Huge wild oxen that roamed the lands of Rhûn, also called the Kine of Araw (Araw was the Sindarin form of Oromë, the Huntsman of the Valar said by legend to have brought the great white beasts to Middle-earth). Steward Vorondil of Gondor famously hunted these oxen, and bore a hunting horn taken from one of them. That horn was passed down as an heirloom to Vorondil's descendants, and was the very horn carried by Boromir of the Company of the Ring.
Notes
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It's hard to ignore the similarity between the wild Eastern Oxen and the aurochs, a real wild animal from which modern cattle are derived, and indeed Tolkien makes this connection explicit. Like the Oxen of the East, the aurochs was widely hunted, but survived into the seventeenth century (the last known aurochs died in 1627). A bull aurochs was as tall as a man at the shoulder, which perhaps gives us some idea of the likely size of the great Oxen of Rhûn.
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- Updated 2 November 2024
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