Heard today that my proposal for a presentation on “Cruising The Archive of Our Own (AO3): Mapping Perversions in Tags for Tolkien Saffics” has been accepted for the SWPACA virtual summer salon! (The deadline for proposing a paper is April 27: you can find the CFP here!)

This is a project I started Before It All Changed (2018-19 to be specific); it was meant to be a chapter in our edited collection on queer approaches to Tolkien, but life, as it often does, interfered with plans.

Here’s the proposal:

This project is inspired by Melissa Adler’s Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge in which Adler analyzes the extent to which the Library of Congress’s cataloging system created and continues to create difficulties in accessing books about gender and sexuality by humanities scholars. She argues that the difficulties originated in the cataloging and shelving of humanities texts using categories created for medical scholarship that historically defined “perversion” as criminal and aberrant behavior and resulted in the diffusion and marginalization of later scholarship from other disciplines.

Cruising the Archive draws on Adler’s theory and uses a tool developed by a fandom statistician, Destination Toast, to analyze patterns in tags given to slash fiction about female characters in the major Tolkien fanfiction categories of the Archive of Our Own (AO3). I focus on tags because AO3 chose, from the start, to give fic writers freedom to create tags for their work instead of forcing them to choose from pre-determined categories. AO3’s system is a “hybrid of folksonomy (user-defined tags) and classification” (“How Tags Work”) with the goal of “[embracing] all varieties of fannish descriptions, while creating background structures to make browsing easier” (“How Tags Work”). The tagging system is an example of a reparative or perverse taxonomy: a reparative taxonomy is a classification system which resists the normative and universalized categories of dominant systems. Some examples of normative categories are the default meanings of “homosexual,” “queer,” and “slash” as referring only to men, or only to male characters. The AO3 system is thus also perverse, with “perversity” defined as strategies of resistance to the normative.

In contrast to the singular normative meaning of “slash,” fans have created a range of terms including femslash; F/F slash;saffic. I analyze how what percentage of fics based on Tolkien’s novels and the films focus on F/F slash and what sort of tags have been generated, situating my work on a specific fandom in Destination Toast’s fan scholarship on F/F slash across AO3 fandoms. An earlier version of this project found that in 2018 the largest percentage of saffics were based on The Silmarillion (7%) while only 2% of the fics for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were F/F. Destination Toast’s recent work documents an increase in femslash on AO3, across fandoms, so I will be comparing current data on the three novels as well as including some discussion on how fics based on the Jackson films compare.

This will probably end up as a stand-alone essay rather than part of the Webs book, but it’s all connected!

My earlier stack about the Cruising the Archive project is here (more details than the proposal above could include).

I have a lot of things with Real Deadlines due during the next six weeks, but this morning I just had to do something fun that has no deadline!

So here are some of my favorite quotes from a 35-year old scholarly article by one of my favorite queer theorists, an article that began with a presentation by Sedgwick for a Modern Languages Association (MLA) paper session titled “The Muse of Masturbation” (she doesn’t say when the presentation was given, but I’d assume late 1980s probably; the other two scholars who presented on the session were Michael Moon and Paula Bennett).1 The quotes are followed by my freewheeling associations and commentary.

Note: The block quotes below are all from the article, but I’ve deleted the subscript numbers for footnotes as well as the footnotes (most of which are bibliographic citations to relevant scholarship—important if you want to follow-up on the topic and her claims which, at the moment, I don’t plan to do).

Opening paragraph:

The phrase itself is already evidence. Roger Kimball in Tenured Radicals- a treatise on educational “corruption” that must have gone to press before the offending paper was so much as written-cites the title “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” from a Modern Language Association convention program quite as if he were Perry Mason, the six words a smoking gun: the warm gun that, for the journalists who have adopted the phrase as an index of depravity in academe, is happiness-offering the squibby pop (fulmination? prurience? funniness?) that lets absolutely anyone, in the righteously exciting vicinity of the masturbating girl, feel a very pundit. (818)

As someone who was writing her dissertation in 1991, the reference to a pundit yanking titles from MLA sessions to use to rant about the degenerate humanities profs (without actually attending the session, or hearing what the presenter had to say) (especially LITERATURE teachers who were all busy kicking Shakespeare to the curb to teach Alice Walker!!11!!) was an annual ritual.

And more or less at the same time, Lynne Cheney was trying to dismantle the NEA and the NEH (she coulda done so much more if she’d just had the muskminions to help her out!). There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to the christian dominionist/neo-fascist playbook.

There seems to be something self-evident-irresistibly so, to judge from its gleeful propagation-about the use of the phrase, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” as the Q.E.D. of phobic narratives about the degeneracy of academic discourse in the humanities. But what? The narrative link between masturbation itself and degeneracy, though a staple of pre-1920s medical and racial science, no longer has any respectable currency. To the contrary: modern views of masturbation tend to place it firmly in the framework of optimistic, hygienic narratives of all-too normative individual development. (819)

Alas, although Sedgwick was absolutely correct in saying that “modern [medical] views of masturbation” back in 1991 presented it as normative, it’s also true that when Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders said in 1994 (at an AIDS conference!) that masturbation “is something that is a part of human sexuality and . . . something that perhaps should be taught,” the immediate fucking freakout that followed resulted in the first African American and second woman Surgeon General being fired (by Bill Clinton who was up to a lot worse than masturbating).

So, yes, some of the country had moved beyond the “masturbation=degenerate” mindset, but some of it had not (and I would bet real money still has not in 2026).

In this altered context [”modern views of masturbation”], the self-evidence of a polemical link between autoeroticism and narratives of wholesale degneracy (or, in one journalist’s historically redolent term, “idiocy”) draws on a very widely discredited body of psychiatric and eugenic expertise whose only direct historical continuity with late twentieth-century thought has been routed straight through the rhetoric and practice of fascism. (819)

Well, yep, and here we are today in 2026 dealing with the normalization of the “rhetoric and practice of fascism” AKA known as “Make Amerika Great Again,” by reverting back to that fantasy earlier period.

In spite of the half-century-long normalizing rehabilitation of this common form of isometric exercise, the proposal to begin an exploration of literary aspects of autoeroticism seemed to leave many people gasping. That could hardly be because literary pleasure, critical self-scrutiny, and autoeroticism have nothing in common. What seems likelier, indeed, is that to label with the literal-minded and (at least by intention) censorious metaphor “mental masturbation” any criticism one doesn’t like, or doesn’t understand, is actually to refer to a much vaster, indeed foundational, open secret about how hard it is to circumscribe the vibrations of the highly relational but, in practical terms, solitary pleasure and adventure of writing itself. (819-20)

OK, this passage is key to my project in Webs which deal in great detail with the “solitary pleasure of writing” (by women, for women) who are, in Sedgwick’s terms, “female homosocial networks” (824). (This passage and the concept also overlaps with the work that has been done to show that reading was considered dangerous for women as literacy became more widespread [the period during which this happens also happens to overlap with Jane Austen’s publishing!]).

There’s section on the history of sexuality (Foucault of course hoves into view), including the history of masturbation (aka: autoeroticism; onanism) and the period of European “masturbation phobia—the astonishing range of legitimate institutions that so recently surveilled, punished, jawboned, imprisoned, terrorized, shackled, diagnoses, purged, and physically mutilated so many people” (821)2

Sedgwick argues that “onanism” existed as a “sexual identity” in Austen’s time:3 “the European phobia over masturbation came early in the ‘sexualizing’ process described by Foucault, beginning around 1700 with the publication of Onania, and spreading virulently after the 1750s” (825) In addition, while there was minimal gendering relating to the phobia, by the 19th century, the gender split was well under way:

According to Ed Cohen, for example, anxiety about boys’ masturbation motivated mechanisms of school discipline and surveillance that were to contribute so much to the late nineteenth-century emergence of a widespread, class-inflected male homosexual identity and hence to the modern crisis of male homo/heterosexual definition. On the other hand, anxiety about girls’ and women’s masturbation contributed more to the emergence of gynecology, through an accumulated expertise in and demand for genital surgery; of such identities as that of the hysteric; and of such confession-inducing disciplinary discourses as psychoanalysis. (825)

Some other key points she makes that are relevant to my project: how scholars studying the “literary aspects of autoeroticism” are also working with gay, lesbian, and feminist theories (821); the theoretical/methodological argument she makes about how those fields developed “the skills for a project of historicizing any sexuality . . .; along with a tradition of valuing nonprocreative forms of creativity and pleasure; a history of being suspicious of the tendentious functioning of open secrets; and a politically urgent tropism toward the gaily and, if necessary, the defiantly explicit” (821).

Her reading of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood’s erotic identities, relationship (and the bedroom scenes in Sense and Sensibility (pp. 827-37) is great fun to read but not particularly applicable to my project on feminist receptions of Tolkien’s legendarium.4 (Note: the excerpts from the 1881 publication “Onanism and Nervous Disorders in Two Little Girls” were extremely creepy and reminded me of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” [published 1891!]).

The last sentence of the essay also coins a nifty phrase that I’m going to have to think of some way of using, if not in the Webs book, possibly in the paper I’m giving at the ICMS at Kalamazoo later this year on “Wanted: More Feminist Queer Medievalists in Tolkien Scholarship” (about the LACK of feminist queer scholarship in Tolkien scholarship):

Sense and Sensibility resists such “progress” only in so far as we can succeed in making narratively palpable again, under the pressure of our own needs, the great and estranging force of the homoerotic longing magnetized in it by that radiant and inattentive presence—the female figure of the love that keeps forgetting its name. (837, my emphasis)

So, I think using some of Sedgwick’s theoretical arguments in my Webs project is going to be immensely fun.

NOTE: I do not have a “paid” subscription option and do not plan to do so; if you see a version that is requesting $ to subscribe, they are an imposter/plagiarist.

You can find background information on my feminist killjoy bibliographic essay in the earlier Substack post here. I’m fairly sure this post won’t make a lot of sense without that background information because what I’m doing today is just dropping a few more observations around my quantitative (not statistical; never statistical) stuff as I work on trying to finish the draft (while keeping within the 6K word-limit!).

First, the number of publications (essays in journals and chapters in collections) that I covered in my 2015 feminist bibliographic essay:1

1970s		  2 
1980s		  5
1990s		  3
2000-2009	23
2010-2013	  7
TOTAL	        40

Second, the number of publications published between 2014 and now that I’ve found for the feminist killjoy essay. The list will probably be added to over the course of the months between now and the absolute-final-no-more-changes-we MEAN it-draft, but as of today, I have found 122 publications (essays, chapters, monographs) on women in the works and life of Tolkien:2

2014	     6
2015	   19
2016	     4
2017	   10
2018	     2
2019	     8
2020	   10
2021	   12
2022	   19
2023	     5
2024	   15
2025	   11
2026	     1
TOTAL       122

YAY!

Publications on women in Tolkien’s life and legendarium have definitely increased in the past twelve years: there are more academic journals and more collections which include at least one chapter on the topic, and even two monographs!3

However, while all of these publications focus (primarily) on female characters or women in Tolkien’s life, they are not all feminist (meeting my definition for the purpose of the chapter but which I’m not posting in public: I can say that the definition is based on textual and rhetorical elements). In fact, there are a couple I consider to be actively anti-feminist, AKA sexist.

But my chapter focuses on the publications I consider to be the best examples of feminist scholarship (by my definition, acknowledging there are multiple definitions of “feminist”).4 That list, at the moment, consists of 39 publications that I group by topics/methodology (War; Resistant Readings; Reception; Biographical [which could also be titled “Edith Bratt Tolkien”]; and Gender/Queer/Monstrous). And as a feminist killjoy, I will identify gaps that I think need to be addressed in future (primarily the lack of intersectional feminist approaches and the Whiteness of the scholarship).

A number of the publications not in the list of 39 (which again may change a bit) come very close to meeting my definition. I’m hoping the editors can include a chronological bibliography of all the publications on women in Tolkien’s life and works I’ve found because they are all worth reading.

My current project (meaning having the loomingest deadline of all the projects I’m juggling) is my bibliographic essay for ‘Great Heart and Strength:’ New Essays on Women and Gender in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (editors Cami Agan and Clare Moore) which is a collection (in progress, under contract with McFarland).

“Great Heart” was inspired by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan’s Perilous and Fair: Women in the Life and Works of J.R.R. Tolkien. I did a bibliographic essay for Janet and Leslie’s anthology, “The History of Scholarship on Female Characters in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Legendarium: A Feminist Bibliographic Essay,” which was great fun in a sort of ARGH-ing way, so of course, I proposed another bibliographic essay for Cami and Clare.

My approach to bibliographic scholarship veers slightly from traditional bibliographic work1 as I explain in a presentation at I did at MythCon a few years ago. In part, because Tolkien scholarship has expanded so much (especially since the release of the Jackson films which led to the “literary” scholarly field having to put up with some of us wild-eyed radical types insisting on doing adaptation, reception, media, and cultural studies including, on occasion [to the despair of some] the occasional Dread Sociological Observations relating to feminist, queer, and critical race theories),2 I have argued the need for specialized/thematic bibliographic work (rather than aiming for comprehensive coverage).

So that’s what I do.

