Éowyn

Éowyn was a woman of the Rohirrim, the horse-breeding people of the grassland realm that Gondor called Rohan and its own folk the Mark. She belonged to the House of Eorl, the line of the first king who had led the Éothéod south out of the northern vales, and she was born in the year 2995 of the Third Age. Her father was Éomund of Eastfold, chief Marshal of the Mark, whose lands lay in the eastern marches most exposed to raiding; her mother was Théodwyn, youngest child of King Thengel and sister to Théoden. On that side she also inherited a strain of Gondorian descent, for Thengel's wife was Morwen of Lossarnach, a tall dark-haired woman of the South whom the Rohirrim named Steelsheen. Éowyn and her elder brother Éomer thus stood close to the throne without being of the direct royal succession.

She was orphaned early. In 3002 Éomund pursued a band of Orcs too far toward the Emyn Muil and was killed, and Théodwyn, who fell ill only after his death, did not long outlive him. Éowyn, then a child of seven, was taken with her brother into Théoden's household at Edoras and reared as a daughter of the king. Those who saw her later described a tall and pale figure with hair like falling gold, bearing herself with a cold and formal courtesy that Aragorn read as the hardness of tempered steel. Her station in Meduseld was that of the king's kinswoman and the mistress of his hall, a charge that grew heavy in the years when Gríma Wormtongue held Théoden's ear and set his own designs upon her.

Her name is given in the Old English forms that Tolkien used to represent the tongue of the Rohirrim, and it is built of two familiar elements: the horse-word éo-, which recurs through her family in Éomund, Éomer, and the ancestral name Éothéod, and wyn, joy or delight. Appendix E notes that in the personal and place-names of Rohan éa and éo are diphthongs, the latter sounded as the eo of English Theobald. She called herself a shieldmaiden of Rohan, using a term her people applied to women trained to arms, and in Gondor she came to be known as the White Lady of Rohan. Dernhelm, the name she took when she wished to pass unrecognised among the riders, is likewise transparent in its Old English shape, joining the word for hidden or secret to that for helm.

The first phase of Éowyn's recorded life is one of waiting rather than action. Through the years in which Théoden's strength failed and Saruman's counsels reached him by way of his own household, the care of the king fell largely upon her, and she watched a man she loved as a father shrink into second childhood while the man who had contrived it watched her covertly and dogged her movements. When Gandalf came to Meduseld in early March of 3019 and the king rose from his chair to take up his sword again, Éowyn stood at the door of the hall; her first appearance in the narrative is as a silent figure of that sickroom, and her release from it came with Théoden's. Before the host rode out she bore the parting cup to the king and to his guests, and when Théoden asked who should govern the Mark in his absence it was his doorward Háma who named her, on the grounds that the people loved her and would follow her. So she was given lordship over the Eorlingas for the duration of the war, and led the folk of Edoras up into the refuge of Dunharrow beneath the White Mountains.

At Dunharrow the charge she had accepted became the cage she most feared. Aragorn came up into Harrowdale with the Grey Company on his way to the Paths of the Dead, and Éowyn tried three times to keep him: first by warning him from the road, then by asking leave to ride in his company, and at last by offering to follow him as any of his men might. He answered that her duty was with her people and that she could not lay it down merely because it was not the death she wanted. In the exchange that followed she named what she dreaded, which was not battle or dying but confinement and the slow diminishment of a life spent indoors while others earned renown. Aragorn rode into the Dark Door at dawn; she remained, and the household of Rohan believed she remained still.

Théoden reached Dunharrow a day or two later, and the muster of the Riders was complete. On the tenth of March, under the shadow that had spread out of Mordor, the host set out for Gondor, some six thousand spears. Éowyn had already ordered the affairs of the Mark and passed her authority to others; she then took harness and helm, gave her name as Dernhelm, and rode in the ranks. Meriadoc Brandybuck, whom Théoden had forbidden to come because no pony could keep the pace, was lifted up before her on her horse Windfola and carried hidden under her cloak. Neither the king nor Éomer knew that his sister and the hobbit rode among the Riders of the Mark, and for four days of hard riding the concealment held.

On the fifteenth of March the Rohirrim came out of the north upon the Pelennor. In the ruin of the charge Théoden's horse was struck down by a dart from the winged beast of the Lord of the Nazgûl and fell upon him, and all his knights were scattered save one. Éowyn stood over her uncle and refused the Nazgûl's threat; she cut the head from the flying creature, and when the mace of the Witch-king shattered her shield and broke the arm beneath it, Meriadoc struck him from behind with the blade out of the Barrow-downs, and she drove her sword down into the empty space between crown and mantle. The kingship of Angmar ended there, and its long-standing prophecy of immunity from the hand of man with it. Théoden died knowing her; Éowyn was taken up for dead until Prince Imrahil found breath still in her, and she was carried into the city with the cold of the Black Breath in her and her sword-arm useless.

Éowyn belongs wholly to the mortal order of the legendarium. She has no share in the arts of the Wise, no inherited gift of the sort attributed to the houses of the Eldar or the Númenórean line, and no named weapon; the sword she carried onto the Pelennor is never described as anything but a Rider's blade. What the narrative credits her with is ordinary in kind and uncommon in degree: horsemanship, training at arms of the sort the Rohirrim allowed to women of rank, and the authority that came with her birth and her place in Meduseld. At Dunharrow she set out her own qualifications to Aragorn in plain terms, saying that she could ride and handle a sword and was not afraid of being hurt or killed, and remarking that a woman without a weapon could be cut down as readily as anyone who carried one. Beyond her own person, the only power she held was delegated and temporary, and she gave it up in order to ride.

