The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim Pays Tribute To Tolkien In An Unexpected And Heartfelt Way

Skip to content Since our introduction to Middle-Earth in 1937’s The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien’s lovingly crafted world has captivated the hearts, imaginations, pencils, and keyboards of more than 4 generations. The world of Middle Earth, featuring such works as The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion alongside more fragmentary and obscure works from the author, has bloomed into countless animated and live-action movies, TV shows, videogames, tabletop games, festivals, and more.

This lively and sprawling canon was expanded in 2024 with The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an animated feature film set in Middle Earth roughly 200 years prior to the events of The Lord Of The Rings and featuring a plot that is unusually disconnected from the events of Tolkiens’ own works, with the film only possessing indirect or fleeting connections to the events of The Lord Of The Rings up until its final five minutes (apparently even an animated film with a fairly standalone plot is not immune to Surprise Gandalf Appearances).

Facing high stakes and big shoes to fill as both the first animated film in the Middle-Earth universe since 1980s’ The Return of the King (Rankin Bass Animated Entertainment) and a project that plays fast and loose with Tolkien’s lore even by current Middle-Earth media standards, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim made a bold move— rather than constructing a new narrative from bits and pieces of other stories already present in Middle Earth, it looked back even further to draw directly from the same ancient languages and cultures that inspired Tolkien himself.

One year before the publication of The Hobbit and 18 years before The Fellowship Of The Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien would present his revolutionary paper Beowulf: The Monsters And The Critics, where he effectively transformed the entire academic discussion around the Old English poem Beowulf by insisting that it should be read as a work of poetry with its fantastical elements (mostly monster fights) left intact, as opposed to the then-current approach of attempting to tease historical data and records of real and mundane conflicts out of the poem.

This was no stand-alone paper for Tolkien either. Old English, the archaic form of English in which Beowulf was written, was a lifelong subject of study and passion for Tolkien— versed in the language since his teen years (and able to write fluently in it, as seen above), Tolkien maintained consistent study of the language in spite of his turbulent and war-ridden young adulthood, with The Hobbit being written while while Tolkien was on fellowship at Pembroke College as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, and in fact the characters and stories that would later become the Silmarillion— and thus the foundation for much of the lore of Middle-Earth as a whole— were initially conceived by Tolkien as the writings of a poet from historical Old-English-Speaking cultures who, encountering Elves and learning their language, had recorded the magical race’s own history and mythos.

Once Middle-Earth itself was more solid in Tolkien’s writings, Old English would again appear in The Lord Of The Rings to serve as the native tongue of the people of Rohan. It can be very well argued that Old English, rather than any other conception of fantasy or even many of the other languages that Tolkien studied or invented, was the author’s truest academic and literary love.

It is with clear and well-researched knowledge of this love, and of the degree to which Middle-Earth itself is rooted in the Old English language and corpus, that The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim crafts every detail of its story. The film’s setting in the previously-mentioned Old-English-Speaking kingdom of Rohan is only the foundation for a story that interweaves itself with the Old English poetic & prose traditions at every turn.

The most obvious of these references is found in the antagonistic Wulf, whose army of beastlike soldiers and romantic obsession with the film’s protagonist all clearly allude to the famous, and enigmatic, Old English poem of the same name (a poem which The War Of The Rohirrim remains in conversation with, as the unnamed heroine of the poem’s grief and powerlessness in her entanglement with the poem’s Wulf is contrasted by the film’s protagonist, Hera, as she leads armies to clash with the film’s Wulf in battle).

However Wulf is far from the only character in The War Of The Rohirrim to have clearly visible Old English roots— Hera’s father, the king Helm Hammerhand, has his name styled in the alliterative form common to OE epithets. This alliteration is continued in the names of Hera and her brothers Haleth and Hàma. Hera’s brothers are perhaps one of the film’s more interesting studies in Old English inspiration, as they connect back to Old English, and the cultures that spoke it, on several levels.

While the brothers together are a clear parallel to Hengest and Horsa, two legendary Horse-Princes from Old English poetry and histories who were believed to have led the seizure of England from its original Brittonic rulers, the names of Rohan’s princes have individual meaning as well— Hàma shares a name with a legendary hero popular in Old English verse, while the name “Haleth” seems to be a slight modernization of the Old English word “Hæleþ” meaning “warrior”, “hero”, or “man”.

Outside of Rohan’s royal family, there are far more names, events and plot arcs in The War Of The Rohirrim that were drawn from the Old English corpus than would be feasible to name in one article. Other instances of note include Fréaláf, Hera’s cousin who inherits the throne after Helm, Haleth and Hàma’s deaths— his name uses a prefix-suffix form common in Old English names, and could be read as either “lord’s inheritance” or “the remaining king”.

The Watcher In The Water that Hera seeks out to defeat a rabid Mumak, while technically a creature from The Fellowship Of The Ring, was clearly inspired by the water-monsters of the Old English poem Beowulf. While the song accompanying Helm Hammerhand’s funeral is in a shortened version of one sung by Eowyn at Theodred’s funeral in The Two Towers (Film)’s extended edition, the fact that the song is in the language of Rohan— and thus in Old English— does serve to further enmesh the film in Tolkien’s own linguistic inspirations.

The decision of the team behind The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim to put such effort and diligence into centering Old English in the story is no mere easter egg. The skilled and clearly extensively-researched utilization of this language and culture shows great reverence of, respect for, and understanding of Tolkien not only as an author but as a person.

By drawing the same historical source material that Tolkien did rather than seek to expand Middle-Earth’s canon based on the worldbuilding as it stands, The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim grounds itself in the same real-life tales and traditions that Tolkien used to shape his worlds, and as a result comes off as completely organic and understandable within the world of Middle-Earth. May all future additions to these stories do the same.