Don't do me like that

[Lush]

I've been here since 2001.

I've seen a lot of threads about women in Lord of the Rings on this forum.

Yet ever since doing serious research ino the fairy tale, I've discovered that you cannot always apply the rules of the tale to the rules of the real world. Therefore, all those guys talking about "women don't belong in stories of war" and "Tolkien was merely using his own experiences in WWI when it comes to women" need to shut up.

Fairy tale survives through its own logic and its own archetypes. Don't bring in the real world to justify the absence of females in the Fellowship, for example. This is reductive. It doesn't do justice to the fairy tale and to the real world.

I suggest a good dose of Maria Tatar on the subject.

Four years of putting up with reductive discussions on the precense/absence of women in Tolkien's work have taken their toll on me.

Appendices:
Women in fellowship, etc.

[Child of the 7th Age]

Lush,

I can sense your frustration and I am not unsympathetic.

The greatest frustration for me is this: we know JRRT could do better. There are female characters in the Silm, most notably Luthien, who are miles above any of the depictions of women in LotR. And what about Andreth in Morgoth's Ring: a stong woman by any standard?

If it worked in the earlier renditions of the Legendarium (and some of the later ones as well), why wouldn't it work in LotR? Here is my take. Lord of the Rings began as a sequel to the Hobbit. It took a long time for the plot and writing to advance beyond that initial mindset and language. But there are certain aspects of LotR which still strongly mirror its Hobbit birth. Some of these are delightful, but others perhaps less so. While the Legendarium as a whole may have had strong female characters, The Hobbit did not. In fact there was not a single female in The Hobbit. I believe that was because he was reading it to his two sons. (Priscilla is not mentioned.)

Lord of the Rings only went a small way beyond the mindset of the Hobbit in terms of its depiction of strong female characters. When Galadriel is imported in from the wider Legendarium, she comes off as the strongest of the lot. Arwen is largely relegated to the Appendix. (Some of her experiences could have been incorporated, I'm convinced of it.) The one exception is Eowyn. Yet there is a curious ambivalence here since she must turn away from her duty to her own people to fulfill herself in a personal sense. This has provoked endless debate and fanficton. The plain fact is that I know of no other "good" character who has this dilemma.

It's not that I don't enjoy the story as it is. But, to be truthful, when I reflect on Middle-earth, I mentally add in the strong female characters who are missing from the written page. When I look at the fanfictions and RPGs on this site, I can see that I'm not the only one to do this, however far outside "canon" such a viewpoint is. (Ooh! There's that awful word again.)

[Lalwendë]

To me, it's swings and roundabouts... On the one hand, Tolkien actually did create some amazing female characters (the power hungry Galadriel for one) so a lot of the criticism of his work is not all that valid, but on the other hand he possibly could have done a lot more or developed certain characters to take a more complete role in the story.

I don't know if it is always reductive to bring into the argument the position of the Author. Certainly I think some arguments are a little overdone - such as to bring up the chestnut that Tolkien was trying to represent a 'medieval world' and thus this is the reason that women do not have such an important position. What? Tolkien was creating a secondary world, not recreating our own world, so he could do what the heck he wanted within it, and if that included a race of Amazonians then so be it; and anyway, he has Hobbits and Balrogs, and there weren't too many of those around in medieval times, were there? If Tolkien's work was a true reflection of medieval life than Eowyn may have been locked into a chastity belt and kept under guard to stop her going off to war at all, that's if she hadn't already been married off to Grima at the age of 11.

But I do think that we have to remember that any text is merely the product of a writer, and that writer's experience of the world will have a bearing on what is produced. Tolkien was a conservative man, living in the highly conservative world of Oxbridge academe, and a follower of the again highly conservative Catholic faith. Many writers before him, and many of his contemporaries, were including challenging female characters in their work, but we have to remember what their own political and social experiences and knowledge were like, and whether they exerted a big influence on their 'art' or not.

