White Lady, With Lamp

[altariel]

It was she they wanted, Lady Wraithbane.

White Lady, With Lamp

Ithilien, in the Fourth Age

In the years after, so many of them came that a house was built in a tranquil valley where Elves now dwelt. Young men no more, the horror of that past still shaped their desolate present. Elf-song soothed them – but it was she they wanted, Lady Wraithbane, whose deed felled a dread king.

And Éowyn welcomed each of them, and fought for them, and ordered a fair house for them. But their devotion baffled her. She never quite grasped what her husband always knew – that pity was hers too, and the healing love can be strong as well as gentle.

Comments

[fallingtowers.livejournal.com]

I like this future for Éowyn quite a lot - and the allusion to Florence Nightingale is a clever and very suitable one. It's so easy to see her superficially as some model of caring and nurturing Victorian womanhood and thus completely misrepresent her amazing achievements. Similarly, the White Lady of Ithilien would have had her work cut out for her, with or without a sword. (And healing is so much harder than killing, in the end.)