Rich and Strange Aeons

‘The old fortress, very old, very horrible now. We used to hear tales from the South, when Sméagol was young, long ago. O yes, we used to tell lots of tales in the evening, sitting by the banks of the Great River, in the willow-lands, when the River was younger too, gollum, gollum.’ He began to weep and mutter. The hobbits waited patiently.

‘Tales out of the South,’ Gollum went on again, ‘about the tall Men with the shining eyes, and their houses like hills of stone, and the silver crown of their King and his White Tree: wonderful tales. They built very tall towers, and one they raised was silver-white, and in it there was a stone like the Moon, and round it were great white walls. O yes, there were many tales about the Tower of the Moon.’

‘That would be Minas Ithil that Isildur the son of Elendil built,’ said Frodo. ‘It was Isildur who cut off the finger of the Enemy.’

‘Yes, He has only four on the Black Hand, but they are enough,’ said Gollum shuddering. ‘And He hated Isildur’s city.’

I'm struck by child Smeagol hearing stories about Minas Ithil, built 2500 years earlier, and fallen to the Nazgul 400 years before.

Also reminder that Sauron had a body, which Gollum got to personally see.

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/

"Critics were divided on the scene where Arwen tells Frodo the history of the rings while naked in the bath, but audiences gave it the highest ratings of the 2023 season..."

I'm reading this George MacDonald book, said to be an influence on Tolkien. It certainly does see reminiscent of the Hobbit and the Prologue, and maybe the Father Christmas Letters and my dim memories of the Lost Tales. But unlike some people (Tolkien), there's a note as to what the goblins live on:

The goats belonged to the miners mostly-a few of them to Curdie's mother; but there were a good many wild ones that seemed to belong to nobody. These the goblins counted theirs, and it was upon them partly that they lived. They set snares and dug pits for them; and did not scruple to take what tame ones happened to be caught; but they did not try to steal them in any other manner, because they were afraid of the dogs the hill-people kept to watch them, for the knowing dogs always tried to bite their feet. But the goblins had a kind of sheep of their own—very queer creatures, which they drove out to feed at night

I'm reading the Silmarillion again, for the first time in years and years. This edition includes his letter to a publisher, pushing for publishing it with LotR. As a summary it's a bit dull, but includes a couple of interesting points. One is that he views A Fall as essential to a story, which certainly makes for tragedy and loss, but seems a bit depressing. (Gaiman, as expressed through Desire in Endless Nights, has a different perspective: "Let me tell you how every story begins: someone wanted something.")

The other is that his work is non-anthropocentric, which yeah. Especially the Silmarillion and First Age stuff, which is mostly elf-centric, where you could have a timeskip of centuries and still feature the same characters. But of course The Hobbit and LotR are hobbit-centric, not human-centric, and while hobbits are a lot like humans -- in some ways, more so than the Dunedain, with their long lives and implied psychic powers -- they're technically not human.

For all the talk of Tolkien's alleged imitators in fantasy, how many have non-humans as the star characters?

(Two come to mind. Watership Down, which whether it was directly influenced by Tolkien or not sure seems like it could have been, conlang and all; and Hodgell's Kencyrath, who are magical humanoids closer to us than Tolkien's immortal elves, but different enough to give a biologist pause about species definitions. Including mental differences: incidents of Kencyr lying or breaking sworn oaths can be counted on one hand.)

Communities need walkability https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/8/4/want-community-build-walkability

Tor.com analysis of Eowyn, including earlier text where she was more accepted as a leader and Aragorn's only love interest. https://www.tor.com/2019/04/04/exploring-the-peoples-of-middle-earth-eowyn-shieldmaiden-of-rohan/

Analysis of Miriel, Feanor's mom. https://www.tor.com/2019/03/07/exploring-the-people-of-middle-earth-miriel-historian-of-the-noldor-pt-1/

And his wife! https://www.tor.com/2019/02/21/exploring-the-people-of-middle-earth-nerdanel-called-the-wise/

Great white sharks flee orcas https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/04/great-white-sharks-flee-killer-whales/587563/

Medieval people tried to keep clean, but clergy didn't. https://aeon.co/essays/medieval-people-were-surprisingly-clean-apart-from-the-clergy
(OTOH there's some passage complaining about the Danes washing their hair and stealing English women.)

Sansa Stark as Gothic heroine, plus what that even means. https://www.tor.com/2019/04/18/the-gothic-and-game-of-thrones-part-i-the-burial-of-sansa-stark/

What the Mona Lisa probably looks like under the grime and yellowed varnish: https://matiasventura.com/post/the-colours-of-the-mona-lisa/ (Prado copy) and http://www.lumiere-technology.com/Pages/News/news3.htm (digital de-varnishing)

Racist history of zoning https://medium.com/@ABetterCAF/why-we-keep-saying-us-zoning-laws-are-the-legacy-of-racism-eee64e58e337

Microwave weapons are a failure https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/high-power-microwave-weapons-start-to-look-like-dead-end/

His essay on osanwe-kenta says it's not limited by range, just familiarity, like Mind Touch in the Blue Rose RPG. While we see some telepathy in LotR, one doesn't really get a sense of long range communications. Ditto for the Noldor in Beleriand, I don't recall a sense of either using palantiri (supposedly invented by Feanor!) or telepathic cell phones between intimates.

