Epilogue: Journal

11 May 93 (Fourth Age), Emyn Arnen

At what cost the truth? What price is too high to pay for the revelation of long-held secrets?

For me, until only weeks ago a passionate defender of truth as the noblest of ethics, the answer has changed. It changed the day I first laid hand on my grandmother’s journals.

I now believe that there are things we’re not meant to know. About others, and especially about ourselves.

It only took me a week to finish the first of the Lady Éowyn’s six journals. (I’ve since completed the rest.) I read at night, entranced and appalled, rarely stopping until sunrise threatened the horizon, but the haggard look that I wore that week wasn’t just due to a lack of sleep. For I was haunted by dreams. By nightmares. By images as explicit as they were unforeseen. But perhaps most of all by the dissonance between the tale as I received it and the journey as she wrote it.

For the point at which she arrived — in the first journal it was a night and day at Edoras, just after the funeral of King Théoden of Rohan, during which she finally made peace with herself and her desires in the most unexpected way imaginable — was the happy ending for which she had forever yearned. On this point her words couldn’t have been clearer. Though she endured unfathomable darkness, trauma, pain, degradation, and even violence along the way, from then on she was content, suffused with apparently boundless joy and an unlimited capacity for love until the end of her days. Her happiness the other five journals confirmed, and reconfirmed, unto the very last word. In fact, the final entry — written only a few weeks before her death — is a twenty page paean to the Lord Faramir; a triumphant, heartbreaking love letter that, alas, he didn’t live to read.

At times I sought to deny the words in front of my eyes, thinking them some sort of twisted fantasy or attempt at alternative history, though if my grandmother had such literary aspirations there exists no other evidence. There’s even precedent for this in the “untold” (a convenient euphemism for “entirely fictional”) tales of Queen Berúthiel, all of which were written long after her death and most of which are consciously, explicitly titillating. I admit to reading more than a few in my youth. And to this day, young men covertly pass battered folios of these bawdy interludes to each other, learning things they’re unready to learn by the light of a solitary candle.

But Lady Éowyn’s story was far too convincing to be anything other than the truth. Along the way, more than a few enduring mysteries were explained in a way pure reason, or even wild guesses, never quite managed.

That my grandparents were happy and in love with each other to the very end, a fact I once believed undeniable yet now questioned with every unfathomable word, is endlessly reconfirmed by these journals. In my younger, less discreet days, even I heard them noisily reaffirming that love on more than one occasion, and they were publicly affectionate in a manner unlike any other couple of my acquaintance. There is, in fact, no name that appears with greater frequency in her journals than Lord Faramir’s, nor any partner with whom she describes as many days and nights of passion.

And yet...

Rare was the visitor to Ithilien that wasn’t at least offered the opportunity for sexual congress with the Lady Éowyn. Some demurred, others accepted, while the majority departed unaware that they’d been presented the opportunity in the first place; an undoubted testament to the discretion and discernment with which she pursued such liaisons. Most encounters were brief, though a few lasted days, weeks, or even (albeit quite rarely) years. Some assignations were easily and quickly arranged, others required considerable subterfuge. The tally (and yes, to my shame I made one) is ... astonishing, to say the least. But not even close to as astonishing as their recounting.

The existence of, and reason for, her private lodgings a half-day’s ride from Emyn Arnen, to which she would rather frequently retreat — and which, as a child and to my eternal consternation, I was never allowed to visit — is at last made plain. My aunt lives there now, and is similarly indisposed to unannounced visitation; a fact which makes me wonder a great many things.

Discretion, for her, meant excluding all permanent residents of Ithilien from her activities, for she deemed the potential of embarrassment and damage to Lord Faramir’s reputation too great a risk. Anyone who made their own advance — welcome or not — was quietly reassigned to another part of the Kingdom.

But whenever she was away from Ithilien — and this happened often, for she was a restless traveler (both in fact and in metaphor) — there seemed to be few limits on her behavior. There were villages, towns, and retreats all over ... even outside ... the realm to which she returned time and time again, and now I know why.

To Minas Tirith she went often, of course, and on almost all such occasions she and Queen Evenstar were able to renew their most intimate acquaintance. The same was true whenever the Queen came to Emyn Arnen, and on the rare occasions that they were able to travel together without their husbands. I already knew they were the closest of friends, but I now know that it’s impossible to overstate their importance to each other, both as friends and as lovers; theirs was a union of support, passion, and love to which many, many pages are devoted. There were, in fact, five relationships (aside from her marriage) that the Lady Éowyn maintained until one or both parties succumbed to mortality, and it passes strange — at least to me — that three of them were so closely related to each other. But now, at least, I understand her long and unusually close friendship with Elladan and Elrohir, Lords of Rivendell ... a friendship that, in my youth, was a regular source of confusion.

For all their endless revelations, her journals are mysteriously, even tantalizingly, silent on the question of whether or not she ever fulfilled her long-held desire to bed King Elessar. If she did, it is not revealed therein ... but there are, at times, mysterious gaps and elisions in a narrative that otherwise shies from no detail, no matter how lurid. What all this means for my still-unfinished prose saga of Aragorn and Arwen’s long courtship and ultimate triumph — a tale I’ve always believed to be the greatest love story of our time — I’m not yet ready to contemplate.

The siblings Ælflæd and Théngelim were, alongside the children of Elrond, the other two friends with whom Lady Éowyn maintained a lifelong bond, and her frequent returns to Rohan always included time with them. Them ... and many others, for as a rule she visited her homeland unaccompanied, indulging in the opportunity thus provided to the fullest extent possible. She was careful to avoid doing anything that might damage her brother’s reputation or rule, but otherwise she acted with all the freedom denied her when she’d called it home.

Though she made it quite clear that she had no personal objection to the inclusion of family should the opportunity arise, in the end she chose to avoid that entanglement. One of the most amusing tales in a narrative filled with a truly surprising amount of humor, given the rather relentless focus of the rest of its content, is the moment she came closest to breaking that rule: watching her nephew (and the future King of Rohan) Elfwine come into his manhood and considering taking an active role in his sexual education. Instead, she made an even more outrageous choice: seducing his fiancée, Lothíriel of Dol Amroth, while sending Ælflæd to her nephew’s bed. Even I, otherwise so often innocent in these matters, have heard whispered tales of their legendary erotic exploits, and now I know to whom the original credit is due.