So you are saying the real problem Frodo et al. had in getting the Ring to its destruction was that they didn’t know enough to ask, “which exit?” 
No, he’s saying they should have asked What Exit? what exit to take.
It seems as if you believe this is an actual history of real things that happened, that of necessity the characters of Arwen, Galadriel, Rosie, Éowyn, et al, were not necessary to the plot. But the story is not historical myth, or mythical history; it is a story and Tolkien constructed the plot so they would not be necessary. He could just as easily have written a story where women were more visibly vital to the outcome.
For instance, when Éowyn is sent off with the civilians, it could have been terribly poignant to watch her stew in silence, driving herself to the decision she made later. We could have seen her explicitly reject the glory and valor she was given, but instead she gets one line “I don’t wanna!” and then she’s banished from the plot. When I read the book, I barely noticed who she was the first time. Éowyn? Who’s that? Oh, right, that chick from earlier, who was sulking at the dinner table. What’s she doing here? How did she learn how to fight? (Also, the whole “King of the Nazgûl will not be killed by any man” would have been more impressive, frankly, had it been mentioned earlier.)
Second, there’s no particular reason that battles in The Lord of the Rings had to be at Helm’s Deep (defending Rohan) and at Osgiliath and Pelennor (defending Gondor). If Lothlorien was so darned important and the Elves so essential and Galadriel so cool, the first battle could have been there. Then Galadriel and the Elves can go ride out to save Gondor. It’s easy; you just write Rohan out of the story entirely. You could even substitute Arwen for the Éowyn “warrior woman” role. Then you have a historical and emotional resonance: the Last Alliance Between Elves and Men, the last hurrah. Instead, Tolkien creates a really important female character who (in the context of the LOTR plot) does virtually nothing that is visible to the reader.
Then there’s Arwen. I completely missed her the first time around, didn’t even know she existed. I can’t recall where she’s ever mentioned by name until Aragorn marries her. In dramatic terms, you could easily raise the stakes with her: put her in Minas Tirith. (Or wherever the final battle is.) Since she’s symbolic of Aragorn’s victory, put her at the victory location! Put her in jeopardy! It’s like the most basic rule of fantasy damsels; put ‘em in distress. For goodness sakes, she could at least get freakin’ captured. That would’ve been nice and Arthurian.
There was a Last Alliance earlier. Ancient history by the time the War of the Ring rolls around.
Éowyn made an attempt to establish her martial prowess earlier; in conversation with Aragorn, she protested that she was a shield-maiden and not a dry-nurse. She did a bit more than sulk at the dinner table; she begged literally on bended knee (“The Passing of the Grey Company”) to be allowed to go with Aragorn, and those near enough to see and who knew him well were aware that it pained him greatly to be obliged to refuse her.
Arwen is seen in “Many Meetings”, as Frodo is beginning to be up and about - and what’s more, Aragorn is dressed up to the nines to accompany her, a strange contrast to his usual appearance. Aragorn also salutes Galadriel as Arwen’s ancestress.
But you know what would be freakin’ cool? Elves riding triceratopes with quad .50-cals. 
The Pine Barrens, immortalized by The Sopranos, mebbe?: New Jersey Pine Barrens - Wikipedia
Either one would have helped. 
Oddly enough as the show was actually filmed in NJ, those were not the Pine Barrens but a forest up in North West Jersey I believe that probably were better suited to Mirkwood. The actual Pine Barrens (as in the Jersey Devil’s home) are mostly pine trees as should be no surprise.
Hey Malacandra, I think the movie “Wizards” did have Elves riding triceratops with quad .50-cals.
Also, Tom was sex.
What the Hell kind of pathetic counterargument is that?
None of the songs and linguistics and endless descriptions were necessary in the telling of the story. But it is a story in a world where these things are expected, so we expect to see them in the book.
Do you somehow expect that the hobbits slogged across Middle-Earth and back, and there were only about three women for them to talk to? Galadriel, Éowyn, and Ioreth the only women worth talking to outside of the Shire? This, in a world where Tolkien makes a point to demonstrate that Middle-Earth does not adhere to the rigid gender roles he was familiar with in his own society?
