![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ljwritesI still remember my huge disappointment with The Lord of the Rings back when I was a wee thing of fourteen. In fact it might have been the biggest disappointment of my young life, which should tell you something about the kind of sheltered life I led.
Lord of the Rings was my favorite book in my teenage years, and my favorite character in the book was Éowyn. My bitter disappointment came when she decided to lay down the sword after the war. In her own words:
My fourteen-year-old self was in total WTF mode. It felt like a betrayal: How could Tolkien create such a kick-ass heroine and then have her give up everything that made her awesome just because she settled on her second-choice man? (The fact that Faramir was my favorite male character mollified me only slightly.) I fumed at Tolkien's temerity at making such a blatantly sexist move.
It wasn't until several more rereadings (what can I say, it was my favorite book) and a couple more years that I realized Tolkien hadn't made a sexist choice with Éowyn, or if he had, he was just as "sexist" with the male characters. The hero of the story, Frodo, loves his books and meals better than any valor in battle, and in fact his renown came not from any physical prowess in battle but from a selfless renunciation of ultimate power and glory. The same goes for Sam, again no great hero in the conventional sense of social power and physical might. Even the more conventionally heroic characters, at least the sympathetic ones such such as Gandalf, Aragorn, and Faramir, speak more than once of how they long for the war to end so the world can return to simple everyday pleasures and the pursuit of beauty and knowledge.
The message is the same each time: True heroes are heroes by necessity and not desire. If you crave power and glory for their own sakes (Sauron, Gollum, Boromir before he came to his senses) that lust will be your downfall.
For all its epic depictions of war, then, Lord of the Rings is really a very anti-war book at heart, acknowledging heroism while mourning the need for it. Éowyn was simply one of many characters who exemplified this theme when she chose to affirm life rather than end it, now that the need for killing was over. Once I came to this realization my love for the character returned, and my respect for Tolkien as a writer grew.
More recently, an extremely interesting discussion with the ever-awesome attackfish, reminded me of my change of heart on Éowyn's choice and got me thinking about the nature of heroism. Attackfish made the point in the linked thread that it's rare to see mothers in heroic roles in fantasy. What specifically interested me, though, were her words in this comment that "doing heroic things takes you away from your kids." That struck me as strange, because isn't there an amazing amount of heroism in raising kids? Parenting requires sacrifice, patience, and personal growth, which I think we can all agree are heroic traits.
Attackfish points out that part of this dichotomy is due to the nature of domesticity, which doesn't have a beginning and an end amenable to storytelling. That's true, but I also think stories exist where we look for them. The repetitiveness of domestic life can be mind-numbing, yes, but the interminable routine of war is agony (or so say those who've been through it). Yet despite its boredom and nonsensical repetition, no one said war doesn't make for good story. Storytelling is a matter of selection and crafting; just as writing a war story doesn't mean you detail every single patrol and every off-hour spent killing time, writing about domesticity doesn't require the story to descend into repetitiveness.
The specific stories that media, particularly fantasy, choose to tell about heroism, then, are a matter of choice rather than the inherent nature of subject matter. And the common choice in the genre is often to construe heroism as the capacity to bring one's will to bear against an external threat, i.e. violence and social power. Characters without such physical, supernatural, or social power are often victims, support characters, or backdrops.
This tendency may explain the curious absence of mothers in fantasy media, who tend to be dead and/or irrelevant. Mothers, after all, are expected to have primary responsibilities in the home and thus are seen to be separate from the dominant narrative of heroism in the genre. Fathers pass on the family name (another important motif in fantasy), connections, and often training, but mothers more often seem to be passive vessels who perpetuate the all-important male lineage and provide care and nurturing, then die or fade away from the story.
Maybe the solution is equality or inversion, to put women in the roles that men traditionally played. We can have matriarchal societies with women warriors, and maybe fathers can be nurturers who more often than not die off to provide character motivation for the kids.
Am I the only one who finds the idea unsatisfying, though? All it does is tell the exact same stories as before, except now women are just the same as men, just as good at violence or better, just as socially powerful or maybe more so. It's the same narrative of violence, power, and privilege, except now the women play the same power-based role as men. That seems to me the mistake of perpetuating the same untenable structure, just with a different set of plumbing installed.
In real life, getting out of that trap means examining the social attitudes that predominate, e.g. that working outside the home is innately superior to raising children. In fantasy and other media, it means scrutinizing the stories we tell and discovering the assumptions behind them, one of which is that violence and power are cooler than being a nurturer.
