A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Posted by Bret Devereaux

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Hey folks! I am working on finishing up some things this week, so I thought I would post the text of the keynote I gave at the Prancing Pony Podcast Moot earlier this December. I’ve made some minor edits to conform a bit more to the form of a blog post, but this remains very much a speaking script, with some of the different expectations (somewhat less detail, more signposting, and a bit more rhetorical flourish, however poorly done) still there. So without further ado, “Tolkien and Éowyn Between Two Wars:”

Tolkien and Éowyn Between Two Wars

I wanted to talk today about the historical grounding of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work and especially his legendarium, following on the theme of the moot, ‘Creating Historical Depth within Fantastical Worlds.’  In particular, I want to speak on the grounding of Tolkien’s perception of war, anchored in both his deep erudition and his own experiences.  In part, that means discussing why the martial aspects of Middle Earth – the size and structure of armies, their commanders, the way they move and fight, the outcomes of their battles – feel so much more grounded and real than many other works in this genre.  They feel more grounded, as we will see, because they are more grounded.

But even more I want to talk about how 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.  The Lord of the Rings being a work of fiction, that collision is resolved not in dry academic broadsides – of the sort you have, inexplicably, agreed to endure for the next forty minutes (I thank you for your questionable decision-making in this regard) – but rather through its characters.

And of course, in the Lord of the Rings as in all great art, it is in the struggle to resolve the unresolvable that profundity of the human experience emerges, in all of its beauty and flaws.

Thus, our discussion proper begins where its wars end: with Éowyn in the Houses of Healing.

Two Wars in the Houses of Healing

I imagine we all know the moment. Éowyn recovering from wounds sustained on the Pelennor Fields, both physical and psychological, has had her heart softened by Faramir and her spirits lifted by the departure of the shadow proclaims (RotK, 271):

‘I stand in Minas Anor, the Tower of the Sun,‘ she said, ‘and behold! the Shadow has departed!  I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, no vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.’ And again, she looked at Faramir. ‘No longer, do I desire to be a queen,’ she said.

And let me offer a brief shout-out to Faramir’s gamely and adroit reply of, “That is well, for I am not a king.”  The fellow is putting in the effort.

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.  I confess I have never been persuaded of this view; we should note of course that 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.

I do think modern readers are somewhat in danger of missing the radicalism of Éowyn’s character, a case – one of many – of Tolkien being so influential that he has created a new norm against which he is judged.  Éowyn’s character, of course, draws on traditions of mythical and legendary women warriors that predate him: the Amazons of Greek mythology – figures like Atalanta or Penthesilea – or Camilla (the Aeneid’s Latin stand-in for Penthesilea). Or, of course, the shield-maidens of the Norse literature that Tolkien loved so: Lagertha, Veborg, Hervor and so on.  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.  Atalanta exists in her story to be defeated in a footrace by Hippomenes and consequently forced into a marriage she had tried to resist (which leads into her ending up transformed into a lion when Hippomenes offends the gods).  Penthesilea and Camilla’s role in their stories are as fearsome opponents to be killed and defeated by male heroes, a violent restatement of patriarchal dominance.  The Amazons more generally ‘exist to lose’ in Greek and Roman mythology.

Shield maidens fare little better.  Verborg appears in the Gesta Danorum, showing valor but being slain in battle.  The younger Hervor, likewise, falls in battle, while Lagertha, the exception, in the Gesta Danorum slays her husband and then promptly vanishes from the story.  In short, these figures, while praised for their value, generally ‘exist’ in the story 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.”  As we’ll discuss in a moment, unforgettable renown is not a small reward! Éowyn has accomplished this and unlike the heroines upon whom she is based, can then leave with her life, to enjoy the peace she has won under the same terms as Samwise or Merry or Pippin or, indeed, Faramir.  In this sense, Éowyn feels far more modern than her critics give credit.

Yet 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.  She is hardly the only character so trapped and indeed 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?”  Samwise can, but Frodo finds he cannot. Faramir longs to do so and finally does.  Many characters – Boromir, Théoden, Denethor – know the end of war only in death.  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.

To understand how Éowyn navigates the collision of these systems, we need to understand how Tolkien himself imagined and experienced war, to understand the two great reservoirs from which his understanding came.  And at last we come to our main topic, for Tolkien has two visions of war that emerge through Middle Earth, both rooted in history.

Those who know my writing will be, of course, in no way shocked that we are 1,250 words in and only now reaching the end of the introduction. Now on to Part IIb.

