Battle of the Pelennor Fields

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of the Pelennor Fields is the largest battle in J. R. R. Tolkien's War of the Ring, fought in the shadow of Minas Tirith as the free peoples of the West made their stand against the Dark Lord Sauron. A Great Darkness of smoke and cloud from Mordor had blotted out the sun on what Tolkien calls the Dawnless Day. When the gates of the city were shattered by the battering ram Grond, only the Wizard Gandalf on his horse Shadowfax stood in the way of the Witch-king of Angmar. Then came the horns of Rohan. What followed was a day of extraordinary reversals: a prophesied death, a last stand on a hill, and a fleet of black ships that turned out to be anything but the enemy. How did a vastly outnumbered alliance survive, and what price did they pay? The answers stretch from the trenches of the Somme to the oldest traditions of Northern European poetry.

• 2. The Defenders and Their Numbers

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  Faramir, son of Denethor, Steward of Gondor, had been outnumbered ten to one at Osgiliath before he was severely wounded in the retreat. The companies that answered Minas Tirith's call from Gondor's outlying provinces amounted to nearly 3,000 men. Prince Imrahil of Dol Amroth, Denethor's own brother-in-law, led the largest single contingent: 700 knights. Their numbers were smaller than hoped, because Gondor's coastal towns were under simultaneous attack by the Corsairs of Umbar. Rohan's contribution was a 6,000-strong cavalry army, the Rohirrim, who were described by Tolkien as "thrice outnumbered by the Haradrim alone." Sauron's army, by contrast, included tens of thousands of orcs, trolls, Haradrim Southrons with their elephantine beasts, Easterlings from Rhûn, and Variags from Khand. The Rohirrim reached the Pelennor Fields only because the Wild Men, known as the Drúedain, guided them through the hidden Stonewain Valley of the Drúadan Forest, bypassing Sauron's lookouts entirely.

• 3. Death of a King

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  Théoden, King of Rohan, killed the chieftain of the Haradrim with his own hand and threw down their standard during the cavalry charge. Then the Witch-king of Angmar abandoned his horse for his winged steed and struck back. A dart from the Witch-king killed Théoden's horse Snowmane; the horse fell and crushed the king beneath it. His niece Éowyn had ridden disguised as a man, calling herself "Dernhelm," and when the Witch-king's Black Breath drove off Théoden's guards, she alone stood firm. She cut off the head of his mount. He broke her shield and shield arm with his mace. At that moment, the hobbit Meriadoc Brandybuck stabbed the Witch-king behind the knee with his Barrow-blade, a dagger from the ancient kingdom of Arnor enchanted specifically against the forces of Angmar. The Witch-king staggered, and Éowyn drove her sword between crown and mantle, killing him. This fulfilled the prophecy made by Glorfindel after the fall of Arnor: that the Witch-king would not fall by the hand of man. Both weapons that struck his undead flesh were destroyed in the act. Théoden named Éomer king before dying; Imrahil, riding out from the city, found Éowyn still alive but gravely ill from the Black Breath.

• 4. The Turning Point

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  Éomer, believing his sister dead, led his entire army in a near-suicidal charge, his vanguard pushing so far ahead it risked encirclement. Gothmog, the lieutenant of Minas Morgul, had taken command after the Witch-king's death and summoned reinforcements from Osgiliath, threatening to split the Rohirrim from the Gondorian forces. Éomer was by then about a mile from the Harlond and prepared to make a final stand on a hill. At that moment a fleet of black ships appeared on the River Anduin, apparently the feared navy of the Corsairs of Umbar. Then the lead ship unfurled the ancient banner of the Kings of Gondor. The sight alone put heart into the Rohirrim and Imrahil's forces and demoralised Sauron's armies before a single soldier landed. The ships carried Aragorn and his Rangers, Gimli the Dwarf, Legolas the Elf, the Half-elven brothers Elladan and Elrohir, and fresh troops from southern Gondor. Legolas and Gimli later recounted that the ghostly Dead Men of Dunharrow, commanded by Aragorn, had taken the Corsair fleet largely through terror alone. A large portion of Sauron's forces was now caught between Aragorn's men and Éomer's cavalry, with Imrahil pressing from the city. Fighting continued throughout the day until, at sunset, no living enemy remained on the Pelennor Fields.

