[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

It's funny that amid all this talk of how few women there are in The Lord of the Rings nobody has mentioned Ioreth, Queen Berúthiel or Erendis. Admittedly none of them plays much of a role in Tolkien’s works, but I’m offering them up in defence of his ability to write female characters, and to make a point about dramatic necessity that seems so often to be missed. They are also all in their way breakers of the beautiful, noble and graceful mould from which so many people cheerfully assert Tolkien’s women to have been drawn, and which is often used as a stick with which to beat him. Éowyn is the exemplar of this, but I shall come to her later as she has already received a lot of attention here.

I shall begin with a character who ought to be familiar to all of us: Ioreth, the old wife from The Houses of Healing. Ioreth is neither beautiful nor wise; nor is she of noble blood, a shieldmaiden or possessed of any other rarified qualities: she's the archetypal old wife, inclined to be garrulous and sentimental, perhaps not possessed of great learning, but nonetheless very competent in her own sphere, remembering useful information such as where to find Kingsfoil, deemed unimportant by the scholarly or heroic men around her. She it is who remembers the fragment of folklore The hands of the king are the hands of a healer, which goes a long way towards proving Aragorn's legitimacy, coming as it does before he reveals either his skills or his lineage. Although she has a very small part to play, she is a believable and sensitively drawn character, with a clearly defined personality and world view; moreover she is a thoroughly ordinary person, who nonetheless has the power to help the great mythic figures of Aragorn and Gandalf, justifying, I might add, Gandalf's faith in apparently unimportant people. Tolkien also has her diffuse some of the grandiose atmosphere that has built up around Gandalf, Aragorn and Imrahil, as in this passage from The Houses of Healing:

And Gandalf, who stood by, said: 'Men may long remember your words, Ioreth! For there is hope in them. Maybe a king has indeed returned to Gondor; or have you not heard the strange tidings that have come to the City?'
'I have been too busy with this and that to heed all the crying and shouting,' she answered. 'All I hope is that those murdering devils do not come to this House and trouble the sick.'

In other words, while the great heroes of the saga have been doing noble and heroic things, people like Ioreth have been quietly and practically getting on with their jobs: she's every bit as important in her way as is Faramir, Aragorn or Éomer, and her implicit criticism of the saga-hero behaviour of her social betters is reminiscent of Éowyn's 'All your words are but to say: you are a woman and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more.' Tolkien criticises heroic and chivalric codes in some of his other works as well, notably in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son, only here, in the supposedly sexist Lord of the Rings he does so through the mouths of women.

Beruthiel is the perfect counter to the argument that there are no really bad women in Tolkien’s stories on the same level as Wormtongue or Saruman. Admittedly she doesn't appear in The Lord of the Rings itself save in passing, but her story illustrates the fact that not all of Tolkien’s women were noble and selfless: some could be really nasty.

Berúthiel seems very much a Miss Havisham character, remaining locked in a loveless house, hating all works of beauty and running a rather sinister secret service using her pet cats. She is clearly powerful, having the ability to communicate with her pets in order to spy on the people of Gondor, but she abuses that power and puts it to selfish uses. In building up mistrust between the people and the monarchy, as is implicit in King Tarannon’s action in setting her adrift with her cats, she imperils the whole Gondorian system of heroic personal leadership, doing perhaps as much damage as Gríma in the general scheme of things.

Erendis is the other side of the Arwen coin. Like the Evenstar she is left alone for long periods as her husband goes travelling (although unlike Aragorn, Aldarion is not sent on his travels by necessity), and probably because there is no earthly reason for his constant seafaring beyond simple wanderlust, and because her time is so much shorter than his (she is not of the line of Elros and therefore does not have the longevity of the line of the Kings), she becomes embittered and brings up her daughter to become an infamous queen. Here, parellels with Dickens’ miserable spinster are more obvious with the inclusion of the younger woman brought up in bitterness and becoming a scourge for men (although in Tolkien’s story this is not intentionally a part of her upbringing).

All of this is quite believable given the situation. These women are not evil, but are, no doubt, driven by the restrictive rôles they are forced to play in the society of myth into petty and selfish behaviour. These characters date from across the development of The Lord of the Rings, the latest being from a tale composed in the mid-1960s, which may indicate Tolkien’s discomfort with female characters before then, but is, to my mind, not particularly significant.

