Gender Equality and Elves
Marta has a post up (The Problem with Eowyn) that is in reply to a post by Anna Wing (Eowyn, Female Agency, blah blah) about the possible gender issues in Tolkien’s depiction of Eowyn. Not being an expert on the LotR canon, I don’t feel that I can contribute to the discussion on Eowyn, but some of the comments drift into gender equality among the Elves, and about that, I have a few things to say.
There is a myth that the Elves had a gender-neutral society, and this premise is often then used to defend Tolkien’s own regard of women. But the Elves don’t have a gender-neutral society. Yes, we have a passage in the dogged Laws and Customs among the Eldar that states,
In all such things, not concerned with the bringing forth of children, the neri and nissi (12) (that is, the men and women) of the Eldar are equal – unless it be in this (as they themselves say) that for the nissi the making of things new is for the most part shown in the forming of their children, so that invention and change is otherwise mostly brought about by the neri. There are, however, no matters which among the Eldar only a ner can think or do, or others with which only a nis is concerned. There are indeed some differences between the natural inclinations of neri and nissi, and other differences that have been established by custom (varying in place and in time, and in the several races of the Eldar).
I see this quote cited perhaps more than any other when people attempt to prove that the Elves had a gender-equal society. I won’t even touch on the problems with the L&C in general right now. We’ll assume that it’s a reliable document that can be taken at its word.
Yes, JRRT concedes that Elf-men and Elf-women are capable of the same things. How big of him. In the very next sentence, though, he immediately begins to backtrack on that, claiming that women mostly invest their energies into children rather inventing and creating things. Next, incidentally, their “natural inclinations” direct them to a life of what is traditionally woman’s work. Not that there is anything wrong with what is traditionally woman’s work, says the woman studying for that ultimate woman’s career in K-12 education. But the notion that women, by their very nature–and their procreative capabilities–are better suited for certain pursuits has been used in our real world history to deny them access to other types of work. This isn’t egalitarian. It’s an attempt to put a rational face on sexism.
And despite the fact that Elf women can do everything the guys can do doesn’t mean that they’re allowed to. One needs to look no further than the ascendancy of Fingolfin to the kingship over his sister Findis to see that the kingship of the Noldor wasn’t work for a woman. There is, furthermore, a pervasive expectancy of female obedience. Turgon believes himself within his rights to deny Aredhel from leaving Gondolin. Lúthien–the poster girl for JRRT’s supposed enlightened view of women–was expected to be obedient not only to her father but also to Beren, when he insisted that she not follow him on his quest. (She didn’t listen either time, but that’s beside the point; a mortal a fraction of her age and abilities felt it his place to order around an Elven princess of considerable wisdom and skill.) Even Fëanor, when arguing with Nerdanel at his departure, says, “Were you a true wife, as you had been till cozened by Aule, you would keep all of them, for you would come with us. If you desert me, you desert also all of our children” (Shibboleth of Fëanor). In other words, a “true wife” is one who follows her husband, against her own conscience even.
In Quendi and Eldar, we have another passage of interest when considering how Elves perceived gender equality:
But three Elves awoke first of all, and they were elf-men, for elf-men are more strong in body and more eager and adventurous in strange places. …
Imin, Tata and Enel awoke before their spouses, and the first thing that they saw was the stars, for they woke in the early twilight before dawn. And the next thing they saw was their destined spouses lying asleep on the green sward beside them. Then they were so enamoured of their beauty that their desire for speech was immediately quickened and they began to ‘think of words’ to speak and sing in. And being impatient they could not wait but woke up their spouses. Thus, the Eldar say, the first thing that each elf-woman saw was her spouse, and her love for him was her first love; and her love and reverence for the wonders of Arda came later.
As in L&C, we have again comments on the “nature” of women–that they are less adventurous than men–and the blatantly sexist declaration that women were literally born to love their spouses above all others. Yes, I realize that Q&E is supposed to be read as a legend, not history. Nonetheless, if these are the legends being taught by the supposedly egalitarian Eldar, it might explain where Fëanor got his ideas about what makes a “true wife” and the other hogwash about feminine nature presented in documents like L&C.
I often see people asserting gender equality among the Eldar when discussing the larger can-of-worms question about how JRRT perceived women in general. JRRT died before I was even born, and it is hardly my place to profess to know his private views. However, his letters and what we can see of how he depicted women in his writing certainly don’t suggest that he had particularly enlightened views. His relationship with his wife, his remarks to his son Michael in Letter 43, and his blatant disdain of feminism suggest that his ideas are actually fairly close to what he expresses in L&C and Q&E: That men and women have inherently different natures, and where women are concerned “it is their gift to be receptive, stimulated, fertilized (in many other matters than the physical) by the male” (Letter 43).
