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Tolkien has memorable women but not very many of them. They don't interact with each other much; in a lifetime of work the number of scenes that *might* pass the Bechdel test can be counted on one hand. Even dropping the "talk not about a man" requirement, just having two women talking at all, leaves us needing only two hands, I'm pretty sure. No woman with a role has a sister.
Also many of the women have a strong pedestal effect, from Idril and Luthien in 1917 to Galadriel in revisions shortly before his death.
GRRM in ASoIaF, despite writing about societies arguably worse for women than anything Tolkien put in the spotlight, has female characters up the wazoo, as POV characters, and interacting: talking, squabbling, plotting, running, using what power and influence they can even in a sexist society. I assume there's plenty of full Bechdel test passing, though I haven't read the books enough to safely assert it, and a lot of things the women would have to talk about would involve a man in some way.
I hate sweeping explanations in general, but have always found "a product of his time" a real copout when it comes to Tolkien. However, I ran into a more interesting version recently: product of his family.
Tolkien's mother died early, he had no sisters, was raised by a Catholic priest, and produced only one daughter. His adult life was dominated by WWI war experience and being a professor in early 1900s British colleges. It would seem that women were genuinely not very present in his life. As for the pedestal, he might have gone straight from "dead mother" to "Edith who will wait for me to be able to marry her despite my guardian's objections."
GRRM has two younger sisters. That's already a huge change in experience: not just one sister, but two of them, to highlight women not being the same. Wikipedia adds that he grew up in a house "belonging to his great-grandmother" which implies she was alive for part of his childhood, probably in addition to his mother, and who knows about grandmothers. His own adult life has been fantasy writing, SF fandom, and screenwriting, all of which have non-vanishing numbers of women. Well, I'm not sure about screenwriting, but film/TV production will have women somewhere in the process, if only as actors.
I would bet that having sisters by no means prevents a man from putting his love interest on a pedestal, but I would bet it at least reduces the chances of "What a Perfect Creature is Woman", what with seeing your sisters fight, annoy you, get sick, suffer cramps, head for the bathroom, get up with bedhead, etc.
So yeah. I wouldn't want to go to town to defend this idea, because people are individuals who make their choices, but the idea that women were in fact quite rare in Tolkien's lived experience, and not in GRRM's, seems worth pondering.
And for people who want to argue that the representation of women in Tolkien isn't a problem, this is undermined by evidence that *Tolkien* eventually thought it was a problem, with him writing a lot more women after LotR, and changing Haleth to a woman (without any romantic or reproductive plot that would require her to be one.)
Relevant links: https://mindstalk.dreamwidth.org/346625.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/g8df1p/hi_lady_tolkein_fans_how_do_you_feel_about_his/fonoqg1/
Also many of the women have a strong pedestal effect, from Idril and Luthien in 1917 to Galadriel in revisions shortly before his death.
GRRM in ASoIaF, despite writing about societies arguably worse for women than anything Tolkien put in the spotlight, has female characters up the wazoo, as POV characters, and interacting: talking, squabbling, plotting, running, using what power and influence they can even in a sexist society. I assume there's plenty of full Bechdel test passing, though I haven't read the books enough to safely assert it, and a lot of things the women would have to talk about would involve a man in some way.
I hate sweeping explanations in general, but have always found "a product of his time" a real copout when it comes to Tolkien. However, I ran into a more interesting version recently: product of his family.
Tolkien's mother died early, he had no sisters, was raised by a Catholic priest, and produced only one daughter. His adult life was dominated by WWI war experience and being a professor in early 1900s British colleges. It would seem that women were genuinely not very present in his life. As for the pedestal, he might have gone straight from "dead mother" to "Edith who will wait for me to be able to marry her despite my guardian's objections."
GRRM has two younger sisters. That's already a huge change in experience: not just one sister, but two of them, to highlight women not being the same. Wikipedia adds that he grew up in a house "belonging to his great-grandmother" which implies she was alive for part of his childhood, probably in addition to his mother, and who knows about grandmothers. His own adult life has been fantasy writing, SF fandom, and screenwriting, all of which have non-vanishing numbers of women. Well, I'm not sure about screenwriting, but film/TV production will have women somewhere in the process, if only as actors.
