No Living Man Am I: Éowyn's Femininity
The fourth essay in a 5-part series on the Lady of Rohan
The original version of this essay was first posted on my blog, roadstainedfeet.wordpress.com.
The Lady of Rohan does not become a man on the battlefield, though she is disguised as one. From her decision to bring Merry the hobbit with her, to her defiance of the Witch King, she thinks and acts as a woman would. Retaining her femininity, she will do what no living man, not even Aragorn, could have done.
Feeling unloved and un-honored, Éowyn prepares to go to war, seeking glory and death. Though her love for Rohan has waned, she will serve it as her brother has, or more accurately, as her cousin did, for she goes to die. Things will not go according to her plan.
Disguised as Dernhelm, a young, male warrior, Éowyn watches while Théoden and Merry echo her earlier conversation. The king tells the hobbit to stay back in safety, for he surely could not do anything worthwhile in the battle. Merry pleads to go and fight for Théoden, “Why, lord, did you receive me as swordthain, if not to stay by your side? I would not have it said of me in song only that I was always left behind!” Théoden replies in no uncertain terms that Merry would be a burden.
One rider among thousands sympathizes with Merry. Dernhelm approaches Merry and says,
“Where will wants not, a way opens, so we say, and so I have found myself. You wish to go whither the Lord of the Mark goes: I see it in your face. Then you shall go with me. I will bear you before me….Such good will should not be denied.”
Together, the halfling and the lady defy the king out of love for the king. The princess and the hobbit whom he had wanted to protect will soon protect him.
They ride toward Gondor, and in the final night Éowyn quietly leaves her éored to ride just behind the king’s guard. To echo and paraphrase her words to Aragorn earlier, she will not be parted from her king because she loves him. This love defies rank and duty, and it draws her to his defense when the Nazgûl attacks.
In the ancient cultures and epic poetry that influenced Tolkien’s work, warriors had a deep obligation to defend their king, even if he had already fallen in the battle. They would not give the enemy the satisfaction of stealing his armor or savaging his corpse. As quoted in the Old English poem “The Battle of Maldon,”
Thought must be the harder, heart be the keener,
mind must be the greater, while our strength lessens.
Here lies our prince all hewn,
good one on grit.
He may always mourn
who from this war-play thinks now to turn.
My life is old: I will not away;
but I myself beside my lord,
by so loved a man, think to lie.
A coward may value his life above his duty, but these heroes will fight to the death, even if their army is already losing. It goes against every sensible notion of self-preservation and counting the cost, but it taps into a deep human need to resist evil to the last. It is better to die in defiance than to live in slavery.
Every rider of Rohan knows his duty to defend his king’s fallen body, but more than duty is required against the Nazgûl, who wield despair like a weapon. The king’s guard are quickly slain or borne away by their frightened horses, and Merry is incapacitated by horror. The person who loves Théoden most stays beside him without a thought for herself.
We are told that emotions are a weakness, and unchecked, this is true. Governing one’s life by whim and feeling is a horrible idea. Reason must inform our moral decisions and dictate our actions, but what lends resolve to decisions and fierceness to action more than love? A mother would snatch her child from a lion, even if it killed her, and not from the knowledge that it is good to protect the weak, but from the certainty that her heart will break if her child dies. It’s a paradox that vulnerability can make us strong. The emotions that make women “weak” are the very thing that will save the king from being devoured.
Éowyn stands alone before the Ringwraith. He threatens to take her back to be tortured before the Eye of Sauron, but she responds by drawing her sword. “Do what you will, but I will hinder it, if I may.”
He scoffs at the foolish warrior. “No living man may hinder me!”
And Éowyn laughs.
Tears are on her face, and she looks hopeless, but she laughs at her foe as she pulls off her helmet and shakes out her long, golden hair.
“But no living man am I!” she cries. “You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.”
This scene is played very differently in the movie, with Éowyn keeping her helmet on until the last minute with that famous one-liner, “I am no man.” That definitely works dramatically, and for a movie, it was probably the best decision.
Yet there is something deeply moving in the book about Éowyn revealing her identity sooner. She fights the Ringwraith as herself, with no disguises. She is seen. To all watching – her foe, her comrade Merry, and any men of Rohan near enough to see – she declares who she is.
The effect on her listeners is striking. The Ringwraith is silent and hesitant, “as if in sudden doubt.” He had not feared Gandalf, but this tiny woman makes him doubt his invulnerability. Sauron could not have imagined giving the Ring to a weak hobbit, and now Sauron’s captain, the Ringwraith, must have wondered about the Rohirrim putting a woman on the battlefield. How humiliating to know, not just in his death throes but in the entire battle, that his doom is coming from a weak woman.
The opposite happens to Merry. Looking on her stern yet hopeless face, “pity filled his heart and great wonder, and suddenly the slow-kindled courage of his race awoke. He clenched his hand. She should not die, so fair, so desperate! At least she should not die alone, unaided.” He joins the fight.
A woman inspiring heroism in other warriors has historical precedent. The Ancient Israelites had Deborah, a prophet so respected that General Barak would not go to war unless she accompanied him. The Israelites were victorious, but the honor of killing the enemy general Sisera went to a woman, Jael, in that battle.
In first century Britain, Queen Boudicca led her people’s last defense against Rome after the Romans killed her husband, flogged her, and raped her daughters. She told the men of Britain,
On this spot we must either conquer, or die with glory. There is no alternative. Though a woman, my resolution is fixed: the men, if they please, may survive with infamy, and live in bondage.
In the Hundred Years’ War, France had already lost land to Britain when Joan of Arc appeared. She restored moral, spiritual, and military order to an army that desperately needed rigor and courage.
