Lord of the Rings: Women

A few new thoughts about an old criticism

Thomas: So this week, someone had the brilliant idea that what the Internet needs is two men explaining female characters in Lord of the Rings to you. Maybe I should say two more men, because there’s already a massive Wikipedia article devoted to summarizing the many things various critics and “Tolkien scholars” have said.

Jude: Just to clarify, some of those people it quotes are women.

Thomas: Great. I’m just saying, it’s always hard to say something new about Lord of the Rings, but surely this is our toughest assignment yet

Jude: Those concerns are easily put to rest by the simple strategy, one we always follow in any case, of not bothering to read most of what has already been said. I doubt our readers have either, after all. Now if they really have read everything already said, well, they clearly have an insatiable appetite for this so they’ll enjoy yet another article. So we can’t lose!

Thomas: Famous last words

Jude: Let’s start by establishing some facts about what we’re up against here. Lord of the Rings is kind of famously a story by a dude, about dudes. There are nine people in the fellowship of the ring and they’re all men, for example. I thought we should start with some numbers, but there’s lots and lots of named characters that essentially don’t matter. That’s true even if you just restrict it to characters with dialogue.

So how many important characters are there, and how many are women? I pulled up the Wikipedia category “The Lord of the Rings characters” and am going to list all the characters that have their own independent Wikipedia page. Note this the real English Wikipedia, not one of the many Tolkien fan wikis.

There are 30 such characters. Of those, 25 of them are men and 5 of them are women, about 17%. Not terrible, I’d say! Could have been worse. To be honest I was expecting worse.

Thomas: I still say it’s worse. Are there really five female characters with their own pages? There are really only three important female characters. Don’t tell me Rosie Cotton has her own page.

Jude: Don’t be ridiculous, she doesn’t.

Thomas: Then who are they?

Jude: Very notable characters. Arwen, Galadriel, and Eowyn, for example.

Thomas: Yes, those were the three I mentioned earlier. So if not Rosie, who else is on your list? Lobelia Sackville-Baggins? Ioreth the nurse?

Jude: No, those are also silly. We’re talking important characters here. So another one is…ahem…Goldberry.

Thomas: You’re kidding me! Goldberry has her own Wikipedia page? That’s incredibly stupid.

Jude: What, you’d rather we shove her into a subsection of Tom Bombadil’s page? This is the twenty-first century, the post-Me Too era.

Thomas: This is clearly a double-standard. Or does Celeborn also get his own page?

Jude: Uh, no, he’s a redirect to Galadriel.

Thomas: I knew it.

Jude: You were complaining we weren’t going to say anything new, and here you are discovering that men are the underrepresented characters in Lord of the Rings.

Thomas: Celeborn’s representation in Lord of the Rings is fine, this is about Wikipedia. Which we’re not here to discuss, I know, but it’s just funny. Celeborn and Goldberry seem to me like equally unimportant characters. But wait, you said five female characters. Who is the fifth?

Jude: Shelob.

Thomas: That’s even worse. Shelob is a giant spider. She doesn’t count towards female representation

Jude: Why not?

Thomas: Because…because…she’s not a human being. A teenage girl reading Lord of the Rings doesn’t look at Shelob and see someone they can relate to.

Jude: Why not?

Thomas: Because…because a teenage girl isn’t a monstrous spider and can’t ever become one?

Jude: A teenage boy can’t become a walking tree, but Treebeard was on my list of male characters.

Thomas: Would the many people who have criticized the lack of women in Lord of the Rings be satisfied if you put out a slightly revised version with “who was female” appended to every occurrence of a horse?

Jude: Probably not, but Shelob is a much more powerful and impressive character than, say, Hasufel, the horse Eomer gives to Aragorn.

Thomas: Shelob is also a carnivorous monster born of a primordial evil that presumably was twisted by the story’s Satan analogue. She’s basically Satan’s grandchild. Grandspider. Or something.

