performance with five members of the French nobility. Four of the dancers were killed in a fire caused by a torch brought in by Louis I, Duke of Orléans, the king's brother. On the suggestion of Huguet de Guisay …  six young men, including Charles [the King], performed a dance in costume as wood savages. The costumes, which were sewn onto the men, were made of linen soaked with resin to which flax was attached "so that they appeared shaggy and hairy from head to foot". Masks made of the same materials covered the dancers' faces and hid their identities from the audience. “ – Wikipedia. The incident later inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, Hop Toad.

All of which is neither here nor there, but you can see how Woses have been an obscure but persistent motif in popular culture. Why, even ideas about Bigfoot might be connected.

In Faramir’s categorization of the Men of Middle-earth the Woses (Druedain = dru ‘wild’ + edain ‘Men’) would fall into the Wild or Men of Darkness. This has nothing to do with their morality, only their degree of enlightenment.

Eilianach was the second of the Beacon-hills from Gondor, so they are quite close. A tall, sharp peak, whose name was of unknown origin.

Tolkien fiddled around with the Woses quite a bit, developing their origins and backstory. Most of this can be seen in Unfinished Tales, Part 4, Section 1. Woodwoses are also mentioned in his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as they are there in the original poem.