During the past ten years, I have evolved from a feminist to a feminist killjoy, inspired by Sara Ahmed’s work.3 A feminist killjoy is “the one who asks questions or offers full-blown critiques that are intended to stop others from simply enjoying something” (Ahmed 2023, 80-82). Ahmed locates the origin of the feminist killjoy in the “stereotype of feminists, a negative judgement, a way of dismissing feminism as causing and caused by misery,” a dismissal which “[provides] evidence of [feminism’s] necessity” (1).4

In my first bibliographic essay, I covered publications on women and Tolkien (which primarily focused on scholarship about Tolkien’s female characters), starting with the first essay I found which was published in 1971 in a literary journal and covering publications that were published through 2013. I summarized the arguments of the publications and analyzed patterns, including change over time, type of publication (peer-reviewed journal, books, fanzines), and whether or not feminist approaches were used (also when other critical approaches were used!).5

In this essay, I start with 2013-2014 publications (given academic publishing schedules, there were 2013 publications that appeared after I turned in my final draft and so were not included) and will be including all the 2025 publications I can find. Given online publication these days, there will probably also be some 2026 ones that are available early enough in the year to be included as well. Part of what I am doing is quantitative, going through the major journals and the published collections and monographs to get some demographic data about who is being published and on what topics. Here are my results of analyzing one of the journals in the field:

TOLKIEN STUDIES 2014-2024 (2024 issue was published in 2025)

Editors: 2M, 1F

Peer-reviewed essays published: 80 (73 single-author; 5 collaborations)6

Total number of published authors: 87

• Male authors: 61/87 (70%)

• Female authors: 23/87 (27%)

• Undeclared/Undeterminable: 3/87 (3%)

Essay Topics:

• Thematic (theme, genre, theory rather than on specific character(s)): 40/80 (50%)7

• Male character(s): 33/80 (41%)

• Female Characters: 0/80

• Mix (male and female characters): 6/80 (8%)8

• Feminist (in title!): 1/80 (1%)9

This post is grouped in my “Webs by Women” collection because it’s connected to that project in the sense of being about feminist receptions of Tolkien (even though it won’t be a part of the book). The feminist killjoy essay as well as the Webs project are both driven by the extent to which Tolkien scholarship is still, in 2025, relying on the stereotype of the feminist (killjoy) by confidently claiming over the years that women/feminists hate/attack Tolkien and his work. The stereotype is maintained by scholars ignoring or cherry-picking from work by women and feminist scholars who are engaging in the complicated process of analyzing what Verlyn Flieger has identified as one of a number of contradictions in Tolkien’s work, specifically around the issues (SOCIOLOGY!) of gender and sex.

I will also be discussing how feminist joy in Tolkien (including my own) must be questioned because of its Whiteness and its heteronormativity): as Ahmed points out, “feminist killjoys do not disappear when we create feminist spaces. . . . To talk about racism within feminism is to get in the way of feminist happiness (34). My goal is identifying intersectional feminist scholarship in Tolkien studies to consider ways in which how we (as a field) can enable more of it in future!10

For those of you not already a fan, you can read about Granny [Esmerelda, AKA Esme, Weatherwax] here). Then go read one of Pratchett’s novels about her and the other witches (a web of witches par excellence).

The webs have been drenched in rain the past few weeks—we live in northwestern Washington, which has had two atmospheric rivers dump unusually large amounts of rain on us (we weren’t in the areas that were devastated by floods in Whatcom county, but not all that far away either). We may get a few days without rain in the next week.

I haven’t been too active here on Substack (or anywhere else online) the last six months because of being buried in editing and indexing tasks for two anthologies: one which was published last month (Queer Approaches to Tolkien, YAY!) and the other which will be forthcoming this year (from McFarland) at some point to be determined: current working title, Racisms and Tolkien: Essays on the Legendarium, its Readers, and Transformative Works (current working title; it may change later on).

Less than an hour ago, I sent out the reviewer reports (double-anonymous peer reviews of the collection evaluating the work and making a recommendation) to my contributors. Both reviewers enthusiastically recommended publication and provided detailed and useful suggestions for improvement of all the chapters. I’ve asked my contributors to revise their chapters and get them back to me by the end of February; I’ll then assemble them into a single document which will be the final draft (to prepare for publication) which I’ll submit to McFarland.

There will still be work on the collection; for one thing, I will be revising my “Preface” and “Introduction” for it, and later this year, I’ll be correcting the proofs and creating the Index [I SHOULD start working on assembling terms for the index before getting the proofs, but we’ll see—I can assemble terms from the chapter drafts; I’ll have to wait for the proofs to get the pages for the index—but it’s one of those tasks that’s easy to say should be done but not necessarily easy to get into until the deadline is staring me in the face].

I have a feminist killjoy bibliographic essay to finish drafting (Jan. 31) for Great Heart and Strength: New Essays on Women and Gender in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (eds. Cami Agan and Clare Moore).

I have managed to resist temptation so am only presenting at one (hybrid) conference in 2026, and that’s not until May: I’ll be attending virtually.

I’m going to try to resist any more presentations or essay submissions for the next couple of years so I can focus on two books projects, one of which I started well before Covid/retiring.

First, I’ll be jumping back into my Webs book project (which I’ve now determined is going to be for written for a general/popular audience); after I get that in shape for submission, or maybe I can do some juggling (which I used to be able to do in past decades!) to work on the project I started some years ago on atheist, agnostic, and animist readers of Tolkien’s legendarium.

That’s the plan anyway. Of course, as I keep reminding myself, life is what interferes with plans . . . .so we’ll see.

I’ll be posting more often here, I hope, as well as working out how to move to my backup Ghost Account given the ongoing (growing?) problems on Substack (although I do not plan to give up subscribing to and reading the mumble-mumble number of fantastic writers I’ve found here).

In the meantime, enjoy a picture of Hild (by me) during a morning nap!

I’ve heard back that my two proposals to the Tolkien at Kalamazoo sessions for the Kalamazoo conference have been accepted! (I can only attend virtually.)

Proposal for “Adaptations of Tolkien: Medieval Traces in Movies, Games and Other Transmedial Texts” (Roundtable, Virtual)1

Overview: Drawing on medieval scholarship on rape and Kristine Larsen’s presentation on the language of rape in Tolkien, I analyze how the scene between Grima and Éowyn in the extended TT draws on two scenes in LotR (TT III, vi, 515 and RK, V, vii, 867) for Grima’s dialogue.

Abstract: My proposed contribution to the roundtable will analyze how the film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings handles the planned, though unsuccessful, rape of Éowyn by Grima Wormtongue. Drawing on the extensive medieval scholarship on rape culture and Kristine Larsen’s analysis of Tolkien’s language in “The gift which was withheld I take”: The Rape of the Sun Maiden in Tolkien’s Legendarium,” I focus on Scene 20 (EE, The Two Towers) in which Grima corners Éowyn in the bedroom where she mourning Théodred whose body is laid out on the bed. While this scene is technically original, meaning created by the three filmmakers (Jackson, Walsh, Boyens) for the film, since there is no equivalent scene between the two characters in Tolkien’s novel, comparing the scene’s dialogue with two scenes from LotR show that it is one of a number of instances where the screenwriters adapt language from other parts of the novel (TT III, vi, 515 and RK, V, vii, 867). Grima’s dialogue uses quotes from the third-person objective narrator and from Aragorn and Gandalf’s dialogue. Both the novel scenes include a group of men who talk about Éowyn who has been sent away (TT) in the first scene or is unconscious (RK) in the second. In neither scene in Tolkien’s novel is Éowyn allowed to speak, nor is she given any agency. I would argue that Tolkien’s handling of this part of her story reflects not only medieval but modern rape cultures which is why the screenwriters’ decision to use language from the novel for Grima’s attempted rape works so well. What is also worth noting is that the film adaptation gives Éowyn a chance to speak and agency: we see casting off Grima’s poisonous rhetoric, rejecting his words and him, and walking away.

Working Bibliography (feminist history & scholarship on rape in the Middle Ages)2

Merback, Mitchell B. “Images of Rape: The” Heroic” Tradition and Its Alternatives.” (2002): 381-386. JSTOR

Lerner, Gerda. The creation of feminist consciousness: From the middle ages to eighteen-seventy. Vol. 2. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Cooper, Mariah L. Representations of rape and consent in medieval English laws and literature. Arc Humanities Press, 2024.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. “Medieval feminist criticism.” A history of feminist literary criticism (2007): 11-26.

Dunn, Caroline. Stolen Women in Medieval England: Rape, Abduction, and Adultery, 1100–1500. Vol. 87. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Lett, Didier, and Marian Rothstein. “Women victims of sexual assault and rape.” Clio. Women, Gender, History 52 (2020): 45-70.

Pistono, Stephen P. “Susan Brownmiller and the history of rape.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14.3 (1987): 265-276.

Schwarzmann, G. An ‘Emotional Ecology ‘of Sexual Violence in Late Medieval England, c. 1250-1500. Diss. Queen Mary University of London, 2025.

Eckman, Zoe. “An Oppressive Silence: The Evolution of the Raped Woman in Medieval France and England.” Journal of the Undergraduate History Department (2009). PDF

Gravdal, Kathryn. “Camouflaging Rape: The rhetoric of sexual violence in the medieval pastourelle.” Romanic Review 76.4 (1985): 361.

Vitz, Evelyn Birge. “Rereading Rape in Medieval Literature: Literary, Historical, and Theoretical Reflections.” Romanic Review 88.1 (1997): 1.

Proposal for “Queer and Feminist Medievalisms in Tolkien’s Legendarium” (Paper session, Hybrid)

Paper Title: “Wanted: More Feminist Queer Medievalists in Tolkien Scholarship”

Overview: Tolkien studies would not exist without work by medievalists and folklorists who first took take his work seriously. After ten years of bibliographic research, I see a relative paucity of feminist queer medievalist scholarship and consider why that may be, given the forty years of feminist medieval scholarship that exists.

Abstract: J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction was identified with medieval England and with medieval studies from the beginning. Given Tolkien’s medieval scholarship, the identification is hardly surprising. Given the uniqueness of his fiction which transformed many of the medieval texts he studied (Chance, Brust), the fact that the earliest academics to take his work seriously were medievalists is also not surprising. Modernist critics such as Edmund Wilson and Burton Raffel were unfamiliar with Tolkien’s medieval sources or his medieval aesthetic which Elizabeth D. Kirk, a medievalist, analyzes in her 1971 essay on Tolkien’s writing style. In this presentation, I acknowledge the extent to which Tolkien scholarship is indebted to medievalists who established the cornerstone of the field. Then I discuss what is currently missing in Tolkien scholarship which is, based on bibliographic scholarship I have done over the past ten years, work by feminist medievalists, including feminist queer approaches. The questions I consider for this presentation concern the gap in feminist queer medievalist scholarship in Tolkien studies, a gap that I do find surprising given the forty-year history of feminist medieval scholarship. I review the history of feminist medieval scholarship as first being formalized in 1984 when three feminist medievalists met by chance after that year’s Congress and ended up creating the Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality. The first issue of the journal was published in 1986, and the journal is still being published today, forty years later. I review, briefly, the feminist medieval work in the journal in multiple disciplines that could be applied in Tolkien studies and then include feminist medievalists in history and literary studies who are currently active on Substack, in order to consider the ways in which feminist scholars trained in other periods can make use of this valuable feminist medievalist scholarship.

Working Bibliography in progress: I’ll be documenting the history and development of feminist medieval and feminist queer medieval scholarship (which is new to me because I am not a medievalist—I started looking into this herstory [yes I am SO 1970s/80s about that!] last June which resulted in this post about feminist medievalists), and drawing from the rather extensive bibliography on “Feminist/Gender/Queer” Tolkien scholarship I’ve been working on for the past ten years!

Below are the two proposals/abstracts I sent in for consideration—they are part of my Webs project although one may spin off into a separate longer essay because I’m not sure it will fit into the existing book. Both are drawn/developed from earlier Substack posts.

The conference portal at Western Michigan asks for a 50-word short description (to be used if proposal is accepted), and a 300-word abstract (not a single word more in either case). So both are included below.

For a paper session (four people presenting for 15 minutes each, usually) on the topic of “Queer and Feminist Medievalisms in Tolkien's Legendarium” (a hybrid session).

Title: Wanted: More Feminist Queer Medievalists in Tolkien Scholarship1

50 words: Tolkien studies would not exist without work by medievalists and folklorists who first took take his work seriously. After ten years of bibliographic research, I see a relative paucity of feminist queer medievalist scholarship and consider why that may be, given the forty years of feminist medieval scholarship that exists.

Abstract: J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction was identified with medieval England and with medieval studies from the beginning. Given Tolkien’s medieval scholarship, the identification is hardly surprising. Given the uniqueness of his fiction which transformed many of the medieval texts he studied (Chance, Brust), the fact that the earliest academics to take his work seriously were medievalists is also not surprising. Modernist critics such as Edmund Wilson and Burton Raffel were unfamiliar with Tolkien’s medieval sources or his medieval aesthetic which Elizabeth D. Kirk, a medievalist, analyzes in her 1971 essay on Tolkien’s writing style. In this presentation, I acknowledge the extent to which Tolkien scholarship is indebted to medievalists who established the cornerstone of the field. Then I discuss what is currently missing in Tolkien scholarship which is, based on bibliographic scholarship I have done in the past ten years, work by feminist medievalists, including feminist queer approaches. The questions I consider for this presentation concern the gap in feminist queer medievalist scholarship in Tolkien studies, a gap that I do find surprising given the forty-year history of feminist medieval scholarship. I review the history of feminist medieval scholarship as first being formalized in 1984 when three feminist medievalists met by chance after that year’s Congress and ended up creating the Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality. The first issue of the journal was published in 1986, and the journal is still being published today, forty years later. I review, briefly, the feminist medieval work in the journal in multiple disciplines that could be applied in Tolkien studies and then include feminist medievalists in history and literary studies who are currently active on Substack, in order to consider the ways in which feminist scholars trained in other periods can make use of this valuable feminist medievalist scholarship.

For a roundtable (more people presenting for a shorter time with more time for Q&A) on “Adaptations of Tolkien: Medieval Traces in Movies, Games and Other Transmedial Texts “ (Virtual)

They don’t want titles for RTs, but my working title for what I’m pretty sure will end up somewhere is Medieval and Modern Rape Cultures.

50 words: Drawing on medieval scholarship on rape and Kristine Larsen’s presentation on the language of rape in Tolkien, I analyze how the scene between Grima and Éowyn in the extended TT draws on two scenes in LotR (TT III, vi, 515 and RK, V, vii, 867) for Grima’s dialogue.

