Quote:
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There is something about a woman's quiet, lonely passing that highlights how much the priorities of history are skewed.
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In favour of the heroic, loud, vivid, tabloid-worthy deaths of men, of course, whilst often leaving out the fact that a forgotten life and a lonely death also heroic precisely because there is nobody to immortalize them (of course, that's not to say that I don't enjoy reading of the heroic, loud, vivid, tabloid-worthy deaths of men, or am ungrateful for their sacrficies, in war, in defense of something or someone, et cetera).
This why Tolkien's description of Arwen's death resonated so much with me. He wrote about what is rarely mentioned.
Not that I mind. Most of "history is written by those who hang heroes" anyway, or so Mel would have me believe.
George Eliot has a wonderful quotation that would do Arwen justice, I think:
...the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.