Hope-lessly in love

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

To my mind, Éowyn's "love" for Aragorn is similar in character to Romeo's love for Rosaline: she loves the idea of him as a dashing warrior prince, but Arwen loves the man himself, regardless of who he might be in the world. You tell me which is the more likely to be requited.

As I see it, Éowyn is looking for someone to rescue her from the drudgery of life in Meduseld. She feels trapped by Théoden's dependency and longs for the freedom she enjoyed before the King began to ail; but she can't think what to do about it. Who should come along as she's feeling this way but the closest thing that Middle-earth could have to a film star? Here's a man who can take her away from it all: how can she help but think she loves him?

What Tolkien does with this situation is a beautiful piece of ironic satire: instead of sweeping the heroine off into the sunset as she expects, Prince Charming borrows her uncle's horse and leaves again, pausing only to brush off her most unconventional advance. Then we have the truly modern part, where she runs off to war at the instigation of her injured pride, only to find herself in the Houses of Healing, suddenly a war hero in her own right and with no need of any man to rescue her from anything. It's no coincidence that it's then, when she's won her own freedom and been tempered by sorrows more serious than that of rejection, that she finds comfort and support in a deepening friendship with another wounded hero, who has also lost a lot in the war.

I see the main message of this story as being that however badly you want something it won't always come to you, and that sometimes what we want isn't really what's good for us anyway. In the end, Aragorn's rejection works out for the best: Éowyn ends up in a social position that affords her the freedom she needs, and in a marriage of equals, where each spouse compliments and supports the other; but if she had got what she wanted, as I have said elsewhere, the results would have been disastrous; both for herself and for everyone else.

As for Tennyson's comment: it doesn't really refer to Éowyn: he was talking about a situation where two people are in love and one loses the other, whereas the Lady of Rohan never even knows the man who rejects her, and certainly has no reason to expect him to return her feelings. Even so, Tennyson's famous phrase doesn't quite ring true: perhaps to lose a loved one to death is less terrible than never to have met them, but there are other ways in which to lose that I'm not sure he had experienced. His words have a glib smugness about them that only the Victorians really mastered, but what more can we expect from the poet who wrote heroic verse about one of the greatest blunders in British military history?

[ September 04, 2002: Message edited by: Squatter of Amon Rudh ]