300 words: My proposed contribution to the roundtable will analyze how the film adapation of The Lord of the Rings handles the planned, though unsuccessful, rape of Éowyn by Grima Wormtongue. Drawing on the extensive medieval scholarship on rape culture and Kristine Larsen’s analysis of Tolkien’s language in “The gift which was withheld I take”: The Rape of the Sun Maiden in Tolkien’s Legendarium,” I focus on Scene 20 (EE, The Two Towers) in which Grima corners Éowyn in the bedroom where she mourning Théodred whose body is laid out on the bed. While this scene is technically original, meaning created by the three filmmakers (Jackson, Walsh, Boyens) for the film, since there is no equivalent scene between the two characters in Tolkien’s novel, comparing the scene’s dialogue with two scenes from LotR show that it is one of a number of instances where the screenwriters adapt language from other parts of the novel (TT III, vi, 515 and RK, V, vii, 867). Grima’s dialogue uses quotes from the third-person objective narrator and from Aragorn and Gandalf’s dialogue. Both the novel scenes include a group of men who talk about Éowyn who has been sent away (TT) in the first scene or is unconscious (RK) in the second. In neither scene in Tolkien’s novel is Éowyn allowed to speak, nor is she given any agency. I would argue that Tolkien’s handling of this part of her story reflects not only medieval but modern rape cultures which is why the screenwriters’ decision to use language from the novel for Grima’s attempted rape works so well. What is also worth noting is that the film adaptation gives Éowyn a chance to speak and agency: we see casting off Grima’s poisonous rhetoric, rejecting his words and him, and walking away.2

This is a virtual event, and a broad topic, so I suspect they may receive more proposals than they can fit into a roundtable slot. But as always, if one or both of my proposals are not accepted, there are other conferences that I can submit to!

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This post is based on the presentation I gave at GIFCon 2025 [Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations] for its “Queering the Fantastic” event on 7th–9th May 2025, but I’ve done some minor revision. It is one of process drafts that will be morphed into the Webs book.

“An Incomplete Academic Fellowship: Excluding Queer Feminist Women from Tolkien Studies”

My presentation today is a strand of my current book project which has the working title, The Web of Women. The book traces some of the complex webs of Anglophone women’s and nonbinary people’s receptions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s legendarium in fandom, academic scholarship, and fantasy novels. My focus in this piece is feminist Tolkien scholarship today, and the need for more such work, especially intersectional feminist work. One goal is to challenge the extent to which some critical theories have been dismissed as inappropriately imposing politics on literature (and, the worst of all politics, “identity politics” which is apparently politics by anyone who is not a straight Christian White man)1 since at least the 1980s. This dismissal is not unique to Tolkien scholarship. Recently in the US, the current regime is attempting to criminalize not only those who work with these theories but people and institutions who circulate them.

In regard to Tolkien’s legendarium, I agree with Sue Kim who argues in “Beyond Black and White: Race and Postmodernism in The Lord of the Rings Film”: that “It is disingenuous to claim that certain modern politics apply (war, fascism, industrialization, conservation) and others do not (gender, sexuality, race)” (881-2).2

I became interested in feminisms and Tolkien in 2012 while doing research for my essay on the grammatical construction of female bodies in The Lord of the Rings (Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium, Vaccaro).3 My interest continued, in 2014, when I wrote a feminist bibliographic essay for Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien (Croft and Donovan). As a queer feminist woman, I found a pattern of publication showing that queer and gender scholarship was published by mostly male scholars focusing on male characters and that the smaller body of work on feminist and gender scholarship by women scholars focusing on female characters was almost completely ignored, and that there was almost no queer feminist scholarship published (a pattern which has not significantly changed since 2014).4

The issue of exclusion or marginalization of gender, feminist, and critical race scholarship is one I have been considering since 2016 when I read Jane Chance’s Tolkien, Self, and Other: “This Queer Creature.” It is the first (and so far only) monograph to apply queer theory to Tolkien’s work. Chance’s work has been praised for its discussion of the connections between Tolkien’s scholarship, his teaching notes, and his fiction in spite of the “density” of the queer theory she cites (Fisher, Larsen).

As someone more familiar with queer theory5 than the two reviewers, I saw problems with Chance’s rhetorical framing of “queerness,” her almost exclusive focus on White maleness and masculinity (even down to her choice of queer theorists), and her argument about Tolkien’s appropriation of the word, “apartheid,” to describe curricular wars between the “Lit” and “Lang” faculty at Oxford. That appropriation is a recent example of the extent to which Tolkien scholarship is White-dominated, with much of the minimal work on race shaped by White scholars’ desire to defend Tolkien, or his work, against charges of racism (Reid 2017).

Chance identifies Tolkien’s “queerness” as his “secret vice” (inventing languages); his birth in South Africa; his parents’ deaths; his humility; his physical build; his religion; his scholarship; his family background as “rustics”; his adaptations of the medieval in his fiction; and his “aesthetic of a ‘queer medievalism’” (p. xii [12], Chapter 2: “Forlorn and Abject: Tolkien and His Earliest Writing”). Then, since she declares Tolkien’s identity and scholarship are “queer,” she claims his “humanism and his feminism—his sympathy for and toleration of those who are different, unimportant, or marginalized—the alien, the rustic, the commoner, the poor, the female and the other” proves that he “is much more forward-thinking than has previously been considered” (xi), meaning, as she develops in her later chapters, that he is neither sexist nor racist.

My problem is not with Chance defining aspects of Tolkien’s identity or work as queer but with her failure to acknowledge the existence of his White, heterosexual, and class privileges in her desire to defend him against scholarship drawing on contemporary critical theories which she describes as attacks. She cherry-picks concepts from contemporary queer and intersectional theories to discuss his membership in marginalized groups while ignoring his membership in privileged groups that benefitted him in systemic ways that he may not have been aware of operating in his favor (and that, apparently, Chance fails to consider as benefitting him!).

The structure of Chance’s monograph follows the pattern that Diane Watt, a feminist medievalist writing in 2019, criticizes in queer medieval studies, that:

the terminology of both the history of sexuality and queer theory has become gender exclusive: homosexuality has come to mean, in common academic usage, male homosexuality; gay history is gay male history; queer sexualities are all too often queer male sexualities. Women are not given equal weight to men, and the histories of male and female sexualities are still artificially separated. (452)

A range of White queer masculinities—Tolkien’s, his male characters’, medieval literary heroes’—are explored in depth in eight of Chance’s nine chapters. All the White women—the women in Tolkien’s life, the medieval female characters Chance claims he so strongly identified with, and the female characters he created—end up jumbled together in a single token chapter with the stated purpose of proving that Tolkien was not a misogynist. I would argue that an argument that uses a male author’s female characters to support a claim about his politics is far from being a feminist argument (even allowing for the wide range of definitions of “feminism” that exist).

Orcs appear occasionally throughout the Chance’s book (and her earlier essays), as representatives of sadistic masculinity, the “queer,” the working class, or the racialized Other. The first peer-reviewed essay on racism in Tolkien written by a Black scholar was not published until 2022: Charles W. Mills’s “The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto,” was published posthumously in The Southern Journal of Philosophy. He wrote the essay in the late 1980s/early 1990s and could not find an editor to publish it. Decades later, his arguments not only anticipate and rebut the defensive stance taken by White Tolkienists as a group but also go beyond to identify the historical elements of the “Orkish genocide” in The Lord of the Rings, an argument which directly counters’ Chance’s attempts to defend Tolkien. Of course, Mills’s is working with the sociological definition of racism as a system; Chance is assuming it is an individual feeling or position.

As a feminist queer scholar, I find little in Chance’s monograph useful although her work did inspire me to address what is missing in it, first, in a collection of queer approaches to Tolkien, but also another on racisms, race, and Tolkien (forthcoming next year from McFarland), and now in the my Webs By Women project.

I have begun analyzing academic anthologies on Tolkien to identify work by women scholars (and at least one genderqueer scholar, according to their contributor information!)6 and work that uses feminist, gender, and intersectional approaches to Tolkien’s legendarium.

Reid Gifcon Handout

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Table I (Selected Anthologies 1968-2024) (on pp. 1) has data from the twenty anthologies I’ve worked through so far, along with notes on p. 2. The list of anthologies is not complete: I began with the first collections published on Tolkien’s work in the US (Isaacs and Zimbardo, 1968) and the first in the UK (Giddings, 1981), and began working through the rest on my shelves. I will be adding to this list, as well as tracking selected journal articles and (perhaps?) some monographs in future. Given the tens of thousands of publications in Tolkien studies, there is no way this will be a comprehensive statistical analysis. But it will, I hope, become a starting point that others might build on.

I identify the total number of chapters (excluding the introductions) in each anthology; the number and percentage of chapters written by women scholars (and the genderqueer scholar); and the number of chapters that I see as examples of feminist, gender, and/or intersectional approaches to Tolkien’s work.

One hundred and twenty-three of the two-hundred eighty-one chapters are by women authors and the genderqueer author, approximately 45% of the total.

However, the percentage of those chapters in individual anthologies ranges from the low of 10% or 13% (Bloom, Kerry) to the high 85%-86% (Croft & Donovan, Agan).7

Almost half of the chapters (9/20) fall into the 20-30% essays by women, and 7/20 between 40-73%. Research in media studies and linguistics show that when more than 20% or so of a group are women, that men (and women!) tend to perceive them as being 50% or more of the group and dominating it in ways that often lead to backlash. While chapters in an academic collection aren’t the exact equivalent of people talking in a group, some parallels do exist.

The increasing gender diversity of authors is likely caused by the extent to which primarily White women in the US have benefitted from affirmative action in academia in recent decades.

Moving from the demographics of the scholars to the topics and approaches in the chapters shows that 59.5, or 20% of the chapters, focus on female characters, while 24, 10%, use feminist, gender, or intersectional approaches. The list of 24 chapters using feminist, gender, or intersectional approaches and a list of nine rhetorical elements I identified in them is on pages 3-4; the characteristics are listed below.

The 24 chapters using feminist, gender, or intersectional approaches are spread over nine anthologies: six of which only have one feminist, gender, or intersectional chapter. More recent publications show modest growth with Perilous and Fair, given its focus on “Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien,” adding over half the chapters to the total, being something of an outlier.

Croft and Donovan do reprint seven earlier essays that they consider the most important of earlier works, but even recent anthologies on more general themes, without any reprints, have no more two chapters. Two of the 24 chapters are by men which allows me to note that I am looking at rhetorical elements, not whether the author is a woman, or whether they consider themselves a feminist, although I am considering adding “identifying themselves as a feminist in the text” as a later list item!

Reading through the 24 chapters resulted in my identification of nine rhetorical patterns (page 3). No chapter has all nine, all have at least three. In addition, the three chapters about female characters that did not strike me as feminist lack any of my listed elements (Jennifer Neville’s “Women,” Romuald I. Lakowski’s “Titania, Galadriel, and the Fairy Queen of Medieval Romance,” and James T. Williamson’s “Emblematic Bodies: Tolkien and the Depiction of Female Physical Presence.)

The scholars whose chapters I characterize as using feminist, gender, intersectional approaches tend to:

1. Focus on female characters from the legendarium ignored by previous scholarship; or,

2. Engage with relevant Tolkien, genre, or related scholarship on female characters, genre, aspects of world-building, etc.; or,

3. Develop contrarian/against the grain/resistant readings of female characters who have been the focus of previous scholarship; or,

4. Apply feminist theories including, as necessary, other related theories such as gender, queer, postcolonial, reception theory, etc., i.e. the dreaded “postmodern”; or,

5. Contextualize the legendarium in what was known about medieval texts, languages, and cultures during Tolkien’s lifetime; or,

6. Contextualize the legendarium in the context of contemporary medieval scholarship which differs; or,

7. Contextualize the legendarium in the 20th century by drawing from primary and secondary historical sources rather than using the simplistic and lazy defense of “he was a man of his time”; or,

8. Contextualize the legendarium in the 21st century by asking “questions concerning interactions between the text and the primary world, drawing on methods from history and the social sciences” (Reid 2017 34); or,

9. Focus on questions of production and reception, including adaptations, translations, transformative works, or other media.

I do not blame individual scholars for their choices in a culture which elevates and valorizes the [straight, White] male as universal, but for any who might be interested in being part of the solution to this problem, I can suggest a few things.

The first is one is already happening: the need for more “themed” publications: Clare Moore and Rory Queripel are co-editing a special journal issue on “Asexuality and Aromanticism in Tolkien’s Legendarium,” and Cami Agan and Clare Moore are co-editing an anthology in celebration of the 10th anniversary of Perilous and Fair’s publication, ‘Great Heart and Strength:’ New Essays on Women and Gender in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

I see the need for more attention to intersectionality, a concept Kimberlé Crenshaw developed as part of critical race theory. I’ve included a quote from an introduction to intersectional feminism written by Roza Cseby on page 5 of my handout, followed by a quote with Alexander Doty’s six definitions of “queer,” along with his warning to avoid assuming that “queer” automatically means “progressive” (pp. 5-6). The last pages are my Works Cited list.

Some of the goals I have for my project are ones I hope others may find useful (and, as often is the case, I think that the goals are applicable beyond the feminist queer, or queer feminist, scholarship. They include:

1. rejecting claims of an authorial intentionality that is privileged over readers’ interpretations;

2. considering adaptations and transformative works as deserving of analysis in their own right rather than evaluating how accurately they conform to the source text;

3. moving beyond a single-axis approach to identity (whether of author, characters, or readers); and

4. valuing how different readers create different or contradictory interpretations of texts based on their experiences, even when they are working from a feminist, gender, or intersectional approach.

Thank you!

WORKS CTED

I was about to say “a couple of weeks ago,” but dang, turns out it was over a month ago!1—anyway back in the past, I posted about the need for the feminists who are not medievalists doing Tolkien scholarship understand that it can be incredibly useful (plus fun) to pay some attention to what contemporary feminist medievalists are doing (whether in literary, historical, archeological, or other academic specializations).

I love when I find later evidence that I was right, and by golly, here we are! My searching around and subscribing to feminist medievalists on Substack has resulted in my learning about an Anglo-Saxon elegy: “The Wife’s Lament!”

If you know about other Stacks or resources by feminist medievalists please let me know! Ditto for writing about and resources on this poem!

Medieval Musings

Heartbreak, loneliness, and disappointed dreams

A new series, sharing Anglo-Saxon poetry with the hope of revealing the untold lives and tales within them: the shared experiences we have with their emotions as they journeyed through lives over a thousand years ago…

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2 years ago · 11 likes · 2 comments · Holly A Brown

What I love most about this poem is the texture that it gives to one person who lived in the deep past (ok, a fictional character, but surely based on the real experiences of the poet or people they knew?). The narrator talks about her intense love and the pain of separation, the disappointment of her ‘life’s lot’ and her jealousy seeing ‘lovers alive who lie in bed’. She talks about the heartbreak experienced by men too: men must put on a brave face, hiding ‘their heartaches, that host of constant sorrows, behind a smiling face’. Isn’t that a relatable experience?!

