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.