Eowyn

The Latest Literary Series . . . A Heroine

     The last book I read in full this year was The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. I am taking it very slow with The Pickwick Papers--in fact, as my In Progress page tells you, I'm taking a week's break from reading, since I was getting so pressured on it and sick of it. Doesn't life have a way of pouring if it has to rain? That's kind of my story today. Okay, that is my story today.

     My heroine today is the coldly beautiful Eowyn. I'm not a fan of the portrayal of her in The Lord of the Rings movies (but I do confess to being overly picky most of the time), and the picture to the right was one of the only ones that really paints her the way I see her in the book. 

     Eowyn is basically an orphan, though practically adopted by her uncle, King Theoden of Rohan. Rohan's diminishing honor and her own pride and willfulness combine to make her rather resentful. She longs for glory and, when Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli come to Edoras, thinks the easiest way to get it is through marriage to Aragorn, heir to the throne of Gondor.

     Eowyn isn't necessarily one of my favorite characters in The Lord of the Rings, but she is very well-done. The reason I don't like her is because she's so brilliantly cold. All you see of her is ice until the end of The Return of the King. I very much doubt that she ever loved anything in Aragorn except his renown, and I love the change in her Faramir, Captain of Gondor, creates.

     Forgive me if this sketch of Eowyn is rather short, but while she is characterized well, she's is almost nothing more than what I said above: cold, longing for fame, wishing her demeaning position in the King's house would vanish. 

     Eowyn's advice to writers: Well, Faramir had relationship problems. To some point, Eowyn does too, but not in so easily seen a form as the Captain of Gondor does. She thought horrible things of her people to the darkness. Faults don't always have to be so obvious . . . it isn't until the first half of The Return of the King that you really get the full depth of Eowyn's resentment. Secondary characters get to be mysterious :)

     "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?" (Gandalf, The Return of the King: Book Five)