Dunlendings

Origins

The Dunlendings were the last free remnant of a people who had once spread widely over the south of Eriador and the vales of the White Mountains. They were akin to the folk of Haleth among the Edain, according to the lore of Gondor, and the Men of Bree and the Dead Men of Dunharrow were of the same stock. In the Second Age the Númenóreans felled their forests in Enedwaith and Minhiriath for timber, and the people of the woods fought them and were driven into the hills, hating the tall sea-kings from then on. When Gondor was founded the hill-men of the White Mountains became its subjects or fled, and the King of the Mountains who swore to Isildur and then broke his oath was of their blood.

The survivors of these people settled Dunland, the green hill-country between the Misty Mountains and the river Isen, which was outside the effective borders of both Númenórean realms, and they kept their own ancient tongue when their kin elsewhere took up Westron. The Rohirrim called them Dunlendings, the dark-skinned men of the hill land, and the name and the land became one.

The feud with Rohan

In the long decline of Gondor the Dunlendings crept back into Calenardhon, the empty province north of the White Mountains, and even into the ring of Isengard when its garrison dwindled. Then in 2510 the Steward Cirion gave Calenardhon to Eorl and the Rohirrim, and the Dunlendings found the land they had been reclaiming taken by strangers whom they regarded as thieves and invaders. King Aldor drove the last of them from the Westfold and back over the Isen in the seventh century of the Mark, and the Rohirrim held the Dunlendings ever after as enemies, calling them Wild Men, while the Dunlendings called the Rohirrim Forgoil, Strawheads, and nursed the grievance across generations.

Some of them nonetheless settled in the west of the Mark and mixed with its people. Freca, a lord of the Adorn valley who claimed descent from King Fréawine, had much Dunlendish blood and many Dunlendish followers, and when Helm Hammerhand killed him with his fist in 2754, Freca's son Wulf fled to Dunland and raised it. In 2758, while Gondor was beset by the Corsairs, Wulf led the Dunlendings and men from the coasts across the Isen, beat Helm at the Crossings, took Edoras and killed Helm's son Haleth on the steps of Meduseld. Through the Long Winter that followed Wulf sat in the golden hall, but Helm's people held out in the Hornburg and in Dunharrow, and in the spring Fréaláf surprised and killed Wulf and drove the Dunlendings out of the Mark. Gondor's forces came up and the invaders were pushed back over the Isen, and Isengard, which the Dunlendings had held, was besieged until its garrison starved. The Rohirrim's hatred of the Dunlendings was fixed by that winter, and the Dunlendings' hatred of them was older.

Saruman's tools

When Saruman took Isengard in 2759 he found the Dunlendings ready to hand, and in the last decades of the Third Age he made them his soldiers. He told them that the Rohirrim were cruel, that the Strawheads burned their captives alive, and that the land was theirs by right, and they believed him because they wished to. Dunlendings served in Isengard alongside Orcs and half-orcs, and when Saruman sent his army against the Mark in March 3019 the hill-men marched with it. They fought at the Fords of Isen and in the assault on Helm's Deep, where they attacked with fire and ladders and swarmed the Deeping Wall, crying for vengeance on the Forgoil. When the Huorns destroyed Saruman's Orcs the next morning the Dunlendings threw down their arms and expected to be burned, as Saruman had told them. Instead Erkenbrand made them swear never to cross the Isen in arms again, set them to burying the dead and mending the wall, and sent them home free, and the Dunlendings, astonished, went.

Relations with other peoples

The Dunlendings' history was one of dispossession, and their relations with others were shaped by it: hostility to the Númenóreans who had first driven them into the hills, lasting hatred of the Rohirrim, and a readiness to follow any lord who promised the return of their land, whether Wulf or Saruman. They had kin among the Bree-folk of the north, and their tongue was spoken in earlier ages by the Men of Dunharrow. Their submission to Saruman brought them into the company of Orcs, an alliance that their own traditions gave them no reason to love.

The Dunlendings were a swarthy, dark-haired people, shorter and broader than the Rohirrim, with the look of the ancient hill-folk of the West; the Rohirrim's name for them referred to their dark colouring. They were hardy hill-men, fighters with spear, axe and bow, and at Helm's Deep they came in numbers with ladders and torches, ferocious in attack and quick to despair when the tide turned. Some had intermarried with the Men of the Westfold, so that men like Freca were counted as Rohirrim of Dunlendish blood.

The Dunlendings lived in scattered villages in the hills and valleys of Dunland, herding and raiding rather than farming widely. They kept their own language, a survival of the speech of the ancient Men of the West that had elsewhere given way to Westron, and their own names for their neighbours. They had chieftains but no king; their unity came from grievance and from leaders like Wulf who could channel it. They had a long memory: the tale of the Rohirrim's theft of the land, as they saw it, was told for five hundred years. They were not builders or traders of note, and they fought as a people rather than an army, brave in the first rush and unreliable after it.

The Dunlendings descended from the woodland and hill-dwelling peoples who lived across the south of Eriador and the White Mountains before the Númenóreans came, and who were akin to the House of Haleth of the Edain. Driven into the hills by the Númenórean timber-cutters of the Second Age and then by the founding of Gondor and Arnor, they survived in Dunland and the Misty Mountain foothills as a people apart.

After the War of the Ring the Dunlendings who had fought at Helm's Deep were sent home under oath, and Saruman's fall removed the voice that had stirred them. Under King Éomer and King Elessar the frontier on the Isen was fixed and peace made with Dunland; nothing more is told of them, but the reconciliation at the Hornburg set the tone for the Fourth Age.