[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Returning to the question of the Rohirrim and their associations with Anglo-Saxon England, it's significant that Tolkien's professional interest was not in a specific period but a particular place. The texts on which he published his most influential academic work were largely products of the West Midlands (with the exception of Beowulf, the production of which has been located to every part of England at some time or another). The part of the Midlands from which Tolkien's Suffield relatives hailed was well within the borders of the old kingdom of Mercia, as is Oxford, and when Tolkien threatened to start speaking only Old English, it was the Mercian dialect that he said he would adopt.

What has this to do with Rohirrim? Well, you only have to look at Mercia to realise that it can't be an English word. It's obviously the Latin version of the English place-name, which would be something like mærc. If this were to take the hard Scandinavian ending that would have been present in the north Midlands under the Danelaw it would be mark - the borderland. Riddermark is simply 'borderland of the horsemen'. Interestingly, Farmer Giles' Middle Kingdom can be plausibly identified with Mercia too, even down to the place-names. Obviously this is an argument that Tom Shippey has used in the past, along with his point for point comparison of the arrival of Aragorn's company in Edoras with Beowulf's arrival at Heorot. Perhaps it's fairer to say, though, that the Rohirrim are heavily influenced by Anglo-Saxon culture and language, perhaps an image of how the Mercians could have been, than to say that they are identical to them.