Let's Read Tolkien 64: The Passing of the Grey Company

Gandalf was gone, and the thudding hoofs of Shadowfax were lost in the night, when Merry came back to Aragorn.

Meanwhile, back at the other ranch: Gandalf speeds off with Pippin, leaving Merry with Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas and the Riders of Rohan. Soon after they've set off back to Helm's Deep, they're overtaken by a group of riders who turn out to be Aragorn's kinsmen from the North, and Elrond's twin sons. I don't think we ever find out if they're as racist as their dad. Anyway they bring Aragorn a flag and some lore reminders.

Fortified with these, Aragorn withdraws while the others eat at the Hornburg. For his own reasons, Merry has taken a shine to Théoden, and offers his service to the king. It's accepted, and he rides off to Edoras with the king's household while Aragorn dramatically announces that he will be taking the Paths of the Dead.

After Théoden's party leaves, Aragorn explains that he looked into the palantír. He not only introduced himself to Sauron, but as Isildur's heir and therefore the rightful owner of the stone, used it to look around a bit as well. Apparently he saw a threat from the south which he has to intercept, and he will do this by passing the White Mountains through the Paths of the Dead, and recruiting a bunch of dead guys while he's there. Dead Men of Dunharrow is a hell of a card to have at the right time in War of the Ring, so it's a good strategy. The ghosts will do what he says because - you guessed it - he's Isildur's heir.

The way to the Paths is through Dunharrow, where Éowyn is in charge. Because the Rohirrim apparently believe that if you go to the Paths you get eaten by ghosts or something, she is very skeptical about Aragorn's plans. However, because she has a crush on him and is extremely frustrated that she can't go to war with her king, she begs Aragorn to take her with him. He refuses and gives her a homily on how she needs to stay behind, and how she may yet get to fight to defend her home if the men fail. Her reply:

And she answered: "All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more."

This is such a searingly, amazingly brutal takedown of Aragorn's patriarchal condescension that I'm still not over it. Aragorn then rides off and they go through a scary ghost place to meet the ghosts, but never mind because this is the key part of the chapter right here. Éowyn is directly putting into words how the system of male honor and warfare works: only men are allowed to go and fight, and if they win, women must praise and worship them; if they lose, it doesn't matter what happens to the women because the men will no longer need them. Whatever her abilities, a woman's place in this scheme is only ever as a spectator or a victim. Aragorn has no counter-argument to this, and only gets out of the situation on the technicality that he can't countermand Théoden's orders.

"I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death."
"What do you fear, lady?" he asked.
"A cage."

This is genuinely powerful stuff. This is Éowyn's chapter; Aragorn just happens to ride through it.

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So, the return of the king is underway, with Aragorn openly declaring himself Isildur's heir to various ghosts and Saurons. His claiming of the palantír and confrontation with the Enemy is good stuff. For all that he carps on about his royal heritage, though, it's worth remembering that the actual hero of the story, Frodo, is the heir of Bilbo, but neither of them ever got anywhere by declaring their illustrious heritage. Because they don't have one. Heritage and heroism were current themes as I was writing this, and there's still a strange obsession with bloodlines and descent in our entertainment, from space wizard daddy issues to orphan wizards who grow up to be cops. Tolkien and his waning bloodlines certainly plays his part, but let's not forget that the fate of Middle-earth is not ultimately decided by any scion of a legendary family tree.

Tolkien takes a moment here to underline the connection between the Rohirrim and the Anglo-Saxons by referring to the "weapontake" at Edoras; in the Danelaw, a wapentake was a subdivision of a shire, and here Tolkien uses the word in a far more literal meaning that may well be where it originally comes from.

Edoras, by the way, is where we already met Éowyn. How Tolkien goes from an entire novel that fails to feature one single named woman character to Éowyn basically indicting the patriarchy, I will never fully understand. Her biting commentary on gender inequality could have been written today.

In his letters, Tolkien talks briefly about the "theme of mistaken love" (Letters, 131) with Éowyn and Aragorn; the idea is that Aragorn represented a way out of her predicament, rather than someone she actually loved. Her despair at being left behind due to sexism is palpable.

My personal opinion is that in the end, the absence of women in Tolkien's writing is not necessarily so much due to any particular misogyny, but rather that it's a product of his almost exclusively masculine upbringing. While it's far too rarely remarked upon that Tolkien was introduced to this whole business of inventing languages by two of his female cousins, most of his childhood and youth after the death of his mother seem to have been spent in exclusively masculine company. His only sibling was a brother; they were raised by a Catholic priest and went to boys-only schools; Tolkien's friends at university seem to all have been men, and he served in the army with men. With a background like this, is it really surprising that women are either distant and ethereal objects of worship, matronly older relatives or, far more often, simply completely absent? It seems like it would have been quite natural for Tolkien to have conceived of his stories as quite literally "Boys' Own" adventures.

The great exception, of course, is Éowyn, who comes straight out of the Scandinavian sagas. In a sense, she's another victory of Tolkien's faithfulness to his "Northern" ideas: even though women barely appear in the story at all, if the Lord of the Rings is a saga, then it must have a shield-maiden, and Éowyn is her. As I said earlier, Éowyn also echoes the strong historical role of women in Mercia, which Éowyn's Rohan is based on. Ultimately it's a tragedy that Tolkien was so incurably phallocentric in his writing, since I think Éowyn and Lobelia Sackville-Baggins are some of his best characters. He could "write women"; he could even potray a woman as equal to men; it's just that he could not actually seem to conceive of women as equal participants in his stories. Their absence is one of the most enduring, fundamental flaws of his work.

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Next time: more horses.