Eowyn stands as perhaps my favorite female character in all of fiction. A few there are which stand near her- Harriet Vane, for instance- and a few I will acknowledge as being, to my experience, as well written- Orual (Till We Have Faces), Jane Studdock, Harriet Vane (again), and the several significant Miss Bennets. Eowyn, however, takes pride of place in capturing the imagination, and so today I’d like to overview her character and arc, learning from Tolkien’s mastery.

The Beginning

Eowyn’s character unfolds to us in the background of the story, in a way, for she gets only passing scenes. In the first, we encounter her “grave and thoughtful… with cool pity in her eyes…. Strong… and stern as steel, a daughter of kings…. Fair and cold, like a morning of pale spring that tis not yet come to womanhood…. Still as stone she stood” (Bk. 3, Ch 6). Already the tension of her character is being established; she is spring-steel, compressed and straining against the bend, tight.

As time goes on we see the desperation which animates her- “Then she fell on her knees, saying: ‘I beg thee!’”- and also the root of that desperation (V.2). We find Eowyn desperate to find a way past that “cage” which she perceives about her, a cage of decay and rot and utter doom, finding herself the least daughter of a degraded house and wishing desperately to work those “great deeds” which would make her no longer a mongrel rolling in “a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek” (V.2; V.8). She names those great deeds her desire; she names their loss her terror (V.2), but at the root, she fears rather what the lack of them confirms- that when the doom comes, she and all hers were as lacking as they oft seemed.

So Eowyn, seeing the darkness, recognizes that death will come, and she desires to in herself vindicate all she is and all she comes from, to be what she fears she and her kin are not: “… of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman.” Thus she pleads: “I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.” She must show Eorl’s house not as broken as it seemed in Theoden’s fool-dotage, in the writhing glint of Wormtongue’s words. Therefore, bent as she is with her entire force upon a singular hope, she regards Aragorn as all that she fears to not be, and when he passes, taking with him her chance of a proving death, “Éowyn stood still as a figure carven in stone, her hands clenched at her sides, and she watched them until they passed…. When they were lost to view, she turned, stumbling as one that is blind, and went back to her lodging” (V.2).

Two Juxtapositions

This desperation drives Eowyn hard, and it leads her into heroism not blameless. Indeed, while Eowyn is a hero and a glorious champion of the right, she is not a paragon; she is not perfect. Not only is there the flaw of despair, which alone would be little weight indeed upon the reader, but there is a further ugliness to which that despair drives her, to which she turns, and the twist in her desires which leads her there.

The twist, first, is that Eowyn does not desire merely an honorable death; as she says, “But when the men have died in battle and honour, [I] have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman” (V.2). The bitterness on her tongue is unmistakable, and it has a measure of truth to it. For all the beauty of the last stand and the bitter defiance to the end, it is a last stand, and it is bitter indeed. In the end, it is a glory for corpses and captives, the first more joyful than the second. Yet Eowyn, who wishes “to ride to… like Théoden the king, for he died and has both honour and peace,” Eowyn should have no flinch from death. The difference, of course, is that such a death has no glory and no renown. It leaves “the House of Eorl… sunk in honour less than any shepherd’s cot” (V.8). Eowyn longs for works of glory and renown which are seen by men, for only in this way can her home be cleared of the charge she suspects is justly set to it.

This imperfection drives her forward from the quiet righteousness of duty, drives her even to abandon duty. As Aragorn reminds her when she first seeks to abandon her post, “If you had not been chosen, then some marshal or captain would have been set in the same place, and he could not ride away from his charge, were he weary of it or no” (V.2). He refuses her dereliction of duty, but she finds another path, for when Theoden says she will “govern the folk in my stead” (V.3), Eowyn makes him a liar. She rides out with him in helm of man, as Dernhelm desiring death, and though the fruit of this is glory and renown beyond expectation, the work of great kings within her hand, the act itself is an ugliness.

Her despair and her desire drive her to this excess. This is the first juxtaposition: to leave duty, and yet to be withal a hero in the essence. Tolkien balances these with subtlety and skill worthy of study, neither denying the vice nor allowing it to outweigh the virtue.

The second juxtaposition is of fear and despair and bravery working in a trio. I separate ‘fear’ and ‘despair’ here because they are not truly the same. Eowyn’s ‘fear’ is of the particular; it is the terror of her house’s decay, of her own unworthiness, of a quiet death in shame, of doom, and, in the scene I would here focus upon, of the Witch King of Angmar, slayer of kingdoms. Her despair is not that particular. Her despair is the certainty, more absence of hope than presence of fear, which underlies all else, the certainty of doom, the certainty, long-fought, that in the end her house is but “brigands drinking in the reek” (V.8). Yet, amidst this dragging fear and this foundation of despair, “For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him” (V.6).

Eowyn stands in a crux of fear, despair, bravery, and (lest we forget) love for the one to her a father. Tolkien shows us this in two sentences, each balancing valor with a companion: “Her eyes grey as the sea were hard and fell, and yet tears were on her cheek. A sword was in her hand, and she raised her shield against the horror of her enemy’s eyes.” Truly, in this trial, we think with Merry: “She should not die, so fair, so desperate! At least she should not die alone, unaided.” In the coldest terms, Eowyn’s struggle towards nobility is an epitome of hard virtue in which we sinners see Christ and God and the truest form of man, God’s image.

