Tolkien and the portrayal of women

[Romeran]

At some point I was talking to my wife about the portrayal of women in fantasy (books, films, video games etc.) and how often women are underrepresented in this area of fiction. We started going through some popular fantasy series and applied the Bechdel Test. The Bechdel test is a litmus test of sorts to see if women are represented in a particular work of fiction.

The test is simple: the test asks whether a work features at least two women (usually named women) who talk to each other about something other than a man.

Strictly speaking I don't think The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings pass. There's a passage with Ioreth:

'"Nay, cousin! they are not boys," said Ioreth to her kinswoman from Imloth Melui, who stood beside her. "Those are Periain, out of the far country of the Halflings, where they are princes of great fame, it is said. I should know, for I had one to tend in the Houses. They are small, but they are valiant. Why, cousin, one of them went with only his esquire into the Black Country and fought with the Dark Lord all by himself, and set fire to his Tower, if you can believe it. At least that is the tale in the City. That will be the one that walks with our Elfstone. They are dear friends, I hear. Now he is a marvel, the Lord Elfstone: not too soft in his speech, mind you, but he has a golden heart, as the saying is; and he has the healing hands. The hands of the king are the hands of a healer, I said; and that was how it was all discovered. And Mithrandir, he said to me: Ioreth, men will long remember your words, and-" But Ioreth was not permitted to continue the instruction of her kinswoman from the country, for a single trumpet rang, and a dead silence followed' (ROTK, The Steward and the King)

But this shouldn't count. For one thing only Ioreth is named and for another they're discussing men (the hobbits, Aragorn, and Gandalf).

Similarly there's some conversation between Eowyn and an unnamed maid, also doesn't really count.

In the other works we have more success. In The Children of Húrin in Chapter 15 The Journey of Morwen and Niënor we have a discussion between mother and daughter about Morwen leaving to go find her son and Niënor not wanting to be left behind. On the one hand Morwen is motivated by a man (her son) but Niënor is not:

"If the wife of Húrin can go forth against all counsel at the call of kindred' said Niënor, 'then so can Húrin's daughter. Mourning you named me, but I will not mourn alone, for father, brother, and mother. But of these you only have I known and above all do I love. And nothing that you fear not do I fear'"(The Children of Hurin, The Journey of Morwen and Niënor, my emphasis).

Here it's quite clear that it's love for her mother (and fear of being left behind to mourn alone) which is why Niënor is determined to follow Morwen, not for love or desire to find her brother (or father).

We get another example in the Silmarilion with Galadriel and Melian:

"Now while the city of Gondolin was building in secret, Finrod Felagund wrought in the deep places of Nargothrond; but Galadriel his sister dwelt, as has been told, in Thingol's realm in Doriath. And at times Melian and Galadriel would speak together of Valinor and the bliss of old; but beyond the dark hour of the death of the Trees Galadriel would not go, but ever fell silent. And on a time Melian said: 'There is some woe that lies upon you and your kin. That I can see in you, but all else is hidden from me; for by no vision or thought can I perceive anything that passed or passes in the West: a shadow lies over all the land of Aman, and reaches far out over the sea. Why will you not tell me more?'

'For that woe is past,' said Galadriel; 'and I would take what joy is here left, untroubled by memory. And maybe there is woe enough yet to come, though still hope may seem bright.'

Then Melian looked in her eyes, and said: 'I believe not that the Noldor came forth as messengers of the Valar, as was said at first: not though they came in the very hour of our need. For they speak never of the Valar, nor have their high lords brought any message to Thingol, whether from Manwë, or Ulmo, or even from Olwë the King's brother, and his own folk that went over the sea. For what cause, Galadriel, were the high people of the Noldor driven forth as exiles from Aman? Or what evil lies on the sons of Fëanor that they are so haughty and so fell? Do I not strike near the truth?'

"Near,' said Galadriel; 'save that we were not driven forth, but came of our own will, and against that of the Valar. And through great peril and in despite of the Valar for this purpose we came: to take vengeance upon Morgoth, and regain what he stole.'

Then Galadriel spoke to Melian of the Silmarils, and of the slaying of King Finwë at Formenos: but still she said no word of the Oath, nor of the Kinslaying, nor of the burning of the ships at Losgar. But Melian said: 'Now much you tell me, and yet more I perceive. A darkness you would cast over the long road from Tirion, but I see evil there, which Thingol should learn for his guidance.'

'Maybe,' said Galadriel; 'but not of me.'

And Melian spoke then no more of these matters with Galadriel" (The Silmarillion, Of the Noldor in Beleriand)

While they are talking about the kinslaying and the Silmarils, I don't think this really counts as talking about men as there were women (Galadriel herself included) who were involved in this tale.

So Tolkien's work might fail or or borderline pass, or pass in the case of some of his works, the Bechdel test I think this is really only half of the problem. It would be easy to write a poor representation of women but contain at least one conversation between two named characters.

While I think that there is certainly numerical evidence that men play a more prominent role in Tolkien's work (the Bechdel test if reversed would be satisfied on the first chapter of both TH and TLOTR) I think it's well worth examining the women who are portrayed.

I think Galadriel and Eowyn are particularly good (albeit possibly somewhat idealized) representations of women. And I also think that Tolkien was quite well aware of the apparent misogyny present and in fact has Eowyn bring this to the attention of the reader:

'"Shall I always be chosen?" she said bitterly. "Shall I always be left behind when the Riders depart, to mind the house while they win renown, and find food and beds when they return?"

"A time may come soon," said he, "when none will return. Then there will be need of valour without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defence of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised."

And she answered: "All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death."

"What do you fear, lady?" he asked.

"A cage," she said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire."

"And yet you counselled me not to adventure on the road that I had chosen, because it is perilous?"

"So may one counsel another," she said. "Yet I do not bid you flee from peril, but to ride to battle where your sword may win renown and victory. I would not see a thing that is high and excellent cast away needlessly."

"Nor would I," he said. "Therefore I say to you, lady: Stay! For you have no errand to the South."

"Neither have those others who go with thee. They go only because they would not be parted from thee -- because they love thee." Then she turned and vanished into the night.'
(ROTK, The Passing of the Grey Company, my emphasis)

Aragorn has very little argument against this, although Eowyn leaves shortly after making her point.

All of this is to say that I think the portrayal of women in Tolkien doesn't fall precisely into the trap (e.g. bikini plate armor) which is so common in fantasy literature, and that the women in Tolkien are far more powerful and nuanced. But I think we can say that numerically they are rather under-represented compared to men, for example we learn very little about the daughters of Finwë (how many people can name them without looking it up vs. how many people can name his sons without pause?) despite learning a great deal about his sons.

I'm curious what other people's thoughts are regarding Tolkien's portrayal of women.

[Winddancer]

I will counter your question with a question: WHY do women have to be more prominent in his works? This is one man's fantasy world, shouldn't he be "allowed" to make it like he want's it?

You also have to take the time he wrote it in, into account. In those days men and women weren't equals, so the fact that he even had women in his books is praiseworthy. And if you think a book full of men and barely any women will push away women, well I dare you to count how many women are here compared to men :P

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Romeran: Aye, they don't pass, but personally as a woman that is no bother to me. I have myself often a better understanding talking to men myself than with my own gender. The exact why I have never understood, but perhaps it is the analytical way of the mind I share with them? I won't say that all men's minds are analytical. But more in a general concept. Tolkien's portrayal of women is okay with me. If a woman wants to follow a full academic career this should be possible, and if a woman wants to embrace the traditional concept of housewife with children, that is equally right with me. Who am I to say how women should do in real life? Or how they should be portrayed in literature, the last is up to the choice of the writer. And if you as reader don't like it, don't read the book. I love heroic men as much as I do heroic women, no difference.

[Romeran]

I will counter your question with a question: WHY do women have to be more prominent in his works? This is one man's fantasy world, shouldn't he be "allowed" to make it like he want's it?

You also have to take the time he wrote it in, into account. In those days men and women weren't equals, so the fact that he even had women in his books is praiseworthy. And if you think a book full of men and barely any women will push away women, well I dare you to count how many women are here compared to men :P

It was never my intention to imply that his works should be different, rather simply to examine them our current perspective. I actually think Tolkien was generally quite ahead of his time in his portrayal of and his support of women (including his daughter). As far as I know, Tolkien was well-known for taking on female students when his colleagues at the time would refuse and that Tolkien's work is rather refreshing in this light compared to many other works of fantasy. I wasn't trying to criticize Tolkien, in fact in some ways perhaps criticizing the Bechdel test and what it really answers.

It's my second part which points out that despite failing to meet this litmus test, Tolkien actually does have a generally positive portrayal of women and that it's not fundamentally bad that they aren't in equal numbers as men.

The exact why I have never understood, but perhaps it is the analytical way of the mind I share with them? I won't say that all men's minds are analytical. But more in a general concept.

There are certainly more men in mathematics than women but I'd have a very hard time arguing that has to do with analytics. My PhD advisor was a woman (and the professor I worked with before that was also a woman) and they had some of the most brilliant analytical minds I've had the pleasure to learn from. I don't mean to imply that you're saying this anyway, it's just a bit of a sore spot for me as I hear a lot of misogyny towards women in my field which I think is a severe detriment, not just to the women but to the field itself as the opportunity cost of all the invention that could have come from brilliant women who were never encouraged or accepted into the field, there just needn't be an additional barrier for women. I'm now getting way off topic.

Tolkien's portrayal of women is okay with me. If a woman wants to follow a full academic career this should be possible, and if a woman wants to embrace the traditional concept of housewife with children, that is equally right with me. Who am I to say how women should do in real life? Or how they should be portrayed in literature, the last is up to the choice of the writer. And if you as reader don't like it, don't read the book. I love heroic men as much as I do heroic women, no difference.

There's a recent trend in movies especially (see Star Wars and possibly some of the trailers for the Rings of Power) to show that the only way a woman can be a "powerful" figure (or that all women need to be this way) is to dominate in "historically masculine" roles, is I think a good example of the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction. It would be nice to see acceptance of all people in whatever role they chose which suits them best, as you point out.

I think as a rule Tolkien struck a reasonable balance here. There are examples of men and women who go into various fields from hobbits to men to elves. On the flip side I think Tolkien generally does a good job in avoiding "toxic masculinity" while we do have heroic "warrior" characters we are often not only shown the softer side of these characters but also shown other characters like Faramir or even the Hobbits in a very positive light.

