Anghraine

Tolkien frequently shifted around his ideas about how language was used in Gondor and Rohan, but I wanted to settle my headcanon in my own mind. So, headcanons for the royal house of Rohan + language!

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One of the interesting things about Théoden’s restriction on entry of any non-Gondorian who doesn’t speak the language of the Mark (assuming I recall it correctly) is that he is probably not a native speaker, himself.

Before Théoden was born, his father Thengel noped out of Rohan, went to serve the Steward in Gondor, married a high-born Gondorian lady, and had three children there, including Théoden. Thengel only reluctantly returned to Rohan when the Rohirrim summoned him to take up the crown. (We don’t know what Morwen, Théoden’s mother, thought about it, but she was the one who had to leave her homeland for a place where her husband didn’t want to go even to be king.) Théoden would have spent his early years with Westron and Sindarin around him, not Markish (or whatever they call it).

It’s possible that Thengel saw to it that his elder daughters and Théoden were taught the language of the place they would one day return to, but not at all certain. We know that Thengel insisted on “the speech of Gondor” being used in his house as King of Rohan, which seems a frankly extraordinary thing to do (linguistic use is very politically loaded! especially in Middle-earth!). If he insisted on the use of Westron or Sindarin in Meduseld, it doesn’t really seem likely to me that he’d have used Markish in Gondor.

Théoden was still a small child when the family went to Rohan (he had two more sisters born in Rohan, including his beloved Théodwyn, Éomer and Éowyn’s mother). He would have learned Markish once there, certainly, and it was presumably the younger girls’ native language. It’s not that he doesn’t speak it himself! But it is interesting that the language that he himself would have had to learn becomes the marker of who authentically belongs in the Mark.

Of course, this policy is partly (perhaps mostly) due to Gríma’s influence. But nevertheless, Théoden is so much King of Rohan, in many ways an embodiment of the Rohirrim in the wider narrative, and his court seems deeply rooted in the culture of Rohan in marked contrast to Thengel’s.

And yet Théoden was born in Gondor to a Gondorian Dúnadan and a prince who assimilates into Gondorian culture to such a degree that he doesn’t want to be king of his own people. I just … wonder about what Théoden even thought of the whole situation, and what led to the choices he made about how he would rule Rohan, and how it impacted his relationship with, say, Rohan-born Théodwyn and the upbringing of her children as well as his own.

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