Books, Films, Adaptations & Reader Responses, 6/8
My personal reader response to Éowyn from my crush at age ten to my queer reader response as part of an academic essay at age 58!
"Strong she seemed and stern as steel, a daughter of kings" (LotR.3.6.515).
“Seemed” is doing a whole lot of work in that description (from Aragorn’s point of view), and that’s not unique. I’ve noticed before, in past applied linguistics/stylistics analysis, that seem/seems/seemed work in significant ways. I’ve always thought I needed to explore that but time! I’m noting it here to help remember that I want to do that at some point.
The links to the previous parts of this series are in the note below.1
I fell in love with Éowyn when I was ten (during my first reading of The Lord of the Rings, in 1965). I hated that she married Faramir. I didn’t like Book!Faramir very much.2
By then, I’d already decided never to get married because all the wives-and-mothers (no childless cat ladies in our small northern Idaho rural neighborhood where we lived three miles away from the small university town where my father taught geology) worked a lot more hours than any of their husbands did and clearly had little (or no) time to read books which was my major interest in life (that is one thing that has not changed the past sixty-plus years).3
Their work sometimes involved one of the designated “women’s” jobs allowed that were outside their homes and earned a paycheck.4 As far as I can remember, those paid jobs included nursing, teaching “home ec” in the junior high school, cleaning houses and taking in washing/ironing).
All the women who worked outside the home were also responsible for the unpaid physical and emotional labor of their homes and families which started with childcare, eldercare, and housework and tentacled out from there. At least two families had widowed mothers living in what was not, at that time, called a “mother-in-law” house. My mother moved her parents to a house next door to us when they could no longer do the work on the wheat ranch where she’d grown up (I was probably four-five when that happened, so 1959-ish).
Women who did not work outside the home for a paycheck did, in addition to the childcare, housework, and eldercare, the great majority of the unpaid supporting5 volunteer work (for their churches, for community groups, including youth groups, for the “ladies auxiliary” of fraternal (hah) organizations like the Elks and Masons who did not allow women to be members).6 There were also volunteer groups supporting the hospital and the university. Many of the women who worked for a paycheck also volunteered for these groups.
I am not sure when any of them slept. There was no way I was going to do that, and I started saying so, loudly, by junior high (if not before).7
So yeah, I hate the Marriage Plot in all its fictional manifestations because *waves at where and when I grew up.*
So what did I want?!? I was asked by exasperated grown-ups when I didn’t answer their condescending questions in the way they expected me to.8 My peers mostly considered me pretty weird and avoided me for the most part, especially in junior high school and after.
Well, if I couldn’t go to Middle-earth (or when I was five, to Oz), then I wanted to grow up and live by myself with all my books and cats, lots of cats. I got a lot of indulgent pats on the head after I said that plus patronizing assurances that I would “grow out of it.” This started around the time I was ten-twelve but continued (albeit with fewer pats on the head) well into my twenties. And that response was not limited to men; in fact, I’d say usually came from married women which I always considered to be spreading propoganda.)
I loved Middle-earth and identified intensely with Bilbo and Frodo (their love of reading; being shorter than all the tall people around them; not getting married, not wanting or having children—Bilbo did not adopt Baby!Frodo after all!). I identified with and loved Éowyn in ways it took me years to learn how to express: that crush was my first queer feeling. My second was a crush on the choir director (who was also the minister’s wife) at the church we attended who (from my perspective) looked and sang, exactly like Julie Andrews (and yep, also had a crush on her).
And eventually, decades later,I found myself including my queer reader response to Éowyn in an essay I wrote for an antholgy on The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium. 9
Excerpt from: Light (noun, 1) or Light (adjective, 14b)?: Female Bodies and Femininities in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings10
As a queer woman, I am not concerned to make a larger argument about the questions of relative misogyny or feminism in Tolkien since the extent to which a reader sees "sexism" or "feminism" in Tolkien's novel is related in part to that individual reader's own world-view and belief system, not to mention individual definitions of "sexism" and "feminism” . . . .Thus, my project is not interested in traditional literary assumptions which have denied critics/scholars their bodies and histories in a demand for a fictional objectivity which ignores gender, situates the white male as falsely universal, and reduces gender to heteronormativity, all assumptions which are increasingly dubious in the twenty-first century.[1]
My project is situated in a contrarian reading of The Lord of the Rings; as a white woman and a feminist, I know I am, and have been since the age of ten, reading against the grain of Tolkien's novel and his stated intentions (within his Letters and as embodied in earlier drafts of his work) about the nature of "women" . . . . My analysis begins with a stylistic analysis of women's bodies in the novel, considering agency and light imageries, then concludes with a queer reading of Éowyn which complicates the types of femininities possible in The Lord of the Rings.[2]
Éowyn is the only human female character (save for Ioreth). While, as Donovan notes, she is associated with light as are Goldberry, Arwen, and Galadriel, the associations seem more natural than supernatural. She is lit by the sun; she does not shine through her own agency. However, her agency is clearly established: she is the grammatical subject of nearly 60% of the clauses in the excerpts, and she acts more in the material world, destroying the supernatural figure of the Ringwraith with the help of a hobbit, his blade, and her sword. More of her verbal processes are behavioral than any of the other characters, save for Shelob, who also is described as fighting. But even before her fight, she is described in movement; like Goldberry, she welcomes guests and serves them. She is described in terms of her dress and hair, but she disguises herself in the garb of a man, including a helm to hide her hair. She bears a cup, but she also bears a sword.
