Shield (or shielded) maiden of Rohan?: representations of the gendered warrior in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings

“You are a daughter of kings. A Shieldmaiden of Rohan…” Aragorn to Éowyn, The Two Towers, 2002. What does it mean to be a “Shieldmaiden” when martial heroism is, by its very definition, masculine? Why a Shieldmaiden, when there are no others in evidence? If the politics and representation of war, and the politics of representing gender, are inextricably linked, what can we make of a woman whose only chance at heroism is the camouflaging of her gender? Paradoxically, war stories appear to polarize gendered identities and roles, at the same time that the nature of war as a crisis forces a blurring of those same roles. Feminist scholarship into the nature of war, and the ways in which home and battlefronts are gendered in the western tradition provide clear examples of this from Margaret and Patrice Higgonet’s Behind the Lines, to Linda Grant De Pauw’s work that traces the history of women and war from prehistory to the present. More traditional military histories emphasize these patterns through the complete absence of women or the discussion of masculinity and ‘the soldier’ as immutable and impenetrable, rather than problematic and constantly in flux. War stories, whether literary or cinematic, reinvent the soldier constantly. However, one constant in the reinvention is the primacy accorded to masculinity in these tales that shape so much of our consciousness. Women are either completely absent from these narratives, used to symbolize home and hope, or are constructed as aberrant and threatening. The Lord of the Rings’ cinematic saga provides examples of the ways in which the boundaries of war and gender are navigated through characters like Éowyn, and to a lesser extent the Elvish Princess, Arwen. The presence or absence of other female characters throughout the films, are indicators of the tensions between the importance of the gendered warrior and her isolation. These tensions are crucial to war as narrative and gendered discourse: the isolation of the female warrior serves to underscore the connections between heroism and masculinity, whether warrior or not.