“the grounding of Tolkien’s perception of war”
“the vision of war in Tolkien’s world is defined by his two great sources – one great and wonderful and one great and terrible – of historical grounding. In a way it is trapped between them, caught between two incompatible visions of both war and the warrior, a collision of ‘wars’ – or, if I may be academically pedantic for a moment, a collision of culturally embedded visions (mentalités, to be even more obscure) of warfare – that Tolkien struggles to resolve in his writings”
“This talk is about how Éowyn finds herself trapped between the two ‘Wars’ Tolkien knew: the wars in his books and the war of his own experience, and how Tolkien navigates Éowyn through this collision to find peace at the other side.”
“our discussion proper begins where its wars end: with Éowyn in the Houses of Healing”
“This character turn is, of course, one of the most controversial in the whole of the legendarium, long criticized on the grounds that it undermines Éowyn’s character to give her traditional feminine domesticity as a reward for her valor”
“To many readers, Éowyn in this moment feels like a character trapped between the modern and the pre-modern: a modern heroine who can fight her own battles with the best of them, who is yet forced to accept the pre-modern consolation prize of marriage and domesticity”
“standing next to her in this moment is Faramir, the finest Captain of Gondor who is yet prepared – eager, even – to take the same reward as Éowyn, to go to govern Ithilien and help it bloom once more”
“That charge is not so different either from Samwise, Merry and Pippin, who all return home to become civic leaders in their communities at peace. Tolkien is not offering Éowyn a ‘woman’s reward’ but rather his version of a heroes reward”
“The set up for Éowyn is familiar”
“It is instead in the payoff, in this moment that Tolkien defies his source material in a way that creates a new paradigm. Because as students of pre-modern literature will know, in the broad western tradition, women warriors exist in literature largely to be defeated”
“In a real sense, these characters are often punished for violating the gender roles of their societies”
“By contrast, Tolkien rewards Éowyn. Faramir openly praises her in directly heroic terms, “For you are a lady high and valiant and have yourself won renown that shall not be forgotten.””
“I think there is something to the idea that Éowyn, in the Houses of Healing stands trapped between the modern and the pre-modern, just not in her gender, but rather in her relationship to war and death, the relationships that have dominated her thinking since we first met her in the pages of The Two Towers.”
“we might understand the theme of the final third of The Return of the King – as one of the great works of Great War literature (I will argue until the end of time that it should stand next to books like All Quiet on the Western Front in this regard) – to be, “how can one leave war behind?””
“Éowyn is, in the Houses of Healing, trapped between a pre-modern relationship to war, which offers her only death in battle, and a modern relationship to war, which offers escape.”
“Tolkien’s armies move at roughly the correct speeds and his detailed accounting of dates in the appendices leave him no room to ‘cheat.’”
“the political systems of Tolkien’s human societies are immediately intelligible as somewhat fragmented Late Antique or Early Medieval polities, with leaders, values customs, armies and social institutions to match their structure.”
“I am quite indebted to the work of John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War (2005)”
“Tolkien thus spend his life marinating in the literature produced by pre-modern societies: Greek, Roman, Old English and Middle English in particular.”
“The worldview that comes out of epics like the Iliad or Beowulf should feel immediately familiar to a reader of The Lord of the Rings. Naturally, across such a chasm of cultures, there will be differences but heroes in these epics are presented as primarily chasing renown, which they accomplish by competing with each other in deeds.”
“there are few ‘old heroes’ in these stories”
“War was not constant in these societies, but it was regular, an occurrence that cycles in and out like the seasons, a society which wholly lacked it was incomplete, perhaps even dysfunctional.”
“A knight too old to fight was a pathetic figure, not an aspirational one.”
