Techno Shieldmaiden
An ancient archetype manifest in the modern world
“Though not a 'dry nurse' in temper, she was also not really a soldier or 'Amazon', but like many brave women was capable of great military gallantry at a crisis.”
-From The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
“But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.”
-Éowyn, Shieldmaiden of Rohan
“Then the heart of Éowyn changed, or else at last she understood it. ... I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien
It feels like magic is reentering the world.
Is it?
There are many who would say that if magic has returned, it has come to us too late in our hour of need. They are wrong. Magic comes precisely when it means to.
Magic has returned, and this means dark magic, too. The Light comes to our aid. Those of us who wield it know better than to think everything is as it used to be. Nothing is normal now. We carry a great burden. We share knowledge of this burden only with those who understand the gravity of its nature. For on all others, the direness of our quest is lost. The part that destiny has called us to fulfill has been growing slowly from a gentle nudge to a razor’s edge in our minds. Our knowledge of ourselves has been forged, and sharpened.
We are no longer in the murky grey between tradwife and third-wave feminist. We have broken free from the one thing we fear - from the cages so enjoyed by our opposites.
We have emerged.
Daughters of Éowyn, we are the antithesis of head girls, girlbosses, and pick-me girls. We reprimand the weakest of our kind for their cowardly dereliction of duty. We observe no false kings, we suffer no tyrants.
We are Valeria equipped with wifi. We are at home in the Flower of the West.
We are both Betty and Veronica: steady and capricious in equal proportion. We confuse you until you love us, but you will find no love less fickle than ours. Our contradictions are sometimes difficult to reconcile, but this bears no hinderance on our persistent endeavor to communicate passionately and effectively with the ones we love.
We are besties with elven beauties and hobbits.
We are Vin Venture with dozens of philosophy titles in our Audible library recommend to us by our friends and lovers. We are comfortable within male dominated groups - not striving to disrupt, dominate, or dismantle them. We admire intelligent gentlemen and they tend to enjoy our company, too.
We are the affectionate war wives of the Soldiers of fifth generation warfare - men who both lead us and cherish us for our love of Freedom, our contempt for cages of all varieties, our statuesque bodies, and our feminine countenance. When our men are tempted to stagnate, we remind them that they know where that path leads. We are Trinity in athleisure.
We do not ban other women from sitting with us, we welcome them in earnest; but they often decline in a state of awe and bewilderment. NPCs are repelled by us until sufficient confrontation with reality sends them sprinting like lost souls into the arms of a Goddess at the decisive turning point of their lives. Only the pure of heart who share our calling to glorify the spirit of Éowyn will go on to exude her essence. The rest will remain nameless cogs in the machine, driven to dysfunction as they try, and fail, to ignore the growing disquiet of the world. They will self-medicate to no avail. They will self-destruct through their habitual consumption of morning after pills.
Éowyn smote Dwimmerlaik and beheaded the fell beast on which he rode. She procreated with a man of the highest quality.
Her spirit has returned to Earth. We are its vessel.
Ethos of the Techno Shieldmaiden
We do not troll like low status mean girls, and we do not suffer to join their cliques. When we sense we are unwanted we simply disappear, leaving less competent women wondering why. Our sudden absence from their lives makes them uncomfortable for it has severed the possibility of narcissistic supply. While they are busy trying to understand us through broken sociometers, we form coalitions with strong men. We imbue these men with status with our presence in their lives. We advise them, countering the spells of invisibility cast on the cloaks of unseen viragos plotting against us in the shadows of The Hill. We thus enhance the armament of our men. We mate with them. We multiply their strength through the ages. We disarm, and then we forget about Becky.
We host parties in our country homes, or on urban rooftop terraces. All who attend are highly esteemed. We smoke, drink, dance, and feast with frens who share our mission. We curate the music, the food, the entertainment, and the lighting. The ambiance we create inspires great laughter and heated debates in which we gleefully participate with men and women alike. The more offensive things we hear and say, the better we sleep.
