Quote:
Originally Posted by Mithalwen
Minas Tirith, even by Tolkien's standards is an excessively male environment, by the time the reader gets there the only women present are the likes of Ioreth and until Sauron falls the only one to enter is disguised as a man! Maybe they do feel particularly threatened by a feminine power. And now I find myself thinking of the realms of Middle Earth as Oxford colleges with the ladies' establishments kept safely on the fringes
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Bree contains no women so far as we are shown. Rivendell contains only one woman, Arwen, so far as we are shown. Balin’s kingdom in Moria contained no dwarf-women, so far as we are told. All of Lothlórien contains only one woman, Galadriel, so far as we are shown. All of Rohan contains only one woman, Éowyn, so far as we are shown. The Ents are all male, having lost their she-ents. Mordor contains no women, so far as we are shown, unless we count Ungoliant as barely inside Mordor instead of barely outside it. Minas Tirith contains only one named woman, Ioreth, so far as we are told. Ioreth and unnamed women work in the House of Healing under the supervision of a male Warden.
I don’t see that “Minas Tirith, even by Tolkien′s standards, is an excessively male environment.” It is just the norm. Comparatively Tom Bombadil was living in a harim.
Would it have made a difference if Tolkien had been employed and lived in something more like a modern university in which many women worked at the same level that he did and some of them produced works of superb scholarship? Merry and Pippin might as well be Amy and Rory from the recent
Doctor Who television stories. There is no real reason why at least one of the main Hobbits could not have been female.