{"id":5403,"date":"2011-05-17T06:30:15","date_gmt":"2011-05-16T18:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=5403"},"modified":"2011-05-13T21:43:21","modified_gmt":"2011-05-13T09:43:21","slug":"tuesday-poem-the-riders-of-rohans-poem-from-the-lord-of-the-rings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2011\/05\/17\/tuesday-poem-the-riders-of-rohans-poem-from-the-lord-of-the-rings\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday Poem: The Riders of Rohan’s Poem, from “The Lord of the Rings”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
\nWhere is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
\nWhere is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
\nWhere is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
\nThey have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
\nThe days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
\nWho shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
\nOr behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?<\/em><\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

This poem appears in The Two Towers<\/em><\/strong>, the second volume in The Lord of the Rings<\/em><\/strong> trilogy and is a song of the Riders of Rohan, a people who are basically very Anglo-Saxon\/Norse in conception, although they ride horses rather than sail longships. I have always loved its strong elegaic quality and sense of life’s transience, and the grief and loss that goes with that.<\/p>\n

Tolkien was a philologist, specialising in Anglo-Saxon, and the language of the people of Rohan, the Rohirrim, is strongly based in that language. The lines in this poem are an adaptation of part of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer <\/em>(sometimes also called The Wayfarer.)<\/em><\/p>\n

I did not realise this until I studied Old English at university and recognised the lines. Of course, I then found that the source for The Lord of the Rings<\/em> adaptation was well-known to just about everyone else! But when I first read The Lord of the Rings<\/em> at around age 14 (or it might have been 13) I simply thought that the poem was wonderful. So it is—and has been now, in terms of its source, for over a thousand years.<\/p>\n

Reproduced here in accordance with fair use.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Blog\u2014and to link to other Tuesday Poets posting around NZ and the world\u2014either click here<\/a> or on the Quill icon in the sidebar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing? Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing? They have passed like rain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5403"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5411,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5403\/revisions\/5411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}