Jude: Female representation doesn’t have to be limited to good characters. In fact, it shouldn’t be. Sauron is male, as is the Witch-King and Smaug in the Hobbit. Should all villains be male? It’s beneficial for representation that Shelob is female.

Thomas: Maybe I’d better see your list of male characters with Wikipedia pages to make sure it’s not full of absurdities like Bill the Pony or the spoon from Frodo’s drinking song.

Jude: Sure, here they are: Aragorn, Bilbo, Frodo, Tom Bombadil, Boromir, Merry, Denethor, Elendil, Elrond, Eomer, Faramir, Samwise Gamgee, Gandalf, Gimli, Glorfindel, Gollum, Grima Wormtongue, Isildur, Legolas, Radagast, Saruman, Theoden, Pippin, Treebeard, Witch-king of Angmar.

A very reasonable list, if I don’t say so myself. So I think this helps—

Thomas: Hold it, Sauron isn’t on that list! And I just checked and he does, in fact, have his own Wikipedia page.

Jude: For some reason it’s not in the category. Don’t complain to me, take it up with the bureaucrats of Wikipedia. I admit this method isn’t perfect, but I think it helps demonstrate that female representation is actually a pretty complex thing that few people think rigorously about.

Thomas: “There are very few female characters in Lord of the Rings” isn’t hard to express, though.

Jude: But why should we care? It might be a problem if most books didn’t have many female characters, but that’s something that—if we decided it was an issue—should be addressed at an industry level, not at the level of any one individual work. Is it a problem that the important characters in the Aubrey and Maturin series are all male? Or so I assume. I confess I’ve only read one of them, but the 2003 film adaptation is famously a movie with no female characters whatsoever.

Thomas: That’s a historical fiction series that takes place on sailing ships two hundred years ago. As a matter of history, those ships were crewed almost exclusively by men, so no, it’s not an issue if that’s reflected in a story about them. But Lord of the Rings isn’t historical fiction. It’s completely made up. You can’t say, “Well, historically speaking, nearly all jewelry-related adventure groups were comprised of male creatures.” Tolkien is writing loosely in traditions of folklore, but very, very loosely. So it’s reasonable to ask: in this fantasy, in which anything was possible, why are there so few women? Surely women’s lives and their interactions with men are, separately or in combination, extremely important components of the human experience?

Jude: I don’t think we’re going to get very far with “why”, though for those interested, I think I can gesture at an answer: Tolkien met Edith Bratt at age 16, married her at age 24, and seems to have been happily married for the next forty-seven years until Edith died two years before he did. There were a few bumps in their initial courtship, but all in all, romance and love and marriage were easy matters in his life compared to the horrors he saw firsthand in the first World War or the fear he must have felt staying home during the second World War while one of his sons fought in France and Germany.

But no one really cares about “why”. The reason this has been so hotly debated is that there’s a kind of value judgment beneath it. Some contemporary critics said the lack of women and, maybe more importantly for them, sexuality made Lord of the Rings fundamentally childish. But every work of art need not address all aspects of humanity to be “adult” or interesting to adults. Think of all the mindless Hollywood action movies that shoehorn in an incredibly underbaked “romance” just to check that box. Are they more “adult” than Lord of the Rings?

Thomas: Hollywood romances are juvenile, yes, but they do it because they think it makes more people come to the movie.

Jude: Well, plenty of people have bought Lord of the Rings and plenty more have seen the movies, so there’s no problems there.

Thomas: I think we can dispense with those old critics. The uncomfortable feeling about it today stems from the sense that there’s something unhealthy in the lack of female characters. It sets off people’s misogyny radars. A weird decision must come from a weird person.

Jude: That’s a very narrow-minded way to approach art. Great artists are all weird people. Great art is itself weird. By definition, a normal person produces art that’s mediocre at best and probably flat-out bad.

