Books, Films, Adaptations & Reader Responses, 8/8
More about Éowyn -- and, in contrast to the Infamous Stew Scene -- a discussion of one of my favorite film scenes!
This post focuses on one of my favorite scenes in The Two Towers, Scene 20, "The King of the Golden Hall," (one of the Extended Scenes released on DVD), specifically the part where Gríma barges in on Éowyn as she mourns Théodred’s death.1 I *love* this scene and would argue that it is one of the best examples of how the film, at times, improves on the source text while remaining completely true to the “spirit” of the source!2
Note: link to the earlier parts of the series listed below!3
The link to Scene 20 is in the first paragraph above, but I also did a quick transcription of it so that you all can compare what Gríma actually says to the source text (Tolkien’s narration and dialogue in two different chapters of The Lord of the Rings!). I bold and italicize the relevant language in the transcriptions and source quotes for ease of comparison.
“Think you that Wormtongue had poison only for Théoden’s ears?”
[Scene opens in the darkened Hall, camera looking down at Éowyn kneeling by Théoden’s side, holding his hand.]
[Voiceover: Gandalf speaking “Saruman’s hold over King Théoden is now very strong.”]
[Éowyn stroking Théoden’s hand.] “My lord, your son, he is dead. [pause] My lord. [pause] Uncle. Will you not go to him? Will you do nothing?”
[Cut to outside, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli, Aragorn pausing before entering Edoras.]
Gandalf: “Be careful of what you say. Do not look for welcome here.”
[Cut to close up on Theodred’s pale face, then Éowyn kneeling by the side of his bed, holding his hand. She kisses his hand. Camera pulls back to show Gríma entering through open door behind her, sort of slithering around one corner.]
Gríma: “Oh, he, he must have died sometime in the night. What a tragedy for the King to lose his only son and heir. [He sits on the bed near her, places his hand on her shoulder] I understand his passing’s hard to accept, especially now that your brother has deserted you.
Éowyn: [Pushes back from bed, shaking off his hand, stands, backs away from him.] “Leave me alone, snake!”
Gríma: [Stands, following her.] “Oh, but you are alone. Who knows what you have spoken to the darkness in the bitter watches of the night when all your life seems to shrink, the walls of your bower closing in about you—a hutch to trammel some wild thing” [He circles her as he speaks, closing in, the camera focusing on his face and movement, and on her face when he passes behind her, ending up standing much closer, closeup on both faces]. “So fair [he touches her cheek, pushing her hair aside] so cold like a morning of fair spring still clinging to winter’s chill [his hand slides down and around her throat; her eyes close a moment, but she forces them open, looking at him, lips parted. ]
Éowyn: “Your words are poison.”
[She pulls away, leaves the room; he is left standing alone in the dark, looking at his hand. She goes through the main door, passing through guards, and stands outside the Hall looking out over the plains of Rohan. Close-up on her face as she looks down, focusing on three horses approaching the gate of the city. A flag rips off the flagpole, next to her and is blown over and out of the city where Aragorn sees it as he is the last to enter the gate.]
There is no scene that is even close to showing this confrontation in the Rohirrim chapters of The Two Towers (6 -11). Tolkien never shows us Gríma and Éowyn speaking together.4 As Gríma and Gandalf say, nobody can know what she has thought, or said aloud when alone because Tolkien does not incorporate her point of view into the story. What we have instead, except for her dialogue (which deserves its own full analysis!) tends toward the the patriarchal male gaze (although Tolkien wrote long before Laura Mulvey coined that term!).
At first glance, then, the film scene seems at first entirely original. It is set just before Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli arrive at Edoras. In the novel, Tolkien gives some of the work of exposition to the characters (as he often does) and, in this way, makes it clear that Gríma has been stalking Éowyn as well as corrupting Théoden in order to undermine his rule in the service of Saruman.
Gandalf reveals that information to the King and the others in the Hall after he heals Théoden. That information is part of a larger pattern of revelation about Gríma’s actions, but all of this information is shared among men. It happens after Gandalf and Théoden send Éowyn away! She is not given the chance to speak to what she has experienced!5
“How long is it since Saruman bought you? What was the promised price? When all the men were dead, you were to pick your share of the treasure, and take the woman you desire? Too long have you watched her under your eyelids and haunted her steps.”
Éomer graspect his sword. “That I knew already,” he muttered. For that reason I would have slain him before, forgetting the law of the hall. But there are other reasons.” He stepped forward, but Gandalf stayed him with his hand (520).
I would argue that this scene (along with the earlier one where we are shown Éomer accusing Gríma, using the same language Gandalf does in this scene, and then being exiled) shows what’s been happening.
However, in the film scene, where Gríma approaches Éowyn, we see her casting off his influence, rejecting his attempts, and leaving him (something that was not/could not be conveyed in the exposition in the novel, and was never the concern of the men). What we see is how Éowyn deals with Gríma without (despite my wish at the start of this piece!) having a sword OR a male defender handy.