Let's think about situations where a conventionally heroic situation involving violence might take a person away from the family. First there are crisis situations where fighting is necessary to fend off active threats, whether it's the dark forces of Mordor or the Taliban in Afghanistan. In these cases there's no real division between this kind of heroism and family life: defending the family and community necessitates violence, and being away from the home is not really a choice but part of community life.
Second, what about non-crisis situations where there is no threat to the family or community? What if a young mother or father decided to become a mercenary to participate in foreign conflicts that did not affect their country or community, not out of economic necessity or duty but because they found it personally fulfilling to fight and kill people? In this case there's a clear division between the heroic and normal lives, but I don't think most people would call my hypothetical woman or man a hero. At best they'd be called a glory-seeker, an adrenaline junkie, or a maladjusted individual running from their personal issues and responsibilities.
Most real-life cases fall somewhere in between, i.e. there is some social need or a possible threat, but people disagree on how great it is or who should step up to fill the gap. The motivation of the person leaving the family, whether physically or emotionally, would be in dispute: Is this person a noble member of the community, or someone who's just in it because they can't deal with life any other way? This is the stuff of much excellent drama (Jimmy McNulty from The Wire comes to mind).
These three hypotheticals tell us something about the nature of heroism. Those who are in it to assuage personal issues, to stoke their egos, or for the thrills are going through the motions of heroism, but few would call them truly heroic. They would be called vainglorious at best and antisocial and worst. Heroism, even in the narrow sense of being good at physical feats of violence, requires the moral and communal component of necessity to preserve or serve the community.
This brings me back to Éowyn, because her story isn't only about the choice to wield a sword or not. That's not even the main point, really, because if she ever ran into immediate danger you can bet your boxed DVD set she'll bring out those Nazgûl-slaying chops in an instant. The much deeper story of Éowyn is about motivation and the nature of heroism.
Faramir, for one, attributes her desire for Aragorn's love and her decision to ride covertly with Théoden to one driving motivation of grandiosity. In his words:
And lest you think he's being too harsh, here are Éowyn's own words:
Here she makes her scorn clear for what she sees as service that is beneath her. To Éowyn, raised in a warrior culture that exalts feats in battle above caring and service, to be relegated to a nurturing role was a fate literally worse than death. This is reflected in her response to Aragorn when he asked her what she feared:
Much like the dominant narrative of fantasy media, Éowyn saw a sharp division between the great deeds of renown and the "cage" of service in everyday, mundane life. Similarly, her crush on Aragorn was born of her fear of the mundane and the shining deliverance she sought in the extraordinary and the remarkable. Faramir names this desire for glory to be her motivation for wanting Aragorn's love (as opposed to actually loving Aragorn), and given her character at the time I'm inclined to agree.
Okay. Sure. Self-serving and vainglorious she might have been, you might protest, but that doesn't make her any less a hero so suck it, Luna!
Éowyn is a hero, no doubt about it. But was it her desire for glory that made her one? That might be what drove her to abandon her people and ride to the battlefield, but why was she the only one who seemed immune to the Nazgûl-inspired terror to defy the Ringwraith? Look at the passage:
I highly doubt Éowyn was the only warrior among the Rohirrim with a death wish and a lust for glory. It might have been chance that her horse had thrown her and Merry near the Witch-King, limiting their ability to run away, but I doubt it was poor horsemanship that bore the personal guard of the King of the Rohirrim, a people famed for their skill with horses, away from the king they had sworn to defend. You think these men haven't been falling or jumping from horses since before they could walk? If these knights were mastered by their steeds' madness it wasn't the horses' terror that overwhelmed them but their own, and I don't blame them one bit. We're not talking about normal fear but an existential and supernatural terror, and the usual motivations for overcoming fear no longer applied.
So what gave Éowyn that kind of nearly superhuman courage? It says right there in the text: She was faithful beyond fear, and loved Théoden as a father. Where appeals to glory and duty faltered, love stepped up to prove itself stronger than fear and mightier than death. You can bet that a large part of Éowyn's bitterness at being a "dry-nurse" (someone who takes care of children but does not nurse them) had to do with having to tend to her elderly uncle for so long, yet the very ties of family and community she had despised gave her the bravery to face down unbearable horror.
This, to me, is the essence of heroism, the bonds of love that make us greater than unfettered freedom ever could. It can be in the form of taking up a sword, a gun, dirty dishes, or a diaper,* but in the end it's about service rendered to something greater than one's self, whether it be country, family, or friendship. True heroism, in other words, is the willingness to give of one's self for love.
