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:
ANd the New Year came in while I was writing that screed above!
Happy New Year! I hope 2013 is better than 2012 (our 2012 was pretty lousy).
OK, I shall dump more stuff on you all: Eowyn! (*waves at The Omega Woman! ME TOO).
There are multiple drafts of Tolkien’s work published in the fourteen volume HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH with commentary by Christopher TOlkien. I have read them, some several times.
Eowyn: in an early version, she’s going to be ARagorn’s bride: when they come to Edoras, they see her and Theoden’s daughter (who gets no lines, and soon disappears).
Then, when Tolkien realized he wanted to bring the Elves and Men together again, he had to decide what to do with Eowyn. Aragorn and Arwen are actually first cousins–i.e. Elrond and Elros were the sons of Beren and Luthien, the first Man/Elf –and yep only female Elves give up their immortality for men!. When the problem of the disparate afterlife came up again, the Valar decided that they had to solve this issue, and gave Elrond and Elros a choice: Elf or Man. Elrond chosen the Elven side; Elros, the Men’s, and became the first King of Numenor (the island given to the Men who fought with the Elves against Morgoth). Elros’ line was long-lived (and Aragorn is descended from that)–but mortal–and although Numenor fell into corruption (prompted by Sauron), breaking the ban on mortals going to Valinor, the virtuous Elendil and his two sons (Isildur and Anarion) and others survived the disaster (think: Atlantis). Arwen was invented very late in the writing process (that’s why the backstory of ARagorn and ARwen is in an Appendix–so was Rosie Cotton, by the way!). So the ruling lines of Gondor go back to Numenor, and to Beren and Luthien.
ANyway–back to Eowyn. First he thought he’d kill her (battle)–she’s an Amazon, etc. Dies fighting.
But then Faramir came along (also very late in the process!), and that marriage occurred (and an alternate reading of her narrative arc is that she achieves a great feat on the battlefield–one no man could ever match, and one she could not surpass–and she marries a ruling noble and retires to be a co-ruler in Ithilien). A lot of feminist history has shown that women of all classes in the Middle AGes, especially the earlier periods, had more rights and choices than did women after the Renaissance got going (Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance,” http://www.duke.edu/web/rpc/country_and_city/women2.html, argued that the increasing power of the centralized state stripped women of previous rights).
So…it’s complicated. And some women did see, and still see, Eowyn as feminist (after years of debating what “feminist literature” might or might not mean, I’m dubious that there’s any way to define the work by the content–not after all the debates I’ve heard–and have settled on reader response being a huge part of determining what is or is not a feminist work).
Eowyn as a character has one of the more complex histories/developments in the work–and Tolkien struggled with what to do with her. And despite all the problems, she still has those great lines about a cage and what will happen to the women when the warriors lose.
::applause::
Ithiliana, that was the BEST comment!
@The Omega Woman: Are you talking about Aravis in The Horse and His Boy? The depiction of the Calormens in that book is just…. no.
*places it on the ground*
*pushes it away with a stick*
*backs away slowly*
Also, Ithiliana, those were fantastic! I would totally take your Hobbit course!
Eowyn struck me as all kinds of Nice Guy-ish, but I really liked having a lady character kill the witchking.
What a great description!
Also absent in Tolkein’s writing is humour. The Hobbit has a little, and Jackson had to add some laden jokes in LOTR and The Hobbit so Middle Earth wasn’t quite such a miserable place. That said, Tolkein was writing sixty years ago, does he really need to be taken so seriously?
I remember reading in one of my father’s numerous biographies of that gentleman that the reason Tolkien didn’t include more female characters was that he felt he knew very little about them. He’d married late and had very few female friends, so he didn’t feel competent in writing about them for fear of getting it wrong and offending them. My impression was that he stuck to Goddesses (Arwen and Galadriel), who’s internal lives he could avoid, and a single heroic, boyish female warrior, who was so like Brunhilde that Wagner and the Germanic folklorists had already done a lot of the work for him.