This scene is also one of a number of instances in th film where the screenwriters borrow language from other parts of the novel and repurpose it by giving it to different characters. In this case, they borrow language from two different (later) scenes: some from the third-person objective narrator, the rest from Aragorn and Gandalf’s dialogue!
The first source borrowing comes from a description of her as she leaves the Hall after being sent away by Gandalf and Théoden. She pauses before leaving, looking back, and there’s a long paragraph describing her that ends with a slight but shallow shift into Aragorn’s pov:
Very fair was her face, and her long hair was like a river of gold. Slender and tall she was in her white robe girt with silver; but strong she seemed and stern as steel a daugher of kings. Thus Aragorn for the first time in the full light of day beheld Éowyn, Lady of Rohan, and thought her fair, fair and cold, like a morning of pale spring that is not yet come to womanhood" (515, emphasis added).
The second source for Gríma’s failed seduction speech is the one I discuss in my essay about female bodies/femininities: the scene in the Houses of Healing when Aragorn, Éomer, and Gandalf are standing around the bed of an unconscious Éowyn, debating the origin and sources of her malady and herresistance to Healing.
The problem is not the physical injury (her broken shield-arm) from her fight with the Witch-King, but may be the spiritual malady, a shock to the spirit, because of the (super)natural powers of her opponent although that injury also affects her body, especially her sword-arm.
Unlike his healing of Merry and Faramir who were also affected by what the Healers are calling the Black Shadow, the influence cast the Nazgûl from the sky, Aragorn is unsure if he can heal Éowyn. He confesses to a limit on his power, the need for a "healing that [he] cannot bring" (867), being able to heal only her body not her spirit.
Let’s pull out for a moment to the “camera eye” perspective: we are seeing a group of men standing around a woman who is unconscious in a sickbed. Rather than discussing remedies, they engage in a lengthy discussion [one that would NEVER have worked in the film! that’s why Jackson showed that information earlier] trying to psychoanalyze when and how she first was made unhappy, stricken with Aragorn calls a malady, and which her brother thinks may be her feelings (unrequited love!) for Aragorn. It’s these girly feelings that are apparently making it so difficult to heal her!
Only Gandalf presents a different perspective and (despite some essentialism) gives her slightly more agency and credit than the others do.
A bunch of men standing over a woman who is unable to speak or or provide information that might be relevant to their questions—I sense the thumb of the Author coming down here!
And yet I cannot claim that she would have spoken even if she was conscious (she may not have wanted to do so although might have been tempted to tell them to fuck off—I would have been!).
This scene in the novel is the source of Gríma’s speech!
“Alas! For she was pitted against a foe beyond the strength of her mind or body.6 And those who will take a weapon to such an enemy must be sterner than steel, if the very shock shall not destroy them. It was an evil doom that set her in his path. For she is a fair maiden, fairest lady of a house of queens. And yet I know not how I should speak of her. When I first looked on her and perceived her unhappiness, it seemed to me that I saw a white flower standing straight and proud, shapely as a lily, and yet knew that it was hard, as if wrought by elf-wrights out of steel. Or was it, maybe, a frost that had turned its sap to ice, and so it stood, bitter-sweet, still fair to see, but stricken, soon to fall and die? Her malady begins far back before this day, does it not, Éomer?”
“I marvel that you should ask me, lord,” he answered. “For I hold you blameless in this matter, as in all else; yet I knew not that Éowyn, my sister, was touched by any frost, until she first looked on you. Care and dread she had, and shared with me, in the days of Wormtongue and the king’s bewitchment; and she tended the king in growing fear. But that did not bring her to this pass!”
“My friend,” said Gandalf, “you had horses, and deeds of arms, and the free fields; but she, born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on.
“Think you that Wormtongue had poison7 only for Théoden’s ears? Dotard! What is the house of Eorl but a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor among their dogs? Have you not heard those words before? Saruman spoke them, the teacher of Wormtongue. Though I do not doubt that Wormtongue at home wrapped their meaning in terms more cunning.8 My lord, if your sister’s love for you, and her will still bent to her duty, had not restrained her lips, you might have heard even such things as these escape them. But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?” (866-7, emphasis added”)
The more I thought about this scene, in doing the analysis for my earlier essay, the more I saw that, in some ways, it is not only sexist, but creepy-sexist,9 as they speculate about her emotional life (which is later followed by Tolkien’s solution of how to resolve that pesky Woman Problem by marrying her off to Faramir which, as I note in the earlier part of this series, I really really hated! Although I guess if he had followed his earlier plan to kill her off in battle, I would have hated that more.).10
Now, I would argue that my reading of that conversation may be one reason I think the lifted lines work so well when Gríma delivers them although I also credit Brad Dourif throughout with a superb job of portraying the character—and his use of pauses in the longer speech as well as the blocking of the scene and his slithery walk (aided by that black robe!) was brilliant.
