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In Tolkien's writings on Middle-earth, we are accustomed to seeing him name two groups of "bad guys:"

• Southrons
• Easterlings

Yet, an examination of these groups shows them to be very different and disparate groups, especially The Easterlings who cover all three ages of Middle-earth.

In The First Age we are introduced to The Easterlings as groups who crossed the Ered Luin into Beleriand late in The First Age just prior to the catastrophe of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, led by two leaders: Ulfang and Bór.

We see other Easterlings with similar names: Brodda, Ulfast, Bórlad, Bórlach, and Bórland.

These are all Nordic Scandinavian names, Viking names.

Which should not surprise us. The first incursions into England by "Barbarian Easterlings" occurred in the 8th - 10th centuries, when the Vikings (Danes) invaded a fairly civilized Saxon Society in England (inheritors of the Roman Rule of England). To these Saxons, the Vikings were named "The Easterlings" in the Saxon and Frankish accounts of the times.

But these Easterlings were soon integrated into the "West" of Middle-earth during The Second Age when their relations, whom the Númenóreans called The Hill Men or The Dark Men of Eriador and Gondor. These were the "men" referred to by The Easterlings of The First Age who had remained behind in Eriador, and did not cross the Ered Luin into Beleriand.

It is interesting that here we have a parallel to The Normans, who were also Easterlings Invaders of England. Norman's were/are also the descendants of Vikings/Norse.

We do not again hear of "Easterlings" until The Third Age, when we have group after group of Easterlings attacking from across Rhovanion, from the region of The Sea of Rhûn. The inhabitants of Rhovanion were given names (Vidugavia, Vidumani, Mahrwini, Marhari) that are Gothic. And, the Goths were relatives of another Easterling group: The Huns, who invaded across Eastern Europe, to get at the still wealthy, but failing West in our world. And in Middle-earth, the first group of Easterlings is also a nation of Nomadic Mounted Tribesmen, The Wainriders.

The Wainriders themselves are relatives to the Balchoth, which is a word that has Magyar and Bulgarian similarities, another group of Mounted Tribes who invaded Western Europe from the East. Descendant from the Balchoth (or "relations") are the Variags, who eventually settle in Khand.

Some have said that "Variags" refers to Vikings (a group established to be Easterlings in The First Age), but Variag is a word used by the Byzantines to describe the inhabitants from the Volga basin near the Black Sea, whom the Byzantines hired as Varangian Guards. They were hardly "Vikings" by this time, even if the Vikings had come down the Volga to the Black Sea. These would have been a collection of Avars, Alans, Rus, and other mounted Tribes.

And, at the end of The Third Age we have The Easterlings of which most are familiar from The Lord of the Rings.

Even with Tolkien's disdain for allegory (do not confuse my earlier analogies with direct allegory, but merely linguistic connections to what may be thought of as an archetype), the later Third Age Easterlings have a much more Oriental feel to them than do the earlier Easterlings, being depicted with great Axes, pole arms, and chariots, which calls to mind the Chinese and Mongols. But we have very little to go on here, since Tolkien gives us no linguistic clues as he did with earlier Easterlings.

But given the historical progression he seems to have followed with earlier "Easterlings," it does seem like this would be the next in progression, that the last major Asian Horde out of the East in Europe to threaten Christendom should be an archetype for Tolkien's last threat out of the exotic East of Middle-earth.

Some might be tempted to claim the Turks were the last threat out of "The East," but Tolkien used the Turks and Muslims as the archetype for the Southrons, which tend to be suggestive of the Arab and Turks in the Islamic Maghreb of Northern Africa (South of Christian Europe).

Direct allegorical analogy to Earthly nations is not what is being sought after here. What is being examined are the linguistic, and thus archetypical, connections that could be said to exist between Tolkien's Middle-earth and our own world, since such connections DO EXIST in the names Tolkien chose for these groups, or in the names we find for members within these groups.

In Tolkien's description of the various Peoples of Middle-earth, we have descriptions of Warriors that match pretty well with those of Saxons, Goths, Vikings, and other historical peoples. While these are not allegorical, they do seem to have been made to give us a firm connection with a world that will seem familiar, even in its difference.



MB