Have you ever noticed there are very few parent/child relationships in Lord of the Rings? There’s Denethor with Boromir and Faramir, of course, and then there’s a couple characters who technically are parent and child but who never interact in that way, like Gimli and Gloin or Legolas and Thranduil, but Frodo and Eomer are orphans, Aragorn’s mother lives for much of his life but is basically not mentioned, and characters like Gandalf and Treebeard that, so far as we can tell, literally have no parents. We could ask why and once again, speculate based on Tolkien’s biography: his father died when he was three years old and his mother died when he was twelve. It’s something unusual about him that manifests in his fiction. But so what?

Thomas: People aren’t worried about the oppression of orphans. Maybe they should be, actually! But there’s not an awareness of systemic discrimination, prejudice, and stereotyping of orphans that there has been with women. In particular, many believe that girls are harmed—or at the very least, were harmed in the past—by growing up without good fictional role models. As white men we can’t really relate to this firsthand, but there’s lots of testimony from people about what a difference it made when they finally found an adventure story, fantasy story, movie, or whatever, where they felt a hero or heroine represented them in some way by sharing their gender, race, sexual orientation, and so on.

Jude: Maybe this is a good time to shift gears and look individually at the three major female characters of Lord of the Rings. Obviously someone wanting to see the exact image of a liberated woman of 2024 will be definitely be disappointed by what they find in a book written by a middle-aged male professor in the 1940s and 1950s, but I think there’s more good than bad here.

Thomas: So are we starting with Goldberry or Shelob?

Jude: We’re starting with Arwen. Her role in the story perhaps mirrors that of female characters in the story more generally: she seems like she ought to be a central character but there’s not nearly as much of her in the story as you’d expect. Frodo sees her at a dinner in Rivendell, then she shows up at the end after the victory to marry Aragorn, something that’s a much bigger deal than it sounds like because she’s half-Elven and by marrying Aragorn, she turns out to be metaphysically renouncing her immortality and choosing to die like a mortal.

Thomas: I’d put it differently. She sits safely at home thoughout the story, sews Aragorn a “have fun storming the castle” banner, then marries him after it’s all over like she’s a prize on the top shelf at Chuck-E-Cheese that he’s redeeming after playing skee-ball for hours.

Jude: That banner plays a key role in one of the book’s most dramatic scenes…but yes. To read the story of their courtship and the clear explanation of Arwen’s sacrifice you have to read the appendices.

Thomas: Yeah, appendix A part (v), squeezed in after a genealogy of Aragorn and before the list of the kings of Rohan.

Jude: Tolkien did say it was the most important part of the appendices and insisted it be included when a Swedish publisher was going to drop all of them (and did drop all the others).

Thomas: But if it’s so important, why is it not in the text itself?

Jude: Tolkien said something to the effect that he couldn’t make it work structurally. I’m not sure if he meant the way the story is told by Hobbits or the timeframe of it.

Thomas: Sounds like he didn’t try hard enough. You know, I do like the idea of having Aragorn and Arwen meet, grow to love each other, get married, and go on a honeymoon to Ithilien or something, but all with Pippin standing around awkwardly at a polite distance, wishing he was somewhere else but forced to be there by the author.

Jude: As we’ve discussed previously, Tolkien felt the main theme of Lord of the Rings was death, something that doesn’t really come through clearly for most readers. That’s why he felt this story was important. And as far as Hobbit mediation, the appendix is written in a very elevated style. Elendil, for example, tells Aragorn he “shall neither have wife, nor bind any woman to you in troth”. I think Tolkien felt this story was too much a matter of legend to be told in the modernist style of the Hobbit portions of the main text.

Thomas: Maybe so, but he also elevates his style a great deal in sections of Return of the King when the Hobbits aren’t around. I think he just didn’t want to put this story in the main text and don’t really accept any of his justifications, even if he believed them himself. Somewhere deep down, he knew this shouldn’t be there.

People will say it gives Aragorn “motivation”, but this does nothing but cheapen Aragorn’s character. Is he only fighting against the forces of demonic evil because Elrond won’t let him marry Arwen unless he wins and becomes a great king? That’s a lot less heroic than the image of Aragorn we are consistently given in the text, the humble man who fights in the shadows to protect townspeople who scorn him.