Today we live in a world which expects everything to be inclusive, even our history, but we cannot accept that sometimes the experience of people of another era, society, age, class, country, etc. will be different to ours. Of course we can critique them, but we cannot expect that they ought to 'have known better'. That way lies the path of being revisionist, altering the history books so that the past is made more palatable to us, changing Lord of the Rings so that Arwen takes a more active role. As a woman I would find it incredibly patronising if literature were rewritten to include more focus on women. As it is, I often find it's a case of going round in circles to discuss why a writer from another era did not include women in his work. Far more fruitful in my opinion would be to discuss where the existing women are placed within Tolkien's world, and what that says about the world they live in. That would do justice to those characters, and justice to the story as it goes beyond that 'barrier' (or glass ceiling!) we get stuck at of just endlessly trying to work out why there are so few women!

[Child of the 7th Age]

But why do we have stronger female characters in the Legendarium (some positive, others less so)? Why are such characters not present in LotR to the same degree?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Child

If it worked in the earlier Legendarium (and the later ones as well), why wouldn't it work in LotR? Here is my take. Lord of the Rings began as a sequel to the Hobbit. It took a long time for the plot and writing to advance beyond that initial mindset and language. But there are certain aspects of LotR which still strongly mirror its Hobbit birth. Some of these are delightful, but others perhaps less so. While the Legendarium as a whole may have had strong female characters, The Hobbit did not. In fact there was not a single female in The Hobbit. I believe that was because he was reading it to his two sons. (Priscilla is not mentioned.)

Originally Posted by Lalwendë
. . . .

[I

Far[/I] more fruitful in my opinion would be to discuss where the existing women are placed within Tolkien's world, and what that says about the world they live in. That would do justice to those characters, and justice to the story as it goes beyond that 'barrier' (or glass ceiling!) we get stuck at of just endlessly trying to work out why there are so few women!

I find great merit in both these approaches. One considers each text in light of what the author produced in his other texts, while the second considers the text in and of itself. I think both, together, ultimately would help us reach a better understanding--although, at the same time, I do have to respect young female readers who say they just can't get interested in LotR because there is no interesting strong female character to draw them in.

Child points out that TH appears to be a story Tolkien wrote for his sons. This accords with the experience of many high school teachers and some pedagogical research into young readers: male readers traditionally aren't interested in books with leading female characters. It used to be that female readers could accept both--now perhaps they have taken a miscue from their teen counterparts and stepped down that solipsistic slope?

But this is to get carried away on a tangent. What both these ideas, from Child and Lal make me wonder is--and this is an idea I don't think we've had a thread on--how did Tolkien the author think of his readership? I don't mean a crass pandering to mass appeal, like market-driven commodities, but I do mean what was Tolkien's writerly relationship with the idea of reader? I think most authors have some kind of sense that they are not writing exclusively for themselves, have some idea of the community they wish to appeal to. Child's observations suggests that Tolkien created TH as an ideal kind of "Boy's story". There were magazines abounding in the 19th and early half of the 20th century that were designed just for boys. (See a sample of the Victorian Boy's Own here. Who would Tolkien have conceived of as his audience for the Legendarium? His fellow Inklings? Men who didn't have the flaw of entwives? Does Tolkien's comments on entwives have any bearing on his other female characters and on the absence of female characters in Middle-earth?

It would really be intriguing to see if Tolkien's Father Christmas letters changed as he began to write them to include Priscilla, and then for her alone, since she was younger than the boys.

As for understanding what the role, place and function of female characters is in the cultures of Middle-earth, that is also a rewarding point of view. What, if anything, do Arwen, Galadriel, Eowyn, Rosie, Ioreth have in common? Does each character reflect that commonality or not? Does this commonality have a similar aspect that is shared by the male characters?

Come to think of it, most of the heroes forge successful (we assume) marriages after the end of the War of the Ring--Sam, Merry, Pippin, Faramir, Aragorn. Gimli and Legolas--does their lack of marriage prospects signify something about the fate of the dwarves and elves? And Frodo--is he unable be healed because he cannot find a mate?

Well, I'm sure I'm rambling. Just some ideas that these excellent posts have stirred up in my cauldron of story-making.

[alatar]

Note that as I'm a guy I completely understand if I get booted from this thread immediately. Anyway...

