Critical Directions for the Study of Tolkien’s Women in the 21st Century
“Perilous and Fair, Ancient and Modern, Luminous and Powerful”:
Critical Directions for the Study of Tolkien’s Women in the 21st Century
Author Talk, July 27, 2016
Janet Brennan Croft
Head of Access and Delivery Services, Rutgers University Libraries[1]
Introduction
It’s a truism of both popular and serious critical response to Tolkien’s best known works that there are no women in them. Or no women worth speaking of. Or, okay, maybe there are a few, but they aren’t important. Or, okay, maybe they might be important, but they are stereotypes of queens and warriors and country bumpkins and not portrayed as real women at all. So, obviously, Tolkien didn’t like or care about women all that much, and Peter Jackson had to add female characters just to make his films marketable to women viewers, and that’s all there is to be said on the matter.
But since the earliest scholarship on The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, there has also been a strain of criticism that has sought to remedy such claims: that insists that Tolkien's fiction does have something useful and modern to say about women and femininity, and that his women do enact essential, rather than merely supportive roles, and even that the women in his life were more interesting and important than previously realized.
Let me tell you a little about my own personal experience as a reader of Tolkien. I first encountered The Hobbit when I was seven, and The Lord of the Rings when I was eleven; The Silmarillion came out when I was in high school, and Unfinished Tales when I was in college. The lack of women in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings didn’t bother me much; years later, when I read Melanie A. Rawls’s essay “The Feminine Principle in Tolkien” (which is included in this book), I realized it was because I found the aspects of the feminine embodied in the best of the male characters compelling enough to keep me reading even if I didn’t see my own exact mirror image anywhere in the books. And I had enough female heroes elsewhere in my childhood reading—which, when I look back at them now, seem close kin to some of Tolkien’s heroines. Princess Eilonwy in Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books, as brave as Éowyn; Sara Crewe, who in A Little Princess could weave words nearly as well as Lúthien wove songs; adventurous girls like Lucy Pevensie and Jill Pole of Lewis’s Narnia books, smart and loving girls like Meg Murray in A Wrinkle in Time, quick-thinking and self-sufficient girls like Eva-Lotta in the unjustly forgotten Bill Bergson books by Astrid Lindgren—there was no lack of role models.
But other readers did pay more attention to Tolkien’s female characters, or lack of them. While this hasn’t been a particular focus of my own scholarship on Tolkien, as the editor of the journal Mythlore and of several books on Tolkien I’ve had a lot of experience with a particularly disturbing phenomenon: ignorance of earlier scholarship on the topic. A prime motivation for me in developing this book with my co-editor Leslie Donovan was my frustration with getting submission after submission to Mythlore from people either saying that Tolkien was anti-feminist and ignored women, OR reinventing the wheel and covering the same ground as some classic article dating back decades. As someone who cares about the direction of Tolkien scholarship, I wanted to see new critics building on this strong scholarly foundation, having a dialogue with earlier work, and not just rehashing tired old critical clichés.
Leslie and I are both members of the Mythopoeic Society, a group founded in 1969 to study the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and other fantasy authors. Since 2006 I have edited the society’s refereed scholarly journal, Mythlore, and I am currently the society chair and gearing up for our upcoming conference, August 4-8. Leslie is the Editor in charge of the society’s press, which generally publishes about book per year. Most of our books have been reprints or first publications of rare items written by our primary authors and their associates, but we also do essay collections. My Tolkien on Film was the first of these in 2004, and we’ve also published Past Watchful Dragons: Fantasy and Faith in the Worlds of C.S. Lewis, The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America: From H.P. Lovecraft to Leslie Marmon Silko, and since Perilous and Fair came out, Baptism of Fire: The Birth of the Modern British Fantastic in World War I. (I have a few copies of that here for sale.)