Our faces are not a universal template featuring heavily laminated brows above overdrawn eyes and an inflamed baboon's ass we dare to call a mouth. We can emote on the full spectrum of expression. We work with what we've got, not against it. We age with dignity and grace. We want to be the prettiest we can be, but we do not fear imperfection or obsess futilely to remove it from our lives entirely. We know this only has the potential to backfire and make us feel worse about ourselves than we felt initially. When we compare ourselves to other women and find that we are less attractive than them, we go with the flow. We make an effort to be happy for them - especially if we are jealous of them - in order that we may multiply the good in this world rather than diminish it.
We work out, but we do not exercise just our glutes. We do not aspire to be the shape of a wisdom tooth - we show our adductors some respect. We smirk at the practice of injecting displaced fat into buttocks to create overfull monstrosities plopped atop underdeveloped hamstrings like droopy pumpkins on yard sticks. We do not want the latest in bodily fashion. We labor under iron for symmetry, for balanced and proportional physiques that exude the grace of a deadly assassin, not the grotesque comedy of a funhouse mirror. We train with real intensity. We ask the girls doing only hip thrusts how much they bench. The question is rhetorical. We wear tinted sunscreen and earrings to the gym. We enjoy our Beauty at all times, including during our workouts. There is no point in sweating if we don't feel pretty while we're doing it.
If we get more attention than we want from men training around us, we do not mock them or demand that the entirety of gym culture changes for us. Rather, we adapt around it. Whether that means dressing with more layers, going at a different time of day, going only with our men, working out at home instead, or simply applying the timeless wisdom of our ancestors and maintaining situational awareness without making Moria out of hobbit-holes, we find a way to train our bodies. The body cannot live without the mind, nor the mind thrive without the body. We want to be healthy and strong, but we also just want to look as good as we can naked. We are not deterred from this objective by age, current body composition, or if we never seem to fit the mold. We deny neither the objective nor the subjective nature of Beauty.
The dark sorcery of the lost woman comes at the price of believing the lie that she only wants to “look good for herself” because “that's, like, what's healthyyy? Yeeaah…” She goes to the gym to flaunt her position on modernity's faulty social status ledger by rejecting men and being blatantly rude to them, even if they were never actually checking her out. This reveals that she has zero conception of what healthy is. By contrast, Techno Shieldmaidens understand that one of the greatest rewards of looking good naked is the primal expression of desire in a man’s eyes when we disrobe before him. We are not disgusted by this, but pleased by it. Thus, if there's a guy sneaking admiring glances at us, and our intuition tells us he means no harm, we do not shame him for striking up a conversation with us under the guise of offering to help us re-rack our weights. Or, since so many men are left hesitant to hit on women having been ridiculed relentlessly by our opposites, we might give a handsome man making eyes at us a little nudge and ask him to help us with something. The chase can be very effective when the man doesn't realize we have already circled the track and are quickly approaching him from behind. Tinder is the enemy of organic attraction. We aim to restore courage to the art of courtship - the setting of just one battle in modernity’s war on humanity.
We do not suffer to be consumed by trends. We discriminate. We are both the chameleon soul and the proud, colorful phoenix. We are the divine compliment to our mates, marking our existence not only by how seamlessly we can blend our lives with theirs, but by how fiercely we come to their aid where they contemplate on the Tree of Woe. We never go out of style, and so we are not bothered with fads of thought or fads of consumerism. We are the manifest preservation of critical discernment, a sanctuary that does not open its doors to the current thing.
We do not suffer to answer to questions about what a woman is. Whether you can figure that out or not, we will use it to our advantage. We are bored with the whining of transsexuals and their group of apologists struggling like mistreated serfs to keep up with and regurgitate the latest trends in phantom genital jargon. We don't care what you think you are - we know it to be false - and we do not indulge you to tell us what we are. Go ahead and mutilate your sex organs if you like, but we are watching you. Sheathed at our side is a tool we wield better than you can - the art of reputation games. We will use it to destroy your powers of influence if you bring your lies near our kids.
