Unfinished Tales

by J. R. R. Tolkien

  NOTES

  1 No writing is extant with this title, but no doubt the narrative given in the third section (‘Cirion and Eorl’, p. 388) represents a part of it.

  2 Such as the Book of the Kings. [Author’s note.] – This work was referred to in the opening passage of Appendix A to The Lord of the Rings, as being (with The Book of the Stewards and the Akallabêth) among the records of Gondor that were opened to Frodo and Peregrin by King Elessar; but in the revised edition the reference was removed.

  3 The East Bight, not named elsewhere, was the great indentation in the eastern border of Mirkwood seen in the map to The Lord of the Rings.

  4 The Northmen appear to have been most nearly akin to the third and greatest of the peoples of the Elf-friends, ruled by the House of Hador. [Author’s note.]

  5 The escape of the army of Gondor from total destruction was in part due to the courage and loyalty of the horsemen of the Northmen under Marhari (a descendant of Vidugavia ‘King of Rhovanion’) who acted as rearguard. But the forces of Gondor had inflicted such losses on the Wainriders that they had not strength enough to press their invasion, until reinforced from the East, and were content for the time to complete their conquest of Rhovanion. [Author’s note.] – It is told in Appendix A (I, iv) to The Lord of the Rings that Vidugavia, who called himself King of Rhovanion, was the most powerful of the princes of the Northmen; he was shown favour by Rómendacil II King of Gondor (died 1366), whom he had aided in war against the Easterlings, and the marriage of Rómendacil’s son Valacar to Vidugavia’s daughter Vidumavi led to the destructive Kin-strife in Gondor in the fifteenth century.

  6 It is an interesting fact, not referred to I believe in any of my father’s writings, that the names of the early kings and princes of the Northmen and the Éothéod are Gothic in form, not Old English (Anglo-Saxon) as in the case of Léod, Eorl, and the later Rohirrim. Vidugavia is Latinized in spelling, representing Gothic Widugauja (‘wood-dweller’), a recorded Gothic name, and similarly Vidumavi Gothic Widumawi (‘wood-maiden’). Marhwini and Marhari contain the Gothic word marh ‘horse’, corresponding to Old English mearh, plural mearas, the word used in The Lord of the Rings for the horses of Rohan; wini ‘friend’ corresponds to Old English winë, seen in the names of several of the Kings of the Mark. Since, as is explained in Appendix F (II), the language of Rohan was ‘made to resemble ancient English’, the names of the ancestors of the Rohirrim are cast into the forms of the earliest recorded Germanic language.

  7 As was the form of the name in later days. [Author’s note.] – This is Old English, ‘horse-people’ see note 36.

  8 The foregoing narrative does not contradict the accounts in Appendix A (I, iv and II) to The Lord of the Rings, though it is much briefer. Nothing is said here of the war fought against the Easterlings in the thirteenth century by Minalcar (who took the name of Rómendacil II), the absorption of many Northmen into the armies of Gondor by that king, or of the marriage of his son Valacar to a princess of the Northmen and the Kin-strife of Gondor that resulted from it; but it adds certain features which are not mentioned in The Lord of the Rings: that the waning of the Northmen of Rhovanion was due to the Great Plague; that the battle in which King Narmacil II was slain in the year 1856, said in Appendix A to have been ‘beyond Anduin’, was in the wide lands south of Mirkwood, and was known as the Battle of the Plains; and that his great army was saved from annihilation by the Wainriders through the rearguard defence of Marhari, descendant of Vidugavia. It is also made clearer here that it was after the Battle of the Plains that the Éothéod, a remnant of the Northmen, became a distinct people, dwelling in the Vales of Anduin between the Car-rock and the Gladden Fields.

  9 His grandfather Telumehtar had captured Umbar and broken the power of the Corsairs, and the peoples of Harad were at this period engaged in wars and feuds of their own. [Author’s note.] – The taking of Umbar by Telumehtar Umbardacil was in the year 1810.

