The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024) is an anime film that tells the story of Helm Hammerhand, King of Rohan, and his daughter Héra. The movie is based on the Appendices of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and contains many references to Old English, especially in the film’s sound track. This blog post discusses the film’s Neo-Old English lyrics!

Gone with the wind: Where is “The Rider”?

“Where is the horse? Where is the rider?”, the opening lyrics of “Hama’s Song” in The War of the Rohirrim (2024) will remind many a Tolkien fan of “The Lament of the Rohirrim” which Aragorn recites in the chapter “The King of the Golden Hall” in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. In Aragorn’s poem, the opening lines run as follows: “Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?”. Tolkien, a Professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) at the Universities of Leeds and Oxford, based Aragorn’s poem on the Old English elegy The Wanderer, which uses the so-called ubi sunt motif (‘where are they now?’) to express the fleeting nature of worldly pleasures (the answer to the rhetorical questions being “they are no more”). As it turns out, “Hama’s Song” of the new movie is closer to the Old English original poem, which has the line: “hwær cwom mearg, hwær cwom mago” [Where is the horse? Where is the man?].

Ubi sunt (or ‘hwær cwom’) lines in The Wanderer. Exeter Book, fol. 77v

The context of “Hama’s Song” makes clear that “the rider” referred to is the movie’s heroine Héra, who is also the subject of the movie’s credits song by Paris Paloma called “The Rider”. If you listen carefully to this song, you will notice that there is a very clear Old English lyric at 0:41 (and again at 2:01 and 3:01): “Heo is se wind, heo is se wind” [she is the wind, she is the wind]:

More Old English lyrics! A speculative transcription of “The Lament for Helm”

A single line in an (otherwise pretty epic) song is nice and all, but it would have been even better if the full song were in Old English, of course! In that regard, the best song of the film may be “The Lament for Helm”, sung by Lorraine Ashbourne (who also voices the character Olwyn). This entire song is in Neo-Old English verse and it is pretty amazing:

At the moment of writing this blog post (16 December, 2024), the lyrics to this song have not been made available. So, the following transcription is mostly speculative (and I am indebted to Leiden University colleagues Rachel Fletcher, Suzanne Klare and Amos van Baalen for their invaluable input):

…      Beadu-cwealm* hafað
fægne frean       forð onsended
giedd sculon singan       gleomenn* sorgiende
on ealdum eodorum*       þæt he eorla wære
his leode leofost       ond land-frymena hiehst*.
Beadu-cwealm*…

[… Battle-death has
sent forth the fated lord
sorrowing minstrels must sing a song
in old enclosures, that he was of warriors
the dearest to his people and the highest of land-lords.
Battle-death…]

The words marked with an asterisk * have been slightly emended from what we can hear in the song for linguistic accuracy:

  • *Beadu-cwealm ‘Battle-death’ – we can clearly hear ‘Beado-cwealm’, but the dictionary form of this word is beadu-cwealm – the word occurs only once in the existing Old English corpus, in the Old English poem Andreas. The pronunciation with the “o” is probably influenced by The Lament for Théodred (for which, see below).
  • *gleomenn ‘minstrel’ – we can clearly hear “gleomann” [minstrel], but the plural verb “sculon” suggests that we need the plural “gleomenn” [minstrels].
  • *eodorum ‘(in) enclosures’. This sounds like “edoran” in the song, but “edoran” cannot be the right form: we need an “-um” to match the dative plural “ealdum”+ Old English eodor ‘wall, enclosure’ is a strong noun and “-an” is a weak nominal ending. “Edorum” rather than “eodorum” is possible (the Old English poem Genesis A, for instance, has “edoras” for expected eodoras, which matches the spelling of Edoras, the capital of Rohan, based on the same Old English word!).
  • *hiehst ‘highest’. We can hear “heahst”, but superlatives are usually affected by i-mutation, so heah > hiehst. That said, heahst is occassionally attested, e.g. in the Old English gloss of the Liber Scintillarum.

What is impressive about this Neo-Old English song is that its author has managed to abide by the rules of alliterative Old English verse, which connects half lines through alliteration on stressed syllables: fæg… frean forþ … | giedd … gleo (and in the same line “sing … sorg“) | eald … eo … eor… | leo…leo…land.

The inclusion of a Neo-Old English song in The War of the Rohirrim does not come out of the blue: Tolkien himself was known to compose his own Old English poetry and, in doing so, also inspired an eerily similar Neo-Old English song that was included in the extended edition of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) : Éowyn’s Lament for Théodred (written by Philippa Boyens and translated into Old English by David Salo).

The Lament for Helm vs. Éowyn’s Lament for Théodred: A comparison

While Éowyn’s song (LfT) appears to have a lot in common with The Lament for Helm (LfH), attentive listeners can spot a number of differences, which are listed below, line per line:

LfH: Beadu-cwealm hafað | LfT: Bealo-cwealm hafað

Éowyn uses the word Bealo-cwealm ‘evil death’ rather than Beadu-cwealm ‘Battle-death’. The word comes from the Old English poem Beowulf, ll. 2265b-2266:

London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, fol. 183r

Bealo-cwealm hafað | fela feorhcynna forð onsended [Evil death has sent forth many of the living].

LfH: fægne frean forð onsended | LfT: freone frecan forð onsended

Clearly, the half line “forð onsended” (sent forth), found in both lamentations, is also based on Beowulf, but both songs provide a different first half line. For Théodred, Éowyn uses “freone frecan” [the noble warrior] – this phrase was not an option for The Lament for Helm, given the fact that the movie also features an unlikable character called Freca (named after the Old English word for ‘warrior’, of course!). The phrase “fægne frean” means something along the lines of “lord doomed/fated to die”, which is very apt for the character of Helm.

LfH + LfT: giedd sculon singan gleomenn sorgiende

Both laments have the same line here, with double alliteration on g and s.

LfH: on ealdum eodorum þæt he eorla wære | LfT: on Meduselde þæt he manna wære

In Éowyn’s song, the minstrels are singing in Meduseld (the hall of the kings of Rohan; medu-seld is an Old English word meaning ‘mead-hall’) and so she alliterates on the m with “manna” [of men]. When The Lament for Helm is sung, they are (crucially) not in Meduseld, but in the Hornburg (later: Helm’s Deep), a somewhat dilapidated place, so “ealdum eodorum” [old enclosures] seems suitable and triggers an alliteration with “eorla” [of warriors].

LfH: his leode leofost ond land-frymena hiehst | LfT: his dryhtne dierest and maga deorost

Here we see a clear distinction between Helm Hammerhand, a king, and Théodred, a prince. The former is “dearest to his people and highest of the land-lords”, while Théodred is “dearest to his lord [i.e. his father Théoden] and bravest of kinsmen”. The alliteration in The Lament for Helm sticks closer to the ‘rules’ than Éowyn’s Lament for Théodred here, since the last stressed syllable of a line rarely participates in the structural alliteration in Old English verse (but in LfT “deorost” alliterates with “dryhtne” and “dierest”).

All in all, then, while the laments are certainly similar (and the one must be based on the other!), there are also clear differences, prompted by the differing contexts in which they are sung. A medievalist would call this mouvance, a concept Tolkien also played around with in his fiction, but that is a story for another blog post. For now, I hope you have enjoyed this little foray into the world of Neo-Old English – if you want to learn more about the topic, there is a whole book about it: Old English Medievalism: Reception and Recreation in the 20th and 21st Centuries!

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in:

You can find my academic publications in the field of Tolkien Studies (available for free, in Open Access) here!

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