After the passing of the
Lord of the Nazgul Merry stands in the middle of the battlefield, ‘blinking
like an owl in the daylight,’ blinded by tears. The motionless Eowyn lies near
him, and there is King Theoden, ‘fallen in the midst of his glory.’ His horse
Snowmane has rolled off him it its death throes; his faithful horse has been
his ‘bane’, the instrument of his death.
Merry lifts the King’s hand
to kiss it, and suddenly Theoden opens his eyes. He speaks in a quiet, clear
voice. He knows he is dying.
‘My body is broken. I go to
my fathers. And even in their mighty company I shall not be ashamed. I felled
the black serpent [the herald and champion of the Easterlings]. A grim morn,
and a glad day, and a golden sunset!’
Merry begs his pardon for
disobeying his orders and following him to battle. Theoden smiles and forgives
him: ‘Great heart will not be denied.’ He bids the noble Hobbit to smoke his
pipe in peace and remember Theoden, for he shall never keep his promise to sit
and listen to his herb-lore. He asks for Eomer; he must be king after Theoden.
And he wants to send word by him to Eowyn, whom he shall never see again.
Merry begins to try to tell
him that she is nearby, but he is interrupted by a sudden clamor and horns
blowing all around them. ‘[H]e had
forgotten the war, and all the world beside, and many hours it seemed since the
king rode to his fall, though in truth it was only a little while.’ Northward
comes Eomer riding leading the Rohirrim, while a force issues out of Gondor led
by the Prince of Dol Amroth, and from the south come the legions of Morgul, led
by a line of horsemen of Harad with footmen behind them, and then mumakil
shouldering bristling war-towers. It seems the battle will soon meet near where
the hobbit stands. He wonders vaguely where Gandalf is. Couldn’t he have saved
the king and Eowyn?
At that moment Eomer rides
up with knights of the king’s household, who have mastered their horses which
fled before the terror of the Nazgul. They look in wonder at the slain fell
beast and the ruin around them. Eomer leaps from his horse and stands in
silence at Theoden’s side, overcome with grief and dismay. One of the knights lifts the king’s standard
from the hand of the dead Guthlaf, king’s banner bearer. Slowly Theoden opens
his eyes, and gestures that the banner be given to Eomer in token of his
kingship. He hails him as King of the Mark and bids him ride to victory, and to
tell Eowyn farewell from him.
‘And so he died, and knew
not that Eowyn laid near him. And those who stood by wept, crying: Theoden
King! Theoden King!’
‘But Eomer said to them:
‘Mourn not overmuch!
Mighty was the fallen,
meet was his ending. When
his mound is raised,
women then shall weep. War
now calls us!’
But he himself is weeping.
He bids them carry Theoden's body from the battlefield to keep it from being trampled,
and also to take the men who have fallen around him. Suddenly he sees Eowyn and
recognizes his fallen sister. His face goes deathly white. What is she doing
here, slain? He goes deadly quiet, fury rise in him, and then ‘a fey mood took
him.’
‘Eowyn, Eowyn!’ he cried at
last. ‘Eowyn, how came you here? What madness or devilry is this? Death, death,
death! Death take us all!’
He leaps to his saddle and
spurs forward, blowing a hornblast and crying in a clear voice, ‘Death! Ride,
ride to ruin and the world’s ending!’ The Rohirrim answer him with Death!
In one loud and terrible voice, and they speed like a roaring tide southward to
battle.
And still Merry stands blinking
with tears, seemingly unheeded by all. He finally stoops to pick up the green
shield that Eowyn had given him and slings it on his back. He looks for his
sword that fell when he struck his blow to the Nazgul; his arm had gone numb
with contact with that deadly flesh. ‘And behold! There lay his weapon, but the
blade was smoking like a dry branch that has been thrust in a fire; and as he
watched it, it writhed and withered and was consumed.’
‘So passed the sword of the
Barrow-downs, work of Westernesse. But glad would he have been to know its fate
who wrought it slowly long ago in the North-kingdom when the Dunedain were
young, and chief among their foes was the dread realm of Angmar and its
sorcerer king. No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would
have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the
spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will.’
Men raise Theoden and Eowyn,
‘laying cloaks upon spear-truncheons’ on a makeshift stretcher. They have to
leave seven others of the household on the field, surrounded by spears to mark
them. They move the King’s horse Snowmane aside as well, and in time he has his
own grave raised where he fell, with a stone engraved with an epitaph. But they
burn the carcase of the fell beast, ‘and ever black and bare was the ground
where the beast was burned.’
Merry follows behind the
bearers and thinks no more of the battle. A great rain from the Sea starts to fall
‘and it seems that all things wept for Theoden and Eowyn.’ The entourage is
suddenly met by a van of men from Gondor, led by the Prince of Dol Amroth, who
pulls up beside them to see what they do. They reply that they bear Theoden who
has fallen, but that Eomer now rides as king on the battlefield. The prince dismounts
his horse to pay respect to the fallen king, and then is amazed that they also
bear a woman.
He examines her, bending
closer to observe her pale cold beauty, and takes her hand. He suddenly cries aloud, asking the Rohirrim
if they have no leeches [healers] among them. She is hurt, deadly so perhaps,
but she still lives. ‘And he held the bright-burnished vambrace that was upon
his arm before her cold lips, and behold! a little mist was laid on it hardly
to be seen.’
Haste is now needed if she
is to be saved, and the Prince sends to the City for aid. ‘But bowing low to
the fallen, bade them farewell, and mounting rode away to battle.’
Notes
Part of Eomer’s despair is
that he seems to be the last of his family, the last of the House of Eorl. And
of course he thought Eowyn was safely back in Rohan. His mood is described
again as ‘fey,’ doom-laden to the point of battle frenzy.
Aragorn said long ago after
the attack on Weathertop, in reference to Frodo’s Barrow-blade, that ‘all
blades perish that pierce that dreadful king.’ Merry seems to have dealt a more
fatal blow. Its maker would have been glad ‘to know its fate’, to finally
fulfill its purpose after centuries of laying in wait.
A vambrance is armor
for the forearm. The episode recalls the scene in King Lear where Lear checks
Cordelia’s breath in hope she is still alive: ‘Lend me a looking glass. If that
her breath will mist or stain the stone, why then she lives.’
The grave of Snowmane is eventually
marked by a howe, or burial mound, with a poem on the stone:
Faithful servant yet master’s
bane,
Lightfoot’s foal, swift
Snowmane.
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