Arwen and Eowyn.

We haven’t had a woman post for ages, have we? Right then, it’s the wee small hours of the morning and there’s a fundamental rule applies: JJs are allowed to talk about whatever JJs want to talk about in the wee small hours of the morning. OK?

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There are two video clips on YouTube which juxtapose Arwen and Eowyn from LOTR, and implicitly ask the question: ‘Which of them gets your vote?’

For me, the problem with Eowyn is that she’s too familiar. She has a look that isn’t uncommon in my home town. It’s the facial bone structure that does it. She looks as though some not-too-distant ancestor was either a navvy who came south from Liverpool building the Trent and Mersey Canal, or a potter from North Wales coming east to offer his skills to the home of the British pottery industry. Such is the provenance of a lot of the women in my home town. I can even see a hint of my own mother in her.

Arwen has two looks, neither of which is so familiar. She has the dreamy, ethereal look in which her hair is long or her face framed by a cowl. When the exigencies of the plot require that look, she displays intense but quiet emotion (in contrast to Eowyn’s emotion which is generally more aggressive.) In other scenes she has the pixie look – hair up and pointy ears exposed in their full glory. That’s the sharper, less manufactured look, characterised by a combination of determination and uncertainty. It even has a hint of the Oriental about it (and please don’t tell me that ‘Oriental’ isn’t politically correct and I must use the term ‘Asian,’ because ‘Asian’ covers everything from Anatolia to Japan, and Anatolian people have very difficult looks from Japanese people. So do Indian people. It’s vague and insipid, so I’m sticking with ‘Oriental’)

That’s what gets my vote, not least because I have my very own Arwen who happens to be of Chinese extraction and is very precious to me.

There. That didn’t hurt a bit, did it? My bed is beckoning.