Overview: Critical History
The first stirrings of feminist and female-centered criticism of Tolkien appear as early as 1971, when Doris T. Myers published “Brave New World: The Status of Women According to Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams” in the Cimarron Review. As indicated by this article’s title, philosophies arising from the civil rights movements in the 1960s and 1970s led not only to increased interest in marginalized fiction, such as Tolkien’s fantasy fiction, but also to new scrutiny of those works from feminist perspectives. Readers and critics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries sometimes interpreted Tolkien’s Middle-earth narratives as lacking in women, preserving cultural stereotypes of female roles, and reflecting antifeminist tendencies. Laura Michel sums up such discussions when she writes that:
For years, Tolkien has been criticized, attacked, explained, forgiven, and mainly misunderstood when it comes to the matter of women. Criticism on this topic has ranged from mild attempts to excuse Tolkien’s point of view to truly violent accusations of misogyny and chauvinism. (56)
Yet, at the same time, other researchers began producing original, detailed scholarship that recognized more positive contexts for Tolkien’s female characters and argued for a more nuanced understanding of Middle-earth women. Although many of these scholars agreed that the historical context of Tolkien’s life prevents him from being considered a feminist of any sort, radical or otherwise, discussions were published that interpreted Tolkien’s women as imbued with unconventional power, particularly those in The Lord of the Rings. Where other works of modern fantasy or mythopoeic literature offered traditional presentations of female characters, scholars in the twenty-first century have noted increasingly that Tolkien’s women are constructed to highlight less common and more positive positions of power.
Despite such positive attention to the subject of women in Tolkien’s world, other recent works echo views from earlier periods of Tolkien scholarship. For instance, Blackwell’s Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, published in 2014 shortly before this collection and intended to serve as an essential resource for Tolkien specialists and students alike, includes a chapter titled “Women” that insists “enforced female passivity is present in all three of the main female characters of The Lord of the Rings” (Roberts 476). That perspectives such as this continue to be published by well-respected presses, after so much research effort and printer’s ink has gone toward correcting similarly ill-informed positions, is troubling. One motivation for this collection arises from our observation that the Blackwell chapter is not an isolated example, but reflects an alarming tendency among even current Tolkien scholars to be unfamiliar with the more positive readings of Tolkien’s female characters and gender politics to be found in both classic and recent research.
So Perilous and Fair aims in part to remedy perceptions among some scholars and readers that Tolkien’s work is bereft of female characters, colored by anti-feminist tendencies, and has yielded little serious, academic work on women’s issues. The fourteen articles collected here were selected for their use of diverse forms of evidence to examine the relevance of women to Tolkien’s works, life, and literary sources. Especially central to these articles is a consistent recognition that, although Tolkien’s fiction undeniably contains many more male than female characters, women enact essential, rather than merely supportive, roles in Middle-earth and in his life.
As we reflect in our collection’s title, Tolkien’s female characters generally are fair in ways identical to those of earlier fantasy heroines; they are beautiful, unblemished, courteous, and kind. Nevertheless, Tolkien made it clear that many of his women are also perilous in ways previous literary works had attributed primarily to women who were villainous or otherwise allied with evil. To cite two obvious examples: Éowyn is a shieldmaiden, a warrior trained to wield a sword in her own hand and destined to slay the undefeatable Witch-king of Angmar; and Lúthien not only rescues Beren from Sauron’s prison, but uses her magic to help Beren wrest a Silmaril from the Iron Crown of Morgoth himself. While such characters frequently require the aid of male heroes, it is significant that the male heroes equally require the power of these women to achieve their victories. Unifying the concepts of perilous and fair lends our collection not only its title, but also a metaphor for issues of female power examined throughout these articles.
There are very few unambiguously villainous female characters in Tolkien’s work; we do regret that Tolkien’s posthumously published poem fragment “The Fall of Arthur” came out too late for us to get any contributions considering his Guinevere, as he described her: “fair and fell as fay-woman/ in the world walking for the woe of men.” I think there will be a lot to be said about her in the future. We also did not have the room in this collection to look specifically at women in the Peter Jackson film adaptations; there are a few essays on women in the Lord of the Rings films in my 2004 essay collection Tolkien on Film, but there’s a lot yet to be written about Tauriel in the more recent Hobbit films.