We do not allow any institution to nerf us by restricting our range of thought. We recognize that the promise of a perfect and just cleansing made by zealots is just as hollow as the promise of utopia made by the state. Both are reaching for the ring of power. We have heard all about Boromir. We do not allow his spirit to do our thinking for us. We heed the warning in our hearts when he offers to “help” us.
We do not seek “empowerment” or “validation” from the corrupt state or from corporate churches that have been co-opted by the regime. Theirs is an inferior magic dependent entirely on externalities. We hone the magic of self-constitution. Ours is a carefully crafted internal locus of control. We acknowledge rationality as the byproduct of human consciousness that it is. We understand its relationship to self-deceit, but accept that it is a part of our condition whether we would have it or not. We whet it to be used as an instrument for introspection and to align our actions with our Purpose. Our morality is designed, given to us through the blood of our ancestors. We did not just arbitrarily “make it up.” Morality runs in the familial line. We did not produce it, it produced us. We use reason in combination with intuition and our most deeply held beliefs to interpret ourselves, others, and the world, and to endeavor to restore honor to our line when it has been forgotten. For as long as we draw breath, honor will never be lost.
We have seen through the motivated reasoning of politicians, academics, journalists, as well as many spiritual leaders. We can see plainly when we are being accused of what others are guilty of - a strategy highly characteristic of the minions of our broken institutions. We can see when even a religious zealot is addicted to loosh. But we are also pragmatic. We forge bonds with those who promise to strive for Freedom’s cause even if their beliefs and traditions differ from ours in the details. We call them trusted frens. We do not assume the inevitability of their betrayal before we have irrefutable cause to do so. We are not so faithless as that.
We do not fly the rainbow flag and we do not genuflect at the cathedral. That we do not flinch at the mention of legalizing drugs does not mean we are left-wing. That we question climate change policies does not mean we are red-pilled. That we are against war does not mean we do not keep and bear arms. That we acknowledge the invasion at our southern border does not mean we are xenophobic. That we embrace our sexual power does not mean we are loose. That we are selective about our men does not mean we are prudes. That we are aware of the risks of sleeping with men does not mean we are trads. When we are agnostic, it does not mean we are faithless. That we are women does not mean we want to be micromanaged by virago head girls of the ruling class. We heed to the guidance of paragons of virtue, not to random, feckless men of the cloth or of managerial regime apparatchiks.
We are not impressed by your credentials. We seek the Truth, not mere information. We learned from the example of Saruman’s fall. We know the difference between operating machinery and being a dispensable fixture of it. We know that institutions will not rescue us, and so we waste no time on them. We pursue the sort of education that money cannot buy. We are driven not by aspirations of professional elitism, but by excellence. We are experience oriented and take risks to this end even when we are scared. We don’t want to live forever.
When all other institutions crumble, we turn inward. We look upon the eternal sky, envied by all for its incomparable majesty. There we find peace.
We are vessels for the Force of femininity alive within us. We are keenly aware of its ability to take us to the dark places it has taken many members of our sex in this hyper-feminized world. We have a choice to succumb to the temptation to stay in the darkness - to marry for material riches alone and not for love, to advance our own names at the unfair expense of others, to invite the forces of Fear and Safetyism to control us utterly, to totally deny or worship our sexuality, or to abandon our children to strangers in exchange for praise and money when we have the choice not to. The protective men in our lives lay their leathers at our feet so we do not slip into the mud as we sidestep the pitfalls in the darkness. We do not flinch at this act of gallantry, and we do not complain about the unforgiving terrain we must navigate in the name of marking the path for our children. We are more vulnerable than men, but we are not dead weight. We see the chivalry of the men who love us and are glad for it. Since they nobly restrain their base desires, so do we. Our self-imposed restraints prevent us from resorting to incantations of “soft misogyny” in the face of a kindness or valor when we think we could somehow profit from doing so. We maintain control of our restraints by exercising our minds through applied philosophy. We are not emotionally incontinent.
