I think Tolkien wrote his women mostly from the subconscious. He seems to sympathise with them and even identify with them more than he really wants to allow himself. Eowyn's speech at Dunharrow gets no satisfactory answer from Aragorn, or Tolkien. After all Tollers was a medievalist and Anglo Saxon specialist and so well aware of how much the position of women in these societies, well, sucked.
I often wondered what exactly lay behind the appalling end he wrote for Arwen. 'Despair' to a Catholic and a medievalist being the one sin for which there can be no forgiveness and really being synonymous with suicide. The only other suicide we see in LoTR is Denethor. Is that really his parallel? Or is this part and parcel of the 'unredeemed earth' bit and the problem of being warriors for good before the coming of Christ gave mankind any hope in the afterlife? Love is an astonishingly powerful force in Tolkien's work but it does not conquer all, in fact with the greater joy tends to invariably come greater pain. The pain is not however all that there is. The whole thing is fascinating and if I ever put my academic ahat on again, probably one of the first papers i will write.
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I often wondered what exactly lay behind the appalling end he wrote for Arwen. 'Despair' to a Catholic and a medievalist being the one sin for which there can be no forgiveness and really being synonymous with suicide. The only other suicide we see in LoTR is Denethor. Is that really his parallel? Or is this part and parcel of the 'unredeemed earth' bit and the problem of being warriors for good before the coming of Christ gave mankind any hope in the afterlife? Love is an astonishingly powerful force in Tolkien's work but it does not conquer all, in fact with the greater joy tends to invariably come greater pain. The pain is not however all that there is. The whole thing is fascinating and if I ever put my academic ahat on again, probably one of the first papers i will write.