#there are so few fucked up women in tolkien berúthiel and thuringwethil are holding down the fort almost by themselves Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[vidumavi]

If you ever want to elaborate about Berúthiel, please do! Your thoughts are so elegant and interesting

-@outofangband

I do want to talk about Berúthiel i love her so much. Thank you for the ask <3

At first, she's set up to be a fairly ordinary tragedy- a girl is married off into an unhappy marriage to a royal from elsewhere for the sake of political alliance, her only purpose from then on is producing heirs. She hates her husband, she hates the kingdom she was shipped off to where everyone thinks she's strange and foreign. That's a sad story but it's ultimately one among many sad stories like it.

Except somehow, she either genuinely has a gift for sorcery or is cunning enough to make people believe she does (or to play into rumours that already existed). She also decides to lean into her anger rather than try to assimilate or garner people's favour- not an easy thing to commit to, since she's trapped at the mercy of her husband with no means of escape, but she returns everyone's scorn tenfold and builds a reputation that makes people afraid enough to still whisper her name thousands of years later. Maybe they called her evil and a witch from the beginning and she thought I will be ten times worse than you think me and took it as a challenge rather than a reason to grovel. Maybe she set out from the beginning with the plan to make them suffer her presence if she had to suffer theirs, I don't know; I do know that she managed to snatch the one thing from her husband that he needed her for: somehow, through all their years of marriage, there are no heirs, though nobody knows why (cat-based sorcery is suggested). She claws back (ha) an outrageous amount of agency for someone in her position.

(Not even the political alliance plan works out because her husband's successor conquers Umbar where she likely came from 20ish years later. That's another thing: she had to marry into a family she probably knew was a danger to her home)

I think her husband tried to kill her. He has plausible deniability, sure, but I don't think you put someone notoriously hostile to all things ocean on a boat and send her out to sea if you're trying to facilitate a safe journey (sidenote: I think it's interesting how she hated the sea her whole life and then she's put out to sea in what might have been a murder attempt. I like to think there was some foresight involved). Nobody knows for sure what happened to her, except that she was last seen at sea, but she doesn't die in Gondor, that's why i called her a haunting without a ghost: her name (a name that was likely given to her after she moved to Gondor) remains until the 4th age (forever tainting the name of the royal family a little, forever referencing an episode that heavily features Gondor's racism and imperialism (and like, misogyny in general). I think she'd be very uncomfortable for some of them to sincerely think about, which is part of why she's vilified so much) but she herself did escape in the end.