![]() But that’s not to say that folks who were both Horse Girls and Lord of the Rings fans weren’t excited about The Two Towers hitting theaters 2002. There simply aren’t enough horses or enough people who form strong bonds with them in The Lord of the Rings for it to truly be Horse Girl culture. (Why yes, you can view most Horse Girl Tropes as Gothic Romance on training wheels.) But while Bill and Sam do reunite in the end, the Fellowship sets him free before they enter Moria and he isn’t seen again for hundreds of pages. The underestimated and undervalued horse who just needs a special person (i.e., the main character) to reveal their true talent is perhaps the second-most common trope of the Horse Girl Story. ![]() The biggest Horse Girl Energy in The Lord of the Rings is Sam’s relationship with Bill the Pony, who he nurses back to health after Frodo purchases Bill from cruel masters for much more than his actual worth. Windfola, the steed she rides to the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, went mad with fear the moment the Witch-King of Angmar arrived, threw both his riders, and bolted not just away but out of the story entirely. However, the books do not show her in a strong bond with any particular equine, making Éowyn’s Horse Girl status a purely semantic one. So, Gandalf is surely no Horse Girl, but what about Éowyn? Éowyn is a girl, and as the princess (well, the niece of a king) of an entire Horse Girl nation, she is closely associated with horses. Shadowfax is extremely cool - but he is really just a very fancy, wizard-only fast travel system, an answer to the problem Tolkien faced when he realized that Gandalf needed to get from one end of his carefully planned map to the other in a completely unrealistic timeframe. Never before had any man mounted him, but I took him and I tamed him. On top of all that, even the greatest of Rohan’s riders considered Shadowfax to be untamable, until Theoden (under Grima’s manipulations) ordered Gandalf to take any horse if he would only leave Rohan as soon as possible - no one expected the old wizard to trot away on the best horse in the country.īut here’s how Tolkien has Gandalf describe the most sacred tenet of the Horse Girl story, the golden and beautiful moment when a wild horse bestows a priceless gift - its trust - on a special person: That makes Shadowfax one of the Mearas, an ancestral line of Rohanian equines who are said to be like to horses as elves are like to men, and may only be ridden by a king of Rohan. He’s descended in a direct line from Felaróf, the steed of Eorl the Young - the first king of Rohan - who, legend tells us, was able to understand the speech of men. Yes, it is indisputable that Shadowfax is a cool-ass horse. It may seem strange to say that The Lord of the Rings lacks sufficient horse content, considering the actual text. The Lord Of The Rings is neither horse-y nor girl-y Fortunately, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Viggo Mortensen, Jane Abbot, and a small legion of local New Zealand equestrians changed all of that forever. They are a romantic fantasy genre of their own, about unbreakable, tantamount-to-psychic bonds between a wild or unruly or simply misunderstood animal and the one special person who takes the time to earn its trust. Though the three books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy have some fancy horses, and even a very prominent horse-loving girl, it never quite puts the pieces of a Horse Girl Story together - because Horse Girl stories aren’t just about horses and a girls. So each Wednesday throughout the year, we'll go there and back again, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. 2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th anniversary, and we couldn't imagine exploring the trilogy in just one story.
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