"'Look!' said Gandalf. 'How fair are the bright eyes in the grass! Evermind
they are called, Simbelmynė in this land of Men, for they blossom in all the
season of the year, and grow where dead men rest.'"
Are Simbelmynė purely a Tolkien invention, or are there real flowers that
grow mostly on gravesites? ? Would the climate of Rohan really be warm enough
for any flowers to bloom year-round? Does the fact that the flowers bloom year
round have symbolic significance?
"'Five hundred times have the red leaves fallen in Mirkwood in my home since
then,' said Legolas, 'and but a little while does that seem to us.'
'But to the Riders of the Mark it seems so long ago,' said Aragorn, 'that the
raising of this house is but a memory of song, and the years before are lost in
the midst of time. Now they call this land their home, their own, and their
speech is sundered from their northern kin'"
Five hundred years is really not a long time in Middle-earth, considering that
the Last Alliance took place over 3,000 years before. The Rohirrim settled in
Rohan, or Calenardhon, as it was known then, in 2510, well into the Third Age
of Middle-earth, yet to the people of Rohan this is "lost in the midst of time"
Why? What does this say about the Rohirrim?
In Appendix A, II, The House of Eorl, Tolkien writes that the Rohirrim were in
origin close kin to the Beornings and the men of the west-eaves of
Mirkwood. Do the Rohirrim and the Beornings still recognize that kinship
at the time of the War of the Ring? Do any traditions or customs remain that
are common to
both?
*******************************************************
Although now long estranged, Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shpes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons--'twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
We make still by the law in which we're made!