There are a lot of reasons to be in love with the Old English elegies. For many medievalists, including me, these poems were the first time we felt we heard a real human voice speak to us out of the early medieval period in the British Isles. The elegies were what seduced me away from modern literature in my first year of my undergraduate degree. And I still feel under their spell, even though my PhD plans have removed me from looking directly at them.

I had never heard of this poem! But apparently it’s well-known these days (more proof that feminist medievalists have been and are doing great work). I moused around on the internet and found this lovely piece that is by a student whose teacher put together a collection of her students’ projects:

Reading the Middle Ages: Oral and Literate Cultures: The Liberating, Newfound Voice in The Wife’s Lament

Research by Samantha Futino

Throughout the elegy entitled, The Wife’s Lament there are a variety of notions that allude to many conclusions regarding the role of a wife or a female during the Anglo-Saxon era in England. First, to assist in the understanding of the elegy, it is crucial to understand the term lament. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term is defined as “an act of lamenting, a passionate or demonstrative expression of grief” (OED 1). This given definition mirrors the actions of the wife amidst the elegy. Additionally, it is significant to observe the source of this writing, which is a woman. The Wife’s Lament directs readers towards the voice of a female speaker in a variety of ways. The title itself informs readers that they are receiving this information from a wife’s point of view; thus, reaffirming that these are words of an Anglo-Saxon female. Secondly, with her tone and chosen language, she continues to embody the qualities and practices of a female who lost their husband during this critical time in England. While it is important to examine the feminine speaker in this elegy, it is also essential for readers to ask the question of how her voice is significant and what her voice is signifying for all Anglo-Saxon women who lost their husbands during this time. In the Anglo-Saxon era of England, the words of women were not trusted or heard, unless there was a male figure by their side (Davidson, 2). Women were commonly recognized by being dominated by males, whether it be their husband, father, uncle, or brother (2). Within this poem, readers hear from a wife, whose husband has been exiled due to an unknown reason. The wife’s pain and sadness gush through her diction and tone, making the pain she is enduring exquisitely evident. For the duration of the poem, the wife’s female voice is the only one speaking, thus giving her a certain amount of agency. Throughout this written report, I will carefully examine The Wife’s Lament, and through my research, I will discover the power of the female voice engravened in this elegy. As the researcher, I am examining the importance of her voice, and what it is signifying for all women during this era within the same situation. I will do so by simultaneously examining the obstacles, qualities, and lifestyles of Anglo-Saxon women during this era. The power of the female voice in "the Wife’s Lament” blurs the boundaries of what was expected of Anglo-Saxon women. The demonstration of a female speaker, expressing her losses and struggles while dealing with a concept of male domination, is a power move for her, since women’s voices were rarely heard or trusted without a male figure being present.

Futino, Samantha. "The Liberating, Newfound Voice in The Wife’s Lament." In Reading the Middle Ages, supvr. Teresa Russo, (issue 1: Old English Literature from Manuscript to Verse: Battles, Heroes, and Women), Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (MARS), Brock University, March 2020, Niagara (The Liberating, New Found Voice in The Wife's Lament · Reading the Middle Ages: Oral and Literate Cultures · Brock University Library). Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL), Tim Ribaric and Daniel Brett.

Site Information for Reading the Middle Ages (RMA)

But had I not been lucky enough to be reading Holly’s and Emily’s Substacks, I would not have known to even look!

My very limited knowledge of Old English poetry mostly comes from listening to medievalists doing Tolkien studies while giving presentations myself in the Tolkien at Kalamazoo sessions at the Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University [even though, as I always explained up front—no false advertising here—I am not a medievalist]. So that knowledge was limited mostly to Beowulf.2

There are some great essays by feminist medievalists such as Leslie Donovan’s Valkyrie essay (influence on Tolkien’s female characters) and Amy Amendt-Raduege’s essay the influence of female characters in the Norse eddas on Lobelia Sackville-Baggins being my favorites),3 but I can more or less count them on the fingers of one hand without having to move to my other hand).

“The Wife’s Lament” is completely different in ways that I have to think more about and it and how it will fit into my Webs!

And I’ve just realized that this is a good time to recommend, highly, Nicola Griffith, a fiction author who has been making incredible use of contemporary medieval scholarship to create an historical series about Hilda of Whitby: brilliant, feminist, queer, and (in my reading of it) everything about the Middle Ages neither Tolkien nor his far-right extremist fans could even imagine existed!).4

Actually, I would recommend everything Griffith has ever written!

A few links to get you started: to her author’s blog and to her research blog.

All About Hild

Hild: A Historical note

Viking Warrior Women (reassessing Birka grave)

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I spent quite a few years hanging out at Mike Glyer’s File 770 (a news ‘zine) with the community at during and after the years when the Sad and Rapid Puppies were trying to drive the “woke” out of the SFF Hugo Awards (read: too many people who were NOT straight white Christian men were winning the awards) back in the day. It was the usual story: I started reading, got involved, started replying to the posts and to other fans hanging out there, and next thing I know, started sending a few things to Mike to post if he wished.1

I was reminded of this piece about my readings/changing responses to Sheri S. Tepper’s work today when I was editing my “presentations and publications” from my CV. I took a look at it and went, holy shit, here’s this piece I wrote about eight years ago about my different perspectives on a feminist writer’s work as my knowledge of different feminist theory changed/increased over time, and, well, somehow this struck me as fitting in with the Webs Book which is about feminist receptions (including but not limited to my own) of Tolkien’s work. So, I thought I’d bring it over here to avoid forgetting about it again!

The piece got some lovely feedback from others sharing their ideas about Tepper’s work which you can read at the link to File 770 above. And I can highly recommend Mike’s ‘zine as an incredible resource for news about all aspects of sff fandom (not to mention a incredibly maintained tagging/curating system that makes it easy to find stuff again!).

The connection(s) I saw involved reader response as a mode of criticism especially involving feminisms. About six of the Webs by Women posts have been about feminist topics of various sorts, but mostly looking at various definitions in different contexts, academic and otherwise. I’m still thinking about how to integrate my journey through different feminisms and their impact on me. I found Tepper’s work during a period after I’d left academia (due to sexism and misogyny) and was reading only women writers (in my late 20s), thus in what I now call my “angry young feminist” phase, a period during which I’d stopped re-reading Tolkien’s fiction (because I didn’t want to get mad at a story that was so important to me for so long; as I discuss elsewhere in this Substack, I got over it!). In terms of Tepper (born in 1929, working at Planned Parenthood, and her eco-feminism), I see commonalities between us in terms of Second Wave feminism.

Now, when I talk about feminist approaches, especially in the context of Tolkien studies, I am now interested in intersectional feminisms. One of the best intersectional feminist Substacks is one titled, feminism for all by 𝙅𝙤 ⚢📖🏳️‍🌈. Since I plan to write the Webs book for a popular/general audience (and writing pieces for File 770 gave me a chance to practice some different rhetorical choices), I am trying to find sources to cite that one, are not as academically weighted down as sometimes happens with peer-reviewed publications, and two, are accessible online which often does NOT happen with peer-reviewed publications.

In a stack titled “bell hooks & beyoncé: who gets to call themselves a feminist?” 𝙅𝙤 ⚢📖🏳️‍🌈 summarizes bell hooks’s definition of feminism; hooks’s 1984 book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center was the first work I read in my doctoral program that criticized the extent to which the major Second Wave feminist writers (white, middle-class, mostly heteronormative) had theorized sexism/misogyny as the “original sin” that was the basis for all other oppressions. In contrast hooks, as 𝙅𝙤 ⚢📖🏳️‍🌈 argues, points out that “these [feminists] were not global south/majority nor women of color asking to center sexism above other oppression. We do not have that luxury, that privilege is not ours.”2

One key point is the difference between “feminism” as an identity (resulting in a binary), and “feminism” as advocacy, movement, action (and especially the usefulness of plural nouns, i.e. feminisms, to avoid privileging one type of feminism which is usually default/white/middle/class version).

If you’ve not heard of Sheri S. Tepper (something which happens to me quite often the older I get—that the sff writers I adored in my youth have fallen out of print, or are not much noticed in the growing number of sff books!), here is an essay, “In Memoriam: Sheri S. Tepper” (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writer’s Association), about her life.

I wrote the following essay as a tribute to her work.

NOTE: Spoilers for a number of Tepper’s novels occur throughout the essay.

CONTENT WARNING: For references to rape and abuse of young women as an element of Tepper’s novels.

The Fan

I found my first Tepper novel in the early 1980s. I remember standing in the University of Washington bookstore reading the opening pages of King’s Blood Four, the first of what would become the nine-novel triple trilogy The True Game. Had Tepper’s work continued in that vein, interesting world-building with a male protagonist, I am not sure I would have become such a fervent fan.

However, even this early novel had threads of the feminist themes Tepper would develop in more detail in her later work. Peter starts out as a typical fantasy orphan hero. He is a young man, a foundling, raised in an all-male environment, who almost immediately embarks on a quest. The setting is the world of the True Game where characters have fantastic powers echoing medievalist fantasy conventions. But the initiating event is an attack on King Mertyn in which Peter is used and injured by his male lover, and the outcome of Peter’s journey is learning about the Immutables (those outside the Game who lack any of the powers valued in the Game) and meeting his mother (not his father!). Those differences were different enough to keep me reading the trilogy and keeping an eye out for her other work.3 I was lucky that she published so many novels so quickly: her entry in Wikipedia lists ten novels published in 1983-1985.

The later trilogies in the True Game series, Mavin’s and Jinian’s, turn away from the male bildungsroman to twist fantasy conventions on multiple levels. Suddenly, as with Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series, I found myself in a science fiction narrative of sorts, a lost colony settled by humans with all knowledge of their origins and history being buried and more fantastic elements replacing them.

But even before I read the later trilogies in the True Game series, I found the Marianne Trilogy.4

Reading the first in this series put Tepper’s name immediately on my “buy as soon as they appear” list of authors, and that response never changed although some of her later works appeal to me much less than the earlier ones. I tend to be completist when I love an author’s works even if I do not love all of them.5

The opening paragraph of Marianne, The Magus, and the Manticore remains one of my favorites:

During the night, Marianne was awakened by a steady drumming of rain, a muffled tattoo as from a thousand drumsticks on the flat porch roof, a splash and gurgle from the rainspout at the corner of the house outside Mrs. Winesap’s window, babbling its music in vain to ears which did not hear. “I hear,” whispered Marianne, speaking to the night, the rain, the corner of the living room she could see from her bed. When she lay just so, the blanket drawn across her lips, the pillow crunched into an exact shape, she could see the amber glow of a lamp in the living room left on to light one corner of the reupholstered couch, the sheen of the carefully carpentered shelves above it, the responsive glow of the refinished table below, all in a kindly shine and haze of belonging there. “Mine,” said Marianne to the room. The lamplight fell on the first corner of the apartment to be fully finished, and she left the light on so that she could see it if she woke, a reminder of what was possible, a promise that all the rooms would be reclaimed from dust and dilapidation. Soon the kitchen would be finished. Two more weeks at the extra work she was doing for the library and she’d have enough money for the bright Mexican tiles she had set her heart upon. (1).

This scene is vital, so present in its appeal to the senses (the sounds of the rain—a sound I often lie awake listening to—the light reflecting off bookshelves, a “refinished table,”), that I become immersed in the world immediately. Marianne’s achievements differ greatly from those of most fantasy novels: she is remodeling an old house and refinishing furniture primarily through her own labor in order to reclaim the color and feel of her childhood home, lost with her parents’ death. [ETA: Over the course of the trilogy, she gains her own powers which can be categorized as more religious (but not Christian) in nature.] The fantasy worlds in this trilogy seem unique (even in the context of Tepper’s work), and I fell in love.

I loved and still love Marianne and her momegs, Marjorie and her horses (Arbai series), Mavin’s refusal to compromise (Mavin trilogy), Jinian and her animals, Jinian’s Seven (Jinian’s trilogy), and the Seven–Carolyn, Agnes, Bettiann, Ophelia, Jessy, Faye, and Sova—in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

I love Tepper’s world-creation, the animism and ecological/environmentalist themes in her work, the creativity of her names for characters and animals, and, most of all, her descriptions of trees and forests. Tepper and Tolkien’s work seem so alike to me in their love for trees although I wonder how many readers would see any similarity.

I love the feminist elements (some of them!): my love for Grass is not only because of Marjorie and her horses but because of Marjorie’s quest to save her daughter. An additional feminist element (which I had not thought of until the early drafts of this essay) are some of the male characters who do not fit the model of heroic [AKA toxic] masculinity: there are two of them in Grass (Rillibee Chime and Brother Mainoa).6

I also (and I’ve not seen many reviews talking about this element!) love the skewering of academia that Tepper does in some of her novels (notably in the True Game series and in Sideshow (third of the Arbai series).

The opening paragraphs of Chapter 1 of Grass are also very high on my list of favorite openings (I did a presentation on the novel as a feminist epic revision of Dune by in part focusing on the epic structural elements such as this opening!)

Grass!

Millions of square miles of it; numberless wind-whipped tsunamis of grass, a thousand sun-lulled caribbeans of grass, a hundred rippling oceans, every ripple a gleam of scarlet or amber, emerald or turquoise, multicolored as rainbows, the colors shivering over the prairies in stripes and blotches, the grasses—some high, some low, some feathered, some straight—making their own geography as they grow. There are grass hills where the great plumes tower in masses the height of ten tall men; grass valleys where the turf is like moss, soft under the feet, where maidens pillow their heads thinking of their lovers, where husbands lie down and think of their mistresses; grass groves where old men and women sit quite at the end of the day, dreaming of things that might have been, perhaps once were. Commoners all, of course. No aristocrat would sit in the wild grass to dream. Aristocrats have gardens for that, if they dream at all.

Grass. Ruby ridges, blood-colored highlands, wine-shaded glades. Sapphire seas of grass with dark islands of grass bearing great plumy green trees which are grass again. Interminable meadows of silver hay where the great grazing beasts move in slanted lines like mowing machines, leaving the stubble behind them to spring up again in trackless wildernesses of rippling argent (1-2).

