The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 765-767

In my last piece on this blog I touched on the words of Éowyn that I want to think more about this week.

“What do you fear, lady?” Aragorn asks her. And Éowyn replies:

“A cage,” she said. “To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”

It is worth remembering here that The Lord of the Rings was published in the early 1950s and largely written during the late 30s and the 1940s. In other words before the modern women’s movement of the 1960s and beyond. The ideal world of a certain form of conservatism is one in which women largely remain in the home caring for their men and their children. It is one in which my mother had to give up her nursing career in England when she married in 1953. The modern nursing profession in England was created by Florence Nightingale in the mid 19th century and modelled upon a monastic style vocation in which women would give their entire life to nursing without the distraction of home and family. I remember my mother saying when she was particularly cross with the behaviour of myself and my four younger brothers and sisters, “If it were not for you I would be a matron (the senior nurse in an English hospital and a very powerful figure) now!”

So it is worth noting these words that Éowyn speaks in that particular context, the context of Tolkien’s world before the 1960s. She wants to go with the soldiers into battle. She tires of her responsibility as keeper of the hearth for the men until they return. Aragorn speaks truly when he reminds her that a deed that no-one notices is no less noble than one that is seen and praised by all. But Éowyn is no less true when she makes this reply.

“All your words are 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.”

I do not want to think here about the question of whether the role of a women in either public affairs, (in Éowyn’s case, in the world of battle at a time of national crisis), or domestic affairs, (in Éowyn’s case, her responsibility to lead the women of her people as they watch over homes and families so that their men will have something to return to after battle is done), is more noble in one case than another. Clearly Aragorn is saying to her that her domestic role is just as honourable than any role that she might play in battle and in one sense that is true. The creation of an hospitable home is a wonderful thing as anyone who has experienced one will attest to and perhaps our deepest longing is to find rest within such a home after the trials of life. In Tolkien’s legendarium we might think of Rivendell as such a place, The Last Homely House, as Tolkien named it in The Hobbit. As Sam puts it when he and Frodo return there after their adventures for a brief stay, “We’ve been far and seen a deal, and yet I don’t think we’ve seen a better place than this.” (The Return of the King p. 964) There is a constant dialogue within The Lord of the Rings between deeds done beyond the domestic sphere and the places of shelter and hospitality within the story. Perhaps one comment that I might add is that the great places of hospitality are the shared responsibility of both women and men, of Arwen and Elrond, of Goldberry and Tom Bombadil, and at the end of the story of both Rosie Cotton and Sam Gamgee. And in the great battle of the Pelennor Fields great deeds are done, both by men and women, as we shall see.

But although Éowyn speaks bitterly about her feeling of being caged within one set of expectations and denied access to another, the most important thing she speaks of here is her own desire. And at this point in her story what she knows of herself is her fear. Her fear of living a caged life, and especially her fear of living within a degraded cage, “a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor among their dogs”. (The Fellowship of the King p. 849)

Éowyn knows what she fears. She also thinks that she knows what might free her from those fears as we shall consider in the next piece, but I would say that at this point she does not know what she truly wants, what she desires more deeply than anything else. But then for each one of us that is one of the hardest journeys of all. The journey into our hearts in order to discover what we truly desire.