#mapsburgh
Re-reading The Two Towers, I came upon this passage from the battle of Helm’s Deep:
“‘Yet there are many that cry in the Dunland tongue,’ said Gamling. ‘I know that tongue. It is an ancient speech of men, and once was spoken in many western valleys of the Mark. Hark! They hate us, and are glad; for our doom seems certain to them. “The king, the king,” they cry. “We will take their king. Death to the Forgoil! Death to the Strawheads! Death to the robbers of the North!” Such names they have for us. Not in half a thousand years have they forgotten their grievance that the Lords of Gondor gave the Mark to Eorl the Young and made alliance with him. That old hatred Saruman has inflamed.”
So basically, we have an indigenous people, whose land was claimed by conquerors from across the sea. When said conquerors couldn’t maintain control of the land anymore, rather than granting independence to the native people, the conquerors handed it off to a different set of foreign colonizers, who have refused to recognize the indigenous people’s rights for hundreds of years. No wonder the Dunlendings are upset! This is a war of liberation for them! Tragically, at the end of the battle, the Dunlending POWs are forced to labor at repairing Helm’s Deep as penance for their rebellion.
This all supports my headcanon that Saruman was the good guy in this portion of the war.
Turns out Tolkien more or less agreed with me. From the essay “Of Dwarves and Men,” in HoME XII:
Also it must be said that ‘unfriendliness’ to Numenoreans and their allies was not always due to the Shadow, but in later days to the actions of the Numenoreans themselves. Thus many of the forest-dwellers of the shorelands south of the Ered Luin, especially in Minhiriath, were as later historians recognized the kin of the Folk of Haleth; but they became bitter enemies of the Numenoreans, because of their ruthless treatment and their devastation of the forests, and this hatred remained unappeased in their descendants, causing them to join with any enemies of Numenor. In the Third Age their survivors were the people known in Rohan as the Dunlendings.