I would bet that having sisters by no means prevents a man from putting his love interest on a pedestal, but I would bet it at least reduces the chances of "What a Perfect Creature is Woman", what with seeing your sisters fight, annoy you, get sick, suffer cramps, head for the bathroom, get up with bedhead, etc.
So yeah. I wouldn't want to go to town to defend this idea, because people are individuals who make their choices, but the idea that women were in fact quite rare in Tolkien's lived experience, and not in GRRM's, seems worth pondering.
And for people who want to argue that the representation of women in Tolkien isn't a problem, this is undermined by evidence that *Tolkien* eventually thought it was a problem, with him writing a lot more women after LotR, and changing Haleth to a woman (without any romantic or reproductive plot that would require her to be one.)
Relevant links: https://mindstalk.dreamwidth.org/346625.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/g8df1p/hi_lady_tolkein_fans_how_do_you_feel_about_his/fonoqg1/
no subject
Date: 2020-04-27 07:56 (UTC)From:But I also think that Tolkien is more complicated than that. (I know a lot less about GRRM.) He starts out with more female characters, in some cases, and I'd argue that the 1917 versions of Luthien and Idril have less pedestal effect than later versions of these characters.
Also, for the presence of women in his life, there was Jane Neave who was a relative he was close to. And later at the university, he collaborated with one or two female scholars, especially Mary Salu and Simonne d'Ardenne. Admittedly not that many, so your general point still stands.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-27 08:39 (UTC)From:> more female
More?
> I'd argue that the 1917 versions of Luthien and Idril have less pedestal effect than later versions of these characters.
The Tor.com review of Idril made her sound perfect from the beginning. https://www.tor.com/2019/07/25/exploring-the-people-of-middle-earth-idril-the-far-sighted-wisest-of-counsellors/
> scholars
I've been reading the Letters, and he mentions some female colleague on the Continent who popped out of hiding after the Allies came and wanted to pick up where they'd left off.
But hardly any other women. Even his wife and daughter just get mentioned going to town or something, they don't seem to *do* anything worth telling Christopher about.
Of course there are at least a few letters to Naomi Mitchison about LotR, and maybe to some other woman.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-27 18:35 (UTC)From:There are some female characters that are never mentioned again (I'm not talking great numbers here, but still some), both in the early Lost Tales and in later draft versions.
For instance, Eowyn had a female cousin in early drafts and there were more women available to ride from Rohan as shield maidens, apparently. It looks as if emphasizing Eowyn's isolation was a conscious decision, when she was reconceived as much more desperate than she was, at the beginning.
Also, in the larger Legendarium, some female characters are not lost, but lose agency during revision or in abbreviated versions. They may or may not regain it in later drafts and, if they do, they may regain it in different fashion.
Idril was never intended to be morally gray, of course (unlike Galadriel), but in the Fall of Gondolin she seems more of a flesh-and-blood woman, rushing about in armour, weeping, laughing, and occasionally confused about what is going on. And we might well have seen her transformed again, if Tolkien had finished his later version of the Tuor story.
The Letters volume, of course, is heavily edited for relevance to LOTR and Tolkien's work on the Legendarium. It still contains at least three letters each (by a quick count) to Edith and to Jane Neave, and letters to other female addressees such as Pauline Baynes (his preferred illustrator), as well as Naomi Mitchison. And I really doubt that Tolkien wasn't telling Christopher anything more about Edith and Priscilla Tolkien than made it into that volume! Which is not to say that he doesn't seem to have regarded Inklings matters as predominantly a male-gendered thing, and so on.
Also, no woman with a role has a sister is not quite true. Yavanna has a sister, Vana (who had a larger role in lost tales). Nienor has a sister Lalaith, sadly deceased before she was born. It is quite true we do not get many conversations, of course!
no subject
Date: 2020-04-27 18:57 (UTC)From:Yeah, I wasn't thinking of Ainur relations, not sure that counts. :) Though interesting that Vana had more of a role.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-28 02:17 (UTC)From:"[The romantic chivalric tradition] takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man's eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars."