The Éowyn Mystique

Gerry Canavan reviews Kenji Kamiyama’s animated film “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.”

By Gerry CanavanJanuary 10, 2025

• SF

• Film

ALTHOUGH J. R. R. TOLKIEN never set foot in Milwaukee (or anywhere in the United States), Marquette University is the unlikely home of the author’s drafts of The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55)—and every two years for the last decade, I have taught a Tolkien class there that draws on this unexpected treasure trove. In many ways the course has become a strange sort of reverse-adaptation class; only, this year’s college seniors were mostly born after the 2003 theatrical release of Peter Jackson’s Return of the King, and it is very clear to me that many, if not most, of my students come to the books through the films (if indeed they have read the books before my class at all).

Our discussions frequently bounce off Jackson’s choices in ways that I hope are generative for better understanding Tolkien’s original intentions; if Sherlock Holmes fans have to deal with “Watsonian” explanations that describe events from within the story world and “Doylist” explanations that describe events from a point of view outside it, readers of Tolkien in the 21st century always find themselves reckoning with the Jacksonian alongside the Tolkienist and the Gandalfian.

This tension between visions of Middle-earth may be no clearer anywhere than in the character of Éowyn, whose iconic victory over the diabolical Witch-King in Jackson’s Return of the King was a formative moment of political awakening for many of my female students. You remember it: the Witch-King believes himself to exist under a prophecy that promises him he can be killed by no living man—but Éowyn rips off the helmet that is obscuring her identity, proclaims “I am no man,” and stabs the monster through the face, in one of the fantasy genre’s most enduringly delightful contractual loopholes.

It’s the unhappy task of my students, then, to read the rest of Éowyn’s story as it is presented in the novel. She wakes up in the Houses of Healing after the battle, and the men—who have all been saved by her heroism from a monster they could not themselves defeat!—are disappointed that she didn’t stay in Rohan like she was told to. They credit Merry, Éowyn’s squire, who sliced the Witch-King’s knee with a special sword he’d acquired hundreds of pages before, with the kill, on the grounds that he is not a man either, but a hobbit—and they stand over her bedside fretting about what to do with Éowyn now given that she is still so very unhappy, asking for a horse and a weapon so she can have another chance at dying in battle like she’d wished.

Earlier, in another deeply quotable moment, Éowyn had told Aragorn, the future king, that she viewed the expectations that had been piled on her due to her gender as a “cage” that she feared worse than death, dreading not simply the feeling of imprisonment but the idea that she would get used to the bars, even come to rely on them, until “all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.” That Tolkien, an Oxford don and pre–Vatican II Catholic, could write such a stirring defense of women’s agency almost two decades before the publication of The Feminine Mystique is shocking—but what is perhaps, sadly, less shocking is that he can’t really commit himself to the idea that Éowyn’s revolutionary desire for equality is a positive development. Instead, he sees her desires as a symptom of the deep sickness of the world in the moment of Sauron’s ascension—and the solution, in the end, is for Éowyn to put down her weapons, become a healer, and most importantly, become a wife and a mother.

In the earliest conception of The Lord of the Rings, Éowyn’s fated husband was supposed to be Aragorn himself, a happy ending that nearly all of the saga is still pointing toward narratively; at the last minute, however, Tolkien added the character of Arwen, an elf princess, to be Aragorn’s partner, leaving Éowyn an unresolved loose thread. Remaining deeply depressed in the House of Healing, and forbidden from returning to the battlefield by order of the still-uncrowned king, Éowyn meets another wounded soldier there—Faramir, a heroic Gondorian nobleman—and is so inspired by his kindness, decency, and piety that she renounces all the aspects of the character that made so many of my students, as young girls, fall in love with her in the first place. But the book reports this as good news: “And to the Warden of the Houses Faramir said: ‘Here is the Lady Éowyn of Rohan, and now she is healed.’”

To say the novel’s version of the Éowyn plotline lands with a thud in the classroom would be a severe understatement. Nearly every instance of the class has unraveled over Éowyn in its final weeks, trying to understand why Tolkien could get so close to a 2024-approved opinion on gender fluidity only to trip over his own feet at the finish line. There are, of course, elements of the book that might help us see this picture in more nuanced terms: the fact that it is ultimately Aragorn’s task to become a healer too; the fact that the book’s 100-page-long in-universe appendices reveal people still arguing about Éowyn and the right way to understand her life centuries later, with the war songs of Rohan remembering her first and foremost as a warrior, not as a wife; and even the fact that the ancient text that will eventually be translated into English as Lord of the Rings is in the possession of Éowyn’s descendants for most of those centuries, and that those descendants are known to have edited the manuscript in unknown ways for not entirely clear purposes. But in the end, there are some number of students who think Éowyn getting married off is, simply, bullshit; no matter how incompatible the idea may be with Tolkien’s ideas about violence, gender, trauma, and recovery, what a sizable portion of my students truly seem to want is for Éowyn to break out of the hospital in the middle of the night; steal a horse, a shield, and a sword; and go on being a superhero until the end of her days.

This long preamble brings us to 2024’s animated The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, directed by Kenji Kamiyama, which reveals to us an older version of Éowyn who seems, potentially, to be wishing for the exact same thing. The anime is heavily indebted to Jackson’s films, not only using its famous soundtrack and elements of its visual design but even deploying Miranda Otto, Jackson’s Éowyn, as its voice-over narrator, stepping into the role that Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) played at the start of Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). This is an Éowyn living in peace after the war, in Gondor, but thinking about the legends of her own people, the Rohirrim—and in particular, thinking about a princess, Héra (Gaia Wise), who, like her, bucked her expected gender role and committed great deeds on the field of battle, only to be written out of history for her trouble. (Even this is something of a deep-cut reference by someone involved in the production who knows Lord of the Rings very well: in the published Lord of the Rings, Helm’s daughter goes completely unnamed, and all the events of the film are attributed to the men around her instead.)

The legend Éowyn tells is a crucial pivot point in the history of Rohan. The king, Héra’s father Helm Hammerhand (Brian Cox), is strong but proud, inadvertently causing a civil war with the notoriously untrustworthy Men of Dunland when he challenges a rude nobleman, Freca (Shaun Dooley), to a fistfight and kills him with a single punch. The resulting schism sees Helm betrayed by an untrustworthy advisor and his court in Edoras destroyed, requiring his forces to retreat to the Hornburg, where they endure a months-long siege in a brutal winter. With both his sons dead, Helm, too, ultimately falls in battle (which is why the Hornburg came to be called Helm’s Deep in his honor). Through her cleverness and resolve, and the help of allies including Olwyn (Lorraine Ashbourne, a retired shieldmaiden) and the Eagles (whom Héra is seemingly the first person to have the good sense to ask to intervene, as opposed to just sitting around waiting for them to show up), Héra is able to lead the people to victory over the usurpers, led by Freca’s son, Héra’s villainous childhood love interest Wulf (Luke Pasqualino).

But after the war, they make her cousin Fréaláf (Laurence Ubong Williams) king instead (over his own objections that Héra should be the one to lead). The choice is Rohan’s loss; from what we see in the film, Héra is the only person in the country with enough brains to see through Saruman (briefly voiced from disused audio recorded by the late Christopher Lee for the Hobbit movies), whom we witness taking up residence in Rohan at the film’s close, ominously. Instead, she rides off into the wild, seeking more adventure. In an almost MCU-esque nod toward sequels that, due to the film’s commercial failure, will likely never be made, she has been secretly contacted by a different wizard, Gandalf, who appears to be assembling a team.

The film is hardly subtle about the parallels between the story Éowyn is telling and the way her own life turned out—an early scene has Héra firmly rejecting her father’s attempt to blithely marry her off to some “Gondorian princeling,” and her own version of a feminist catchphrase sees her wearing a cursed wedding dress and wielding a blade on a flaming battlement, proclaiming, “I am bride to no man.” The older Éowyn is not only fantasizing about a different path she might have taken but also reflecting on what has happened to all the women in the story Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam wrote about the War of the Ring; it’s not hard to imagine an older Éowyn, much like the one who narrates War of the Rohirrim, reading the copy of the Red Book of Westmarch that Pippin has brought her and Faramir decades after the war and feeling a bit sour over the question of who gets lauded for their heroism and bravery, and who gets relegated to a footnote of a footnote in a long list of great and powerful kings.

By all accounts, The War of the Rohirrim did not meet either commercial or critical expectations: on a budget of $30 million, the film made only $4.6 million in its opening weekend, and has not cracked $20 million worldwide since its release. The film was very quickly put on streaming in an effort to recoup what is considered by Warner Bros. to be a major flop in an important franchise. Critics—perhaps many of them unfamiliar with anime conventions, including artistic techniques that limit detail and movement to save money on animation—certainly seemed flummoxed by the film, which generally earned quite mixed reviews. To be sure, the film’s embedded first-person narration and explicitly mythological tone is a bit hard to square with the mode and tone of the Peter Jackson films, a disconnect also amplified by the anime form; what are we to make of characters, inhabiting the same basically realistic world as Frodo and Sam, who seem able to activate Super Saiyan power-ups in the midst of battle?

But the students from my latest Tolkien class uniformly loved it. The idea of Héra’s story as an in-universe legend, being told long after the fact by a person with a particular agenda in ways that might be interrogated or contested, actually replicates the narrative frame of the book version of The Lord of the Rings in a way no adaptation has yet been able to. This isn’t the truth, as such; it’s a legend, one Éowyn is thinking about and telling us in a particular way for a reason that is meaningful to her. And the idea of checking in on Éowyn after the war to see how she’s doing, and if she’s actually happy with the choices she has made, allows us to think in a new way about questions that have haunted my class every single time the book has been taught. My students have never been willing to let her go at the end of The Return of the King, and obviously they aren’t alone. Trying to read the entirety of the legendarium in a single semester is a challenge—in my class, we read not only The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings but the famously difficult Silmarillion (1977) too—but I’ve already decided that future versions of the syllabus will need to make time for The War of the Rohirrim, and its tantalizing vision of a postwar Éowyn telling stories of women that the men around her would prefer to forget.