  10 The great westward bends of the Anduin east of Fangorn Forest; see the first citation given in Appendix C to ‘The History of Galadriel and Celeborn’, p. 337.

  11 On the word éored see note 36.

  12 This story is very much fuller than the summary account in Appendix A (I, iv) to The Lord of the Rings: ‘Calimehtar, son of Narmacil II, helped by a revolt in Rhovanion, avenged his father with a great victory over the Easterlings upon Dagorlad in 1899, and for a while the peril was averted.’

  13 The Narrows of the Forest must refer to the narrow ‘waist’ of Mirkwood in the south, caused by the indentation of the East Bight (see note 3).

  14 Justly. For an attack proceeding from Near Harad – unless it had assistance from Umbar, which was not at that time available – could more easily be resisted and contained. It could not cross the Anduin, and as it went north passed into a narrowing land between the river and the mountains. [Author’s note.]

  15 An isolated note associated with the text remarks that at this period the Morannon was still in the control of Gondor, and the two Watch-towers east and west of it (the Towers of the Teeth) were still manned. The road through Ithilien was still in full repair as far as the Morannon; and there it met a road going north towards the Dagorlad, and another going east along the line of Ered Lithui. [Neither of these roads is marked on the maps to The Lord of the Rings. ] The eastward road extended to a point north of the site of Barad-dûr; it had never been completed further, and what had been made was now long neglected. Nonetheless its first fifty miles, which had once been fully constructed, greatly speeded the Wainriders’ approach.

  16 Historians surmised that it was the same hill as that upon which King Elessar made his stand in the last battle against Sauron with which the Third Age ended. But if so it was still only a natural upswelling that offered little obstacle to horsemen and had not yet been piled up by the labour of Orcs. [Author’s note.] – The passages in The Return of the King (V 10) here referred to tell that ‘Aragorn now set the host in such array as could best be contrived; and they were drawn up on two great hills of blasted stone and earth that orcs had piled in years of labour,’ and that Aragorn with Gandalf stood on the one while the banners of Rohan and Dol Amroth were raised on the other.

  17 On the presence of Adrahil of Dol Amroth see note 39.

  18 Their former home: in the Vales of Anduin between the Carrock and the Gladden Fields, see p. 375.

  19 The cause of the northward migration of the Éothéod is given in Appendix A (II) to The Lord of the Rings: ‘[The forefathers of Eorl] loved best the plains, and delighted in horses and all feats of horsemanship, but there were many men in the middle vales of Anduin in those days, and moreover the shadow of Dol Guldur was lengthening; when therefore they heard of the overthrow of the Witch-king [in the year 1975], they sought more room in the North, and drove away the remnants of the people of Angmar on the east side of the Mountains. But in the days of Léod, father of Eorl, they had grown to be a numerous people and were again somewhat straitened in the land of their home.’ The leader of the migration of the Éothéod was named Frumgar; and in the Tale of Years its date is given as 1977.

  20 These rivers, unnamed, are marked on the map to The Lord of the Rings. The Greylin is there shown as having two tributary branches.

  21 The Watchful Peace lasted from the years 2063 to 2460, when Sauron was absent from Dol Guldur.

  22 For the forts along the Anduin see p. 378, and for the Undeeps p. 337.

  23 From an earlier passage in this text (p. 376) one gains the impression that there were no Northmen left in the lands east of Mirkwood after the victory of Calimehtar over the Wainriders on the Dagorlad in the year 1899.

  24 So these people were then called in Gondor: a mixed word of popular speech, from Westron balc ‘horrible’ and Sindarin hoth ‘horde’, applied to such peoples as the Orcs. [Author’s note.] – See the entry hoth in the Appendix to The Silmarillion.

  25 The letters R· ND ·R surmounted by three stars, signifying arandur (king’s servant), steward
. [Author’s note.]

  26 He did not speak of the thought that he had also in mind: that the Éothéod were, as he had learned, restless, finding their northern lands too narrow and infertile to support their numbers, which had much increased. [Author’s note.]

