Brego

Lineage

Brego was born in 2512, two years after his father Eorl had led the Éothéod south to the Field of Celebrant and received Calenardhon from Gondor. He was therefore among the first generation of the Rohirrim born in the new land. He had at least two sons, Baldor and Aldor.

King of the Mark

When Eorl fell in the Wold in 2545 fighting Easterlings who had broken into the eastern marches, Brego became the second King of the Mark. His first task was to finish his father's war, and he drove the last of the invaders out of the Wold, securing the borders of Rohan along the Anduin for generations. His reign was otherwise a time of settlement and building.

Eorl had kept his house at Aldburg in the Folde. Brego chose a new site for the king's seat on a green hill at the mouth of the Harrowdale, beneath the White Mountains, where the Snowbourn came down from Dunharrow. There he built Edoras and the great hall of Meduseld, roofed with gold, which was finished in 2569. It remained the house of the kings of Rohan for the rest of the Third Age and beyond.

Baldor and the Dark Door

At the feast held to hallow the new hall, Brego's eldest son Baldor drank deep and swore that he would tread the Paths of the Dead, the haunted road beneath the Dwimorberg behind Dunharrow. The Rohirrim later told that Brego and Baldor together had once explored the valley of Dunharrow and come to the Dark Door, and had found there an ancient man, withered as old stone, who told them that the way was shut until the time came, and died at their feet; Baldor's vow was a challenge to that warning. He went into the mountain and did not come out, and his father never learned his fate. Brego died the next year, in 2570, of grief, and his second son Aldor, called the Old, succeeded him and reigned for seventy-five years.

More than four centuries later, when Aragorn led the Grey Company through the Paths of the Dead, they found in a chamber under the mountain the bones of a tall man in gilded mail, lying before a closed door he had tried to open with a broken sword. Aragorn named him Baldor son of Brego, and the company left him where he lay.

Legacy

Brego is remembered chiefly for Meduseld and for the loss of Baldor. He was laid in the second mound at Edoras beside his father, and the story of the Dark Door was still told in the Golden Hall when Théoden sat there.

Died of grief in 2570, a year after his son Baldor vanished on the Paths of the Dead; buried in the second mound at Edoras.