[Winddancer]

Ooooh my biiiiggest gripe about the "pendulum" is it having to be a woman, but not just that but that the man has to then be completely neutered. It is absolutely disgusting way of pushing an agenda. No one needs to slam the other gender in pursuit of equality. You can have powerful women without all the men then being weak. If you make the woman powerful and the man weak, then its the exact same thing you are fighting against, just reversed. *gets off soapbox*

In regards to my question, I know you werent implying it needed changing, but it is often something people bring up when talking about the books. I am just of the opinion that to me, as a woman, it isnt something I got angry about or wanted to boycott because it had so few women in it and that is one thing that will likely annoy me about the tv show because it will absolutely go out of its way to make it all about the female character, in an unnatural and agenda fixated way.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Romeran: I believe when you say about: "I don't mean to imply that you're saying this anyway, it's just a bit of a sore spot for me as I hear a lot of misogyny towards women in my field which I think is a severe detriment, not just to the women but to the field itself as the opportunity cost of all the invention that could have come from brilliant women who were never encouraged or accepted into the field, there just needn't be an additional barrier for women." Currently I am nearly five years out of work, because I rolled into the position of caregiver for my dad with Alzheimer. So it is interesting to me what is happening in the field you work. I surely can come in that women in the academic field aren't yet really valued for what capacities they have. And my grandpa was in the fifties also ahead of his time, as both his sons and his daughter had to learn on a trade after their highschool finished. My dad became an engineer, his sister was a logopedist in her years and his brother was doing something with sales. Now they are all retired. It was not that uncommon what Tolkien offered for his children and rightfully so.

Winddancer: Personally I never liked the portrayal of weak men and women.

[Elenhir]

The Bechdel test, in a strenuous sense (yes, I know it came from a comic), isn't really meant to be applied to individual works, to see if one passes and another fails and judge them in that regard. It's more a health metric for the complete body of narrative art (or a particular form of it), especially when paired with the Reverse Bechdel test. If you have one book with a single male point of view, it is much more likely that you will pass the reverse and fail the original than the other way around, and vice versa with a single female point of view. But if you have five hundred books, you might expect the pass/fail rates all tallied up to look similar. And what the test illuminates is that they don't. It was also more useful before anyone knew what it was, because it is really not a high bar, and it is trivial to abide by the word and ignore the spirit.

That said, Tolkien did not write women often or particularly well. I, for example, can name the daughters of Finwe, but that's mainly because I, too, use them as an example of the lack of integration of Tolkien's few women into the narrative. They might as well not be there, and practically they aren't. Another favorite is pointing out that Finwe's wife didn't gain a name until after LotR was written.

But there's the rub. LotR changed something. Tolkien, having to work with a touch more low-order, day-to-day realism in his writings, perhaps found the need to populate his world with the women who always must have been there. It's no longer a lofty view of political events and wars and the progress of civilization, where one could feasibly construct a world which mirrored the party-line (never true) that women weren't involved in such things. Farmer Maggot has a wife. If we go to the court of some king and stay there for a while, we can't just have sons and nephews: there must be daughters and nieces. The common folk in the streets must come in proper variety to ensure there will still be common folk in the streets a hundred years on. Suspension of disbelief only goes so far. There are limits, and even a world which remains overwhelmingly male can't be exclusively so.

But that is, really, a low bar. And it seems, at some point, Tolkien must have realized the absurdity of it, because later we have this out of Erendis:

Men in Númenor are half-Elves (said Erendis), especially the high men; they are neither the one nor the other. The long life that they were granted deceives them, and they dally in the world, children in mind, until age finds them - and then many only forsake play out of doors for play in their houses. They turn their play into great matters and great matters into play. They would be craftsmen and loremasters and heroes all at once; and women to them are but fires on the hearth - for others to tend, until they are tired of play in the eve­ning. All things were made for their service: hills are for quarries, river to furnish water or to turn wheels, trees for boards, women for their body's need, or if fair to adorn their table and hearth; and children to be teased when nothing else is to do - but they would as soon play with their hounds' whelps. To all they are gracious and kind, merry as larks in the morning (if the sun shines); for they are never wrathful if they can avoid it. Men should be gay, they hold, generous as the rich, giving away what they do not need. Anger they show only when they become aware, suddenly, that there are other wills in the world beside their own. Then they will be as ruthless as the seawind if anything dare to withstand them.

Thus it is, Ancalimë, and we cannot alter it. For men fashioned Númenor: men, those heroes of old that they sing of - of their women we hear less, save that they wept when their men were slain. Númenor was to be a rest after war. But if they weary of rest and the plays of peace, soon they will go back to their great play, manslaying and war. Thus it is; and we are set here among them. But we need not assent. If we love Númenor also, let us enjoy it before they ruin it. We also are daughters of the great, and we have wills and courage of our own. Therefore do not bend, Ancalimë. Once bend a little, and they will bend you further until you are bowed down. Sink your roots into the rock, and face the wind, though it blow away all your leaves.

So the saving grace is that Tolkien at some point aware that we hear less, because he wrote less, and entered a period where he tried to counter this. The egg on his grace is that he didn't do a particularly good job. Galadriel, for all the layering on layering that Tolkien does for her, remains largely irrelevant to the plot of the stories, and as a result is more Mary Sue than well-fleshed character, when you ask many of those who have read all the material. Haleth, often raised as Tolkien doing a good job of writing women, is a genderbent character of the same name who remains for the most part otherwise unchanged. Arie(n) rises in prominence in Myths Transformed, text II, but people tend to shy away from that example because the plot points involved aren't great as far as giving women roles in stories go. At the end, I think the best you can say is that Tolkien was trying.

@Winddancer, our particular microcosm is a very different place from many other islands in the fandom. I know you're at a bit of tongue-in-cheek, but the demographics here have many more important factors than Tolkien.

[Dungeon Delver]

You might have opened a can of worms here my friend not that that's a bad thing of course. Tolkien's women are something the need to be discussed without people running over themselves to defend him when it's simple academic analysis.

My personal belief: Tolkien put women on a pedestal and in doing so, dramatically decreased their actual relevance to the story.

1) Arwen, in a certain light, is nothing more than a prize for Aragorn to strive for, his entire character arc can be boiled down to winning the thrones of Gondor and Arnor simply so he could marry Arwen. This is a dramatic oversimplification I know and somewhat contrary to real literary analysis, but the point is a valid one in my opinion. Her role in the films was changed so that she stood more on equal footing with Aragorn. While PJ didn't do a great job of making her a fully realized character for the films, he at least gave us a hint of personality which is almost void in Tolkien's work.

2) Éowyn is a stronger character with a little more personality, but she's still a means to an end character without much agency. Sometimes, when I go back and read it almost feels like Tolkien himself is lampshading the idea of agency by specifically taking hers away and making her arc about regaining said agency. It's somewhat undercut, however, by her reliance on the male characters in her life, be he Aragon, Faramir, Théoden, or Éomer, in order to achieve a true "end".

3) Galadriel is perhaps the most rounded female character in the entire trilogy but she's absent throughout most of it. We are told, rather than shown, about her greatness and her power and her agency. Certainly, when she's "on screen" she is every bit as powerful as people make her out to be (even going so far as to make Celeborn utterly irrelevant).

I will counter your question with a question: WHY do women have to be more prominent in his works? This is one man's fantasy world, shouldn't he be "allowed" to make it like he want's it?

I think this rather undercuts what literary analysis is supposed to be. If we went by the assumption that what we discuss, debate, and analysis is what ought to be "allowed" then essentially everything in this forum is pointless. I don't believe the point here is to say "Tolkien was bad at writing women and thus XYZ should happen". Looking back at texts with different lenses, though, is key to making sure people can understand it and take what they need from it.

The women in Tolkien's works don't "need" to be more or less prominent for analysis of his portrayal of them to take place. The way he wrote them tells us about him as an individual and about the world and time in which he was writing.

Adaptations today ought to feature more diverse characters in different roles because that is a reflection of today's society. In Tolkien's day, women were, as you said, not equal or were still fighting for basic representation and his writing reflects that (consciously or unconsciously).

Of course, none of this (even my opinion) means that we should bash him or throw him aside. His works ought to be studied and the role women play in his work needs more analysis because that's how we understand ourselves better and, in the end, isn't that what reading is meant to be about?

[Winddancer]

That is totally where I fall short when it comes to lore discussions Im afraid. I dont analyse his works in the depths that have been done since the first Plaza. One example is Tom Bombadil. I just scratch my head as to me TB was simply a "mistake" something that Tolkien forgot to edit out, a remnant of the childrens book he was going to write (in lines with the Hobbit). Dont shoot me! I know thre are people that think differently on that and that is fair enough, I by no means claim that my opinion is the correct opinion. I will say I almos did not read the book twice because of him :P

I dont know if I do or dont disagree with adaptations having to feature more diverse characters. Part of me says absolutely! More inclusivity is better. But a part of me says, that isnt Tolkiens work then, its being changed away from the world he created. Not because being more inclusive is bad, but because it is generally done in a way where the inclusiveness becomes the main point and the story gets lost in how much it is trying to be inclusive and trying to ensure all genders and races are covered. The superhero woman that is more powerful than any man, the black hobbit and elf. It then teeters on not being about this fantasitcal world and starts being about race and gender agendas, you know what I mean?
I would like to see inclusion and equality, without it being the main point, without slamming down the men in the process. But most of all, I want to see the world Tolkien made without todays problems and hangups. Meh dont know if I am expressing myself without coming across as being anti woke. Though I hope that those who know me know I do not mean it as such.

And for me reading is so not about analysing the text. Its about immersement, escaping the real world for a moment, where good wins over evil (grrr, we will prevail! :P ) and to delve into those fantastic relationships, like Sam and Frodo, Aragorn and Legolas and I couldnt give two hoots that there isnt 2 women who have that described as it didnt matter to me that it was male friendships, to me it was JUST friendships and the genders were irrelevant, I could STILL picture it being something I could one day exprerience.

My point is really that I dont need there to be women in the story for it to be a good story. I can still identify with a male character and it never bothered me that there were only like 3 women mentioned in the LOTR because that wasnt important. What my takeaway from the books were, was that it was about friendship and overcoming insane struggles with your friends help.

[Dungeon Delver]

I dont know if I do or dont disagree with adaptations having to feature more diverse characters. Part of me says absolutely! More inclusivity is better. But a part of me says, that isnt Tolkiens work then, its being changed away from the world he created. Not because being more inclusive is bad, but because it is generally done in a way where the inclusiveness becomes the main point and the story gets lost in how much it is trying to be inclusive and trying to ensure all genders and races are covered. The superhero woman that is more powerful than any man, the black hobbit and elf. It then teeters on not being about this fantasitcal world and starts being about race and gender agendas, you know what I mean?
I would like to see inclusion and equality, without it being the main point, without slamming down the men in the process. But most of all, I want to see the world Tolkien made without todays problems and hangups. Meh dont know if I am expressing myself without coming across as being anti woke. Though I hope that those who know me know I do not mean it as such.

