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There is a side issue that I want to raise. The female writers at BD (such as Fea) protest at Tolkien's outdated view of women. However, might it not be that Tolkien's view, half of it anyway, is based on his (dare I say it) accurate understanding of a man's inner workings as regards gender relations? Do women (let's be specific: women who are members of the Barrowdowns) really understand what it is like to be a man relating to women? I daresay I can spot a female writer trying to write a man attracted to a woman: the narrative is missing certain things. ...
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Littlemanpoet - I truly believe you are treading on dangerous ground. You are making generous assumptions. Gender differences are only one small ingredient in a much larger pot. Tolkien, for example, was operating out of a particular value system, historical vantage, and social/economic viewpoint (as we all do). Because of that intense but limited perspective, Tolkien had a better understanding of certain men
and women whose ethics, status, and historical standing were somewhat similar (or at least sympathetic) to his own. Would Tolkien have had an equal understanding of gender relations vis-a-vis a male character who was a slave on a large plantation in the antebellum South, or a man incarcerated in a death camp during the second World War? Or would someone closer to that era and mindset ( or at least one who had studied these particular periods to a greater degree) have an advantage in understanding the male in question...... even if that someone was a female? These are extreme examples, but you get my drift.
We are talking about something much more basic than whether a woman can or cannot be classed as a feminist. Rather, it all gets down to how any person, male or female, views the divide between men and women. Some folk see that divide as being virtually unbridgable. I am not one of them. I believe there is more that binds us together than separates us. And because of that, I believe that a female writer can realistically portray a man and his thoughts/feelings, just as an excellent male author can depict a woman with such sensitivity that it makes the reader cry.
Surely you don't believe, for example, that Tolkien's Beren is more successful than his Luthien, merely because Tolkien was a male. Luthien has one foot in faerie but the rest of her is very "real", and I have no trouble accepting her feelings for Beren. And would you criticize Luthien for going out on the road on a wild adventure in a manner that most women would not do, as someone who was trying to wrest from men the role that rightly belongs to them? She was definitely a nonconformist by the standards of Elven society and even by our own contemporary standards.