Thinking about the book scene and the film scene (and the intriguing differences), I am irrestibly reminded of one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite Virginia Woolf publications (A Room of One’s Own, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1957).
Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? . . . .How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper, I asked myself, and in despair began running my eye up and down the long list of titles. Even the names of the books gave me food for thought. Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women. . . . . Women do not write books about men—a fact that I could not help welcoming with relief. . . .What could be the reason, then, of this curious disparity, I wondered, drawing cart-wheels on the slips of paper provided by the British taxpayer for other purposes. Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women. A very curious fact it seemed, and my mind wandered to picture the lives of men who spend their time in writing books about women. . .(pp. 26-7)
I am forcing myself to not provide even more of the excerpt (including what I left out, as indicated by the ellipses), but I can highly recommend reading the entire (fairly short) publication (which is available at Project Gutenberg!).11
And although I have one more post about Éowyn in mind, it’s not really about the film adaptation, but about the ongoing tendency among (mostly) male critics to stereotype women readers and critics as feminists who “hate Tolkien.” So that will become its own stand-alone post because the seven part series that my original plan leafed into is quite long enough, I think!
When I’m talking about the film, I’m always talking about the Extended Edition which is the one I have seen the most times. I cannot remember the last time I watched the theatrical releases, but it was years ago. I think that the new and extended scenes improved The Two Towers more significantly than was the case for the other two releases (though I love some of the additions in both of them).
It’s not my choice for the *best* example from the film: I award that distinction to “The Lighting of the Beacons”—along with the lead-up to it in “Pippin’s Task.”
There couldn’t be, given the limitations of Tolkien’s narrative point of view. All narrative points of view, or perspectives (first-person, second-person, and the various third-person [limited omniscient, objective, and omniscient]) have ways of telling a story they can do excellently, and limitations on what they can show/narrate. The hobbits (primarily Frodo, with Sam taking over after Frodo is captured, and Merry and Pippin in their separate storylines after Gandalf takes Pippin to Minas Tirith) are the primary point-of-view characters in the novel which is primarily written in third-person limited omniscient, where readers perceive most of what happens through the points of view of major characters. The Rohirrim chapters at this point lack all hobbits and thus are narrated primarily in third-person objective (sometimes described as “fly on the wall,” or “camera-eye”). This POV is an external perspective which describes what characters do and say, but rarely, if ever what they think/feel/see. There are a few minor exceptions in these chapters, rarely lasting more than a sentence or two. For an example, look at the last sentence of Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall,” after the host rides forth to Isengard, which focuses on Éowyn, left behind: “Far over the plain, Éowyn saw the glitter of their spears, as she stood still, alone before the doors of the silent house” (525). The last phrases in the sentence hints at her feeling (alone, left behind, the silence) but it’s implied, not narrated directly. There’s a passage in “The Passing of the Grey Company” (in Book 5, Return of the King) which focuses on her, but, other than the brief phrase in the opening line of the section (“The Lady Éowyn greeted them and was glad of their coming”), the narrative perspective is still primarily on actions and dialogue. There are no extended passages in this section of the novel that immerse a reader in the perspective of the point of view character in the novel (as I said, no hobbits!).
Don’t even get me started on that! It could be a whole other rant!
As any mortal MALE warrior would have been, remember. And was! Merry was, plus others in the City! It’s not just because she’s a woman!
Gandalf’s term “poison” is given to Éowyn in the film scene: she calls him a snake, and says his “words are poison” which I think is pretty cool! But that one word isn’t as unique as the cluster of images Aragorn and Gandalf (who are the Good Guys! remember) use.
I do think it’s worth noting that Gandalf’s summary of what Gríma, primed by Saruman, probably said in Rohan was accurate—but that the film scene shows him taking an entirely different approach to Éowyn! Just saying! I’d bet a nickel that Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens wrote those lines!
I doubt that was Tolkien’s “intention”—but that just emphasizes the difference between systemic sexism and conscious/intentional sexism.
I highly recomend David Craig’s excellent essay in which he analyzes the different versions and resolutions Tolkien considered for her character—including killing her off! I summarize those options in my earlier essay, but his is worth reading in full (for one thing, I consider it the first queer reading of Tolkien).
Craig, David M. "'Queer Lodgings': Gender and Sexuality in The Lord of the Rings." Mallorn, vol. 38, Jan. 2001, pp. 11–18. Link. Rpt. “Queer Lodgings: Gender and Sexuality in The Lord of the Rings - Reprinted with a New Introduction by the Author.” Mallorn, no. 61, 2020, pp. 20–29.
When I did a summer abroad study for one of my graduate programs at Lincoln College, Oxford, Woolf’s Room was one of the two books I packed to take along with me (knowing I’d be able to buy lots and lots of other books when I was there, which I did, plus of course all the libraries at Oxford) but that one I wanted with me and read MULTIPLE times. This summer was in the early 1980s, before e-books so packing books for a long trip was always difficult.