It’s an odd-numbered day, so I can admit that I only read the book after seeing the first movie–and, moreover, thought the first movie was simply wonderful and the second excellent, though flawed in places.
Sadly you are wrong on the first point. While Gandalf talked of the Eagles rescuing him, no one actually brought up the idea to ask the Eagles to fly Frodo and the Ring to Mt. Doom. Of course it would have been dismissed for several good and wise reasons but surely Sam or Gimli should have asked at least.
You are wrong on the second too as Sauron had no fear of the Ring being destroyed and no need to guard the path and entrance to the crack. He had good reason to fear Eagles as both spies and attackers. He would well remember the way they flew into Angband itself to rescue the body of Fingolfin and fly it back to Turgon his son at Gondolin.
The best Fantasy “series” ever, in both the film and the book.
Boromir died, Gandalf, Saruman, Sauron were “angels” of a sort.
Eomer married Princess Lothíriel, daughter of Prince Imrahil of Dol Amroth.
Legolas and Gimli were considered too young to marry at the start, but could have well done so in the 120 years after the LotR.
Elrond was married to Celebrían, who was still alive at the time of the books but had passed over the Sea.
And, it was set in the High Medieval period, where frankly, most women had little duties other than to give Birth- few had any adventures. Eowyn was a nice refreshing change.
And then after she was safely married, she no longer wanted valor. Nice lesson, I think not.
I wouldn’t call Galadriel a placeholder, but she exerts a very passive role on the plot. Here, have some presents. Yes, Elves can fight with the strength of a hundred Men, but we can’t help you. We’ll stay here and weave rope and sing songs about dead Gandalf instead. So sorry to hear about the Ring. I can use my secret Elfy senses to detect someone is about to betray you, but heck, you’ll figure that part out soon enough. I’ll just put the whammy on him and go back to singing songs about dead Gandalf.
Yes, you could say she’s essential because she gave Frodo and Sam the rope they needed to climb the cliff, and Frodo the star-glass that Sam used to pass the gate at Cirith Ungol, and Pippin the elven-brooch to cast away as a sign for Aragorn. In that regard she’s no more a major character than the tailor who made Aragorn’s hat, without which he would have caught pneumonia and died.
You’re right on most of them but Legolas & Gimli.
Legolas was plenty old enough to marry and was probably born in the 2nd age though it was never clarified. We know and learned almost nothing about Legolas except his father was Thranduil and along with Oropher his father they fought in the War of the Last Alliance where Oropher died at the Black Gate. We know Oropher was a Sindarin Elf of Doriath.
Gimli was born in 2879 so was 140 and thus old enough to be married by Dwarven standards but young enough not to be yet.
Yes it was Tom Bombadil and eighty odd pages wasted picking mushrooms that did it for me.
Other than that I loved LOTR when I was younger, now that I’m older and don’t accept the divine right of kings I really can’t stand any of the “bow, scrape, he’s your leige and lord and you should die for him” crap.
This kind of puts a dampener on the whole thing for me, particularly Return of the King which is full of this kind of writing.
Whom we had never heard of.
Yes … most women had few duties other than giving birth. And providing a freakin’ heir to the throne. And yet Denethor has two big, burly, manly sons who are unmarried and marching off to war. Surely Tolkien knew as well as anyone what happens to kings whose lines are ending without an heir: Edward the Confessor, Elizabeth I, Richard II, Henry VIII — they get desperate. Marriages are arranged when the heirs are barely teens. At least Theoden had an heir lined up, until he was killed — but only one heir. Evidently Theoden only ever had one son, then quit; and neither he nor Denethor appeared to have brothers.
There’s also no reason that Elf and Dwarf cultures should have the same Victorian attitudes as the Men: Legolas and Gimli could easily have been female. But Tolkien decided that Elves and Dwarves were precisely the same, except more so; we never even see Dwarven women.
Any one of these decisions makes sense in isolation: Denethor was gloomy about the end of the world as he knew it; Theoden was grieving for the end of his line, etc. There’s always a good, rational justification why women are invisible. Taken in total, I think it says a lot more about Tolkien than about his world.
What about Princeton? Certainly more urban than Rivendell, but it’s a great town, and the focus on scholarship and whatnot there is certainly Elvish enough.