I don’t feel the need to apologize for Tolkien’s views or allow my utter disagreement with them attenuate the joy that I take from playing in his world. Nor do I feel that acknowledging that there is sexism in Middle-earth means that that world needs “fixing,” which often seems to be many people’s conclusion when someone like me insists that she sees sexism there. That is not the case at all. I don’t discuss gender issues in Tolkien’s world with any revisionist intent but, rather, because as an important work of literature that we connect with because we see ourselves in its characters, Middle-earth echoes those same attitudes can be seen on Modern-earth, and knowing to see them for what they are allows us to begin fixing them where it actually counts.
(My thanks go to Oshun and Pandemonium both for their always clear insights on gender in Tolkien’s world and helping me to form my thoughts into hopefully coherent words!)
lease, come inside my humble cottage and have a seat by the fire. Many are the stories here, and they are not the sorts of stories you'll often hear beyond these walls. Yes, the world is listening--and judging--but do not worry. You are safe here. I am the Heretic Loremaster. I read the same books as everyone else, but I read them a little differently: I don't necessarily take them at their word. I like to look at the stories that build our mythological history from the eyes of those disfavored by that history.
Hope to add more to this discussion tomorrow. Just found this as I came in to shut down my comuter for the night, so for the moment I just want to say: well reasoned!! ASnd I greatly appreciate the particular references. Thank you for the insights.
Great post.
Based on his letters especially, it definitely doesn’t seem as if Tolkien had a very progressive attitude towards women. Otoh, he also doesn’t come across as the typical male chauvinist. More as a child of his time and social and cultural background.
I think that’s the reason why the attitude that the lack of feminism in Middle-earth needs “fixing” rubs me the wrong way. I’m ALL for an in depth exploration of the female characters who appear in LotR and the Silm, and for letting them tell their own story by means of fanfic. But I don’t see that as “fixing” Tolkien’s “chauvinism”. No matter that he may not have had the most enlightened attitude concerning the roles of women, I do believe that first and foremost he gave the female characters the parts they have in his stories because that fit the story he wanted to tell, the world he wanted to build. Seriously, given his time, his background, his personal beliefs — what we know of them, anyway — how COULD he have written his female characters in a modern way? He was not a modern man.
Considering that, it strikes me that within the more or less traditional confines he wrote for his female characters, he DID give them enough personality, enough story, enough conflict to allow us to pick up the threads and tell their stories as modern female writers. That’s more than many writers still do today.
Oshun posted her LJ to this thread and I followed. Thanks, oshun!
In JRRT’s times, the role of women was clearly that of houseviwes and mothers, and any woman who deviated from them was probably frowned upon and/or patronised. So it is not surprising that this perception was reflected in the world he created. I can live with that. Whenever I read one of those “glitches” in his works, I sigh and carry on, and enjoy the other 99% of Middle-earth that is fabulous. I don’t drop the book in disgust and go into a rant. If I did that with every book I read, I would always find something I dislike or disagree with, the more the older or more distant the writer’s culture is from my own.
Plus there is another 10000% of great fanfic that creates brilliant stories of what the female characters would have been capable of in the wonderful setting JRRT created. Perfect arrangement, in my view!
Oshun: Thank you!
It’ll be here if you ever want to add more, but I also empathize with how tired you are by this discussion by now!
Juno: Thanks!
In my experience, the “revisionist fanfic feminist” is a bit of a bugbear. That’s not to say that somewhere in this broad and very diverse world, there isn’t someone who wants to rewrite LotR to represent perfect gender equality or who writes fanfic with the intention of depicting Middle-earth as a gender-equal paradise, but I’ve never seen it, although I know many authors who call themselves feminists and deliberately write female-centric Tolkien-based stories. I do see, however, much hyperventilating over the possible detrimental (revisionist) role of mixing Tolkien and feminism, or at least an awareness of gender roles. For example, Pandemonium once linked me to a discussion on TORn where a forum member claimed not to understand the point of a feminist approach to Tolkien’s works since modern feminism didn’t exist when he was writing. What did we expect to do, play the PC police and sanitize his world to represent our egalitarian ideals?
To the contrary, I like writing in a world where the attitudes toward women closely resemble our own. For me, revisionism would miss the point because it would brush aside legitimate concerns in the works that parallel issues in our own world without dealing with them in any substantial , insightful way. We don’t get this luxury in the real world when dealing with sexism.
(That’s not to say that constructing worlds in the image of one’s own ideal world is wrong. Just not my cup o’ tea, personally.
)
Russandol: If I held books to those standards, I’d read almost nothing!
This kind of continues what I just noted in reply to Juno that, to me, I don’t feel the need to “fix” the sexism in JRRT’s works. It’s the world in which he lived, in which we continue to live, to a lesser degree. I enjoy grappling with the questions raised in such a world by way of fantasy literature, especially imagining how characters I admire, like Nerdanel, would have perceived and coped with such a culture. It lends me strength and insight to cope with my own. 