“We meet this same historically grounded vision of war in early on in Éowyn”
“Éowyn at this point seeks to take part in that competition for renown; chiefly she fears being forever barred from it”
“When Éowyn confronts the Witch King she stands “faithful beyond fear” not because she thinks he can win – she promises merely “do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may” – but because for someone seeking a glorious death, the Witch King holds no fear (RotK, 127-8)”
“we get an even clearer statement from Éowyn , “I cannot lie in sloth, idle, caged. I looked for death in battle. But I have no died, and battle still goes on” (RotK, 264-5; emphasis mine). I think it is easy to miss but we must stress Éowyn is in these pages actively seeking death, because she can see no better ending, no better conclusion than that of Beowulf or Achilles”
“We recognize the deep and self-harming depression in Éowyn’s death wish, but this is the script her culture has for her to achieve renown: she must ride into war and not out of it again. That perspective feels real because it is grounded in Tolkien’s own deep erudition of the literature of the kinds of societies Éowyn comes from – and the answers they have to her struggles and pains”
“But, of course, Tolkien had another experience of war”
“Great Britain came to the First World War in something of a different position than the powers on the continent. The continental European powers had, by 1914, adopted armies along the lines of the Prussian army that had won the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1), which had led to the formation of Germany. Under that system, these countries prepared very large reserves in peace time: young men were processed through the military, given basic training and after a few years’ service discharged to be called up when war came in their millions”
“when the war broke out in August, 1914 the continental powers fielded massive armies: nearly two million Germans, one and a half million Russians, one and a quarter million Frenchmen, and half a million Austrians. By contrast, Great Britain – protected by the Royal Navy and as concerned with colonial wars than European ones – had maintained a small, well-trained professional army and kept civilian society largely civilian. The initial British deployment to France at the start of the war, the British Expeditionary Force, was thus supremely modest in size (albeit unusually well-trained): 115,000 men”
“Secretary of State for War, Herbert Kitchener created what would be the ‘New Army,’ a larger all-volunteer force to fill out the ranks and enlarge the British force to fight the kind of warfare in the trenches it was now facing. The initial plan was for 500,000 volunteers; more than five million men would fight in the British Army during the First World War”
“These were not the experienced, professional soldiers of the early BEF (the ‘old contemptibles’ they called themselves) nor were they reservists drawing out familiar and long-stockpiled weapons from depots laid in long preparation for just such a war. Instead, they were the flower of British youth, drawn by patriotism to a war for which they were unprepared, to be fed to ravenous Ares by their hundreds of thousands”
“Enlisting ‘late’ as he had wanted to complete his studies Tolkien reported for training on July 19, 1915 and on the 4th of June, 1916, Tolkien was shipped to France to the Western Front.”
“He had arrived just in time for the great testing of Kitchener’s New Army (some elements of which had already been in combat for a year), a planned joint Franco-British offensive along the Somme River.”
“Tolkien’s unit worked burial detail for the first days of the offensive as they waited to rotate forward.”
“Since Tolkien had arrived, his battalion had lost sixty men dead, four hundred and fifty wounded and another seventy four missing (out of a notional strength of roughly 1,000), a casualty rate of almost 60%.”
“Tolkien fell sick with trench fever, communicated by the lice that lived in the trenches. The sickness saved his life.”
“As Tolkien himself famously notes in his preface, “to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.””
“it is in the aftermath of this experience that the first long, coherent part of the legendarium comes together and it is one of the bitterest and most tragic: the Fall of Gondolin”
“One cannot help but sense in the lost innocence and spoiled purity of Gondolin, that Tolkien had lost a great deal too.”
“a different, modern vision of war.”
“this has always come out most clearly in two passages: the dread that the defenders of Minas Tirith experience, watching Sauron’s army prepare their assault, complete with artillery and trenches of fire, unable to intervene to stop them, which seems so clearly to evoke the dread of bombardment and assault in the trenches of the Western Front”
“Frodo’s sad reflection at the end of his journey, “I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me.””
“Tolkien’s deep and long marination in the literature of ancient and medieval societies, his mastery of their traditions, equipped him to write about societies like theirs, and wars like theirs, with a masterful understanding of their world;”
“his experience of the First World War prepared him to understand those conflicts in a way his historical subjects rarely could”
“we can return to Éowyn in the Houses of Healing and perhaps understand her better, caught not between the woman and the warrior (Tolkien will let her be both), but between the two wars in Tolkien’s life: the glorious wars of heroes doomed to die he found in his books and the brutal, all-consuming horror that he was doomed to survive”
“She sought glory and achieved deeds of the greatest valor, but has found only real war: she looked for the beaches of Troy but has found the mud and of Flanders; all the glory of deeds bled away leaving death as the only future she can see”
“Faramir seeks to offer Éowyn a way forward, the way Tolkien himself must have found, a way past war and glory and death to something greater – peace. It is a distinctively modern vision which imagines that the end of war might yet be found on this side of the grave”
“in talking with Faramir – who is open in praising that she has “won renown that shall not be forgotten” (RotK 270)– she is able to find a way beyond war: not into domesticity. Notably, he does not demand that Éowyn lay down her heroic status – unlike Aragorn, he does not offer her pity, but praise – her renown, her status as a hero is reaffirmed by Faramir, not rejected. But unlike her Greek and Norse forebearers – or so many of Tolkien’s childhood friends – she can enjoy that reward at peace on the other side of war”
“Tolkien has, in a sense, gifted Éowyn with his modern conception of war, enabled her to see beyond war to the possibility of enduring peace and to the promise of a life lived for “all things that grow and are not barren.””
“In Éowyn – though not only in her – he has reconciled the war of his books with the war of his life.”