Philippa: [The Funeral of Théodred] We wanted to use something which is echoed in lots of different cultures – but particularly in Maori culture as well – that the body is taken by the men and handed to the women, which is what we’ve got here: the women are waiting by the grave to receive the body, and they’re the ones that actually put the body of Théodred into the tomb.

Peter: [screen cap] This big crowd shot is a duplication shot, where we had about a hundred extras and we spent four or five hours shifting them around from place to place. We had a motion control camera, so we just repeated the camera move, so the first part of the shot had the body being carried in the foreground and with about, you know, a hundred extras nearby; and then we just kept repeating the shot, and we had the extras moving around, just moving from one quadrant to the next until we actually shot about eight different passes of them, so we turned one hundred extras into eight hundred extras, and we used the computer to composite them all together.

Philippa: The song that Éowyn is singing here was written by David Salo, who is – had primarily acted as a translator into Elvish; being an expert in Old English, when we came to choosing a language for the Rohirrim, we decided to use Old English – there’s very little extant language written for the Rohirrim by Professor Tolkien – and this particular piece was written by David Salo for this burial – using little bits and pieces of ‘Beowulf’, actually, the great poem.