We are not insulted by men who acknowledge our beauty, but we have learned to be guarded against those who would abuse it or fail to see anything else about us. Some of us have leveraged the spatial aspect of the cyber world to capitalize on our beauty. We have learned that this practice can be very costly in the long-run. We ultimately heed resonant warnings against going too far in this direction when we hear them. We listen when regret begins to loom over our choices. We learn from the cautionary tales of women whose love of frivolity and attention stole all memory of their need to get off of social media and OnlyFans and pair with a man and have children before it was too late.
We do not suffer to be called sluts for existing in a time of psychological warfare, and we do not suffer to call men toxic for doing the same.
We have all fought and bled in this war.
We are informed by the error of our pasts, if we indeed find error with them. We are informed by reason against paralyzing shame and obsessive regret, but we do not delude ourselves with platitudes of pride about the things which honest reflection tells us we actually wish we had been able to do better than we did. We have both enough edge and enough self-respect to interact with the online world at the intersection of subjective value, true economic necessity, and skepticism of narratives of convenience designed to inflate our egos that we intuit are too good to be true. We are pragmatic, not dogmatic. We modify our actions accordingly. We take heart and find dignity in knowing that all but the most evil among us are always doing the best they can with the information and technologies they possess. We are no exception.
Those among us who awaken from intoxicated pasts seek not the status given to perpetual victims, but strength. When we realize the wisdom in it, we abandon behavioral detritus and pick up a ruck. When the time is right, we seek men who can further smooth the edges of a rare diamond lingering in the rough. When the rolls are reversed, we show the men we seek to form relationships with the same courtesy rather than chastising them for the lessons they too had to learn the hard way.
We acknowledge that body count matters and so we are highly selective about the men with whom we will risk a pregnancy. We also acknowledge that men of the highest character do not require virgins to validate their sense of value. They hold their worth as self-evident, and so do we - virgin or not.
We no longer suffer to be jealous of AI models, for we have remembered that we are AI's muse. If hyper-realistic AI models look prettier than us, it is only because AI never gets anything right!
We are educated in self-defense, and not just through our knowledge of the law or internet security. We don't take big risks with our safety if there are viable alternatives available to us. We tell trusted frens and family where we are going and when to expect us to return. We are careful about where we go. When we listen to music with wireless headphones, we make sure we are still in tune with our surroundings. We do not foolishly expect all danger to disappear from the world, but we try to avoid blundering into it, especially if we are ill prepared to face it.
We choose our weaponry to compliment our stature. Some of us train Brazilian jiu-jitsu, some of us carry firearms, others carry poisonous aerosols or distress whistles. You will not know which unless you violently aggress against us, giving us certain cause to show you. It is not always possible, but it is always optimal to have a capable and trusted man with us. We do not fight with men unless we cannot run away. Although we are vigilant and carry hammers, we know better than to call absolutely everything a nail. We ask for help when in doubt. We do not gaslight ourselves for any reason.
We wear the oils of lilac and gooseberries as our fragrance. We wear clothes that can withstand free movement that compliment our figures without revealing too much and shoes we can sprint in. We dress to kill.
Our ultimate battle as war wives is fought during childbirth. We push our children out, or they are cut from us. Either way we are left scarred. We do not begrudge our children these scars. We never lend anything to our babies that does not come back to us a little dented or smudged. Our bodies are no exception. We smile kindly at the mirror. We wear our scars as our best attire, a stunning suit made of hellfire.1
The time eventually comes for us to pass our fertility to our daughters and granddaughters. We do this with grace, not resentment or jealousy.
For our disposition of gratitude for our lives, even for the unavoidable suffering, we shall remain Beautiful until we close our eyes forever.
