How Impressive is Shadowfax?

For the sake of my own game design interests, I've been thinking about overland movement rates and how they should be set. Most simulation-oriented games (both wargames and RPGs) involve moving units around a map with different types of terrain. The map usually has a well-defined scale, and the number of hexes (or squares, or whatever) that a unit can cover in a single "move" is a reflection of how far that particular unit could supposedly move over some period of time.

As I've been reading the Lord of the Rings aloud to my wife over the last couple years, I've been paying more attention to the distances and times given in the text. Tolkien often emphasizes the exceptional nature of the endurance of his protagonists, and the long distances they travel (often to the point of exhaustion).

Most of these distances match up well with "heroic fantasy" expectations.  Frodo and Sam routinely seem to be able to travel up to 8 leagues (about 24 miles) before needing rest, which almost exactly matches the 24 mile daily movement allowance given in classic 80's era Dungeons and Dragons (looking at the Cook/Marsh Expert rulebook). The pursuit of the Uruk-Hai by Aragon, Legolas, and Gimli involves the more remarkable feat of covering around 130 miles over the course of four days, which prompts Eomer to praise their fortitude. This amounts to movement around 33 miles per day, which would correspond to a roughly 50% increase in movement over the 24 mile "base" allowance. Sure enough, the rulebook allows for a "forced march" option that increases daily movement by 50% (at the risk of possible exhaustion). And that also seems right around the limit of a modern ultramarathon runner's capability of 184 miles in four days (making allowance for the fact that most runners don't carry swords and axes!)

But one curious problem is the speed of Shadowfax, the horse "borrowed" by Gandalf from the stables of Rohan. Shadowfax is described in a variety of superlatives: He can gallop tirelessly, can keep pace with a flying Nazgul fel-steed, and is proclaimed (by Theoden) as the finest horse Middle-Earth will ever see. Here we see the description of Shadawfax's three-day route from Isengard to Minas Tirith:

"Thrice as far as the dwellings of King Theoden,and they are more than a hundred miles east from here, as the messengers of Mordor fly. Shadowfax must run a longer road."

As the crow flies, the distance is 300 miles, but with a detour around the south end of the Misty Mountains, this is probably increased by a few dozen miles more. So call it 360 miles. If Shadowfax covers this distance over the course of three nights, bearing Gandalf and Pippin, then he's covering about 120 miles a night. Over the course of 10 hours, this averages to about 12 miles an hour.

This doesn't seem very fast, does it? For comparison purposes, a top-end modern endurance horse can cover about 100 miles in a day while bearing a load of 300 lbs. That's probably more than a wizard and hobbit combined! So Shadowfax isn't really exceeding a modern Arabian by all that much. Granted, he can do this on three successive days, and in the dark over rough terrain(!), but it hardly represents a supernatural pace of the sort that would prompt the descriptions in the book. Presumably we're witnessing this speed through Pippin's less experienced eyes, just as the size of the Oliphaunt is magnified by Sam's telling.

Compared to an average workhorse, this is still pretty remarkable. Wolseley's 19th century military handbook lists the daily movement of a pack horse at around 16 miles! This seems quite pessimistic, but the logistical complications of moving a large group of horses together (some of them in better health than others) probably limited the speed to that of the slowest animal.

Still, it's hard to know exactly where to set horse movement, for a heroic fantasy game using a small group of mounted riders. Somewhere in the middle seems right. The suggestion of 48 miles per day (from the Expert set) doesn't seem completely unreasonable compared to modern endurance records, and still leaves plenty of room for Shadowfax to be exceptional.