Tepper’s books occupy a major part of my “favorites” bookshelves (the ones in my bedroom as opposed to the ones in the library or in my home office or in my office at school). I took this picture of her books stacked up on my bedroom chair the day after I heard of her death.

I wrote Mike to ask if he would be interested in a tribute essay when I learned Sheri Tepper died (October 22, 2016). I began scribbling notes and re-reading some of her books immediately. I got (immediately!) sidetracked (academic habits now ingrained), looking at the scholarship and some critical discussions of her work online. I kept writing, and cutting, and cutting, and writing, until I realized there was a huge amount I wanted to say that I did not have time for and could not yet develop at this point.7

My original impulse was to write a fan tribute, but apparently, I am a different kind of fan in 2016 than I was in 1986.8 I still love (some) of Tepper’s work passionately (and find I am immediately grabbed/immersed in my favorites the moment I open them and read the first paragraphs) even though I can see the validity of many of the criticisms I’ve read. It’s nothing as simple as the suck fairy visiting loved books from my early years (I’ve been reading Tepper, like my other favorite writers, more or less continuously since I found her work thirty-four years ago [42 now!]).

I haven’t yet figured out what has happened although I am beginning to think that the flaws in her work are representative (for me) of some of my own flaws, and some of the flaws in some feminist discourses, and even in the broader American culture. To figure that out, I have to write more, but that has to come later. It’s all connected to my life and experiences, and to the development of Anglo-American feminist speculative fiction and to the current political situation in the U.S.

I wrote the first draft of this piece Wednesday, November 9, nearly twelve hours after it became clear that Donald Trump would win the presidency. The weeks since then have featured events that I think go well beyond what Tepper in even her most “heavy-handed”9 message fiction thought of writing even though her focus on the dangers of patriarchal authoritarianism, particularly that flavored by a certain flavor of American evangelical fundamentalism (similar to that of the Quiverfull Movement), seems prescient to me.

For some years, I have thought that Tepper, among all the sff writers whose work I know, was the most focused on detailing the threats to women’s rights, especially the right to reproductive choice, that have been the focus of the GOP/Tea Party/social conservative movement the past few decades and which are reading unprecedented heights.10 These attacks are not the only threats from the social conservatives/GOP who are exulting in the chance to dismantle the legislation and overcome court rulings that addressed systemic sexism, racism, homophobia, and poverty in this country, but I do not see much contemporary sff addressing this particular issue.11 Tepper’s work is informed by the feminist discourses that are labelled “Second Wave Feminism,” a focus I see as connected to the strengths of her work as well as its flaws.12

One of the quotes from her 2008 interview at Strange Horizons is very much reflective of what I’ve been feeling since the election:

SST: Post-apocalyptic, post- or mid-holocaust? You say that’s a grim place to go on a daily basis, yet we both do it every day, don’t we? We’re living in it, Neal. Did you think it was still in the future? Read the daily paper. How do I hold myself there? I read the daily paper. How do I recover? I don’t. Do you?

I discovered Tepper, as I found so many other women writers, after I left academia in 1982 because of the sexism in a graduate theatre program where I was doing a Master’s in playwriting.13 Some of my experiences in that graduate program, and in others, are why I do not see all of Tepper’s male antagonists as “straw-men” or unrealistically flat. I spent several years working in low-level clerical jobs and adjunct teaching while reading nothing but feminist theory and women writers. I started by finding and reading all the writers discussed in Joanna Russ’ brilliant How to Supress Women’s Writing, but I also pursued a longtime strategy of mine that predated my becoming a feminist: read the bookshelves at libraries and bookstores. If a title or a cover caught my attention, I’d read the first page and see what if it grabbed me.

That’s how I found Tepper.

At the time, I was happy to see the feminist ideas in her work and did not see some of the more problematic aspects relating to Second Wave feminism, particularly in regard to the whiteness of her characters and a view of sex / gender / sexual orientation that defaults to straightness and erases or condemns queerness, flaws that [ETA: were typical at the time in most cultural productions and continued into the 21st century as debates in sff fandom the past few years have highlighted].

I returned to academia in the late 1980s because I could do feminist work in a doctoral program; I did not realize how much intersectional feminist work had been done during the 1970s/1980s until I took my first theory course. That course, and the ones following, changed everything for me. Among other things, critical theory freed me from the limitations of the New Criticism methods I learned in my undergraduate days (which excluded popular genres by fiat): Foucault was the one whose work gave me my first tools for writing about science fiction in an academic context (though I had to sort of sneak it into my dissertation­). The work by intersectional feminists gave me an entirely different perspective on the sff I loved.

The Academic

As a lifelong fan turned academic who got a Ph.D. in English in part so I could teach sff, I have always been aware of how literary canons are built to exclude. The exclusionary nature of canon-building did not disappear when the 1970s led to so many challenges to the Anglo-American canon of literature: what came about was more an “explosion” of canons [ETA: something that is still bothering the hell out of the “Western Civilization/Dead White Male Canon” defenders and has started being imposed by fiat at some universities.]

Thus, there is a feminist sf canon that developed over time, with scholars focusing until recently on the relatively small body of text known as the “seventies feminist utopias” (or the lesbian separatist utopias). Feminist sf scholarship has grown and developed in recent years, and I think the early focus on utopias/dystopias was inevitable given that utopias/dystopias were the only “science fiction” allowed in literary studies at the time.14 I love some of the novels (particularly those by Joanna Russ and Marge Piercy), but never felt that I had much of anything to say about them as opposed to work by other women sff writers that I saw embodying various feminist ideas in the more genre-typical works.

My love for Tepper’s work was one of the main reasons that I became interested in the ways in which (some) women writers publishing in the 1980s integrated feminist ideas into their sff in ways that differed from the 1970s feminist utopias (a genre which has nearly disappeared, as Peter Fitting discusses in his excellent essay, “Reconsiderations of the Separatist Paradigm in Recent Feminist Science Fiction,” published in Science Fiction Studies in 1992).

The Marianne trilogy, along with Mavin’s and Jinian’s, and the Arbai series (Grass, Raising the Stones, and Sideshow are my favorite Teppers.15 My first major academic presentation in 1991 was on Grass as feminist epic revision of Frank Herbert’s Dune. I have published one article on Tepper’s work in which I talk about the trilogies in the context of feminist utopias, arguing that Tepper’s work explores feminist themes through the concept of “momentary utopias” or “momutes.”16 The paragraphs below cover some of points I made in that publication.

The early trilogies (Marianne’s, Mavin’s, and Jinian’s) are all stories about young women who resist the expectations of their male-dominated families and cultures in ways that differ from the 1970s feminist utopias (with the exception of Woman on the Edge of Time). Since more women began publishing in the 1980s, a greater range of feminist ideas began to appear along with a greater range in genres. Tepper did write one book that can arguably be considered a feminist utopia or dystopia (The Gate to Women’s Country) but I consider most of her work to be feminist speculative fiction with strong fantastic/fantasy elements.

The blend of fantastic worldbuilding and systems of magical powers existing with stories of male family members raping girls, restricting their education, and forcing them into marriages inform these novels. The protagonists resist/escape family pressures but focus on individual resistance for the most part. All the protagonists escape their families but only one is involved in an attempt to change the dominant culture.

Marianne changes her life by changing the time-line (with the help of the momentary gods which she learns how to use by watching her aunt, the villain of the narrative) rather than by changing social expectations or cultural systems. Her power comes from her birth as a Kavi, a member of the hereditary ruling class in Alpenlicht. This trilogy stands out as one of the few of Tepper’s stories in which heterosexual marriage is presented as a positive relationship. I loved it for its worldbuilding, the momegs, the beautiful descriptive prose of the natural world, and the secondary worlds.

Mavin is born into an oppressive extended family, a group of Shapeshifters in the Land of the True Game. Mavin escapes by leaving the Shifter compound, rescuing her younger brother, and, much later, her older sister, and others along the way. Not only does she face rape as she as she is deemed adult (is able to Shift), but the ongoing rape and abuse of her older sister is revealed which gives her an additional reason to leave. Mavin’s trilogy is very much a quest narrative covering twenty years of her life, but she never marries. She loves Himaggery, a wizard she meets in the first novel, but does not stay with him. One of her quests is to rescue him, and shows that they were happy only when shifted into magical beasts (singlehorns are described as very similar to unicorns). Mavin gives their son, Peter, to her brother to raise. Mavin does not change the cultures or communities she passes through, but she goes beyond what Marianne does by rescuing women and girls. The extent of the world beyond the Land of the True Game is shown in Mavin’s journeys—and the environmentalism/ecological elements are very strong.

Jinian’s trilogy moves from the focus on the individual to that of the groups attempting to change the dominant culture before the world dies (because of the actions taken by human colonists). On her quest, Jinian learns about the origin and history of human settlement on Lom. Humans colonized the planet, not realizing that Lom (embodying the Gaia hypothesis) was sentient and able to communicate with all its native creatures. Lom tries to bring humanity into its web, but humans resist; then, Lom grants humans magical Talents. But their increased power leads to more violence against each other and the destruction of the environment. The groups working to try to change human society, the Wizards and Dervishes specifically, are mostly (but not exclusively) women.17

Jinian is raised in an abusive family (who turns out not to be her birth family), but is helped from the start by a group (a coven!) of older women, called a Seven, who are Wizards /Wize arts. She is a Wizard and a beast-talker, able to communicate with animals and the other sentient beings of Lom. She is the one who discovers that the spirit is trying to commit suicide. As a result of the efforts Jinian leads, Lom decides to live but takes away the humans’ Talents. Jinian becomes involved with and marries Peter during the course of her quest, but also has strong relationships with other women, not only with her Seven, but with Silkhands the Healer.

Over time, as I read Tepper’s late work in the context of my graduate courses and embarked upon my first attempts to write intersectional feminist scholarship on science fiction [ETA: which is difficult, and I’m still trying to figure it all out!], I became aware of the problematic aspects relating to race and heteronormativity. Those patterns are not unique in sff either at the time or today. Additionally, I saw the tendency in Tepper narratives to construct sexism as institutionalized by authoritarian religions and regimes as caused by a genetic component of humanity.18

Thus, her novels showed that only a change in the human genome could change human nature, leading to eugenics/breeding programs (explored in detail in The Gate to Women’s Country but also central to The Waters Rising and Fish Tails). Some novels show groups of humans running the breeding programs while others feature external agents causing the change, at times with the cooperation of some humans (the Goddess in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, the Arbai device in the Arbai trilogy, the Pistach in The Fresco).19

[ETA: Note to self: need to explore how Benita, the protagonist in The Fresco, and Faye, one of the Seven in Gibbons, are women of color (Hispanic and African American, respectively) and what, if anything has been written about them].

The Question for the Future

I am ending this piece by noting the question that I keep coming to as I’ve been working on the drafts: the extent to which Tepper’s gender/genetic essentialism is representative of popular ideas in feminism specifically and more broadly in U.S. culture.

The entry on Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) covers some of the feminist theories which are are essentialist (meaning the assumption that sex or gender differences are “natural,” or genetically created).

P. Z. Myers noted in a recent post in his blog, the idea that “male” and “female” DNA exists is so widespread that even a Young Earth creationist cites “science” (incorrectly, but still tying the claim to “scientific knowledge”) to support his claim of the essential differences between men and women: There’s no such things as male and female DNA by P. Z. Myers.

Genetic essentialism is heavily implicated in Jim Crow concepts of “race.”20 This conversation between two anthropologists, (which Myers linked to in another blog post) covers the widespread and common understanding that DNA is “race”: New Articulations of Biological Difference in the 21st Century: A Conversation, Agustin Fuentes and Carolyn Rouse, at Anthropology Now.

Agustin: The core problem here remains that biology courses in high school and college are taught by individuals who, at least subconsciously, buy into the “race as biology” and “genetics as deterministic” perspectives. There are very, very few high schools in the United States where accurate information on human biological diversity is offered. There are few courses even at the college level where such information is provided or where contemporary evolutionary theory and biology are the norm. Inside and outside the classroom, students are mired in implicit “race talk” related to issues of biology and an overemphasis on genetic control of behavior. Think about discussions of professional sports, testosterone, violence, sexuality.

The history of deterministic genetics is tied to the history of genetics, with the impact on popular understanding of sex, race, and sexual orientation being documented fairly extensively.21 The tendency to assume a “natural” (aka genetic) cause for differences is widespread.

Tepper’s work definitely assumes a genetic component, but stories/novels are sneaky. They twine around and bite their own tails. As I was re-reading Tepper’s work for this essay, I kept thinking about how Fish Tails, unlike some of the earlier novels, seems to critique the common trope of breeding programs as solutions in the two plot lines: Lillis and Needly’s life in Hench Valley, one of Tepper’s most clearly delineated (and yes, heavy-handed!) portrayals of patriarchal authoritarianism, and Xulai’s story (which began in The Waters Rising. I agree with the various critical reviews I’ve seen that this trilogy has a number of problems in narrative technique, characterization, and themes,22 but it also contains some criticism of the attempt to improve the human race through breeding programs that did not exist in the earlier works.

So this piece seems to be the start of something longer trying to figure out what I see going on in Tepper’s work, and how people (including but not only me) have responded to it over the years. I don’t really need any more projects added to the mountain, but I don’t think this one is going to go away anytime soon.

ADDENDUM July 4, 2025: Well, technically it did go away, for a while, in that I didn’t keep working on it after it appeared at File 770. The drafts and other process materials are lurking in my personal archive of publications. But now I’ve gotten my hands on it again and dragged it back into my Web, I might use parts of it in the actual book, or I might develop some of it into its own essay. I gave a number of presentations on her work back in my feminist speculative fiction period.

Background

I began writing this post months ago (last fall!) for Webs — but then, as often happens became distracted by something else. My main interest was what they were doing with Tolkien’s work (the anthology is about the Inklings) and how different it might be from the more well-known (I suspect) Zimbardo and Isaacs’s collections. But I got carried away in summarizing things. I’ve decided to publish as is, not finished, and later will pull out some material for use. There’s only one more Tolkien essay I have to read.

I think some of my friends who are interested in Christianity/theology/Tolkien might be interested in the main argument the editor Mark Hillegas makes as he tries to distinguish the excellence of the Oxford writers compared to pulp sf cultists! I sure snickered a lot when I was reading that—but I think it’s a rather unique approach to trying to save their work from the “garbage can of genre” (in the context of literary scholarship of the last century’s dead white male canon and their prejudice against fantasy which has been well-documented in Tolkien studies!).

