Theoden and alcoholism

[Lokktar]

Just read the Houses of Healing for the first time as an adult. Also for the first time since I had to watch my old man slip slowly into alcohol over the years and see the effect it has had on my sister. It felt like Tolkien wrote those paragraphs about Eowyn specifically about my family.

I doubt Tolkien meant for Theoden and Grima to be an allegory of how booze can hurt a family and how there's hope for an alcoholic who gets clean and remembers what it's like to wake up in the morning sober again. But damn it fits.

[Rivvy Elf]

@Lokktar this is an interesting observation. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tolkien had this or something similar pop up in his head from his experiences with surviving WWI and seeing the effects of WWI on survivors