The one act on which her standing in the story rests is not presented as an overpowering. Glorfindel had foretold after the fall of Angmar, more than a thousand years earlier, that the Witch-king would not perish by the hand of man, and the Pelennor resolves that saying by admitting two figures whom its wording did not cover. Even so, Éowyn's thrust was not sufficient by itself: it followed Meriadoc's stroke from behind with a blade made in the North-kingdom in the old wars against Angmar, whose making carried a virtue against precisely that enemy, and the text is explicit that this blow undid the bindings that held the Nazgûl's will to his unseen sinews. Both weapons were destroyed in the doing, hers shattering and the hobbit's consumed. Neither could have accomplished the deed alone, and the victory on the field itself was decided elsewhere, by the ships that came up the Anduin under Aragorn's standard.

Three men of her own household fix Éowyn's position before the war reaches her, and each defines a different constraint. Théoden was uncle and foster-father at once, so that his long decline was for her simultaneously a public calamity and a private bereavement; the attachment is the one motive in her story that the narrative never treats as suspect, and it is what places her over his body when everyone else has been swept away. Éomer was the nearest thing she had to an equal, the only person in Meduseld before whom she needed no ceremony, and his own defiance of Gríma had ended in his imprisonment shortly before Gandalf came, leaving her alone in the hall at the worst moment. Gríma himself is the counter-figure of the group: Gandalf named his attentions openly and charged him with watching her and following her movements, and it is his interest that turns her guardianship of the king into a form of exposure rather than a trust.

Her two wartime attachments outside the family are studies in asymmetry and its opposite. What she asked of Aragorn he could not give, and his refusal was neither cruel nor evasive; he offered honour and pity in place of what she wanted, and afterwards judged that she had fastened less upon the man than upon what he seemed to promise, which was escape from a life she could not endure. With Meriadoc the relation is level. Both had been forbidden the ride for reasons of duty or size, both went regardless, and neither told the other's secret; she carried him hidden on her horse for four days, and on the field the deed belonged to the two of them together, after which they lay side by side in the Houses of Healing under the same care. He is the only companion in her story who owes her nothing and is owed nothing in return.

The figure took shape slowly in the manuscripts published in The History of Middle-earth, and her place within the royal house was not settled at once. In working drafts of the chapter that became The King of the Golden Hall, Théoden was given a daughter named Idis, who came down the hall at his side; for a time she stood in the narrative beside Éowyn, his sister's child, and the two shared the ceremonial function of attending the king. Idis was afterwards struck out, and everything that had been assigned to her passed to Éowyn, leaving the single figure of the published text. In these same papers Éowyn carries the epithet Elfsheen, a title that does not survive into The Lord of the Rings.

The ending Tolkien first foresaw for her was quite different, and it moved twice. At a stage before Arwen had entered the story at all, outlines sketched a marriage between Aragorn and Éowyn as the settlement of the war; later notes reverse the outcome entirely, proposing that she should die on the Pelennor in the act of avenging or defending Théoden, and that Aragorn should therefore take no wife. Only with the unplanned emergence of Faramir in the Ithilien chapters did a third resolution become available, and the drafts of the Houses of Healing show the healing and the betrothal being worked out after the fact rather than aimed at from the beginning. The concealed ride with the hobbit, by contrast, was reached relatively early and altered little.

In Peter Jackson's three-part film version Éowyn is played by Miranda Otto, appearing first in the second instalment of 2002 and again in the concluding film of 2003. The screenplay enlarges her presence in Rohan considerably. Where the book keeps her in Edoras and then sends her with the people of the Mark to the refuge under the White Mountains, the films attach her to the general retreat to Helm's Deep, so that she is inside the fortress during the siege and takes charge of the women and children sheltering in the caves; the Dunharrow muster is correspondingly reduced. Gríma's designs upon her, which Tolkien conveys largely at second hand through Gandalf's accusation, are dramatised directly in scenes invented for the film, as is a sequence in which Aragorn finds her practising with a sword. Her attraction to Aragorn is made a running thread across both films and is answered explicitly rather than left to a single exchange, and the name Dernhelm is never used: she rides in the host disguised but unnamed, with Meriadoc concealed beside her.

The Pelennor scenes follow the book's outline, with the winged steed destroyed and the Lord of the Nazgûl brought down after Meriadoc's stroke from behind, though the older prophecy that underwrites the moment goes unmentioned and the Barrow-blade's particular virtue is not explained. The aftermath is where the adaptation diverges most sharply: Aragorn's healing in the Houses of Healing is compressed almost out of the theatrical cut, Faramir and Éowyn's courtship survives only as a brief passage in the extended edition, and their marriage and settlement in Ithilien are not shown. Earlier screen versions treat her still more summarily. Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978, which ends with the battle at Helm's Deep, leaves her out of the Edoras material altogether, so that she has no part in it. The BBC's twenty-six-part radio dramatisation of 1981, being far fuller in scope, retains her withheld ride, the deed on the Pelennor, and the recovery and betrothal that follow it.