Eowyn’s heroism, earned and hard-bought, even sought in unworthy course, is true. “Still she did not blench: maiden of the Rohirrim, child of kings, slender but as a steel-blade, fair yet terrible,” Tolkien writes, and we are transported to the moment, seeing this binding-together of the breaking and the mending of man. We watch, and we rejoice with her victory, and we see her fall. We listen to the words of Theoden, who regards her with love even though he thinks her many days away, and then we, with Eomer, cry ‘Death’ in the charge.¹

The End

Chapter 5 of Book VI of The Lord of the Rings is an odd chapter, in dramatic terms, for its events take place half before the downfall of Sauron and half after, but the whole of it comes after not only the Ring’s destruction but Frodo’s rescue and awakening in victory. By all rights, the tension of Sauron should be lost, and the immense skill of Tolkien is seen in that some of the tension reappears for a time on the basis of the prose’s weight alone. Yet this chapter, The Steward and the King, finds another path to renew the weight of Sauron’s oppression even after his death, for we walk alongside Eowyn and Faramir as they anticipate perhaps utter ruin, even “to die in battle… in bitter pain.”

By the alchemy² of words, we are transported to stand with Eowyn and to say with her, “I stand upon some dreadful brink, and it is utterly dark in the abyss before my feet, but whether there is any light behind me I cannot tell. For I cannot turn yet. I wait for some stroke of doom.” Even as we feel this, we know, with compassion and with dramatic irony and with an anxiety that she learn, that the end of this bitterness is the sweetness of victory. We fear, nevertheless, that this is not enough.

For we know that the fall of Sauron is not full healing to Eowyn. Still she is the maid who says, “Nor is it always evil to die in battle, even in bitter pain. Were I permitted, in this dark hour I would choose the latter.” The loss of certain death, we realize, is not a full remedy. She still hungers to vindicate her house and herself, and she still sees, if with a darker and dimmer certainty, that she must with her sword and her helm be that proof. Sauron may be cast out, but the evil of the world outlasts him, and the damage his presence wrought upon that world.

How can she come to true healing?

In reading the climax and conclusion of Eowyn’s arc, it would be too easy to see the reflection of modern political or cultural paradigms. Perhaps a reader, accustomed to the catch-phrases of the modern world in all their shallowness, could see in Eowyn’s completion an unsubtle ‘Just go to the kitchen,’ a moralistic decision that the maid must set aside her shield and take up a man. Whether he likes that message or not, it hardly matters; the problem is the misinterpretation of the text’s actual weight, an ignorance of its excellence. This reader has seen Tolkien’s work a-slant, taking only the skimming and fitting it to a simplicity and unkindness more familiar to our unsubtle age.

“I stand in Minas Anor, the Tower of the Sun,” Eowyn says, “and behold! the Shadow has departed! I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren… No longer do I desire to be a queen.” In these words are capsuled the turn of Eowyn’s soul, the break of transformation. In them we see that, yes, she has set aside the shield; yes, she has taken up Faramir and the love of him. Yet cast your mind back, and see the whole in perspective.

At the first we are told, Eowyn is “Fair and cold, like a morning of pale spring that tis not yet come to womanhood” (III.6). So Aragorn sees of Eowyn at their first glancing meeting, and on this foundation Tolkien builds her whole. In this light, we see that Eowyn’s turn is not a brutal ideological or moralistic determination on women in the military or the importance of family. No, the turn of Eowyn’s arc is the passage from immaturity, girlhood and the dream of vindication-through-renown, into maturity, womanhood and the certainty of life. She sets down the sword not because a woman should not lift such (for such an absolute command is not given (V.2, Aragorn)) but because it is not the tool proper to the works of maturity.

Of course, that consigning of the sword to immaturity speaks volumes deeper than any catchphrase on ‘women fighting’ ever could. The contrast between Eowyn’s turn to healing and Aragorn’s coming into the kingship says as much. She sets aside the sword entirely to heal (though it is certain that in grave exigency she would willingly bear it again); Aragorn, though the king’s essence is as a healer (V.8), must still bear the sword (VI.4). Tolkien thus shows his Christian conviction that it is for the man to protect, even to death, so that the woman might not be forced to extremity’s remedy. The richness of this ‘message’, however, lies in the fact that it is not given as a message. No, Eowyn simply sets aside immaturity; she heals, putting away the things which she grasped in drowning-man’s fervor, and takes up paths suited for her womanhood’s course, in which she will find lifelong blessing and peace.

Conclusion

Eowyn’s tale is a goldmine for writers, yes, but it is a goldmine also for readers and for every one who seeks counsel. We can see, as writers, how Tolkien works and does not flinch from the twisting parts of even his heroes. We can learn, as readers, where to find greater reserves of beauty in those works made by masters. We can understand, as those who seek counsel, the weight of despair, of fear, of desire twisting nobility, of maturity and immaturity drawn into contrast. Amidst all of this, too, we learn (in words never said but ever present) that the Lord can work with even our sin great beauty; even our faults are His instruments.

God bless.

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1. See this article. The movie borrowed this moment for Theoden and, like many parts of the movie, the problem isn’t that the change doesn’t have a workable result. It’s that the movie’s version just doesn’t measure up to the book’s, however good it is in absolute terms. ↩︎
2. A fortuitous word, for it is the nature of fiction to unite us in soul with people who are not strictly real, becoming them for a while in order that we may be more fully God’s and more fully what He made us, our true and sanctified selves. ↩︎