The difficulty with
Tolkien’s
Arwen is that we don’t know anything much about her.
It seems she is revered by the
Elves, but we don’t see the reasons she is revered, other than being, it appears, extraordinary beautiful.
In writing
The Lord of the Rings Tolkien himself only gradually realized that this Trotter
hobbit was actually the lost heir to the throne of
Gondor.
Lost heirs are standard in romantic fiction and are often the heroes. Certainly
Aragorn whom Trotter metamorphed into took on role of the standard virtuous and noble romantic hero who in the end gains his rightful place and of course marries suitably.
But that’s not the center of Tolkien’s story. The full story of Aragorn’s life and of his love for Arwen lies mostly outside
The Lord of the Rings. The small amount of writing on the matter in the Appendix A doesn’t well fill the gap.
I don’t find that among Tolkien’s most inspiring writings. Tolkien doesn’t make Arwen come alive or early Aragorn come alive.
Accordingly Arwen can’t be much else than blank to the reader. She is weakly characterized.
I don’t see much in Arwen either to hate or to respect from knowledge that Tolkien provides, other than knowing that in default of any other information we probably should take her at Aragorn’s and Tolkien’s estimation if we can do so.
Perhaps if Tolkien had been given longer to work on the Appendices and more space had been provided he Tolkien would have been able to fill out the tale of Aragorn and Arwen satisfactorily.
I am reminded of similar complaints for much the same reason from generations of readers of Walter Scott’s
Ivanhoe, readers who far prefer Rebecca to the staid and conventional and mostly unknown Rowena.
The same reaction occurs with Victor Hugo’s
Les Miserables where Eponine seems far worthier of Marius’ love than does Cossette (though Marius himself is so useless that one also wonders why Eponine bothers with him).
And what did Tarzan see in Jane Porter compared to La of Opar?
Now if Tolkien had been writing a conventional heroic romance he would have focused on Aragorn and Arwen and the story would have ended at their coronation and wedding (and the wedding of
Faramir and
Éowyn).
Group weddings are common at the end of heroic romances. Instead Tolkien’s center is with the smaller folk who made the triumph possible. Aragorn is not Tolkien’s main interest and Arwen, invented very late as an appropriate love interest, is less so.
That Arwen is uncharacterized is reasonable in
The Lord of the Rings. It is more of a flaw that Tolkien did not do more with her in the Appendix A.