Inclusivity isn't the main point though, it's only made the main point by naysayers and "anti woke" people trying to say that a work must remain completely pure to be valid. Inclusivity is meant to just be a part of the story. Black elves, black hobbits, physically strong women aren't the main part of the story, they are just part of the story. There is no "gender agenda" being pushed by Amazon. For all the flaws that will be in ROP, I seriously doubt any of that is going to be it.

If we want an adaptation that "remains true to Tolkien's world" then we should just leave it to the books. Adaptations inherently change the text as the medium by which that text is presented as well as the time in which the adaptation is created. From the Rankin/Bass adaptations to ROP today, they reflect the society they are created in. Tolkien is timeless because he keeps getting adapted and the roles in which he put characters are continuously being analyzed, which I think is a good thing

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Frost: Your personal analysis of the three major women in Lotr (though I don't quite agree), I had to laugh you called Arwen a prize to win for Aragorn. I dosee validation in your point. What you express to keep to the books, that is what I do. Anything else around is fanfiction to me. Nothing of it is written by Tolkien himself, or edited by his children.

Winddancer: That you feel falling short, mirrors my feeling as well, and I am totally in your corner with that. On your example of Tom Bombadil, better known to me as Iarwain, I incorperated him in Legolas' account (pure fanfic story). The centre is Legolas' perception and Tolkien never covered this from elven perspective than some disregarding talk in Imladris. As reader I could never do something with it, to understand Iarwain. So I allowed Legolas to tell me this.

......
I had my weapons with me, and my grandmother hers. Somehow she was fond of the axe and carried one with her. Then she had also a bow and arrows. She wore a woman’s leather harnass under her clothes for protection. We crossed through orc infested country after all. It was ride of two days and on the third midday we arrived at Rhosgobel, unharmed. Radagast was outside.
“Welcome! Welcome!” he called loud in Leikvian. “It’s a good day to arrive.”
The Maia was a bit eccentric, but that had never been a bother with me. He was one with the forest, like us. We came from the forest road and I rode a little behind my grandmother.
“Thank you, friend,” said my grandmother. “The days of renewing have arrived.”
From her horse she jumped lightly on the ground. But I remained seated and looked at a strange man with a long beard and clothes in bright colours. He was quite oddly dressed, but it was not what I saw that surprised me most, but what I sensed. He held such a power in his hands that he was neither man or elf, but at least one of the Maiar. But as I reached out for a sense of Radagast I knew the man was no Maia at all.
“You’re an Ainu,” I said in Annúnaid. “Iarwain Ben-Adar.”
His jolly nature was a bit lost at that moment when he just looked at me. I had never seen him before and nor in these lands. But how he looked as people had described when the meeting took place what to do with the ring.
“How do you know?” he asked while his benevolent nature returned.
“You came across four Periannath from the Shire and saved them from the Huorns. Two of them used to tell about it when we travelled as Fellowship together,” I nodded. “The ring had no effect on you, and you could see Baggins even he had the ring on his finger. Such a thing only reacts thus only to people weaker than its maker, but not stronger. You have a Vala status. And your name says as much.”
“You have very keen eyes, son of the elves. Who are you?” asked Iarwain without any resentment, which was surprising to me.
“I am Lord Legolas Thranduilion of Lasgalen, son to King Thranduil,” I identified myself.
“A prince of elves?” asked Iarwain with a smile. “It’s very long ago I met princes of the elves. I can’t remember when but it’s very long ago. I should make a song about this.”
I introduced my grandmother too. Iarwain nodded.
“My name is Tom Bombadil actually, but the elves call me often Iarwain,” he said and then he sang.

This has not happened to me in a long time
I met a prince, a prince of the elves
He came from the fair woods, the lovely woods
Over the eastern mountains white in snow.

He kept with these four lines and repeated them again in all mirth he felt. I looked at my grandmother, not knowing either to laugh or to look serious. I was a bit loss with words at this reaction. But apparent Iarwain was just this way.
“He is a very good fellow, Tom,” said Radagast.
I dismounted and took Celair at the reins toward Radagast’s home. I had seen the disarrayed place before and nothing had changed really. This was how Radagast lived, a house and tree at the same time. And animals of all sorts came by, as was with no other.
“If you are no part of songs and tales, create then your own and you’re part in it,” said Iarwain sudden.

Here comes Tom, Tom Bombadil
And see, he meets the prince of elves
Part of the famous Fellowship
And the other eight members.

Brave and courageous they carried
The heaviest burden of this era
To its doom, in the dark land
Where the shadows are.

The shadows were there no more in the wasted and scorched land of Mordor. Probably never it would be as it was long ago, green and fair. It was poisoned and rotten, its water a dead pool where nothing lived. I had heard partly from Samwise Gamgee how it had been entering and walking there.
........

I adapted a lot in that account, for the female weight I added his maternal grandmother to balance out this 'missing mother theme'. Only a father was a bit too marginal for me. She is a mother who lost her daughter and has a grandson.

Your quote: "I would like to see inclusion and equality, without it being the main point, without slamming down the men in the process. But most of all, I want to see the world Tolkien made without todays problems and hangups. Meh dont know if I am expressing myself without coming across as being anti woke. Though I hope that those who know me know I do not mean it as such." I agree with you on this point, as it is my feeling as well. I am not afraid of any ideology, but I am very careful with talking about them. Most of the time they have a very dangerous element in them, for which I have been harrassed in school and at work, when it comes to my personal name. Despite I don't cast it aside and see as their problem if they don't like it. When it came the sexual nature of people I bought books in 1995 (I was 20 years old) to get rid of my ignorance in that area. Anything on LB+ was not in view in school programs in the 1980's in Holland, as far I remember from my education. Equality came as far the equal laws between men and women from 1957 (milestone at the time in sense of empowerment). A word as 'inclusion' didn't really exist. When it came to slavery, I bought the 1977 TV miniseries of Roots, based on a book over the ancestors of Alex Haley. And there has been many more subjects that had my interest over the years.

[Boromir88]

I will link you to one of the first threads I posted when the NuPlaza was reborn: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=214. That is in the Media Adaptations forum and it is about Tauriel. Evangeline Lilly in an interview, said she was in a "sassy mood" so would ask Tolkien the question "Do you hate women?" There might be some overlap with the discussion here, but you are asking for different things than I was.

There's a recent trend in movies especially (see Star Wars and possibly some of the trailers for the Rings of Power) to show that the only way a woman can be a "powerful" figure (or that all women need to be this way) is to dominate in "historically masculine" roles, is I think a good example of the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction.

That's one of the things I'm most curious about with the upcoming Amazon series. How they will portray Galadriel. Because I think there's a tendency for media adaptations today to want to "check boxes." But more importantly, in my opinion, is how are they going to portray Galadriel. She's not a "powerful" and "strong" woman simply because she takes on the historical masculinity roles; putting on armor and commanding armies. To me, it's her ambitions, independence, and willfulness in her youth to not care what other characters do or say. She's an independent actor, and doesn't make her decisions based on what the will the "men do or think."

That was my essential problem with Tauriel. I didn't object to PJ wanting to write in more women roles in The Hobbit. I think it was necessary and could have improved the film. The issue is thinking just because Tauriel has a bow, and blade and can fight she is a "strong" female character. But she's not, because she spends the Battle of Five Armies running around trying to find Kili. Her motivations are to chase after Kili and wonder what the dwarf has in his trousers.

[Winddancer]

Her motivations are to chase after Kili and wonder what the dwarf has in his trousers.

His beard! Amiright?

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Strictly speaking I don't think The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings pass.

(Romeran, OP)

Coming in on The Hobbit, strictly speaking bejabbered, the only active female characters (pronoun: she) are, i am pretty certain, some of the Mirkwood spiders!

You can spin this how you wish. Evidently, heroism + fairy story + history, Tolkien's aesthetic mix, did not comprehend women explicitly. I'm a man and perhaps not sensitive to misogyny, but i never myself felt that this was the issue. on some level, Tolkien simply had a different notion than us of a family - with the woman at home and the man going out to work; but when he comes back, at least this man, told stories to his children. So the stories are intrinsically domestic, but about the outside world (into which men go out and meet each other).

But clearly, this Oxford professor was uncomfortable with women. (His comments on female students in a letter to one of his sons are hard to digest.)

But on The Hobbit the extreme reflects some self-consciousness on the part of our author. It is certainly true that there are no female characters in the story that unfolds, but this is tied up with the fact that the story is about how a Baggins came to act like a Took. The 'woman' in The Hobbit is Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, whose chief adventure was becoming Mrs. Bungo Baggins, nudging Bungo to build her the most luxurious hole this or the other side of the Water, and raising their son, Bilbo. But when we meet Bilbo his parents are apparently long dead and he appears as a copy of his solid and respectable father. Belladonna is, as it were, one of the hidden keys of The Hobbit.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

My personal belief: Tolkien put women on a pedestal and in doing so, dramatically decreased their actual relevance to the story.

Yeah, that is what i meant also with Belladonna Took (perhaps an extreme case).

[Chrysophylax Dives]

But Goldberry...

[Fuin Elda]

I'm glad Boromir88 brought up the Tauriel thread from before. This does very much feel like a furthering of that discussion, and I'd say the Silmarillion is probably the closest to passing the Bechel Test while LOTR and The Hobbit fail it but he does make excellent jabs at his own failings.

@Aikári Salmarinian I would agree Arwen does come across very much as a prize to be had - her father literally sets a task for Aragorn in order to marry her. If that is not the definition of her being a prize I do not know what is.

Goldberry is to me another female character that comes across very much as a prize for Bombadil, she just comes across as property in the wording, and Ifeel like Tolkien for his part tries to lessen that blow perhaps with Goldberry's speech on the sort of Master Bombadil is. It feels very much like Erendris - a comment on his own writing but perhaps because he didn't know how to move away from that because of how he was raised and the times he lived in he did the best he could with a limited perspective on what a powerful woman would look like.

As Frost says we are told about the women of power we do get to see Galadriel, Melian, I feel even some of the female Valar are relegated to the same sort of treatment.


Personally I find it to be as I said Tolkien not having the examples in his life to do more than that, of course all we can do is ponder at how he would have written these stories if he'd had another 20 or 30 years before they were published in terms of how the female characters developed. I don't think adding women people of color etc is outside of the scope, the inclusiveness I think help make it fuller but some of the characters added seem to be done at the cost of making them full characters. Arwen they filled out from what she was in the books, she was more than a prize but that was a as Aikari called it (and rightly so!) Fanfiction. Tauriel was just utterly underwhelming in terms of her reasons for doing anything.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Without disregarding Tolkien as writer or as professor, the world was different when he was born as Queen Victoria sat still on the throne. When he died, this was the present Queen Elisabeth, which we know all so well. We see an entire development in emancipation of the woman during his life, which was almost unthinkable back in the days of Queen Victoria, and this is - thanks for my analysis of some texts encouraged by other forum members - clearly visible in Arwen and Eowyn. Where Arwen in the beginning just is like the housewives as back in Victorian And Edwardian times, Eowyn is a portrayal of the emerging modern woman. She doesn't accept the cage born in. The same sense I see in my maternal grandmother, who could have been an Arwen of sorts, my mother was more an Eowyn of sorts, engaging her legal freedoms when they were given in 1957, where my grandmother shunned hers aside and allowed others to take the toil. There was a huge difference between mother and daughter when it came to emancipation. Therefor it is easier to indentify with Eowyn than Arwen in the term of the social progress of women. Priscilla Tolkien died recently, but she was good example of the women got their regal rights along life progressed and learned how to engage with them. Just as my mom and grandma were.