The Essays
The fourteen articles we selected include seven “classic” articles first published in several different sources between 1984 and 2007; these, we feel, represent strong readings that are textually sound and have made substantial contributions to the evolution of scholarship on women in Tolkien’s fiction. These classic explorations are balanced by seven articles published here for the first time which offer original examinations that build appropriately on past studies and point the way to future directions for the topic. Since many more fine articles might have been included here, this collection is best considered only as a representative sample of articles on the subject. We restricted our offerings to studies exclusively on Tolkien’s life or works, not media adaptations, and sought to avoid publishing works that substantially overlapped each other in subject material or approach.
Our collection opens wi[LAD1] th a section on “Sources in Critical and Historical Contexts” that consists of three new articles. The first is “The History of Scholarship on Female Characters in J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium: A Feminist Bibliography,” an extremely useful and long-needed bibliographic essay by Robin Anne Reid that establishes the critical context for the study of women in Tolkien’s life and works, analyzing trends and defending a feminist approach to the topic. This essay clarifies that significant scholarship has been published over the course of the field of Tolkien studies that addresses the subject of women—a trickle before 2000 and a flood since then. Because of the very thorough coverage of this article, we decided that a separate bibliography of additional reading was not needed. (Robin is a professor of Literature and Languages at Texas A&M University at Commerce, and for the past several years she’s been working on a particularly interesting digital humanities project called The Tolkien Corpus.)
Following Reid’s article is a study by John Rateliff titled “The Missing Women: J. R. R. Tolkien's Lifelong Support for Women's Higher Education” that explores the ways in which Tolkien’s female family members, students, and colleagues informed his views on women as well as his writing. Rateliff examines several obvious and often overlooked instances of strong women in Tolkien’s life in order to highlight his commitment to higher education for women as proof that he understood and empathized with women’s concerns. While we’ve had some good biographical studies that address the important women in his personal life – his mother Mabel, wife Edith, aunt Jane, and daughter Priscilla – the women in his professional life have been comparatively neglected before now. But as Tolkien himself said in response to Edwin Muir, an early critic who called The Lord of the Rings “a boy’s story” lacking maturity,
He says it's written by a man who's never reached puberty, and knows nothing about women . . . except [as] a schoolboy. […]. I thought it was very rude, from a man who so far as I know is childless, writing about a man surrounded by [women] —wife, daughter, grandchildren. —(JRRT; Gueroult interview)
And, we can add, colleagues and students.
Sharin Schroeder’s “She-who-must-not-be-ignored: Gender and Genre in The Lord of the Rings and the Victorian Boys’ Book” concludes this section by identifying relationships between Tolkien’s novel and works such as H. Rider Haggard’s She—the adventure-romances which Tolkien enjoyed as a young reader and which had a demonstrable effect on his own writing style and themes. Through close comparisons of Galadriel and Ayesha, as well as genre differences and expectations, Schroeder corrects some central misconceptions about the portrayal of women and gender relations in The Lord of the Rings.
In the section titled “Issues of Power,” we present three classic articles that serve as a foundation for the development of scholarship on women in Tolkien’s fiction. “The Feminine Principle in Tolkien” (1984) by Melanie A. Rawls explores the interaction of Masculine and Feminine principles (gender as opposed to sex) in Tolkien's Middle-earth. In this essential study for refuting claims that Tolkien rejects the feminine, Rawls demonstrates how the balance of the principles in a character—for example, Galadriel’s balance of power and self-knowledge, Aragorn’s combination of military might and healing ability, or more humbly, the hobbit appreciation of cooking skills in both sexes—is an important factor in his or her place in the struggle of good and evil, evil resulting in many cases from an imbalance of these principles.
Expanding the conversation to incorporate larger issues of gender, Nancy Enright’s “Tolkien's Females and the Defining of Power” (2007) describes Tolkien’s female characters as offering a critique of traditional and worldly power typically embodied in masculine images. Her article establishes Tolkien’s female characters as a reflection of biblical teachings that promote the choice of love over pride as a more powerful alternative to the domination by force that is typically conceived of as masculine. Enright reads Éowyn’s rejection of the warrior life in favor of becoming a healer as a triumph of the power of love, not a diminishment of her character.
