Much smarter minds than mine have taken on some of these topics, but I have some thoughts about Gondorian cultural imperialism that were at the heart of my Rohan Secret Santa fic. I wanted to expand on them a little further in a way that I couldn’t in the story without pulling the whole narrative off down a big tangent, SO…
The question I was initially trying to answer for the fic (thanks to @emyn-arnens for the GREAT prompts!) was: what happened to all the shieldmaidens of Rohan? We know that as a people stretching all the way back to the pre-Rohan, pre-Éothéod days of the Northmen, the Rohirrim had an acceptance of women in arms. And we know the shieldmaiden concept was still alive enough for Éowyn to invoke it, tying herself to that wild and “ungentle” tradition. But she only rode with the army in secret, and we didn’t see any evidence of other shieldmaidens in that host. On the contrary, the Rohirrim told the Gondorians that Éowyn was the only woman among them, and any time in the text when we hear Théoden summon warriors, he always calls only for men (and, in one instance, strong lads). So shieldmaidens seem like a still-acknowledged concept, but not something that was in evidence anymore. Where did they go? What could cause the Rohirrim to let this significant and distinctive element of their culture wither?
To me, there was no satisfying explanation that was purely internal to the Rohirrim. This was their tradition, they’d happily kept it for many hundreds of years, so it doesn’t make sense that they would just suddenly and voluntarily abandon it absent outside influences. And in thinking about those outside influences, the one that resonated most for me was the long shadow of imperial Gondor.
It seems only self-evident to me that if you join yourself into an oath of eternal alliance with Middle Earth’s biggest, most powerful and most culturally dominant empire, that will have some kind of effect on your perspectives and behavior, both consciously and subconsciously. That’s not to say that I think Gondor necessarily had a formal agenda to change and control the Rohirrim or that the Rohirrim entered into the oath expecting it to have a substantial effect on their culture. But I think the alliance couldn’t help but change Rohan nonetheless, at least to some extent, just by virtue of the power imbalance between the two kingdoms.
Gondor had thousands of years of continuous national history dating all the way back to Númenor and the blessing of the Valar. In the Third Age, they projected power and influence on a worldwide scale bigger and better than anyone else but Sauron himself. They had knowledge and skills that no other community of Men had access to. They’d eaten up and subsumed huge chunks of land that used to belong to others, and they had a historical goal, through the hoped-for restoration of their line of kings, to reassert their claim to even greater parts of the map. Even as a declining remnant of their peak strength, there was no one else in Middle Earth who had an empire to rival Gondor.
Contrast that with the Éothéod, a smaller, younger, upstart group who had no king at the time of the oath, who had lost their traditional homeland to conquest and enslavement, and who lived a very different, more rustic, more nomadic daily lifestyle than the Gondorians. Yes, Eorl and his crew came in and saved Gondor’s ass at the Celebrant and, in turn, they were granted the land that became the Mark and the right to rule it. But that means the kingdom of Rohan itself only existed by Gondor’s beneficence - they were literally on Gondor’s land (well, land Gondor took from the Dunlendings, but that’s another story) by Gondor’s leave. That creates an immediate and pervasive sense of obligation between them. And what can be given can be taken away, so it also creates an inherent sense of precarity, especially because the gift of land was conditional right from the start — it was always limited to the rule of the stewards. So even though the two lands were the closest of allies and Gondor never suggested that it would renege on the oath*, there always had to be even the vaguest possible worry in the back of Rohirrim royal minds that to displease Gondor would be both to anger the most powerful human empire in Middle Earth and also to possibly endanger the continued existence of the Mark as its own independent political entity.
That’s already a huge pressure that would have some effect on your actions and choices, but then you layer on top of that the more subtle impact of being a smaller, younger, less established kingdom that’s joined at the hip with Third Age Middle Earth’s biggest exporter of culture. The common tongue used across all the lands traces its roots to Gondor’s ancestral language. There are structures and artifacts strewn all over the place that were put there by Gondor and stayed there as reminders even long after the Gondorians themselves had withdrawn from those areas. Gondor was inherently tied up in almost everyone else’s national history to some extent, and the overwhelming dominance of their presence would make it extremely difficult to avoid the homogenizing influence of their culture even if Gondor wasn’t actively trying to impose its values and practices on others (which they very well might have been!).