[Fuin Elda]

I would argue that that argument is at least partially fallacy (or as you put before Fanfiction ). Queen Elizabeth was crowned literally the year before LOTR was published and he was writing it LONG before that which would make basing Eowyn off of QUEEN Elizabeth is a bit of a stretch. She was active in the military though in the war but only in the end of the war... She was a minor before that and would have very much been protected and sheltered. You also have to remember the common folk did not have near the access to the royal families as we do now at most King George was a voice on the radio there were no address from the princesses. Queen Elizabeth II was the first televised coronation and before that they were untouchable and unseen it was for nobles and rulers. And I have a hard time believing that a 9 year old boy would know much about Queen Victoria (which is how old Tolkien would have been when she died) to base Arwen off of her - never mind I'd question how he would equate her in her dying years to be akin to Arwen yes he could likely learn things in school but I don't really see where you'd get your argument for either of those from.

Indeed Arwen is more of the Victorian/Edwardian Housewife, and Eowyn very well may have been based more on say the women taking part in the second world war but I wouldn't put either of those queens you listed as being inspirations for them sadly.

Indeed you even mention that your mother was given her freedoms years after the publication, indeed there was the argument for those freedoms gaining traction but they weren't common practice yet by the time LOTR was published and the writing would have taken place before it.

I am of course a proponent for saying Tolkien as an educated man would likely have found the women in his life gaining legal rights as the right thing given the tone he takes in terms of mocking himself in how little we do hear about women.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

I was not making really an argument. My point of view comes from the European mainland, it is not British at all. It might have a fallacy in what you know, but I don't see it. Though I admit it is heavily generalised. I don't know exact when Tolkien wrote his books or when it was published. Besides I made no mention of that in my last post. I tend sometimes to sway bit too much off topic. But it's okay you bring it up to fundament your reply.

I could also have said that Tolkien was born in the timescope of Queen regentes Emma (mother of Princess Wilhelmina) and died in the reign of Queen Juliana. It is just the historical frame, not the inspiration idea of the English queens themselves. The empowering sense of women was by 1970 in full swing, the emancipation of the woman. In Europe this got an upstart during world war I. But for us (Hollanders) this war was skipped, we weren't part of it. Holland was neutral and Kaiser Wilhelm respected this. After the war Holland became his country of refuge. From around 1900 we had a typical Dutch phenomenon in place that is called Pillarisation. And it was only after WWII this system began to be questioned. 1957 was in Holland the breakthrough when it came to social legal women rights. Men had no longer the power to decide for mother, sister, wife or daughter their whole lives long. In other European countries this happened in other years, but I don't know which.

Tolkien was a well educated man. And true what he said, little is heard from women. My grandma could mostly complain about these rights. She didn't really grasp this in the end I think. My mother accepted this as something normal. In emancipation level there was tremendous difference between both women. Besides I can talk about both of them, they passed away years ago, before I entered the Plaza. And Frost voiced Arwen as a prize to win (after a contest) for Aragorn, I had to laugh about that is all. It reads pretty funny. More seriously I don't see it that way, but that is another matter.

Edit: Corrected a few minor faults.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Goldberry is to me another female character that comes across very much as a prize for Bombadil, she just comes across as property in the wording, and Ifeel like Tolkien for his part tries to lessen that blow perhaps with Goldberry's speech on the sort of Master Bombadil is. It feels very much like Erendris - a comment on his own writing but perhaps because he didn't know how to move away from that because of how he was raised and the times he lived in he did the best he could with a limited perspective on what a powerful woman would look like.

Oooo. I disagree quite strongly on that. if i am in love with anyone in Middle-earth it is Goldberry, and she aint no prize! I'll come back to you when I've collected my thoughts some more.

[Dungeon Delver]

Goldberry is to me another female character that comes across very much as a prize for Bombadil, she just comes across as property in the wording, and Ifeel like Tolkien for his part tries to lessen that blow perhaps with Goldberry's speech on the sort of Master Bombadil is. It feels very much like Erendris - a comment on his own writing but perhaps because he didn't know how to move away from that because of how he was raised and the times he lived in he did the best he could with a limited perspective on what a powerful woman would look like.

I agree with you there, now that I've had a chance to think about it. Goldberry has almost no agency unto herself throughout that particular section of the story. As much as she's a partner of Bombadil, she's clearly a lesser partner that's been "found" and kept.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Goldberry has almost no agency unto herself throughout that particular section of the story. As much as she's a partner of Bombadil, she's clearly a lesser partner that's been "found" and kept.

Oi! You both give me pain. You are both discussing only the sequel and ignoring the original, so you are both seeing less than half the picture. Go read 'The Adventures of Tom Bombadil' (edit: the poem of that name, not the whole book) and you will discover Goldberry's agency, as also the other side of her comments on Tom's mastery.

[Fuin Elda]

@Chrysophylax Dives Ohhh I have read the Tom Bombadil poem there is one verse where she pulls on his hanging hair and near drowns him and he tells her to go home and go to bed so she does because Tom Bombadil doesn't like wading.

And then he decides after his adventures to CATCH Goldberry and hold her fast, sending water rats and everything else scuttling and TOM had a merry wedding it doesn't actually state that both of them had a merry wedding so I'm not sure where you're seeing her agency in that poem. As a woman that doesn't come across as agency in the least... I'm curious which part of that poem makes you think she has agency? It sounds like he tried to make the wedding acceptable to her in that she had lilies and flowers but I mean that's pretty standard for dowery requirements on arranged/forced marriages

[Chrysophylax Dives]

@Chrysophylax Dives Ohhh I have read the Tom Bombadil poem there is one verse where she pulls on his hanging hair and near drowns him and he tells her to go home and go to bed so she does because Tom Bombadil doesn't like wading.

And then he decides after his adventures to CATCH Goldberry and hold her fast, sending water rats and everything else scuttling and TOM had a merry wedding it doesn't actually state that both of them had a merry wedding so I'm not sure where you're seeing her agency in that poem. As a woman that doesn't come across as agency in the least... I'm curious which part of that poem makes you think she has agency? It sounds like he tried to make the wedding acceptable to her in that she had lilies and flowers but I mean that's pretty standard for dowery requirements on arranged/forced marriages

OK. We are at one on the poem.

You may disagree with my reading (maybe even convince me out of it) but here is my reading. I read this 1934 poem as a courtship in two parts, with Goldberry making the first move and Tom, after his other various adventures, responding. The response is deliberately framed to invoke late Victorian ideas (fantasies, really) that 'primitive marriage' began as 'marriage by capture' - so one can certainly read Tom's return in terms of capturing a prize. But I read the whole courtship and marriage as initiated by the River-woman's daughter. Hence, I deem Goldberry modest when she asserts in the sequel that nobody has ever caught Tom. I read the poem as about how two people 'catch' each other.

The poem does have another side, of course, because these are not exactly normal people. Goldberry is a personification of nature - of water, of the River that is her mother. And so you can read the courtship and catching in terms of 'domesticating' or taming the wild - which i could see objection to.

To the extent that Goldberry is a woman (as distinct from nature) she is the most modern woman in the two hobbit stories. But this is linked to her being 'nature' in the sense that she (and Tom) are free of most social conventions - notably not marriage! (The bedrock of Tolkien's idea of society, I guess). But just compare Bilbo's mother, who was Miss Belladonna Took but 'became' Mrs. Bungo Baggins, with Goldberry as she is named and titled in the sequel, that is in Fellowship: after marriage, she remains 'Goldberry, the River-woman's daughter'.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Goldberry has almost no agency unto herself throughout that particular section of the story. As much as she's a partner of Bombadil, she's clearly a lesser partner that's been "found" and kept.

Just chance brought me then, if chance you call it... Tom had an errand there, that he dared not hinder.’ Tom nodded as if sleep was taking him again; but he went on in a soft singing voice:

I had an errand there: gathering water-lilies,
green leaves and lilies white to please my pretty lady,
the last ere the year’s end to keep them from the winter,
to flower by her pretty feet till the snows are melted.
Each year at summer’s end I go to find them for her,
in a wide pool, deep and clear, far down Withywindle;
there they open first in spring and there they linger latest.
By that pool long ago I found the River-daughter,
fair young Goldberry sitting in the rushes.
Sweet was her singing then, and her heart was beating!

He opened his eyes and looked at them with a sudden glint of blue:

And that proved well for you – for now I shall no longer
go down deep again along the forest-water,
not while the year is old. Nor shall I be passing
Old Man Willow’s house this side of spring-time,
not till the merry spring, when the River-daughter
dances down the withy-path to bathe in the water.

[[My thoughts: After marriage, she lives in the house of Tom Bombadil. As autumn bites, Tom brings his love water-lilies from the pool where first he found her (and her heart was beating). These are the last water-lilies of the summer, and winter brings rains pouring and trickling and streaming into the garden from the Downs above and beyond. With spring, she dances down the willow-path back to her mother to bathe in her waters. If this woman does not have agency, I do not really know what you might mean by that term.]]

[Fuin Elda]

OK. We are at one on the poem.

You may disagree with my reading (maybe even convince me out of it) but here is my reading. I read this 1934 poem as a courtship in two parts, with Goldberry making the first move and Tom, after his other various adventures, responding. The response is deliberately framed to invoke late Victorian ideas (fantasies, really) that 'primitive marriage' began as 'marriage by capture' - so one can certainly read Tom's return in terms of capturing a prize. But I read the whole courtship and marriage as initiated by the River-woman's daughter. Hence, I deem Goldberry modest when she asserts in the sequel that nobody has ever caught Tom. I read the poem as about how two people 'catch' each other.

The poem does have another side, of course, because these are not exactly normal people. Goldberry is a personification of nature - of water, of the River that is her mother. And so you can read the courtship and catching in terms of 'domesticating' or taming the wild - which i could see objection to.