Mind you, in the Silmarillion you get to know Galadriel quite well and she changes a lot as she gets older. So at some point he must have started to feel more confident.
He was a child of his age, culture, class and education and I think it’s as well to bear those in mind when reading him,
I thought there was humour in Fellowship of the Ring – Bilbos’s party, and the parts where the hobbits were going through the Shire. There were glimmers of it in Legolas and Gimli, later – like when Gimli throws a fit over Merry and Pippin sitting smoking in the ruins of Isengard when he and Legolas have run and ridden all over the place trying to rescue them. Certainly the tone of the later parts of the story are much more serious, which is hardly surprising. The thing I find most annoying is the way Frodo is such a passive figure (to me). I get that it’s taking all he can do to resist the Ring, but it’s like his personality is sapped at the same time – the journey through Mordor is almost an extended road to Calvary.
Seranvali – those are very interesting points, and I would say kudos to Tolkien for not presuming about women characters, in that case!
Meh, Mr C fell asleep, he has the flu. Thus, I return! How’s 2013 looking for those on the other side of the world?
Also, I too read Eowyn as a bit Nice Girl, just didn’t have a term for it at the time.
(Cut me some slack, I was about 8 or 9.)
“Please write your epic set of novels featuring females as you would like them portrayed and leave the rest humanity that resides in reality alone. Thank you.”
This is my favorite one by far. It displays such a lack of awareness I almost wonder if it is a Poe. But look at those upvotes!
I’m a huge Tolkien fanboy. That doesn’t mean I won’t readily acknowledge the major flaws–sexism, classism, racism. You can be a fan of something that has things you don’t approve of–too many fans feel the need to insist that the things they like and their creators are perfect.
When adaptations are recreating his works with almost the exact same problems they were printed with originally? Yeah, probably.
Ithiliana is motivating me to finally finish reading The Return of the King. I’ll have to do it quick, though, since the last Wheel of Time book is coming out soon (another can of fantasy gender worms).
” (another can of fantasy gender worms)”
I want someone to draw this.
G’day from almost-over 1st January, Cassandra!
Must say the future’s looking pretty much the same around here. ::looks around:: Cats snoozing. Telly on. Me not doing the writing I am halfway through after days of procrastination. Nope, nothing very different here.
Ah, Wheel of Time. I think I got a little way into the second book and gave up. The whole bit with the women imprisoned (and was there something about metal bindings?) was so ewwww I couldn’t persist. Plus Mum had read further on and got pissed off with the whole Dragon business, and it didn’t sound like something I wanted to pursue. Just as well given how LONG that series proved!
I am just seeing a doco of a half-grown hippo who comes into a kitchen to drink tea from a bottle!
Yoyo:
She is indeed, but she had nothing to do with Heavenly Creatures. But this is an excellent excuse to recommend Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table, which is the other great early 90s NZ film about women’s lives.
Eowyn= Talyor Swift.
“Can’t you see that I’m the one that understands you?
Been here all along…
Why can’t you see-ee-ee
You belong with meee-ee-ee…”
*Snerk*
I’m just reading the Silmarillion and Beren’s and Luthien’s story. I thought them falling in love was pretty tired: He falls in love with her because she’s so beautiful and has a great singing voice, oh, that’s deep, and she just randomly falls in love with him back. However, I really like the rest of their story. Luthien’s father tells Beren he can marry Luthien if he brings back one of the Silmaril’s from Morgoth’s (the Big Bad) crown. Beren tries to, gets caught and thrown into prison. Luthien wants to save him, her father imprisons her high up in a tree to stop her from saving Beren, Luthien escapes by climbing down a rope made of her own hair and eventually saves Beren with the help of a magic dog. Finally they manage to get one of the Silmarils (although Luthien is really the one doing all the work here since she’s got magic powers and Beren doesn’t). In the end of that quest she saves his life after a werewolf bit of his hand. So she really is pretty far from the traditional fairy-tale princess, whom would have the prince doing all the work and fighting all the monsters. It’s clear that she’s not just some price for Beren to claim; SHE wants to marry HIM as well, and goes to great lengths to do so. And I think the subversion of the Rapunzel tale is cool too; that rather than a prince using her hair to rescue her, she’s using her hair to escape imprisonment herself and save her prince.