Also, the relationship is fundamentally unequal. Both because Arwen is about 2,700 years old and Aragorn is just a very young-looking 87, but also Arwen is making this huge sacrifice for the relationship, leaving an immortal future spent with her family and friends for a hundred years of marriage to Aragorn. Whereas Aragorn is apparently marrying one of the hottest people on the planet. Good for him, but is that heroic?

Jude: Once again there’s a clear biographical analogy for all this. Tolkien met his future wife Edith when he was 16 and she was 19. He was Cathloic and she was Protestant. Tolkien’s guardian disapproved of their relationship and forbid any contact until Tolkien was 21. Tolkien waited, re-established contact, and soon they were engaged. The prospect of Edith converting to Catholicism caused her own guardian to throw her out of the house. They were engaged in 1913 but not married until 1916, when Tolkien was about to go to fight in France and it seemed nearly certain he would die.

All these facts are paralleled in Aragorn and Arwen’s story. Edith was three years older, not thousands of years, and she seemed to be choosing widowhood rather than death by marrying a young officer, but this must have all been deeply resonant for Tolkien himself. He probably knew on some level this wouldn’t have the same emotional power for many his readers, but he couldn’t bear to remove it, so he stashed it in the appendices.

When you look at it that way, I think it’s kind of sweet that he couldn’t resist putting his wife into the story.

Thomas: Maybe so, but previously we were talking about what message a female character sends to the hundreds of thousands—actually, probably millions—of girls and women who read Lord of the Rings. Arwen’s message seems to be: women should stay home and look pretty while men go out in the world and take care of the important things. If you get bored, try sewing something to help inspire your man to greatness.

Jude: Then let’s move on to a very different sort of character. Galadriel is an elf-queen, the “lady of the golden wood”. Tolkien doesn’t use this language, but in conventional terms she’s a formidable sorceress who is known and feared in neighboring Rohan. She’s married to Celeborn, but at all times he portrayed as very much the junior partner. She is confident that—unlike Frodo—she is “great” enough to use the One Ring to rule the entire world. But she is also wise enough—and good enough—to avoid the temptation of the ring, unlike Saruman and Boromir. She seems to be able to almost read minds and knows more than just about anyone else how bleak the circumstances are, but unlike Denethor she’s wise enough to avoid despair. She hands out magical artifacts, issues prophesies, and after Sauron’s downfall, she apparently destroys his old fortress of Dol Goldur more or less singlehandedly. Talk about a strong female character!

Thomas: I don’t know, she’s impressive, yes, but the text puts her on a pedestal. She’s more like the Virgin Mary than she is a real woman.

Jude: It’s true that some people come away with that impression, but Tolkien didn’t mean for Galadriel to be some sort of perfectly good person. The reason she’s in Middle-earth in the first place is she rebelled against God, or at least the angels, in the Silmarillion. It’s not supposed to be a given that she turns down the ring.

Thomas: Perhaps not, but she turns it down instantly, so it feels like it. This is going to be long enough without digging into women in the Silmarillion, but Tolkien only added her in after writing Lord of the Rings. Until then, it was just Fëanor and his sons leading the rebellion. And I think it’s worth mentioning that although Galadriel has powerful magic, Tolkien has this weird gendered take on magic where Fëanor and other male elves do things through a sort of engineering, creating gems and rings, whereas Galadriel just pours some water into a bowl. Very domestic.

Jude: I’m not sure exactly why, but Tolkien really wants magic to be vague and fuzzy, not rigorous and quantified. Maybe because to him it was analogous to creative art.

Thomas: But when Celebrimbor forges a ring of power, he’s literally creating something. When Galadriel pours water in a big bowl, all she’s created is a birdbath.

Jude: Well, to sum up, your objection to Galadriel is that she’s not a good female role model because she’s too impressive and powerful? But also that her magic is too wimpy?