To the extent that Goldberry is a woman (as distinct from nature) she is the most modern woman in the two hobbit stories. But this is linked to her being 'nature' in the sense that she (and Tom) are free of most social conventions - notably not marriage! (The bedrock of Tolkien's idea of society, I guess). But just compare Bilbo's mother, who was Miss Belladonna Took but 'became' Mrs. Bungo Baggins, with Goldberry as she is named and titled in the sequel, that is in Fellowship: after marriage, she remains 'Goldberry, the River-woman's daughter'.

So I still don't see it as agency? Tom Bombadil really doesn't interact with her aside from calling her a pretty maiden and telling her to go back to go to sleep. Yes she does get sassy - I feel like that's the best word for it- with him in relation to teasing him about his sputtering and drowning and overall inability to swim.

But I wouldn't say the primative marriage /victorian fantasies are something that should be marked as some sort of agency for the woman. there were very few rights for women back then and I feel like that's more of a male fantasy in terms of being able to catch a woman and have her marry him than it being some sort of womans agency.

As for courtship maybe I just don't know enough about Victorian/Edwardian era to see what a singular interaction as any sort of proper courtship - we literally have ONE stanza of her talking and the rest is Bombadil, and it's not even interacting with Goldberry or him thinking about her other than him mentioning she was the first thing he told to go to sleep and rest before Old Man Willow, and Badgers and a barrow white. Indeed Goldberry is a personification of nature - and we hear her in the sequel? talking about how Tom has mastery of all, she is named his wife, that is who she is even if she keep's the 'river-woman's daughter' title, we see Tom going and getting lilies for her because she can't go get them herself? We also don't see her leave the house making her feel to me at least more of a hostage than equal... I feel this is more of a Hades and Persephone type trick than true agency... Granted I don't know how well the version of that myth I know was translated.

But really her being allowed to visit her mother in spring? I don't see that as agency... Where did Goldberry live in the Winter before she wed Tom? Just because Tom can't be in her home in the winter doesn't mean that she couldn't still be there doing as she liked.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

:) I'll have to think on your reply. Maybe there is no meeting. But I have to consider slowly what you are saying.

And maybe some of the problem is the term 'agency'. I realize i'm not exactly sure what it means. Also, there is a difference between the story and the character that can be read out of the story. Goldberry has no instrumental role in the story, unlike Bombadil; but this is distinct from her being a 'kept prize'.

[Fuin Elda]

That I will agree on perhaps we need to figure out exactly what we are each meaning in terms of agency. For me I have too admit it's the ability to do what she wants when she wants how she wants. Does there need to be give back and forth in a partnership yes but I don't really see that in this in terms of true back and forth - it comes across as Tom says this because he caught me and I must do as he says. Now that is quite a broad stroke of agency and expecting that to happen in a novel where for a good part of the authors life before the publication of his book women didn't even have the right vote.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Wrote this before seeing your post; but gotta hit send and go work!

But I wouldn't say the primative marriage /victorian fantasies are something that should be marked as some sort of agency for the woman. there were very few rights for women back then and I feel like that's more of a male fantasy in terms of being able to catch a woman and have her marry him than it being some sort of womans agency.

OK, one point at a time (and for now - gotta go do stuff!) I come to these marriage-by-capture fantasies by a narrow path that no doubt obscures for me some of what is going on here. Around a decade ago I got a bit obsessed with prehistory, both what we know about it today and also how it came to be discovered - which discovery is usually dated quite precisely, to an archeological excavation in the Somme in 1859. On the second, the discovery was really something - someone i read talks of 'the bottom falling out of history'. In the British Isles, for example, it was still in 1865 accepted scholarly wisdom that prior to the invasion of the Romans in 55 B.C. the native Britons had lived only a few generation on the land. Now, all of a sudden there was this almost endless prehistory, with folk wandering around and living in this hill and that valley for time out of mind.

On the grand scale, this newly discovered prehistory is the unknowable realm into which Tolkien projected his imagination. But what is vital to appreciate is that Tolkien marks a fundamental reappraisal of the meaning and investigation of this vast prehistoric past. From the perspective of a university professor, Tolkien embodies a new 20th-century academic sanity that knows how to draw limits to scholarly inquiry into origins.

Sorry, I've gone way too deep. But we are at the point. Tolkien perceived (rightly) that most of what had been said about the prehistoric past over the previous half century since 1859 was fantasy pure and simple, and not of the most wholesome kind! As a scholar, he in effect says that the origin, even the very ancient past, is beyond the reach of our senses - we can only imagine it, and our imagination may as well be artistic!

On the other side of Middle-earth is a waste-yard of late Victorian fantasies, which speak far more of the male elite that raised the governing classes of the British Empire than they present any insight at all into the lives of our ancient ancestors.

In a nutshell, when Tolkien in 1934 invokes late-Victorian fantasies of marriage by capture in a poem published in The Oxford Magazine he is playing fast and loose with an already antiquated Oxford past. I'm not saying that J.R.R. Tolkien held ideas of women that we should embrace. But I am quite certain that he considered the late-Victorian anthropologists who argued that the origin of the institution of marriage was men capturing women from another tribal grouping were engaging in unwholesome and foolish male fantasy.

[Fuin Elda]

So if I'm understanding right your saying Tolkein is for his part making a statement on this (especially with his other quips at how little we see of women) fantasy in some cases even if he didn't entirely partake in giving his female characters full agency? If so I can certainly agree with that.


And I have thought of another female character of his that I think takes the cake on agency in terms of she's matches my opinions of how when and were especially for a Tolkien character and that is Luthien. this was brought oddly enough to my attention thanks to a meme I just shared but honest to goodness I think she takes the cake - She's all fine and dainty and dancing and just as willing to tear the world down (well at least Morgoths) Does she have help? Yes but she casts spells runs away when her parents go NO. She flat out just goes watch me and does what she wants

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Well, he certainly did not in general give his women characters full agency. I feel my crush on Goldberry may have led me into unjustifiable romanticism above. Still, not only does she keep her name and title, she is not a mother, which seems significant when it comes to Tolkien and women. (On names and titles: I don't think they matter in the same way after Bree, but from Bag-end at the start of The Hobbit to the House of Tom Bombadil I think they are a feature of the story.)

[Chrysophylax Dives]

You might have opened a can of worms here my friend not that that's a bad thing of course.

Now the lid has started to come off, let us please not stop here. I am an older and wiser dragon than when i last posted, having been blown away by some literature i happened upon yesterday, and now see the worms wriggling more clearly. But before returning to the 'capture' of Goldberry by a spirit of the land with only the most tenuous connection to the Valar, I'd like to try an indirect approach and sound you all out on a perhaps related point that Tolkien makes about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in his 1953 lecture.

Gawain has arrived at the castle of Sir Bertilak (really the green knight) and his lady, and the scene is set for the temptation of Gawain, which Tolkien says is the real matter of the poem. The host proposes a deal: for three days he will go hunting and Gawain stay in the castle with the lady, and each evening each shall give the other what they have won. Tolkien writes (Monsters & Critics 82-3):

... all is so normal in the castle that on reflexion the question must soon arise: 'What would have happened, if Gawain had not passed the test?' For we learn in the end that the lord and lady were conniving; yet the test was meant to be real, to procure if possible Gawain's downfall and the disgrace of his 'high order'. The lady was in fact his 'enemy keen'. How then was she protected, if her lord was far away, hallooing and hunting in the forest? It is no answer to this question to point to ancient and barbaric customs or to tales in which memory of them is still enshrined. For we are not in that world, and if indeed the author knew anything about it he has wholly rejected it. But the author has not wholly rejected 'magic'. And the answer may be that 'fairy-story'; though concealed or taken for granted as part of the machinery of events, is really as integral to this part of the story as to those where it is more obvious, such as the incursion of the Green Knight. Only fayryge will suffice to make the plot of the lord and lady intelligible and workable in the imagined world that the author has contrived. We must suppose that just as Sir Bertilak could go green again and change shape for the tryst at the Chapel, so the lady could have protected herself by some sudden change, or destroying power, to which Sir Gawain would have become exposed by falling to temptation, even in will only.

I'm not really asking a question about this, more inviting your deliberations. But, obviously, I'm inclined to read something of this into the courtship (as i would like to call it) of Bombadil and Goldberry.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

That is totally where I fall short when it comes to lore discussions Im afraid. I dont analyse his works in the depths that have been done since the first Plaza. One example is Tom Bombadil. I just scratch my head as to me TB was simply a "mistake" something that Tolkien forgot to edit out, a remnant of the childrens book he was going to write (in lines with the Hobbit). Dont shoot me! I know thre are people that think differently on that and that is fair enough, I by no means claim that my opinion is the correct opinion. I will say I almos did not read the book twice because of him :P

Ha! Winddy, you and i are in full agreement on lore, just separated by different tastes. After loads of HOME reading and pondering 'Peeling the Onion' and Tolkien's Letters, this is also my conclusion about TB: he is at the heart of what the sequel to The Hobbit was imagined as before it changed after 1939 and became a totally different story. Only difference between our short and tall lore perspectives is the preference - in my heart I think The Hobbit is the greater story and the sequel to The Hobbit of far greater interest than all of Galadriel, Aragorn, and Mithrandir put together. So the difference between us is on one plane vast, but on the lore my personal belief is that you hit the nail on the head.

[Winddancer]

@Chrysophylax Dives I think my view of the Hobbit was skewered by the fact that I didnt know it was a childrens book and it was so different from LotR. But Sam and Frodos friendship will forever be dear to my heart and will therefore always be the one I choose between the 2.

[Lail]

I have to admit to being somewhat unsatisfied with his portrayal of women...

My biggest gripe is that most female characters are attached to a man in some way. They are almost always someone's daughter, wife, mother, etc. and presented this way rather than being the protagonist of their own stories, but assets who play supporting roles. I guess this is sort of similar to the comments about Arwen and Goldberry being "prizes"-- that is all they are and little else and I would add Fimbrethil to that list as well. Galadriel would be an exception where those roles are reversed -- as in, Celeborn who? Beren and Luthien may have equal footing. In fact, I'd call Luthien the hero of her own story. The only unattached females I can think of right now (there may be a few others), who stand alone without a man, are Nienna and Arien. I can honestly say it bugs me that there aren't more. Yes, I like and/or identify with some of Tolkien's female characters (as I do male ones, too), but that doesn't meant that I can't be somewhat unsatisfied still.

The other thing I dislike is...As someone who was fairly tomboy-ish (cringe I'm not a fan of that word) growing up, as a young person, Eowyn was a hugely important character for me. I loved her. To me back then, she fought the system, she didn't allow herself to be relegated to the default mother-and-having-babies/caretaker narrative, and she made a difference in the world. All of these are things that I really valued and wanted for myself, and still do, but many years later, I am more at ease with my femininity and while I still have no interest in the motherhood-life-narrative for myself personally, I find it incredibly frustrating that woman are so often subjected to being masculinized in order to be seen as "strong". Women who are feminine are strong, people who have nonbinary gender identifies are strong, strength has nothing to do with masculinity and I have to admit this is one of those things that just drives me crazy in societal perceptions as well as fiction so sorry for going somewhat off the rails here...my point is, is frustrates me that this is what Tolkien did with Eowyn.

