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:
The dwarves in the hobbit are portrayed as merry, they do a lot of singing and forgetting that there’s a dragon at the end of their journey — they’re generally happier than “great, we all might die” Gimli. And the two in the back are Fili and Kili, so no, they aren’t immune to ridiculous expressions.
The facial hair seems par the course for dwarves though.
Does this prachet guy write good women characters?
Yes, he does. Granny Weatherwax may well be the most awesome older female character ever written by a man.
Awesome!! I have a new book on my reading list.
If it’s specifically Pratchett’s feminist side you’re interested in the book I’d suggest starting with would be Monstrous Regiment. Any of the books centered around the witches would be good too – I like Lords and Ladies and Witches Abroad.
Cool, thanks Cassandra!!
Sorry, blockquote fail. It’s my text from “the Silmarillion” onwards.
I like Granny, but I have a problem with the way Pratchett himself seems to ADORE her and everything she does. She’s pretty nasty sometimes, the way she manipulates people around her and do things behind people’s back “for their own good” without their consent. I don’t have a problem with her being this way, but I dislike how Pratchett seems to think she can’t do anything wrong.
But yeah, overall he writes great female characters.
That’s not how I read his attitude towards that character at all. I think he’s very aware of her flaws – in fact I don’t think he’s ever written a character without obvious flaws.
@CassandraSays
My take on “fantasy can of worms”. I may have had a little too much fun doing it.
Ooh! I like WormDalf.
Well, take stuff as when she sent a letter to Verence telling him he’s gotta order Magrat to marry him or else it’s never gonna happen – and she also describes Magrat in that letter like she’s some little pet of hers. All this completely behind Magrat’s back. Magrat understandably gets pissed off about this when she finds out, but Nanny tells her more or less that Granny was right because thanks to this letter Magrat did end up with Verence. And it seems to be Pratchett’s attitude too, that at the end of the day it was okay for Granny to act this way, because she had Magrat’s best interests at heart and it worked out for the best.
So maybe I exaggerated when I said Pratchett seems to think that Granny can do no wrong – but it clearly seems as if he excuses some really bad stuff she does, because he loves the character so much.
Also! It’s interesting to me to look ay Granny and Vimes as sort of parallel characters, one female and one male. Both of them are nasty as hell at times, and it’s part of what makes them work as believable characters, imo. The fact that they could easily be every bit as bad as the people they’re fighting if they had just a little bit less of a conscience.
“She’s trying to find something to get offended by”
WHHOOOOSSH
There goes the irony, flying unnoticed above your heads.
Sybill Ramkin-Vimes gets very little facetime in Pratchett’s books, but she is still a remarkable character. I like her a great deal.
She really is. The Vimes books keep growing on me over time.
Also, in terms of great characters in general there’s the Patrician. Not nice, obviously, but a great character.
*sigh*
Elrond is NOT Priscilla. Priscilla was the bus, you idjits.
(Sorry, pet peeve.)
@Cassandra, funny you should say this, because there’s one other character in the Discworld series that often annoys me because I get the feeling that Pratchett is SO IN LOVE with his own creation when it comes to this one – and that’s Vimes. 😛
I think my favourite Pratchett character might be Nanny after all. I love how she’s a big, old, fat, jolly slut, who’s much cleverer than she lets on most of the time. Actually, how often do you see big, old, fat, jolly, clever sluts in litterature? Movies? Comic books? ANY medium? There’s Nanny… and no one else.
I like Sybill too btw. Although the portrayal of her and Vime’s marriage sometimes annoys me… There are places where he sneaks around and do stuff behind her back… Like she wants him to eat healthy food and he sneaks down unhealthy food when she isn’t looking… the tired old cliché of heterosexual marriage being a kind of ever-lasting conflict between the boring but responsible woman and the more hedonistic man.
Overall though I like her character.
I like Nanny and Casanunda. They’re fun, and oddly believable in context. Go for it, at any age!
It’s the combination of Nanny and Granny that really tips you off to just how feminist Pratchett’s worldview is. Can you imagine any other current male author writing those two characters and being so fond of both of them? Plus, if you’re a Brit, you probably have someone like Nanny Ogg somewhere in your family tree (I have several).
I love both Granny and Vimes, probably for the very reasons that you don’t like them!
OT but hey, happy 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation!
Also if we’re talking about an entire category of characters rather than an individual I’ve always been very fond of the Igors.
