Felaróf

Mansbane

Felaróf first appears as a wild foal in the north, in the days when the Éothéod, the ancestors of the Rohirrim, still lived in the upper vales of the Anduin. Léod, their lord and a famous tamer of horses, caught the foal and reared it. It grew into a horse of great size and beauty, white, strong and proud, and when at last Léod dared to mount it, it bolted with him and threw him against a rock, and he died. The horse was called Mansbane after that, and the Éothéod would have killed it.

Eorl's weregild

Eorl, Léod's son, was sixteen. He tracked the horse, and when he found it he did not try to catch it but spoke to it, demanding as the price of his father's blood that it give up its freedom and serve him for the rest of its life. The horse understood. It came to Eorl and let him mount, and it served him ever after with no bit or bridle. Eorl named it Felaróf. The Rohirrim later said that Felaróf and his kind had been brought out of the West over the Sea by Béma, the Vala the Elves call Oromë, and that this was why they understood the speech of Men and lived as long as they did.

The Field of Celebrant

In T.A. 2510 Gondor called for aid against the Balchoth and the Orcs, and Eorl rode south with the whole strength of the Éothéod. He rode Felaróf at the head of the host. The horsemen crossed the Anduin, fell on the enemy from the north in the fields between the Limlight and the Silverlode, and saved the army of Cirion. In reward Cirion gave Eorl the province of Calenardhon, which became Rohan. Felaróf was the first horse to carry a king of the Mark.

Death and line

Eorl reigned thirty-five years and fell in battle against the Easterlings in the Wold in T.A. 2545; the tradition of the Mark held that Felaróf lived as long as his master and died at the same time, and the horse is remembered with Eorl in the lore of the royal mounds at Edoras. His descendants were the Mearas, the lords of horses, who would bear no rider but the king of the Mark or his sons, and who lived the span of Men. Shadowfax, the greatest of them, was of his line, and Snowmane, the horse of Théoden, may also have been.

Died in T.A. 2545, in the same year as Eorl's death in the Wold, according to the tradition of the Mark; the Mearas descended from him.