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No sex please, we're Hobbits

As the fanfare begins for the final film in the Tolkien trilogy, could more have been made of the Ladies of the Ring?

Stephanie Merritt
Sunday December 7, 2003
The Observer

'Tolkien's Women' is one of those titles that always appears on lists of hypothetical World's Shortest Books (the most famous example of which is 'My Struggle' by Martin Amis). Since The Lord of the Rings was published, Tolkien has been accused of using it as a platform for a number of unattractive ideas - racism, fascism and snobbery among them - but a medieval attitude towards women is the most consistent criticism levelled by modern dissenters.
In its thousand crowded pages, the book features just one significant woman, Eowyn, if, by 'woman', you mean human, or what the books call 'of the race of Men'. There are other female characters, though the only ones who matter are two elves and a giant spider. When The Fellowship of the Ring , the first in Peter Jackson's film trilogy, was released in 2001, it was remarked that although the elvish women were played by two of the biggest names in the cast - Liv Tyler and Cate Blanchett, (respectively Arwen, the elf princess, and the Lady Galadriel) - their screen time and significance to the plot were marginal, and that was after having their roles fleshed out by Jackson beyond Tolkien's minimalism.
It would be churlish to fault Tolkien on the absence of psychological realism in his characters, but even more problematic in terms of film adaptation, and obviously connected, is the fact that there is no sex in the book. There's no sex in Jane Austen, either, but in her novels erotic tension is the motor of the story. The Lord of the Rings is concerned entirely with valour, moral and physical courage and the comradeship of brothers in arms. Even the quest, unlike those of courtly romance, is endured not to win the love of a woman but for the infinitely more selfless end of defeating the forces of evil.
The two parallel male-female relationships - between Aragorn and Arwen, and Faramir and Eowyn - exist as one more occasion for the characters to showcase their virtues; both are characterised by purity and self-denial, not by desire.
The point is, of course, that it doesn't matter. Though it either ignores or sublimates the business of sexual pursuit and romantic love, which we have come to consider the sine qua non of film and literature, The Lord of the Rings remains the bestselling work of fiction of the twentieth century and is tipped to be the winner of the BBC's Big Read. Clearly these readers are not all men in their late teens and early twenties who speak Elvish and have never actually met any girls.
'Good stories are good stories, whether they're about men, women or both,' says Kristine Kathryn Rusch, author of a series of bestselling fantasy novels, and one of few women to have won the prestigious Hugo Award for science fiction. 'Tolkien continues to appeal because the stories he tells are darned good ones, which have been faithfully and lovingly altered for the screen.'
Whether the stories needed altering, particularly in terms of the female roles, remains a matter of debate among Tolkien fans. I first fell in love with The Lord of the Rings at 12 and have reread it several times (though I must stress that I don't speak Elvish). Having grown up with children's literature that largely featured boys as the heroes of adventure stories, it didn't occur to me at the time to mind, or even notice, that the women didn't get much of a part. Now, I don't think it matters.
Fantasy and science fiction have always been seen as appealing to male writers and readers, although according to Rusch this has begun to change over the past 40 years . A website such as Feminist Science Fiction (www.feministsf.org) provides a comprehensive list of the many women writers and critics now working in this area, and although some contributors to its discussion boards hold Tolkien responsible for creating and perpetuating the male bias, most agree that The Lord of the Rings has to be understood as a product of its time.
With that understanding, it seems to me that to accuse him of disregarding women is absurd. In fact, he is quite sympathetic to his female characters, Eowyn in particular, and he even acknowledges the difficulties his women have, given the expectations and limitations that the genre forces on them. 'You had horses, and deeds of arms, and the free fields,' Gandalf says to Aragorn, '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.'
Eowyn may not get her man, but she does at least get to fight alongside him.
Film critic Antonia Quirke says Jackson could have exercised far more imagination in the presentation of the women. 'Tyler and Blanchett are ridiculous. While you expect a certain fidelity to the conventions of fantasy, these characters are straight from a Kate Bush album cover. They're comic. The first time I saw Arwen's entrance, with the background music and soft focus, I nearly wet my knickers, and I couldn't understand why no one else was laughing.'
The danger is that the accepted level of suspending disbelief when it comes to fantasy, whether on the page or the screen, makes us less critical of the execution, but it seems to me equally wrong to demand more of the genre than it is able to give. Jackson's women may be one-dimensional, but so are Tolkien's, and so are many of the female characters in the epic poems and sagas on which The Lord of the Rings is based - and the same is also true of the men, Hobbits and elves.
In the one review of the final part of Jackson's trilogy to appear so far in a British paper, published anonymously so as to break the embargo, the critic expresses disappointment that the love story between Aragorn and Arwen is allowed to fade away. In fact, Jackson allowed their relationship a far greater share of the narrative in his first two films than it has in the book.
That the most important love relationship in the story does not involve any of the females, but is the fraternal/paternal bond between Frodo and Sam is not a dismissal of women. Rather, it's an affirmation of the value of loyalty and respect between the classes; you could take issue with that, or you could simply accept that Middle Earth still operates by the mores of 1930s Oxford, and for Jackson to have messed about with that would have been even sillier than soft-focus elves.


to acknowledge – zwracać uwagę, przyznawać
appeal – przemawiać, apelować
altered – zmieniony
bias – uprzedzenie
bond – więź
churlish – grubiański
comprehensive – pełny
courtly romance – romans
darned – bardzo, cholernie
deed – wyczyn
desire – pożądanie
dismissal – odrzucenie
dissenter – odszczepieniec
doomed – skazany
execution – wykonanie
fidelity – wierność
to flesh out – rozwijać
hypothetical – hipotetyczny, potencjalny
to level – kierować (krytykę, oskarżenie)
maid – pokojówka
mores – tradycyjne zwyczaje
to perpetuate – zachowywać, utrzymywać
plot – wątek
purity – czystość
pursuit – pościg
self-denial – odrzucenie siebie
selfless – bezinteresowny
sine qua non – warunek konieczny
snobbery – snobizm
to suspend – zawieszać
to take issue with sth – silnie nie zgadzać się z czymś


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