And my friends interested in feminist approaches to scholarship and questions of misogyny in scholarship might also be interested.

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This post is sort of an extended (yes, it’s too long for some email browsers) set of notes and commentary on a 1969 anthology as evidence of a pattern of exclusion of women from Tolkien scholarship. I tend to write this sort of thing out at some length searching for patterns as I go through the note-taking, then compress later on. The anthology is:

Mark R. Hillegas, editor. Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Preface by Harry T. Moore. Southern Illinois UP, Feffer & Simons, Inc. 1969. Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques, Harry T. Moore, General Editor.

I decided it was worth seeing what the earliest (Anglophone) academic publications looked like (mapping out disciplinary, gender, theoretical, and religious discourses in them—not to mention acknowledging the Whiteness of them all!) as background for some of the current assumptions in Tolkien scholarship in today, fifty plus years later.

The notes below are just a starting point: I’m skimming the essays rather quickly to see which I’ll be interested in reading in more detail later on (spoiler alert: it will be those essays which go against what one might call the ‘mainstream’ of Tolkien literary criticism!).

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I discovered the Hillegas anthology while doing research on fanzines at Marquette. I was wandering around in the shelves where the Tolkien Archive’s excellent library of secondary scholarship is stored, and it was one of those delightful serendipitous discoveries that happen in libraries and bookstores, plus other places where books assemble, creating magical spaces! [It can sometimes happen, sorta kinda, when I am mousing around online—when I click on a link from somebody, or browse through a list of the results from a search1

The title intrigued me; I pulled it out to examine, and realized that I had never heard of it which was odd given its early publication date.2

As far as I knew/had read, the first of the three Isaacs and Zimbardo collections was the only academic anthology published in the 1960s as well as the first academic collection period. Given my experiences with Tolkien (and sff in general) as a fan and aware of the Modern Language Association's attitude of disdain toward genre literature back then, I was fascinated to read the "Introduction" in which Hillegas goes into detail about his 1966 MLA session on the works of Lewis and Tolkien, noting that "the room was packed, with people standing at the back and overflowing into the hall. . . the response was so enthusiastic that it seemed worthwhile to carry the discussion over into a book" (xvi).3

At that time, I was primarily interested in how Hillegas presented the collection of essays, how he framed them, in his Introduction, which meant I only skimmed a few of the chapters since I am don’t work on the other Inklings, and the essays on Tolkien were not relevant to any of the approaches I take when analyzing Tolklien’s works (or the adaptations, or the reception).4 But it’s worth looking at the overall terrain when thinking about patterns in the scholarship as a field.

As an undergraduate and lifelong sff fan, I was aware of the prejudice that the genre/genres faced in U.S. English departments in the 1970s and 1980s! Back then, I was the weird English major who not only devoured Shakespeare and the Romantics and British literature generally but who also read sff and was not afraid to talk about in my undergraduate and two Master’s programs at the time.5 One sub-branch of the Tree of SF was somewhat respectable in Englit terms: dystopias (probably because they’re so depressing!). No contemporary fantasy was ever allowed in the door as far as I knew.

Hillegas explains that his goal is to rescue the three writers from a "cultist's underground," thus the MLA session and the anthology. Hillegas's “cult” differs from the one that Isaacs and Zimbardo (who I’ll be writing about later in this series!) saw as the problem for SRS Tolkien scholars: the fans, specifically in their case, the 1960s counterculture fans of Tolkien, were faddists, button-makers, hippies, and college students who were to blame for Tolkien’s work failing to earn the proper intellectual/academic respect.

Hillegas finds an entirely different “cult” to blame: the readers and fans of August Derleth, Weird Tales, and pulp science fiction generally, as well as the writers with "technical or scientific" educations who ignore myth in favor of materialism are the cult Hillegas wants to rescue the Inklings from. Hillegas describes Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams as “emerging, as it were, from the underground of the cultists,” praising their “seriousness” about fantasy and its “value” as a “mode. . .for presenting moral or spiritual values, which could not be presented in realistic fiction,” and the “high order of excellence of what Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams have written” (xiv).

Finally, Hillegas claims that “the fantasies of these three men are of the sort which appeals especially to the literary community—‘serious’ novelist and poets, critics, professors of literature—whom one might call ‘literary intellectuals’” (xvi).6 There are more comparisons, of course, showing the superiority of these authors over (apparently) all the “Weltanschauung of most writers of science fiction,”7 with their ”quantifying materialistic vision of the universe and human existence” (xvi).

The overall impression I get from Hillegas's introduction is that a large part of the Inklings' status (for him) comes from their Oxford connection as well the fact that their work is presented in a "mode valuable for presenting moral or spiritual values” which appeals to “literary intellectuals” which nobody would ever (snirk) call a cult, right? After all they have a better Weltanschauung that all the grubby materialists and peons out there who LIKE pulp sf!

NOTES

170 pages, hardback, blurb on back is summary of the “Contributor Information”

Part of a series focused on “Crosscurrents/Modern Critique” (meaning not coming from medievalists).

Preface (v-vi), Harry T. Moore, dtd. March 2, 1969, 7 paragraphs.

In the first paragraph, he explains that as a series editor, he always writes a preface for all the books chosen for the series which was “not an easy task, but he did the beset he could, often wishing that he had been born more glib. Since he read widely, however, he could generally manage to find something to say about whatever book he was dealing with” (v).8 However, this particular book is about “three authors he had no read with any thoroughness, nor did he intend to read them, although the book in question was one he had no hesitation in accepting” (v).

In the rest of the preface, Moore explains that he accepted the ms. for publication in a series which “has been fairly wide-ranging” (vi); that he does not consider “his preferences necessarily infallible . . . . particularly when so many people whose judgment he respects happen to like those particular authors” (v); that while he enjoys some fantasy, “he cannot become engrossed by the whimsy of a Tolkien; let others enjoy it as much as they please,” but he will “help them along, and help the cause of these three writers,” by publishing it for “the many intelligent readers interested in its material” (vs). Moore is friends with Hillegas9 whose “Introduction . . . makes out a good case for his special kind of fantasy, showing how it has an appeal for many ‘literary intellectuals,’ as Professor Hillegas designates them” (vi).

Notes on Contributors (vii-ix) [10 men (83%) 2 women 17%)]10

J. B. S. Haldane: The “world-famous bio-chemist, biologicist, geneticist, Marxist, and philosopher and spokesman of science,” (vii). Link goes to a site dedicated to his life and work. I’m not sure how much of his published work is literary criticism—but I look forward to following up after reading his essay on Lewis!

Mark R. Hillegas: At the time Shadows was published, he was an “Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University,” specializing in “the impact of science on literature, the relationship between the humanities and the sciences, and the literary imagination of science” (vii) [huh, apparently he thought the impact of science on literature was no-good, materialistic, not spiritual?]. The link leads to his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction which notes that “[i]n 1961 he gave, at Colgate, one of the first university-level classes in sf in the USA,” and published a number of essays on dystopian fiction (“his approach reflecting a period [‘1960s-1970s] when they were primarily thought of and treated as Mainstream Writers”)11 AHA: he was working with dystopias which were considered mainstream instead of pulpy.

Daniel Hughes: A literary critic and”poet; he was “an Associate Professor at Wayne State University, specializing in English Romanticism” (vii), publishing on “Shelley, modern fiction, and poetry. The link leads to an obituary for Hughes, written by a personal friend of his from Wayne State, focusing more on his poetry than his criticism, describing him as living “a pure life of the mind, and art -- romantic poetry, Renaissance Italian painting, European classical music -- [which] was for him a kind of religion, through his life, including the forty years he endured multiple sclerosis.”

W. R. Irwin: William Robert Irwin was a “Professor of English and Director of Graduate Study in English at the University of Iowa.]” (viii). The link leads to the entry describing his archived papers at the University of Iowa, a collection which includes “reviews, essays, and manuscripts he produced throughout his career as a professor of English. Correspondence, newspaper clippings, course notes, and departmental memos are also included.”12

Clyde S. Kilby: The first major figure in Tolkien studies hoves into view, described as “Professor of English at Wheaton College . . . a personal friend of C. S. Lewis [who] spent the summer of 1966 working with J. R. R Tolkien in Oxford” (vii). The link leads to Kilby’s biographical page at Wheaton College: he was the “founder and first curator of the Marion E. Wade Collection [now Center].”

Charles Moorman: Full name: Charles Wickham Moorman III. He was a “professor of English [focusing on medieval and Arthurian mythologies] and Associate Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Southern Mississippi,” publishing on the Oxford Christians (such as Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and T. S. Eliot).13 The link goes to his Wikipedia article (which supports my sense that there are not many online sources about Moorman available).

Robert Plank : was “the Program Chief, Social Work Service, Mental Hygiene Unit, Veterans Administration Hospital, Cleveland Ohio, and Lecturer in English and Psychology, Case Western Reserve University” (vii). The link leads to the Tolkien Compass which lists Plank as one of the contributors to Jared Lobdell’s A Tolkien Compass. Plank’s essay is "'The Scouring of the Shire': Tolkien's View on Fascism.” Lobdell’s anthology was first published in 1975, so six years after the Hillegas anthology. Plank’s essay in Shadow is on “Some Psychological Aspects of Lewis’s Trilogy.” In the second paragraph of this essay, Plank declares that his intention is to “stay away, as far as possible, from literary criticism,” and to avoid“[fixing] Lewis’s place in literary history, or [discussing] his religious, philosophical or political ideas” (26).

Gunnar Urang: I could not find any authoritative source to link to for this writer, and his “Note” is rather brief. He was an “Assistant Professor of English at Wooster College, has just completed his Ph.D. in Theology and Literature in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, writing a dissertation on Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams” (ix). That means he probably completed his doctorate in or slightly before 1969.

Jessica Yates has a post (at the Tolkien Collector’s Guide) discussing the possibility that Gunnar Urang was the “Mr. Rang” that wrote to Tolkien asking for information about about some of the names in LotR which led to Tolkien writing a letter (#297) which he never sent. Yates references Urang’s book, Shadows of Heaven: Religion and Fantasy in the Writings of C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J. R. R. Tolkien. The book was published in 1971, so I would bet a nickel that it’s based on Urang’s dissertation. Yates describes the book (including his careful attribution of research!) and concludes that the “book deserves to have been more cited than it has been.”

George Parker Winship, Jr.: I have not been able to find any online information on this author (although I think I may have found some articles about his father, George Parker Winship, Sr.? the name doesn’t seem all that common); the only results are citations of his work. Junior was at the time of publication of the anthology “Chairman of the Department of English at King College,” and wrote an “early, seminal14 article on [Charles] Williams’ fiction, which appeared in the Yale Review in 1950” (ix). The title of early article is cited in publications about Williams: “This Rough Magic: The Novels of Charles Williams.”15

Alice Mary Hadfield got a degree from Oxford, and then an “M.A. from Mount Holyoke [and was] an assistant to Charles Williams at Oxford University Press in Amen House in London” (vii). She published a number of books, including “the first biography of Williams” (vii). The first link leads to her Wikipedia entry, and the second to a list of her books at an online used book shop.

Patricia Meyer Spacks OK, this is interesting—I actually *knew* of Spacks previous to finding the Hillegas anthology (as I knew of Kilby, but in an entirely different context). I vaguely knew Haldane was a scientist, and I knew Kilby’s name from other Tolkienists, but Spacks was a feminist literary scholar! And I spent a lot of years doing feminist literary scholarship (which used to be a small enough field you could buy all the books in a year without much effort and which then grew rapidly and exponentially during my time as a working academic though the “feminist scholarship on sff was a very small part of that growth!). Her area of specialization was 18th/19th C literature (not really Tolkien’s period), and according to the Wikipedia article, she accomplished a great deal during her life (chairing multiple departments, publishing books, winning awards, serving on major humanities organizations, and serving as the President of the Modern Language Associations, not exactly a bastion of feminism back in the day!). Lo, she has donated papers to the Archives at Yale!

Born in 1929, she is still alive and apparently still writing as of information posted in 2024. Her essay in Hillegas is on Charles Williams’ work (“Charles Williams The Fusions of Fiction”) but she has another essay, titled “Power and Meaning in The Lord of the Rings” which appeared in the 1968 and the 2004 Isaacs and Zimbardo anthologies. According to Wikipedia, it was a reprint from a socialist journal, Critique, I’m saying “apparently” because I have to check this all out.16 All I’ve found so far is Wikipedia sources, and I think there’s an error in their attribution which I’ll try to figure out when I have a bit more time later, plus I want to see what Zimbardo and Isaacs say in their anthologies which are on my pile to be covered later for this series!)

She published many books—none about Tolkien!—but the earliest book publication seems to be 1971 (I don’t know how comprehensive this list is—I may find a better one later). She got her doctorate in 1955 (the year I was born!) I am interested in her work, given she is clearly a feminist literary scholar who, for whatever reason, chose to write on a fantasy writer at a period when the genre was not accorded much respect/status by the academic types .

“Introduction,’ Mark R. Hillegas, pp. xiii-xix, dated December 18, 1968.

Table of Contents

“C. S. Lewis: The Man and the Mystery” by Chad Walsh (pp. 1-14)

Focus is on Lewis’s work on religion; Walsh knew Lewis; draws on biographical sources, influences on Lewis, and mostly the nonfiction. I don’t think I’ll be spending much time on this one.

“Auld Hornie, F.R.S.” by J. B. S. Haldane (pp. 15-25)

Haldane was not part of the original MLA session; in fact, his essay is a reprint of one which was published earlier.17 As a scientist and Marxist, his essay was (I suspect) sought out by Hillegas because he describes his “principle of selection in putting together this volume has been to achieve as much variety in approach and viewpoint as possible: not only the biologist and Marxist, Haldane, but an expert in psychological analysis, two poets, and various scholar-critics have their say” (xix).

While the essay was originally framed as a review of Lewis’s Space trilogy, Haldane feels free to engage with Lewis’s books “which are intended to defend Christianity,” nonfiction as well as fiction (15) and to make larger argument about Lewis’s influence, and the contemporary debates around “science” and “religion” (as well as to be rather sarcastic about some elements of Lewis’s style). I can definitely tell that I’ll be coming back to this one because, although it’s about Lewis, there are resonances with Tolkien’s work (although now I have to go see if Haldane every wrote about Tolkien!).18 And, I am impressed, given the commentary from Hillegas in his introduction, that he wanted to feature Haldane’s essay in this collection!

