Kine of Araw

The white oxen of the East

Far to the east of Gondor, on the shores of the inland Sea of Rhûn, there lived in the Third Age herds of great wild white oxen. The Men of Gondor called them the Kine of Araw, Araw being the name in their tongue for Oromë, the huntsman of the Valar. The tradition behind the name is that Oromë, who alone of the Valar came often into Middle-earth in the ancient dark and hunted there, had brought these beasts out of the West or had hunted them himself; and the Rohirrim, who called the same Vala Béma, held the sires of their Mearas to be his gift in the same way. Whether the kine were in any real sense Oromë's is not said; the association is a piece of Gondorian lore that survived into the days of the Stewards.

The Horn of Gondor

The kine matter to the histories because of a single horn. Vorondil, called the Hunter, father of Mardil the first Ruling Steward, hunted the white kine in the east, and from the horn of one of them was made the Great Horn of the Stewards, tipped and bound with silver and written over with ancient letters. It passed from eldest son to eldest son of the Stewards' house for nearly a thousand years and came at last to Boromir, who blew it at his departure from Minas Tirith and again, to Elrond's displeasure, at the setting out of the Fellowship from Rivendell. The lore of the Horn was that if it were blown anywhere within the bounds of Gondor of old, help would come. Boromir blew it on Amon Hen on February 26, T.A. 3019, when the Orcs of Isengard fell on him and the young hobbits, and no help came in time; the horn was cloven in two by his enemies and the halves floated down the Anduin to be found and carried to Denethor, who sat with them in his lap in the days before the siege. Faramir heard its call from far away, and so did the men of Minas Tirith.

Nature

The kine are described only as wild, white and huge, and as worthy game for a Steward famed as a hunter. They are the only cattle in the legendarium given a name of their own and a place in the lore of a kingdom, and they stand with the Mearas and the Eagles as beasts whose fame rests on a supposed connection with the Powers of the West.

Fate

Nothing is recorded of them after Vorondil's day. Presumably the herds remained in Rhûn under the Easterlings, whom Gondor rarely troubled.

Great white oxen, wild, with horns large enough to be made into a war-horn that could be heard across the vale of Anduin.

None; wild herds.

Held by the Men of Gondor to be the cattle of Oromë, hunted by him in the ancient days; the texts present this as tradition.

Not recorded after the Third Age.