How fast was the fastest horse in the East (and the West)?

[Alcuin]

I’d like to resurrect this thread so that I can refer to it later. (Yeah, I know: ulterior motives.)

Endurance horse racing is a modern sport from the 1950s. There is an organization that referees and oversees these activities in the United States, the American Endurance Ride Conference. However, I found the website of The Old Dominion Endurance Rides most helpful for information.

One-day endurance rides typically cover 75 or 100 mile (121 or 161 km) courses. The longer course (100 miles) takes approximately 14–15 hours.

A typical horse moving over long distance will move at medium trot, 6–8 mph (10–13 km/hr). Reading through the literature, however, it is clear that, unless a horse has been trained, its speed will be about 6 mph.

Gordis quotes Tolkien’s notes in Reader's Companion on Shadowfax’s movements. Tolkien kindly gives us the number he uses for Shadowfax: 10 mph (16 km/hr). That is 5/3 the normal speed of a horse. (Thank you, Gordis. You made this much easier!)

Gandalf took three days to go from Edoras to Minas Tirith on Shadowfax with Pippin. Théoden took 5 days for the same journey, albeit with a considerable, slower detour through Drúadan Forest. That’s the same ratio, 5:3.

Aragorn pushed the Dúnedain horses harder on the road to Pelargir, riding them about 7 mph for about 10 hours/day for 4 days. Tolkien describes them reaching Erech “stumbling with weariness”.

Don’t be deceived by these “low” numbers. We live in age of machines that move faster than we do, sometimes so fast we can’t keep up and are at peril of our lives. (AI weaponry is a terrible thing, and it’s coming sooner than you think.) The story is told that some well-educated folk thought there was a risk to passengers riding trains at 20 mph a couple of hundred years ago: that was as far as you could expect to move in a day. There’s another thing to consider, too: people actually have more endurance than most animals. We don’t run fast, but we can run a long time (when trained and in condition): there’s a marathon race every year in Wales between humans and horses: they shortened it for the horses. In the 1970s, a Soviet survey team discovered a family of Old Believers living in remote Siberia. The son was in his early 20s: he hunted (quite successfully) by chasing down deer. Moving 60 miles an hour in an automobile and flying across the Atlantic in 5 hours are things that have only emerged in last 80 years, in just one lifetime.

Tolkien was very much aware of how far and how fast horses could move. He grew up as an earlier age was coming to an end; and he studied professionally histories and tales of how people moved in older days. In preparing this post, I discovered a thread in which one person posted,

Page 37 of David Johnson's "Napoleon's Cavalry & its leaders" concerning the 1805 campaign says that Murat's cavalry had made marches of upto 50 kilometres per day (roughly 31.25 miles). This pace soon told on the horses, especially the ones cooped up in barges for the invasion of England. Backs were rubbed up into sores by saddles and cruper-loops, saddlecloths & harness straps. One trumpeter said that his regiment the 8th Chasseurs resembled a walking infirmary!

Tolkien is using much greater distances in his story: twice as fast for Aragon’s ride to Pelargir, three times as fast for Gandalf’s ride on Shadowfax to Minas Tirith (and his ride from Rohan to the Shire).

Shadowfax was moving 60% faster than other horses, running 5 miles for every 3 miles they could run.

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Originally Posted by Jon S.

Here is an example of real life equine long-distance running average speed. This horse won with a speed of 17 km/hour which is approx. = 10 mph.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2000/08/28/horse.2.t_0.php

In Shadowfax's case, he wasn't running on Churchill Downs, he was running cross-country through mixed terrain and certainly not at all, in Middle Earth in those days, as the crow flies. I think he did admirably.

This was a useful citation. The link is broken, however, but can retrieved from Archive.org.

[Valandil]

Originally Posted by Alcuin

I’d like to resurrect this thread so that I can refer to it later. (Yeah, I know: ulterior motives.)
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Just looking through threads and saw this. Did you ever get to your ulterior motive?

[Alcuin]

I have my ulterior motive all laid out. My hand is injured, though, and typing is a pain. (This is non-dominant hand typing.)