One of the Middle-Earth palantiri was put up in Elostirion and could only look west, back to the Master-Stone in Avallone. This tells me Elrond could have been chatting with his (biological) parents for the past 3000 years. Raise your hand if you ever thought that was implied by the texts...

Overwhelmingly male characters, speaking and non-, and the girls don't get to do much. http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2011/05/reading-dr-seuss-can-be-dangerous.html

'Nel notes that it was pointed out to Geisel that there was a line from ‘And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street’ that was sexist (“Say – anyone could think of that, Jack or Fred or Joe or Nat – Say, even Jane could think of that.”) and when asked to change that line, he called the request “beyond contempt”.'


Sample of Republican predictions about Obama's administration. Not exactly accurate. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/01/01/3607416/4-things-2015-obama-reelected/

(FB warning) description by a black Harvard attorney of how he's treated as a black man. Not well. https://www.facebook.com/yani.copas/posts/10152921411817114


I hadn't noticed before that the Nandor knew about hobbits. http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?745784-LotR-What-s-the-relationship-between-Rivendell-Mirkwood-and-Lothlorien&p=18612060#post18612060


men with guns feel like victims http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/30/opinion/police-respect-squandered-in-attacks-on-de-blasio.html
and go on effective strike http://nypost.com/2014/12/29/arrests-plummet-following-execution-of-two-cops/
union leader calls mayor an accomplice to murder http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/31/opinion/when-new-york-city-police-walk-off-the-job.html
NYPD "will only make arrests when it has to". As opposed to... when it feels like? http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-nypds-work-stoppage-is-surreal-20141231


why do women menstruate? http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-evolutionary-benefit-or-purpose-of-having-periods

The Hobbit

Nothing here, except mention of Bilbo's mother, Belladonna Took, and Bilbo's newphews and nieces at the end. And the spiders, but I don't think they're clearly female in the text, or at all, just by extrapolation from Ungoliant, Shelob, and spider biology.

To be fair, there's not that many named characters outside the main party. Elrond, Gollum, Beorn, Bard, Smaug, a thrush, and Dain (who I don't think even has a speaking role, ditto Bolg chief of the Five Armies goblins.) There's a few more by title: the Great Goblin, the Elvenking, the Master.

Gandalf does bring up Belladonna to compare Bilbo unfavorably to her. There's Interesting History there that AFAIK Tolkien never hinted at.

The Lord of the Rings

Lobelia, Goldberry, Galadriel, Eowyn, Shelob, Ioreth, Arwen, Rosie. More get mentioned: Luthien and Nimrodel. This is out of many more named side-characters; LotR probably has more than the Hobbit just by the birthday party, never mind by the time Frodo leaves Bree.

What's interesting or more damning is to consider the points at which female characters could have been bigger parts of the story without great distortion or 'forcing' martial roles on women. For example, Mrs. Maggot and her daughters bustle around but she's given only one line, unlike Goldberry, or Mr. Maggot's chattiness. If there is a Mrs. Butterbur she's back in the kitchen, again unlike Goldberry. Despite the elves supposedly being fairly egalitarian there are no women mentioned at the Council of Elrond, not even Arwen, nor was one mentioned in conjunction with Gildor Inglorion back in the Shire. Theoden's wife is dead if he ever married; Denethor's wife is dead; Boromir probably never married. Minas Tirith is practically empty of women, because they and the kids have been sent away for safety, but given the nature of the Enemy, was that really safer than being in Minas Tirith? Sauron could have swept the countryside instead... point is, author made a choice that minimized female presence.

The Hobbit is odder: who's to say some of the elven guards and porters, or people in Lake-Town, weren't women? They're just generic people in the text, after all.

Galadriel's a very strong and significant if brief character, Eowyn's strong, Ioreth is, well, memorable, but there's still a lot missing. The Entwives, of course, are literally missing.

The Maiar-Istari were all sent as advisors in the form of old Men, specifically male.

The Silmarillion and other material

A lot of characters in this one, as listed here. Another post claims

I've also often wondered if Tolkien became concerned about the lack of important female characters while writing LotR, because when he returned to working on The Silmarillion after writing LotR, he added even more! It emerges from the History of Middle-earth series that Miriel (Feanor's mother), Indis (Feanor's stepmother/Galadriel's grandmother), Lady Haleth (the founder of the Haladin, who was "a renowned amazon with a picked bodyguard of women"), Emeldir the Manhearted (Beren's mother), Turin's friend Nellas, the wise-woman Andreth, and Queen Erendis of Numenor were all created by Tolkien after the writing of LotR. (Also, of course, Galadriel was only introduced into the legends of the First Age after the writing of LotR, for which she was originally created.)


Plus there's frigging Luthien, Melian, Idril, Finduilas, Nienor, Elwing, Aredhel, Varda/Elbereth, Yavanna, and more -- minor Valar or Maiar, various wives at least get names. Not all get great speaking parts but the Silmarillion is a tale of deeds, not a novel, so speaking roles aren't abundant. But they often Do Things, or defy people. Luthien defies her father and the devil, Melian protects a kingdom, Idril saves the remnant of one, Aredhel defies her relatives and later her husband, Galadriel defies everyone, Andreth has a spirited philosophical discussion about mortality with Finrod. Nerdanel restrained and then defied her husband, Feanor(!), as well as being an unusual crafter and *not* an epic beauty.