What Happened to the War Dead of Middle Earth?
The three major battles in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings consist of Helm’s Deep, the Pelennor Fields, and Morannon at the Black Gate. In addition, there are a multitude of smaller battles and skirmishes. Although Tolkien never specifies the number of dead, tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of soldiers were involved in these clashes. At Helm’s Deep, for example, the dead are so numerous that they form piles over which the orcs advance.
Many were cast down in ruin, but many more replaced them, and Orcs sprang up them like apes in the dark forests of the South. Before the wall’s foot the dead and broken were piled like shingle in a storm; ever higher rose the hideous mounds, and still the enemy came on. (The Two Towers)
Despite the magnitude of these losses, however, Middle Earth is not a stinking cesspit of corpses. Something, therefore, must have been done to dispose of the battlefield dead — but what? For some reason, this question took on the utmost importance in my mind and I decided to go back to the text to see if it could be answered. Unfortunately, in writing The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s main intent was not to provide an anthropological study of funerary practices in Middle Earth. Nevertheless, textual clues allow us to piece together a basic overview. As we will see, Tolkien drew on both historical and contemporary sources — and perhaps even personal experience from World War I — when he created traditions surrounding death in wartime, burial, and remembrance among men, dwarves, hobbits and even orcs.
Mounds and Mass Graves
Mounded graves, or barrows, are a burial style associated with Viking warriors and Anglo-Saxon kings. One of most famous barrow burials in the United Kingdom is Sutton Hoo, where excavations began in 1938, around the same time that Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings. (As a medievalist, he would likely have been familiar with barrows prior to that discovery.)
In Rohan, as in real life, kings are buried in barrows:
For after three days the Men of the Mark prepared the funeral of Theoden; and he was laid in a house of stone with his arms and many other fair things that he had possessed, and over him was raised a great mound, covered with green turves of grass and of white evermind. And now there were eight mounds on the east-side of the Barrowfield. (The Return of the King)
In Middle Earth, mounds are also used to inhume multiple people who died at the same time. They denote a man (or men) who died with honour and who will be remembered by his people forever, even if they bear no inscription.
“Look!” said Gandalf. “Friends have laboured here.
And they saw that in the midst of the eyot a mound was piled, ringed with stones, and set about with many spears.
“Here lie all the Men of the Mark that fell near this place,” said Gandalf.
“Here let them rest!” said Eomer. “And when their spears have rotted and rusted, long still may their mound stand and guard the Fords of Isen.” (The Two Towers)
While grass and flowers grow on the mounds of good men who died valiant deaths, the mass graves of orcs create barren spots that people wish to avoid.
Far down into the valley of the Deep the grass was crushed and trampled brown, as if giant herdsmen had pastured great droves of cattle there; but a mile below the Dike a huge pit had been delved in the earth, and over it stones were piled into a hill. Men believed that the Orcs whom they had slain were buried there; but whether those who had fled into the wood were with them, none could say, for no man ever set foot upon that hill. The Death Down it was afterwards called, and no grass would grow there. (The Two Towers)
This lifeless patch of blight finds a parallel in the post-war landscapes of the Great War. While Tolkien’s experiences on the Western Front are believed to have inspired his depictions of Mordor, it is impossible to know whether he consciously created the Death Down as an equivalent to the Zone Rouge (Red Zone) in northern France, where even today the land is considered unsafe for habitation due to the concentration of poisonous munitions. Whatever the case, he reiterates the link between evil creatures and barren land in The Return of the King. Here, at the spot where the Witch-King of Angmar’s “fell beast” is slain and burned, the ground remains “ever black and bare.”
Less detrimental to the environment is the grave of the men who are killed during the Scouring of the Shire. They are interred — dumped, even — without ceremony in a place that is neither beautiful nor memorable:
The dead ruffians were laden on wagons and hauled off to an old sand-pit nearby and there buried… (The Return of the King)
In siding with Saruman, they have shown themselves to be no better than uncivilised animals, and their dead bodies are treated as such. However, the nineteen hobbits who died in the same clash are “laid together in a grave on the hill-side, where later a great stone was set up with a garden about it.” This grave might be a nod to the garden cemeteries built after World War I for the British war dead, which were built around the concept of memorial gardens rather than mere repositories for bodies. With its stone and garden, the hobbits’ grave is the closest thing in Middle Earth to what we would recognise as a cemetery.
“Officers” and “Other Ranks”
High-ranking individuals like captains, kings, and princes are treated according to their social stature. When Theoden died at Pelennor, for example, his body was given special treatment that was not accorded to the rank and file who fell with him.
…the king’s body they covered with a great cloth of gold, and they bore torches about him, and their flames, pale in the sunlight, were fluttered by the wind. (The Return of the King)
Theoden’s body was also returned to Rohan to be inhumed, a privilege not afforded to most other war dead in Middle Earth.
Háma, the captain of Theoden’s guard, died at Helm’s Deep and was buried in a single grave separate from the other men.
