I think “chivalric romance” is one term of art, and yes, there’s a dearth of warrior women archetypes in that specific subset of medieval literature.
I was speaking of medieval literature generally, since, as you acknowledge, Tolkien was quite familiar with the broader corpus and thus also undoubtedly aware of the occurrence of better women models in it. Eowyn, for instance, harks to Germanic shieldmaidens - but the difference there is that shieldmaidens didn’t hide their femaleness.
It seems to me, all you’re saying is that he consciously chose to base his depictions of women of the one sub-corpus that didn’t have strong women other than the Sorceress archetype, while he was aware of the possibility of having them. That’s not exactly a good defense of his choices.
I’m aware of the influence (had to read his SG&TGK at Uni), but not willing to give him a pass for it. Not when he also drew on better traditions as well.
I think the real issue is that Tolkien, by all reports, didn’t know many women. His mom died when he was 12: he and his brother were raised by a priest. His formative experiences were in the male-centric WWI. Later, his social circle was exclusively Oxford Dons. He met his wife when he was 16, and by all accounts never had any other romantic interest.
You can’t write what you don’t know, and Tolkein didn’t know women. It’s a structural problem: strictly gender segregated societies, where boys are taught to treat women as boring or irrelevant, results in books written where women are boring or irrelevant.
So, i love the lord of the rings. It’s the first novel i read. I literally learned reading fluency by reading the Lord of the rings. I learned what a paragraph was by observing that it was awkward to stop reading for the night at the end of a sentence if it wasn’t also the end of a paragraph. I used to reread it every year throughout elementary school. It informed my imagination as a child.
But i think it’s a weakness that the books have (almost) no female characters. That doesn’t mean they are terrible books. But i don’t feel the need to excuse that flow. There it is, it’s unfortunate, it’s real, but the books have other good things that i love.
Maybe you could elaborate. Galadriel is a powerful ruler and it is suggested possessive of immense personal power as well, either through magical or combat prowess. Eowyn is portrayed as being skilled enough in combat to fight some pretty serious enemies. These are two characters we meet in the Fellowship’s quest which is a very small slice of Middle Earth.
Meanwhile on real Earth we know that women fighting in combat was exceptionally rare at least from 800AD to the 1500s, covering the entirety of the Middle Ages.
We also know that female rulers with individual agency were likewise extremely uncommon, maybe 5 particularly notable ones in a 700 year period, and a handful more less notable.
Now maybe Middle Earth these things were just as rare and we have the exceptional circumstance of meeting both Eowyn and Galadriel in the story. But it would at least seem to me Tolkien portrayed Middle Earth women as being more powerful than women historically were over the timespan I mentioned.
That’s a good catch on the fireworks though, I had completely forgotten they make an appearance in LOTR. I don’t really think that changes the technology equivalent setting of Middle Earth from “middle age equivalent” to a later era though. It would seem instead gunpowder was equivalent to how it is in Wheel of Time, or middle age China before it was weaponized, in that it is used ceremonially but not in warfare.
I certainly see no broad indications that Middle Earth has entered say, the technological equivalent of the Enlightenment period and probably not even the early Renaissance. There is some ancient and very epic architecture in the story but it’s always seemed that those were basically created in part through magical means and not deep understanding of modern science and engineering.
I don’t really think he needs a pass for it. It is perfectly fine to write stories with few or no female voices. It’s also perfectly fine to say you prefer to read stories that have more female characters.
O.K., but he was raised by his mother from the age of 3 (when he, his brother, and his mother returned to England from South Africa, and his father died in South Africa a few months later before he had a chance return to England too) to the age of 12. Because she converted to Catholicism during that time, Tolkien didn’t have much contact with either his father’s or his mother’s family after that. His mother chose a Catholic priest to be his guardian after her death because she didn’t want either family to convert him and his brother back to being Protestants. So his life from 12 to 18 was living with men who weren’t really like parents but just rather formal teachers. His life from 3 to 12 was thus like being raised by a single mother who didn’t let him associate much with her or his father’s family. His life from 12 to 18 was like that of a well-off boy back then who was sent away to public school (in the British sense of “public school”) and didn’t much see his parents.
The movie had Saruman using gunpowder or some similar explosive as a weapon.
I think the industrial revolution, and the problems Tolkien saw it creating, was one of the inspirations of his works. There are a lot of literary and especially poetical works written around WWI that decry industrialization, and the disruption, pollution, and breakup of traditional ways that it was bringing. I think LOTR falls into that genre.
I’m not sure we can simply conclude Tolkien didn’t know many women. Yes, he was raised by a priest and his colleagues at Oxford were overwhelmingly male. But he lived in 20th century Britain not Saudi Arabia. I don’t know a ton about his day to day life but I’m not sure we can assume he didn’t interact with women regularly.
Compared to how modern children are raised, I think it’s safe to say he had a lot less exposure to girls and women, especially in social situations. I don’t think it’s a crazy inference to conclude that the paucity of women in his writing might well have been a reflection of his own experiences: he knew and loved some women deeply (his mother, his wife) but other than that, his experiences were in very male-centric spaces. This was pretty normal for mid-century Britain, but even for that time and place, Tolkien’s life experiences were on the male-centered side of the range of normal.
ETA: I imagine he “interacted” with women in a superficial sense, but I wouldn’t be shocked to learn the number of extended, informal (i.e., not as a tutor) conversations he’d had with women other than his wife and mother could be counted on one hand. I mean, being pleasant to a shopgirl doesn’t really equip you to write a female character.
Are you suggesting that means he did have lots of contact with women? It sounds like he was quite isolated from women. I’m not saying that this was abnormal for other men of his time–which is why most of them didn’t write about women, or did a lousy job of it when they tried. Gender spheres were very strict. But I do think even within the norms of his time and place, he had less contact with women than most. There were no sisters or girl cousins and their friends when he was home for holidays, no aunts. He wasn’t part of any social circle that included co-ed events.
By all accounts he adored his wife. They met when he was 16, and he apparently never had any other romantic interest. But contact with one woman (plus his mother, as a child) has to be contrasted with the dozens of boys and men he knew well over the course of his life. All his friends were male. All his classmates. After he was 12, all his guardians, to an extreme degree. All his colleagues. Most of his students. How often did he ever even hear two women talking to each other for more than the time it took him to walk past? His life failed the Bechdal test.
This doesn’t correct the flaw in the works–it is a flaw that they are so male-centric. But I think it does explain why it was nearly inevitable, not just in LOTR but in so many other works.
How are you defining “exceptionally rare”? Because I don’t consider the currentevidence to indicate that.
5 in 700 > 1 in a 3021 year span.
It seems nothing like that to me. One supernatural female, and one woman warrior who takes part in 1 fight and then becomes non-warrior wife doesn’t stack up against the many real women who wielded martial or temporal power (often, yes, through or as regent of men because: patriarchy) or fought as warriors.
Tolkien lived in a much more sex-segregated society than we do. So, he not only had less knowledge of individual women, he also had less experience with societies or cultures in which women worked and fought and did adventurey kinds of things alongside men.
No, I’m with @Martin_Hyde on this (in general, not necessarily specifically with regard to LOTR): it is entirely possible to write a good full-length novel with few or no female voices—or one with few or no male voices—without it necessarily being a fault or flaw in the novel. It may be missing a dimension, like a symphony without wind instruments or a movie in black and white, but a single creative work doesn’t have to exist in all dimensions.
And there are also novels in which it is a flaw. And it’s a problem when there are too many novels (or movies, or whatever) without adequate representation.