Uh oh! It seems that some woman is offering some opinions about Tolkien!
Over on Time.com, Ruth Davis Konigsberg has a brief personal essay reflecting on the almost complete lack of female characters in the new Hobbit film, and in Tolkien’s ouvre generally. As she notes, it’s not until about two hours in to the nearly three-hour movie that “we finally meet someone without a Y chromosome,” namely Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel — and she was added into the originally all-male story by the screenwriters. Blanchette’s is the only female name out of 37 named in the cast list – though there are a couple of unnamed female characters who make brief appearances.
“I did not read The Hobbit or the The Lord of the Rings trilogy as a child, and I have always felt a bit alienated from the fandom surrounding them,” Konigsberg observes.
Now I think I know why: Tolkien seems to have wiped women off the face of Middle-earth. I suppose it’s understandable that a story in which the primary activity seems to be chopping off each other’s body parts for no particular reason might be a little heavy on male characters — although it’s not as though Tolkien had to hew to historical accuracy when he created his fantastical world. The problem is one of biological accuracy. Tolkien’s characters defy the basics of reproduction: dwarf fathers beget dwarf sons, hobbit uncles pass rings down to hobbit nephews. If there are any mothers or daughters, aunts or nieces, they make no appearances. Trolls and orcs especially seem to rely on asexual reproduction, breeding whole male populations, which of course come in handy when amassing an army to attack the dwarves and elves.
Yes, yes, as she admits, Tolkien’s few female characters tend to be powerful. But that hardly changes the basic fact that the Hobbit, and Tolkien generally, is overloaded with dudes.
These fairly commonplace observations have, naturally, sent the orcs and the elf princesses of the Men’s Rights subreddit into an uproar. Naturally, none of them seem to have bothered to read any of Konigsberg’s brief piece before setting forth their opinions, which sometimes accuse her of ignoring things she specifically acknowledged (like that whole powerful-female-character thing), and completely miss that the bit about reproduction is, you know, a joke on Konigsberg’s part.
Here are some of my favorite idiotic comments from the “discussion.” (Click on the yellow comments to see the originals on Reddit.)
Uh, Jane Austen’s books are filled with dudes. Especially Pride and Prejudice 2: Mr. Darcy’s Revenge, which was later adapted into a buddy cop movie starring Robin Williams and Danny Glover.
EDITED TO ADD: Somehow forgot to include two of my favorite comments:
Oh, and if you were unable to find a woman in the picture above, try this one instead:
Grunts was GREAT! I loved that book.
I have to say I am much liking the discussions of Tolkien.
Aergenti: Lovecraft is a small doses thing.
1: He is racist as all fuck. Not just of a racist time, but racist for his time.
2: The central element of most of his stories is the same. He knew it, and didn’t care. He even wrote a story to respond to the complaint that his mcguffin was always the same, and a bit of a cop-out.
He used the mcguffin to do it.
The prose is purple, but not bad for what it is, if you can deal witht he other two (and to be fair, the racism isn’t, as I recall, a dominant theme, but when it shows up, it’s there.
So not a Lovecraft fan, but this is a pretty good essay over the issues of racism and immigration issues in Lovecraft (characterized as “blunt, ugly, and unavoidable.”) Spoilers to the max throughout as is the case with any sort of analytical article.
http://www.contrasoma.com/writing/lovecraft.html
I think Pratchett grew as an author in terms of portraying women–compared the first attempt at Granny (Equal Rites) over her later development!
ARGH MUST GO! Drive to airport hotel LOOMS.
*must remember to come back to talk about Pratchett*(
(OH, in GUARDS!GUARDS! there’s a lovely take off of the lost heir returning to slay the dragon and get the kingdom that doesn’t quite work out! Pratchett has said that in some of his earlier work he was satirizing the bad imitators of Tolkien!).
Yeah, Lovecraft stories feature a lot of black and white underclass people bringing about the apocalypse. And usually upper-middle class white men stop it at the cost of being forever tainted by the experience.
It’s been awhile since I read him, and there are probably too many stories for me to give you specific titles to avoid, but here’s a basic breakdown. There are the Lovecraft stories with racist symbolism that you might miss if you don’t know what a tool he was, like how “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is actually about how racial mixing leads to horrible degeneration and worship of evil gods. There’s probably too many in this vein to avoid while still getting a good feel for Lovecraft, but I found these stories were at least tolerable.
Then there are the stories where brown people are all cultists trying to end the world. These ones get pretty bad, and range from “seriously uncomfortable” to “basically unreadably racist,” but they’re less common; if you’re reading from a collection and it looks like the protagonists are going to go anywhere outside the United States, assume it’s gonna get pretty racist and proceed with caution.
And then there are the stories where Lovecraft goes wild with the racist dehumanizing descriptions. The only one I remember is “Herbert West, Reanimator,” which is basically a story about how black people are wild animals disguised as a second-rate Frankenstein rip-off. Definitely skip that one.
Ultimately, I don’t think you can avoid the racism if you want a decent representation of Lovecraft’s writings (and I don’t think you should if you want to get a good feel for him as a writer; his racism was really foundational to his artistic output). Whether you can still enjoy the stories or whether it ruins the stories for you, I can’t predict.
There’s one bit in Lovecraf that struck me. In The Colour Out of Space, a horse called Hero is killed, and iirc the narrator says “but there was no time to mourn” – how often is compassion for an animal expressed in fantasy/horror/sf, especially from that long ago?
I have to say that Granny Weatherwax is my favorite character. I aspire to be her one day.