Although Tolkien's work is often denigrated as an "action" novel, my linguistic analysis supports what a number of other scholars have argued: that the important actions are not those of physical battles, of actions in the material world. While as an adult, I can see the ways in which Tolkien's style constructs Goldberry, Arwen, and Galadriel as having a range of spiritual and moral powers, as argued by Craig and Donovan, I also would argue that the reason Éowyn appealed, and appeals, the most to me can be supported in part by the grammar of the text: she acts. . . .If, as Donovan argues, Éowyn is most strongly affected by the valkyrie tradition, her agency and behaviour can be connected to those figures. However, Tolkien himself criticized the idea of a "strong Amazon," mythic figures in classical Greece, and the valkyrie are also mythic creatures, linking the material and spiritual worlds. What many may enjoy as a myth or story would not necessarily be considered a model for human behaviors; such behavior might well be considered queer, unwomanly, and so condemned.
Engaged in constructing a queer reading, I would not join in that condemnation although Tolkien expresses some measure of it. Instead, I draw upon queer theory, specifically Judith [Jack] Halberstam's [3] Female Masculinity, a second-generation text, building upon the early work in gender done by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Earlier feminist theorists argued that gender roles are socially constructed, but tended to focus on heterosexuality as the norm. Gay and lesbian theory in the earlier years tended toward a homonormative construction, with the "gay" or "lesbian" an essential, if privileged, category in opposition to heterosexuality. Contemporary queer theorists can complicate both social essentialism (the idea that all female bodies, all women, are socialized toward femininity) and homonomativity (the idea of an essential gay or lesbian self). Halberstam argues the need to consider gender as being constructed socially, in part through language, and as not contingent upon the body, allowing for female participation in the construction and performance of masculinity.
Moving from arguing that gender is socially constructed to analyzing how a socially constructed gender can be separated from the body complicates theoretical reliance on binary assumptions, such as the idea that there are only rwo genders, femininity and masculinity, or two sexualities, heterosexual and homosexual. Halberstam argues that culture has ways of signifying masculine females and feminine males but that (as is true in a patriarchal system), much more attention is paid to feminine males than masculine women. Because she does not ignore class and ethnicity, she can argue for the existence of multiple masculinities. The range of masculinities includes the dominant one (of white middle class men) as well as a range of alternative ones created by the intersections of class, ethnicity, and sexual identity with masculinity. Halberstam focuses on queer female masculinities because she sees heterosexual female masculinity as more heteronormative and less challenging (although worthy of study by others). While Halberstam's work intervenes in a range of discourses and subjects: historical, performance, literary, autobiographical, etc., I find many of her rhetorical moves useful, particularly the claim that mainstream culture has acted to suppress female masculinities but that those masculinities have existed, both historically and in contemporary sub-cultures. To suppress something means that, culturally, people are aware of its existence. Alternative female masculinities exist even when women who are ambiguous in gender presentation are suppressed or marginalized. The result of suppressing female masculinities is that "male masculinity [stands] unchallenged as the bearer of gender stability and gender deviance." Examples of female masculinities are: "the tomboy, the masculine woman, and the racialized masculine subject" (41). Halberstam does not argue that creating new language will change heteropatriarchal attitudes; instead, she moves to claim that a breakdown of gender difference as a signifying system is already taking place in some parts of contemporary society and that such local breakdowns can be used to cause change in other areas.
