"I am Eowyn"

“That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs in his mind.” -Gandalf referring to Sauron in “The Two Towers”

I re-read it just because it was lying about. While this was never my intent, the thought never does occur to my father that I have no interest in his position, other than my concern with the implications of his condemnation of me. I always regarded it as fine, this is who you are. What mattered to me though was the familial state and whether this ideology would impact to benefit people, or was it just substitution?

If you look at my father’s arguments, you will find it hinges on the accusation that I covet a more exalted place than his, it’s all relative to his placement. Nothing could be further from the truth. I thought of his place as relative based on merit. I thought, too, that he had the equal capacity to make it worthless.  My real point is that my father can only frame his arguments towards me in relation to his position, and I am not even in the same ballpark. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want what was offered in juxtaposition to him. I proved this by shutting it all down, giving it all up, rather than ever entering the possibility of such a split occurring, of being accused of this whether it was true or not. But all my father can assume is that I’m trying to usurp his place. I walked away from it long ago when I divorced. I bear no relation to his position; I was wilfully stripped of everything. And I did not seek to revolt, merely to answer my own question of who I might be in a scheme I myself never devised.

Once years ago, say perhaps when I was about fourteen of fifteen, my father asked me which of the Lord of the Rings characters I though best represented me in real life. I excluded the nine because they were all male, though there is the fact that our family, too, is nine. I’d hesitate there too because if you think of it, my father would assumed the characters of the three pivots of the nine, Gandalf, The King, and the Ring-bearer. So Frodo was out automatically (I kept it a secret that was who, out of the nine, I felt the most identity with.) That left the three female characters, Eowyn, Galadriel, and Arwen.

Arwen was too aloof and beatific, almost a non-entity. Besides she was the closest to Aoreth and Aoreth was always an unattainable ideal to me, purified distillate. Besides Arwen married the King and I didn’t want to go near there, especially since that role should have been Mother’s. Eowyn, though, I could handle. I admired her icy, austere spirit, her courage, the fact that she fought. She killed the Witch King. So I said, “Eowyn”.

Dad wasn’t impressed. He said he thought of me, in fact, as Galadriel. That blew my head. (She wasn’t even on my mental map.) I felt flattered. But I preferred Eowyn. I thought it more honest. After I’d read The Silmarillion I could banter (this was after I’d finally cajoled Dad into reading it), “So, Galadriel was really one of the exiled, barred from heaven!” Hardly the golden ideal he’d prescribed. I think now of that as his image for me, how he would mould me into an image ideal, but according to his prescriptions. In those appalling letters he exhorts, “Where is my Galadriel?” They sent me a bottle of “Holy Water” (they prayed over it) with her name on it. It’s been his secret ideal all this time.

Eowyn is closer to the truth.

She fights.

She is morbid. Her heart is frozen. She is trapped in a castle, lusted after. She is mortally wounded nigh death by a sorcerer’s weapon, suffers unrequited love for an unattainable ideal.

But what recently went “Cha-ching!” is that she never marries the King. She finds true happiness in the Steward, Faramir, who heals her heart.

She kills the greatest of dark servants. To gain this victory she disobeys a royal command.

Eowyn is much, much closer to the truth.