I see this thread is off an running in a direction of its own, but I want to specify some things.
Mithalwen, et al, please take not of my original post.
I am not complaining about the fact that Tolkien isn't Margaret Atwood. I am complaining about reductive, reactionary discussion of the subject.
For example.
Farael, and I hope you forgive me for picking on you in particular,
You wrote:
Quote:
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hope I don't get labeled as a machist pig after saying this but at least to me, it's much harder to convey a sad mood with the precense of women.
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This pertains to your own enjoyment of the book, it doesn't have anything to do with the genre of the fairy tale, the work of archetypes, and so on.
For some reason, the second you bring up women in Tolkien's work, the same questions get asked,
"Oh so you don't like the book?" "You can't relate?" "You think he's sexist?" "You think Legolas should have been a Legolasa?"
I'm tired of this. Nobody, for example, is interested in looking at, say, Goethe's representations of the male as a sphere and the female as a cube; his ideas of domesticity and how they relate to fairy tale archetypes.
This is, as I wrote in my original post, reductive.