In the midst of the field before the Hornburg two mounds were raised, and beneath them were laid all the Riders of the Mark who fell in the defence, those of the East Dales upon one side, and those of Westfold upon the other. In a grave alone under the shadow of the Hornburg lay Háma, captain of the King’s guard. He fell before the Gate.
Háma’s separate grave brings to mind that of the Grimsby Chums from the Great War, who were found in a mass grave in 2001 near Arras, France. The grave contained twenty bodies in a row, with one at the end slightly distanced from the others. It has been speculated that this man was an officer and was interred with the men under his command. Similarly, in the Middle Ages, high-ranking dead — if they could not be returned to their hometown — were sometimes buried at local churches near battlefields, separate from the mass graves near or on the field; it was only in the mid-to-late nineteenth century that individual graves for non-ranking soldiers became more widespread.
Even Snowmane, Theoden’s horse, was laid to rest in a way commensurate to his rank as a king’s mount. Unlike the men of Rohan buried beneath anonymous mounds, Snowmane receives a headstone.
They dug a grave and set up a stone upon which was carved in the tongues of Gondor and the Mark: Faithful servant yet master’s bane, Lightfoot’s foal, swift Snowmane. (The Return of the King)
Cremation
Cremation is reserved for baddies. The Riders of Rohan bury their own dead with honour, but burn orcs as they would dead animals:5
“There were no dwarves nor children,” said Eomer. “We counted all the slain [orcs] and despoiled them, and then we piled the carcases and burned them, as is our custom. The ashes are smoking still.” (The Two Towers)
Later, the Riders burn more orcs and scatter their ashes:
And over the wide fields the keen-eyed Riders hunted down the few Orcs that had escaped and still had strength to fly.
Then when they had laid their fallen comrades in a mound and had sung their praises, the Riders made a great fire and scattered the ashes of their enemies. (The Two Towers)
Tolkien was a staunch Catholic, and it may be of note that the Catholic Church forbid cremation from 1886 until 1963. While exceptions were made for mass death events and to prevent the spread of disease, cremation was considered a rejection of the possibility of resurrection. Nowadays, although cremation is permitted, scattering ashes is forbidden; the Vatican reasons that “reservation of the ashes of the departed in a sacred place [such as a cemetery or church] ensures that they are not excluded from prayers and remembrance.” That the Riders of Rohan not only burn dead orcs but also scatter their ashes ensures that they will not rise again and that they will also be forgotten — the latter providing particular contrast to the mounds where dead Riders are inhumed and that are meant to last forever.
The power of fire is also harnessed to dispose of machines and engines after the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. This destruction marks the definitive end of Saruman’s industrial revolution that would have filled the world with “metal and wheels.”
Fire and smoke and stench was in the air; for many engines had been burned or cast into the fire-pits, and many of the slain also, while here and there lay many carcases of the great Southron monsters, half-burned, or broken by stone-cast…. (The Return of the King)
The use of the word “slain” here could refer to orcs but also to men: the Southrons, Easterlings, and Haradrim had allied themselves with Sauron. That they are committed to the flames indicates that, no matter who they are, they are unworthy of remembrance.
Only the dead dwarves of the Battle of Azanulbizar escape the negative connotations of cremation. However, Tolkien makes clear that cremation was undertaken as a last resort (and indeed war dead were an exception to the Catholic church’s ban on cremation).
It is said that every Dwarf that went from that battlefield was bowed under a heavy burden. Then they built many pyres and burned all the bodies of their kin. …Such dealings with their dead seemed grievous to the Dwarves, for it was against their use; but to make such tombs as they were accustomed to build (since they will lay their dead only in stone not in earth) would have taken many years. To fire therefore they turned, rather than leave their kin to beast or bird or carrion-orc. (Appendix A)
To have a “burned dwarf” in one’s family was a mark of great honour.
Orc Rituals
There is only one description of orcs dealing with the aftermath of a battle in The Lord of the Rings.
[Legolas] pointed, and they saw that what they had at first taken to be boulders lying at the foot of the slope were huddled bodies. Five dead Orcs lay there. They had been hewn with many cruel strokes, and two had been beheaded. The ground was wet with their dark blood.
“I think that the enemy brought his own enemy with him,” answered Aragorn. “These are Northern Orcs from far away. Among the slain are none of the great Orcs with the strange badges. There was a quarrel, I guess: it is no uncommon thing with these foul folk. Maybe there was some dispute about the road.” (The Two Towers)
That orcs do not even bother to burn the bodies of their enemies reinforces Tolkien’s portrayal of them as lower animals lacking in intelligence and culture.
Final Thoughts
While we may lament that Tolkien does not provide us with more information about burial customs among orcs or hint at battlefield casualty clearance, the real world is not necessarily more forthcoming. We still don’t know what happened to the majority of the dead of medieval wars, nor do we know the ultimate fate of the thousands of Waterloo slain. One thing we do know, however: the peoples and cultures of Middle Earth reflect Tolkien’s professional interests and personal experiences. In other words, they are a product of his humanity, and as such we can recognise them and understand them even though they inhabit only a fantasy universe.
