Lord of the Rings: Feminist or Flop?

🧝🏻‍♀️Ever wished there were more female characters (main or otherwise) in Lord of the Rings? Us too! We do love Eowyn and Galadriel, though. 🗡️ 

How do we approach Lord of the Rings' portrayal of women? What does it mean to write women well? Was Tolkien progressive for his time, or stuck in the past? 

Join us as we dive into the study and critique of Tolkien's representation of female characters in Lord of the Rings. 

Transcript

  📍  Hi, and welcome to the Literary Lamppost Podcast, where we analyze books and see what we can learn from them. 

I'm Caitlin. I'm a math grad student, but I love English and I love analyzing literature. And I'm Ashley, 

an assistant editor for a magazine and a writer. 

Today we are continuing on our series on Lord of the Rings.

Last episode, we talked about the Men of Lord of the Rings, and today we are talking about the women. And we will have one more, our third and final episode on Lord of the Rings next time where we'll be talking about good versus evil. So for those of you who need a bit of a reminder, the Lord of the Rings books follow a hobbit named Frodo who is tasked by a wizard Gandalf, with the very important task of taking a powerful but very dangerous ring to the place of its creation.

A volcano in the treacherous land of Mordor to be destroyed. 

FRO is accompanied by his faithful friend Sam, as well as two other hobbits. They join up with an elf, a dwarf, and a ranger, and they also encounter a lot of very cool characters and some pretty badass women. 

And today we are going to be talking about those very women.

Now, there's some controversy when it comes to the female characters in Lord of the Rings. There are not very many of them, and none of them are main characters. Interestingly, the Lord of the Rings books actually don't pass the Bechtel test. So the Bechtel test is based on three criteria. Number one, there have to be at least two women characters.

Number two, who talk to each other about number three, something other than a man. Now the Bechtel test was not created in order to bash certain films or books, but in order to create awareness around the lack of female representation in movies and books. Now, just because a film or a book passes doesn't necessarily mean it's a good representation of women, and just because it doesn't pass doesn't mean it's terrible, but it's just good to keep in mind because there are.

A shocking number of books and movies in which the girl characters are just side characters and exist only for the men's pleasure. I remember watching a movie with a group of boys once and feeling sad when it finished because the women practically never opened their mouths, and when they did, they were totally crazy and sex driven, and only talking about men even like fighting each other over the men.

They didn't have a single normal conversation, and the ones that didn't talk were dressed super sexily and just hung on the arms of the men. And the boys that I was with all loved the movie and it just made me feel a bit icky. And I was quite a bit younger at this time and I didn't know about the Bechtel test then, and I couldn't really put into words what it was that I was feeling.

Josh and I are watching Suits at the moment, and Suits is a relatively new show, and it takes like three seasons. For them to pass the Bechtel test. It's insane. Mm-hmm. All the women, like, there's female main characters, but they don't really talk to each other about anything other than the men in their lives until much later.

So it's still a very relevant test. Yeah. And Lord of the Rings does not pass this test, but the way that femininity is portrayed is a little more complex. And we can't just say that Tolkien hated women and that women are represented terribly, and that's that 

there are some really cool female characters in Lord of the Rings.

And the bit that doesn't pass is the fact that they don't talk to each other. At all. There's actually an edit of the film I've seen on Instagram where it's edited as if it's gonna play the movie and it's a Lord of the Rings. But every time a woman talks to another woman and it's literally a two second clip of a woman talking to a little girl, and then it rolls the credits.

It's funny, 

but. It makes a good point. 

Yeah, and probably about half of the female characters exist mainly in the context of their relationship to the male characters in the story, and they don't have a lot of their own. Story to go on, but the portrayal of female leadership is not 

insignificant. And back to our favorite idea, two things can be true at the same time.

So the portrayal is mild, but not necessarily bad. I think it's good to go back and look at who the author is in situations like these. So I was researching Tolkien's backstory in his life and how he got with his wife, and I noticed that a lot of the things he writes about seemed to stem from his own love story, which I found very interesting.