* In fact, rereading the exchange between Éowyn and the Nazgûl, it seems to me the closest real-life equivalent isn't so much the mess and confusion of physical battle but a determined fight against a loved one's illness. Try reading it with that metaphorical lens, it's really interesting.
The linchpin moment when it all came together for Éowyn might have been when she stood with Faramir at Minas Anor, but I think the bulk of her development happened earlier, at Pelennor and at the Houses of Healing. Faramir was a part of her story, sure, but I don't think she could have accepted his feelings if she were the same woman who sought the freedom of death and glory rather than the bonds of life and duty. If her outlook had not already changed, she would have felt herself diminished in settling for a steward when she had wanted a king. She also would not have understood the value of Faramir's honesty and vulnerability with her in laying out his feelings in full without any games. Nor would she have seen the worth of his unconditional acceptance in seeing all her flaws and mixed motivations yet loving her all the same.**
**This is kind of honesty and acceptance in relationships are classic secure attachment behavior, colloquially known as being "a keeper."
Only when she saw past the labels king and steward, of renown and ignomy, could she see the value in giving and receiving love rather than trying to be some fixed concept of greatness. Being herself in the context of her relationships, Éowyn the niece who was willing to die for her uncle, turned out to be the route to the renown she had wanted so much. And ironically, that acclaim no longer mattered to her because in realizing what was most important in her life she no longer had to chase other people's ideas of what made her more or less worthy of being remembered and praised.
In many ways Éowyn's journey is my own, and that of many others who went from self-importance to self-acceptance. Physical and social power may overlap with but can't be the entirety of heroism, which is in the end the willingness to be bound and to serve. The word "hero," after all, shares a root with "serve," and "heroism" means courage exhibited in fulfilling a high purpose or attaining a noble end. And the question of what makes for a high purpose or noble end is one we have to answer throughout our lives as tellers and consumers of story--that is to say, as human beings.
Lord of the Rings was my favorite book in my teenage years, and my favorite character in the book was Éowyn. My bitter disappointment came when she decided to lay down the sword after the war. In her own words:
"I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren."(The Return of the King Book VI, Chapter 5: The Steward and the King)
My fourteen-year-old self was in total WTF mode. It felt like a betrayal: How could Tolkien create such a kick-ass heroine and then have her give up everything that made her awesome just because she settled on her second-choice man? (The fact that Faramir was my favorite male character mollified me only slightly.) I fumed at Tolkien's temerity at making such a blatantly sexist move.
It wasn't until several more rereadings (what can I say, it was my favorite book) and a couple more years that I realized Tolkien hadn't made a sexist choice with Éowyn, or if he had, he was just as "sexist" with the male characters. The hero of the story, Frodo, loves his books and meals better than any valor in battle, and in fact his renown came not from any physical prowess in battle but from a selfless renunciation of ultimate power and glory. The same goes for Sam, again no great hero in the conventional sense of social power and physical might. Even the more conventionally heroic characters, at least the sympathetic ones such such as Gandalf, Aragorn, and Faramir, speak more than once of how they long for the war to end so the world can return to simple everyday pleasures and the pursuit of beauty and knowledge.
The message is the same each time: True heroes are heroes by necessity and not desire. If you crave power and glory for their own sakes (Sauron, Gollum, Boromir before he came to his senses) that lust will be your downfall.
For all its epic depictions of war, then, Lord of the Rings is really a very anti-war book at heart, acknowledging heroism while mourning the need for it. Éowyn was simply one of many characters who exemplified this theme when she chose to affirm life rather than end it, now that the need for killing was over. Once I came to this realization my love for the character returned, and my respect for Tolkien as a writer grew.
More recently, an extremely interesting discussion with the ever-awesome attackfish, reminded me of my change of heart on Éowyn's choice and got me thinking about the nature of heroism. Attackfish made the point in the linked thread that it's rare to see mothers in heroic roles in fantasy. What specifically interested me, though, were her words in this comment that "doing heroic things takes you away from your kids." That struck me as strange, because isn't there an amazing amount of heroism in raising kids? Parenting requires sacrifice, patience, and personal growth, which I think we can all agree are heroic traits.
Attackfish points out that part of this dichotomy is due to the nature of domesticity, which doesn't have a beginning and an end amenable to storytelling. That's true, but I also think stories exist where we look for them. The repetitiveness of domestic life can be mind-numbing, yes, but the interminable routine of war is agony (or so say those who've been through it). Yet despite its boredom and nonsensical repetition, no one said war doesn't make for good story. Storytelling is a matter of selection and crafting; just as writing a war story doesn't mean you detail every single patrol and every off-hour spent killing time, writing about domesticity doesn't require the story to descend into repetitiveness.