Edith Crowe’s “Power in Arda: Sources, Uses, and Misuses” (1996) asks how one can be a feminist and still like Tolkien. She analyzes issues of power and renunciation in Tolkien's works with particular attention to models of power relations based on dichotomies such as dominator vs. partnership and power within vs. power over, drawing on a framework developed in Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade. Particularly important is Crowe’s consideration of various sources of power (spiritual, political, physical) and how these are wielded by various peoples and individuals in Middle-earth. As she points out, “Creative, life-affirming, and nurturing powers are those associated with good in Middle-earth, and are found in both male and female” (148).
The section “Studies of Individual Characters” deals with specific women, primarily in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, through two classic and two new articles. “The Fall and Repentance of Galadriel” (2007) by Romuald Ian Lakowski uses material related to the development of Tolkien's legendarium to examine Galadriel's depiction in The Lord of the Rings. Focusing particularly on Tolkien's evolving views on Galadriel's rebellion and redemption, Lakowski argues that Tolkien’s continuing efforts to rethink Galadriel’s place in his mythology until the very end of his life indicates the importance of this female character in his work.
Cami Agan’s new article, “Lúthien Tinúviel and Bodily Desire in The Lay of Leithian,” positions and emphasizes the role of the female body as the primary source for Lúthien’s power in Tolkien’s legendarium. For Agan, Lúthien’s feminine attributes, grounded specifically in her gendered body, portray her as an active, potent force in Middle-earth’s history in contrast to the passively ineffectual maiden other scholars have perceived. This article is particularly interesting for its examination of a highly positive depiction of female sexual desire and fulfillment in Tolkien’s works.
While Kristine Larsen also deals with a female character from Tolkien’s legendarium, her article (also newly published here) describes the development of Nienna from her earliest versions as a one-dimensional goddess of doom to a complex and central figure of Middle-earth’s mythology. In “The Power of Pity and Tears: The Evolution of Nienna in the Legendarium,” Larsen contradicts views that Nienna’s only mode is to weep passively for others by arguing that Tolkien eventually empowered this character with conceptions of mercy and mourning as participatory actions echoing those in which Christian faith perceives the Virgin Mary as interacting with humanity. (Kris is a particularly interesting scholar, working primarily in the area of the Inklings and science, especially astronomy and cosmology; she just gave the scholar keynote address at the 2nd annual New York Tolkien Society conference earlier this month.)
Closing this section is Melissa Smith’s “At Home and Abroad: Éowyn's Two-fold Figuring as War Bride in The Lord of the Rings” (2007) which shows how viewing Éowyn’s relationships with Aragorn and Faramir in comparison with historical war-brides provides striking insights about the character’s psychology. In her attraction to Aragorn she exhibits characteristics of the left-behind war bride; as Faramir’s wife-to-be, she is the war bride who leaves her home and family for a foreign land.
What’s particularly interesting about all of the articles in this section is how Tolkien’s ideas about and depictions of these female characters evolved over the course of his writing. Even Éowyn, who did not occupy his mind for nearly as many years as Galadriel, Nienna, or Lúthien, changed greatly during the period he worked on The Lord of the Rings. I’m currently supervising a thesis on Lúthien concentrating on just this aspect of her character: her change from delicate little dancing fairy-maid to mature elf-woman of powerful music-centered magic capable of defeating Sauron and Melkor, and more than an equal to her male partner in both daring and self-sacrifice. The question of WHY Tolkien kept returning to his key female characters and making them stronger, more interesting, and more fleshed-out is an intriguing one and a good direction for future research.
Any study of Tolkien’s works and life would be seriously flawed without some discussion of his sources in early literary history, which leads to the next section on “Medieval and Renaissance Contexts.” Here, we offer my co-editor Leslie A. Donovan’s “The Valkyrie Reflex in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: Galadriel, Shelob, Éowyn, and Arwen” (2003) to demonstrate how Tolkien's Old Norse sources suggest that female power may be expressed differently than male power. Donovan specifically traces the characteristics of the valkyrie figure in medieval texts to present the ways in which Tolkien’s characters exhibit, subvert, or transform the power attributed to these mythological women; her inclusion of Shelob in this analysis is particularly insightful. (Leslie is a professor in the Honors College at the University of New Mexico.)