All is not lost to those of us who never had biological children. We adopt as the infertile Yennefer of Vengerberg adopted Cirilla. This can take the shape of an actual legal adoption or something closer to offering our mentorship to our younger relatives, the children of our close friends, our godchildren, stepchildren, or anyone who reads our blog posts. We share stories about the time before we realized that we did not have forever to have children, or we explain why that was physically impossible for us to do. We think of the girls we mentor as our own children. We advise them to become mothers. We choose to serve as an example rather than to be lost to bitterness. Through us, the girls become better prepared to face the challenges of this world. They grow and often do well in life and we are contented by our contribution to this even if we believe it was small. In this way, we manage to experience a gratifying sliver of the sweetness of motherhood. Even the childless among us can still be mothers at heart.
We do not go willingly into the pigeonholes of inaccurate labels. Anyone in touch with the return of magic to this world can sense that many of these labels fail to do us justice. We reject the label of girlboss because we reject the premise of an oppressive patriarchy. We reject the label trans because we know our sex to be fixed, even if we are tomboys at heart. The single girls among us reject the label pick-me girl for we know that sociopathic phonies cannot do what we do because they are not what we are. One does not simply win the bikini category at the Olympia just because she starts abusing thyroid hormones and diuretics. Girls who think they can pretend their way into sustaining a long-term relationship with a man just for his money or whatever else will be sniffed out when tested. Like essays written using Chat GPT, there is something inauthentic sensed beneath the surface. The longer the magic is in the world, the more palpable this inauthenticity will become. We will aid this development and help keep posers in check.
Those of us who are married and aim to please our husbands reject any accusations that we have a pathological dependence on male validation, but we unabashedly admit to taking pleasure in the approval of our husbands, too. We have blended our own tastes and goals with the lives of worthy men and sustain deep bonds with them because we had the capacity to do so without faking a personality. If we prefer the company of men, it is only because those specific men are cooler than you. For our excellence in the skill of balancing our own interests with the interests of our husbands, we are the chosen - we have been sufficiently validated as worthwhile mates:
We are the best ever. We are the most brutal and vicious, and most ruthless champions there have ever been. No one can stop us. Head girl is a conqueror? No, we’re Éowyn, she’s no Éowyn. There’s never been anybody as ruthless! We’re Artemis, we’re Aphrodite. There’s no one like us. We’re from their cloth. There’s no one can match us. Our style is impetuous, our defense is impregnable, and we’re just ferocious. We want the heart of the Nazgul! We want to slay his children! Long live the King!2
While we recognize them as incomplete or inaccurate, we can withstand to be called any labels or any manner of curse without coming apart at the seams. We wield magic, remember? You see only the trunk, the branches, and the leaves. We also see the breadth and the depth of the root system. We are calm and collected in the face of things clearly meant to insult us. To your chagrin and frustration, it is your status and not ours that is lowered when you call us names or quip at our undue expense because of how well we maintain our composure.
We can tease and be teased unlike the humorless freaks we battle. We delight in irony. We remember to take ourselves lightly.
We are good frens with women and with men both. We mitigate for any possible sexual attraction from the opposite sex with humor, assertiveness, and by maintaining a respectable distance from men we do not love romantically or who are spoken for. We establish cordial and genuine friendships with the women our frens date or are married to. We are not homewreckers. The more frens the better!
Unless she has been vicious toward us, we have no reason to be cruel to any woman who came before us in the lives of the men with whom we are now romantically involved.
We are composed in the face of women who think they can seduce our men; if not because we are readily self-assured then because we have been adequately reassured by the men with whom we have built a relationship of trust. We expect them to keep the promises they make to us since their honor depends on it. We are not naive pushovers: we are secure. Our chaos is calm, not frantic.