Haldane praises Lewis’s literary skill and brilliant writing in the trilogy (comparing him to Dante and Milton), but also criticizes Lewis’s ignorance of the science of his time.19 Haldane’s explanation for this problem is that “Christian mythologoy incorporated the cosmological theories current eighteen centuries ago. Dante found it a slight strain to combine this mythology with the facts known in his own day. Milton found it harder. Mr. Lewis finds it impossible” (16). Haldane goes on to point out that there is only “one decent scientist in the three books, a physicist who is murdered by the deveil-worshippers before we have got to know him” (17), while the rest “have an ideology which ranges from a Kiplingesque contempt for ‘natives’ to pure ‘national socialism’ with the devil substituted for the God whose purposes Hitler claimed to carry out” (17). Then, Haldane extends the criticism of “scientists” to the limitations of Lewis’s theology upon his view of “[Haldane’s] species” (22) (a lovely word choice! Then, a page or so later, Haldane says “I agree with Mr. Lewis that man is in a sense a fallen being The Origin of the Family seems to be to provide better evidence for this belief than the Book of Genesis. But I disagree with him in that I also believe that man can rise against by his own efforts” (24).

“Some Psychological Aspects of Lewis’s Trilogy” by Robert Plank (pp. 26-40)

Plank situates his purpose, and his argument, in this chapter as “[staying] away, as far as possible, from literary criticism,” in order to focus on the [I guess psychological] question of “why does [this literary text, the Space Trilogy] appeal to readers?” while also avoiding Lewis’s “religious, philosophical, or political ideas” (26). I admit that I’m not quite sure what to do with that information which appears in the second paragraph, immediately following the first paragraph’s opening statement that:

C. S. Lewis was, for which we should be thankful, paradoxical: a science fiction writer who did not write real science fiction;20 a Christian who ranged far away from the inherited world of Christianity;21 a novelist whose works were not, in any ordinary sense, novels.22 (26)

Plank claims that Lewis “shows in his works how he has come to terms with the great issues that are also the objects of psychological study: birth and death; the role of man [sic]—and his own role in particular—in the world; love and hate (or sex and aggression),” “great issues” that Plank also calls “fragments” (26-7). And by paragraph 5, Plank has pulled the rhetorical move which is one of the major reasons I dislike (most) psychological approaches to literature: he is going to psychoanalyze the human being who write the fiction:

The task of psychological analysis is to put the confession together from the fragments. In endeavoring to do so, I shall lean on what Lewis says in the trilogy, using extraneous material only occasionally, to make explicit what in the three novels, since they are fiction, can only be implicit. (27).

If someone ever wants to do a study of the historiography of psychological criticism of authors/literature (especially done by people trained in the discipilne, as opposed people trained in literary studies who’ve read some psychology), they might be interested in reading what Plank has to say!

“Out of The Silent Planet as Cosmic Voyage” by Mark R. Hillegas (pp. 41-58)

This chapter is by the editor of the anthology and might be of some interest to Lewis scholars! The basic argument is that the scholarship on Lewis’s Space Trilogy has focused on his “use of myth in the ‘cosmic trilogy,” but that readers tend to think that the first of the books is less valuable than the second and third (presumably in how mythic it is). Hillegas’s argument is that: “I would like to argue here that Out of the Silent Planet, seen for what it really is and not just as a mythic presentation of Christian doctrine, is a considerably better work than it is at the moment thought to be” (42), concluding that the first “is the least propagandistic of the three volumes in the trilogy,” and that Hillegas thinks that as time goes on, Silent Planet will be considered the best of the three books” as an example of "the “cosmic voyage” (58).

“‘Now Entertain Conjecture of a Time’—The Fictive Worlds of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien” by Charles Moorman (pp. 59-69)

A rather interesting comparative approach, starting with comparing “On Fairy Stories” with “Fantastical or Mythical?” (an essay by Lewis) in order to consider the ways in which each of the writer’s theory connects to their fictional practice: Moorman sees Lewis as more consciously allegorical than Tolkien (check!); also sees Lewis as more focused on Christian themes than Tolkien (check—in fact, at the end, Moorman sees LotR as more pagan! YAY early pagan identification FTW!); acknowledges the different tones might be largely due to the presence of child protagonists). Would probably be of most interest to Inklings scholars (and/or Lewis fans who might disagree with some of Moorman’s conclusions about Lewis’s series), but I’m definitely interested in the pagan element.

“Meaning in The Lord of the Rings” by Clyde S. Kilby (pp. 70-80)

Kilby seems to consider the “meaning” of a text to be connected to its popularity and/or being recognized “as a creation of permanent value” (70), and puts forth some reasons for the popularity. These include: “Ancestry and antiquity”. . . .”a viable history”. . . .being a “world. . .containing its own myths and legends” . . . .characters still living from “the ancient past” . . . .and the “myths [turning] out to be true” which is important to those of us living in an “infinitely atomized l[universe] (70-71). Additional reasons come up throughout the essay: “epic scope”. . . . “noble blending of melancholy and joy” [compared to Keats’s “Grecian Urn”]; “joins the high art of the world in revealing the significance, even the glory of the ordinary” (73); “creates a more poignant feeling for the essential quality of many outdoor and indoor experiences” . . . “the depiction of a world of being as well as doing” (74). . . .the desire of readers to re-read (“Great writing is always more qualitative than quantitative. Knowing the outcome enhances rather than detracts from the story” [74-5]). And the list goes on for a few more pages (little time spent developing any of these points—it truly does read like a list, especially when a few pages later, Kilby lists names of people writing about the dire situation of the modern world (Barfield, Lewis) and, a few pages later (astonishing!) “Miss Marjorie Wright” (must indicate marital status of The Woman!) who wrote a thesis on myth in Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams. But she doesn’t take up much space, and within a few lines, Kilby is back rhapsodizing about goodness/truth/beauty/myth/mystery/reality and the conversations among/between men, and then off to a couple of pages on sound/phononlogy in Tolkien’s work (a lot of lists here) (oops, I was wrong: at one point, “Professor Tolkien” appears—the only other honorific popping up.23 The last two paragraphs are all about the reason why the novel is “being widely read today”, with the answer being that “people [specifically “a businessman,” W.H. Auden, and Kilby himself] experience in common the meaning of leadership, greatness, valor, time redolent of timelessness, and common trials. Men become temporary human. . . . . For a century at least the world has been increasingly demythologized. But such a condition is apparently alien to the real nature of men” (80).

OK then! But I have to say this is just the sort of example I figured I’d find that sees Tolkien’s world as “a world in which history is not bunk and truth is a possibility here and now, a world in which God still happens to be alive and man is still responsible, an allusive but not at all an illusive world” (75).

Clearly Kilby felt Tolkien’s work was limitless and inspiring; not surprisingly perhaps, Kilby’s interpretation of its meaning seems limited in many many many ways.

“Pieties and Giant Forms in The Lord of the Rings” by Daniel Hughes (pp.81-96)

Hughes’s essay explores whether or not LotR is more connected to the Classical (which is what Hughes claims that Tolkien’s aesthetic is “aligned with” [81], according to "“On Fairy Stories”) or to the Romantic (comparing parts of his essay and novel to Coleridge and Blake’s work). Tolkien’s religious beliefs are more or less gestured at in the context of his art (treating them more as as shaping his Classical and/or Romantic elements, or as a way to connect Tolkien’s themes to Simone Weil’s work). Hughes covers quite a few structural elements of the novel: Frodo as the main character, Gollum, and Gandalf as the characters “whose presence manifest almost as well as Frodo’s” [86]), discussing the characterization and narratological choices Tolkien made. But the essay also covers the major “fantastic” characters: Bombadil, Treebeard, the Elves, and what he says “may be the most striking feat of The Lord of the Rings [for many readers]: its resuscitation of the Heroic Age, its virtues and valor intact” (91). Interesting claim at this point:

Tolkien, in writing for now even through his removed world, has succeeded in doing what might have been thought impossible in our ostensibly liberal-democratic, war-hating times (emphasis mine); he has almost brought off an epic as grand as Beowulf, as detailed as an old dim chronicle, and as old-faschioned in its values as an Icelandic saga or Sir Walter Scott. (91)

The exemplar of the Heroic Age is Aragorn who serves, when Tolkien realized who “Strider” was, as the “image that enables Tolkien, the artist, fantastist, and theorist of Faërie, to join hands with Tolkien the admirer of the Heroic Age’s tales and devices” (92).

“Tolkien’s Fantasy the Phenomenology of Hope” by Gunnar Urang (pp. 97-110)

Note to self, need to do!

The Novels of Charles Williams” by George P. Winship, Jr. (pp. 111-24)

“The Relationship of Charles Williams’ Working Life to His Fiction” by Alice Mary Hadfield (pp. 125-38)

“Christian Doctrine and the Tactics of Romance The Case of Charles Williams” by W. R. Irwin (pp. 139-149)

“Charles Williams The Fusions of Fiction” by Patricia Meyer Spacks (pp. 150-159)

NOTE: This post is not really a "readable" post (in the sense I cannot imagine anybody wanting to read it) because it's adapted from my academic resume (aka: a curriculum vitae, CV, because academics gonna academic) and is basically an organized list of my publications and presentations. So it's a resource (and I bet I find it easier to update when it's online especially since I don't have to keep documenting "teaching" and "service" which I did before I retired) that I find useful to have handy because I don't remember dates!

The majority of publications are print (and thus paywalled) (because academia, publish or perish, etc.) but the ones that are open-access contain links. And I am shifting to almost entirely open-access (when I choose a journal to publish in; sometimes friends bounce into view and ask for me to do something for one of their projects, and wave fun titles/topics in front of me). 

Personal Photo of Author

ROBIN ANNE REID
robinareid  A fastmail.com
  
EDUCATION

Ph.D. University of Washington, December 1992
M.A. Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, 1984
M.A. Western Washington University (Creative Writing/Poetry), 1981
B.A. Western Washington University, 1979

BOOKS

Race, Racisms, and Racists: Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium, Adaptations, and Readers (working title), editor. Forthcoming 2026. 

Queer Approaches to Tolkien: Essays on the Many Paths to Middle-earth. Co-edited with Christopher Vaccaro and Stephen Yandell. McFarland, 2025.

Tolkien in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Tom Shippey. Co-edited with John Wm. Houghton, Janet Brennan Croft, Nancy Martsch, and John D. Rateliff, McFarland, 2014.

The Encyclopedia of Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Greenwood, 2008. 

Ray Bradbury: A Critical Companion. Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers Series. Greenwood P, 2000.

Arthur C. Clarke: A Critical Companion. Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers Series. Greenwood P, 1997.

EDITED JOURNALS

Authorizing Tolkien: Control, Adaptation, and Dissemination of J. R. R. Tolkien's Works. Co-edited with Michael D. Elam, Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 3, iss 3, 2016.
scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol3/iss3/ 

Race and Ethnicity in Fandom. Co-edited with Sarah N. Gatson. Half of double-guest edited issue for Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 8, 2011. journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/issue/view/9

ESSAYS & CHAPTERS

"'Within Bounds That He Has Set': A Stylistic Analysis of Cities and Strongholds in The Lord of the Rings," Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth: Essays on the Habitations of Tolkien's Legendarium, edited by Cami Agan. Mythopoeic Press, 2024.

"Making or Creating Orcs: How Thorinsmut's Free Orcs AU Writes Back to Tolkien," Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 11, iss. 2, article 3. 2020. 

"The History of Scholarship on Lois McMaster Bujold's Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Feminist Bibliographic Essay," Biology & Manners: Essays on the Worlds and Works of Lois McMaster Bujold, edited by Regina Yung Lee and Una McCormack, Liverpool UP, 2020, pp. 13-31.

"The Holy Family: Divine Queerness in The Curse of Chalion and The Hollowed Hunt," Biology & Manners: Essays on the Worlds and Works of Lois McMaster Bujold, edited by Regina Yung Lee and Una McCormack, Liverpool UP, 2020, pp. 209-227.

"On the Shoulders of Gi(E)nts: The Joys of Bibliographic Scholarship and Fanzines in Tolkien Studies," Mythlore, vol. 37, no. 2, article 3, pp. 23-38. 

"The Queer Phenomenology of Ann Leckie's Worldbuilding in the Imperial Radch Series," Fastitocalon: Studies in Fantasticism Ancient to Modern, vol VII, Worldbuilding in the Fantastic, 2017, pp. 61-77.

"Race in Tolkien Studies: A Bibliographic Essay," Tolkien and Alterity, edited by Christopher Vaccaro and Yvette Kisor, Palgrave, 2017, pp. 33-74.

"Writing a Life: The Stylistics of Ray Bradbury's Autobiographical Novels," Critical Insights: Ray Bradbury, ed. Rafeeq McGiveron, Salem, 2017, pp. 137-162.

"Bending Culture: Racebending.com's Protests against Media Whitewashing," 
Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction, edited by Isiah Lavender III, U of Mississippi P, 2017, pp. 189-203.

"'[T]hings That Were, and Things That Are, and Things That Yet May Be': Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings Online," with Judy Ann Ford. Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works, ed. Leslie A. Donovan. The Modern Language Association of America. Approaches to Teaching World Literatures Series, 2015, pp. 214-18. Finalist for the 2017 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies.

"Reading the Man in the Moon: An Intersectional Analysis of Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," Critical Insights: Robert A. Heinlein, ed. Rafeeq O. McGiveron, Salem, 2015, pp. 55-69.

"The Authenticity of Intersectionality in Nicola Griffith's Hild," The Middle Ages in Popular Culture: Medievalism and Genre, edited by Helen Young. Cambria, 2015, pp. 75-90.

"The History of Scholarship on Female Characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium: A Feminist Bibliographic Essay," Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan, Mythopoeic P, 2015, pp. 13-40.

"'The Wild Unicorn Herd Check-In': Reflexive Racialisation in Online Science Fiction Fandom," Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction, ed. Isiah Lavender III, U of Mississippi P, 2014, pp. 225-240.

