ain't that just the way

Moth & Beetle

When we first see Aragorn it’s the famous shot of him in a dark cloak, his face hidden in shadow

But what other characters wear dark cloaks and have their faces hidden in shadow?

It’s not just that Aragorn is Shifty-Looking™,  the film is drawing a clear visual parallel between Aragorn and the Ringwraiths. They’re shadowy figures in hooded cloaks that conceal their faces, who seem to be looking for Frodo. After the innkeeper tells Frodo about “Strider,” Frodo even begins fidgeting with the Ring like he did when hiding from the Ringwaiths.  At this point in the movie neither Frodo or the audience have any idea what the The Black Riders are,  (I mean you do if you’ve watched the films a million times but teCHNICALLY–) and Aragorn is framed as if he might as well be one of them.

Frodo denies knowing anything about the Ring until Aragorn pulls off his hood and shows his face, something the Black Riders never did:

At which point both the characters and the audience start to realize he might be trustworthy.

But the thing is:

When Frodo asks Aragorn what the Black Riders are, Aragorn responds:

“They were once men, great kings of men. Then Sauron the Deceiver gave to them nine rings of power….”

“Woah Strider, are you telling me that Great Kings of Men are secretly hiding out in Bree under new names/identities while disguised in dramatic dark cloaks???? Well I’ll be on the lookout for these secret kings, Mr Strider, tell you if I see any.” 

But seriously tho– the Black Riders are introduced as mysterious hooded figures,  then revealed to be Great Kings of Men who fell to the dark side. Aragorn is introduced as a mysterious hooded figure who might be a Black Rider, then revealed to be a Great King of Men who might fall to the dark side. 

This is also why that last moment between Frodo and Aragorn in Amon Hen is so great: Frodo (and the audience’s) first impression of Aragorn in Bree was: could this person be a Black Rider? And at the climax of the film, after we’ve learned all about who “Strider” really is, and how the Black Riders were men just like him who were corrupted by Rings of Power, ……in a way, we’re still asking the exact same question. 

The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.

For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.

German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.

The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.

I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.

So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).

There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.

Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf  when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.

(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage. 

The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have. 

Now to be clear, these roles were never lost—the sources exist and historians know how to analyze them and have written libraries of books on the subject. The problem is that those histories and their meanings haven’t penetrated much into public conceptions of the past.

My cousin Helen will be 102 in February and she is still one of the smartest people I know . A couple of years ago she told me that after she escaped the Warsaw ghetto (she wouldn’t tell me how, although I suspect that it may have been under the dead bodies on a cart dragging out the dead, as she got in to the Warsaw Ghetto in an empty body cart) she went to the apartment of a woman she had been friends with who only knew her as the person on her forged papers, but who would not ask questions about Helen showing up without luggage or explanation.

On the third day that she was there the woman called to her excitedly, shouting “Come and see!” Helen went out onto the balcony. Smoke was rising from the ghetto a few blocks away. The Warsaw Ghetto had fallen. “Isn’t it wonderful?” asked the woman. “The Jews are burning!”

Helen said the smile on her face was the hardest thing she had ever had to do.

And Helen’s daughter mentioned that she had never heard Helen talk about that incident before. Her mother kept so much of what had happened back then to herself.

Helen’s older sister, Wanda, had false papers, worked with the Resistance and, without any training, worked as a nurse for Nazi Doctors who didn’t suspect her. (As a spy? Because her false ID was that of a nurse? I don’t know.) All the information I have about the living and the dead is fragmentary, like peering at a huge room through a tiny keyhole.

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“Charles Wallace and the unicorn Gaudior undertake a perilous journey through time in a desperate attempt to stop the destruction of the world by the  mad dictator Madog Branzillo”

???

“Charles Wallace’s sister, Meg – grown and expecting her first child, but still able to enter her brother’s thoughts and emotions by “kything"”

and thank you to @somnambule-plus​ for my new favorite word… schoogle