• 5. Tolkien's Northern Courage

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  Tom Shippey, a leading Tolkien scholar, identifies a double signal at the moment Rohan arrives: a cockerel crowing at dawn and, in answer, what Tolkien calls "the great horns of the North wildly blowing." Shippey traces the cock-crow across Western literature, from the denial of Christ by Simon Peter and the promise of resurrection that followed, to Milton's Comus, to a cockerel killed and thrown over a wall by a witch in the Norse tale of King Hadding, and crowing to him a moment later. The horns, Shippey writes, mean "bravado and recklessness." Together, the message the passage carries is that dying undaunted is no defeat, and that this was true long before Christianity arrived to explain why. Janet Brennan Croft notes that the battle is partly seen through the eyes of Pippin, who experiences it as a common soldier in the trenches of the First World War might: tedious waiting, a sense of uselessness, terror and ugliness. Yet Tolkien refuses the irony of the Modernists. Hugh Brogan's remark, cited by Croft, is that the hobbits' determination "masters all the grief and horror, giving it dignity and significance" - a thought Croft reads as therapeutic for a man whose mind had been darkened by war. James Shelton, writing in the Journal of Tolkien Research, notes that after Théoden's death Éomer declaims in alliterative verse: "Mourn not overmuch! Mighty was the fallen, meet was his ending. When his mound is raised, women then shall weep. War now calls us!" Tolkien records that Éomer wept as he spoke, humanising the warrior behind the ancient form.

• 6. The Elegiac and the Vivid

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  Robert Lee Mahon, writing in CEA Critic, identifies the elegiac note running through the battle. Men have the gift of Iluvatar, which is death. Even of Aragorn and Éomer, whose skill in battle was such that few dared stand against them, Tolkien notes quietly: "But many others were hurt or maimed or dead upon the field." The battle chapter closes with what Mahon calls "an elegiac lay" in which a scop of Rohan imitates Tolkien's beloved Old English poem Beowulf: "We heard of the horns in the hills ringing, the swords shining in the South-kingdom... There Théoden fell, Thengling mighty... high lord of the host.... Death in the morning and at day's ending lords took and lowly. Long now they sleep under grass in Gondor." Nancy Martsch, writing in Mythlore, highlights that Tolkien served at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and quotes C. S. Lewis, himself a war veteran, on the quality of Tolkien's battle writing: "It is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front when 'everything is now ready', the flying civilians, the lively, vivid friendships, the background of something like despair and the merry foreground." Martsch also singles out Tolkien's attention to recovery in the Houses of Healing as a subject usually passed over in fantasy. David Bell, writing in Mallorn, concludes that the Captains of the West were lucky, as Napoleon had reportedly asked his generals to be; had Aragorn arrived later, the battle would have been lost.

• 7. Sources and Adaptations

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  Elizabeth Solopova notes that Tolkien repeatedly referred to the historian Jordanes's account of the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields, and she traces a series of parallels. Both battles are cast as conflicts between civilisations of the East and West, and both Jordanes and Tolkien describe their engagement as one of legendary fame lasting generations. The death of the Visigoth king Theodoric I - thrown from his horse and trampled by his own charging men - echoes the death of Théoden crushed beneath Snowmane; and in both accounts the fallen king is carried from the field with his knights weeping and singing while the battle continues around them. Scholars have also compared the Witch-king's prophesied end to Macbeth's, whose killer similarly was "not of woman born." In the draft stages recorded in The War of the Ring, the third volume of The History of the Lord of the Rings, Théoden died by a projectile to the heart rather than being crushed, and Tolkien considered killing off Éowyn as well. In Peter Jackson's 2003 film The Return of the King, the battle was described by The Telegraph as "the most spectacular and breathtaking" battle scenes ever filmed. Jackson said he drew inspiration from Albrecht Altdorfer's 1529 oil painting The Battle of Alexander at Issus, depicting events of 333 BC, with "people holding all of these pikes and spears against an incredibly stormy landscape." In the 1981 BBC radio adaptation, the battle's climax was rendered as a kind of opera, with Jack May and Anthony Hyde voicing Théoden and Éomer as a Nazgûl descended on them, followed by Éowyn's confrontation with the Witch-king.