The "Fair" Sex in LotR

[Bêthberry]

*returns after a five hourdefragging session with computer!* (Must be all those music downloads from my kids. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] )

Do you mean the fact that there were a number of rocks and difficulties which they faced as a couple? This included such things as Edith's difficulty in embracing Catholocism wholeheartedly, her ambivalent feelings about the fact that JRRT spent so many nights out of the house with his male friends in literary groups, or the fact that she was a lovely young woman and accomplished pianist who did not share his intellectual life or even his writings to any significant degree. Was it things like this you are referring to, or something else I have forgotten?

Yes, Child, these are indeed some of the things which made me reconsider the female characters in LOTR. My first reading of LOTR, long ago, was not necessarily naive or innocent, but it wasn't complicated by second thoughts about the characterizations. Then I came to know Tolkien's critical works, particularly the essay on Beowulf and the wonderful, original thoughts in On Fairy Tales. (I hope that is the correct title; I often just remember it simply as 'On Fairie.') These are to me some of the finest critical articles in English literary scholarship.

Then I reread TH and LOTR last year and this year Carpenter. I find it hard to reconcile some of Carpenter's points with the morality Gandalf espouses in the books. For instance, I cannot understand why Tolkien insisted that Edith convert, since, to the best of my knowledge, the Church does not demand that of spouses of Catholics. This decision isolated Edith from her family and strikes me as being very much a domineering action. And the image of male academics lost in their own world from which they exclude women is something which disappoints me (and I know academics). I don't have the sense that Tolkien was able to appreciate Edith's intellectual accomplishments, which she sublimated. Carpenter's ideas that Tolkien's relationships with women were stymied at an adolescent level is not something particularly proven in the biography. (I would like to read a real scholarly biography, not that such would necessarily be the real McKoy.)But I take it back to LOTR and wonder. Did Carpenter take this from LOTR or did he find it in Tolkien's life?

I recognize the significance of Galadriel, but the passivity of Arwen reminds me of the passivity of the Lady in Milton's masque Comus. Which is a problem for me because I think one of Tolkien's outstanding achievements in LOTR is to make goodness an active, attractive virtue (in contradistinction to Milton's foible of making Satan more attractive dramatically in [i]Paradise Lost[/b]).

Hence my hesitations over just why Eowyn's folly has to be her infatuation with Aragorn and power. (Although this morning, reading the old thread on "Was Boromir a Mistake", I realized that both a male and a female member of the human race in LOTR suffer from error but through remorse are forgiven.)

Maybe this is something akin to my having to accept that a respected, revered writer has feet of clay. Maybe I am asking too much of Tolkien.

Bethberry

[ July 27, 2002: Message edited by: Bethberry ]