And some of the dynamics between him and his wife are represented by the women in his books. Tolkien was orphaned at age 12 and grew up under the care of a priest, and he actually grew up with his future wife, Edith, who was three years older than him and a Protestant, but they were great friends. But when they were 18 and 21, the priest discovered that they were in love and banned Tolkien from seeing Edith until he was 20.

He waited though and he wrote her a letter the day he came of age. She was engaged to someone else but broke it off and married Tolkien instead. She also became a Catholic and then moved to Oxford with him, which she actually hated. It was a very academic environment, which in the early mid 19 hundreds, England was also a very male environment, and Tolkien had his little book club, the Inklings with CS Lewis.

Edith actually resented the inklings because she was never a part of it. That made me really sad. As someone who has long been a fan of the inklings and been desperate to start my own version, it's sad to think that there were women on the edge of things that I've loved hearing about, and I've never heard about those women.

We're actually quite fortunate to live in the time when we are, because now in academia, we have a lot more women in that space, and it's kind of crazy to think that it wasn't that long ago. That women weren't even allowed to go to university. 

Yeah, it's pretty crazy. . Eventually, when Tolkien retired, they moved away to a little town where Edith actually wanted to go. 

That's actually quite interesting because we have the character of Arwin who is an elf and elves are immortal in this world, and she actually gives up her immortality for a man, just like Edith gave up her Protestantism to marry Tolkien.

Arwin is also much older than Aragon being an elf. I think he's. I don't remember if the books confirmed it, but the movies say that he's 80 despite looking like he's in his mid thirties because he's a ranger and that bloodline makes him look younger. But Arwin being an elf is obviously a lot older and their love was also forbidden until Aragon took his role as king of Gondor and the reunited kingdom.

Edith was also the inspiration for the character Lutheran from the Samilian, and on their gravestones under their real names is Carved Lutheran and Baron. 

We haven't read the Samilian, but their story is mentioned in Lord of the Rings. And from what I know, Lutheran was a pretty major character and had a very pivotal role in that story.

Yeah. So if you view Tolkien as a. Stuffy academic product of his time. He actually did remarkably well in portraying a few strong female characters. And it's not always necessarily about how many women are in the story, but who they are, like quality over quantity, I guess. There's this Pinterest quote about Tolkien's books and about how he's written them.

And our mate reads, sexism would be depreciating them, meaning the women, patronizing them, humiliating them to show how weak women are. But Tolkien did the exact opposite. Making his female characters strong and wise, and loving women, wives, mothers, Queens, warriors, people. While we can 

wish that our favorite authors who lived back then were as progressive as we are.

We have to realize that between them and us are decades of women who fought for the right to vote, to work and to be treated as equals in university and workspaces. And we can hope for these modern views from 21st century writers. In fact, we should expect them. And if they're not there, we can challenge them in today's world.

But while we can do that with modern authors, we can't really change the writing of somebody who was writing in the 1940s. But what we can do is understand that they were a product of their environment and give them grace for that while critiquing them and encouraging future authors to do better. 

So that is what we are going to do, critique them.

And we're going to start with gold berry 

man. She's such a cool character. 

Yeah, she's, she's different from the other women portrayed in the books. She's not a part of the main story. She's not. A part of the politics of the world. She's Tom Bombardi deal's wife and is a river spirit with Mother nature vibes, but she's only within her small context and she's married to Tom who.

Is thing that's older than middle Earth itself. I don't really know what he is. I haven't figured that part out. 

I don't think anybody really knows what 

he is. Yeah. But both of them are indifferent to the power that the ring holds and they're happy within their context and yeah, it's just this kind of little side quest.

The hobbits go on and we meet these characters and then we never see them again. A lot of people kind of wonder why they're in the story, but they're based. A poem that Tolkien had written earlier. 

Oh, I didn't know that. 

Yeah. And then he just used their story in the Lord of the Rings books. Goldberg calls Tom master, but their relationship is actually very egalitarian, very equal.

They work together to look after the old forest. And while Goldberg does a lot of the domestic work, she does it with this sense of agency, like it's where she wants to be less. So a woman who married a man and so has to look after the house while he gallivant around. She does a lot of her own gallivanting, and Tom doesn't restrain her or quote unquote let her do it.