Did Tolkien consider more female characters, then shy away as he just couldn't 'see' them? As mentioned, in LotR we have a strong queen in Galadriel, the romantic interest princess in Arwen, the tomboy in Eowyn, the 'auntie' in Ioreth, etc. Did Tolkien consider increasing the involvement of his females characters, but then struggle depicting what the day-to-day interactions with the male ones would look like, and seeing where his prose faultered, back away? What would it be like to be accompanied by Arwen from Rivendell all the way to the Black Gate, if I were Aragorn? Then as Aragorn, how would I react differently but realistically?

Have made attempts (poor) at writing throughout my own life, and, like many others, using 'what I know' as the basis, I can see how my own depictions of female characters has changed/would change from the time that I was a goofy teen to young adult to married man to father of four, three of which are daughters. And considering this, did Tolkien get locked into an early storyline which could only be altered so much which changing the whole story, at least in his mind?

And lastly, I think that the writings in the Sil are more 'mythological,' and so may have provided the distance that Tolkien required to create more and stronger female characters.

I'll shut up now.

[the phantom]

I have no problem with the amount of pages spent on women in Lord of the Rings, because there weren't any women in the Fellowship. If there had been, then I would've expected to see quite a bit of her, but since there wasn't a woman, I can hardly be surprised by the lack of female focus in the story.

Should there have been a female sprinkled into the Fellowship? I don't think so. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that would've seemed a bit contrived. The Fellowship was already full of males, and none of them could be easily replaced, you see.

The four hobbits- you obviously can't kick any of them out.

Aragorn, the returning King, is definitely in.

Boromir, the heir to the Steward, could not be replaced.

Gandalf- no question about him.

It makes sense that Gimli, the dwarf representative, was male, when you consider that the majority of dwarves were men, and dwarf women rarely seen. Plus, would a dwarf woman really be satisfactory to those desiring a female character? I mean, do you really think the average human female could relate to a dwarf female any better than she could relate to an ent?

Legolas is the Fellowship member that would perhaps be the easiest to replace, but the Fellowship needed an elf, so Legolas would've had to have been replaced by an elf woman. But who? Name me a noble, fair elven lady who would absolutely love to go off into the wilderness with a bunch of men and get all dirty and sweaty and knowing full well that there was a peril of being captured by orcs and such. We had a debate in this forum one time about what exactly befell Lady Celebrian when she fell into the hands of the orcs. Do you think any elf woman would like to risk that happening to her? Do you think any elf men would allow their sister/daughter to step forward and take this risk? No, they would've stepped forward themselves in order to shield their daughters/sisters.

Not to mention the fact that a female in the Fellowship would've changed the journey quite a bit. They'd have to bathe, dress, and relieve themselves separately and such, which would've been a liability because there were times when everyone needed to stay together and no one should've been wandering off alone.

Just for a moment, imagine sticking Eowyn into the Fellowship. Talk about a disaster. She and Aragorn caused each other enough problems in the short time they were around each other. And perhaps Boromir would've taken a liking to her. You never know. Let me tell you, there's nothing like an emotional complication involving a woman to harm a man's judgment. We're dumb like that.

So to sum it up, I don't think a woman belonged in the Fellowship. It makes sense the way it is. And since there is no woman in the Fellowship, you can't expect women to have a huge presence in the book, because the book follows the members of the Fellowship. Make sense?

PS I have this nagging feeling that I'm begging to have my head bitten off. Not that I care. If I stir up a storm of angry posts, at least I've done something.

[Mithalwen]

Originally Posted by Child of the 7th Age

.

The greatest frustration for me is this: we know JRRT could do better. There are female characters in the Silm, most notably Luthien, who are miles above any of the depictions of women in LotR.

This I have to disagree with.

I am a feminist. It has never stopped me enjoying the Lord of the Rings or indeed "Boy's Own". But every fibre of my being is revulsed by the "Tale of Beren and Luthien". The most "revered" woman in the canon barely speaks. Her "power" is in her beauty and in her "blood" neither of her own making. Despite her power she is passive until motivated my her desire for Beren. I suppose it is at least something that neither party in this relationship is attracted by the other's mind . She allows herself to be imprisoned which shows a lack of self respect and she gets Finrod killed (unforgivable). All just to marry the gloopy Beren and pull one over on Daddy. If that is the summa cum laude of female depictions in Tolkien I would rather have no females at all.