We do not throw away what is damaged or otherwise imperfect. We rebuild it or we build around it. We move on from men who let us down before we vow ourselves to a lifelong mate; but once this vow is made, we keep it. We now only move to make room for the imperfections of our husbands that we cannot outright fix or permanently improve. We do not nag so much as we accept and adapt. We don’t submit so much as we synchronize. Our husbands do not dominate us so much as they lead. We are the chameleon soul: if we vow our loyalty to a man who unexpectedly needs a caretaker, then that is what we become.
We do not mistake the unfairness of life for the unfairness of our husbands. Neither do we place blame or resentment such as this on our children when they need us at an inconvenient time. Our husbands keep us, and so we keep them. We observe the traditions that work, and discard the rest. We add our own special twist.
We are not tradwives, we are radwives. Radical wives - the root of all, the original, the fundamental female companion. Like Éowyn before us, we ride or die.
We are not easily fooled by ugliness embodied, even when it is sophisticated enough to disguise itself with charm or the appearance of wisdom. We have realized the falsehood that charming people never think only of themselves, for we have seen how practiced psychopaths do this regularly. We smell the servants of the managerial regime to be Gríma Wormtongue fed posting under uninspired usernames, or spouting lies about dangerous treatments they call “safe and effective,” or calling for internet censorship. We tell them and all who can hear us that their words are poison!
Contradiction is a consistent aspect of our self-expression. We endeavor to be as dangerous as our sex will allow, whether through the fearless stroke of a pen or the adornment of a gi, but we also make room for the delicate and sensitive aspects of our nature.
We are in constant flux with the moon. We will crash into your vessel without warning on what had seemed like it would be a night of smooth sailing. The flow of our moods can be overwhelming, even for us. But they are also serene so as to ensure safe passage to shore. Unlike our counterparts who deny the tumultuous potential of their nature and pretend they are beyond reproach, we know we are krazy. With time and experience, though, we learn how to rush and rest with the tides of our womanly energy, not against them.
We operate with the stroke of keys on a keyboard, 24-hour access to training equipment, and subscriptions to blogs that the establishment calls naughty. Whether with an ad-free app or regular old pen and paper, we track our menstrual cycles in the name of performance optimization, self-awareness, and to plan for downtime. We wear synthetic fabrics and ride to battle with school boards or to replenish the stores of our home. We grate our hands against knurling, but we keep our callouses perfectly smooth - the better to caress his face with. Our muscles are firm, the product of intense resistance rather than lame existence. Our features are soft, made by nature not laboratories. We connect to bluetooth and listen to our favorite music or audiobooks as we carry our children on our backs inside of modern baby baskets. We are not just elite, we are 1337. We are the convergence of an old and exquisite archetype and the digital age. We access the internet not in pursuit of girl power, but womanly competence - and to fight for those we love. We are Techno Shieldmaidens - the carriers of the traits of warrior kings! You will suffer us!
Forth!
It will soon be more common to personally know someone who has been killed by the managerial regime than not. Each of us, our country, our kin, our friends are under attack. Éowyn lost her father, her uncle, and many friends to the violence of orcs. This sort of loss prevails in our world now. We are the sisters, wives, mothers, aunts, daughters, cousins, and friends of men and women lost to tragedy. We are the Shieldmaidens of the modern age. We want to fight fiercely for all who still live.
But.
In his wisdom, Aragorn cautioned Éowyn of the limitations of pursuing her self-interest with abandon. This warning reveals an important point to understanding the true Shieldmaidens of today:
Éowyn: Too often have I heard of duty […]. May I not now spend my life as I will?
Aragorn: Few may do so with honor.
Éowyn: Shall I always be left behind when the Riders depart, to mind the house while they win renown, and to find food and beds when they return?
Aragorn: A time may come soon when none will return. Then there will be need of valor without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defense of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.
Can you neglect your duties with honor? What did Aragorn mean when he said that there are few who can? I posit that the answer lies in the understanding of what true humility is.
