quietblogoflurk:

(I’m not a real Tolkien buff, just a
Tolkien hobbyist, so please consider this a placeholder post for something much
cleverer.)

One of the fantastic things about LOTR is
how it weaves stories-within-stories, how glimpses of myth and history are
revealed through character interactions. The sheer wealth of backstory is
amazing, but what brings the whole thing alive is the characters’ awareness
that they themselves are re-enacting, continuing or creating stories. It’s the
clearest with the characters of Bilbo, Frodo and Sam, who openly comment on
being in a story, who are comforted by stories, who become the stuff of epic
ballads in Gondor and who end up writing the story that becomes the Red Book of
Westmarch, and therefore LOTR itself. (Note that the power and burden of
telling their own stories rests with the ringbearers.) But hints of the same
thing show up in other subplots too –Aragorn the storied heir, Arwen as an echo
of Luthien, Gandalf capitalising on his own mythical status.

Things get a little weird when it comes to
Eowyn. Because the more I look at it, the more she reads like a female
character who knows she’s at the mercy of a sexist storytelling tradition. Some
of Eowyn’s grief comes of worry and shame and thwarted love, but the recurring
motif is fear of being forgotten, of not being remembered in songs as a valiant
hero. Of dying in that last desperate fight protecting hearth and home, with
her bravery forever unremembered and unsung. And her fear is entirely
justified, considering the rest of the LOTR universe: compared to the immense
number of male characters, there are staggeringly few named/speaking/relevant female
characters. For the most part, women’s lives and deaths are forgotten, both in
the present day and the various layers of backstory. Don’t bring me
counterexamples, I know that there are some, the point is that there are not
very many. I once wrote a list of characters whose fathers or father figures
and present/named, while their mother figures are dead/absent/unnamed: it is
most characters.

Unlike the male characters Frodo, Sam or
even Faramir, who become part of a war story against their will and only want
to see it through the end, Eowyn seeks out danger in the hopes of renown or a
good honourable death. She has to – in the LOTR world, women automatically
disappear from the war narrative, either safely evacuated, or horribly killed
in ways the author doesn’t want to describe. She’s holding on to a narrative
that keeps trying to buck her off. Her primary motivation is to take part in
the narrative as an active character. She tries to be where things happen, she
follows the action – even her love for Aragorn is implied to be a consequence
of her quest for renown. Aragorn is a mythic hero, and getting to be near him
might let her touch the story.

It’s poignant that she has to dress as a
man in order to get close to the plot, but her big, heroic moment comes with a
revelation of her identity as a woman. Once she managed to take heroic action
and indelibly write herself into legend, she can retreat to the peace known to
hobbits and Faramir, and spend the rest of her life doing important but non-epic
things. But she’s safe to do that now she has her title of “Lady of the
Shield-Arm”, now she has won renown.

II don’t think Tolkien was deliberately
writing a critique of his own sexism. I think he set up the rules of his
secondary world in an unthinkingly sexist way, but he wanted to write a cool
female character, and these two priorities kept clashing and clashing on the
page, she can’t be in this scene because she’s a woman but I need her to be in
this scene because it will be great, and out of that conflict Eowyn was born.