  27 His name was long remembered in the song of Rochon Methestel (Rider of the Last Hope) as Borondir Udalraph (Borondir the Stirrupless), for he rode back with the éoherë at the right hand of Eorl, and was the first to cross the Limlight and cleave a path to the aid of Cirion. He fell at last on the Field of Celebrant defending his lord, to the great grief of Gondor and the Éothéod, and was afterwards laid in tomb in the Hallows of Minas Tirith. [Author’s note.]

  28 Eorl’s horse. In Appendix A (II) to The Lord of the Rings it is told that Eorl’s father Léod, who was a tamer of wild horses, was thrown by Felaróf when he dared to mount him, and so he met his death. Afterwards Eorl demanded of the horse that he surrender his freedom till his life’s end in weregild for his father; and Felaróf submitted, though he would allow no man but Eorl to mount him. He understood all that men said, and was as long-lived as they, as were his descendants, the mearas, ‘who would bear no one but the King of the Mark or his sons, until the time of Shadowfax’. Felaróf is a word of the Anglo-Saxon poetic vocabulary, though not in fact recorded in the extant poetry: ‘very valiant, very strong’.

  29 Between the inflow of the Limlight and the Undeeps. [Author’s note.] – This seems certainly in contradiction to the first citation given in Appendix C to ‘The History of Galadriel and Celeborn’, p. 337, where ‘the North and South Undeeps’ are ‘the two westward bends’ of the Anduin, into the northmost of which the Limlight flowed in.

  30 In nine days they had covered more than five hundred miles in a direct line, probably more than six hundred as they rode. Though there were no great natural obstacles on the east side of Anduin, much of the land was now desolate, and roads or horse-paths running southward were lost or little used; only for short periods were they able to ride at speed, and they needed also to husband their own strength and their horses’, since they expected battle as soon as they reached the Undeeps. [Author’s note.]

  31 The Halifirien is twice mentioned in The Lord of the Rings. In The Return of the King V 1, when Pippin, riding with Gandalf on Shadowfax to Minas Tirith, cried out that he saw fires, Gandalf replied: ‘The beacons of Gondor are alight, calling for aid. War is kindled. See, there is the fire on Amon Dîn, and flame on Eilenach; and there they go speeding west: Nardol, Erelas, Min-Rimmon, Calenhad, and the Halifirien on the borders of Rohan.’ In V 3 the Riders of Rohan on their way to Minas Tirith passed through the Fenmarch ‘where to their right great oakwoods climbed on the skirts of the hills under the shades of dark Halifirien by the borders of Gondor’. See the large-scale map of Gondor and Rohan in The Lord of the Rings.

  32 It was the great Númenórean road linking the Two Kingdoms, crossing the Isen at the Fords of Isen and the Grey-flood at Tharbad and then on northwards to Fornost; elsewhere called the North-South Road. See p. 343.

  33 This is a modernized spelling for Anglo-Saxon hálig-firgen; similarly Firien-dale for firgen-dæl, Firien Wood for firgenwudu. [Author’s note.] – The g in the Anglo-Saxon word firgen ‘mountain’ came to be pronounced as a modern y.

  34 Minas Ithil, Minas Anor, and Orthanc.

  35 It is said elsewhere, in a note on the names of the beacons, that ‘the full beacon system, that was still operating in the War of the Ring, can have been no older than the settlement of the Rohirrim in Calenardhon some five hundred years before; for its principal function was to warn the Rohirrim that Gondor was in danger, or (more rarely) the reverse’.