The specific stories that media, particularly fantasy, choose to tell about heroism, then, are a matter of choice rather than the inherent nature of subject matter. And the common choice in the genre is often to construe heroism as the capacity to bring one's will to bear against an external threat, i.e. violence and social power. Characters without such physical, supernatural, or social power are often victims, support characters, or backdrops.
This tendency may explain the curious absence of mothers in fantasy media, who tend to be dead and/or irrelevant. Mothers, after all, are expected to have primary responsibilities in the home and thus are seen to be separate from the dominant narrative of heroism in the genre. Fathers pass on the family name (another important motif in fantasy), connections, and often training, but mothers more often seem to be passive vessels who perpetuate the all-important male lineage and provide care and nurturing, then die or fade away from the story.
Maybe the solution is equality or inversion, to put women in the roles that men traditionally played. We can have matriarchal societies with women warriors, and maybe fathers can be nurturers who more often than not die off to provide character motivation for the kids.
Am I the only one who finds the idea unsatisfying, though? All it does is tell the exact same stories as before, except now women are just the same as men, just as good at violence or better, just as socially powerful or maybe more so. It's the same narrative of violence, power, and privilege, except now the women play the same power-based role as men. That seems to me the mistake of perpetuating the same untenable structure, just with a different set of plumbing installed.
In real life, getting out of that trap means examining the social attitudes that predominate, e.g. that working outside the home is innately superior to raising children. In fantasy and other media, it means scrutinizing the stories we tell and discovering the assumptions behind them, one of which is that violence and power are cooler than being a nurturer.
Let's think about situations where a conventionally heroic situation involving violence might take a person away from the family. First there are crisis situations where fighting is necessary to fend off active threats, whether it's the dark forces of Mordor or the Taliban in Afghanistan. In these cases there's no real division between this kind of heroism and family life: defending the family and community necessitates violence, and being away from the home is not really a choice but part of community life.
Second, what about non-crisis situations where there is no threat to the family or community? What if a young mother or father decided to become a mercenary to participate in foreign conflicts that did not affect their country or community, not out of economic necessity or duty but because they found it personally fulfilling to fight and kill people? In this case there's a clear division between the heroic and normal lives, but I don't think most people would call my hypothetical woman or man a hero. At best they'd be called a glory-seeker, an adrenaline junkie, or a maladjusted individual running from their personal issues and responsibilities.
Most real-life cases fall somewhere in between, i.e. there is some social need or a possible threat, but people disagree on how great it is or who should step up to fill the gap. The motivation of the person leaving the family, whether physically or emotionally, would be in dispute: Is this person a noble member of the community, or someone who's just in it because they can't deal with life any other way? This is the stuff of much excellent drama (Jimmy McNulty from The Wire comes to mind).
These three hypotheticals tell us something about the nature of heroism. Those who are in it to assuage personal issues, to stoke their egos, or for the thrills are going through the motions of heroism, but few would call them truly heroic. They would be called vainglorious at best and antisocial and worst. Heroism, even in the narrow sense of being good at physical feats of violence, requires the moral and communal component of necessity to preserve or serve the community.
This brings me back to Éowyn, because her story isn't only about the choice to wield a sword or not. That's not even the main point, really, because if she ever ran into immediate danger you can bet your boxed DVD set she'll bring out those Nazgûl-slaying chops in an instant. The much deeper story of Éowyn is about motivation and the nature of heroism.
Faramir, for one, attributes her desire for Aragorn's love and her decision to ride covertly with Théoden to one driving motivation of grandiosity. In his words:
"You [Éowyn] desired to have to have the love of the Lord Aragorn. Because he was high and puissant, and you wished to have renown and glory and to be lifted far above the mean things that crawl on the earth. And as a great captain may to a young soldier he seemed to you admirable. . . . But when he gave you only understanding and pity, then you desired to have nothing, unless a brave death in battle."(The Return of the King Book VI, Chapter 5: The Steward and the King)
And lest you think he's being too harsh, here are Éowyn's own words:
"Too often have I heard of duty. But am I not of the House of Eorl, a shieldmaiden and not a dry-nurse? I have waited on faltering feet long enough. Since they falter no longer, it seems, may I not now spend my life as I will?"(The Return of the King Book V, Chapter 2: The Passing of the Grey Company)
Here she makes her scorn clear for what she sees as service that is beneath her. To Éowyn, raised in a warrior culture that exalts feats in battle above caring and service, to be relegated to a nurturing role was a fate literally worse than death. This is reflected in her response to Aragorn when he asked her what she feared:
"A cage. To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recalls or desire."
