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mebediel · 14 days ago

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Is it just me or does Arwen get the Anne Hathaway treatment sometimes? She’s so inoffensive that people look for reasons to dislike her. She’s too passive, too perfect, too sheltered. Probably a haughty, entitled bitch underneath the good girl routine.

Arwen is an underwritten female character, and that means that people tend to fill in the blanks with negative interpretations. I’ve been guilty of this myself! It’s tempting to pit her against Eowyn: the action girl vs. the pampered princess. But the more carefully I read, the less convincing I find certain criticisms of her. So here are some takes on Arwen that I don’t agree with anymore:

1. Arwen was extremely sheltered.

It’s true that Elrond sets conditions for Aragorn to be able to marry Arwen. (I’d argue that this was very reasonable, and Elrond was asserting his authority over Aragorn as much over his daughter.) But otherwise he doesn’t seem to be very controlling or overprotective. Arwen travels freely between Rivendell and Lothlorien whenever she feels like it, even though her mother was captured and tortured by orcs while making the same journey. This paper contains a good example of the impulse to overstate Tolkien’s sexism while pitting Eowyn against Arwen:

“…we travel with Eowyn, but Arwen moves only at the order of her menfolk and only when she is to be wed.” (pg. 20)

This author is so determined to prove that Tolkien doesn’t allow his women to travel that he ignores Arwen’s canonical freedom of movement. When we first meet her in Rivendell, she has just returned from a long visit to Lothlorien. In the Appendices, Elrond calls her “Lady of Imladris and of Lorien,” acknowledging that she is an adult woman who spends a lot of her time living far away from him. I find it significant that Elrond originally tries to keep Arwen’s existence a secret from Aragorn, but he can’t prevent her from coming back from Lothlorien unannounced. Here is another quote from the same paper about Arwen’s arrival in Minas Tirith at the end of LotR:

“All of the challenging matters are dealt with in her absence; when all is peaceful, then she appears—fashionably late and carefully chaperoned by her father.” (pg. 60)

“Carefully chaperoned” seems uncalled-for. How carefully chaperoned is Arwen when she is meeting Aragorn alone in the woods? Why is it that when Frodo travels through the wilderness, it is an exciting and dangerous adventure that changes him as a person, but when Arwen does the same thing, she is merely being transported from Point A to Point B like an Amazon package? Why don’t her travels count as interesting life experiences??? Hmmm?

It’s valid to complain that Arwen is excluded from the main action of LotR, but we should be careful not to be more sexist than Tolkien himself. In fact, Tolkien insisted that elves are somewhat androgynous and elf women are strong and capable. In general, elves are less vulnerable than Men to cold, hunger, and hardship, and they have a stronger connection to nature—all of which must be true of female elves as well. Arwen is not that different from Luthien and Aredhel, who also moved freely through wild landscapes (and married strange men they met in the woods).

2. Arwen only falls in love with Aragorn because he looks like an elf.

In the Appendices, Galadriel gives Aragorn a good scrubbing and dresses him up nice, and Arwen apparently falls in love the moment she sees him looking so handsome and elvish. (“Then more than any kind of Men he appeared, and seemed rather an Elf-lord from the Isles of the West.”) So she must be superficial and gullible, right?

This is where I kvetch about the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen and how deceptively simple it is. Don’t be fooled! There are two factors that make it a little tricky: call them the “brevity of the narrative issue” and the “Barahir issue.” First off, Tolkien admitted that when he writes in the register of an archaic chronicle or legend, he condenses certain things: “The legends of the foundation of Númenor often speak as if all the Edain that accepted the Gift set sail at one time and in one fleet. But this is only due to the brevity of the narrative.”

Secondly, the Tale is narrated by Barahir, the grandson of Faramir, which invites us to question its objectivity. There is an extremely visible seam between the first part of the Tale, which relies on Aragorn as a source, and the narrative of Aragorn’s death, which centers Arwen’s perspective. (She’s the only one left to tell the story at that point, of course.) The final sentence (“Here ends this tale, as it has come to us from the South”) makes it clear that Barahir is not intended to be an omniscient narrator.

There’s a frustrating lack of detail about Aragorn and Arwen’s courtship in Lothlorien, which makes perfect sense if you imagine that Aragorn is the source of the narrative. Of course he would be stingy with the details! All we’re told is that they spent “a season” wandering around together… weeks in which their initial attraction must have grown into real love, but which remain personal and private in Barahir’s history.

Why did Arwen really fall in love with Aragorn in Lothlorien? She certainly wasn’t impressed the first time they met. Aragorn was only 20 years old at that point; he was a BABY. At their second meeting in Lothlorien, Aragorn is 49 and “somewhat grim to look upon.” He has grown and matured and done impressive things. Arwen sees the greatness in him: “Dark is the Shadow, and yet my heart rejoices; for you, Estel, shall be among the great whose valour will destroy it.” Yes, he does clean up nicely, but Arwen knows that he’s not an elf, and that she’ll have to give up her elvish life if she wants to marry him. When the hobbits meet him, he has a “rascally” appearance and streaks of gray in his hair… Arwen can hardly be mistaking him for an elf lord all the time.

