Tolkien Calendar: The Great Years

The funeral of Theoden serves to bridge the past and the future for the people we have loved and followed through their journeys. Theoden is the last of the major heroes to be honored, and his final rites, with all their ceremony and song, symbolize both his and Rohan's greatness; his story of personal redemption and courage is also that of his people. Yet there are small glimpses of personal bereavement in Tolkien's description--Theoden's minstrel Gleowine never sings again after farewelling his master, and Merry, drawn from the first to serve and love the Rohirric king-cries for him from the heart, lamenting the loss of one who was a father to him, "if only for a little while."

At the funeral feast, newly crowned Eomer presides over a company that puts aside sorrows of the past to look forward to a new era of close relations between Gondor and Rohan. His own deep love for Aragorn is part of that bond, and the ties are royally and permanently cemented in the ceremony which trothplights Eowyn of Rohan with Faramir, Prince of Ithilien. " Thus, said Eomer, is the friendship of the Mark and of Gondor bound with a new bond, and the more do I rejoice." Eowyn and Faramir, having emerged from their own personal darknesses into the light, are living symbols of a brand new world.

For Eowyn, the troth plighting is especially liberating, for she is now free from the sorrow of the unrequited love she bore Aragorn. And he is free of the pain it caused him