She does what she wills and he does what he wills, and together they live very happily. Gold Berry also has 

magic power of her own. But it's interesting that while she's such a strong female character, she has no real power and influence on the storyline of Lord of the Rings and in the politics of the world.

She has no 

interest, no real power beyond the borders of her own little forest. I think she's a good representation of how far Tolkien was willing to go with his representation of women not putting down women, but. Underrepresenting their potential, perhaps like they can have power, but only within these specific contexts.

And we see a little bit of that as well with Arwin and Gala. Arwin and Gala are elfs. They are ethereal, beautiful and powerful. And they do have interesting, albeit side 

stories. Galadriel along with cell born rules. L Lauren, the Golden Wood, a place where elves live and where time has been slowed by a ring, which Galadriel has that protects the land from Evil.

Gala Glad is the one who wears the ring and she bears the majority of the power cell. Born here is written as usually how the Queen in a story is written. He just kind of sits there and. Smiles and says kind things, but really like what's his purpose? It's glad that's in charge. She draws in the company and wins their loyalty.

The members of the company. That is the people traveling with Frodo. Remember her often. Once they leave, they think about her beauty and her kindness, and they're drawn to the memory of her. For them, she's this vision of wisdom and protection and of all the good things in the world. You can almost say that she's the antithesis or foil for so on and mortar.

But La Florian is a small part of middle earth and a small part of the story the company travels through. It finds comfort and strength in the shadow of Gala Gladwell's power yet. Gala GLAD is pretty powerless against the forces of evil that are even starting to penetrate her own forest. She gives the company gifts to help them on their way, but she's really no match for the evil that they will be battling against.

And in the end, she, along with all of the rest of the elves in middle Earth, end up departing middle Earth and leaving. Arwin is the other elf. Main character that we meet, she's actually not really mentioned all that much at all. And you have to really pay attention to notice that there's something going on between her and Aragon.

And again, Arwin is more of a side story. Aragon's main purpose in life is to be a ranger, to do as best as a descendant of Isel Dore and to take his rightful throne as king of the reunited kingdom. I think Arwin represents. 

Something for Aragon to fight for beyond just saving the world. He also has this wedding with Arwin to look forward to once he does take his place as king and that gives him a sense of purpose.

Yeah, but it's kind of sad that she's this background character. 

I would love to hear more about Alan's story. I 

would like for her to have more of a story. 

She is just the end result. 

For Aragon, like she's an elf. She has power, but she doesn't do 

much. Yeah, she doesn't have a main role in this story. I think that if Tolkien had written her story more, it would've been an interesting story and I would've liked to see it.

And coming from someone who knew a fair amount about Lord of the Rings, but had never read them before this podcast series, still haven't seen the movies, I actually thought that there was gonna be more of Arwin because. People talk about her a lot. People talk about, I think the elves and I just, I don't know.

I just thought there was gonna be more, but there wasn't. I 

think they make do with what they have. 

Yeah, 

because there's so little female representation have to capitalize on what there is and again, she gives up her immortality for a man and it's still very much, her relationship with him is central to her storyline and it's just a shame we don't see more of her.

But then there's a o win. She's human and she's the most girl boss character in the book. She's a heroine, but she's driven by a very shallow crush in a man who loves someone else. 

Aren't we all

I mean, no, you are not. It's just so real though, a I feel you, girl. I've been there not for a long time, but I've been there. She's also super frustrated by the role. Thrust upon her as a woman. She's really the only female leader in Godo, and when everyone else goes off to war, she's told to stay behind.

She's like the only one of the leadership that stays behind. 

And so she rebels and sneaks into battle dressed as a man with her hair tied up under her helmet, 

and there's just this iconic scene of eoin. She's fighting the witch king, the leader of the nasal. And there's been this prophecy made that no man can kill him.

