This week’s post from Stephen Winter reminded me of this.

To scholars of Saxon law, Boromir’s horn-blowing in “The Ring Goes South” has a completely different meaning.  I was delighted to read this paper by Thijs Porck 1 that explains what Boromir was doing:

Gif feorcund mon oððe fremde butan wege geond wudu gonge & ne hrieme ne horn blawe, for ðeof he bið to profianne: oððe to sleanne oððe to aliesanne.

This is from the laws of Ine, King of the West Saxons. In modern English, it says, “If a stranger from afar journey through a wood, off the road, and neither call out nor blow his horn, he is to be taken for a thief, either to be killed or set free.”

So when Boromir said, “I will not go forth as a thief in the night,” he was just following the law.

Blogger’s note: This post has three purposes: (a) because I use this blog as a prosthetic long-term memory; (b) to circumvent the terrible sharing functions of the Reddit iOS app; and (c) to try out the “easy footnote” plug-in.

Notes

  1. Porck, Thijs. “New Roads and Secret Gates, Waiting around the Corner: Investigating Tolkien’s Other Anglo-Saxon Sources.” Tolkien among Scholars (2017): 49-64.