The Historicity of Middle Earth

When I started actually writing about Tolkien’s legendarium, I was surprised by how strongly grounded it was, historically.  I had grown up on these books, having them read to me before I even could read them myself, and I had returned to them regularly, but I hadn’t sat down to work through them the way a historian would until 2019 when I started blogging on them.  But I came back to them in the context of writing critiques of other fantasy worlds which claimed more ‘realism’ and yet often betrayed a far weaker understanding of societies in the past.

I expected to find similar cracks in the foundations of Middle Earth, but there are few.  Tolkien’s armies move at roughly the correct speeds and his detailed accounting of dates in the appendices leave him no room to ‘cheat.’  Likewise, 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.

No small part of this, of course, comes from Tolkien’s own meticulous plotting, including day-by-day accounting of where characters are (which of course shows up in the appendices).  But he has not worked out all of those details – there is little sense that Tolkien had worked out, for instance, a complete flow-chart of Rohan or Gondor’s administration, yet what we see makes sense with history.  The strong historical grounding of Tolkien’s legendarium comes from Tolkien’s own deep marination in the literature of societies like the ones he describes and his own experience of war.  We begin with the former.

The War in Tolkien’s Books

I imagine for at least some of you, the details of Tolkien’s education are already familiar, but let me go over the basics and then provide a bit of context for them.  I should note that in this next part, I am quite indebted to the work of John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War (2005); I imagine in a gathering such as this, little recommendation of it is required.  I offer it all the same.

Even as a schoolboy, Tolkien was enamored with literature and languages.  He himself writes, “I was brought up in the Classics” – by which he means ancient Greek and Latin literature – “and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.”  Education in turn-of-the-last-century Britain remained heavily based on the Classics and a solid working knowledge of Greek and Latin (and of Greek and Roman history) was assumed for any man who wanted to present as an educated man.  Modern European languages – Tolkien excelled in German, winning first prize in the subject at his school in 1910 – were also a standard part of education.

Tolkien ‘discovers’ the early Germanic languages via Joseph Wright’s Primer of the Gothic Language in 1908 (Tolkien is 16 at the time) and so his love affair with Germanic, rather than Roman languages was begun, to the last the rest of his life.  In 1911, Tolkien began his studies at Oxford, but initially enrolled reading (that is ‘majoring in’ in American parlance) Classics.  He only shifted to English literature – Old English – in 1913.  Tolkien is thus deeply familiar with the Greek and Roman Classics before he moves on to develop his prodigious knowledge of Old and Middle English literature.

Of course, the war intervened – we will return to that in a moment – but in his academic career, Tolkien produced a number of major works on English literature (in addition to producing the defining works of English literature we are discussing here).  While Tolkien’s work on Beowulf, most famously “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936) is perhaps best known – Tolkien essentially revolutionized the study of English’ oldest epic poem – he also worked on later medieval romances, translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the 14^th century Middle English poem Pearl.  Although Tolkien did not work on similar continental literary traditions, the French tales of knightly deeds (chasons de geste) or the songs of the Occitan troubadours, he can hardly have been ignorant of them and one detects allusions to them at certain points in the Lord of the Rings.  When Théoden, for instance, about to ride to his glorious end, “seized a great horn from Guthlaf his banner-bearer and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder” it is hard not to hear an echo of Roland from the 11^th century chanson de geste the Song of Roland, who finding himself in a battle that will claim his life blows upon his own horn so hard his temples burst.  Roland’s horn, evidently made from elephant tusk, is termed the Olifant in the poem, a name which also ought to jog some memories from Middle Earth too.

As a historian, I also feel I would be remiss if I did not note the scholarly climate of historical study that Tolkien was entering into: Tolkien’s early scholarly years are happening at the same time that historians were assembling the first modern, systematic efforts to map out political and social organization in pre-modern societies.  Theodore Mommsen’s Römische Geschichte (Roman History) was published in from 1871 to 1908 and won a Nobel Prize in 1902; his systematic effort to understand the Roman system of governance, Römisches Staatsrecht had been published in 1888.  As always, scholarship on the Middle Ages was a touch later, but Marc Bloch’s La Societe foedale, (Feudal Society), a foundation-stone work in understanding medieval society, was published in 1940 (Bloch, a member of the French resistance, was murdered by the Nazis in 1944).  I cannot say for certain if Tolkien engaged with these works directly, but given his place at Oxford he could hardly have avoided them entirely, even if he wished (and even if one imagines he might have rebelled against the relentlessly materialist focus of the historical work of his day).