@Cassandra: I wouldn’t say I dislike them. I’m sort of conflicted when reading them. Particularly Granny. I LOVE it when she beats up bad guys. Literature should have more old wrinkly women being all bad-ass and beating up bad guys!
Oo, Tolkien and Pratchett, two of my favorites.
If you want to read a perfectly brilliant deconstruction of Tolkien’s orcs, and other problematic issues, I can highly recommend Mary Gentle’s Grunts! which is a lovely satire of the race, gender, and class issues in Tolkien’s work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunts! Trigger Warning for graphic rape, violence, mayhem, etc. (In this novel, the female orcs fight alongside the male orcs–just beause the men and elves cannot tell a female orc from a male orc isn’t their fault!).
I didn’t mean to imply that all orcs were created from prisoners–it’s as others have said, MOrgoth (who was a Vala, and who is sort of an analog to Lucifer in the creation myth) took prisoners and tormented them and brainwashed them into orcs–but yes, they could reproduce, and even maintain their own cultures (and different languages, though Tolkien never created much of the Orcish languages–he creates parts of 14 different languages, spending the most time on Elvish). This is not in the major fictions of the legendarium: you have to go to the HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH and Tolkien’s letters (and the theories changed over time: after the US bombed Japan, Tolkien wrote bitterly that Orcs had to have descended from men).
There are goblins (which JRRT had in THE HOBBIT) as well as orcs — and then the Uruk-hai–all fairly hostile to each other. And since the orcs were enslaved by Morgoth, then Sauron, the idea of forced breeding doesn’t disagree with anything I’ve read–and there are bits and pieces in LOTR where it’s clear that many of the orcs resent their servitude and want to escape from Sauron (and from under the Nazgul)–granted, it’s to set up on their own as a gang of robbers, but still!
Elves reproduce rarely (immortals, after all), and as someone said, Tolkien has a whole long essay on their habits and customs. I think, if I recall the numbers correctly, that only 1 in 3 dwarves is a woman–so there again, marriage is fairly rare. Still, when the timeline is thousands of years (First Age and Second Age and into the Third Age), populations can build up.
There’s a definite sense of asexuality in Tolkien’s worlds/characters: he just wasn’t writing about love and romance and sex in any way.
The SILM is also pretty clear that men can fail/be corrupted as well as Elves — in fact the “Black Numenoreans” refers not to skin color but to Numenoreans who went over to Sauron by choice, and there are references to the negative impact colonialism/empire building has in the histories of both Numenor and Gondor. (Tolkien thought everything went pear-shaped after the Normans invaded England in 1066 and started empire-building). Dwarves, also, have historically worked with goblins and orcs and others–different groups of dwarves might ally with the goblins–others were allied with the Elves (the inscription on the gate of Moria refers to a time when one group of Elves who were very interested in building and technology–the ones who worked with Sauron on the Rings–were allied with the Dwarves, before the balrog was awoken). Sauron (and Morgoth) could take very fair forms, and often worked through seduction/persuasion until they were defeated in certain ways and sort of blasted out (Sauron was a Maia–like Gandalf–so it’s more accurate to think of them as spirits taking bodily form temporarily than as an elemental aspect of their being).
Since a bunch of this information is dealt with only in the SILM or his letters and other unpublished writings, it has to be dug for (although there’s scholarship on it all), and it doesn’t in any way change the impact of the more popular texts!
I don’t at all disagree that Tolkien’s work is racist and sexist (and elitist! and classist)–I just disagree with the idea that he himself is uniquely bad/worse than just about anybody else living during the time he did. This relates to the tendency in literary studies, still, to see the so called great/canonical literature as universal and GOOD, and therefore not at all racist or sexist (when it is), and to dismiss popular genres as bad not only in writing but ideological apparatus.
Oh, and someone married Tolkien marrying late: sorry, am sneaking in to comment in between work and getting ready to leave for conference, so am not looking it up.
No, that was C.S. Lewis who married late.
Tolkien met Edith Bratt (also an orphan, at the boarding house they both lived in), when they were both adolescents, and she was three years older than him, and they fell in love–but when the priest who was Tolkien’s guardian saw him having tea with her in a public tea shop, he extracted a promise from JRRT to not do anything until he was an adult. Tolkien agreed, but wrote her immediately upon turning 21–and they were married fairly soon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Tolkien
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien#Courtship_and_marriage
She died before him, and he had “Luthien” engraved on her tombstone; “Beren” is on his–there’s evidence in the letter that that story was sort of his myth for their relationship.