There are many examples of this in fiction, as well. In The Iliad, the Amazon Queen Penthesilea leads the Trojans after Hector dies, when no other men can take the lead. In the movie Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman leads frightened men over the trenches in WWI France. In Star Wars, Princess Leia’s cool courage inspires Han, a hitherto gutsy but selfish character, to accept his doom in Cloud City. He convinced Chewie to stand down and protect Leia rather than waste a rescue attempt on him, as well.
When fighting for a lost cause, each warrior must face his mortality and decide to flee or die. His illusion of indestructibility, his confident belief that he could fight his way back home, is shaken. Women are naturally suited for such desperate times because they have no such illusions about surviving the battlefield. Both Queen Boudicca and Joan of Arc died for their efforts, the martyrs of lost causes. They went because it is better to die fighting than to just lie down and surrender. They embody the spirit of courage in “The Battle of Maldon.” They symbolize the last defense of civilization. Who better to inspire that desperate courage in others?
Men, or at least good men, want to protect women. When instead they see a woman, a person smaller and physically weaker than themselves, rise to great acts of moral and physical courage, they cannot just stand by. Far from shaming them, her example inspires them. Merry, of course, is smaller than Éowyn, and he has often been protected by other warriors, but he is still masculine and feels that urge to aid her. She should not die, so fair, so desperate.
So fair. Her beauty makes her doom sadder to Merry. This is an uncomfortable point to make because we often don’t like to acknowledge beauty as a positive feminine trait. Perhaps this is because beauty is passive and unearned; a beautiful person simply is beautiful. Perhaps it is because beauty is unequally given. Perhaps it’s because I, like many girls raised in conservative, well-meaning circles, heard much more about the ways beauty tempts men to sin than the ways it can inspire them to greatness.
Yet beauty is meant to ennoble. It can goad action when reason falters. Seeing Éowyn defy the enemy is as poignantly beautiful as a simbelmynë flower on a burial mound or a mournful air on a violin. We are right to regret the end of beautiful things, and to prevent their end where we may.
Éowyn does not just encourage Merry with her courage and beauty. She actively fights and kills the fell beast and then the Witch-king with tactics that make sense for a woman. In self-defense classes, women are told to expect that a male attacker will be bigger, stronger, and faster. She cannot overpower him, but she can outsmart him and use his strengths against him. Éowyn fights a defensive battle, using her enemies’ power and arrogance against them. She allows the fell beast to dive at her so that she can cut off its head. As it dies, the dark shadow on the battlefield falls away, “a light fell about her, and her hair shone in the sunrise,” a clear symbol of despair giving way to hope.
That sunlight on her head has burst from the West, across the ocean, where the Valar, the Maiar, and Eru sit. From Gandalf’s famous words that “Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker,” and from Tolkien’s admission that an Authority beyond the Valar resurrected Gandalf after the fight with the Balrog (Tolkien’s Letters, letter 156), we know that Eru the Creator intervenes in the story.
This is most often symbolized by light piercing darkness. The Phial of Galadriel contains a heavenly light powerful enough to defeat Shelob. On the slopes of Mount Doom, Sam sees a white star twinkling through a gap in the volcanic murk. As he realizes “that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach,” he gains hope to continue.
This same light from Eru now dances on Éowyn’s golden hair. He is shining a spotlight on her. He will use her to bring hope and redemption to this horrific battle.
Éowyn shows incredible resilience as she ducks and dodges the flail that ultimately shatters her shield and her arm. After she falls to her knees, Merry stabs the Black Rider’s leg with an ancient dagger, making him vulnerable to Éowyn’s blade. Despite her pain, she rises to her feet to stab the Witch-king. He crumples into nothing as he dies.
In the book, Éowyn immediately falls unconscious because of the Black Breath that the Ringwraith blows on her in its last moments, so Merry is given the parting words to Théoden, who is miraculously still alive. I definitely prefer Peter Jackson’s decision in the movie to let Théoden see that Éowyn has saved him and to let them say their goodbyes to each other. I think she really needed to know how much her uncle did love and honor her. In the book, Éomer would have to convey Théoden’s last words, “I would send word to Éowyn. She, she would not have me leave her, and now I shall not see her again, dearer than daughter.” We hear his regret.
Maybe she shouldn’t have left her post at Dunharrow, maybe she shouldn’t have broken out of her éored to ride with the king, but it is good that she is here. She saves her uncle, kills an ancient wraith, and wins the glory she has always desired. “Her deeds have set her among the queens of great renown,” Aragorn says in the Houses of Healing.
Tolkien may not have believed in sending women to the front lines, but he clearly honors what any warrior, man or woman, hobbit or elf, must do in desperate times. “I am no man” is not a declaration, “I’m better than a man; don’t send a man to do a woman’s job; men are weak.” It’s an exclamation point to Tolkien’s theme that the weak may succeed where the strong would fail. In Moria, Boromir notches his blade ineffectually on the cave-troll, but little Frodo draws blood with his sword, Sting. Sam beats Shelob with the light of Elendil. A hobbit with an elf-blade and a maiden with a will of steel defeat the Witch-king. These heroes don’t triumph because of personal strength, but because of grace.
Éowyn is not fulfilled by her victory. When she awakens in the Houses of Healing, she asks to be allowed to ride out again. She wants to die in battle. She will need to be convinced that her worth comes from a different source.
Works Cited
“The Battle of Maldon.” Translated by Jonathan A. Glenn, 1982.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter, 2000.
—. The Return of the King: Being the third part of The Lord of the Rings. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.
—. The Two Towers: Being the second part of The Lord of the Rings. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.
The Works of Tacitus. Translated by A. Murphy, 1794.