*TTT - Éowyn (Miranda Otto)*

I greatly enjoyed Eowyn in the movies . . . but! But she wasn't really, in my opinion, the Eowyn of the books. That Eowyn was cold and fair, like a pale spring that has not yet come to womanhood (quote), stern and hard, and when Merry sees her cry once, it seems all the more terrible to him that such a stern and cold woman should cry. Miranda Otto herself admitted that she felt like she was crying all the time in the movies. I think that Eowyn as Miranda played her was a visualization of the unseen inner life of Tolkien's character. She was rather Spockish: feeling much but hiding most of it. Miranda's Eowyn hid nothing. Also, most of Miranda's Eowyn's inner struggle, as it were, was centered around her love/infatuation for Aragorn, while with the book Eowyn, that was only part of her problem. The whole point of Gandalf's words about her in the Houses of Healing (which Grima says in the movie) <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:<HR> But who knows what she spoke in the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all hre life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>were to illustrate that Grima's spell had fallen quite as much on her as on Theoden: <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:<HR> Think you that Wormtongue had poison only for Theoden's ears? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> and that had nothing to do with Aragorn. <BR>Do not think that I am disparaging Miranda Otto's playing of the character. I think she was magnificent, and though I was highly annoyed by Eowyn unconsciously trying to shove in on the woman Aragorn loved, I liked the movie character. (She gave me some great ideas for a story I am writing and which I will soon post on the Barrow-downs fan fiction site.) It was just not wholly consistent with the book character, probably to make her more appealing to the average viewer.