And as a scholar of military equipment in particular, I have to note that Tolkien, drawing carefully on the language of these medieval works, is remarkably adept at recreating in words a relentlessly Early Medieval military material culture: maul hauberks, partially enclosed helmets, broad shields that splinter and long spears from horseback.  The internet has, since then, placed the wealth of human knowledge about arms and armor at the fingertips of every writer and yet few if any modern writers are so precise.

Tolkien thus spend his life marinating in the literature produced by pre-modern societies: Greek, Roman, Old English and Middle English in particular.  And it is clear to me that in the process he developed an intuitive understanding of how these cultures imagined their worlds, how they thought about society, about politics, about their own values.  It is why his Secondary World feels so real and true; he understands the societies on which it is based at a depth few ever manage.  And how they thought about war.

Pre-Modern Éowyn

And it is here we meet what we might call out ‘First Éowyn,’ the pre-modern Éowyn.

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.  War, of course, is the principal stage upon which this competition takes place, but not the only one.  But this headlong pursuit of renown is almost invariably tied up with death: there are few ‘old heroes’ in these stories and those that do appear – like Nestor in the Iliad – appear as much as pathetic figures as anything else.  No one really listens to the advice of Nestor in the Iliad (only Telemachos listens to him in the Odyssey), an old blowhard who has outlived his renown and thus much of his value in these societies – they listen to Achilles, to Agamemnon, to Odysseus, men in their prime who are still performing great deeds.

This connection of death and renown is explicit in the Iliad, through its central character, Achilles, whose menis, (‘wrath’) is set out as the poems theme.  In Book 9 he reveals that, unusual amongst men – he is, after all, a demigod – he has two mortal fates.  “For my mother, the silver-footed goddess Thetis told me of the two-fold fates bearing me to death.  If on the one hand I remain here, fighting about the city of the Trojans, I will lose my return-home, but my renown [kleos] will be imperishable.  If on the other hand I return to my beloved fatherland, I will lose my great kleos, but long shall my life endure, and the doom of death shall not fall upon me.” (Iliad 9.410-416)  Achilles, the consummate hero, naturally chooses to remain and although the poem ends before his death, every reader or listener would have known that Achilles, by choosing to remain and defeat Hector, the mightiest Trojan, had both achieved that undying renown (we are, after all, still talking about him), but at the same time, had doomed himself to die beneath the walls of Troy.

Likewise, of course, Beowulf.  While Beowulf’s superhuman strength – he has a nasty habit of breaking his own swords, he is so strong – defines many of his fights, the defining aspect of her person is the one the poem ends on, that is he lof-geornost “most desirous of fame” (3182).  Lof – praise, fame, renown – serves much the same role as Greek kleos (or Latin laus or gloria), as the central thing for which heroes compete.  Thus, episodes like Beowulf’s accounting of his exploits upon arriving at Heorot (399-424) before his boast to defeat Grendel and his prickly response when Unferth tries to play down his exploits (499-606).  Renown, reputation for great deeds was all.

But heroism and death are linked in Beowulf as they are in the Iliad.   Deep into his old age, when a dragon strikes his kingdom, Beowulf we are told was “too proud to line up with a large army against the sky-plague” (2345-9).  Instead he takes only a small band and when most of these abandon him in fear, he confronts the dragon alone, declaring, “I risked my life often when I was young.  Now I am old, but as king of the people I shall pursue this fight for the glory of winning, if the evil one will only abandon his earth-fort and face me in the open.” (2510-15).  When Beowulf’s one stalwart companion, Wiglaf rushes to his aid, he encourages Beowulf, “Go on, dear Beowulf, do everything you said you would when you were still young and vowed you would never let your name and fame be dimmed while you lived” (2663-66).  Beowulf, of course does go on, in a fight he knows full well will claim his life, yet render his renown imperishable.  How could a man who is lof-geornost do otherwise?

These characters and their motivations, of course, have their attitudes rooted in their own societies and time.  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.  Participation in war in these societies was, after all, often an essential part of the transition from boyhood to adulthood for young men.  It is easy for us to miss how central this could be for these societies. 

