I think also with Eowyn Tolkien chose to use her to more clearly illustrate the horror of war. Here we see someone who has not been to war before experiencing it in its full horror. She not only sees comrades felled on the field but she sees her uncle, her surrogate father felled. The men she is with have experienced battle before, and even though it will also be horrific to them, the use of Eowyn, someone inexperinced in this, draws a more clear contrast.
There could also be something being made clear in the contrast of Eowyn's beauty with the ugliness of war. Such a contrast could not be as clearly achieved if Tolkien had used one of the men in such a context - not because women are there only to be beautiful, but because Tolkien has already made a point of telling us how fragile she looks. He could have achieved the same effect by using a male character and telling us how fragile
he was, but the image of a woman in the midst of a battlefield is more incongruous (or it certainly was when he was writing!) and therefore shocking.
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Originally Posted by Mithalwen
And gardeners always have challenges ...
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Yes, she could always have kept her swordplay up to scratch by felling slugs in an interesting fashion...
But seriously, just because she agreed to marry Faramir and live a peaceful existence it does not mean that she went into a life of cooking and cleaning; she married a powerful man who, as Mithalwen says, seems to love her for who she is, not what she looks like. As Middle Earth entered the Fourth Age there would be much work to be done requiring those who could rebuild, and much less need for fighters.