Q: Is There A Lack of Mother-Daughter Bond in Middle-earth?
ANSWER: The real question is actually more along the lines of “please explain the lack of mother/daughter bond in middle-earth” — which seems to me to be very likely a homework or essay question. I’m reluctant to do your school-work for you, but I think this is nonetheless a very interesting question and one which should drive hundreds of thoughtful essays.
Scouring the texts one rarely comes across references to strong mother-daughter relationships. There seems to have been one between Melian and Luthien, if only in the sense that Melian taught Luthien a great deal of Maiaric lore. That relationship may also have been extended (in Tolkien’s thought) to include Galadriel, who is said to have dwelt in Doriath for a very long time and was close to Melian. And Galadriel herself seems to have been close to Arwen, who traveled back and forth between Lorien and Rivendell. I suspect that Galadriel’s relationship with Arwen was strengthened by the departure of Celebrian over sea in the Third Age year 2510. On the basis of this small amount of evidence, I will also argue that Celebrian was probably very close to Galadriel, since she was traveling from Rivendell to Lorien when the Orcs abducted her.
The last mother-daughter reference in this chain of familial connections is given at the end of the “Tale of Aragorn and Arwen”, when she bids her daughters farewell in Gondor and leaves the realm forever to seek her fate in Lorien. Hence, it could be argued (I think) that Tolkien intentionally included a strand of strong mother-daughter love and mentoring into his mythos starting with Melian and descending down to Arwen’s daughters. But it is also true there are many examples of women in Tolkien’s stories who become separated from and/or even estranged from their mothers.
Even Luthien eventually must leave Doriath, never to see Melian again. Melian’s heart must have been filled with despair at the prospect of not being able to enjoy Luthien’s companionship for the rest of Time. It should not surprise readers, then, that she would leave Doriath so soon after Thingol’s death, even though that part of the history was revised several times as Tolkien reinvented his legends.
Many of Tolkien’s female characters are portrayed without motherly support and affection, even if it is not his intention to imply that such support and affection was not really there. On the one hand, it is difficult for a man to write about such relationships; but for a man like Tolkien, who lost his mother early in life and had no sisters, it would have been even more challenging. Of course Tolkien would eventually be able to observe the relationship between his wife Edith and their daughter Priscilla but he would not be able to bring the insight that a brother of a daughter might have into such complex relationships.
Hence, Tolkien’s fiction really has very little to say about the ways mothers and daughters behave toward each other. He was unable to build any great tragedies around the pain and love that a mother and daughter share. And that may be a good thing, in that his fiction does not attempt to reach beyond his personal experience; and it may be a bad thing, in that Middle-earth is impoverished by the lack of mother-daughter relationships among its most important characters.
If you write fan fiction it may be worthwhile to consider what sort of mother-daughter relationships could fit within the themes that Tolkien’s Middle-earth supports, and how those themes might be extended. I don’t think J.R.R. Tolkien considered mother-daughter relationships unimportant — I just don’t believe he had much personal insight to offer into them. He may even have viewed them as very intimate experiences that required a different perspective than his own. I am sure, however, that privately Tolkien must have acknowledged and understood the importance of the relationship between mothers and daughters. The lack of such relationships in his fiction should not be used to construct improbable misogynistic interpretations of Tolkien’s literature. If this lack is a flaw in the work that does not mean it had to also be a flaw in the man.
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Although, as you say, Tolkien probably felt unqualified to explore mother-daughter relationships, I think his novelist’s insight was quite sound when he ruled them out both for Arwen and for Eowyn. The loss of Celebrian throws Arwen back on her father, who for this reason is more clearly a rival to Aragorn in his claims on her. In a more gentle way, Eowyn may have transferred her affections for her own lost mother to Theoden; but he too must depart before she is really free to choose.
I should have mentioned the story of “Aldarion and Erendis”, since she obviously had a conflicted relationship with their daughter. That was another example of a relationship where the child had to choose between a parent and something else (I guess in this case between two parents). I haven’t really given much thought to parent-child relationships in Tolkien’s work, although I know there have been some papers on the topic — mostly dealing with sons who lose their mothers, I believe.