[Bêthberry]

Estelyn, I think you have hit on what caused my hesitation, the difference between 'deduced' and 'inferred'. Of course, there's nothing wrong with inferring things from a text! I'm just not as hopeful as you are that such might be the case here. And also like you I mistrust the armchair analyst. As George Steiner once said, "The heart can be manifold, even self-contradictory" and if we often do not fully understand those people around whom we live, how much more difficult it is to understand someone who we know only by the traces on the page, which can be, to my mind, both more and less readable.

Yet, that said, I succumb to some observations which might be my own inferences!

I wish I knew more about Tolkien's dislike of Lewis' wife, Joy Davidson. (There is a photograph of her on the wall of the Rabbit Room in the Eagle and Child--do you remember it?) As I read his letters, I sense a very gentle, caring man. I also see a man who, over and over again in his life, gathered groups around him possibly in a desire to recapture that marvellous spirit of fellowship which he shared with his school chums, the T.C.B.S. Society, torn apart by war and death. I don't think Tolkien so much consciously excluded women as much as he explored imaginatively this formative experience.

davem, you are quite right that in his other writings, Tolkien explored a greater range of female characters and I thank you for copying the quotation here. I was limiting my comments here to LotR, as that was how Estelyn set up the topic. I think that in The Silm Tolkien was in part exploring the old idea that a female prince means woe and hard times for the country--I'm thinking here of some of the mythology Elizabeth I contended with. (How ironic that now for so many she is England's greatest monarch.) There are substantive differences between the kinds of characters Tolkien peopled The Silm with and the kind he explored for LotR. I wonder if we have ever explored this point in a thread?