  36 According to a note on the ordering of the Rohirrim, the éored ‘had no precisely fixed number, but in Rohan it was only applied to Riders, fully trained for war: men serving for a term, or in some cases permanently, in the King’s Host. Any considerable body of such men, riding as a unit in exercise or on service, was called an éored. But after the recovery of the Rohirrim and the reorganization of their forces in the days of King Folcwine, a hundred years before the War of the Ring, a “full éored ” in battle order was reckoned to contain not less than 120 men (including the Captain), and to be one hundredth part of the Full Muster of the Riders of the Mark, not including those of the King’s Household. [The éored with whichÉomer pursued the Orcs, The Two Towers III 2, had 120 Riders: Legolas counted 105 when they were far away, and Éomer said that fifteen men had been lost in battle with the Orcs.] No such host, of course, had ever ridden all together to war beyond the Mark; but Théoden’s claim that he might, in this great peril, have led out an expedition of ten thousand Riders (The Return of the King V 3) was no doubt justified. The Rohirrim had increased since the days of Folcwine, and before the attacks of Saruman a Full Muster would probably have produced many more than twelve thousand Riders, so that Rohan would not have been denuded entirely of trained defenders. In the event, owing to losses in the western war, the hastiness of the Muster, and the threat from North and East, Théoden only led out a host of some six thousand spears, though this was still the greatest riding of the Rohirrim that was recorded since the coming of Eorl.’

  The full muster of the cavalry was called éoherë (see note 49). These words, and alsoÉothéod, are of course Anglo-Saxon in form, since the true language of Rohan is everywhere thus translated (see note 6 above): they contain as their first element eoh ‘horse’.Éored, éorod is a recorded Anglo-Saxon word, its second element derived from rád ‘riding’ in éoherë the second element is herë ‘host, army’. Éothéod has théod ‘people’ or ‘land’, and is used both of the Riders themselves and of their country. (Anglo-Saxon eorl in the name Eorl the Young is a wholly unrelated word.)

  37 This was always said in the days of the Stewards, in any solemn pronouncement, though by the time of Cirion (the twelfth Ruling Steward) it had become a formula that few believed would ever come to pass. [Author’s note.]

  38 alfirin: the simbelmynë of the Kings’ mounds below Edoras, and the uilos that Tuor saw in the great ravine of Gondolin in the Elder Days; see p. 73, note 27. Alfirin is named, but apparently of a different flower, in a verse that Legolas sang in Minas Tirith (The Return of the King V 9): ‘The golden bells are shaken of mallos and alfirin / In the green fields of Lebennin.’

  39 The Lord of Dol Amroth had this title. It was given to his ancestors by Elendil, with whom they had kinship. They were a family of the Faithful who had sailed from Númenor before the Downfall and had settled in the land of Belfalas, between the mouths of Ringló and Gilrain, with a stronghold upon the high promontory of Dol Amroth (named after the last King of Lórien). [Author’s note.] – Elsewhere it is said (p. 321) that according to the tradition of their house the first Lord of Dol Amroth was Galador (c. Third Age 2004– 2129), the son of Imrazôr the Númenórean, who dwelt in Belfalas, and the Elven-lady Mithrellas, one of the companions of Nimrodel. The note just cited seems to suggest that this family of the Faithful settled in Belfalas with a stronghold on Dol Amroth before the Downfall of Númenor; and if that is so, the two statements can only be reconciled on the supposition that the line of the Princes, and indeed the place of their dwelling, went back more than two thousand years before Galador’s day, and that Galador was called the first Lord of Dol Amroth because it was not until his time (after the drowning of Amroth in the year 1981) that Dol Amroth was so named. A further difficulty is the presence of an Adrahil of Dol Amroth (clearly an ancestor of Adrahil the father of Imrahil, Lord of Dol Amroth at the time of the War of the Ring) as a commander of the forces of Gondor in the battle against the Wainriders in the year 1944 (pp. 379 – 81); but it may be supposed that this earlier Adrahil was not called ‘of Dol Amroth’ at that time.

  While not impossible, these explanations to save consistency seem to me to be less likely than that of two distinct and independent ‘traditions’ of the origins of the Lords of Dol Amroth.