Eowyn reflects.

Men are brave and strong and go out to fight. Women are weak and soft and stay at home. Everybody knows that.

I never accepted it, never since, at the age of four, I threw my doll down the well because, like me, it wore skirts, but its face, unlike mine, showed a fatuous contentment with the way things were.

Always, in that dangerous long-ago world, when my father or uncle or cousin or brother rode away to battle and war, dearly as I loved them, I cannot remember feeling anything but envy: envy of the dangers they would run, and the courage they would show, and the glory they would win. Envy, even, of the death they might die.  

Why were women doomed to inaction, condemned to be cowards?

At last my hour came, and I rode into battle and had my part in the slaying, and avenged my fallen kin, and won renown that has not been forgotten. Yet, even as I grasped at the warrior’s crown, there were feelings in my heart that I had not known before, and all the renown and glory that I won seemed to me worth nothing, since I could not have what I thought I most desired.

I was neither man nor woman. I was nothing.

Out of that nothing, my lord re-made me, a new woman in a new world: a world of hope, but not yet a world of peace. So I learned to send my lord into battle, and not weep to see him go, at least not where I could be seen. I learned the long, slow, bitter death of the woman who waits day by day for news that never comes.  The joy of every safe return was overcast by the knowledge that there would be a next time, and another, and another after that.

And now comes the worst time of all, when for the first time I must send not only my lord into battle, but also my son. I shall embrace them both, and smile, and stand to watch them go.

What a small, a very small and paltry thing is the courage of men, compared with the courage of women.