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a tamer of wild horses, was thrown by Felaróf when he dared to mount him, and so he met his death. Afterwards Eorl demanded of the horse that he surrender his freedom till his life’s end in weregild for his father; and Felaróf submitted, though he would allow no man but Eorl to mount him. He understood all that men said, and was as long-lived as they, as were his descendants, the mearas, ‘who would bear no one but the King of the Mark or his sons, until the time of Shadowfax’. Felaróf is a word of the Anglo-Saxon poetic vocabulary, though not in fact recorded in the extant poetry: ‘very valiant, very strong’.

29 Between the inflow of the Limlight and the Undeeps. [Author’s note.] – This seems certainly in contradiction to the first citation given in Appendix C to ‘The History of Galadriel and Celeborn’, p. 337, where ‘the North and South Undeeps’ are ‘the two westward bends’ of the Anduin, into the northmost of which the Limlight flowed in.

30 In nine days they had covered more than five hundred miles in a direct line, probably more than six hundred as they rode. Though there were no great natural obstacles on the east side of Anduin, much of the land was now desolate, and roads or horse-paths running southward were lost or little used; only for short periods were they able to ride at speed, and they needed also to husband their own strength and their horses’, since they expected battle as soon as they reached the Undeeps. [Author’s note.]

31 The Halifirien is twice mentioned in The Lord of the Rings. In The Return of the King V 1, when Pippin, riding with Gandalf on Shadowfax to Minas Tirith, cried out that he saw fires, Gandalf replied: ‘The beacons of Gondor are alight, calling for aid. War is kindled. See, there is the fire on Amon Dîn, and flame on Eilenach; and there they go speeding west: Nardol, Erelas, Min-Rimmon, Calenhad, and the Halifirien on the borders of Rohan.’ In V 3 the Riders of Rohan on their way to Minas Tirith passed through the Fenmarch ‘where to their right great oakwoods climbed on the skirts of the hills under the shades of dark Halifirien by the borders of Gondor’. See the large-scale map of Gondor and Rohan in The Lord of the Rings.

32 It was the great Númenórean road linking the Two Kingdoms, crossing the Isen at the Fords of Isen and the Grey-flood at Tharbad and then on northwards to Fornost; elsewhere called the North-South Road. See p. 343.

33 This is a modernized spelling for Anglo-Saxon hálig-firgen; similarly Firien-dale for firgen-dæl, Firien Wood for firgenwudu. [Author’s note.] – The g in the Anglo-Saxon word firgen ‘mountain’ came to be pronounced as a modern y.

34 Minas Ithil, Minas Anor, and Orthanc.

35 It is said elsewhere, in a note on the names of the beacons, that ‘the full beacon system, that was still operating in the War of the Ring, can have been no older than the settlement of the Rohirrim in Calenardhon some five hundred years before; for its principal function was to warn the Rohirrim that Gondor was in danger, or (more rarely) the reverse’.

36 According to a note on the ordering of the Rohirrim, the éored ‘had no precisely fixed number, but in Rohan it was only applied to Riders, fully trained for war: men serving for a term, or in some cases permanently, in the King’s Host. Any considerable body of such men, riding as a unit in exercise or on service, was called an éored. But after the recovery of the Rohirrim and the reorganization of their forces in the days of King Folcwine, a hundred years before the War of the Ring, a “full éored ” in battle order was reckoned to contain not less than 120 men (including the Captain), and to be one hundredth part of the Full Muster of the Riders of the Mark, not including those of the King’s Household. [The éored with whichÉomer pursued the Orcs, The Two Towers III 2, had 120 Riders: Legolas counted 105 when they were far away, and Éomer said that fifteen men had been lost in battle with the Orcs.] No such host, of course, had ever ridden all together to war beyond the Mark; but Théoden’s claim that he might, in this great