I don’t even know what that means. When I think about books and other art, I think about a lot of different things about them. I’m not going to Tolkien’s grave and casting dark necromantic rituals and binding his spirit to this world so that I may castigate it, I’m noticing flaws in a book he wrote. I’m also noticing strengths in a book he wrote.
When I notice the strengths of his novels, I don’t feel obligated first to examine other 1940s books to discuss those strengths in historical context. I feel no similar obligation when noticing the flaws.
Because we’re not having this discussion in the 1940s. Tolkien is not only still common today, but also revered. And the more esteem something has, the more you need to be careful to acknowledge its flaws, lest you wind up praising those as well. That which is honored is that which is imitated, after all.
Inasmuch as we are comparing Tolkien to other works, it’s not just that which came before which is relevant. Someone looking for a work based on how it handles women might want to choose a different work.
Tolkien is important enough today that how he handled women is worthy of discussion outside of a historical context. Other works are less likely to be talked about at all.
That said, I could see an argument that, if we found someone who was particularly good on this subject, then it might make sense for us to take a second look and see if they need to be added to the canon. And getting more representation in what works exist could help us get a fuller picture and a broader foundation for which future stories can be written.
I do not consider a lack of female characters to be a flaw in and of itself. It is a flaw if good storytelling would make female characters an obvious choice for inclusion, or if good world building etc would require it. Old Man and the Sea doesn’t have any female characters either, although I guess the fish could have been female.
Tolkien’s works are tied to Anglo Saxon and Germanic mythology and early storytelling, specifically stories like Beowulf. He chose a setting in which people wear armor and use swords and bow and arrow, and travel around on foot or horse. This was then, a pre-gunpowder, pre-modern setting, with magic present. The sort of armor and weapons he mentions would fit in somewhere in the early Middle Ages if we tried to equate it to Earth history, albeit it isn’t an easy 1:1 mapping. In such a society it would be unusual for the story to be equally split between male and female, particularly a story focused on military campaigning, combined with a sort of Arthurian hero’s journey motif. Women were primarily wives and mothers in the context of that setting. Tolkien actually portrays women as significantly more powerful in Middle-Earth than they were in Real-Earth in a contemporary timespan. I think it would have been unrealistic to have portrayed them as equals and equally likely to participate in something like the Fellowship and the various battles and adventures they were involved in.
So do I–which is why I would not call it a flaw had Tolkien even more emphasized women in his books. I think this falls into what I would call ‘artistic choice’, to me a flaw in writing is some form of mistake, either in storytelling or you’re presenting a story in an untruthful way. I also would factor in the author’s intent and motivations.
If someone writes a fictional novel set in the antebellum South, and portrays all the slaves as dutiful servants happy to serve their benevolent masters, and portrays all of the masters as kindly and paternalistic, I would argue that is both unrealistic and shows very bad intent on the part of the author. Such that I do not think such choices are appropriate artistic license, and constitute defects of both writing and judgment.
The wave of sitcoms in the 80s and 90s that tried to rehash the “working husband, homemaker wife, 2.5 kids” formula I think suffer from this same thing–by those decades most women were in the workforce and were not homemakers. The motivation in choosing to portray them that way was not a good one, and also wasn’t showing relatable stories for the intended audience.
But a story set in a middle age era world, the society and story being masculine and patriarchal seems fairly acceptable and normal to me. Unless we’ve reached a point where we cannot portray patriarchal societies in fiction? That would be odd to me since virtually all pre-modern societies were patriarchal, and many extant human societies today remain patriarchal.
I will say an interesting thing is that in the era Tolkien wrote, there was no real movement for greater portrayal of women as strong characters in fictional writing. The fact he still included several, including two women that actually take the field of battle at points, I think speaks to the fact he actually did want to include strong women in his story.
But, yeah, you’re right. Tolkien’s omission of strong female characters in LOTR doesn’t really detract from the work.
If we want to be really critical of Tolkien’s writing, he wasn’t that great at characterization anyway. Everyone is pretty black and white. They’re archetypes more than actual characters, and his women characters (if he’d written more) wouldn’t have been any different.
