[davem]

Originally Posted by bb

To the Rohirrim, as to the other groups of the race of "Men" Tolkien gives the terrible battle frenzies, the glorification and justification of war, the militaristic and authoritarian social organisations, the insularity which can lead to genocide

In an article in the lat,est Amon Hen (The Modern Rohirrim by Jason Finch) There's a discussion on the way the Anglo Saxons were percieved at the time Tolkien wrote LotR. He writes:

When JRRT wrote LotR the Anglo-Saxons were effectively an unknown people, archaologically speaking. In the late 1940's over 1,100 A-S cemetaries were known of & had been excavated to varying degrees against less than ten excavated settlements. Burials can reveal a lot about how people died & how the living treated the dead, as well as revealing some indications about how life was lived, but this bias in the evidence would have given an incomplete picture, not helped by other biases...

It was believed that A-S England had been a largely empty land, with a small population & was still largely covered with woods...

There were some towns, such as London, but the picture was for the most part of an England of simple farmers & small settlements surrounded by forexts & with few or no comforts, ruled by warlike barbaric illiterate lords, just looking after the land until the Normans turned up & defeated them in five minutes...

In short, the image of the Anglo-Saxons Tolkien had in mind was very similar to the one he presents in LotR. But Finch goes on to point out that:

Considerable evidence has been found for large scale A-S manufacturing of pottery, jewellery, & metalworking at a number of towns...

Far from being an illiterate society it appears that later A-S England was as literate as any in Europe. In fact this level of literacy meant England was the most centralised & organised nation of its time, with what can only be described as a proto-civil service in existence.

Now, it will be argued that the period of Anglo-Saxon England which Tolkien was basing his Rohirric culture on was earlier than that just prior to the Norman Conquest, but the point is, he did not know much about the day to day life of the A-S peoples. His knowledge would have been drawn from the poems (Beowulf, Finnsburg, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Maldon, etc. in conjuntion with the limited knowledge gained from graves So, in effect, he used the 'idealised' A-S world of heroic myth ('confirmed' by the swords, daggers, etc found in the graves), to create the Rohirrim.

The Rohirrim are his 'fantasy' Anglo-Saxons, 'idealised' in one sense into a warrior elite, but certainly not 'idealised' in the moral sense. So, as Bb says, it seems that Tolkien has 'split' the 'English' into two, the peaceful, bucolic world of the Shire is one, the illiterate warrior culture of Rohan is the other. What both groups share, however, is mistrust of the 'outsider' - even, in the case of the Hobbits, of some of their fellow 'insiders' ('They're queer folk in Buckland.')