TED NASMITH
The Shadow of Sauron
the lord of the rings
Éowyn fighting the Uruk-hai in the Glittering Caves [x]
LOOK AT THIS LIFE IS GOOD and it’s 4.30am i think i should sleep now probably. probably. if i can.
FUCKING.
FINALLY.
Look, I do get why they cut this out of the film – they wanted to make Eowyn more of a symbol of female power, and in order to do that effectively they thought they needed to keep her powerless for as long as possible; preventing her from fighting the orc pack, putting her down in the caves with the others who “couldn’t” fight. I disagree with that – I think the battle of Helm’s Deep would have been far more effective with women fighting alongside the men – but I do get it.
However, this scene to me is just so important, because it shows exactly what Eowyn says earlier in the film: those without swords can still die upon them. She does all of this fighting with no armor, no shield, just the sword that she probably had to sneak down there and in a long, hella impractical skirt with her long, hella impractical hair down. And she still wins. She takes on what, like a half-dozen uruk-hai and kills all of them to death really hard. This is the movie that I would’ve loved even more than the movie I got, and I love that movie A LOT.
Tolkien mostly forgot that women/females existed in his stories, but that doesn’t mean we have to.
Anonymous asked: yes talk about eowyn and antifeminism
Okay, so this might be a little lengthy.
I will admit, when I first read The Return of the King (I was ten) and I realized that Éowyn had “given up” fighting and warfare for healing, I was offended. I was hurt. Éowyn was a lot like me – fiery, headstrong, determined – and suddenly I was faced with this realization that I was expected to settle down and be quiet and be nice and just not do what she did. I hated it. She was still my favorite character, but I really resented Tolkien for doing what I thought was something horribly sexist.
And then? Well… then I grew up. Oddly enough I sort of became Éowyn. I grew depressed. I fought not to protect others but because somewhere in the corners of my heart I sought death. I fell in love with the idea of someone rather than the true person, and it turned me hard and cold. And suddenly it made sense. Suddenly I understood that she didn’t fight for any healthy reason. She went to war to die, both because she felt trapped by society and because she felt she had no other choice. She wanted the glory of battle, not the joy of knowing that she was protecting her homeland. This I think is best evidenced in her argument with Aragorn – he’s pointing out (very wisely) that she’s not being left behind with the women and children, she’s being charged with the defense of Edoras. Somebody has to stay behind and rule and do queenly things, somebody has to protect those who cannot fight. And she doesn’t want to do that. She wants to fight for herself and her own reasons, she wants the glory. Aragorn calls her on it, tells her that soon she could be called to fight, “valor without renown”, and she hates that. So she suits up, goes off to battle, and seeks to die because she thinks that being left with the responsibilities is somehow lessening her value as a person.
It takes a stint in the Houses of Healing to show her that she’s wrong.
I almost think that it was her relationship with Faramir that brought her around. Not in a “love transforms you” sort of way, though. Because Faramir is the opposite. He doesn’t seek out war and valor. He wants to fight to protect his people, but his true joy is in peacetime. I’d say that being exposed to that mindset helped her see how wrong she was, which is why in the end she chooses to lay down her sword.
Personally I don’t think she stopped fighting, but I think in the future she fought to protect her people rather than for her own gratification.
I see a lot of myself in Éowyn. Always have. And so it’s hard for me, looking at Tolkien’s work eleven years later, to see this very natural character growth as antifeminist. Especially when we’ve got women like Lúthien, Aredhel, Nessa, Nienna, Varda, Galadriel, Míriel, and Haleth to show that Tolkien did in fact respect women, did believe that they could be valiant and could be whatever they wanted. I think his message with Éowyn was not “women shouldn’t fight”, but “if you fight, fight for the right reasons”. It doesn’t help that he was very opposed to war and to bloodshed for its own sake.
This is the only Meta Fridays post I’m probably going to reblog here, but it’s because I’ve gotten a lot of questions/comments about Éowyn from readers and it pretty much sums up my thoughts in one post.
Faramir is a writing sort, but he’s not the type to waste words. Boromir, less of a scholar, less fond of writing, but more the sort to relate details and stories which may be less than relevant. Which I think has interesting implications on the correspondence between them.
so in my headcanon, Boromir’s the long-letter writer (his fellow soldiers are always like ARE YOU WRITING TO A GIRL WHO ARE YOU IN LOVE WITH and he just rolls his eyes because he’s writing to his kid brother) with the occasional short missives that are either military correspondence or completely irrelevant nonsense that he thinks will make Faramir laugh (and because they MIGHT be military correspondence, Faramir is obliged to open them as soon as he receives them. this leads to him making a lot of strange faces in front of his men.)
and Faramir is the one who can get across everything he wants to say in three sentences or so (like, short enough that Boromir has the whole thing memorized by the time he reads it twice) but sometimes he will sit down and write PAGES UPON PAGES, just to get out his thoughts, and when Boromir gets those he knows something is happening in Faramir’s head.
so when Faramir goes through Boromir’s room after his death, he finds all the letters in a drawer and so he brings out all of the old ones he’s kept and sits on his brother’s bed and reads them. he manages to keep from weeping until he comes across one of the short ones Boromir sent a few years ago, which contains a particularly stupid joke and came by the hand of a messenger who was under the impression that the letter was urgent. and he can hardly bear to think that the one who considered laughter so urgent is dead, and will never send him absurd letters again.