And so when she's fighting him, he says, hinder me thou fool. No living man may hinder me. Then the clear voice was like the ring of steel. But no living man, am I? You are looking upon a woman. Ha ha. I literally have chills every time I read that. I love that moment. And the quote continues. The helm of her secrecy had fallen from her and her bright hair released from its bonds gleamed with pale gold upon her shoulders.

Her eyes gray as the sea were hard and fell, yet tears gleaned in them. A sword was in her hand and she raised her shield against the horror of her enemy's eyes, and she ultimately kills him. And that's just, I love that image of her standing there with her long, golden hair. She's feminine, but she's strong and powerful, and she kills this really monstrous enemy.

It's just such a validating moment. Yes, women are often underestimated and pushed aside, but in this moment, a woman can do what a man could not, and she ended up playing such a pivotal role in this battle. 

So it seems like Tolkien was pushing back on the standards of the time, but hadn't fully taken them apart and was still steeped in them, which does actually make sense.

It's clear that he was intentional with his representation of EO in here. And then there's this whole arc with Faria, which we touched on a bit last week. Her happily ever after with him is this weird combination of she's being driven by. Both a shallow crush on Aragon and this deep, profound passion and love for her country and wanting to fight the evil that's going on.

Mm-hmm. And her drive to go to war and do something meaningful is probably actually reflective of the time in which Tolkien was writing that being World War ii when women were stuck at home and couldn't really do anything to help the battlefront. 

Yeah, and interestingly, she turns away from the warrior life in the end, and now I'm all for turning away from wanting a glorious death and becoming a hobbit who never leaves home.

But it's interesting that Eoin had to give up her dreams of being a warrior in order to find happiness. We don't see that happening with the male characters other than the hobbits whose definitions of masculinity are perfect for the 21st century. Go listen to our first episode, 

and that's kind of reflective of the fact that most.

Men do not have to choose between fighting for what they believe in and having their happily ever after. And 

yeah, 

in this case, it seems like Eoin is being forced into that choice. 

The character of Eoin herself, she goes through this process of realizing what it is that she really wants, and if she doesn't want to be a warrior.

It's 

almost a benevolent sexism thing. 

Yeah. 

Like, oh, this, look at this woman. She figures out that she wasn't made for this after all. 

Yeah. And that's how she finds happiness. That's how her arc ends. Whereas you never see that happening with male warriors. So I guess that's where the time that Tolkien is writing in is seeping through his writing.

Yeah. But in saying that, she's almost written as this character who. Because she's a woman, she's able to look past the quote unquote stupidity of war and rationalize that she's only doing it for validation and glory and that's not what matters. And you could say that wars are started by men who just have too many emotions and the women like rationalize past that.

Yeah. There's an argument to be made there. I wanna finish up with a quote from Tumblr. It's a little bit long, but I think it's worth reading. Aen is obviously the funniest character in Lord of the Rings because of what she does to the analysis of the book, where you have to say, except for that one character who fears being restricted to the feminine role based on her gender and disguises herself as a man to fight valiantly on the battlefield as well as any of her comrades becomes to realize that her obsession with glory and battle was driven by an almost suicidal level of alienation to her mandated role and the complex mix of admiration and envy for the men.

Around her that leads her to interrogate her own desires and tame her mental demons, and ultimately craft a self-actualize life for herself with the support of the people she loves. That balances freedom and social connection. The female representation in this 

book is terrible. 

I don't think that it can be said better than that.

Next we have Rosy, who is a Hobbit and not mentioned at all in the first two books, and. Honestly, I roughly knew the characters in Lord of the Rings. Before I read the books. I knew a fair amount of side characters. But Rosie, where does she come from? And it, to me, it seems odd that she's not mentioned at all.

She's the one who Sam marries in the end. Now, Sam is very one track minded. Protect Frodo, follow his master. He's the perfect picture of loyalty and sacrifice. He's kind and good and stubborn when it counts, but you wouldn't know he's got a girl back home who he's pining to get back to. And I personally think that Rosie and Sam's.

Love story is the sort of love story. A man who spends all his time in male circles would conjure up Tolkiens in an all male book club where he's writing these grand novels, having a grand academic life while his wife is sitting at home sad, because she cannot be a part of that part of his life. 