Thomas: I should also mention that although Tolkien in all other ways writes a completely sexless narrative, he’s still got enough of a male gaze that it is really important to him to clearly establish that Galadriel is extremely attractive.

Jude: Maybe that’s just part of being a deeply impressive elf.

Thomas: Okay, then is Elrond hot?

Jude: Uh…probably?

Thomas: It doesn’t say, does it? Galadriel and Arwen are just so hot it has to be mentioned all the time, but what about Elrond or Aragorn?

Jude: I think it’s very safe to assume they are both super-hot.

Thomas: I disagree, but even granting that, with men it’s subtext whereas with the women it is text. Also, since I mentioned Arwen stays home until the war is won, I also need to point out that Galadriel stays home too.

Jude: So does her husband! And unlike the movie, so do all the elves she rules, male and female!

Thomas: Just saying. Even when Tolkien took the trouble to write her into the Silmarillion, he ended up having her stay in Doriath for basically the whole time. As disappointing as the Amazon TV series has been, at least they recognized that Galadriel ought to be doing cool things.

Jude: Then let’s turn to the third woman since she definitely does not just stay home. Éowyn is the niece of King Théoden. She endures a brief and incredibly unrequited crush on Aragorn before defying orders to remain at home to instead ride to war in disguise as a man. There she does what Aragorn and Théoden failed to do and kills the Witch-King, the leader of the Ringwraiths who have menaced Frodo and the other characters for the entire story. The feminism here is just off the charts, especially when you consider this is a novel from the 1950s.

Thomas: Except you somehow forgot to mention she gives up being a warrior, marries a random male character, and takes up gardening.

Jude: We’ll come to that, but first I think it’s worth quoting a big chunk of Éowyn’s conversation with Aragorn in Return of the King, after he insists on walking the paths of the dead:

‘You are a stern lord and resolute,’ she said; ‘and thus do men win renown.’ She paused. ‘Lord,’ she said, ‘if you must go, then let me ride in your following. For I am weary of skulking in the hills, and wish to face peril and battle.’

‘Your duty is with your people,’ he answered.

‘Too often have I heard of duty,’ she cried. ‘But am I not of the House of Eorl, a shieldmaiden and not a dry-nurse? I have waited on faltering feet long enough. Since they falter no longer, it seems, may I not now spend my life as I will?’

‘Few may do that with honour,’ he answered. ‘But as for you, lady: did you not accept the charge to govern the people until their lord’s return? If you had not been chosen, then some marshal or captain would have been set in the same place, and he could not ride away from his charge, were he weary of it or no.’

‘Shall I always be chosen?’ she said bitterly. ‘Shall I always be left behind when the Riders depart, to mind the house while they win renown, and find food and beds when they return?’

‘A time may come soon,’ said he, ‘when none will return. Then there will be need of valour without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defence of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.’

And she answered: ‘All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.’

‘What do you fear, lady?’ he asked.

‘A cage,’ she said. ‘To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.’

‘And yet you counselled me not to adventure on the road that I had chosen, because it is perilous?’

‘So may one counsel another,’ she said. ‘Yet I do not bid you flee from peril, but to ride to battle where your sword may win renown and victory. I would not see a thing that is high and excellent cast away needlessly.’

‘Nor would I,’ he said. ‘Therefore I say to you, lady: Stay! For you have no errand to the South.’

‘Neither have those others who go with thee. They go only because they would not be parted from thee – because they love thee.’ Then she turned and vanished into the night.

Thomas: This is a really good exchange and it’s all the more notable for how rare it is. Today books and movies are full of “banter” but it’s rare in Lord of the Rings for two sympathetic characters to disagree so sharply. That’s a shame because Tolkien is quite good at this.

Jude: Éowyn is not merely present in the story as this defiant warrior-woman archetype, I think she clearly gets the better of the much older and allegedly wiser Aragorn in this little debate.

Thomas: I wish, but I think we’re supposed to agree with Aragorn that Éowyn is being childish. She’s wrong to value fame and glory so highly.

