We have less direct evidence about Tolkien's attitudes to women, or to gender issues; unlike Lewis his non-fiction writings don't delve into theology or philosophy or relationship dynamics, but stick strictly to matters of language and literature.
And let's face it, if you're coming to a conservative Catholic 1950s Oxford professor looking for 21st-century intersectional feminist theory, you're going to be disappointed.
When Treebeard describes how the Entwives were more practical but less imaginative than the Ents, and how they went about civilizing and domesticating the world while the Ents would have been content to exist in the wilderness, I think we're seeing some of Tolkien's real gender philosophy; possibly making the common mistake of universalizing his own experiences in his marriage, in which he was certainly the more imaginative and less practical partner.
There are no female characters at all in The Hobbit. In The Lord of the Rings you can count them all on your fingers and have some left over, and only two, Galadriel and Ăowyn, get more than about half a page each. (Well, OK, three if you count Arwen in the Appendices. Four if you count Shelob.) Even in the Silmarillion, which is a bit closer to balanced in this respect, Tolkien has a habit of pedestalizing his women.
Both Galadriel and Ăowyn are worth taking a closer look at. Galadriel, rather than her consort Celeborn, is evidently the one who makes the decisions in LothlĂłrien; she overrules his misgivings about Gimli, for instance. She is feared in Gondor and Rohan, where men like Boromir and Ăomer believe her to be a wicked witch. And the fascinating thing is they're right. She fits nearly every aspect of the fairy-tale Wicked Witch trope. She has magical powers, she's ambitious, she lives deep in the forest, she draws travellers in and determines their destiny. Yet Tolkien chides her detractors' fears as ignorance, holding her up for us to admire.
Then thereâs Ăowyn. When Tolkien first introduced her into the drafts of The Lord of the Rings, she was to have been Aragornâs love interest. In the finished work, her love for him is unrequited, and she falls into despair. But here again Tolkien subverts a trope from the heritage he drew on. In mediaeval romances, in folk-tales and ballads, ladies who despair of love pine away and die picturesquely; Ăowyn makes a rather different choice, to put it mildly. And it's not so clear that her trouble is lovesickness as such. Gandalf diagnoses her as follows:
"My friend," said Gandalf [to Ăomer], "you had horses, and deeds of arms, and the free fields; but she, born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man, whom she loved as a father, and watch him falling into a mean dishonoured dotage; and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff he leaned on.â
That is, Ăowyn chafes at the limits imposed on her life by the gender structure of the Rohirric court, and sees marriage to the King of the West as her ticket out of there.
All of this is quite beyond C. S. Lewis, even in Till We Have Faces. But the fact that I have to argue for it, winkling out convenient passages like potatoes from mud, tells you that it's hardly clear or obvious. At the conclusion of their respective arcs, Galadriel submits to "diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel"; and Ăowyn realizes that "No longer do I desire to be a queen," and puts aside her weapons to become a healer.
I'm not finished arguing, of course. Galadriel's submission is an act of strength, of withstanding the temptation of the Ring, to which more than one male character will later succumb; it turns on their heads the myths both of Pandora and of Eve. And we know Ăowyn never wanted to be a queen, because the male-imposed duty that she ran away from to go to war was the duty of being queen regent of Rohan. She wanted to save people, not rule people. But I can't claim that my case is obvious; not in The Lord of the Rings.
It is only in LĂșthien's story in the Silmarillion and, still more, the Lay of Leithian, that Tolkien draws out this subtle theme and proclaims it to the skies. LĂșthien begins by subverting the story of Rapunzel, becomes a knight-errant rescuing a male damsel-in-distress from a dungeon, and proceeds to gender-flip the myth of Orpheus. Undergraduate courses on English literature will tell you that feminist subversions of fairy-tale tropes began with Angela Carter in the 1970s; well, Tolkien was doing it in the 1930s, if only he could have found a publisher willing to chance it.
I'd like to quickly note that, in all of Middle-Earth, we never meet a married couple where the wife is of a lower social rank than her husband, and in nearly all cases she's his superior. Galadriel is senior to Celeborn. Ăowyn is a daughter of kings where Faramir is merely a steward; at the earlier stage of composition when she was to be paired up with Aragorn, Aragorn was just a ranger. When Aragorn became the lost King of Gondor, he had to be given an Elven princess for a bride, in a repetition of the situation between LĂșthien and Beren.
Now read the post above about C. S. Lewis's gender philosophy again, and imagine how he would have felt about all this.
I could go on -- in other places I have gone on, and on, and on -- about how Tolkien reverses the typical fantasy clichés to code evil as masculine and good as feminine. But I'm here to make a case about the relationship between the Lay of Leithian and The Silver Chair, and I think I have said sufficient about their respective authors' attitudes to women to move on to another point in the next reblog.