Humility is not about being humble, of forming a self-image of assumed inferiority to others. It is about knowing yourself. It is about realistic self-assessment. We know the outcome of Éowyn’s choice now. This informs us that she was a woman of humility, not hubris. She understood (and fulfilled) the duty she had to the “unpraised” work of minding the house, cooking, tending to the needs of convalescing Soldiers, and to the needs of other women and the young. She also understood that her range of talents extended beyond this work. Her self-assessment proved correct when put to the ultimate test. She not only fought bravely, she fought with skill and competence.
She contributed to a decisive victory at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, but she did not neglect her more traditional responsibilities. She did not abandon her duty, she expanded it because she could do so with honor. She kept her honor because she took on the responsibilities that stemmed from all of her capabilities. She therefore neglected none of her duties, but rather fulfilled even the ones others had doubted were hers to fulfill. Had she been proven wrong, she may have lived by some miracle, but she would have been dishonored by the outcome of her delusion.
This is why we do not give in to excitement and meddle in things too far outside the scope of our abilities. This is why we do not yield to the temptation to chase praise only to stroke our pride and egos. We can and should always reach for the next level, but we cannot skip over it at will without plummeting to our well-earned humiliation and defeat.
Uncaged War Wives
Pride, hubris, and delusion are not the only ways in which we lose our honor to acting in our self-interest without regard for our responsibilities. Aragorn’s warning may also be interpreted as speaking to a warning against material hedonism - “the belief that complete human happiness and well-being fundamentally consists of and is achievable through the fulfillment of a sufficient number of material needs and psychological desires.”3
Éowyn asked Aragorn why she should not spend her life according to her will. He responded that only few could manage to do so with honor. Looking at this exchange through the lens of material hedonism, another duty is foreshadowed to have been awaiting Éowyn’s readiness - the duty to prioritize purpose and meaning over material and psychological desires. I believe that Éowyn was rewarded by fate for her humility and courage with a romance that would not have been possible if she had been materially oriented in her desire to participate in the fight alongside her kin and companions. To deny this chance at marriage and children, Éowyn would have been denying her capacity for them, and therefore neglecting her responsibility to the same. She would have succumbed to a desire for valor disconnected from her higher purpose. Only by marrying a man - a man of good nature with the capability, and therefore the responsibility to court and wed her - did she remain connected to her higher purpose. Only by giving life to her son, Elboron, when she had the competence to do so did her valor remain with her and persist through the ages so that it could return to us now.
As Éowyn once was, many of us Techno Shieldmaidens are still “Fair and cold, like a morning or pale spring that is not yet come to womanhood.”
What brings us to fully realized womanhood?
Just as there are no points of light without shades of black, there are no women without men.
Éowyn was great frens with Meriadoc “Merry” Brandybuck, but she was too masculine for him and there was no attraction there. She felt a deep affection for Aragorn, and he cared for her, but his heart was spoken for. Tolkien initially intended for Aragorn to wed Éowyn, but he wrote that Aragorn was, “too old and lordly and grim" for her.
Fate took a hand and Éowyn met her match in Faramir. He was more masculine than Éowyn could ever be - which is exactly all that is ever needed to to establish the ideal amount of masculinity and the ideal amount of femininity in a committed romantic relationship between man and woman. Such a recipe satisfies the palate because the flavors contrast yet compliment one another. All that is needed to achieve ambrosial delight is an adequate comparison, a balance between savory and sweet. Perfect tension and perfect resolution between man and woman.
Every man of good character is now either a Soldier of fifth generation warfare, or a prophesied casualty of it. These men do not fight in the conventional style of the great Riders of Rohan, the men of Gondor, and Éowyn. The fight looks much different now than it did in Middle Earth. It is fought through ideas, networking, voting and political involvement, personal development, and the development of parallel systems. For the married Techno Shieldmaiden, it is also fought by creating families and raising children at home to the greatest extent possible, not abandoning them purely out of some perceived opportunity for convenience to compromised institutions designed by wicked men to manufacture more orcs for Sauron’s army. Similarly, our cages do not look the same as they once did. Now we fight against the chains in our mind. We fight propaganda - especially that which would have us bind ourselves to the shackles of self-destructive, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Techno Shieldmaidens with the capability to make a family have the responsibility to make a family that we may pass our knowledge of our natural condition of Freedom down for posterity’s safe keeping, as our forefathers entrusted it to us. Those of us who marry and have kids often keep busy fulfilling more traditional roles than other Techno Shieldmaidens. Opportunity cost offers no release from the need to prioritize according to our greatest strengths. We do not, however, organize according to arbitrary lists of rules not useful to our personalities, situations, or dominant architypes, but based on what we believe will yield the best outcomes to suit our ultimate purpose. Sometimes women do the traditionally masculine thing of working because their family absolutely needs the money. Sometimes men - gasp! - change a diaper so that their wives can have a walk and a shower in peace that they may recharge their battery. This doesn’t mean complete or permanent role reversals have occurred. It doesn’t mean that the people choosing to organize this way are denying that things might be more idealistic if they could afford to do them differently. It is neurotic to spin your wheels so excessively in this way. It is a little too rigid and inflexible and you will blunt your sword doing it. We should strive to make choices based on what enables us to maximize the strengths of our given sex and we should fulfill our duties when they fall outside that framework.
The work we do at home may not always have the appearance of excitement or even importance when its fragmentary components are compared to the modern battles our men are faced with. Our work is often solitary, redundant, unnoticed, and subject to frequent and thankless gall. But the big secret is that this work is essential to the fight we are in. It therefore scratches the itch in the hearts and minds of the Techno Shieldmaiden to answer to such calls to duty even if we sometimes find the daily realities of them to be a bit dull. Even if we do not have the natural temperament of a docile nursemaid, that is what we will be when the mission requires it of us. Such is the responsibility of those of us that have the spirit of Warriors - of Shieldmaidens.
We are ridiculed for our housework and child rearing by our enemies precisely because we are at war with them. The propaganda they design against us is an act of aggression. Though we do not all have the time, the cognitive bandwidth, the community support, the energy, the resources, or the traits required to fight in the precise manner we would like to, or as we once did before we became busy mothers, or as our husbands do, we go on supporting through our efforts in the home. We respond to a crisis when called to it. We recognize when we are responding to a crisis even when the battlefield is quiet. We fall to our lowest level of preparedness when the heat is on and so we are always preparing.4 Even when we do not have sword and shield in hand that we may make room for our babies and tidy the beds, the spirit of the Shieldmaiden lives on within us. This is fifth generation warfare survival. Freedom is on the line. We are all war wives.
We do not neglect our responsibilities. In a crisis and at all other times we do what we believe is right and that we have the capacity to do. We do not lie to ourselves about our capabilities out of convenience or material interests alone. We fear neither pain nor death. We do not fear the consequences of doing the right thing or of doing what is in our very nature to do. The spirit of Éowyn has awoken within us. A magic she brings in our hour of need that we may use it to fight for Freedom and all we love. And fight we shall for we would die before bending the knee to the lidless eye.
Aragorn: What do you fear, lady?
Éowyn: A cage. To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of valor has gone beyond recall or desire.
Aragorn: You are a daughter of kings, a shieldmaiden of Rohan. I do not think that will be your fate.
Thanks for rucking with me. Please enjoy the music as you exit.
https://allpoetry.com/poem/12351062-A--stunning-dress-made-of-hellfire-...--by-Lifespar-Ulitm
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/648034
“When the pressure is on, you don’t rise to the occasion—you fall to your highest level of preparation.” ― Chris Voss
Saving this piece to dust off when my daughter is old enough to receive some of its wisdom. Uncanny how things of value materialize fortuitously. Thank you, from a fellow Rucker.
Women did not talk like this when I was young. It is very good to hear, for this older warrior. Keep saying it. Magic is rising.