Even the tomboy I was as a child understood on some level that Tolkien probably "intended" Éowyn's powers and actions to be read as a breakdown in the social order that would need to be condemned or cured, unlike the spiritual and moral powers of the "mythic" figures of the Elves and Goldberry. Éowyn is "saved" from traveling down the road that, in Tolkien's text, may have led to an existence similar to Shelob's. I base this limited statement of his intention upon three pieces of evidence: a scene in the novel, revisions made during his writing process, as described by Christopher Tolkien, and language in his letters. When Éowyn lies injured and ill in the Houses of Healing, she does not respond immediately to Aragorn's powers and the athelas. Instead, Aragorn confesses to a limit on his power, the need for a "healing that [he] cannot bring" (849), being able to heal only her body not her spirit. The scene shows a group of men standing around her in the Houses of Healing trying to analyze when she first was made unhappy, stricken with Aragorn calls a malady and which her brother thinks may be her feelings for Aragorn. Gandalf provides a slightly different view (a reflection of the idea of a woman warrior): saying that she was "born in the body of a maid, [with] a spirit and courage at least the match of [her brother's]" (848-9). Her earlier anger at a traditional woman's role, especially when told to wait and die, is cast in a negative light as illness or despair by men around her; the narrator seems to share this sense of her since he described her, after Aragorn's rejection, as stricken and stumbling after begging him. This sort of diagnosis sounds all to familiar to contemporary feminists who have been told that they and the feminists preceding them are too angry, are going too far, that feminism is an illness of the body or mind or perhaps both, that they are "unnaturally" trying to act as men, against their nature. The solution to such problems is, of course, marriage, as the narrator happily provides for her instead of the originally planned death.
The changes Tolkien instituted during his long and complex revision process are one reason that David Craig characterizes Eowyn as rhe most complex character in the novel. A comparison of the different drafts in The Treason of Isengard shows that the first draft had two women standing behind the king. The two are Idis and Éowyn; the first is Théoden's daughter, the second and younger, is Éowyn: "very fair and slender she seemed. Her face was filled with gentle pity, and her eyes shone with unshed tears. So Aragorn saw her for the first time in the light of day, and after she was gone he stood still, looking at the dark doors and taking little heed of other things" (445). Idis soon disappears, and the meeting of Aragorn and Arwen is significant because they look at each other and fall in love. A list of details includes the following: "Aragorn weds Éowyn sister of Éomer…and becomes King of Gondor." Yet in another list of notes (not dated), that alliance is rejected: "? Cut out the love-story of Aragorn and Éowyn. Aragorn is too old and lordly and grim. Make Éowyn the twin-sister of Eomund, a stern amazon woman. If so, alter the message of Galadriel (XXVI.17). Probably Eowyn should die to avenge or save Theoden." The possibility of Aragorn's mourning Éowyn's death and never marrying was also considered (448).[4] In the final draft, Éowyn's final destiny is to marry Faramir, changing to become a Healer and rule by his side in Ithilien. A letter Tolkien drafted discussed his sense of the (final) caracter, disowning any sense uf her as an Amazon and explaining that her feelings for Aragorn were not really romantic, and that she was not really a soldier, just a woman acting in a crisis (Letters, 323, 244].11
In another letter to his son, Michael, Tolkien clearly sets forth his ideas of essential differences between men and women which can be summarized as heterosexist, correlating to his religious philosophy of a fallen and imperfect world, allowing that women can be corrupted but stating that they are naturally and "instinctively" monogamous, naturally and instinctively happiest when married, unlike men (Letter 43). I doubt Tolkien would have accepted homosexuality as anything other than a corruption, a sin. However, as a number of critics note, he grew up in a homosocial culture that was common during the late Victorian and early 20th century. There is no evidence of female same-sex relationships or love in The Lord of the Rings: simple friendship between women is hardly shown except perhaps in Ioreth's companionship with her kinswoman at the Coronation. A brief reference to a close friendship between Melian and Galadriel is given in The Silmarillion (115, 126). Generally, women are isolated from all other women, a feature not at all uncommon in works by male authors who would have had little or no access information about female friendship, female love, female bonding. However, the lack of such relationships described in the text does not preclude a female reader from connecting to a female character or characters.
The author Tolkien constructed Éowyn to serve his purpose in his narrative, but her development through multiple revisions is complex. His very obvious dislike of the concept of a woman picking up arms to fight as men do is clear, yet he is the sub-creator who showed her voicing that impassioned statement to Aragorn:
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. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death"(784).