Sure, we can say that he didn't know or understand women well or he was a product of the times or we can compare him to some of his contemporaries who wrote terrible portrayals of women (I mean just refer to reddit/menwritingwomen for starters) who may have been better off leaving them out entirely and we could say well at least he didn't do that, but I also think these are somewhat flimsy excuses because off the top of my head, Lewis Carroll published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 and George MacDonald published The Princess and the Goblin in 1872. LOTR was published in 1954, so not a product of the times if two others books (and probably others) were capable of writing fantastical stories written by male authors featuring female characters who were the heroes of their own stories (to my memory, it has been a while since I've read either), but maybe a product of Tolkien's lived experiences in having little exposure to female companionship aside from his own wife(? I think?) that perhaps led to him only being able to see women in this light. However, I have to say, I find it hard to believe someone with such imagination as to come up with entire worlds couldn't imagine a woman holding a job and doing her own thing without a man around. Surely in his time, he must have met a capable woman or two or many? (Edit: especially after so many women would have filled necessary roles in both WWI and WWII!!)

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Lailyn: It can be a frustrating narrative. In the care circle my father with dementia get twice a day personal help with eating and dressing, and all of them are women, except one student. We got together in a short, but rather intense conversation about the roles of men and women and the whole LB+ matter as well. And he brought up he found it extremely difficult to find his own place in society, as he got an established relation with his girlfriend, same age as him (24). What I find most striking (having observed this in other occasions) that the young adults of today are more conscious of world matters than my generation was twenty(five) years ago. But at 45+ myself I am facing myself with these dilemmas as well. What could be my place in this all? The very questions he was asking himself, I was also asking myself, and we had a good laugh about that realisation, that what age you are, you always struggle to (re)define your place in society. I am sorta out of it since 2017.

I don't have children myself, not that I never wanted to have them, but it didn't happen to me to find the love in life. I have my own fantasies about pregnancy and birth, but alone I can't do it. I would need my husband's support for that. Instead my life is mostly dedicated to my parents, though the care of my mother with cancer was shared with three. But with my father I stand for 90% alone in it. My dad is at home fairly substantive in all things he do, but in strange places he really can act confused and not knowing what to do.

Tolkien grew up and lived in a total other era than I was born and grew up. Elements of that old world were ingrained in my upbringing, but I was never unhappy with being a girl, and later turning to a woman. The reproductive part of me got a regular pattern I had never trouble with accepting, and now getting close to memopauze time, well I am growing to that too, and don't resist it at all. Since a few months I changed my wardrobe with more skirts than I had in years, and I feel much better by it. Though I keep wearing trousers too. I don't feel anymore masculinity and femininity are so widely divided, as I was taught in that past. Men and women have the same range of emotions, and my father expressed that strikingly on the day my mother was buried, had he been a good father to my sister and me? And I gave him a hug, and said he had always been a fantastic and righteous dad. He asked at the moment when nobody was further around. It must have felt safe to him he asked that then.

Around me I know enough people who are like you, who have no interest in the father/motherhood-life-narrative, and I feel it is their right to choose for single or married life without children. To me it is not a crime at all not to have them. I can come in why some elements in Tolkien's tale aren't what you like.

[Rivvy Elf]

I want to bring up Tolkien's own analysis of his Athrabeth work in Morgoth's Ring.

Here is the quote I'll be referring to:
"The Athrabeth is a conversation, in which many assumptions and steps of thought have to be supplied by the reader. Actually, though it deals with such things as death and the relations of Elves and Men to Time and Arda, and to one another, its real purpose is dramatic: to exhibit the generosity of Finrod's mind, his love and pity for Andreth, and the tragic situations that must arise in the meeting of Elves and Men (in the ages of the youth of the Elves). For as eventually becomes plain, Andreth had in youth fallen in love with Ægnor,
Finrod's brother; and though she knew that he returned her love (or could have done so if he had deigned to), he had not declared it, but had left her—and she believed that she was rejected as too lowly for an Elf. Finrod (though she was not aware of this) knew about this situation. For this reason he understood and did not take offence at the bitterness with which she spoke of the Elves, and even of the Valar. He succeeded in the end in making her understand that she was not rejected out of scorn or Elvish lordliness; but that the departure of Ægnor was for motives of 'wisdom', and cost Ægnor great pain: he was an equal victim of the tragedy."

I believe this quote stands on its own and you can make multiple inferences towards Tolkien's psychology on even people who are supposed to be in the same category (both Finrod and Andreth are considered part of "the Wise"). But if both are wise, then logically, Tolkien should've directly pointed out in his analysis what Finrod learned from Andreth. Yet he explicitly states how good and awesome Finrod is, while making it clear that Andreth was the one that was being taught by Finrod.

Yet Andreth was one of the Wise! His own analysis implies that this was not really an equal conversation in terms of the end results. Why, Tolkien?

[DalMaegil]

I would only say, certain contrived tests set aside, that the Professor's portrayal of women was generally not inimical, from the standpoint of those who loved freedom and virtue.

If anything, he illustrated that it was tyranny and wickedness that was responsible for the greatest crimes against women, whether the unlawful marriage of Ar-Pharazôn to his own cousin by force, the machinations of Morgoth and Glaurung over the family of Túrin or even the imprisonment of Lobelia Sackville-Baggins by Sharkey's Men.

To me, the dichotomy is quite obvious. Among the noble or heart, women are honoured and protected. Among the wicked, women are seen as little more than chattel.

[Rivvy Elf]

@DalMaegil Thus, Arnor and Gondor were doomed to begin with because they did not follow the Numenorean succession law in terms of women potentially becoming rulers. Meneldil had quite a few older siblings that were in-line ahead of him that were nameless, implying that at least some were female (fitting the pattern), and somehow he became the Gondorian king after Anarion. I can't name any Arnorian queen regnants... or queens in general, no female Chiefs of the Arthedain/Dunedain, and the lotr.wikia page contains only 3 named Gondorian Queens... all of whom were not Gondorian (Beruthiel was a black numenorean)

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Goldberry is to me another female character that comes across very much as a prize for Bombadil, she just comes across as property in the wording, and I feel like Tolkien for his part tries to lessen that blow perhaps with Goldberry's speech on the sort of Master Bombadil is.

This thread was pretty good in the Covid days. Back in the midst of it, the scary-eyed name changing one, who directs the discussion above for a while and Aiks usually names Frost, won the plaza story competition with a tale of Bombadil and Goldberry. It is a difficult thing for me to return to this story, the stylistic merit of which is undeniable. Astutely invoking the mythic struggles to escape of ancient Greek tales, and thereby quite correctly drawing Bombadil as the timeless mythical Pan of the English countryside, the story appeared to suggest that Goldberry was not merely a prize but a non-consenting agent in the courtship of Bombadil and Goldberry. And this despite Goldberry pulling Tom into her River by his beard at the start of the story, and appearing as free as the rain when we meet her in Tom's house in the sequel. But to my mind the plaza consensus at the time when that essay was awarded first prize was as upside-down as anything we find in 'Peeling the Onion' - it is a consensus that appears merely because the pendulum swings the other way. But I find it very difficult to engage in correct literary analysis of this undeniably well-crafted story because, at the time, there were only two entrants in the competition, and mine came second.

So I concede I am likely blinded by petty jealousy. However, returning to this conversation after some moons I have not changed my reading of the House of Bombadil. It is the weak spot of the plaza - old and nu. And part of the problem is Beowulf. You got to read the Old English poem if you want to understand the male heroes, young and (especially) old. But on women and courtly love and all that stuff, the Old English is not the place to turn, and yet it eclipses all else. To catch the threads of Tolkien on women, you gotta open the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Beyond Goldberry... People turn to the great Elvish women. Well, the likes of them is too far above my head. Then people add the Shield-maiden of Rohan. But she is a Valkyrie consumed by a death wish, and not your usual woman. And after Elvish queens + Éowyn, everyone stops like that is all the woman in this world of story bar some talktative nurse in Gondor.

But the great story of the War of the Ring begins with all the Hobbits, old and young, lads and lasses, feasting and dancing and merry-making at the long-expected party of Bilbo Baggins. And the story ends with Sam at last no longer divided, having watched his Master sail into the West he returns home to Rosie Cotton.

It is just that as soon as Tolkien steps out the door he only ever imagines adventures with other men.

[Aikári Salmarinian]

Chrys: I would advice just enjoy Tolkien's tales for the fun and pleasure he wrote with, and wanted to share in bookform. I will not repeat what I posted above. So Eowyn is perhaps the portrayal of a valkyrie, a norn or even a dis. I see just a woman, deprived from all merital matters in her life, because of Saruman's actions, her uncle bewitched by him, her nephew slain, her brother banished, the king's advisor who betrayed them. What can you do in a climate of intensive fear and oppression and without support, on your own alone? I asked myself that. I think she was well portrayed in the movies and Tolkien didn't diminish her for who she was, a daughter of the king's sister. Hobbitland was Tolkien's prime idea of the England he loved, the county side. Hobbits in fantasy culture is a beautiful portraying of that.

I did read the Green Knight for Tolkien's academic analysis. But further I don't care about the poem at all. The idea of women they are seductive material for a man is kind of appalling to me, and does neither justify the genders of men and women. But so the ideas about women were when the poem was written (14th century), it is what it is.

I understand heroes of all kinds just fine without the use of ancient literature. The northern theory of courage idea is appliable for all cultures around the world. I wonder what is wrong to imagine a story just with other men? I always had my peace with it, in Tolkien's fanstasy world. Their characters are most important to me, gender comes as second, or even as third. Tolkien's male characters are not overly masculine and have their insecurities, same for the (few) women in the tales. They are not overly feminine and have their insecurities. I could always build my characters from the given templates, and Aikári and Quennar worked excellent for years to be roleplayed by me. If Tolkien hadn't been a fantastic writer, we wouldn't have had this forum (still) today.

[Chrysophylax Dives]

I did read the Green Knight for Tolkien's academic analysis. But further I don't care about the poem at all. The idea of women they are seductive material for a man is kind of appalling to me, and does neither justify the genders of men and women. But so the ideas about women were when the poem was written (14th century), it is what it is.

Well, that is pretty definite Aiks. And there is not much if any such seduction in Tolkien's writings. But there is temptation - for jewels, and for the realization of prohibited desires, like escape from death. The temptation of Galadriel is a pretty central scene. So the seduction and the temptation are there, albeit transposed, with the biblical myth of the Fall hovering always near the surface.

