[Guinevere]

I started writing this contribution ages ago, but got interrupted at the time, and now I suddenly found the draft gain, so I decided to post it after all. (I don't know if anyone will read this, after all that time... )

This is one of my favourite chapters, since I belong to the category of “Faramir swooners” and am a hopeless romantic. So this beautiful, subtle lovestory appeals very much to me!

Here is something I noticed but nobody here commented on it:
As I read Eowyn’s words to the warden .

“…and those who have not swords can still die upon them.”

I was immediately reminded of the words in the Bible:

“all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”

What Eowyn says sounds almost like a reply to those words as well as to the words of the warden! I cannot believe that Tolkien wasn’t aware of that... What do you think?

I read with interest the discussion about Eowyn “forsaking her previous identity” and “diminishing” by marrying Faramir and becoming a healer.

Originally posted by Davem:
My reading is different. It seems to me she becomes a warrior because she cannot see any other way out of her situation. She ends up happily married to a man she loves, with a fulfilling, creative role. What is the alternative - would you prefer that she continued living on the battlefield, killing orcs & probably dying at the hands of one of them, bleeding her life away into the mud?

Eowyn the Shieldmaiden is a great character to read about, but if you put yourself in her place, what's so attractive about such a life?

She went to war not because she wanted to fight but because she wanted to die & win some renown in the process, to prove herself 'worthy' in terms of her culture.

What, exactly, does Eowyn 'give up' that's worth having?

I agree very much with what Davem and Lalwendë and Alphaelin have written!

Originally posted by Fordim Hedgethistle:
And I still remember quite vividly my thundering shock when Arwen arrives and Aragorn marries her -- I had no idea from the text that they were engaged. In subsequent readings I see that there are clues, but Tolkien's decision to relegate the love story to the Appendix confounds me. It is a rare case in which -- I think -- his art fails.

Hm, I suspected something between these two when I read about Aragorn’s dreamy behaviour on Cerin Amroth and his words “Arwen vanimelda, Namarië!”
And then I browsed in the Appendices long before finishing the book (I was just too curious ) and read the story of Aragorn and Arwen. So the wedding didn’t come as a surprise to me, but too bad I read the sad ending too!

Originally posted by Lalwendë:
Yes! It's a shame that we do not get to see more of Eowyn, and Faramir for that matter, as both these characters are very complex with real hang-ups and problems, and strong inner personalities which struggle for expression. That's the impression I get, anyway. Whoever says that Tolkien's characters are flat and dull ought to be pointed to look at these two (and, for that matter, Gollum and Frodo).

Yet I know several people who think that Faramir is too perfect, that he isn’t believable because he seems to have no flaws… (This was PJ’s argument for the alteration of Faramir’s character in the movies as well )
Well, he may be an ideal, but he came very much “alive” for me in the book. So I quite agree with Lalwendë! I think Faramir’s most extraordinary character trait is his perceptiveness and compassion.(Also commented upon by Beregond) He recognizes better than Eowyn herself what is going on in her mind!

I thought it also interesting that he, as a descendant of Númenor, had this recurring nightmare about the great dark wave drowning everything. (And stupid of the scriptwriters to give those words in the movie to Eowyn, in quite a different setting¨)
Even more interesting is what Tolkien writes in one of his letters

from letter #163….I have what some might call an Atlantis complex. Possibly inherited, though my parents died too young for me to know such things about them, and too young to transfer such things by words. Inherited from me (I suppose) by one only of my children, though I did not know that about my son until recently, and he did not know it about me. I mean the terrible recurrent dream (beginning with memory) of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields. (I bequeathed it to Faramir.) I don’t think I have had it since I wrote the “Downfall of Númenor” as the last of the legends of the First and Second Age.