As to Galadriel I now know how Sam felt in this exchange:
She was doing more than you realized. She had her own realm to defend. She may have used her powers and the power of her Ring to break Sauron’s darkness when both Minas Tirith and Frodo needed it most. She and Celeborn fought the forces of Dol Guldur though it was but a footnote in the Red Book of Westmarch as it did not directly concern the Hobbits.
Dol Guldur attacked Lothlórien three times and failed and then Celeborn led an army to Dol Guldur and captured it and “Galadriel threw down the walls of the stronghold.” Not even Gandalf or Saruman could have done this last part as far as I know and this was after the One Ring was destroyed so she probably did it with her Ring waining or without it at all. It was strongly hinted at that Galadriel was constantly confronting Sauron in a battle of wills and scouting his doings while all the time confounding his attempts to scry out Lothlórien.
It seems likely Sauron feared Galadriel gaining the Ring more than any other. He never did seem to realize what Gandalf and Saruman really were and the Heir of Elendil was but a human that needed time to gain mastery over the Ring and to consolidate his forces. Galadriel he knew was one of the most powerful of Elves and he strongly suspected she had one of the Elven Rings already.
re the absence of women in the saga - surprisingly, this never really bothered me. Eowyn was such a strong character, that it sort of made up for it. And his inclusion of her story says a lot about Tolkien, I feel. He could have just as easily not told this part of the tale. And Eowyn’s decision to forego the warrior role at the end, and marry someone whose temperment suited her and oversee Ithilien? Well, that seems a fine choice to me. The important thing being that it was at that point a choice.
Yeah. Women were doing really important things, in other stories. I could make some up, even.
But Tolkien didn’t put them in The Lord of the Rings, and so I call it a weakness.
That would be because they didn’t belong there. They did, however, belong in the Silmarillion, and so they’re there. You are, of course, welcome to consider it a weakness. I don’t, but so what?
Big deal. After it was over, Faramir wasn’t too interested in heading off to war, either, unless he had to. Nor, for that matter, were most of the others.
RR
So we get long, dull passages that are important to the men but have nothing to do with the Ring, and exclude these supposedly major female characters doing valiant deeds off-screen.
Yeah, I call it a weakness. So sue me.
The hints were there and most of the details I provided were in the appendixes of the Return of the King. I’m sorry there were none in the Fellowship but then how many women were ever more than a trophy to be won or rescued in any of the legends, myths and Arthurian tales? For the time Tolkien’s addition of Éowyn if anything stands out at quite exceptional and of course Galadriel stands in for the Faerie Queen that was more common.
Good grief. I cannot believe this beat-down of someone pointing out that there aren’t all that many female characters in LotR in a thread talking about the book’s weak points.
This isn’t some subjective measure – there really are not that many female characters. And the pitiful few that are there, are more conspicuous by their absence throughout the majority of the book.
It doesn’t matter that this was the way of thinking in Tolkien’s time, or was the way potrayed in the stories he was imitating – they aren’t freaking in the damn book!
And I certainly would think that the esteemed experts here should understand the disappointment at people reading the role that Tolkien gave Éowyn’s in the story, and then looking at Galadriel in disappointment that he did not make an effort to have her be as vital a character.
Time and again, when there is opportunity to have a woman as even a walk-on, they are not present. Were there no important women in Rivendell to sit in on the council? In Lothlórien, with Galadriel’s example, there were no significant elven women in her court? In Minas Tirith, with its traditions of ruling queens? Heck, why didn’t Butterbur have a wife in Bree? Ridiculous.
And though I like Lúthien, the only other women in the Silmarilion who do things are Valar or Maiar. Or spiders, I guess.
At least the Arthurian tales had sex; Guinevere and Lancelot were bumping uglies behind the king’s back. Sex and attraction is a major factor in the story. It seems to me as if Tolkien tries very hard to keep the very notion of sex out of the books.
I’m not saying that Lord of the Rings needed some softcore in it, but a little perspective would be nice: we read about Aragorn eating dinner; what Pippin had for breakfast in the Tower of the Guard; Gandalf picking out a horse; a song about how there’s no more Entwives; a tree Aragorn plants; a poem Bilbo made up; a list of captains and how many troops they brought; a list of dead people who didn’t make it through the Battle in Pelennor Fields; dissertations on pipeweed; the origin of the word “hobbit”; a cool skeleton in the Paths of the Dead which Aragorn says he doesn’t care about; how sad everybody is that Boromir is dead; a battle with some wolves near Moria; a song about a hero from a completely different story who’s been dead for centuries; how Aragorn makes some promises to some tribe in the forest; how the Fellowship tries to go through the passes, but then doesn’t, and they turn back; a list of beings that the Ents once heard about; how the Hobbits retake their tiny village; and how the Ring is terribly important but Frodo sits around for thirty years doing nothng about it.