Now I come to my point about dramatic necessity. We have to ask ourselves whether at any point in Tolkien’s stories his narrative ever requires that a woman be present without his including one: what would have been the dramatic advantage of having a woman along with the Fellowship? Essentially she would be unsexed as Lady Macbeth desires to be because she would be in a situation demanding only fortitude and combat skill (like it or not, in the world of Middle-Earth, these are not traits that it’s easy for a woman to acquire, least of all one with enough spare time to go gallivanting half-way across the continent on a quest). Éowyn could have managed it, but she would have caused problems with her unrequited love for Aragorn. Given Tolkien’s view on the relations between men and women given in Letter #43, he would have regarded some sort of awkward entanglement as an inevitable side-effect of taking a woman young enough to fight along with a lot of men into the middle of nowhere (so ludicrously taboo in Tolkien’s young day that it would probably never even have crossed his mind). He wrote to his son Michael in the letter to which I referred above:

In this fallen world the ‘friendship’ that should be possible between all human beings, is virtually impossible between man and woman. The devil is endlessly ingenious, and sex is his favourite subject. He is as good every bit at catching you through generous, romantic or tender motives, as through baser or more animal ones. This ‘friendship’ has often been tried: one side or the other nearly always fails. Later in life, when sex cools down it may be possible. It may happen between saints. To ordinary folk it can rarely occur: two minds that have really a primarily mental and spiritual affinity may by accident reside in a male and a female body, and yet may desire and achieve a ‘friendship’ quite independent of sex. But no one can count on it. The other partner will let him (or her) down, almost certainly, by ‘falling in love’.

Here, then, we have a primary motive for the author in keeping his male and female characters separate, and since he was concerned with the historically predominantly masculine practice of quests and warfare it’s understandable that he left the women somewhere safe and sent the men out to run all the risks. To me Éowyn is an indication that Tolkien believed that women were quite capable of taking on military rôles, but also believed that no man should readily allow them to do so. We can hardly blame him for chivalrous impulses, since he grew up in a society that was forever reminding young men that it was their duty and responsibility to protect women and children. To an old boy of an Edwardian private school the idea of allowing women to place themselves in any sort of physical danger when there were men standing idle would be unthinkable, hence Aredhel defies Turgon in order to ride forth to her doom and Éowyn defies her uncle and his warriors in riding off to war. The men are absolved from their duty to keep the women from harm by their being ignored or deceived: had they simply allowed women into harm’s way they would have been at fault within their own system of ethics.

In my opinion, Tolkien was actually rather forward-looking in his view of women. Given that he was heavily influenced by the overwhelmingly male-dominated sagas of early-medieval northern Europe and brought up in the profoundly patriarchal Edwardian England, his cheerful admission that women are as much capable of heroism and wisdom as men (he was 26 when women were first given the vote in Britain) is remarkable. He casts women in a variety of parts: ruler and seeress, servant, mythical princess bride, warrior and mother. The fact that he avoids the now horribly clichéd ‘warrior princess’ is to my mind a strength rather than a weakness. It would be all too easy to throw in a couple of stock characters like the film version of Arwen just to spice up the plot (although probably not quite so easy for the Professor), but he still manages to throw in the vulnerable yet skilled shield-maiden who is their template. It would be simple to show all the women as ethereal and perfect, but he throws in the insufferable and steely Lobelia Sackville-Baggins and the frothy yet competent Ioreth. He never compromises his plot or the internal consistency of his world by bringing forth Athena-like swordmaidens from polite and patriarchal societies, or demure and submissive helpmeets from tough lands like Rohan. During the War of the Ring he deems it a woman’s rightful place to govern the people of Rohan, a job with great responsibility attached to it and requiring great skills of leadership; a task for which, in my opinion, Éowyn is not very well suited on account of her youth.

In these days of equal opportunities for all, in which women are serving in the front line of battle and playing any part in society that suits them it is perhaps more difficult to understand a world in which there are set tasks for men and women. To many people it seems unfair that the women are left to fend for themselves while the men fight the battles, but what of the man unsuited to war: his place according to this world is on the battlefield, and only accusations of cowardice will attach to him if he remains where he is most useful. A woman who steals away to war and does well will win renown, but what of the man who stays at home and achieves great things there? The chances are that he will be forgotten. That’s the problem with the world of saga, myth and fable: it simply isn’t fair. It has a place for everyone and everyone in their allotted place, which is so fundamentally opposed to our system, in which (officially) nobody has an allotted place at all, that we are bound to have trouble with it. However, to regard it as an authorial weakness that a writer remains consistent throughout his work, or to think that he leaves things out of his writing because he cannot write about them, is to my mind overly simplistic and rather uncharitable. We might as well say that Tolkien couldn’t write about children, or cows, since there are so few of the one and none of the other in The Lord of the Rings. As we have established, we all appreciate the world that he created, and different gender rôles, or a closer concentration on domestic life, which would have been necessary in order to include more women within his reality, would have given his work a different tone, perhaps even changed its basic nature. I’m not sure that any of us would really have wanted that.