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The Oathsworn
| Website | |
|---|---|
| Founding date | December 10, 2008 on Landroval. Re-established December 10, 2017 on Laurelin. |
| Goal | Gold, glory, friendship, and fulfillment of their destinies.Their paths one day may lead to bloody graves—but now, they charge with sworn kinsmen into battle, and sit shoulder to shoulder on mead-benches, voices mixed in song. |
| Main area of operations | The Oathsworn make their home in Fylstott, a fortified burh in the foothills of the White Mountains—but more often than not, they range far beyond their stronghold to earn gold in battle and honour debts to distant lords. |
| Kinship type | Man |
| Friends/Allies | N/A |
| Rivals/Enemies | The enemy bands who threaten their lands and those of their allies; too does the Oathsworn fight beneath many a lord’s banner for gold and fame, never breaking a contract once it is made. |
| Kinship status | Active and recruiting |
| Recruiting Officer(s) |
Background
Many a spear
dawn-cold to the touch will be taken down
and waved on high; the swept harp
won’t waken warriors, but the raven winging
darkly over the doomed will have news,
tidings for the eagle of how he hoked and ate,
how the wolf and he made short work of the dead.
Beowulf, lines 3021-3027
(trans. Seamus Heaney)
These are no hangers-on in heroes’ armour. These few who’ve survived their weathered lives have earned their place in the shield-wall. They have seen the burnings of halls and fields, the scattering of kinsmen, and a hundred bloody battles throughout the lands where Rohirrim have tread.
Once, the Oathsworn were a warband over half a hundred strong. Now, they are but a handful, though as desperately loyal as ever. Over the years, they’ve earned word-fame, treasure, and friendship, but their success has waned, and now they fight to return to the height of their glory.
The King has declared that those who join them have the chance to earn back what they’ve lost: titles, land, their good names—all but the people they’ve buried. Their fealty is not to the King, however, but to songs that will be sung of them in years to come, to the promise and pursuit of peace, and, above all, to each other.
The oath that members of the Oathsworn are sworn to is as follows:
Your foes are my foes; your friends are mine own,
and till my body is broken your battles I shall fight
now that we are trothed by the sword. True to my brothers,
in fierce battle I shall fight to the end
until my kin release me or I live no more.
Out-of-Character Information
The Oathsworn is, by design, a warband with characters of disparate histories, more desperate in nature than Éomer’s éored in The Lord of the Rings. Our aim is not to limit ourselves to the published text of The Lord of the Rings, depicting only that which is extant in the source material, but rather to create and explore new facets of Rohan which the text does not reveal, drawing upon (and thus colouring our notion of Rohan with) other sources such as the Sagas of Icelanders, Beowulf, and the Old English verse that influenced Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Although we write Rohan as an explicitly patriarchal and heteronormative society, and play a motley band of its exalted warrior élites—the Riders of Rohan—we endeavour to be inclusive out-of-character, and thus are especially welcoming of characters who play outside the presumed cultural norm, including shieldmaidens fighting for acceptance in a male-dominated warband, men combatting accusations of unmanful behavior, exiles hunting for safe haven from the law, and other types of outcasts on the outside of Rohanese society.
Banner image: Bogatyrs (1898), Viktor Vasnetsov