[Ephtariat]

I'll just post a thought. When Tolkien is “accused” of idealizing Woman, one should understand how his is a celebration of Woman, in line with the Biblical account offered in 1 Esdras 3-4:41, when Zorobabel wins an argument over which is the most powerful thing on earth: wine, a king, or a woman, by stating it is the latter, but truth surpasses all. Zorobabel claims that women give birth to all, that all work is done so that they may enjoy its fruit, that a man leaves his parents to be joined to a woman, and that even an emperor can be found with a woman in his lap, playing with his crown. The further claim that truth is superior even to women brings about the logical conclusion that it is a true woman that is the strongest thing of all, even among women. This conclusion, in turn, can be applied to the Marian blessing of conjugal fidelity in which we have seen Tolkien’s Marian devotion to chiefly consist. The account of Zorobabel’s speech is found in many fourteenth century authors, such as Chaucer, who includes it in his Tale of Melibee (1106-1108), and also in the early fifteenth century, as in Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes (1721-1745). But it is Gower who interestingly adds to Zorobabel’s speech (Confessio Amantis VII: 1783-1949) the tale of Alcestis who gives her life for her husband and is later rescued by Hercules, thus providing yet another parallel of a successful descent to the underworld to retrieve the soul of a beloved woman. The fact that in Tolkien there is no parallel to the Song of Lúthien before Mandos gives the idea of how he envisioned Fantasy and Woman itself as the retriever of both Man and Reality, or rather that there one could find finally established, at least as a glimpse of the afterlife, the prefiguring of a perfect reciprocity.

[Troelsfo]

What a delightful thread! Thank you very much!

Before I dive into it more fully, a few minor comments (collecting my thoughts and posting on the main thrust of this thread will take a bit of time ...)

Her motivations are to chase after Kili and wonder what the dwarf has in his trousers.

His beard! Amiright?

Precisely!! The – occasionally unfortunate – feature of the Longbeards was that they had to take measures to avoid tripping over their own beards ...

(trace amounts of irony may be present in this product ... )

[Troelsfo]

Strictly speaking I don't think The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings pass.

(Romeran, OP)

Coming in on The Hobbit, strictly speaking bejabbered, the only active female characters (pronoun: she) are, i am pretty certain, some of the Mirkwood spiders!

And possibly some of those unnamed and undescribed Elves in Rivendell (albeit, I admit, I find it hard to imagine women, even Elves, behaving that ridiculously ... ).

<snip>

The 'woman' in The Hobbit is Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took,

Gollum's grandmother also gets a couple of mentions, but Belladonna is the subject at the only use of “she” and the object of the two uses of “her” (that I could find when searching my Kindle using my phone app).

whose chief adventure was becoming Mrs. Bungo Baggins, nudging Bungo to build her the most luxurious hole this or the other side of the Water,

For her own money, mind ... Is there any suggestion elsewhere (not in Letters, mind – I just searched that one) that Bungo built Bag End on Belladonna's nudgings? Just curious as that might allow her just that miniscule amount of agency (though, of course, it had to be her husband building it ... for her money).

[Chrysophylax Dives]

Gollum's grandmother also gets a couple of mentions, but Belladonna is the subject at the only use of “she” and the object of the two uses of “her” (that I could find when searching my Kindle using my phone app).

whose chief adventure was becoming Mrs. Bungo Baggins, nudging Bungo to build her the most luxurious hole this or the other side of the Water,

For her own money, mind ... Is there any suggestion elsewhere (not in Letters, mind – I just searched that one) that Bungo build Bag End on Belladonna's nudgings? Just curious as that might allow her just that miniscule amount of agency (though, of course, it had to be her husband building it ... for her money).

Gollum's grandmother is actually worth underlining, I think (not least because Tolkien then walked back any suggestion of matriarchy).

On the nudging - I think that is my own projection. The only justification I could give would be one of family characteritics: a Baggins would carry on living in the same hole and it would take a Took to prompt the great adventure of burrowing out Bag-end.

[Troelsfo]

As I said above, what an utterly delightful thread! Thank you to all who have contributed, but special kudos going out to @Romeran for starting it, and to @Elenhir, @Akhenanat (also, I believe, called Frost?), @Lail, and @Rivvy Elf for bringing in some very perceptive perspectives.


There are some (not here, but in the wider world of literary critique) who have extrapolated from their own uneasiness – in some cases even dislike – of Tolkien's women, and taken it to the point of accusing Tolkien of misogony. Against such accussations, I believe it is fair to bring out defences of the man, but I would rather keep this as a discussion of the textual sources of that uneasiness that is felt by many readers, including myself.

But here, @Akhenanat should be praised for stating what ought to be obvious – that looking at the portrayal of female characters in Tolkien's works is “simple academic analysis” – it is, indeed, a little foolish to start defending the author against legitimate academic literary analysis.

It is, however, also a valid starting point in such academic analysis that many of us feel varying degrees of uneasiness when thinking of Tolkien's portrayal of female characters (henceforth “Tolkien's women” because it's easier).

And while I do not agree with Elenhir with respect to the Bechdel test not being intended to be applied to individual works (I think that is exactly what the Bechdel test is intended for), I would agree that the test is not really all that relevant here. It may provide a starting point for a conversation about the uneasiness that I refer to, but it is at most a starting point for that – it tells us that something specific is absent, but not what is present, nor what other elements, that might be relevant, are absent.

That said, Tolkien did not write women often or particularly well. I, for example, can name the daughters of Finwe, but that's mainly because I, too, use them as an example of the lack of integration of Tolkien's few women into the narrative. They might as well not be there, and practically they aren't. Another favorite is pointing out that Finwe's wife didn't gain a name until after LotR was written.

These are, I think, good points.

Tolkien, in my opinion, certainly didn't write the normal, everyday woman very well. The examples we know are such as Lobelia, Mrs. Maggot, Mrs. Cotton, and Ioreth, all of whom seem almost charicatures of certain ‘types’ of stereotypical women.

Taking my inspiration in the literary modes of Northrop Frye, I would suggest that Tolkien is OK at writing women in both the Mythic (Elves & Ainur) and Romantic (Éowyn) modes (who would be either of a higher nature than humans, or at least “larger than life”), but he is particularly bad at writing female characters in the mimetic modes, where I think he ends up writing them in the Ironic mode (where we find these charicatures of extremely sterotypical women),

More to be said later – this is just a means of entering the fray

[Ephtariat]

I referred to Tolkien's critics, but with "uneasiness" my discourse would be the same. Tolkien does not describe women in everyday tasks for philosophical reasons that have to do with his rehabilitation of both fantasy and woman and entail the whole cultural history of the West (prepare to a long comment).

Fantasy is a word of ancient Greek origin. Its original form, φαντασῐ́α, phantasia, first occurs in the fifth century BCE, meaning that it is never found in archaic poetry nor in the earliest philosophers. Nonetheless, the etymological origin of the word from the verb φαίνω, phaino, ‘appear, come to light’, is telling, because it is a verb stemming from the same root as φάος, phaos, ‘light’. In other words, fantasy is essentially related to eyesight, to vision, therefore to the idea of apparition too. It is significant how light, vision, and apparition of a goddess are all entailed in one word when the coming of dawn is described in the first book of the Iliad and the second of the Odyssey:

ἦμος δ᾽ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς
[then Dawn appeared, child of Morn, the rosy-fingered]
(Iliad 1:477; Odyssey 2:1)

In the same book of the Iliad the goddess Athena appears to Achilles, and again the word utilized to describe her manifestation is a form of the verb phaino, this time used in connection to the brilliant gaze of her eyes. This, again, entails vision, light and apparition of a goddess, in such a way as to imply that the connection was strongly established in the archaic mind. That the dimension of phaino is not only divine or unearthly, but also material and practical is revealed for example in two instances from the Odyssey connecting the expression with childbearing and marriage: in the first one it is said of Helen that γόνον Ἑλένῃ φαίνειν, she will be shown a child, i.e. she will be granted to bear one, in Odyssey 4:12; in the other φαίνειν παράκοιτίν τινι means to show (i.e. give) one a wife (15:26).

An author who gives us many examples of the usage of terms related to phaino such as phasma and the verb phantazo is Aeschylus, the writer of tragedies, who in his Agamemnon in the absence of Helen has Menelaus inadvertently make her phantom lord of the house: πόθῳ δ᾽ ὑπερποντίας φάσμα δόξει δόμων ἀνάσσειν, “in his yearning for her who sped beyond the sea, a phantom will seem to be lord of the house” (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 414-415).

In ancient Greece, in the archaic and classical periods, the quintessential phantom is the phantom of Helen, the phantom of the lost wife, that which Menelaus finds to be the lord of his house, a phantom deriving from the Homeric notion of Helen as the daughter of Olympus. In this sense, apparition or appearance is beauty. As Norman Austin writes:

Beauty is among the greatest, if not the greatest, of all the archetypes in Homer's pantheon. Whoever possessed beauty in Homeric society would possess the world, so high was the value placed on beauty. Aphrodite may be wounded by a mere man (in Iliad 5) or abused by Hera and Athena for her soft, womanish ways, but we should not be misled by such temporary insults to her dignity. Hers was the power to undo even the political arrangements of Olympus (as in Iliad 14, when Hera borrows Aphrodite's charms to divert the will of Zeus). Beauty in the Iliad, as in Plato's cosmology, is the Subject to which every signifier turns, like the compass point to its magnetic pole. (Austin 2008: 24)

In this sense, it is apt also to recall Sappho’s Anaktoria Ode: “Some men say the cavalry is the fairest sight / On the black earth; others say the rank and file / Soldiers; and others, the fleet. But I say it is / Whatever a person desires. / Very easy it is to make this intelligible to anyone”. In the reconstructed lines, the Ode continues: “for Helen, deserting her husband, sailed to Troy, giving no thought to her child or her dear parents” (Austin 2008: 54). As a contrast, it may be taken into account Stesichorus’s Palinode, cited in Plato’s Phaedrus 243a, when Socrates says that, having talked in derogatory terms of Eros, he will do as Stesichorus, who wrote a praise of Helen as a remedy for his being blinded by the gods for offending her, and so Socrates will compose a praise to Eros. He then cites what we may take to be Stesichorus’s Palinode’s incipit: “The story [logos] is not true. / You did not board the well-benched ships, / You did not reach the towers of Troy”. In Plato’s Republic 586c we find the explanation that what the Trojans brought to Troy, according to Stesichorus, was not the actual Helen, but an “eidolon”, which is the same thing as saying a phasma.

Finally, in Euripides’ Helen, we have the full-fledged story, wherein the eidolon of Helen is paralleled to her phasma (569). Euripides had announced Helen in the last lines of Electra (1277-1281): “Helen [. . .] never went to Phrygia. Zeus, to give birth to strife and slaughter of men, sent the ghost of Helen to Ilium”.

