Love Letter to Eowyn
Preface: I haven’t read the Lord of the Rings books, but I have seen the movies many, many times and read the relevant Wikipedia pages. Tolkien nuts, please don’t get mad at me if I’m wrong/oversimplifying.
You may have noticed that, since The Hobbit came out in theaters, I’ve been a huddled mass of Lord of the Rings feelings. That is because the Lord of the Rings trilogy is the greatest non-Star Wars thing in the world. The series is just a puzzle in which every piece is a fantastic character driven by a different objective.
Frodo wants to destroy the One Ring for a great many reasons, the most poignant of which is that he knows it’s the right thing to do, despite how deeply he wishes he didn’t have to do it.
Aragorn wants to save Middle Earth from evil but without receiving credit for doing so, because he wants to redeem the name that he inherited from a man whose greed condemned Middle Earth in the first place.
Pippin wants to mean something in a good way and do right by everyone, no matter how despicable some people are, because he has had such a small life in the Shire that he desires to handle big things with the same grace that he handles small things (he’s not always graceful, per se, but he is good).
Elrond wants to preserve his people, especially his daughter, but he also wants to help Middle Earth, because he knows that the time of the elves is ending, but men are also important and deserve to live to their time too.
Saruman hitches his wagon to the wrong Giant Flaming Eye because he wants power and feels that he knows how to use it, and also he doesn’t want to die, which seems simple but is not a bad motivation.
There are so many others who are incredibly fascinating in their own right- don’t you even get me started on Samwise Gamgee- but there’s one character in particular that I want to write about here.
Eowyn.
Eowyn is a shieldmaiden of Rohan, the niece of King Theoden. When we first meet her in The Two Towers, her life is the worst. She is stuck in the palace at Edoras, trying to keep the kingdom in one piece as her uncle rots (literally, guys) under the bad juju of evil wizard Saruman and his crony, the Snape/Pettigrew hybrid Grima Wormtongue. Her brother Eomer has just been banished, her cousin Theodred has just died, and Wormtongue, despite his romantically inauspicious name, will not stop hitting on her. Basically her only solace at this point is that she has really, really great hair, and on the solace meter, that’s pretty low.
But everything changes when a band of four rides into town: A white wizard (Gandalf), a ruddy dwarf (Gimli), a well-groomed elf (Legolas), and a scruffy-lookin’ ranger-who-would-be-king (Aragorn). These four get the nasty spirit out of Theoden, kick Wormtongue outta Dodge/Rohan, and generally improve Eowyn’s life by about 98.7% in less than half an hour. Gandalf is preoccupied with the big and important questions of Middle Earth, Gimli is like a fun uncle (or funcle), Legolas is an elf and therefore embedded to his very core with better-than-youness, but Aragorn…
Well, Aragorn takes some time out of his main activity (bringing ConflictedSexy back) to cross swords and wits with Eowyn. It’s clear from their first real encounter that he respects her a lot, and he’s not really going anywhere. Plus, he’s so ConflictedSexy. (Please don’t read that as sarcasm. It wasn’t.) So it comes to pass that Eowyn falls maybe a little or a lot in love with Aragorn.
Now, if you wouldn’t mind, please step out of the story with me for a moment to travel back in time with me. The Return of the King came out in 2003. I discovered (read: was finally allowed to watch) these movies in 2002. Since I entered middle school in August of 2003, these were pretty much my main obsession all throughout junior high. This is important to what’s coming next.
I had a huge fat crush on a boy in junior high. I don’t mean that I liked a boy or dated a boy or whatever. I had a huge. fat. crush on him. If you know me at all, you know who it was. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I just thought that he hung the moon.
Let me state for the record that this was a very. different. Emily. Junior High Emily was the worst, and I have nothing but gratitude for the people who knew her and still choose to be friends with Subsequent Emily.
I’ve said that Junior High Emily did two things: judged people, and liked this boy too much. Fortunately, I am pretty sure I have mostly grown out of the first (call me on it if I haven’t) and I know that I have grown out of the second (though it took a while).
The other part of this that’s important is that Huge Fat Crush Boy (or, as I shall now shorthand him, HFCB) did not feel the same way. That’s okay. That happens. A lot. To everyone. At one point or another.
Doesn’t mean it was fun.
To be honest, liking someone who doesn’t like you back is the actual worst. I’m not going to go into it in too much depth, because you can pretty much just watch The Holiday and get what I’m talking about, in much better wording, plus Kate Winslet. Mostly what sucks about it is that it makes you feel all weak and stuff, because there’s nothing you can do about it. If something in my life sucks, then I want to take steps to make it better. That’s the kind of person I am. But when you like someone who doesn’t like you, there are no steps to be taken. You can’t stop liking the person, or else you would. And you can’t make them like you, because why would you want to be with someone if you have to force them to like you? That’s not fun for anybody. So you just kind of sit there, like a sponge of sadness, which is what I did for a good portion of middle school.
Re-enter Eowyn.
I owe so much to Eowyn.
While I was sitting there like a sadness sponge, I watched Lord of the Rings. Eowyn was my favorite character pre-HFCB, but upon rewatching, I saw something that I hadn’t seen before. Yes, Eowyn is cool and beautiful and smart and tough and independent and brave and wonderful. But she was also like me. She loved Aragorn (not that HFCB was Aragorn, mind you, nor was I Eowyn. It’s a loose analogy), and despite all of these great things about her, Aragorn did not love her back. Did that make her weaker or dumber or even a sadness sponge?
NO.
Because Eowyn, while sad, didn’t just sit and pine and pine and pine. She got out there and rode horses and fought battles and inspired people and even proved that women can do things! She was still subject to unrequited love, but she wasn’t a victim of it! In fact (spoiler alert, although if you haven’t seen Return of the King yet then what are you even doing with your life), there is this King Bad Guy Creature called the Witch-king of Angmar, who thinks that he is invincible because a 1000-year-old prophecy by the Elf-lord Glorfindel says that he will not die “by the hand of man.” In the movie, when he meets Eowyn on the battlefield, he hisses, “You fool, no man can kill me.” Eowyn pulls off her helmet, her hair tumbles down, she roars, “I AM NO MAN,” and then STABS THE WITCH-KING IN THE FACE.
Actually, in the movie, she roars, “I AM NO MAN.” In the book, her speech is considerably longer and surprisingly even more awesome:
“But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.”
Of course, the Witch-king dies, because bad guys never consider potential loopholes in prophecies, and Eowyn cements herself as the coolest ever. And all of this while being head-over-heels for a great guy who doesn’t love her!
And then, after the battle and the healing and the restoring and the inspirational music, Eowyn does the most important thing: she moves on. She gets up one morning and suddenly she loves Aragorn a little less, and the next morning it’s lesser still, until one day it’s all just gone! Eventually, she falls in love with one of the other fantastic men in Middle-Earth, Faramir (who overcomes the literal worst father in the history of literature to become a pretty great dude) and together they presumably have really excellent, beautiful, brave children, and make Middle-Earth a better place. Eowyn has a future after the Huge Fat Crush Era (Era-gorn?). And- shockingly enough- so did I!
Thankfully, my days of all-consuming crushes on boys are gone (well, almost gone: love me, Tom Hiddleston), but I don’t know if I would have made it through them in one piece if not for the shining example of Eowyn.
I guess what I’m saying here is, don’t ever let someone tell you “it’s just a fictional character!”
Sometimes, fictional characters can be the ones that help the most.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch a gif of Aragorn opening some doors. What? A girl can dream!