It is not as though it is astonishing that there are no people of other ethnicities in the book – the hobbits don’t actually go anyplace we’d expect to see those people. They DO go where I’d expect to see women. But, we don’t see them.
Interesting discussion. I don’t deny that Tolkien just was not interested in writing about women. It doesn’t bother me so much tho. I’ll keep imagining the Blue Wizard was female.
Both of them? :dubious:
Sure why not. Let’s make all the blue wizards female.
I don’t think the lack of female characters is a weakness, any more than the lack of humor is a weakness. It’s more of a personal preference. People who like romance (or sex) in their stories will find LOTR lacking. People who like tales with roughly equivalent male and female characters will be disappointed.
To me the weaknesses are the poor explanations for not involving the eagles and for Aragorn letting Frodo go off alone with Sam.
“If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate!”
Stay up with the discussion, please. 
I’ve said that the issue of women in the story is an issue of story environment. It’s something that could be added, but it isn’t integral to the story line. For some readers, the lack of women makes the environment less interesting.
But I have said we are discussing the books flaws. This is different. This is a discussion about things that undermine the story. An example is the Magic Eagle Machine: like Star Trek, once you’ve invented something magical that gets you out of bad situations, you end up having to try and justify it’s exclusion from every other script where it would be useful. The Magic Eagles, by being inserted into the book as the rescue mechanism for Gandalf (JRRT could have simply left the eagles out of the story, relegating them to the quaint fairy-tale memories of Bilbo in The Hobbit), force the reader to wonder why they aren’t simply used to insert the Fellowship directly into Mordor. Hell, simply fly above Orodruin and dump the ring into the lava from above. By failing to explain why this option isn’t used (forcing the fans to retcon the situation), the book has a flaw. It’s a weak point in the book.
So what I’ve said is this: you and Fish make solid arguments for why women COULD be added to the story. But if you can’t make an argument that they MUST be added to the story, you are simply talking about flavor, not flaws.
As an example: if there was a part of the story where the Fellowship was in a place where only a woman would reasonably be interacting with them, and they end up interacting with a man or some creature instead, that might be considered a flaw, n’est-ce pas? 
Weakest point?
Tim Benzadril and Hashberry.
Oh, you mean LORD of the Rings!
It’s a flaw in my view. It detracts from my enjoyment of the books; therefore I feel it’s a flaw. You’re free to disagree.
It is not my place to argue that Tolkien should have written about women. I’m merely observing that he went far, far out of his way to exclude women from the plot — important women, in fact, that he himself created, doing important things he refuses to tell us about, things that he somehow felt should take a back seat to the dull, trite, unimportant poems the men were sitting around reciting while they were cooking bacon for breakfast and farting on each other.
Whenever I read the stories I can’t be fully transported to Middle-Earth because I keep imagining a stodgy professor of languages living in a century-old world where men were all-important and women were all but invisible — for the same reason I can’t watch Manga without imagining sweaty Japanese guys in small, dimly lit booths drawing the animation cels.
That’s exactly why they should have repeated it. It would have resonated. It’s like a cardinal rule of fiction; if you say “nobody has ever beaten this challenge,” then by the end of the book, someone must. If you say “Elves and Men will never ally again,” then I would expect that to be a main theme of the book.
We’ll forget for the moment how the Mirkwood Elves and Men and Dwarves of the Iron Hills stood together at the battle of Lake-Town.
Yeah. And I when I first read the books, I completely forgot about her until she came back in the end. She’s the heroine destined to destroy the second-biggest villain in the book, and yet she gets fewer lines than Tom Bombadil, who does virtually nothing. The poor woman isn’t even allowed to kill the Lord of the Nazgûl without a male’s help. Why couldn’t she have that scene to herself? Oh, right — because Merry needed another scene.
And again, she’s easy to miss. She’s underfoot. Glóin gets more lines and is mentioned by name several times. Arwen is sometimes not even called Arwen; she’s sometimes Evenstar, which is confusing as hell.
shrug
There’s to be no pleasing you - though I feel that the War of the Ring had plenty to get Aragorn up off his duff in the first place, without needing a hackneyed damsel in distress in Minas Tirith to make it personal. (PJ apparently disagreed, hence that risible business with Arwen sickening in RotK and Elrond finally deciding to get around to getting Aragorn’s sword mended.)