Tolkien wasn’t a fan of the prophecies in Macbeth. He tells us that the Ents were partially created because he was disappointed that the forest didn’t actually come to life. He says, “I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war.”
I don’t know if he ever came right out and said so, but it seems reasonable to infer that Eowyn’s role was likewise to ‘correct’ another prophecy from Macbeth. Macbeth believes that he can’t be killed by any man “born from a woman,” but Macduff was actually a C-section! Loophole!
So is Eowyn a strong character with an important role to play, or is she a vehicle for dramatically revealing the right way to loophole that prophecy? I just did a quick ctrl+f search through his letters and she barely gets any mention at all.
But I agree that Tolkien wasn’t much interested in characterization. He was telling a gigantic allegory, creating a mythology, inventing languages, and doing lots of other stuff with much higher priority.
Tolkien’s characters are much more legends than they are people, is how I’ve always seen them. Tolkien/LOTR is also a bit of an older style of writing, and older may not be the right word–rather in most modernish fantasy I’ve read (say from the 1970s and later), we get this “third person limited omniscient” point of view. Typically there is one character and we get to hear their inner monologue and all that they are thinking, but other characters are portrayed as outsiders. Tolkien writes more in a traditional third person narrative format, I think the actual conceit of LOTR is it’s someone telling the tale as written in the Red Book of Westmarch, which was Frodo’s compilation of the adventures of the Fellowship. Tolkien’s chapters don’t have a single character who is the point of view focus, the narrator relates the stories and approximations of the motivations and thoughts of all the characters. This tends toward a less personal feel and more akin to older epic tale sort of narrative writing.
TBF, in the other thread, that was the argument - that perhaps the reason a particular woman like The Chronicles of Narnia but doesn’t like The Lord of the Rings is because the former has more female characters. That’s not claiming that LOTR is objectively bad because it doesn’t have many major female characters, it’s entirely about personal enjoyment of a book.
Tolkien was writing just after a major world war in which - in most countries, and certainly in England - men were conscripted and women weren’t, and LOTR is partly a war epic. It’s not really surprising that most of the characters are men.
For me, as a woman, it was the writing style that turned me off, not the gender of the characters, but that’s purely personal opinion too. Tolkien created an amazing huge, detailed fantasy world, and I like it for that, despite finding the books themselves (apart from the Hobbit, which we read at school when we were ten) a hard slog.
I think it means that your “issues with Tolkien” or “criticism of the books” aren’t really issues with Tolkien specifically, but with the era in which he lived and wrote or with the kind of literature he was writing.
Yes, LOTR is a “history” of the War of the Ring; and how many histories of wars (or histories of any historical period before or during Tolkien’s lifetime) have had a significant number of important female characters?
Why are you thanking the male poster who agreed with me, rather than me?
Thing is, you seem to have got the wrong end of the stick. People aren’t bashing Tolkien for not including many female characters - they were simply arguing that there aren’t many female characters, and that that can be a problem for modern readers encountering the books today, no matter how justifiable it is in story terms. (And the reason they had to argue it is because some people disagreed about the lack of female characters).
Of the Westerners Tolkien showed us, they were mostly decent people acting in good faith. I’m sure there was a Goromir, the wife beater, and a Hemlock Took, who poisoned her husbands. They just didn’t make it into the book because they’re not heroic and they’re not sympathetic.
I agree that JRRT could have done more to show his strong female characters doing stuff, but he didn’t sugarcoat (for instance) Rohan’s sexist policies against women riders. Tolkien put it out there plainly, then had Eowyn blatantly disregard those policies.
That wasn’t the point. Would it have been more clear if I had said “I think it means that your “issues with Tolkien” or “criticism of the books” aren’t really issues with Tolkien or his works specifically, but with the era in which he lived and wrote or with the kind of literature he was writing”?
In that case, you’re wrong. It can be interesting to examine novels in the historical/social context in which they were written, but I do not believe it is necessary.
I don’t have the book ready to hand, but my recollection (from one of the appendices) is that while Celeborn led the assault from Lórien against Mirkwood after the fall of Sauron, it was Galadriel who actually cast Dol Guldur down. Which makes sense, as she was the wearer of one of the Three (Nenya, if memory serves).
