Arwen
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- This article is about the fictional character. For other uses, see Arwen (disambiguation).
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Arwen Undómiel is a character from the fictional Middle-earth universe created by J. R. R. Tolkien. She appears in his best-known book, The Lord of the Rings. Arwen is an elf who lived during the Third Age.
In Quenya Arwen's name signifies noble woman (Q. 'ar'=noble, 'wen'=maiden). Her second name or epessë, Undómiel means Evenstar (Evening star) (Q. 'undómë'=dusk, 'él'=star) Therefore she is also called Arwen Evenstar.
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[edit] Appearances
[edit] Literature
Arwen is the youngest child of Elrond and Celebrían, her elder brothers being the twins Elladan and Elrohir. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of Eärendil the Mariner (the second of the Half-elven), great-granddaughter of Tuor of Gondolin, and therefore a direct descendant of the ancient Mannish House of Hador. Arwen is also a descendant of King Turgon of the Noldor through her great-grandmother Idril. Through her mother, she is the granddaughter of Lady Galadriel and the great-granddaughter of Finarfin. Through both of her parents she is a direct descendant of the even more ancient Elven House of Finwë. Furthermore Arwen is a descendant of Beren and Lúthien Tinúviel, whose story resembles hers. Arwen is held to be the reappearance in likeness of her ancestress Lúthien, most fair of all the Elves, who is called Nightingale (Tinúviel).
Arwen is a very distant relative of her (future) husband Aragorn, being his first cousin sixty-three times removed. Aragorn's ancestor, Elros, the first King of Númenor, was Elrond's brother and thus her uncle.
Eventually becoming Queen of the Reunited Kingdom of Arnor and Gondor, she was the betrothed of Aragorn son of Arathorn, of the line of the Kings of Arnor.
She rejects her Elvish immortality (which she, as one of the Half-elven, was free to do, thus having the choice to be counted as an Elf or a Man to marry and die with Aragorn.
After the War of the Ring ended, she became the wife of Aragorn (who took the ruling name Elessar Telcontar) and they produced the future heir of the throne, Eldarion, and at least two unnamed daughters.
By Arwen and Aragorn's marriage, the long-sundered lines of the Half-elven are joined. Their union also serves to unite and preserve the bloodlines of the Three Kings of the High Elves (Ingwë, Finwë, and the brothers Olwë and Elwë) as well as the only line with Maiar blood through Arwen's great-great-great grandmother, Melian, Queen of Doriath.
The romance between Aragorn and Arwen is reminiscent of that between the Man Beren and the Elf Lúthien, but as with many other tales of the Third Age, theirs is considered to be a pale copy of the deeds of earlier ages.[citation needed] (Lúthien, for example, once defeated Sauron to rescue Beren, and later enchanted Morgoth by singing.) Still, only two other marriages between humans and High Elves are recorded in Tolkien's stories, and all of the individuals involved are their common direct ancestors (Beren and Lúthien, and Tuor and Idril).
As told in The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, found in the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings (after the third volume, The Return of the King), a young Aragorn encounters Arwen for the first time at Rivendell, where he had been living; she had been staying with her grandmother in Lórien. He falls in love with her at first sight, but it is not until they meet many years later in Lórien that she falls in love with him, and they "plight their troth".
Arwen's first appearance in The Lord of the Rings proper is at Rivendell, when the Hobbits arrive there, and Aragorn is seen with her—the first hint of their relationship. Later, when the Fellowship come to Lothlórien, he remembers their earlier meeting.
She enters the story again when, before taking to the Paths of the Dead, Aragorn is met by a group consisting of Dúnedain, his people, from the North, and Arwen's brothers, Elladan and Elrohir. They bring to him a banner on black cloth: a gift made by Arwen, and a sign that encourages him to take the difficult path. When it is unfurled at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields to reveal the emblem of Elendil in mithril, gems, and gold, it is the first triumphant announcement of the King's return.
Finally, she arrives at Minas Tirith after Aragorn has become king, and they are married.
The four mentions described above are her only appearances in the story as it stands, not counting The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen. Judging by visibility, Arwen is mostly a minor character in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, but she nevertheless appears in detail in the Appendices. Also, she plays a role in the plot which is disproportionate to the number of scenes in which she appears. When Éowyn falls in love with Aragorn it is his fidelity to Arwen that forbids him from reciprocating, thereby motivating Éowyn's subsequent actions during the Battle of the Pelennor Fields which have major repercussions for the defence of Middle-earth. Arwen continually serves as inspiration and motivation for Aragorn, who must become King before he may wed her—not an insignificant task, considering the many long years he devotes to this cause.
Arwen gives up her life in 121 of the Fourth Age, at Cerin Amroth in Lórien, after the death of Aragorn. At the time, she is 2,901 years old.
[edit] Adaptations
Arwen does not appear in Ralph Bakshi's 1978 adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, nor in the 1980 Rankin-Bass adaptation of The Return of the King. Embedded within the epic, Arwen's love provides a thematic note of tragedy, eloquently summarized by Elrond in a central scene:
- "If Aragorn survives this war, you will still be parted. If Sauron is defeated and Aragorn made king and all that you hope for comes true, you will still have to taste the bitterness of mortality. Whether by the sword or the slow decay of time, Aragorn will die. And there will be no comfort for you, no comfort to ease the pain of his passing. He will come to death, an image of the splendor of the kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world. But you, my daughter, you will linger on in darkness and in doubt as nightfall in winter, that comes without a star. Here you will dwell, bound to your grief under the fading trees, until all the world is changed and the long years of your life are utterly spent."
In Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Arwen is played by Liv Tyler. Various additional scenes pertaining to Arwen are inserted, some of which deviate from the books and some of which seem inspired by the Tale.
In the first film, she sneaks up to find Aragorn and single-handedly rescues Frodo Baggins from the Black Riders at Bruinen, thwarting them with a sudden flood, summoned by an incantation. In the book, it was Glorfindel who put Frodo on horseback and sent him alone to flee the Ring Wraiths, and Elrond and Gandalf who arranged the flood. In the book, Frodo makes his own stand against the Ring Wraiths; in the movie Arwen defends him. During this flight, Arwen wields the sword Hadhafang, stated to have once been wielded by her father in film merchandise. This sword, however, does not appear in the books at all; in fact, in the books, Arwen is never mentioned as armed (but she could have armed and defended herself as need; see below).
Following the aforementioned scenes, the deviations include a scene in which Aragorn is injured and has a dream about Arwen (who kisses him), a scene where Arwen has a fight with her father about leaving for Valinor, and a scene where she (with Figwit) actually departs for Valinor and then suddenly returns when she sees an image of her future son, Eldarion. (In the books, it can hardly have been surprising to Arwen that she and Aragorn might have children together, since she herself is the descendant of two similar unions.)
Also, and perhaps most importantly, she apparently becomes sick with grief in the film version of The Return of the King — possibly over Aragorn's seemingly hopeless cause and his impending death — soon after she rides back from the road to the Grey Havens. Elrond takes the reforged Narsil, now Andúril, to Aragorn at Dunharrow, and tells him that her fate has become bound with the One Ring, and that she is dying. However, no explanation is ever given for these statements, not even in the Extended Editions. Later, after the Ring is destroyed, Arwen shows up at Aragorn's coronation looking no worse for wear.
[edit] Reaction
Arwen had a very small visible role in the books outside of the Appendix (due to Tolkien conceiving the character late in the writing; Aragorn was originally supposed to marry Éowyn, as related in The History of Middle-earth). In addition to making Arwen a more visible character, the change employs the principle of "economy of characters". Characters like Glorfindel (the Elf who helps Frodo by lending him his horse and later aiding his companions in driving the Ringwraiths into the water in the book), who appear once and perform only a few tasks, are often excised from film interpretations.
In earlier copies of the script (when the movies were supposed to be filmed in two parts under a different production company), Arwen actually fought in the Battle of Helm's Deep and brought the sword Andúril to Aragorn. Some attribute the elimination of her character from the sequence to an early script leak. Another story is that Liv Tyler herself felt that the character's involvement in Helm's Deep was inappropriate, and convinced Jackson and his team to leave her out of the sequence, although the team did film at least part of her planned appearance at Helm's Deep.[citation needed]
These changes have met with mixed reactions. Many fans were upset [citation needed] because they seemed to pander to the lowest common denominator — that in order to make Arwen a "worthwhile" or "strong" character, she had to be a warrior — while in the books, her strength stems from her brave choice to forsake immortality and live a mortal life with Aragorn, which did not involve martial skill. Furthermore, there is already a skilled female warrior present in the story — namely Éowyn, but she first appears in the second part of the film trilogy. Some fans felt it odd to make it a point to insert a female warrior into a story which already had a prominent one, because this detracts from Éowyn's bravery in riding to battle. However, in the second and third films in which Éowyn appears, Arwen's martial abilities are toned down.
Some criticize The Lord of the Rings for including few named female characters and thus accuse Tolkien of sexism. However, in the essay Laws and Customs among the Eldar, which appears in Morgoth's Ring, Tolkien writes that male and female Elves are in fact viewed in Elven society as equals, save for the fact that only the females are capable of childbearing and are thus viewed as literally holding the future of their people in their hands. It is for this reason that they traditionally refrain from going to war (although they are still trained in all the aspects of combat taught to male Elves), usually occupying themselves during wartime as healers. As the text itself states:
- In all such things, not concerned with the bringing forth of children, the neri and nissi (that is, the men and women) of the Eldar are equal – unless it be in this (as they themselves say) that for the nissi the making of things new is for the most part shown in the forming of their children, so that invention and change is otherwise mostly brought about by the neri. There are, however, no matters which among the Eldar only a nér can think or do, or others with which only a nís is concerned. There are indeed some differences between the natural inclinations of neri and nissi, and other differences that have been established by custom (varying in place and in time, and in the several races of the Eldar). For instance, the arts of healing, and all that touches on the care of the body, are among the Eldar most practised by the nissi; whereas it was the elven-men who bore arms at need. And the Eldar deemed that the dealing of death, even when lawful or under necessity, diminished the power of healing, and that the virtue of the nissi in this matter was due rather to their abstaining from hunting or war than to any special power that went with their womanhood. Indeed in dire straits or desperate defence, the nissi fought valiantly, and there was less difference in strength in speed between elven-men and elven-women that had not borne child that is seen among mortals. On the other hand many elven-men were great healers and skilled in the lore of living bodies, though such men abstained from hunting, and went not to war until the last need.(Morgoth's Ring, "The Second Phase", Laws and Customs Among the Eldar).
[edit] External links
- Arwen at The Thain's Book