Sneak in what cutesie gotchas you like, but the Mirkwood Elves were at the Battle of Five Armies by chance - they were there to bring help to the men of Lake-town and incidentally see if they could bag a share of Smaug’s treasure, and fighting goblins was the last thing on their minds. Once the enemy was upon them there was nothing for it but to fight, and they were Orc-haters enough to join in with a good will, but they didn’t set out as a matter of policy to form an alliance and go to war.
The Elves were a spent force by the time of LotR; it had been downhill all the way for them ever since Galadriel was young, and with the passing of their last and least High King Gil-Galad the Noldor ceased to exist as a united entity. The mightiest Noldo left East of the Sea was Queen over a people foreign to her by birth, though she had lived among them since long before Morgoth was overthrown. Cirdan and Elrond had households, not kingdoms, and no dominion over the Wood-Elves and more distant kindred lurking about the place. And if you know sic 'em about Tolkien you know that this dated back about a generation in his own private writings before LotR ever hit the shelves, and it wasn’t to be tossed aside on a whim.
Sorry you get confused about Arwen’s surname - it must be as tricky as hell for you to keep track of who Aragorn, Strider, Estel, Ellessar, Telcontar and “the Elfstone” all are.
If you find the unprominence of female characters in LotR disturbing then you must really hate Jules Verne. Why, in Journey to the Centre of the Earth the Prof’s niece Grauben expresses sorrow to Axel that she can’t come, because “a woman would only be in the way”.
Just a nitpick. Depending on the version accepted; Galadriel either lived out the first age in Beleriand or moved into Eriador before the fall of Nargothrond. She did not move onto Lothlórien until after spending time in Eregion (Hollin) somewhere around 1300 to 1697(SA).
For completion sake; She was not the Queen of Lothlórien until after Amroth left after 1981 when the Balrog awoke nearby in Moria.
Jim
At least Strider/Aragorn and Gandalf/Mithrandir are mentioned multiple times in context with both names. There’s even a passage where Gandalf explicitly recites all the names “in the south I am Gandalf, in the west I am Mithrandir, to the east I go not,” or some such. There’s also a letter from Gandalf that says “his name is Aragorn son of Arathorn” and a scene in Rivendell (“Strider! Well I never”) that matches Aragorn up to his other names.
I don’t have my books in front of me, but as I recall it, Arwen isn’t even mentioned by name when we first see her — Frodo just observes a really beautiful elf-maiden sitting beside Elrond. Pfft, could be anybody. And had Arwen been in Minas Tirith it would have been a much more concrete and tangible demonstration of her choice to stand with Aragorn. I feel that it makes her look wishy-washy to stay behind with the Elves in Rivendell just to see if the Men win the battle. (She loves Aragorn, but not that much, it seems. Samwise loves Frodo so much that he’ll follow him into a secret Council but Arwen can barely bestir herself from her bonbons at bedside to see Aragorn off to battle.) We barely get to see who she is — Elbereth is mentioned more times than Arwen — and she’s gonna be the Queen of Freakin’ Gondor.
“A woman would only be in the way” is exactly what they told Éowyn. That didn’t seem to stop them from inviting along Sam, Merry and Pippin, who had no battle training whatsoever!
Aragorn: All right, who’s the next applicant?
Pippin: Me, sir.
Aragorn: (reading the resume) Can’t ride, can’t fight, can’t boat. Can sing a little.
Pippin: Yep.
Aragorn: Got any armor or swords?
Pippin: Armor, no. But I robbed a grave and stole this knife.
Aragorn: Male?
Pippin: Yep.
Aragorn: You’re in. Who’s next?
Éowyn: Me, my lord.
Aragorn: (he reads her resume) Trained warrior, it says. Shield-maiden of Rohan. And you can ride.
Éowyn: Yes.
Aragorn: Says here you have your own gear, and a horse. Interesting.
Éowyn: Then I’m in?
Aragorn: You’d just be in the way.
Makes no sense.