Eowyn

[calimac]

kate_nepveu has undertaken to re-read The Lord of the Rings and is posting her thoughts - spoilers permitted - in LJ. Naturally I signed up to follow along, and have been participating heavily in comments. I don't want to mention this in any of the Tolkien user groups without permission, as the influx might not be what the user would want, but I have less qualm about mentioning it here.

We haven't gotten very far yet, but already the vexing topic of Eowyn has come up, and my comment on a recent post stands pretty well alone, and seems relatively coherent to its author:

Tolkien's most admirable warrior characters, Aragorn and Faramir, fight because they have to do so to preserve their countries, not because they love war for its own sake, as Boromir and Eomer to an extent do. Faramir even says specifically: "I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend."

At the same time, though, they don't fight half-heartedly: if you're going to do this job, you must throw yourself into it with vigor. Otherwise you will fail at it, and there's no point in undertaking the job if not to do your best to succeed. This has misled some critics into claiming that Tolkien glorifies war, which is the exact opposite of everything he actually says about war per se.

So we have an attitude of considerable subtlety here, and the same thing applies with Eowyn. On the one hand, Theoden and Eomer are sexist to the extent that they ignore or are blind to Eowyn's abilities and desires, and I think Tolkien wants you to realize that. (At one point either Gandalf or Aragorn, I forget which, actually lectures Eomer about this.) On the other hand, she does disobey a direct order from her King, and leaves a necessary task (watching the home front) undone, at least by her. On the third hand, without her the Lord of the Nazgul would not have been killed. On the fourth hand, from Eomer's point of view he nearly loses his beloved sister on top of everything else.

The key to understanding Eowyn's change of heart is, to my mind, very simple: she goes to war in the first place neither out of love of battle nor really to defend her people (since she considers the war futile), nor even for the reason that Theoden does (futile or not, for him it's simply the right thing to do): she goes out of despair. When she loses that reason for despair - when her own battle is won, and she sees Faramir's unquenchable hope for the larger one - she loses her need to be a warrior.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I haven't been able to comment--time has been too crunched--but the topic is fascinating. I also hadn't had the time to get the books down and check, but though I agree with most of your assessment, it seems to me that some of Eomer's wish to go out in glory was in Eowyn too. Not just despair. But she sheds the idea of glory on the battlefield, and at first only the despair remains after she's wounded. I thought on a reread some years ago that Eowyyn in many ways represented the views of the very young men JRRT knew, heaving to the Somme with ideas of glory, if not ideals--but glory and ideal were fairly swidtly quenched by reality.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's a very innocent and naive love of glory in Eowyn also, mostly expressed in her desire to emulate Aragorn. But though it influences her determination to go, it's pretty much disappeared by the time she actually does.

As we said, it's mixed and subtle.

[pyffe.livejournal.com]

And remember that she's also had to sit and play the goodly woman, with a lech leering over her, out of love for her Lord all that time. She was powerless to do anything to assist him, and was ripe for doing something, anything, that would be action instead of more sitting and waiting. And she knew damn good and well what Grimma wanted from her. She was an object drooled over by him.

I just recently went through the books again, this time on audio tape, and I distinctly recall that she did not simply abandon her tasks on the homefront. She gets things set up, then into capable hands BEFORE joining the men. There isn't much detail about it, but there is enough mention to indicate that she didn't just abandon her people to fend for themselves.

She has long been one of my favorite characters of all time. In college, I used to do dramatic readings of her scenes, and even had a character named for her at Ren Fair.

I thought it was sad that in the movie, they didn't stress the fact that if it wasn't for her, they might not have won the war. But I know it was only a movie, and had only a certain amount of time, but *I* would have liked more. She was the only one who stood a chance against the Lord of the Nazgul.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

First paragraph: quite correct.

Second paragraph: I don't remember this, but it could be. Nevertheless, Theoden had asked her to do it, not someone else. Largely because she was a scion of the house of Eorl. It seems quite likely that, had Theoden and Eomer both been killed but the war had been won, they intended that she should become the first Ruling Queen of Rohan. So the guys might not have been as sexist as all that.

Last paragraph: And if the movies had made the time, by for instance cutting out ridiculous non-textual scenes like the badly-animated Legolas sliding down the elephant's trunk, they could have conveyed this.

[pyffe.livejournal.com]

I never took this as sexist. When reading a work of fiction, one automatically has to accept the roles given the characters based on the world the author creates. When it came to these books, there were just accepted roles for the different people. The thought that her role was sexist is an attempt to put 'our' rules on Tolkien's world and not applicable, in my opinion.

And my point was that she did get everything set up, but did not stay to watch over everyone. I'd have to look up the passages. (I feel like I'm arguing what the definition of "is" is! *giggle*)

I wish they'd done a 4th movie to include the return to the Shire. That section included some of my favorite bits in the whole series. I think they put in the Legolas bits to keep the interest of Bloom's Teenie Bopper Fan Club.tm :-D And while we're on complaints, I would say that I didn't appreciate them using Gimli as "comic relief". His character in the books was great, and he deserved better treatment in the movies.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The demeaning of Gimli is just one of the Ten Thousand Things wrong with these movies. You want a list?

[pyffe.livejournal.com]

Nah. I thought overall they were great. But if we picked nits, we'd be here forever.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The nits are a different list.