April 4, 2002

Women in LotR
Richard P.

OK, so I am probably digging myself a great big hole here by wading into the feminism issue and lack of lots of women with large roles in Lord of the Rings.

You will argue that in todays world it is innapropriate to not have central women characters, but I believe that the Lord of the Rings would still be as popular if it was written post emancipation of women. Tolien was writting his world, and would still write his world even today as a place where it is mainly men who do the fighting because that is what men are physically or mentally (and I'm not saying that this is a good thing) capable of doing, whilst most women are not.

Now you will say, "yes, but some women are capable of fighting"... to which I say, exactly, thats why we have Eowyn in the book. We also have Galadriel, and here Tolkien is emphasising perhaps the strenghts of women. Before I start getting my head bitten off about how one fighting woman is not enough compared to all the male soildiers look at the role she ends up playing. Look also at modern armed forces, since male and female entrance excerises were made the same in the UK there has been a massive rise in the amount of women suing the armed forces because of injury in the tests.... because a large proportion of them aren't physically up to it (although as I said, some are).

Now... I'm not trying to argue against feminism here, or that men and women shouldn't have equality in all things.... but I love Tolkien's works, and when people accuse him of being anti-women, it gets on my nerves. Tolkien always said, he was just trying to write a good story and a mythology for England.... and in that sense he wrote it as realistically as he could..... with a roughly medieval bias for many of the large "armed" nations, how many references are there in medieval history of women going to war?

The Elves also have Galadriel... one of the oldest and most powerful beings on Middle-earth... yet she is always overlooked be people critising Tolkien.