Much like the dominant narrative of fantasy media, Éowyn saw a sharp division between the great deeds of renown and the "cage" of service in everyday, mundane life. Similarly, her crush on Aragorn was born of her fear of the mundane and the shining deliverance she sought in the extraordinary and the remarkable. Faramir names this desire for glory to be her motivation for wanting Aragorn's love (as opposed to actually loving Aragorn), and given her character at the time I'm inclined to agree.
Okay. Sure. Self-serving and vainglorious she might have been, you might protest, but that doesn't make her any less a hero so suck it, Luna!
Éowyn is a hero, no doubt about it. But was it her desire for glory that made her one? That might be what drove her to abandon her people and ride to the battlefield, but why was she the only one who seemed immune to the Nazgûl-inspired terror to defy the Ringwraith? Look at the passage:
The knights of [Théoden's] house lay slain about him, or else mastered by the madness of their steeds were borne far away. Yet one stood there still: Dernhelm the young, faithful beyond fear; and he wept, for he had loved his lord as a father.(The Return of the King Book V, Chapter 6: The Battle of the Pelennor Fields, emphasis mine)
I highly doubt Éowyn was the only warrior among the Rohirrim with a death wish and a lust for glory. It might have been chance that her horse had thrown her and Merry near the Witch-King, limiting their ability to run away, but I doubt it was poor horsemanship that bore the personal guard of the King of the Rohirrim, a people famed for their skill with horses, away from the king they had sworn to defend. You think these men haven't been falling or jumping from horses since before they could walk? If these knights were mastered by their steeds' madness it wasn't the horses' terror that overwhelmed them but their own, and I don't blame them one bit. We're not talking about normal fear but an existential and supernatural terror, and the usual motivations for overcoming fear no longer applied.
So what gave Éowyn that kind of nearly superhuman courage? It says right there in the text: She was faithful beyond fear, and loved Théoden as a father. Where appeals to glory and duty faltered, love stepped up to prove itself stronger than fear and mightier than death. You can bet that a large part of Éowyn's bitterness at being a "dry-nurse" (someone who takes care of children but does not nurse them) had to do with having to tend to her elderly uncle for so long, yet the very ties of family and community she had despised gave her the bravery to face down unbearable horror.
This, to me, is the essence of heroism, the bonds of love that make us greater than unfettered freedom ever could. It can be in the form of taking up a sword, a gun, dirty dishes, or a diaper,* but in the end it's about service rendered to something greater than one's self, whether it be country, family, or friendship. True heroism, in other words, is the willingness to give of one's self for love.
* In fact, rereading the exchange between Éowyn and the Nazgûl, it seems to me the closest real-life equivalent isn't so much the mess and confusion of physical battle but a determined fight against a loved one's illness. Try reading it with that metaphorical lens, it's really interesting.
The linchpin moment when it all came together for Éowyn might have been when she stood with Faramir at Minas Anor, but I think the bulk of her development happened earlier, at Pelennor and at the Houses of Healing. Faramir was a part of her story, sure, but I don't think she could have accepted his feelings if she were the same woman who sought the freedom of death and glory rather than the bonds of life and duty. If her outlook had not already changed, she would have felt herself diminished in settling for a steward when she had wanted a king. She also would not have understood the value of Faramir's honesty and vulnerability with her in laying out his feelings in full without any games. Nor would she have seen the worth of his unconditional acceptance in seeing all her flaws and mixed motivations yet loving her all the same.**
**This is kind of honesty and acceptance in relationships are classic secure attachment behavior, colloquially known as being "a keeper."
Only when she saw past the labels king and steward, of renown and ignomy, could she see the value in giving and receiving love rather than trying to be some fixed concept of greatness. Being herself in the context of her relationships, Éowyn the niece who was willing to die for her uncle, turned out to be the route to the renown she had wanted so much. And ironically, that acclaim no longer mattered to her because in realizing what was most important in her life she no longer had to chase other people's ideas of what made her more or less worthy of being remembered and praised.
In many ways Éowyn's journey is my own, and that of many others who went from self-importance to self-acceptance. Physical and social power may overlap with but can't be the entirety of heroism, which is in the end the willingness to be bound and to serve. The word "hero," after all, shares a root with "serve," and "heroism" means courage exhibited in fulfilling a high purpose or attaining a noble end. And the question of what makes for a high purpose or noble end is one we have to answer throughout our lives as tellers and consumers of story--that is to say, as human beings.
