Wulf

Lineage

Wulf was the son of Freca, a rich lord of Rohan who held lands along the river Adorn on the borders of Dunland. Freca claimed descent from the fifth king of the Mark, but his blood was largely Dunlendish and his loyalty to Edoras was slight. Through his father, Wulf had a claim, however thin, on the House of Eorl, and connections among the Dunlendings whose ancestors the Rohirrim had driven from the plains.

Freca's death and exile

In 2754 Freca came to Edoras with an armed following and demanded that King Helm Hammerhand give his daughter in marriage to Wulf. Helm answered with insults, and when the council had finished he took Freca outside and killed him with one blow of his fist. He then proclaimed Freca's kin the enemies of the king, and Wulf fled westward over the Adorn with his father's followers into Dunland. There he spent four years nursing his grievance and gathering allies among the Dunlendings, who had their own reasons to hate the Mark.

The invasion of the Mark

Wulf's chance came in 2758, when the enemies of Gondor and Rohan struck at once. Corsairs from Umbar and the south attacked Gondor's coasts and landed raiders at the mouths of the Isen and the Lefnui, while Easterlings crossed the Anduin into the eastern Mark. Wulf led a great host of Dunlendings, joined by these landed enemies and by the men of the Adorn, across the Fords of Isen. Helm met him at the Crossings and was defeated, and fled with his remnant to the Hornburg at Helm's Deep. Wulf marched on Edoras and stormed it. Haleth, Helm's elder son, died at the doors of Meduseld, and Wulf took his seat in the Golden Hall and named himself King of the Mark.

The Long Winter

His triumph lasted a single winter, and that winter was the worst in memory. Snow buried the Mark from November to March. Wulf's Dunlendings besieging the Hornburg froze and starved in the Deeping-coomb, and Helm, walking out alone at night in white, killed them in their camps until they fled at the sound of his horn. In Edoras Wulf ruled a dead city. When the thaw came in 2759, Fréaláf, Helm's sister-son, came down from Dunharrow with a small band and surprised Meduseld, and killed Wulf in the hall he had usurped. Gondor's help arrived soon after, and the Dunlendings were driven back over the Isen before the end of the year.

Legacy

Wulf's rebellion was the last great attempt of the Dunlendings to reclaim the plains, and its failure left them a broken and resentful people on the fringes of the Mark. Their hatred of the Rohirrim, inflamed again by Saruman two and a half centuries later, brought them to the Hornburg once more in the War of the Ring, and to another defeat.

Slain in Meduseld by Fréaláf Hildeson in 2759.