Arwen

Arwen was born in the year 241 of the Third Age, the youngest child and only daughter of Elrond of Rivendell and of Celebrían, daughter of Celeborn and Galadriel. Her elder brothers were the twins Elladan and Elrohir. Through her father she descended from the union of Eärendil the Mariner with Elwing, and so from the three houses of the Edain and from the Elven-kings of Beleriand alike; through her mother she was of the kindred of Lórien and of Doriath. This double inheritance, part Elven and part mortal, was not merely a matter of genealogy in her case: her father belonged to a line that had been granted the right to choose to which people it would belong, and that choice remained open to his children as well. She is counted among the Eldar, and dwelt in Rivendell and in the wood of Lothlórien in turn, among her mother's kin.

Her given name is Sindarin. She bore in addition the name Undómiel, which is rendered in the Common Speech as Evenstar; in the High-elven tongue the word behind it denotes the twilight of evening, the hour when the first stars appear, and the epithet was given to her by her own people rather than taken as a second personal name. The men of the North knew her, when they knew of her at all, by the translated form. Tolkien treats the two names as belonging to different registers: Arwen is what she is called, Undómiel what she is called by those who wish to say what she means to them.

The comparison that follows her through the narrative is with Lúthien Tinúviel, the fairest of the Children of Ilúvatar, from whom she was descended at many removes. Those who saw Arwen in Rivendell held that the likeness of Lúthien had returned upon earth after long ages, and her father said as much of her. The resemblance was understood by the Elves as more than a matter of features: it carried the expectation that her life, too, would run against the ordinary grain of Elvish fate. Beyond such comparisons little is recorded of her early centuries, which she appears to have passed quietly between her father's house and her grandmother's realm; the sources that survive concern themselves almost wholly with what came after.

The first turn in Arwen's life that the chronicles fix by a year concerns her mother. In 2509 of the Third Age Celebrían rode south towards Lothlórien to visit her own kin, and in the high pass beneath Caradhras her company was ambushed; she was taken by orcs and tormented before Elladan and Elrohir found and freed her. Her wound could be healed in body but not in heart, and in the following year, 2510, she went down to the Grey Havens and passed over the Sea, leaving her husband and her three children in Middle-earth. Arwen was then in her twenty-third century of life. Much of the time that followed she appears to have spent in Lórien with Galadriel and Celeborn rather than at Rivendell, so that when Aragorn son of Arathorn was brought to Elrond's house as a child of two in 2933 and reared there under another name, he grew to manhood without ever setting eyes on his foster-father's daughter.

She returned to her father's house shortly before the year 2951, and it was in that year that the two met. Elrond had just told Aragorn, then twenty years old, of his true name and descent, and had given into his keeping the ring of Barahir and the broken shards of Elendil's sword, withholding the sceptre of Annúminas until he should earn it. Walking afterwards in the woods of the valley, Aragorn came upon Arwen and, taking her for the figure out of the lay he had been singing, addressed her by Lúthien's name; she corrected him, though she allowed that her fate might prove not unlike that lady's. His mother Gilraen and then Elrond both warned him off the hope that followed. Elrond's judgement was plainly given: Arwen was of a lineage and an age far beyond his, and she would be no man's bride unless that man wore the crowns of both Gondor and Arnor. Aragorn went out into the wilderness soon after and did not see her again for nearly thirty years.

Through the years of waiting and through the War of the Ring itself she remained in Rivendell, and it is there that she is first shown directly in the narrative, seated beside her father in the hall on the evening of the feast that preceded the Council. She took no part in the journey south, but her hand reached the war by another route. In the winter of 3018 and after, she worked in secret upon a great standard of black cloth, worked with the White Tree, seven stars and a crown in silver, mithril and gems, and gave it to the Rangers of the North when they rode to find Aragorn. Halbarad carried it furled across Rohan and bore it still for him at Dunharrow in March 3019, together with a brief word from her that the time left was short and that either their hope would come now or every hope would end. The banner was unfurled at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, where it declared the returning king to the city.

Arwen came south with Elrond and a great company from Rivendell and from Lórien, reaching Minas Tirith on the eve of Midsummer, 3019; Elrond gave the sceptre of Annúminas to Aragorn and put his daughter's hand in his, and the wedding was held on Midyear's Day. Before the northward company set out again she spoke with Frodo Baggins, telling him that his hurts might not be healed in Middle-earth and offering him what she herself no longer needed: a place on a ship into the West in her stead. With that she gave him a white gem on a chain to wear when the memory of his burden pressed on him. Two years later, in September 3021, Elrond went to the Havens with the Ring-bearers and passed over the Sea, and the parting he had foretold to her took effect.

Arwen holds no office in the narrative and commands nothing. She sits on no council, and is not present at the one held in her father's house; she bears none of the Three Rings; she rules no land of her own before her marriage, and no following, guard or household is ever named as hers. Her weight in the story is dynastic and emblematic rather than active. Appendix A reckons her marriage the third of the unions between the Eldar and the Edain, after Beren with Luthien and Tuor with Idril, and states what that third one accomplished: the two branches of the Half-elven, parted long before when Elrond and Elros chose differently, were joined again, and the line of the kings was restored in the son born of it.