She fears a cage—bars that keep her from doing great deeds. She expresses herself in the language of the heroic epic because that is the language she has; that is the language of her people and culture. Tolkien's own work re/vises the epic heroic model by embedding later, Christian, elements, but it is equally possible for a reader of Tolkien's work to read in sympathy with Éowyn and against the grain of her sub-creator who once planned for her death because she was a "stern Amazon." Such a reader can imagine much more in the character than the author could show directly. There are gaps in every text, and the gaps in this text are large enough to allow for a queer reading.
My favorite characters as a child and adolescent were Frodo and Éowyn. Both were considered to act "queerly" by the norms of their culture. Craig notes the extensive use of the word "queer" to describe Bilbo and then Frodo by the hobbits around them (16).12 The behaviors which set the two hobbits apart were not only their reading, interest in Elvish history and culture and languages, but also their choice not to marry. While the word "queer" is not applied to Éowyn in part because the diction would not be appropriate for the Rohirrim, I believe that the concept would have been applied by many of her people in reference to her choices during much of the time of the story.[5]
Frodo's storyline and characterization are clear since he is the primary point of view character; in contrast, Éowyn tantalizes. While she has more story time than other female characters, moving through the text in contrast to the others who seem confined to one location and playing a climactic role in the final battle in a way that hinges on her cross-dressing (being taken for a man before being revealed as a woman). While she was always more present for me than other female characters, closer to me, I was confused about the sense of doom that seemed to surround her in the text, the expressed fears of Gandalf and Aragorn to Éomer that she is likely to die if she cannot regain hope. One could argue those fears are part of the larger story—certainly her individual despair exists within a conflict that threatens the entire world and might bring about the death of all that is good and true, but even as a child, I had the sense that she was suffering from problems other than the Dark Lord's attacks on Middle-earth and all its inhabitants. I had no language to express either my sense of her problems (and my attendant disgust at the healing/marriage resolution to her plot) or to express my attraction to her during my first decades of reading the novel; that language would come only years later, in a doctoral program during the 1990s as I began to study gender and queer theory. Ironically, by that time, I had not read Tolkien's work for some years, choosing to read more feminist work and to read the women writers not assigned in my earlier college programs. I came back to the novel by way of Peter Jackson's live-action film, as well as coming to scholarship on Tolkien, the film, and fan fiction. As an adult reader, I can bring a number of contemporary theories and methods, specifically, stylistics and queer theory, to my reading of the texts, finally voicing the reading that began when I was a child.
Writing this essay was not the end, though! I had begun writing fanfiction in 2003, and although there was a hiatus later on (focusing more on scholarship and grant-writing for a while), I’ve recently returned to writing fanfic, some about Éowyn as I discuss in the next installment of this series (which I’m scheduling to post the day after this post goes live—IF I’m doing the Substack thing correctly!)
[1] Ethnicity and class as well as gender and sexuality are identies excluded from the falsely objective analysis. More intersectional work, especially drawing upon critical race theories, is needed in Tolkien Studies, but that lies outside the scope of this project.
[2] I am in debt to David Craig's excellent discussion of the psychological complexity of Éowyn relating to the various versions of her that Tolkien created over time. While that issue is not a major part of his essay which focuses primarily on Frodo and Sam's relationship, I am building on that portion in this essay.
[3] http://www.jackhalberstam.com/on-pronouns/ [as far as I can tell, this site may no longer exist—the ephemeral internet]
[4] Christopher explains the item of Galadriel's message as relating to the Elfstone message which originally referred to a green stone Theoden was wearing, and told Aragorn to "look in the shadow of the dark throne" where Eowyn was standing.
[5] Here, I draw upon Shippey's argument about the essentially modern culture and diction of the Shire in contrast to the medieval and Anglo-Saxon culture and language of the Mark (Author of the Century, 47-49, 90-92). The earliest date of a citation in the OED for "Queer" is 1508. It is not a word that would have appeared in the language of the Rohirrim.
Part One: The Substackers who inspired this series!
Part Two: My personal journey from Tolkien (book) fan to Jackson (film) fan to aca-fan!
Part Three: Shakespeare and Tolkien and Queer Shakespeare and Tolkien. I was a Shakespeare fangirl in my undergrad days and have watched over the years of how they are both defended as bastions of “Western Civilization” from those of us who are happily applying *all* and queer, feminist, gender, marxist, and critical race theories! Yet somehow, we persist.
Part Three.Five: An excerpt from my “Culture Warriors” project on far-right extremists’ appropriation of “Tolkien” [because of his pure white tototally straight and heteronormative etc. (imagined) Middle Ages] and the FRE’s attacks on all the rest of us who dare to see them differently.
Part Four: My answers to the adaptation questions from Jokien with Tolkien’s post.