In contrast, Phoebe Catherine Linton explores Éowyn as modeled on medieval romance and quest conventions in her new article “Speech and Silence in The Lord of the Rings: Medieval Romance and the Transitions of Éowyn.” Linton envisions Tolkien as using traditional patterns associated with medieval female knights to inspire his more modernly motivated war-maid, drawing on sources like Christine de Pizan’s Trial of Joan of Arc and the 13th century French romance Silence.
Bringing us forward into the Renaissance, Maureen Thum’s “Hidden in Plain View: Strategizing Unconventionality in Shakespeare's and Tolkien's Portraits of Women” (2006) challenges us to look more closely at the disguises of women in The Lord of the Rings and Twelfth Night to discover alternative styles of power and gender. She compares Viola and Olivia to Éowyn and Galadriel. She urges readers to comprehend that both Tolkien and Shakespeare adapt traditional stereotypes of women in similar ways in order to advance gender roles beyond those normally limited by their societies.
The final article in this collection stands by itself in its own category, “Women as Readers of Tolkien,” to point the way toward possible future directions for the study of women not only within Tolkien’s works and life, but as these may also inhabit other works. Una McCormack’s “Finding Ourselves in the (Un)Mapped Lands: Women's Reparative Readings of The Lord of the Rings” documents the ways in which some women write fanfiction as a creative-critical response to Tolkien's text. She draws on Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in which the title character finds himself in a problematic relationship with Tolkien’s text, loving the book in spite of the absence of positive portrayals of people like him in it. McCormack investigates a representative sample of fanfiction that inserts new or previously marginalized female characters into Tolkien’s familiar storyline to dialogue with the canonic text about issues of gender and power.
Future Directions and Conclusion
What directions might scholarship on Tolkien’s women take from here? Possibilities include close examinations of female characters in media adaptations of Tolkien’s works—artwork, movies, television, and games. What do such adaptors draw from Tolkien, and what aspects of his works do they omit or alter? What do adaptations have to say about their creators’ own readings of Tolkien? The tools of digital humanities also offer intriguing new ways to study Tolkien’s texts at a granular level, revealing gendered patterns of vocabulary and frequency of speech, for example, and enabling evidence-based comparisons with other authors. We might keep in mind these words from Robin Reid’s opening survey of the field:
[T]he essays newly published here may act as guides to future scholarship in which the consideration of Tolkien’s female characters, and their intersections with feminisms, will not seem so perilous in the growing body of work on Tolkien’s legendarium and its reception. (39)
More broadly, Tolkien’s works have come a long way from marginalization to near-acceptance as part of the canon. One welcome trend I am seeing is the dropping of the previously nearly obligatory introductory apology for studying Tolkien that prefaces so many fine works of scholarship; we no longer need to make excuses as, from one direction, the lasting value and merit of genre fiction and media are more widely acknowledged, while from the other, popular culture becomes more of an acceptable topic for critical and theoretical study. Tolkien sits at the sweet spot in the center of these converging trends.
Our central aim in Perilous and Fair was to refute simplistic claims that Tolkien has nothing useful, relevant, or modern to say about women. We also intended to confirm that critics have engaged fruitfully with issues surrounding the feminine and female power since the early days of Tolkien scholarship and that they continue to do so. We hope this body of work will spark further discussion and criticism about the roles of women in Tolkien’s works and life and establish clearly the continuing importance of this topic to future scholarship.
(Works cited to follow)
[1] Much of this talk is taken from the Introduction to Perilous and Fair, co-written with Leslie Donovan, and from my contributions to panels on the book at SWPACA in 2014 and on Tolkien’s women at the New York Tolkien Conference in 2015.
[LAD1]Janet—Do you think we should break these paragraphs up more? They seem awfully long, but it seemed reasonable to divide it into sections. But perhaps it should be by article? What are your thoughts?