3. In general, Arwen only seems to connect with mortals who are elf-coded.

In addition to Aragorn, Arwen is associated with two other mortals who are described as having “elvish” vibes: Frodo and Elanor (Sam’s daughter). You could take this as Arwen being a snooty person who can only relate to people if they are elves or at least elf-like, but I think this misses the point. Arwen’s connection to Frodo is deep and poignant. Tolkien makes this extraordinary statement in one of his letters:

“Her renunciation and suffering were related to and enmeshed with Frodo's: both were parts of a plan for the regeneration of the state of Men.” - Letter 246

The mysterious connection between Frodo and Arwen is established early on, before the Council of Elrond: “….then suddenly it seemed to Frodo that Arwen turned towards him, and the light of her eyes fell on him from afar and pierced his heart.”

This meaningful look is never explained, but it is finally paid off at the very end, when Arwen gives Frodo her place on the ship to Valinor. Sauron has been defeated, the King has returned, everyone is rejoicing, but even in her happiness Arwen is deeply concerned about Frodo. She seems to understand better than anyone else that Frodo has been wounded in a way that will never heal, and she does everything in her power to help him.

Arwen is a ridiculously empathetic and self-sacrificing person! She gives up her immortality to marry Aragorn, and then immediately thinks, “cool, so can I give my ticket to eternal happiness to someone else?” What does this poor lady have to do to prove that she isn’t self-absorbed???

There’s also the detail that Sam’s daughter Elanor becomes one of Arwen’s maids of honor. In European courts, a maid of honor was traditionally a member of the nobility who acted as a companion to the queen while helping her with her duties. Elanor may be very pretty for a hobbit, but she is still a hobbit, not an elf or even a human, and she comes from a working class family on top of that! And yet Arwen takes a liking to her and invites her to join her court in Gondor. It’s hard to reconcile that with the idea that Arwen is aloof, awkward or snobbish.

4. Aragorn was the only mortal she truly cared about. She didn’t understand why the Numenoreans fell or have any sympathy for them until Aragorn was dying.

So I think this is the brevity of the narrative creating problems again. If you read closely, it’s evident that Arwen’s lifespan is connected to Aragorn’s. (Tolkien confirmed this in his notes in The Nature of Middle Earth.)

When Aragorn decides to die, he is not just leaving Arwen a widow, he is ensuring that she will follow him very shortly. Arwen knows this! As she begs him to change his mind, the narrative explains: “She was not yet weary of her days, and thus she tasted the bitterness of the mortality that she had taken upon her.” Not yet weary of HER days. The mortality that she had taken upon HER. She is not just grieving for Aragorn, she is reeling at her own impending death! Aragorn’s last words to her suggest that he knows she will die soon: “In sorrow we must go, but not in despair” and “we are not bound forever to the circles of the world.” Sure enough, as soon as Aragorn dies, Arwen ages rapidly and it’s implied that she turns into an old woman: “But Arwen went forth from the House, and the light of her eyes was quenched, and it seemed to her people that she had become cold and grey as nightfall in winter that comes without a star.”

Frankly, I think Arwen is entitled to curse God or say whatever crazy shit she wants to. She’s grieving Aragorn, but she’s also frustrated and hurt at the way he’s ignoring her wishes and making a one-sided decision to end his life AND HERS. Her emotions must be all over the place. And yet she shows only the faintest hint of exasperation with Aragorn, and her bitterness at God is expressed as pity for the fallen Numenoreans. She’s way nicer than I would be.

If she formerly scorned the Numenoreans as wicked fools and didn’t understand why they did such awful things, does that necessarily mean that she didn’t grieve for Faramir or Eowyn or other people that she had lost before Aragorn? I don’t think so. Tolkien’s own position on the fallen Numenoreans was basically “they were horrible people and you shouldn’t feel bad for them,” so Arwen’s “scorn” was likely a normal attitude among the elves and maybe even the Dunedain. (Aragorn considers it a privilege to be able to give up his life, rather than clinging to it like the corrupt Numenorean kings.) I think it’s normal for Arwen to be experiencing a new extreme of emotion in such a painful situation, such that she goes to some dark places that were outside her understanding before.

Tolkien had a favorite quote from Simone de Beauvoir (of all people!) which he said was helpful for understanding LotR:

“All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.”

I can’t think of any character in LotR that this applies to more perfectly to than Arwen. Intellectually she may have accepted mortality, but in the moment of Aragorn’s death, she realizes, to her horror, that she doesn’t feel the same way he does about dying and she never will. Her tragedy embodies all of Tolkien’s painful ambivalence about death: “For if this is indeed, as the Eldar say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive.” The gentle cynicism of “as the Eldar say”—oh man, I can’t tell you how much this endears Arwen to me. Rest in peace, babygirl, you were a saint for putting up with Aragorn.

#tolkien #lotr

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