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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