Perilous Realms by Burns Marjorie;

Author:Burns, Marjorie; [Burns, Marjorie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Wisewomen, Shieldmaidens, Nymphs, and Goddesses

There is no doubt that Tolkien idealized the masculine world of camaraderie, fealty, and fellowship, a world best depicted through high-minded adventure, through battle and quest and united opposition against evil in all its guises and in all its various extremes. Though hearth and home are idealized within this world as well (and are idealized all the more in their absence), they represent an ideal which the hero must relinquish in order to protect those who are in need or unaware and in order to gain, through individual sacrifice, the higher spiritual perception that Tolkien’s heroes achieve. This means that the comforts and security customarily associated with domesticity, household, and family (and therefore with mothers, sweethearts, and wives) must be put aside – or, more fittingly, must appear to be put aside, since, in truth, Tolkien never fully removes either the feminine or the domestic from the core of his tales. Tolkien, in fact, does a far better job of honouring the feminine and celebrating the domestic than nearly all other fantasy or adventure writers have managed to do before or after him.

Let me be clear. It is not a masculinizing or a liberating of the female Tolkien advocates (or achieves) but a celebration of qualities traditionally ascribed to women and found in the best of his characters, male and female alike. Nonetheless it is still true that Tolkien is more restrained in his presentation of female characters than he is with his males, and this makes it easy to understand why readers are likely to feel that Tolkien (by today’s standards, at least) fails to do justice to the female sex and relies too readily on easy convention and the usual stereotypes.

In The Hobbit, for example, only one female is mentioned by name, Bilbo’s ‘remarkable’ mother, Belladonna Took, and she never appears within the tale itself; once the adventure proper begins, there is little to suggest females exist at all, little beyond the requisite ‘maidens’ mentioned in passing as a dietary favourite of Smaug, allusions to Gollum’s grandmother (learning to suck eggs), or the brief indication of the feminine in such collective phrases as ‘hobbit-boys and hobbit-girls,’ ‘nephews and nieces,’ ‘lads and lasses,’ or the lake-town ‘women and children’ who are ‘being huddled’ into boats.

The Hobbit was originally written for Tolkien’s three young sons in the early 1930s. (Priscilla, Tolkien’s only daughter, was still an infant at the time.)1 This in itself could explain The Hobbit’s lack of female characters. But in the more adult Lord of the Rings, with its larger audience (and with its greater number of individuals and races and more fully developed societies), the relative scarcity of females is less easily justified. We have – as representatives – Arwen, Galadriel, Goldberry, Éowyn, Rose Cotton, Lobelia, and Shelob, and that’s about it. Each is presented as a single type, as a lone example detached from others of her sex; each, at the same time, is excluded from the fellowship (or Fellowship) of males, though each lives with, among, or, at the very least, in close proximity to males.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.