Death is my favorite Pratchett character, but there’s so many wonderful ones to choose from that it’s about an 87-way tie for second place. (Well…Nanny might actually have second locked up. An 86-way tie for third, then.)
Random sidenote: a few years back, I ran a homebrew RPG murder-mystery game set in Ankh-Morpork, and it was ridiculously, hilariously fun trying to script and describe events in Pratchett’s voice – but the absolute high point for me, and the reason the game was murder-mystery themed in the first place, was that as the GM, I got to play Death. (I also got to play Vetinari and all members of the Watch except Nobby and Fred Colon, because the rules allowed people to play as established characters – which, IIRC, all but one of my players opted to do, which made it even more fun – but barred them from choosing any characters “who would be of any actual use in solving a murder.”) I really need to find another crowd of people who would be into an RPG that nerdy and try to put that game together again someday, because it was unquestionably the most fun role-playing experience I’ve ever had.
Oh, and since people are posting the moments that made them fall in love with Pratchett, this was mine:
There was a rattling behind Mr. Pin as Mr. Tulip pulled out his set of stylish executive barbecue tools.
“What are you doing?”
“That -ing zombie is going to end up on the end of a couple of -ing handy and versatile kebab skewers,” said Mr. Tulip. “An’ then I’m gonna put the edge on this -ing spatula. An’ then…then I’m gonna get medieval on his arse.”
There were more pressing problems, but this one intrigued Mr. Pin.
“How, exactly?” he said.
“I thought maybe a maypole,” said Mr. Tulip reflectively. “An’ then a display of country dancing, land tillage under the three-field system, several plagues, and, if my -ing hand ain’t too tired, the invention of the -ing horse collar.”
I had just picked up The Truth by chance, not knowing what it was, and when I hit that passage I laughed so hard I had to put the book down. And then I bought a pile of Discworld novels the next week. 🙂
We’re talking about gender in Discworld, and no one’s mentioned the Dwarves yet?
For the un-initiated: Pratchett’s dwarves have genders, but no outward gender expression to differentiate them (he quips that a major step of dwarvish courtship is sussing out whether the other party is of a gender you’re interested in). But when dwarves start moving to human cities, the women start embracing some of human women’s gender expression, and it’s interesting to see what they keep and what they discard (they may weld heels onto their mining boots, but they’ll never shave their beards!) And of course, there’s the regressive backlash back in the dwarvish cities…
And since we’re sharing our favorite Pratchett quotes (and since I have Hogfather on the brain as reading it is one of my annual Xmas traditions):
I’ve read that line 3,000 times, and “where the falling angel meets the rising ape” still gives me stomach butterflies.
One of my favorite things about Pratchett is that you think you’re just reading a funny fantasy story, and then BOOM!, he drops some philosophy on you. Hogfather, for example, isn’t just a parody of English Christmas customs wrapped around a story about a man trying to kill
Santa Clausthe Hogfather – it’s also a meditation on the importance of stories and myths. (See also: Witches Abroad, which incidentally has a couple of Tolkien references among all the fairy tale nods and is therefore technically on-topic for this post).Polliwog, love that rule in your RPG about not playing anyone who’d actually be any use in a murder investigation – did the murder get solved? 😀
Emily, that’s one of my favorite quotes, too. Hogfather is a strong contender for my favorite Discworld novel, both because of that fascinating musing on the role of myth and because the shopping-mall-Santa scene gives me the giggles anew every single time I read it. 🙂
emilygoddess, I just LOVE Hogfather. It’s the first Death story I read and I think I fell for him in it. Especially when he’s desperately trying to tell anyone he really is the Hogfather, while the pillow under his robe is heading south and the strings on his beard are all too obvious. And how he gets so caught up in the role and the injustices and sadness in life, and refuses to play by those “that’s how the stories go” rules.
APPLE! SAUCE!
Eventually, though it took them a while! In the meantime, my players managed to chase after and/or accuse about fifteen completely incorrect suspects, get several more people killed, burn down the Mended Drum again, and fill Unseen University with several million very angry mice.
It was AWESOME. 🙂
“I saw your piggy do a wee!” Yeah, Pratchett knows kids as well as he knows cats.
Gollum was supposed to have come from a sort of pre-hobbit race….
Polliwog – ROFL that’s even worse than one of the actual novels!
emilygoddess – that, and those boars are AWESOME in that scene. The way he describes their noises – wow!
Another of my favorite Pratchett lines is the one in Witches Abroad about the landlord being a real bloodsucker.
(He’s a vampire)
Ooh, in the comments- “speaking as a female (anyone else see a red flag’ I am embarrassed to be associated with you.”
Speaking of vampires:
“Under the table, Greebo sat and washed himself. Occasionally he burped. Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.”
Witches Abroad
Oooh i like this one: “The writer might want to do a little bit more research on the subject material. Tolkien actually had a very high regard for women and because of that, he found it very hard to write them, which is why all his female characters tend to be Goddesses, queens, etc.”
haha, please don’t make Tolkien into a Nice Guy.
OMG, he’s right! Galadriel totally friendzoned everyone!
Well, except Celeborn, but he doesn’t strike me as being a Bad Boy!
With all the crap the writers of The Hobbit movie did to change it into a trilogy, they could have added more women characters, or have at least cast some protagonist-type characters with non-lily-white actors (Hello, LoTR trilogy! I am talking to YOU!). That’s what annoys me.
Am I angry? No, merely annoyed. And really, I’m much, much more disappointed than I am annoyed.
Do I hate Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories? No, I grew up reading them and still consider them important, in spite of all their flaws. What I wish is that the people adapting them to modern film would try to make them a little less of an all-white BroFest.