No enchantment, spell or feat of strength is anywhere attributed to her, and the texts make no claim on her behalf that they do not immediately support. What she is credited with is craft, judgement, and foresight of a narrow and practical kind. The great standard she worked in secret over the years of waiting is the only labour of her hands that the chronicles record, and it functions in the story not as a thing of power but as a token: cloth that declares who the man carrying it is, at the moment when that declaration decides matters. The message she sent with it read the state of the war correctly while its outcome was still open. At Minas Tirith she judged, before Frodo had said so himself, that his hurt would not be mended in Middle-earth.

Nearly every tie the sources record for Arwen runs through her father, and Elrond occupies two positions in her life at once. He is the parent whose house she returns to and whose grief she must weigh, and he is also the authority that fixes the terms on which she may be given, and later the one who states what the arrangement will cost her. No third party mediates between them; the relationship is conducted directly and its language is that of conditions and consequences rather than affection, though the affection is not in doubt. Her brothers stand in exactly the position she does — children of the same house, with the same choice held open before them — and it is worth noting that when their father took ship they had not resolved it. That makes Elladan and Elrohir the only figures in the legendarium who face what she faced, yet the narrative never sets the three of them in a scene together. Her mother, by contrast, is absent from the whole span of the recorded story, so that Galadriel is the only kinswoman of an older generation who appears anywhere near her.

The attachment that defines her is remarkable chiefly for how little of it is shown. The sources give two encounters before the pledge and long separations on either side of it, and in the intervals other people speak on the couple's behalf: Aragorn's mother, Elrond, Galadriel, and at the last a Ranger carrying a token and a few words north to south. Arwen's own utterances to Aragorn amount to a handful of exchanges across sixty years. What the texts describe, in place of intimacy, is a reckoning — the price named, the price accepted, the price paid — so that the marriage is characterised almost entirely by what it removes from each party rather than by what passes between them.

She has no adversary. No enemy is named against her, the Dark Lord is nowhere said to know of her existence, and she is never set in opposition to a person; what stands against her is a condition, and it is one she chose. Outside her family and her husband the record preserves a single relationship, the brief conversation with Frodo Baggins at Minas Tirith, and it consists of one offer and one gift. Of her dealings with the people she reigned over, with the households of Gondor, or with any friend of her own, nothing is set down. The figure that emerges is defined by kinship on one side and by a single attachment on the other, with very little between them.

The love-story told in the Appendices was no part of the original design, and for much of the composition of The Lord of the Rings the character did not exist at all. In the earliest drafts the ranger encountered at Bree was not a man of Númenórean descent but a hobbit called Trotter, who wore wooden shoes; within that scheme a marriage to a daughter of Elrond was unimaginable, and no such daughter was in view. Even after Trotter had been remade into Aragorn, outlines sketched while the story stood at Lórien proposed that he should in the end wed Éowyn of Rohan, and a later note instead has Éowyn fall in battle avenging her king, leaving Aragorn unmarried. Arwen entered the work at a comparatively late stage, and the Rivendell scene in which she is seen beside her father was worked into a chapter that had already been written without her.

The greater part of what is recorded of her was therefore composed after the narrative was finished, during the long labour on the Appendices, and the drafts printed in The Peoples of Middle-earth show the tale of Aragorn and Arwen taking shape as a separate piece that Tolkien found awkward to place within the apparatus he was assembling. One passage that would have named her in the body of the book was in the end discarded. Tolkien drafted an epilogue for the closing chapter, in which Sam answers his children's questions some years afterwards, and it ended with a letter from King Elessar announcing that he and the queen would ride north to the bridge over the Brandywine; the epilogue was set aside before publication, and with it the book's last mention of her. The drafts of both letter and epilogue are printed in Sauron Defeated.

Peter Jackson's three films give Arwen a considerably larger and more active part than the book allows her, and she is played throughout by Liv Tyler. The most conspicuous change comes early: the flight to the Ford of Bruinen, which in the novel is undertaken by Frodo alone on a horse lent by another elf of Elrond's house, is reassigned to her, so that she rides with the wounded hobbit before her and confronts the pursuing riders at the water's edge. Her presence is then sustained across the second and third films by material with no counterpart in the narrative, chiefly a series of exchanges with her father about whether she will sail, and a physical decline that ties her strength to the fortunes of the war. The banner she works in secret and sends south with the Rangers does not survive into the films, since the Rangers of the North do not appear in them; in its place Elrond himself brings the reforged sword to Aragorn in Rohan, which transfers to the father a function the book assigns to the daughter. Footage placing her at the battle of Helm's Deep was filmed and then removed before release, and the change of plan was afterwards discussed by the production at some length.

The older adaptations move in the opposite direction. Ralph Bakshi's animated film leaves her out altogether: it covers only the first half of the story, and the rescue at the ford is given to Legolas rather than to any member of Elrond's household, so that the character has no occasion to appear at all. The BBC Radio dramatisation, though the fullest of the earlier versions at twenty-six parts, keeps her at the margins for a structural reason — nearly everything the book records of her lies in the appendices rather than in the chapters, and the series works from the narrative proper.