For hundreds and hundreds of pages at a time, The Hobbit and LOTR have no female characters. When you’re a 13-year-old girl and the Bechdel test hasn’t been invented yet, that’s fine. It just means that gender doesn’t exist. There’s no male or female: in this Fellowship, everyone’s a Fellow.
Then Éowyn appears, and she is quickly established as the single most interesting personality in the books. She’s a reluctant but loving caregiver to her uncle, a loyal sister, a patriot, and a warrior who disguises herself as a man to join the battle. She is the only one willing to help another rule-breaker (Merry the hobbit, who is told to stay behind for his own good). She falls in love and is rejected. She defeats one of the enemy’s greatest champions, makes one of the two jokes in the entire LOTR opus, and fears nothing but a cage.
But suddenly, with Éowyn, gender is present, and in all the worst possible ways. While Eowyn’s brother runs Rohan’s defense, she must stay home to nurse her debilitated uncle. There, she cannot escape her creepy stalker because the men have given him free rein in the house. And when the men leave for war, they tell her to stay home with the other women.
At this moment, Tolkien gives her a shockingly bitter speech: “All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more.”
The first time I read that speech, it was a revelation. Tolkien set his stories in a feudal world, but here he told us that Éowyn — that all the women — knew they were being wronged by it.
But Tolkien didn’t follow through. On the contrary, he crushes Éowyn. When she recovers from her battle injuries, he has her make an inexplicable about-face. “I want to be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren,” she says, literally turning away from the open air and returning to the stone tower. Suddenly, she says she will be defined by, and walled in by, fertility.
The speech comes out of nowhere. We are given nothing that justifies this as a decision Eowyn would make after all her years raging against being trapped indoors as nurse to a sick old man.
I puzzled about it for years, trying to come up with an explanation that could make sense within the narrative. Maybe, I thought, Éowyn has given up. She was exhausted, ill, depressed, disappointed in love, and pressured from all sides. Now, one of the most powerful men in the kingdom was offering her escape from her homeland if she would agree that the wider world was not for her. Maybe she no longer had the strength to do anything but concur.
Or maybe, I thought, Éowyn was apotheosed into a symbol of the feminine forces of fertility and renewal. After Éowyn’s decision, Tolkien abandons all the hard, cold metaphors he’s been using. Before her renunciation, she was likened to ice, stone, silver, steel, and winter. The term “unfeminine” is never spoken but flutters just off the page. After her renunciation, she is likened to warm sun and spring. She wears a Madonna-like blue cloak. A gift from her new lover, it belonged to his (paging Dr. Freud!) mother.
But if this is Tolkien’s depiction of the eternal feminine, it is a perfunctory one. Éowyn does not actually becomes a mother. In fact, as soon as she pledges her life to fertility, she disappears from public view. This doesn’t seem to be a story about a woman embracing the archetypical eternal feminine. Instead, it seems to be a way to get rid of the character.
( *No woman in the LOTR gets pregnant, gives birth, or mothers a child. Not even the river nymph Goldberry, who spends the winter surrounded by water and lotus flowers, Persephone-like symbols of resurrection and spring renewal. Even she is portrayed as pretty and virginal, surrounded by water, not milk, no moons or blood, no messy children in her cold stone home where Tom Bombadil gets to gaze at her all winter.)
So I began to think that this was exactly what Tolkien had done. Maybe Éowyn’s decision doesn’t make sense within the narrative because Tolkien simply violated his integrity as an author, forcing her back behind those stone walls so he could get back to the parts of the story he cared about, the parts about the men. Maybe that was worth more to him than everything he had constructed about Éowyn’s character.
With any of these explanations, one thing remained constant. Éowyn’s decision made it impossible to keep pretending that Middle Earth was a place where gender didn’t exist. Éowyn’s story told me that for Tolkien, gender existed, and gender meant all the crappy things that men do to women under the patriarchy.
Worse, it told me that Tolkien had enough empathy to understand the horror and powerlessness of being forced into a medieval gender role, and that even with this insight, he still sided with the patriarchy.
So that’s how Éowyn’s story broke my heart. Forever now, Tolkien looks coldly out of the pages at my 13-year-old self. This Fellowship isn’t for you, he says. All his words are but to say, you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have their adventures, you have leave to read about them, as long as you do not delude yourself that those adventures are for you.
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