By way of example, we might take Aeschylus.  Aeschylus, if you are not familiar, was an ancient Athenian playwright, a writer of tragedies – the higher, more prestigious form – and was by far the most famous playwright of his generation; arguably of any generation. He was the only playwright whose tragedies continued to be restaged in festivals after his death, the equivalent of the very greatest writer-director of his day.  We have the text of Aeschylus’ funerary epitaph, engraved on his gravestone.  It reads (in translation), “Beneath this stone like Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian, who perished in the wheat-bearing lands of Gela; of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak, and the long-haired Persian knows it well.”¹

No mention of his plays, his many first-place finishes in theater competition at religious festivals.  But Aeschylus fought at Marathon, the most famous battle of his age and thereby won the renown of which his tombstone boasts, that Marathon can speak of his fighting skill and his Persian foes remember it.

For the men of the ‘military class’ – defined differently in each society – war also never fully left them.  Few heroes of the Trojan War ever come home: both Achilles and Hector die on the battlefield.  So too, of course does Beowulf, mortally wounded by his last triumph, the slain dragon.  And Roland likewise does not survive his famed and doomed last stand at Roncevaux Pass.

That was not merely story convenience.  The citizen-warriors of Greek city-states (called poleis) continued to serve when the polis went to war deep into old age.  Socrates, born c. 470, fought at Potidaea in his 30s, at Delium in his 40s and at Amphipolis, likely nearing 50.  Military age for an ancient Greek polis ended only around 60.  Likewise, knights did not ‘retire.’  Their status as warriors was an essential part of them that continued deep into old age and could only be laid down if they took up another equally totalizing vocation, by taking holy orders as a monk. 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.  Indeed, as we come to know the character, it dominates her thoughts.  As Éowyn pleads with Aragorn to take her down the Paths of the Dead and Aragorn reminds her that she has – again – been chosen to lead Rohan in the king’s absence and against the possibility that he and Éomer might not return, she responds, “Shall I always be chosen?’ she said bitterly, ‘Shall I always be left behind when the Riders depart, to mind the house while they win renown, and find food and beds when they return?” (RotK 62; emphasis mine).  When asked what she fears, she responds, “A cage…to stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire” (RotK, 62; emphasis mine).  Éowyn at this point seeks to take part in that competition for renown; chiefly she fears being forever barred from it.

And that comes inexplicably linked with her own attitude towards death.  When Éowyn declares to Aragorn, “I do not fear either pain or death,” (RotK, 62) it is not an idle boast.  She is, in effect, attempting to make the same choice as Achilles: to choose the short, glorious life over the long life lived without renown.  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).

And even in the Houses of Healing, Éowyn holds to this vision of war.  When Gandalf describes her as “waking…to hope” she responds “At least while there is an empty saddle of some fallen Rider that I can fill, and there are deeds to do. But to hope? I do not know” (RotK, 158-9)  To Faramir she declares, “And it is not always good to be healed in body. Nor is it always evil to die in battle, even in bitter pain. Were I permitted, in this dark hour I would choose the latter.”  Shortly thereafter, 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. This experience.

Tolkien’s Modern War

Once again, I imagine a fair bit of this is known to many of you but I think it is worthwhile to cover the details.

On June 28, 1915 J.R.R. Tolkien, 18 days out of his undergraduate education, applied for an officer’s commission ‘for the duration of the war.’  It is worth, I think, offering a bit of background here, as 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.  Rapid Prussian had won them the Franco-Prussian War and so this system was designed to keep the whole male populace in readiness for such a war.

Consequently, 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.  It was almost immediately apparent as the fighting began in the Battle of the Frontiers that this would not be sufficient.

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.

It was into this rapidly expanding force that Tolkien was commissioned, with the war already very much underway.  Enlisting ‘late’ as he had wanted to complete his studies Tolkien reported for training on July 19, 1915 and on the 4^th 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.  The French role in the attack had been downgraded because the German assault on Verdun (begun February of that year) had diverted French reserves, but this equally meant that the attack at the Somme would have to go forward no matter what and had to continue, no matter what went wrong: German attention from the straining French lines had to be diverted.  The battle, which began on the first of July, 1916 and ground horribly on until the 18^th of November, was, of course, a famous and terrible failure.

Tolkien, deployed with the 11^th Lancashire Fusiliers, arrived near the front on the 27^th of June, by which point the pre-assault artillery barrage had already begun; preparatory barrages in WWI could last days or weeks.  Tolkien’s unit was in reserve for the first days of the battle (begun July 1), but his close friend and T.C.B.S. fellow (Tea Club, Barrovian Society)² Robert Gilson was killed on the first day of the battle, by shellfire; he would not be the last of Tolkien’s boyhood friends the war claimed.  It was artillery that did most of the killing; infantry did most of the dying. Tolkien’s unit worked burial detail for the first days of the offensive as they waited to rotate forward.