On the other hand, there is a elven princess who is wholly admirable, unfortunately she doesn't get as much attention. She manages to marry her mortal with Daddy's blessing, uses her wits in the common good and ensures that at least some of her people survive. Go Idril! At least Tolkien's blondes aren't bimbos - and they have more fun.

Idril, Galadriel, Eowyn are all strong, feisty politically engaged women - yes they are beautiful and high-born but that doesn't define them in the way it does Luthien and her type Arwen.

Tolkien wrote few satisfying female characters but the ones he did are fabulous. For me Eowyn and her "evil twin" Erendis are the finest. As Lalwende has pointed out, Tolkien was a child of his time and culture. Also, perhaps more than any other really successful author, he was writing for himself above all. He certainly wasn't going to be writing to pander to a feminist movement that hadn't really kicked in at the time of publication . I don't see the point in criticising him for not being Margaret Attwood . You might as well criticise Turner for his failure to do portraiture. The vast majority of Shakespeare's characters are male too but some of his greatest characters are women.

Tolkien wrote what he wrote. It can't be changed. Disliking a certain aspect or a story doesn't mean we have to reject the whole. It is not invalidated. You don't have to reread anything that you dislike...the canon is a buffet not a set menu . Hey it works for me.....I have manage to ignore the existance of Bombadil almost continuously for over 20 years.....

[Anguirel]

I agree with you to an extent about Luthien, Mith, though, despite all my best anti-mortal efforts, I always find myself liking Beren. When I was writing a script for a Lay of Luthien animated film I was always longing to get out of Doriath. The other thing I noticed was that Beren seemed to be almost constantly trying to get away from Luthien while on the quest! Oh yes, for her protection it may have been, but what would Dr Freud have made of it?

I do think that you remarking that she allows herself to be imprisoned is going a bit far though. She was unaware of the magnificent Celegorm and wondrous Curufin's supremely cunning intentions until it was too late...

As for your list of female worthies-Idril, Galadriel, and Eowyn-I would undoubtedly add Aredhel, Haleth, and Melian. Just because things often went wrong doesn't diminish their glory.

Oh, and Morwen.

[Mithalwen]

I meant letting herself be imprisoned in the tree by her Dad .... It is the Middle Earth equivalent of being sent to your room

Aredhel rocks, apart from not making a clean getaway, but she wasn't a blonde . Morwen ... her story is so bleak.....

[alatar]

But back to the original question, which I think is what character or characters, newly minted or replaced/subsumed, would attract more female readers in 2006?

And I would disagree with some of the posts where it's stated that women could not do certain things (hold the throne, go to war, etc). Umm, unless my library is all skewed, but isn't this fantasy? Sure, it seems realistic, but couldn't a Xena-type Arwen character at least hold her own against Aragorn etc? Peter Jackson seemed to think so.

And was the Balrog male or female?

[Mithalwen]

Err could you specify the question then?.... I detected a release of storm but no actual question in the original post ....

And while it is classified as fantasy, it is not random. Tolkien created various cultures with their own rules and norms. In the culture of the Noldor, women fought only in defence therfore a Xena Arwen would be breaking from her culture. If you put such a unorthodox figure as a central character in the story the unorthodoxy is liable to become the story. Tolkien's story was of a small person's quest to save the world ( Eowyn is marvellous but realtively peripheral - and perhaps because of the fact she is not bearing so much of the burden of the plot has such a well rounded character). How many issues are you expecting Tolkien to tackle in his story before it is acceptably politically correct?

Should he have rewritten it with Frodo as a disabled, gay, single-parent from an ethnic minority?

[Raynor]

Originally Posted by Child of the 7th Age

While the Legendarium as a whole may have had strong female characters, The Hobbit did not. In fact there was not a single female in The Hobbit

Well, that is a bit over the edge; beside the general refferences to "women" and "girls", there is an interesting refference in the very first chapter:

As I was saying, the mother of this hobbit - of Bilbo Baggins, that is - was the fabulous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of the hobbits who lived across The Water, the small river that ran at the foot of The Hill. It was often said (in other families) that long ago one of the Took ancestors must have taken a fairy wife

Originally Posted by the phantom

They'd have to bathe, dress, and relieve themselves separately and such, which would've been a liability because there were times when everyone needed to stay together and no one should've been wandering off alone.

