Holy Saturday

Later today I'll be at Grace Church doing the Great Vigil.  For now, I'm checking mail and, for this post, noting that I have finished The Lord of the Rings.  All 1031 pages of it!  I wonder now that I put off rereading this book for so many years.  It's a wonderful tale of the struggle of good against evil... rich in texture... wonderfully complex, yet never so convoluted that you lose the thread... written with an archaic style which remains quite readable... and possessed of great heart!

And TLOTR is timely, too.  In recent weeks we've been treated to a lively national discussion about women's health care and religious freedom (as if those two categories were mutually exclusive).  Behind that is a dialogue about the role of women in society.  That this dialogue is being conducted mainly by men is one indication that it will not prove helpful.  How interesting, with this muttering on the airwaves in the background, to read the following dialogue between Aragorn, heir to the throne of Gondor, and Eowyn, niece of the King of Rohan.  Aragon has decided to walk the Paths of the Dead in order to recruit an army of dead warriors in the effort to defeat Sauron.  Eowyn asks to go with him.

     "Your duty is to your people," [Aragorn] answered.
     "Too often have I heard of duty," [Eowyn] cried.  "But am I not of the House of Erol, a shieldmaiden and not a dry-nurse?  I have waited on faltering feet long enough.  Since they falter no longer, it seems, may I not now spend my life as I will?"
     "Few may do that with honour," he answered.  "But as for you, lady: did you not accept the charge to govern the people until their lord's return?  If you had not been chosen, then some marshall or captain would have been set in the same place, and he could not ride away from his charge, were he weary of it or no."
     "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?... All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house.  But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more."

Later, it is Eowyn who dispatches Sauron's chief lieutenant, the Witch King of Angmar, whom no man could kill.  As she does so, she declares, "I am no man!"

I don't think J.R.R. Tolkien was a feminist.  Yet he put his writer's nib on an argument as contemporary as the latest outburst from pufferfish politicians.  Some conservatives are convinced that the world was much better when women labored at the stove, barefoot, with one baby on the hip and another clutching at her skirts.  If they read this bit of the Rings novel, they would probably find Eowyn objectionable, or inexplicable.  Well, the pufferfish can go read comic books. •••