Jude: Yes, despite the fact he’s writing an adventure story of the sort that inevitably glorifies battle to some degree, Tolkien served in the trenches and has no illusions about war. But Éowyn pivots and points out that if she shouldn’t risk her life fighting in Gondor, why on earth should Legolas and Gimli?

Thomas: Éowyn has that mic drop moment, but their friendship with Aragorn has been built through many months of dangerous travel, whereas she just has a schoolgirl crush on him. It’s not really equivalent and in the next scene Aragorn turns his back on her begging to accompany him and rides off.

Jude: But if the text is on Aragorn’s side, you have to explain why she grabs another, even more sympathetic character in Merry, rides off to war, and wins a shocking victory through a great act of heroism. Had she not been there to kill the Witch-King, the battle at Minas Tirith might not have been won, or at least might not have been won without far worse casualties.

Thomas: I’m sure Tolkien felt women were athletically inferior to men and had no business being on the battlefield. Éowyn nearly dies, and the sight of her on the battlefield causes Éomer to despair and nearly get killed himself. Putting female characters “in the refrigerator” just to motivate male characters is a trope we look down on these days.

Jude: You have to admit that Faramir is put in a very similar refrigerator—actually, the opposite—during the very same sequence. Gandalf has to go save him and, it is implied, as a result can’t prevent Théoden from being killed. Whereas nothing bad actually comes of Éomer’s charge. It all works out great in the end.

Thomas: Despair is Tolkien’s great sin, and Éowyn is guilty of it. Implied in her side of the argument above, and to an extent even in Aragorn’s responses, is the idea that they are inevitably going to lose, so why shouldn’t she lose fighting on the battlefield instead of amongst the burning houses afterward? She and Merry go to the battle as almost a kind of suicide.

Jude: True despair is a sin, but being valiant in the face of hopelessness is a great virtue for Tolkien. The reward for this is “eucatastrophe”, the sudden and unexpected good outcome that is meant to reflect, in Tolkien’s view, the religious truth of Jesus. 

Accordingly, he structures the battle at Minas Tirith as a series of hopeless moments that are unexpectedly relieved: the Witch-King breaking the gate only to hear the horns of Rohan, the Witch-King killing Theoden and saying no man can kill him only to be slain by Eowyn, Eomer finding not just Theoden dead but, seemingly, his sister and thinking all his loved ones are dead, and finally the arrival of the ships that seem sure to be bringing reinforcements from Umbar but instead are revealed as Aragorn leading men from southern Gondor.

Thomas: She still feels hopeless after the battle, but then there’s deliverance: a man. She ends up as Faramir’s prize for helping Frodo.

Jude: I think you could just as easily say Faramir is her prize for fighting courageously. She wouldn’t have met him if she had waited meekly in Rohan.

Thomas: Instead she retires meekly to Ithilien.

Jude: Because she rides to war so dramatically, people get hung up on the fact she settles down afterwards, but everyone in the story stops being a warrior. Frodo himself refuses to even fight when they return to the Shire. The text is consistent in favoring characters who have interests beyond war. It’s a failing of Boromir’s character that he doesn’t, for instance, and a credit to Faramir that he does. In marrying him, Éowyn puts away her childish things: the hopeless crush on Aragorn and the selfish desire for glory.

I think what’s most remarkable about her story is how much it leaves to the reader. Most of Lord of the Rings is black and white, but the text allows you to read about her and wish she stayed in the saddle as a cavalry commander, celebrate her turning to peaceful life, believe Aragorn was right and she should have done her duty at home, or exult in her daring decision to ride to war. Tolkien leaves readers to decide for themselves what to make of all of it.

Thomas: Made it’s time for us to do the same. Unless you want to spend a while discussing whether Shelob is a Freudian analogue for—

Jude: I really don’t, actually. So yes, we’ll leave Goldberry and Ioreth for the readers to decide about as well. Next time we’ll turn to Dune, which has…well, it has a very different set of things going on with its female characters that should provide an interesting contrast.