Part Five: The Ents (books, films, and adaptation issues): the one thing about the adaptation of the Ent narrative that I dislike! Plus recommendation for Martin Barker’s scholarship.
That was one of the biggest changes in attitude caused by the film: I fell hard into total YUM/love/lust/OHWOW with Film!Faramir (due 99% to David Wenham). I also knew knew from the very first moments of the very first scene that my OTP was Frodo/Faramir. (My Book OTP was always Sam/Frodo!).
I should note here that I have no idea whether or not any of the women in that neighborhood liked reading, wanted to read, felt cheated of time to read (they were grown-ups; I was a kid!). I didn’t think about that: I was looking at the models around me for adulthood, and there wasn’t a single one in that neighborhood (or that I ever saw in that town) that appealed to me. I finally escaped from Idaho in 1976 (or ‘77?—about then!). I do think that odds are incredibly good that all of them in some way had something they loved to do and did not have time to do it.
I know that my mother wanted to return to college to finish her degree in Economics (she dropped out after two years to go to work to support my father in his graduate work as many women did in her generation). It didn’t work: looking back, my brother and I (both in elementary school) were stinkers about it, but my father could have supported her and didn’t. She handled all the economic decisions in the family: taxes, investments, budgeting, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. She was also one of the very few people who didn’t care if I got married or not, and in fact encouraged me to do what I loved no matter what it was.
By “designated women’s job,” I mean that the job advertisements and hiring policies were still segregated by gender in 1965, and it was legal to do so. Looking back, I suspect they and lacked “whites only” designation only because the town and the state were overwhelmingly white.
By “supporting,” I mean that they were never the public-facing leaders, or holding any leadership positions (except in the women’s auxiliaries, I guess, which I never participated in because I escaped from Idaho before I was sucked into those groups; the youth and adolescent groups were hell enough).
Years and years and years later, after the divorce, and after she escaped from Idaho herself, when the Elks were forced to allow women to join, she was the second woman to apply to the local Lodged. The only picture she ever framed as a present for me was of her in her official Lodge picture, after being elected to the Board, in the regalia. She loved the work she did for the Lodge (mostly relating to how to raise money to support the Elks’ Children’s Hospitals).
I gather, from reading a number of feminist Substacks, a number of which are by women much younger than I, that married women with children still do the vast amount of unpaid work for their families in the U.S. as well as being expected to work paying jobs. So while there have been changes since the 1950s-1960s in women’s rights and men doing a teensy bit more around the house, lots hasn’t changed.
As an autist (undiagnosed until I was almost 60 years old), I struggled for decades with the tendency to take those sort of socially required questions literally and answer them truthfully even when they were the pro forma nitty gritty of interaction. I remember one bizarre period when I was in college, while the divorce was going on (it was a bad one), and when people asked me how I was doing, I would answer “terrible, thank you” with a big smile, and they’d nod and smile back not hearing what I said. I was nearly thirty when I happened to get a class on applied linguistics which helped me understand the function of what always seemed a waste of time to me (it’s that “inability to recognize/understand social cues” a number of neurodivergent people have!).
When I redact a few lines of text, I use the MLA 4-dot ellipsis: . . . . When I redact a paragraph or more of text, I use the divider line. If you are interested in reading the essay and unable to purchase a copy, I am happy to share a pdf for your personal use. Email me at robinareid AT fastmail dot com.
Reid, Robin Anne. "Light (noun, 1) or Light (adjective, 14b)? Female Bodies and Femininities in The Lord of the Rings." The Body in Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on Middle-Earth Corporeality, edited by Christopher Vaccaro, McFarland, 2013 pp. 98-118.
Because the Tolkien Estate tends to set draconian limits on how many words of Tolkien’s legendarium can be quoted (withough requiring $$$ which humanities scholars don’t have) in academic publications, I could not quote the specific letter in the published version. Here it is:
Éowyn: It is possible to love more than one person (of the other sex) at the same time, but in a different mode and intensity. I do not think that Eowyn's feelings for Aragorn really changed much; and when he was revealed as so lofty a figure, in descent and office, she was able to go on loving and admiring him. He was old and that is not only a physical quality: when not accompanied by any physical decay age can be alarming or awe-inspiring. Also she was not herself ambitious in the true political sense. Though not a 'dry nurse' in temper, she was also not really a soldier or 'amazon', [sic] but like many brave women was capable of great military gallantry at a crisis.
Yvette Kisor recently published an extensive stylistic analysis of the uses and contexts of “queer” (and related words) in The Lord of the Rings that is well worth reading!