In addition to just having their culture in your face all the time, Gondor’s wealth, power and prestige might also have made it extremely difficult to resist the internal tendency to draw some connection between “how Gondor does things” with “the best way to do things.” Cultural inferiority complexes are a real thing, both nationally and regionally, and you can often find people arguing to abandon unique local ideas and traditions because they have come to be seen as an impediment to achieving the same kinds of economic, political and cultural success that someone else has demonstrated. (That could be especially likely to happen at times when the smaller culture is having a low moment — for example, just after the Long Winter, when Rohan was invaded and occupied by outsiders and just barely fought their way back to freedom after MANY deaths and MUCH suffering. It would be understandable at such a moment for people needing to recover some standing and to project strength again to look to a stronger, more powerful party and take steps to model themselves more after that more powerful party.)
All of that is to say that it seems logical to me that the shieldmaiden tradition of Rohan might have been a victim of this Gondorian imperial homogenization. In my HC, that happens several different ways, both explicit and implicit.
On the explicit front, I imagine Gondor registering some concerns with Rohan in the early years of their formal alliance about having women in the army when Rohan came to help defend Gondor’s borders (as they did repeatedly) or rode alongside Gondorian forces in joint campaigns. Gondor didn’t have a role for women in arms, and their men might have balked at seeming to endorse the idea by accepting female soldiers in their combined forces. They may have simply viewed women as inherently inferior warriors, and/or they may have been concerned about how the women of Gondor would respond to regularly seeing an example of women living outside of the gender roles that were enforced in Gondorian society (“don’t go getting any ideas, ladies!”). And so if the Gondorian steward said to Rohan, “we don’t want this and we’d really appreciate it if you didn’t make our lives difficult by persisting with it,” how much would a Rohirrim king be willing to push back? Would he provoke their closest ally and benefactor with all the attendant risks of that, or would he give a little ground and say, “OK, well, we’ll keep our shieldmaidens, but we just won’t include them in those éoreds that are sent to Gondor or that fight in joint campaigns so as not to offend the Gondorians’ sensibilities”? The latter seems very plausible to me, and so suddenly there was a new constraint on female martial power in Rohan that was never there before. A precedent of restriction had been set for the first time.
More implicitly, as neighbors and the closest of allies Rohan would be regularly compared to Gondor, and how the differences were perceived very easily could have affected Rohirrim behavior and attitudes. Perhaps some of that was in reaction to criticism. If some Rohirrim traditions were seen as “uncouth” or “heathenish” by Gondorian imperials, those traditions could easily come under internal pressure in Rohan as part of an effort to win Gondor’s approval and legitimize themselves as a worthy ally and source of power. Or perhaps it was aspirational. Some of those Rohirrim leaders may have started to interpret the fact that the Gondorian women didn’t ✌️have✌️ to fight as a sign of societal advancement — Gondor was so secure and successful that they could maintain their status without even needing half the population to be involved in defense. So adopting a similar stance in Rohan may have been their way of staking a claim to Rohan as a similarly secure and successful kingdom.
In either scenario, there is an external standard the Rohirrim are being measured against and reacting to. That could be against the Rohirrim’s will and much to their displeasure. It could be a very cynical reaction, with Rohirrim leaders making knowing and calculated cultural sacrifices for a perceived political benefit. Or it could be internalized, subconscious self-criticism, as in they legitimately started to believe that their old ways were out of step with the broader world or their rough edges needed sanding down as a mark of progress.
I think this could have especially been the case for the shieldmaidens because the only other community of Men that we know canonically had women in arms was the Easterlings. (Indeed, the Rohirrim had a LOT more in common culturally with the Easterlings than Gondor but that’s a topic for another day.) How natural would it be for Rohirrim leaders to start feeling some pressure (even self-imposed) to constrain a tradition they share only with a mortal enemy — a people who are looked down on all across the West as lesser-than? In my HC, that is how we get another level of erosion of shieldmaiden culture. Rohirrim royals, sensitive to their standing in the broader Middle Earth community and the criticism that they have wives and mothers — nurturers who are supposed to bring forth life! — engaging in warfare and the dealing of death just as those wild Easterlings do, cut those wives and mothers out of the éoreds as a matter of policy. That’s a self-inflicted blow and not something Gondor asked or demanded of them, but it’s still tied to the broader dominance of Gondorian cultural ideals that made the Rohirrim practices seem (allegedly) weird and undesirable by comparison.
The final form of that internalized self-criticism, to me, was the royal ascendance of Thengel, father of Théoden. We’re explicitly told that Thengel was in love with Gondor and Gondorian culture. We don’t necessarily know WHY, but we know he was incredibly impressed by what he saw of Gondorian society and thought it beneficial to try to embody it as much as possible. He moved there as soon as he was able, married a Gondorian woman, had several Gondorian-born children, served their steward, spoke their languages, and only came back to Rohan “unwillingly,” after which he still tried to preserve some Gondorian traditions in his own royal house (such as the use of their language). For all we know, he bought into the “high v middle man” concept that Faramir describes for us later, with the high Gondorians positioned as more ennobled and advanced than the Rohirrim middle men.
