Fram

Lord of the Éothéod

Fram was the son of Frumgar, the chieftain who led the Éothéod north out of the vales of Anduin near the Gladden Fields after the fall of Angmar in 1975. The Northmen settled in the land between the sources of the Anduin, the Misty Mountains and the Grey Mountains, driving out the remnant of Angmar's people east of the mountains, and Fram ruled them there around the turn of the second millennium of the Third Age. These were the ancestors of the Rohirrim, five centuries before Eorl led them south.

Scatha the Worm

The Grey Mountains were the haunt of the cold-drakes that had multiplied there since the days of Morgoth, and the greatest of them in Fram's time was Scatha, the Worm, who preyed on both the Éothéod and the Dwarves. Fram killed Scatha, by what means the histories do not say, and so gave his people peace from the dragons for a long while. He also took the dragon's hoard, and it was this that undid him. The Dwarves of the Grey Mountains claimed the treasure as theirs, since much of it had been dug from their own halls before Scatha took it. Fram refused. He sent them the teeth of the dragon strung as a necklace, with a message that such jewels would be hard to match in their own treasuries. The Dwarves took this as it was meant, and the Éothéod believed that they killed him for it. No friendship existed afterward between the Dwarves and the Éothéod, or between the Dwarves and the Rohirrim who came from them.

Legacy

Part of Scatha's hoard went south with Eorl's people and remained in the treasury of Edoras. The silver horn that Éowyn gave to Merry at the funeral of Théoden, small and wound with figures of horsemen, was said to have come from that hoard and to be the work of the Dwarves of the North. Fram's deed is one of the only three dragon-slayings in the histories of Men in the Third Age, and the only one whose hero's name is remembered mainly for what it cost him.

Killed, according to the tradition of the Éothéod, by the Dwarves of the Grey Mountains in the quarrel over Scatha's hoard.