Thank you for that insightful post! I admit I stopped discussing these (admittedly, rather fascinating) issues a long while ago because it made me a combination of angry and sad when women are trying to convince me that Arwen spending 1000+ pages doing needlework is totally progressive and totally as important as Aragorn saving the world.
For me personally, there was never a question that there is sexism in LOTR. When I read the book at age 14, well before my university eduction (which was all about gender), this was one of the points that stood out to me – even though I had no real clue yet what my problem with Tolkien’s world was (pretty much as I didn’t realize “Interview with the Vampire” was obviously slashy and just knew *something* was off). I heartily disagree with Tolkien on a great many things and gender is only one of them. I don’t think it necessarily needs fixing, even though I’m probably doing that in my fanfiction simply because I write women differently than Tolkien. I generally like giving them a plot.
I think it’s pretty obvious from Tolkien’s writings that he felt males and females have some mysterious essential difference in their spiritual natures. Given that, it makes sense that he’d not only not portray the Elves as having a gender-equal society, he’d regard the creation of such a society as an actively bad thing (since it would inevitably involve actively suppressing that essential difference). I don’t know why people find that so hard to accept. We don’t have to agree with all of the Professor’s opinions to find pleasure in his works.
Re: gender equality amongst the Eldar. Per the linked documents, er, screeds, it is true that Tolkien wrote explicitly that neri and nissi were not confined to gender-demarcated “professions.” But then the ol’ Oxford don proceeds to speak out of both sides of his mouth as you have noted. Apologists will immediately defend JRRT by stating that he was ahead of his time whereas actually, things have changed only a bit, cf. remarks like Larry Summers which (in part) blamed the dearth of women in tenure-track faculty positions in science and math to differences in innate ability.
The “man of his times” only holds a few drops of water for me. Suffrage, anyone? Keep in mind that throughout our history, there have been cultures where women retained personal and financial rights and that female ambition and drive to stand equal to their male counterparts did not suddenly arise in the 19th and 20th centuries. At a personal level, my maternal grandfather, who was 8 years Tolkien’s senior, was considerably more progressive when it came to women’s equality.
Following on to Michelle’s comment, I, too, noted the lack of women when I first read the LotR when I was a girl of 14 y.o. Prior to reading the LotR, I had read a number of books which had female protagonists. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken was hands-down my favorite at that time, and I loved Lessa from Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonrider series. So both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, although I enjoyed them immensely, left me feeling like I was a bit on the sidelines in this guys’ quest story. And this was as a 14 year old.
When I read the novel as a girl, I really latched on to Eowyn (although I liked aforementioned Lessa much more) because she took on such a powerful role. As to what happened to her after the War of the Ring? Canonically speaking, we know very little. When I Anna Wing’s comments on this matter, I very much appreciated the passion behind them, but they are just as speculative as any fan fic story. If one is to analyze Eowyn’s role in a critical manner, then it must be through the auspices of canon. I know. Incredibly ironic that I would say that, but I do see a stark distinction between use of the texts for scholarly analysis of Tolkien’s work vs. speculation as a part of fan fiction. I, too, would like to think that Eowyn might have garnered power within the framework of “marrying up.” (Tolkien’s classism is another matter.) But that’s my wishful thinking. From the texts themselves, I am not altogether convinced that Eowyn did not fall into the “receptive” type of gal per JRRT’s letter to his son, Michael.
My issues with JRRT aside, like you, there are many aspects of the mythopoeia that I love, in spite of vehement disagreements I might have with the sub-creator.
Re Eowyn, you do realize that the “other side” (assuming there are sides in this, which I probably shouldn’t) is worrying that Eowyn’s conversion to the Faramiric value system is too sudden to be convincing and so she doesn’t really deserve to marry him? The way I read it, Eowyn’s story as written by Tolkien is interesting because of the contradictions it contains; I think they are unresolved contradictions and the slightly forced happy end is part of that. Yes, there is plenty of positive and negative evidence for sexism in Tolkien’s writings and not all of it can be blamed on the times he lived in, although probably quite a substantial amount of it can be explained by his particular background. But he still gave Eowyn that speech about being burnt with the house. (Which is almost a bit like giving Shylock in the Merchant of Venice the lines: “If you cut us, do we not bleed?”) And she proves mighty, infallible Aragorn wrong, you know–she did turn out to have an errand to the South, in spite of all the caveats and problems associated with that (despair, death wish, dereliction of duty towards the Rohirrim, etc.). LOTR is, after all, a book that manages to describe both Frodo throwing away his weapons in Mordor and Legolas and Gimli’s orc-counting game, apparently both with approval. I would imagine that it is these contradictions, among other things, that make people want to write Tolkien fan fiction–certainly, I’ve read very good stories about Eowyn that addressed the subject.