Rule 34, my friends. Rule 34.
Which reminds me. Has Axel Braun done a LOTR parody yet and if not, why not? Despite it being pretty much a sausage fest, we still have Rosie Cotton, Goldberry, Arwen, Galadriel and Eowyn. Lobelia?
My apologies for taking so long to get back to this thread. Although I’ve read a lot of Tolkien’s fiction, several biographies of him, and his collected letters, it’s been awhile and I don’t consider myself a real expert. I had to do some research. I posted to a mailing list of Inklings experts (and I mean people who’ve actually written many books and articles about them) the comments that Sehmket made in post #19 that I was replying to in post #26. As you’ll see below, the politest thing that anyone would say about Sehmket’s comments was that they were only 90% wrong. Most of the people on that mailing list found them so confused that they didn’t consider it worth their time to reply to them. Here are the three replies that I got on that mailing list:
1st reply:
HOPELESSLY, HOPELESSLY WRONG.
- Tolkien was well known for his support of women at Oxford, and in higher education in general. See the comments to this effect by Priscilla Tolkien, quoted in Christina & Wayne’s READER’S GUIDE, p. 1111.
[This is referring to Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond’s The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Reader’s Guide: Reader’s Guide.] - Lewis discouraged friends from visiting the Kilns because of his unorthodox family arrangements, though he made exceptions. By the time Lewis married, he and Tolkien were no longer close and didn’t see much of each other.
- The ‘lustful thoughts’ and “mak[ing] babies” passages are sheer phantasia, unsupported by anything Tolkien ever wrote or said. Whoever posted this, they’re projecting their own issues upon JRRT. He or she may be confusing a letter by C. S. Lewis to E. R. Eddison for something Tolkien wrote, but even that’s a stretch.
Conclusion: not worth taking seriously.
2nd reply:
This is not 100% wrong, just about 90%. Tolkien did say some things about women we find weird today. He did say that women, on the whole, can only learn intellectually when they have a crush on their teachers (Letters p. 49-50), a puzzling, even more than it’s offensive, remark from a man who actively supported and participated in women’s education, and some of whose female students, like Simonne d’Ardenne, went on to great things without him, which is exactly what he here says that women don’t do. He believed in the tired old generalization that women are naturally monogamous and men aren’t (p. 51), and, considering that, it’s odd and inconsistent that he also believed it was improper for women to conduct even civil weddings (p. 62).
But he did not say that women shouldn’t be educated, or that he was baffled that they would want to, still less that it was because they’ll only want to make babies. That’s somebody else’s stereotype, not Tolkien’s.
And there is nothing, either in Tolkien’s Letters or anywhere else reliable, saying he refused to visit Lewis’s home, still less that he took a Taliban-like view that women’s mere presence incites lust in men. It was the society of the time that ordered that unmarried men and women not be allowed to be alone together. In fact, as a young instructor, Tolkien was in demand at the women’s colleges because, as a married man where most of his colleagues were not, the women students could be sent to his home (the usual place of teaching for instructors who weren’t college fellows) without a chaperone! (see Carpenter’s biography, p. 102)
3rd reply:
[About the claim that the course was in fall 2002, at the time that The Fellowship of the Ring came out.]
The Fellowship of the Ring came out on December 19, 2001. (My computer’s wallpaper is the Council of Elrond, with the date in the bottom right corner!)
If Sehmket will give the specific letters that she is referring to, I will respond to her. Otherwise, I’m not going to take a week off work to research and write the definitive article about Tolkien’s attitude to women. (Yes, it would take that much time.) I think Sehmket has hopelessly confused various things in her memory about Tolkien’s letters. I’ll make specific replies to specific letters that Sehmket is willing to cite, but I’m not going to devote a huge amount of time to this thread.
Great reply WW, thanks!
Solidly debunked her post, I’d say.
Wow, Wendell, that’s awesome.
Please take a moment if you haven’t already and thank the Inkling-ers that replied to you for the assist, especially that second reply. I personally found that detailed information really interesting.