Given his infatuation with all things Gondor, I can’t imagine, then, that Thengel wasn’t influenced by Gondorian patriarchal ideas of womanhood, looking for a model to his own wife, a noble born, sophisticated Gondorian lady who wielded her influence through subtlety and cleverness rather than ever taking up a sword or mounting a horse. And the unfortunate thing about a monarchy is that one person with very strong opinions can impose those opinions on others without real limitation if they’re in the right place to do so. With that in mind, I made Thengel the final nail in the official shieldmaiden coffin, issuing the edict that even the unmarried women could no longer ride in the éoreds as he tried to reshape the very ideal of the Rohirrim woman to be more in line with what he loved best about his wife and her land. He thought he was doing right and was blinded by his own biases, and thus finally ended the open practice of a tradition that had survived ages of history in one form or another, only to die at last in the vain name of progress.
Note, though, that I say “ended the OPEN practice,” because I definitely don’t think any of this Gondorian influence over time pervaded down into the ranks of the regular people as strongly as it did at the top. (That’s also why I think the tradition had to be eroded over time rather than ended in one big step — even as a monarch, you can’t push your people too far, too fast without risking revolt.) I think your average Rohirrim would still bristle strongly at the notion that there was anything wrong with their own culture and certainly wouldn’t like the implication that they were inherently inferior to Gondor. Tolkien even told us specifically that Thengel engendered this resentment with his zeal for Gondorian cultural practices! And that means those who weren’t interested in the notion of achieving a Gondor-level of prestige and who were free of the need to worry about keeping Gondor happy as a matter of policy could and did hold tight to their old values and traditions, which they treasured.
So just because Thengel said “no more women shieldmaidens” by law does not mean that there were no more in practice. It’s just that they then had to go through the charade of clothing themselves as men, riding among the éoreds just as Éowyn herself did in the guise of Dernhelm. Perhaps she didn’t come up with that strategy on her own; it was just what women in post-Thengel Rohan did when they wanted to be part of the fight. There would be far fewer shieldmaidens willing and able to do that once it became officially illegal because not everyone will risk flouting a royal edict. But shieldmaidens would still be there, just as there would still be Rohirrim men who would be fine with their presence and loyally look the other way in service of preserving the tradition — something that we see Elfhelm and all of his men do when Dernhelm was among them. In fact, who is to say that Éowyn WAS the only woman at the Pelennor Fields? Maybe that remark as the Rohirrim were carrying Éowyn into Minas Tirith was just another manifestation of male riders covering for the existence of other Dernhelms in their ranks. The Gondorians don’t want to think of themselves being saved by Rohirrim women, so the average Rohirrim just tells them Éowyn was a one-off. What they don’t know won’t hurt them!**
In any event, this has gotten far too long*** and I don’t want to write a whole side explanation of my fic that is as long as the fic itself. I hope it makes sense to others though, of course, I acknowledge that we’re firmly in HC territory here. So, you know, do with that what you will!
*There are some signs that Gondor doesn’t take the alliance quite as seriously as the Rohirrim. Most notable to me is that at the time the Oath of Eorl was sworn, Cirion and Eorl agreed that the Halifirien (the mountaintop in what was now Rohan that was Elendil’s burial place and the site of the Oath) should always be treated as hallowed ground and jointly guarded and maintained as a physical manifestation of the bond of word that had just been agreed to. But in time, the Gondorians both furtively removed Elendil’s grave back to Gondor and abandoned the duty of providing for any of the Halifirien’s care or protection, as though it no longer had any priority or meaning for them. The Rohirrim, however, kept loyally maintaining it on their own, right up until Aragorn came back with Éomer to re-up the Oath in full.
**I actually love this concept and think it’s canonically consistent for the Rohirrim. Buried in the non-LOTR writings is a note from Tolkien that the Gondorians liked to ascribe descent from the House of Hador to the Rohirrim (which presumably elevated their status as allies in Gondorian eyes, since the Hadorians were stone cold badasses of the First Age). And while this wasn’t strictly true (the Rohirrim and Hadorians share a common ancestor but are not direct descendants), Tolkien wrote that the Rohirrim chose not to correct it because the assumption worked in their favor with Gondor. So they are not above some little white lies where they perceive such things to advance their interests!
***Did anyone actually read this far? I’m impressed, and I thank you! ♥️