The change into the notion of phantasia effected by early philosophers such as Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle, that is coeval to the introduction of the very word for it and is subsequently developed by classical and hellenistic philosophers, consists in the detachment of the concept from the sphere of the sacred and especially the feminine, bodily, sexual and procreative sacred to bring about an abstraction, a fancy, a useless idea that is consequently condemned as such. I will then term it devaluation of phantasia. In late Antiquity, even before Christianity was definitively tainted by the stain of Persian dualisms, Paganism itself had become its own parody, so that the gods themselves may be ridiculed by comedy writers, and prayers and rituals were subject to a pragmatic view, being considered valid, regardless of their nature, as long as they were effective.

In the third century CE, Augustine of Hippo was chiefly interested in “the Neoplatonic use [of phantasia] which he discovered in the libri Platonici, the books of the Platonists. These he began to study intensely in 386 when he was aged 31-32 in the Latin translation provided chiefly by Marius Victorinus” (Watson 1988: 135). If Augustine found the Neo-Platonics interesting, it is because they strongly refused attributing a corporeality to God, and, in general, they held the body in strong contempt. Augustine was also personally influenced by Manichaeism, a direct descendant of Zoroastrianism. After all, as Götz König points out, “it is (and was already in the early Islamic period) communis opinio that the Manichaean dualism is a reformulation of the Zoroastrian one”.

Indeed, the Zoroastrian religion is strongly misogynist, as one may read in their own writing:

“The fifty-ninth subject is this, that, in the good and pure religion of the Mazda-worshippers, they have not commanded the women to perform prayer (nyiyish). And their niyiyish are these that three times every day, at dawn, mid-day prayer, and evening prayer, they stand back in the presence of their own husbands, and fold their arms and speak thus: ‘What are thy thoughts, so that I may think them; what is necessary for thee, so that I may speak it; and what is necessary for thee, so that I may do it?’ For, any command, and whatever the husband orders, it is requisite to go about that day. And, certainly, without the leave of the husband she is to do no work, so that the Lord may be pleased with that wife. For the satisfaction of the sacred being is in the satisfaction of the husband; so that every time that they perform work by command of the husband they call them righteous (ashavan) in the religion; and if not, what do they call them? [They call her jeh (the primal whore)]” (Saddar Nasr LIX, cited in Sadeghi 2018: 51).

Augustine’s broader conception of phantasia as related to the Fall is influenced by such views. His writing De sermone Domini in monte discusses the same scriptural passage we have found cited by Clement of Alexandria in relation to the trial against the man who had satisfied his sexual urges with a concubine in a dream: “You have heard that it was said of old: Thou shalt not commit adultery [Exodus 20:14]. But I say to you, that whosoever shall look on a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27-28). In Robertson’s words:

St. Augustine, contrary to prevailing modern opinion, finds the justice of the second command, which warns against sin in the heart, to be greater than the first, which is concerned only with overt action. At the same time, the second confirms and fulfills the first. To lust after a woman and to ‘look on a woman to lust after her’ are different, since the second implies not only that the observer is tickled by fleshly delight, but also that he has passed through three stages which are involved in the commission of any sin: suggestion, delight (or pleasurable thought), and consent. Only after consent takes place in the mind does the sinner prepare for overt action, a sin ‘in deed.' If sins ‘in deed’ are repeated, the sinner may come to sin ‘in habit.' The suggestion takes place when the attractive object is perceived, the delight in the contemplation of the object, or of its image, with a view to fleshly satisfaction; and if this delight is not repressed by the reason, the reason consents to it. This process, St. Augustine explains, is analogous with the process of the Fall. Suggestion enters the senses subtly, like the serpent. There the carnal appetite, or Eve, may take pleasure in what is suggested and cause the reason, or the man, to consent, whereupon he is expelled from Paradise, or, that is, from the light of justice into death. (…) St. Augustine generalized the adultery in the scriptural text to mean the action of any evil cupidity, pointing out that the Scripture frequently uses fornicatio to mean any kind of turning away from God (Robertson 1969: 72-73)

Such a proposition is enormously influential. From this moment on, phantasia or imaginatio is associated with Eve and the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, meaning that it is broadly seen as sinful by itself, or at least despicable because it is the main gateway to sin, even when it is not thought of to be entirely evil. Such is the dominant view throughout the Middle Ages. In order to represent the diffusion of Augustine’s views in the Middle Ages, Robertson takes John the Scot as an example, for “if we can formulate a general pattern on the basis of these materials in Scotus and St. Augustine, we shall have at our disposal a very valuable medieval commonplace” (Robertson 1969: 72). Indeed, John the Scot wrote:

When a fantasy of gold or of some precious material is impressed on the corporal sense, the phantasy seems to that sense beautiful and naturally attractive because it is founded upon a creature which is extrinsecally good. But the woman, that is, the carnal sense, is deceived and delighted, failing to perceive hiding beneath this false and fancied [fantastica] beauty a malice that is cupidity which is the ‘root of all evil’ [1 Timothy 6:10]. ‘Whosoever shall look on a woman to lust after her,’ Our Lord says, ‘hath already committed adultery with her in his heart.' But if He had spoken openly, He might have explained, whoever impresses the phantasy of feminine beauty on his carnal sense has already committed adultery in his thought, desiring the wickedness of libido, which secretly attracts him beneath the imagination of the false beauty of that woman… (De div. nat., PL, 122, cols. 825-829, cited in Robertson 1969: 72)

What especially matters, according to Robertson, is that:

“the mind should not be allowed to dwell on the ‘woman,' the image of corporeal beauty, with a view to physical satisfaction. This is an ‘abuse’ or ‘waste’ of such beauty, which should instead be referred to the reason, and specifically to that part of the reason – the Verbum Dei, or the higher part – which perceives the Laws of God (rather than those of nature alone), and whose function is wisdom” (Robertson 1969: 75)

Applying critical historicism to the historical development of Christian morality indicates that through Augustine Persian misogyny and contempt of the body became dominant in the West, defining Fantasy as woman’s body and associating it with adultery and sin.

Tolkien’s point is to propose a notion and practice of fantasy as a Secondary World, not associated with the betrayal and divorce from the Primary World and reality, neither the reality of the physical world nor that of God. His purpose is the legitimization of Fantasy, and in order to do so he must remove any association with the Augustinian phantasia or adultery of the heart.

The “bestialization” of the female evil principle in Ungoliant and Shelob, almost the only female evil characters in the whole history of Middle-earth, is the final indicator that what Tolkien aims at is to dissociate women from adultery and evil, and indicate blame and sin to belong primarily and chiefly to men. Such a tendency in Tolkien’s writings explains a good part of their appeal to all readers, either because they agree with Tolkien, or because, while retaining a genderless view of sin, or because they do not believe in sin at all, they find it fascinating as a fantasy.

Tolkien’s Lúthien (and, secondarily, Idril and Arwen) epitomizes the discourse on Woman as image of God, but she is also meant to represent real women and to be a metaphor of Fantasy. This complexity is allowed by the skillful devising of her character as the only Mirror of Adultery that is at the same time sinless and gets ratified in Marriage: it is her relationship with Beren, being he a human, that is liable to be constructed as a betrayal of her people and race, but at the same time she is a daughter of an equivalent “adultery” between an Angel (her mother Melian) and an Elf (her father Thingol). She is the equivalent of Eve in the medieval, Augustinian account of the three steps of sin, but she re-configures them as steps in love. She is a figure of Helen of Troy who is “abducted” from Dairon, but what he lost was actually, like Aragorn for Éowyn, “a shadow and a thought,” only a phantasm of her, a phasma. She is Thingol’s Guinevere, what the King held most dear, and yet she was never his own, but belonged to Lancelot, or the Fairy King, represented by Beren. Nonetheless, she is the quintessential faithful wife, the quintessential fairy wife, and the condition for keeping her is fidelity. She is a loyal version of Lady Bertilak who is Gawain’s wife, a truthful version of Cryseide, and the faithful wife that Gower advocates. She is Mary Magdalene, Eurydice, Heurodis, and Langland’s Lady Mercy. She is the ultimate achievement of God, as Agrippa held woman to be, and a figure of Mary in her motherhood of a child that for the first time shares two natures, either elvish and human (Dior), or godly and human (Jesus).

Another respect in which Tolkien's removal of the "everyday woman" is tied to the removal of adultery is the fact that where characters are guests they typically have a Host doing the house's honors instead of a Hostess. As Marjorie Burns wrote:

What Tolkien gives us, however, is a masculine version of domesticity. Females rarely appear in these homey scenes or shelters, and those that do generally have little to add. Beorn’s hall, with its mead, log fire, and serviceable straw mattresses; Treebeard’s home of earth, water, and overshadowing trees; Faramir’s hidden cave [. . .] are maintained solely by males and yet are fully comfortable. Throughout the books, household duties that would customarily fall to a wife are, with one or two exceptions, fulfilled by other males – by servants or companions or by the homeowner himself. From Bilbo to Beorn, from Fatty Bolger to Faramir, males (nearly always single males) are most likely to supply meals and baths and beds. Even Goldberry seems overshadowed in her hostessing role by what Tom, her husband, does. [. . .] In Rivendell, in the Last Homely House, there is even less of the feminine – nothing beyond passing references to Arwen to suggest the female sex. Only in Lothlórien do we find a female figure central to the scene, but Lothlórien serves more as a spiritual respite than it does a domestic interlude; there are in Lothlórien no pots and pans, no stony hearths, no tubs and steaming baths. (Burns 2005: 136-137)

Significantly, both Beren and Aragorn are guests in Elven realms when their romances with their Elven partners begin, and so Aragorn is a guest when he meets the Shieldmaiden of Rohan, whereas Éowyn’s acceptance of Faramir coincides with her acceptance of her role as a healer just when they are both guests in the Houses of Healing, thus symbolically making her accept her lover as his Hostess. But it is surely Gawain’s role as a guest at Hautdesert that prompts such a motif in Tolkien’s works: the same happening could not have taken place in Camelot. Indeed, knights are guests of ladies in other romances as well, and there are other instances of sexual temptation, but it is in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that Tolkien found both the condemnation of actual adultery and the willingness to accept human sexuality in its greenness of spontaneity and fecundity. His removal of the female hostess is then meant to secure the divergence of his Fantasy from Augustinian adultery of the heart. If a man is essentially hosted by his wife, it is evident that every situation that involves being a guest of a different hospitality means by itself a temptation to adultery, unless there is only a male host. In the same way, if reality is hosted by a fantasy in the way that Tolkien defines as “inner consistency” of the Secondary World, then any change subsequently introduced in the laws governing the Secondary World may involve disbelief, unless the change is justified within the Secondary World itself.

I could write more on this subject (indeed have!), but I believe this suffices for now.