Q: How Does Tolkien Depict Women in Middle-earth?
ANSWER: Women in Tolkien, women in Middle-earth. The topic is very sensitive, very controversial, and many people have expressed their opinions often and vehemently. Some critics complain that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are “boy stories” with too few roles (or none) for women. Some people argue that Tolkien was biased against women and that he intentionally downplayed their significance in his fiction.
These questions should be addressed in three separate categories because Tolkien’s fiction does not all fit into one category.
First, let us look at Tolkien’s mythological constructions from The Book of Lost Tales to Middle-earth. These elaborate myths do include some strong female characters but the majority of the stories focus on male characters, particularly flawed male characters who engage in great or minor evil. With one notable exceptional there are no evil witches in Tolkien’s mythological cycles because he did not really feel that women were as closely associated with evil as men.
Tolkien could certainly find plenty of examples of women doing evil in the Greek and Norse myths he so loved, but his personal writings suggest that he favored a more censored role for women in his thoughts. He wanted to believe they were better caretakers of the best of human gifts than men.
Secondly, The Hobbit was originally composed as an ongoing story to entertain Tolkien’s then young sons and the story naturally followed a male character with male companions because boys typically like those kinds of stories. Even in the 21st century the majority of “princess” stories shared through print and media are directed toward girls. There is no shame in knowing there are gender biases in our fiction.
Should fiction be universally criticized for allowing those biases? That’s a question each of us must answer for ourselves.
Finally, although The Hobbit is clearly a “boys’ tale” Tolkien at some point changed the narrative structure of The Lord of the Rings to include strong female characters even though they were not central to the story’s plot. We can speculate on why that is so but we cannot really explain it. In my opinion the early tale was still very much a sequel to The Hobbit designed to be similar to that book in form and structure, and hence the setting did not demand a female character.
When Tolkien made the conscious decision to shift the story telling toward a more realistic interpretation of myth he did include women who served a variety of purposes that one can identify with through the study of Greek literature and the Norse sagas. There is also a strong trait of what Tolkien might have conceded was a medieval romance in some of his female characters.
Arwen remains too aloof for many readers, and Tolkien has been criticized for moving “the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen” to the appendices. However, that portion of her story did not really fit with the primary narrative and he most likely made the right decision. I think the reader does better to feel frustration over Arwen’s implied presence than to resent her being sidelined.
Galadriel is portrayed as a mover and shaker who acts largely behind the scenes. The reader is treated to a rare glimpse of what goes on in her court, unlike the majority of Middle-earth’s inhabitants. Galadriel is often lauded as one of Tolkien’s strongest women although he alludes to her private failing when she says to Frodo: “I pass the test. I shall go into the West”. Tolkien reveals in a writings that Galadriel had once rebelled against the Valar and was, alone of all the Noldor, forbidden to return to the West until she proved herself ready to reintegrate into the Eldar society oversea.
Eowyn may be the most popular of Tolkien’s female characters but she is often seen as an abused and neglected foster daughter who serves more as a plot device (slay a villain, marry a prince). Tolkien tried to explain that Eowyn’s tale was more complex than that but she was still a relatively minor character in a very long story. Eowyn’s story might make a better romance if told on its own terms.
Of Tolkien’s other characters, only Luthien Tinuviel (from The Silmarillion) receives nearly universal acceptance. Although Tolkien tells the story of Beren and Luthien “from afar” either through poetry (“Lay of Leithian”) or narrative (‘Of Beren and Luthien” in The Silmarillion and Aragorn’s brief retelling of their tale in The Lord of the Rings), it is one of the more complex and interesting stories of the First Age. In fact, “Of Beren and Luthien” is one of the Tolkien stories that is most like a Norse or Icelandic saga, where the hero and heroine pass from one situation to the next, facing grave challenges and overcoming them, all the while trying to live their lives.
Women in Tolkien’s literature struggle to emerge from the latency of his creativity. His first thoughts were for myths relevant to England, and then to stories of a high Elven race, and then for Hobbits, and then for a high heroic story that might have made both the Greek and the Anglo-Saxon poets proud. Somewhere along the way Tolkien chose to write about the tragedies of a few very notable women, each in her own tale, as well as their achievements and their failures. He may not have done the best job of promoting those stories to the general population, but without hobbits those women characters from Middle-earth probably would have been lost and forgotten by now.
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