But Toke loved Edith and there's so much evidence of the love that they had for each other, their whole lives.

But Edith wasn't really part of his adventure, and I think that's probably why he wrote Rosie the way that he did. 

Yeah, the patient girlfriend, you know, not Sam's wife till the end. Who's waiting at home? The picture perfect rustic housewife. At the end of the day, it's the life with Edith that he wants.

But that's almost a background to the academic world that he's part of. Yet Tolkien wrote in one of his letters that Rosie was absolutely essential to the storyline, to the study of the hero's character that is Sam and. Quote to the theme of the relation of ordinary life, breathing, eating, working, begetting and quests, sacrifice causes, and the longing for elves and sheer beauty.

And I think he has a point. 

Through this 

whole huge adventure story, Rosie represents something more simple, yet something that perhaps every character in the story longed for belonging. A place to call home a simple life without having to fight against threatening evil. 

And I think it's important when fighting evil to have something like that to hold onto.

Take a moment, dear listener, and think, are there any more female characters, which we have missed? 

 Ah, but there is one. 

And that character is she lo 

ah, she lo the great and terrifying giant spider? Yeah. She's not generally considered one of the women characters in the story. 

I think that she should 

be considered despite that.

Well, I'm just saying generally, despite the fact that her name has the word she in it, she lobbies a spider. Except imagine the sort of spider out of your worst nightmares. She lives in a system of caves that are dark and filled with her spider webbing that is so strong that only an elf sword. Can you cut it?

Sam and Frodo get trapped in there. Led there by Gollum, who has joined Salmon Frodo. But we get the inkling that he is really on mortals side and we think he's leading them to mortal, 

but really he's leading them to Sheila. If you've ever read Throne of Glass, I can guarantee the Stig and Spiders were inspired by Sheila because Sarah J Mass actually loves a lot of the rings and there's actually a decent amount of stuff that she took inspiration from.

So the way that the Hobbits see she lob in the darkness is from a vial of light given by Galadriel. Galadriel is the good to she LO's evil. Her protection and wisdom and light is contrasted with she LO's wickedness and powers of destruction. There's 

a lot of different speculation from lots of different scholars saying.

Lots of different things about Sheila. Why this villain in particular was cast as female. I think she's actually the only female villain in the story of with, there's a whole bunch of Yeah, I think so. Male villains. So it's kind of consistent that the only V one, but I mean good for him that he included one 

talking himself.

Didn't like spiders. He didn't have a phobia, but. 

He 

used them to portray villains and female spiders are definitely the scarier as they often eat the males. So I guess it does make sense that if he chose a spider, he would choose a female spider. But you know, the fact that we have a female villain can be seen as a win, and that's because.

Giving women agency includes 

portraying them as villain. It means allowing women to be evil. Because to be human is to choose and to be human means that there are parts of you that are good and evil. If you are only to portray women in stories as good incapable of evil, you would be denying them a part of their humanity.

So we'll take the win. 

Yeah. 

Ultimately, I think that we can recognize that while Tolkien could have done more with his representation of women. It's also important to recognize that he was writing within his own context and was fully affected by that context. I think it would be insane for us to require him to write women to the standards of today.

What I see when I read Lord of the Rings is that he made a significant effort. It wasn't perfect. Lord of the Rings is still very much a story about men and boys, but he did push back on the attitudes of his time and it did make a difference. Which female character is your favorite? 

I don't know. I feel like AEO would be if I had actually read the third book, so I'd rather not answer that.

My 

favorite character is Aon, which honestly shouldn't be a surprise 'cause she's the most fleshed out character of all of them. I found another. Pinterest or Tumblr quote that I really liked. It says, Aon is your favorite Lord of the Rings character when you're 10, because she's a young woman who gets to fight with a cool sword.

And then Aon is your favorite Lord of the Rings character again when you're in your twenties because she's a young woman who is bitter and angry and deeply depressed. Who learns to heal 

and find hope, and she also gets to fight  📍 with a cool sword. And on that note, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Literary Lamp Post.

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