Now it was some time since I read the lord of the rings, but at the time I read Eowyn as not just doing anything for Aragorn – she was also really tired of just sitting at the castle like a good princess while the guys had all the action. There’s a little speech that Gandalf makes to her in the books that’s been transferred to Worma in the movie version that indicates as much. I was fine too with her completely giving up on fighting and marrying Faramir at the end of her arch – she’d already done a truly great deed, so maybe she was simply content then.
Galadriel wasn’t in the Bilbo book, but the stuff they added comes from other of Tolkien’s writings, it wasn’t invented for the movie from scratch.
So I’m in the camp who thinks Tolkien women are pretty good characters, BUT it’s still weird that there’s so few of them, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with calling that out. Now personally I’m much more annoyed with works that have lots of women in them but where the women are all stereotypical sexist characters, than with works that simply lack women. Still, it should be pointed out. I’m a big fan of the Bechdel test as well – not because a work that fails it is automatically sexist or one that passes it is automatically feminist (that is VERY much not true), but it’s an important eye-opener. We’re so used to seeing male-centric media that we often don’t react to it, although we totally notice when media is female-centric. Therefore, it’s important to keep pointing out.
@quantumscale I didn’t see Eowyn as going into battle or fighting the Witch King as a suicide thing at all. She was well-trained, and didn’t want to feel useless, hence the going into battle. She fought the Witch King because he killed her father in front of her.
To me the main sexism problem in LOTR is the under-representation of female characters rather than their actual portrayal.
Actually, despite being woman and white I reacted more to the racism in LOTR than to the under-representation of female characters… Scary people from the South and the East support Sauron while the noble Europeans fight him.
However, apparently Tolkien made notes and letters where he discussed what happened to the blue wizards. He figured that one of them went east and another south, and they were to help people in this area who were fighting Sauron. He was going back and forth on the issue of how successful the blue wizards were in that respect. Sometimes he thought that maybe they managed to stir up anti-Sauron revolutions in the east and south, and this helped weakening Sauron and therefore playing an indirect but important part in the ultimate success. It’s a pity we don’t have such stories… they would really have made the whole thing seem less racist.
I say this and I still love Tolkien. As others have pointed out, one can love something while recognising problematic elements.
It is a shame – though again, not surprising for the time and place – that the “Southrons” are just portrayed as a sort of mass of people deceived by Sauron. It’s almost odd in the context of the books being so influenced by Tolkien’s experiences in Europe during WWI.
If that makes no sense it’s because I’m posting half asleep after finally getting a blog done! Niters, all. 🙂
And yes, while TOlkien never settled on a single authoritative version of the orcs/goblins, the basic philosophy of his storyverse is that evil can corrupt, but never create–so Morgoth takes prisoners of war (elves and in some versions men as well) and corrupts them and tortures them and brainwashes them to create orcs and goblins — there was a whole shitload of wars in Middle-earth during the First and Second Age related in the Silmarillion.
It’s not obvious that every individual orch or goblin has to be created this way. (And I think Tolkien once said too that there “obviously” are female orchs as well, only we never see them in the books since they don’t go into battle.) Creationism rather than evolution is true in Tolkien’s universe, that much is clear. And it seems like only Illuvatar can create new species from scratch. But even if Morgoth originally made the orchs by torturing elves, it could be the case that the orchs could then produce more orchs the old-fashioned way.
Anyway, it’s clear that elves and dwarves reproduce through sex, it’s just that the women of these species (particularly when it comes to the dwarves) don’t play any parts in the stories.