Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

Over two months since I did a Tolkien… this just will not do :-)

This is not so much a lament for one person as it is a lament for the passing of time and the passing of a way of life - the Rohirrim (Eorl’s people) were a tribe of nomadic horsemen and pasturers, who settled down (became ‘respectable’) a few hundred years before the events in The Lord of the Rings. This song is a lament for the last of the nomadic chieftains (the aforementioned Eorl), who was also the first of the Kings of the Golden Hall (as his seat of power was called).

The imagery is (as always with Tolkien) utterly beautiful; I like it especially for its simplicity. Which, again, is only what’s to be expected from a direct and unsophisticated (I wouldn’t say ‘crude’) people. Another example¹ of Tolkien’s practice of matching the quality of his poetry to the skill of the (fictional) poet supposed to have written it.

A few comments on the form: the poem is consciously modelled on Old English verse - specifically, in the rhyming-couplet scheme and the heavy alliteration. Indeed, Tolkien based the Rohirric language on Anglo-Saxon at a sort of meta-linguistic level - it (i.e., true Rohirric) bears the same relation to the Common Speech of the characters in the book as does Old English to our modern language².

Lest any Middle Earth neophytes think otherwise, let me assure you that Tolkien did indeed write poems other than elegies and laments; in fact, his narrative comic verse is among the best there is. It’s just that I happen to like the slow dignity and poignancy with which he imbues his serious verse - it takes great skill to pull this off without sounding pompous or ponderous; at its best, though, such verse can be deeply moving.

— Thomas