Tolkien himself moved up to the front with his battalion on the 14^th of July; battles in WWI ran for months and the bodies of those slain two weeks earlier remained in places on the field.  An attack that night to capture the village of Ovillers-la-Boisselle failed with heavy losses – Tolkien and his fellows watched as other elements of the 7^th brigade tried to take the ground, were thrown back and then were sent to try themselves; Tolkien’s job as a signal’s officer was the hopeless task of trying to maintain the wire that enabled cable communications.  Another assault on the 15^th, with no more success had left another British unit, a Warwickshire battalion, stranded behind enemy lines, so the Lancashire Fusiliers set to the bloody, muddy work of blasting their way with grenades through the trenches to relieve them.  By the 17^th, the village had fallen; it had cost the British 5,121 men to take a tiny village that before the war had a population of just a few hundred and in any case had been bombed out of existence long before they arrived.

Tolkien was back in the line in October for an attack on the 21^st, which succeeded in the small ways that assaults in the First World War could: a little ground and a few prisoners taken and heavy losses on both sides.  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%. The Lancashire Fusiliers were kept in existence as a unit through the offensive only through continuous replacements.  Having been in and out of the front lines since June, on October 25^th, Tolkien fell sick with trench fever, communicated by the lice that lived in the trenches. The sickness saved his life.  Not all of his friends were so lucky: fellow TCBS member Geoffrey Bache Smith was killed by shrapnel in November during the closing days of the battle.

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 striking that it is in the aftermath of this experience – Tolkien himself played down any notions that he was writing Middle Earth ‘in the trenches’ – 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.

Far from the heroics of the tales in his books or of Eowyn’s dread hopes, his experience of war had been more like Bilbo’s experience. Like Tolkien, Bilbo at the Battle of the Five Armies comes to battle reluctantly, for a fight he had hoped could be avoided, and he is swiftly incapacitated – struck down by a stone rather than by trench fever.  When he returns to health, he finds not glory, but simply the list of dead friends: Thorin, Fili and Kili.

Robert Gilson (KIA Jul. 1, 1916), Ralph Payton (KIA, Jul. 22, 1916), Geoffrey Smith (WIA Nov. 29, d. of wounds Dec 3, 1916), Thomas Barnsley (KIA, Jul. 31, 1917).

Also like Bilbo, when the next war came, aged, he could only stay in Rivendell and wish good luck to the next generation that must bear the peril and wait anxiously for their return.  Of his sons, Michael Tolkien commissioned as a lieutenant in the British Army in 1941; Christopher joined the R.A.F. in 1943.  Mercifully, both survived.

Tolkien’s deep reading of ancient and medieval literature had equipped him to understand pre-modern societies in peace and in war: how kings and captains lead, how their armies are formed, what castles and fortresses are for and how they are made, what values and words hold them together, but his experience in the First World War of course shaped him also. In some cases, in trivial ways – as noted Tolkien knows, intuitively, how fast men march because he had been a lieutenant responsible for drilling and marching men.

But he also comes with a different, modern vision of war. To me, 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.  And of course, 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.”  The Return of the King, in particular, clearly stands as one of the great works of the Great War.  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.

Resolving Éowyn’s War

And at last, 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.  This contradiction comes together in many of Tolkien’s characters, but strikingly in Éowyn.

When Éowyn wakes first she is surprised to see Éomer, “for they said that you were slain. Nay, but that was only the dark voices in my dream. How long have I been dreaming?” (RotK, 158) Frodo, too, has dark dreams of the horrors of his part in the War of the Ring that never quite go away and one detects here an echo of what many in his generation experienced, of wounds that “cannot be wholly cured” (RotK, 299).  Éowyn has ridden out heroically, she has stood in battle heroically before a great foe and triumphed.  Yet, in her words, “I looked for death in battle.  But I have not died, and battle still goes on” (RotK 264-5).  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. We, of course, already know that Faramir – who loves not the bright sword for its sharpness – has grown past the heroic, Homeric view of war and now he tries to draw Éowyn forward. Faramir declares to her, “you and I have both passed under the wings of Shadow, and the same hand drew us back” (RotK 266). Éowyn at first refuses, “I am a shieldmaiden and my hand is ungentle” (RotK 266) – and even seems to wither once the Shadow of war departs (her chance at a glorious death with it; RotK, 270).  But 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.

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