By contrast, we don’t get to see: the fall of Isengard; Gandalf’s confinement by Saruman; Aragorn seizes the corsair fleet with the Army of the Dead, which is a ripoff, considering how much time we spend watching Aragorn trying to get to the Stone of Erech to rally them; a supposedly important female character waging a supposedly important battle; the final battle at the Gates of Mordor; and Gandalf fighting the freakin’ Balrog. Some of those — maybe — are told in flashback by a character who was there. All told, it is the female characters who unquestionably get the short shrift.
I love the books, but they are neither a good history nor a fully satisfying adventure (to me). I can’t get past how almost every time there’s a big exciting bit, Tolkien chickens out; and how he spends more time on inconsequential doings of the male characters than on anything done by female characters.
Honestly, it would bug me if there were more female characters. Though Lord of the Rings is set in an imagined world, it atttempts (and I would say succeeds) to invoke an actual historical period–i.e., the medieval period. In such a time, women would NOT have been the major actors in such a conflict as is related in the story, and placing them in the story in great numbers in the story would have been jarring and disconcerting.
And your remark about Butterbur is just silly. He’s a freaking minor character who appears in, what 3 chapters? There’s no point in adding a wife, or son, or daughter, or catamite, or mistress, though he may have had any or all of these things; that would be a distraction that served no purpose.
As for Lothlorien, by my count all of three elves there get names and significant face time: Galadriel, Celeborn, and Haldir. These three all have particular purposes to move the narrative along, and create the texture of the world, and there’s little room or need for more.
Do you seriously expect any narrative about warfare in a pre-industrial society to include women warriors as anything other than an oddity? Do you actually find it surprising that, of the four realms whose rulers we see, only one has a female one? Even today, women executives (of nations) are significantly less common than male ones.
If LotR were set in the real world and modern times, it would be appropriate to have more female characters. But as it is, complaining about the dearth of the distaff is like wondering why Wonder Woman doesn’t have a little brother.
Excuse me, but we’re talking about JRR Tolkien here. Pointless details that serve no purpose to the main action are his bread and butter. How many pages did we spend on mallorn trees, again?
The innkeeper’s wife would have been an entirely appropriate character and role for the story Tolkien was telling.
Did you see me say anywhere that I was expecting warrior women? No, you did not. Because you are arguing against something I did not say. I just want there to be some more women in there. Doing anything.
Let us take, for example, Arwen. She lives at Rivendell, is the daughter of one of the most powerful elves left in Middle-Earth, the granddaughter of the most powerful elf, and held to be akin to the return of Lúthien herself. Why wasn’t she sitting in on that council meeting about the Ring? It is not as though the elves discount the advice of their women, or expect them to be seen and not heard – what, was she off baking lembas?
And I agree that Galadriel and Éowyn are unusual characters, whom we should not expect are ordinary women. That is just it, though – where are the ordinary women? We see lots of ordinary men (e.g., Butterbur, Beregond, etc.); why do we only see the extraordinary women?
I find it extremely odd that in this pre-industrial society, there isn’t more fucking going on. Birth rates are always higher when the death rate is higher, even today; subsistence living means lots of gettin’ down.
Denethor and Theoden would have had more brothers and sisters, and definitely more sons; and when each of them became a widower, each would have re-married to produce even more heirs. In a wartime medieval society you could never have too many heirs to the throne. There’s no historical reason why both Denethor and Theoden had to be widowers and Aragorn a bachelor (he’s freakin’ 70 years old! have some kids! preserve the bloodline!). The sheer number of bachelors, unmarrieds, and widowers is telling, especially among the royalty; they simply did not ride off to war and leave these things to chance. Marriages were arranged and secured before the heirs were even adult. Hell, my grandfather fought in World War II and he got married before he left.
In addition, Tolkien’s race of Mary Sues — his idea of perfection — are all tall, good, beautiful, graceful, slender, musical, super-sensory, master artisans, perfect warriors, functionally immortal beings who don’t have sex. To me, that says volumes about Tolkien.