Cf the Druedain, UT, many of Haleth's warriors were women, and I doubt they had such problems; women also participated in the Marhwini attack on the Wainriders; the elven nissi also participated in fights (cf Of the laws and customs of the eldar).

The most "revered" woman in the canon barely speaks.

She enchants Beren with her singing, she convinces Thingol not to kill him, she puts Melkor to sleep with, again, her singing, she is the _only one_ to change the heart of Mandos... come on .

she gets Finrod killed

Why blame her for his death? Maybe Beren for "twisting" his hand into joining him, but not her...

All just to marry the gloopy Beren and pull one over on Daddy

The ennoblement of Men by Elven blood is part of the 'Divine Plan', cf Letter #153... so there is more to it ... *feels special defending his favorite hero*; without her, there would have been no silmaril for Earendil to protect him on his voyage, therefore no war of wrath, etc; not to mention the general uplifting of moral her deeds caused .

[Mithalwen]

Originally Posted by Raynor

She enchants Beren with her singing, she convinces Thingol not to kill him, she puts Melkor to sleep with, again, her singing, she is the _only one_ to change the heart of Mandos... come on .
Why blame her for his death? Maybe Beren for "twisting" his hand into joining him, but not her...
The ennoblement of Men by Elven blood is part of the 'Divine Plan', cf Letter #153... so there is more to it ... *feels special defending his favorite hero*; without her, there would have been no silmaril for Earendil to protect him on his voyage, therefore no war of wrath, etc; not to mention the general uplifting of moral her deeds caused .

Singing is not speech. And we don't know what she sang. We know nothing of her mind Basically she is motivated by lust (like Melkor). And most girls know howto get round their fathers so that is nothing special. She may be part of the plan but she is driven by selfish motives, trails death after her and has zero personality. And she is not revered for her role in the Silmarils such as it is but for her beauty and dying for love *sticks fingers down throat*. I just see her as a slightly less trashy Paris Hilton....

There would have been no Earendil without Idril's brain and foresight ..........

[Raynor]

And we don't know what she sang.

From the Lay of Leithian, HoME III:

Then did she lave her head and sing
a theme of sleep and slumbering,
profound and fathomless and dark
as Luthien's shadowy hair was dark
each thread was more slender and more fine
...
His dreadful counsel then they took,
and their own gracious forms forsook;
in werewolf fell and batlike wing
prepared to robe them, shuddering.
With elvish magic Luthien wrought,
lest raiment foul with evil fraught
to dreadful madness drive their hearts;
and there she wrought with elvish arts
a strong defence, a binding power,
singing until the midnight hour.
...
With arms upraised and drooping head
then softly she began to sing
a theme of sleep and slumbering,
wandering, woven with deeper spell
than songs wherewith in ancient dell
Melian did once the twilight fill,
profound, and fathomless, and still.
The fires of Angband flared and died
...
Suddenly her song began anew;
and soft came dropping like a dew
down from on high in that domed hall
her voice bewildering, magical,
and grew to silver-murmuring streams
pale falling in dark pools in dreams.

These quotes are proof of the magic in her words - she is the chief enchatress among the elves; but there is more to her merit, since magic itself couldn't move Mandos, only art (or Art maybe) from Of Beren and Luthien, Silmarillion:

The song of Luthien before Mandos was the song most fair that ever in words was woven, and the song most sorrowful that ever the world shall ever hear. Unchanged, imperishable, it is sung still in Valinor beyond the hearing of the world, and the listening the Valar grieved. For Luthien wove two themes of words, of the sorrow of the Eldar and the grief of Men, of the Two Kindreds that were made by Iluvatar to dwell in Arda, the Kingdom of Earth amid the innumerable stars. And as she knelt before him her tears fell upon his feet like rain upon stones; and Mandos was moved to pity, who never before was so moved, nor has been since.

I just see her as a slightly less trashy Paris Hilton....

I doubt this was Tolkien's impression of his wife

Originally Posted by Letter #340

I have at last got busy about Mummy's grave. The inscription I should like is:
EDITH MARY TOLKIEN
1889-1971
Luthien
brief and jejune, except for Luthien, which says for me more than a multitude of words: for she was (and knew she was) my Luthien.