Remember reading or hearing somewhere that Tolkien based Rohan off Mercia. But, I don't remember seeing or hearing anything about a Mercian cavalry or even Anglo-Saxon cavalry. Off the top of your head, was that 'a thing'? Or am I just mis-remembering things?
As far as Mercian cavalry goes I haven't heard much on it, though they may have used it later. There was a paper I saw recently that surmises the Bernicians did, but that they adopted it from the British.
Tolkien wanted to fix a problem the Anglo-Saxons had, which was they did not use horses in battle but used them to transport infantry. This was widely believed especially at the time Tolkien was writing to be the reason the Normans conquered England. So the Rohirrim are Saxons on horse back though the Saxons were an infantry culture. The cultural ancestors of the Saxons the Britons were probably, and a bit ironically, more like the Rohirrim than Tolkien's beloved Saxons were.
Remember reading or hearing somewhere that Tolkien based Rohan off Mercia. But, I don't remember seeing or hearing anything about a Mercian cavalry or even Anglo-Saxon cavalry. Off the top of your head, was that 'a thing'? Or am I just mis-remembering things?
As far as Mercian cavalry goes I haven't heard much on it, though they may have used it later. There was a paper I saw recently that surmises the Bernicians did, but that they adopted it from the British.
Tolkien wanted to fix a problem the Anglo-Saxons had, which was they did not use horses in battle but used them to transport infantry. This was widely believed especially at the time Tolkien was writing to be the reason the Normans conquered England. So the Rohirrim are Saxons on horse back though the Saxons were an infantry culture. The cultural ancestors of the Saxons the Britons were probably, and a bit ironically, more like the Rohirrim than Tolkien's beloved Saxons were.