That said, if you’ll excuse a slight devil’s advocate, I can very easily see where Sekhmet’s feminist professor took the quoted passages shown in that second reply and used them as a basis for projecting modern feminist thoughts onto (and naturally against) the professor and his written opinions, extrapolating outwards from there into some sort of wild anti-female polemic.
If a student is being taught something that’s wrong, I can’t see faulting them for not knowing that their professor is wildly misusing the source material - they’re a student after all.
/devil’s advocate
(Seriously tho - please tell them “thank you” from at least me - that was very kind and very informative of them.)
Good post, Wendell–the ball’s definitely in Semkhmet’s court.
Muchas gracias, Wendell.
I’ve sent your thanks to the people on the mailing list who answered the question.
Nicely done nonetheless. I consider myself a student of JRRT’s ME writings (and a “C” student at best) rather than a scholar, and I loved reading your assertions.
Holy crap, Link got a sex change.
I’m sorry, the book in question is somewhere in one of many boxes of books, and it has been many, many moons since I’ve read it, so I’d be hard-pressed to find the page reference.
However, if you’re interested, this is the book in question: Amazon.com
Yes, I am a she 
Also, I was a Physics major taking upper level Rhetoric courses.
Hm, well, it appears my memories of what happened in that class are a little slanted. I’ll take that into consideration in the future. Guess that’s what I get for posting much too late at night and in not too sober of a state.
I thought the inclusion of Arwen’s scenes in the movie tended to either be part of the original tale (e.g. rushing Frodo to the emergency room) or helped explain some plot or visual elements that came later (e.g. the drawn out give-Aragorn-the-necklace scene wasn’t just romantic filler but also explained to us why it was shocking and sad to see the necklace floating on the stream in Two Towers.
I’ll forego any assumptions or judgement until I see Hobbit II but I’m hoping this new character will help the movie by explaining to Bilbo and company (and, therefore, to the nonWorshipping audience) the whys and wherefors of local protocol, history, politics, or race-relations. In other words, ‘it’ would be a device for interfacing with the audience and ‘it’ might as well be female to also add a bit of variety to the male-heavy scenery. This would actually trim some material rather than pad the canon, but could also help people in the general audience to understand the situation without having to dwell too much on ancient minutiae. Yes, the die-hards will probably say, “But that’s not why they do that! They do that because…” but the general audiences will nevertheless be given enough of a pseudo-explanation to be comfortable with the unfolding story to sit through and not just say, “Screw this stuff! It’s not even making sense to itself!”
A friend once asked me why the Hobbit and FOTR seemed to focus so much on men and particularly on the bond between Frodo and Sam. Was that implied homosexuality?
I had, at the time, recently read a brief biography on Tolkien and reminded my friend that The Hobbit was originally told as bedtime stories to J.R.R’s son, who was in early grade school [or younger?] and LOTR started off in response to “Tell me another. Tell me more about Bilbo’s ring.”(1) Boys that young are(2) still thinking ‘pals are awesome’ and ‘girls have cooties’ and they’re building tree forts with cardboard signs outside that say “No Girls Allowed” J.R.R. was simply catering to his audience/son and filling the tale with the kind of characters (and genders) that would be appealing to the listener. It’s interesting to see that, without betraying that original set-up, the women who appear in the developing story become stronger, more influential, and more important – just as they do in a boy’s life as he grows older.
–G!
(1) As an aside, this reminds me of a foreword to Lewis Carrol’s Alice and Looking Glass collection. It noted that Alice was a real girl who had asked the author to “Tell me a story. Make it a nonsense story. The sillier the better.” and nevertheless people still overanalyze every dot of ink from start to finish.
(2) This wasn’t such an ancient period as when Tolkien was originating his stories. Even as a teen in the late 1970’s me and my friends still preferred hanging out with guys rather than ‘those gossipy girls.’ I realize we’ve since seen an increasing number of news stories about 2nd-graders raping kindergartners and 1st grade girls blowing in bathrooms, but I tend to think of those as shock-news incidents rather than common everyday events. At the very least, we could avoid what someone DrDeth called “Present-ism” and still believe toddlers in Tolkien’s time were less lust-driven than today’s youth.