"Polytemporality and Epic Characterization in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: Reflecting The Lord of the Ring's Modernism and Medievalism," with Judy Ann Ford. The Hobbit in Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on the Novel's Influence on the Later Writings, edited by Bradford Lee Eden, McFarland, 2014, pp. 208-221.

"Genre, Censorship, and Cultural Changes: Critical Reception of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451," Critical Insights: Fahrenheit 451, edited by Rafeeq McGiveron, Salem P, 2014, pp. 37-49. 

"Light (noun, 1) or Light (adjective, 14b)?: Female Bodies and Femininities in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings," The Body in Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on Middle-earth Corporeality, edited by Christopher Vaccaro, McFarland, 2013, pp. 98-118.

"Remaking Texts, Remodeling Scholarship" in Remake/Remodel: Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions, edited by Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis, Palgrave, 2012, pp. 179-196.

"Into the West: Far Green Country or Shadow on the Waters?" with Judy Ann Ford. Picturing Tolkien: Essays on Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings Film Trilogy, edited by  Janice Bogstad and Philip Kaveny. McFarland, 2011, pp. 169-182.

"Mythology and History: A Stylistic Analysis of The Lord of the Rings," Style, vol. 43, no. 4, Winter 2009, pp. 517-538.

"Thrusts in the Dark: Slashers' Queer Practices," Extrapolation, vol. 50, no. 3, Fall 2009 pp. 463-483.

"Councils and Kings: Aragorn's Journey Towards Kingship in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings," With Judy Ann Ford. Tolkien Studies, vol. VI, 2009, pp. 71-90. 

"'Yearning Void and Infinite Potential': Online Slash Fandom as Queer Female Space," with Alexis Lothian and Kristina Busse. English Language Notes. Queer Space Special Issue, ed. by Jane Garrity, vol. 45, iss. 2, Fall/Winter 2007, pp. 103-111. A collaborative experiment in a note format (rather than formal essay) that in online at LiveJournal in its full version; the cut version is in the print journal. 

"'Tree and flower, leaf and grass': The Grammar of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings," Fantasy Fiction into Film, edited by. Leslie Stratyner and James R. Keller, McFarland, 2007, pp. 35-54.

"Breaking of the Fellowship: Competing Discourses of Archives and Canons in The Lord of the Rings Internet Fandom," How We Became Middle Earth, edited by Adam Lam and Nataliya Oryshchuk, Walking Tree, 2007, pp. 347-370.

"Cunning Linguists: The Bisexual Erotics of Words / Silence / Flesh," with Eden Lee Lackner and Barbara Lynn Lucas, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, McFarland, 2006, pp. 189-206.

"Tolkien's Book and Jackson's Film: Adaptation, Substitution, Translation or Desecration?" Arizona English Bulletin, vol. 45, no. 2, 2003, pp. 3-10.

"Borderlands Theory and Science Fiction," The SFRA Review, no. 250, Jan/Feb 2001, p. 10.

"Lost in Space Between 'Center' and 'Margin.'" Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds, edited by Susan Weisser and Jennifer Fleischner, New York UP, 1994, pp. 343-357.

"Constructing Sites/Sights of Resistance: Inserting Different Discourses of 'Race' and 'Ethnicity' into Feminism," Diversity: A Journal of Multicultural Issues, vol. I, no. 2, Spring 1993, pp. 29-56.

EDITOR REVIEWED CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS

"How Queer Atheists, Agnostics, and Animists Engage with Tolkien's Legendarium," Tolkien and Diversity: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Summer Seminar 2021, The Tolkien Society, edited by Will Sherwood, Peter Roe Series XXII, Luna Press, 2023, pp. 52-85. 

"From Beowulf to Post-modernism: Interdisciplinary Team-Teaching of J .R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings," With Judy Ann Ford. The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference Celebrating 50 Years of The Lord of the Rings, edited by Sarah Wells, Tolkien Society, 2008, pp. 106-111. 

"'Momutes': Momentary Utopias in Tepper's Trilogies," The Utopian Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Twentieth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Martha Bartter, Praeger, 2004, pp. 101-108.

EDITOR REVIEWED BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAYS

"Tolkien's Literary Theory and Practice," in "The Year's Work on Tolkien Studies 2018," edited by David Bratman. Tolkien Studies, vol. 20, 2021, pp. 297-305.

"Tolkien's Literary Theory and Practice," in "The Year's Work on Tolkien Studies 2017," edited by David Bratman. Tolkien Studies, vol. 19, 2020, pp. 282-88.

"Tolkien's Literary Theory and Practice," in "The Year's Work on Tolkien Studies 2016," edited by David Bratman. Tolkien Studies, vol. 18, 2019, pp. 211-16.

"Tolkien's Literary Theory," in "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies 2015," edited by David Bratman. Tolkien Studies, vol. 15, 2018, pp. 301-307

"General Criticism: The Hobbit," in "The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2014," edited by David Bratman. Tolkien Studies, vol. 14, 2017, pp. 229-233. 

"Tolkien's Literary Theory and Practice," in "The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2014," edited by David Bratman. Tolkien Studies, vol. 14, 2017, pp. 240-247.

"Philology and Language Studies: Tolkien’s Use of English," in "The Year in Tolkien Studies 2013," edited by David Bratman. Tolkien Studies, vol. 13, 2016, pp. 283–290. 

"Tolkien’s Literary Theory and Practice," in "The Year in Tolkien Studies 2013," edited by David Bratman. Tolkien Studies, vol. 13, 2016, pp. 242–257.

EDITOR REVIEWED "NOTES" & "COMPANIONS TO"  

"'Perilous and Fair' in 'A Bleak, Barren Land': A Feminist Responds to Dylan Lee Henderson’s Essay," Mythlore, vol. 43, no. 2, article 19, 2025, pp. 253-269. The Online Supplement, Writing from Ithilien, 2025.   

“Chapter 17: Anglophone Science Fiction Fandoms, 1920s-2020s.” The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2024, pp. 147-54.

"Chapter 13, 'I Came for the 'Pew-Pew Space Battles'; I Stayed for the Autism: Martha Wells' Murderbot," The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction, edited by Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry, Wendy Pearson, and Lisa Yaszek, Routledge, 2023, pp. 95-101. 

"A Queer Atheist Feminist Autist Responds to Donald Williams's "Keystone or Cornerstone? A Rejoinder to Verlyn Flieger on the Alleged 'Conflicting Sides' of Tolkien's Singular Self"," Note, Mythlore, 2022, vol. 40, no. 2, article 14. 

"Melissa Scott," Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture, edited by Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink, Routledge, 2022, pp. 179-184.

"The White Elephant in the Room: Lois McMaster Bujold's Participation in Racefail '09,"  Short But Concentrated: An Essay Symposium on the Works of Lois McMaster Bujold, eds. Una McCormack and Regina Yung Lee, Fifth Storey Press, Chapter 3. 

"Celebrating 'Queer Lodgings.'" Note, Mallorn, iss. 61, Winter 2020. pp. 31-31. 

“Chapter 21: Fan Studies.” The Routledge Companion to Sciencd Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint. Routledge, 2009, pp. 204-13. 

REVIEWS

Review, Tolkien Among the Moderns, edited by Ralph C. Wood, Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 6, iss. 1, article 2, 2018.

Review, The Woman Fantastic in Contemporary American Media Culture, edited by  Elyce Ray Helford, Shiloh Carroll, Sarah Gray, and Michael R. Howard II. Science Fiction Film and Television, vol 11, iss. 2, 2018, pp. 341-6. 
	
Review, Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages, edited by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers. Tolkien Studies, vol. 4, Spring 2007, pp. 314-323.

Review, "J.R.R. Tolkien Special Issue," Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies, guest edited by Shaun F. Hughes. Tolkien Studies, vol. 3, Spring 2006, pp. 178-182.

Review, "Three Greenhaven Press Books (Readings on J.R.R. Tolkien; Readings on Fahrenheit 451; Readings on Frankenstein)," Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 12, iss. 1, no. 45, 2001, pp. 126-131.

Review, Sherri Tepper's The Fresco, The SFRA Review, no. 253, July/Aug 2001, p. 30.

Review Essay: "New Feminist Cultural Criticism," Science Fiction Studies, vol. 27, no. 81, part 2, July 2000.

Review Essay: "Feminism, Gender and Science Fiction," The SFRA Review, #235/236, August/October 1998, pp. 10-12.

ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES 

"Ray Bradbury," Popular Contemporary Writers, vol. 2, edited by Michael D. Sharp, Marshall Cavendish, 2005.

"Charles de Lint," Dictionary of Literary Biography,  Vol. 251: Canadian Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers, edited by Douglas Ivison, Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2002, pp. 49-60.

ONLINE ESSAYS

"Writing Against the Grain: T. Kingfisher's Feminist Mythopoeic Fantasy," File 770, Aug. 4, 2021. 

"Melissa Scott’s Invisible Worlds," Glasgow In 2024. June 28. 2021. 

"Visiting Middle-earth," File 770, July 5, 2018. 

"Sheri S. Tepper," File 770, Jan. 2, 2017. 

GRANTS

External

Co-director, National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Institute for School Teachers. "J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: The Real and the Imagined Middle Ages" with Judy Ann Ford. $175,395. Summer II 2009.

Co-director, National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Institute for School Teachers, "From Beowulf to Post-Modernism: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings" with Judy Ann Ford. $138,000. Summer II 2004.

Internal

2009 Research Enhancement Grant $4500
The Fan Fiction Reader

2007 Research Enhancement Grant $4,738
Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy: An Encyclopedia, published 2008, Greenwood P.

CREATIVE WRITING

Poetry

"Rock Roses. "The Mayo Review. Texas A&M University-Commerce. 2008.

"Fireflies and Spidersilk." Cereberation, 2007.

"January 29, 2000." New Texas 2001, edited by Donna Walker-Nixon and James Ward Lee. University of Mary Hardin-Baylor.

"Texas Victorian Wedding Story." New Texas '99, edited by Donna Walker-Nixon and James Ward Lee. University of Mary Hardin-Baylor.

"Wings and Stone." Western Ohio Journal IX-1 Spring 1988.

"Taking Pictures." cold drill, Spring 1988.

"Song." Boise Statesman, Fall 1987.

"Old Woman." Root Weave, Fall 1985.

"Montana Camping Trip." passaic review, #7/8.

"Ancestral Determination." The Panhandler, #14, Fall 1984.

"A Matter of Survival." "Northwest Magazine," Portland Oregonian, Summer 1984.

"Fall Haiku" and "Holly Haiku." Piedmont Literary Review, vol. VIII, no. 4, 1984.

"A Sheep and Horse Man," Poetry Today, December 1983.

"Different Feelings." Kwani #1, Fall 1982.

"Bus Trip." Another Small Magazine, I-2, Spring 1982.

"Turning of the Season," Poetry Seattle, May, 1982.
 
Plays Produced

Patterns. One Act, Cornish Institute, Seattle, Washington, November 1984.

A Reforestation Project, One Act, Student Directed Plays, Western Washington University, March 1982.

Lonely Woman, One Act, Radio Theatre, Western Washington University, February 1982.

Rose Tints, Full Length, New Playwright's Theatre, Western Washington University, November 1981.

The Hostage, One Act, New Playwright's Theatre, Western Washington University, Spring 1980.

Other

Dissertation: A Genealogy of North American Feminism, 1963-1991: Competing Narratives of 'Gender,' 'Race,' and 'Ethnicity,' University of Washington, December, 1992.

Thesis: Permutations: A Group of Poems in Three Movements. Western Washington University, June 1981.

PRESENTATIONS

Keynote/Plenary And Invited Presentations

“Tolkien’s ‘Absent [Female] Characters’: How Christopher Tolkien Expanded Middle-earth.” Tolkien Society, Christopher Tolkien Centenary, Virtual, November 23, 2024.

"On the Shoulders of Gi(E)nts: The Joys of Bibliographic Scholarship and Fanzines in Tolkien Studies," Guest of Honor, MythCon 29, Atlanta, GA, July 20-23, 2018. 

"The Tolkien Corpus," Plenary, with Christian Hempelmann, THATCAMPOK 2016, Oklahoma State University, May 20-21, 2016.

"Tolkien and Popular Culture," Keynote, Tolkien in Vermont 2016, University of Vermont, April 8-9, 2016. 

"Slashing the Fathers: Who's Anxious Now? Queering Harold Bloom and J. R. R. Tolkien in Female-Authored Fantasy," IAS Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor, University of Bristol. Public lecture, and postgraduate seminar on theories of reception, rereading, rewriting, and remixing in popular culture. July 2010.

"Remaking Texts, Remodeling Scholarship," Keynote. Remake | Remodel: New Perspectives on Remakes, Film Adaptations, and Fan Productions. University of Göttingen, Germany, 30 June - 2 July, 2010.

"'Harshin Ur Squeez': Racisms in LiveJournal Online Fandoms," Plenary presentation, Third Slash Fiction Study Day, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, 25 February, 2008.

"'A Room of Our Own:' How F/F Slash Queers Female Space," Keynote, Second Slash Fiction Study Day at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, 27 February 2007.

"The Final (?) Closet: Real People Fiction/Real People Slash," Keynote, Slash Fiction Study Day, De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom. March 1, 2006.

"Bringing 'Popular Culture' Into the Multiethnic American Literature Classroom," Keynote. Second Annual URI English Studies Conference: The Uses of Popular Culture. Providence, Rhode Island, October 20-21, 2000.

"Boundary Crossings: Litera(Cul)tur(Genr)es," Featured Speaker. The 1994 Lorraine Sherley Literature Symposium: A Limitless Field: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literature," Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, October 1, 1994.

Conference Papers 

“Race-ing to Gender Arda: A Stylistics Analysis.” Northeast Popular Culture Association Conference, Virtual, October 9-11, 2025, Handout. 

“A ‘Tolkien’ of One’s Own: Women Making Their Own ‘Tolkiens.’” Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA, April 16-19, 2025.

“An Incomplete Academic Fellowship: Excluding Queer Feminist Women from Tolkien Studies.” GIFCon 2025: Queering the Fantastic, Virtual, Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow, Centre May 7-9, 2025. 

“Heritage Starts with HER: Women Writers Writing Back to Tolkien’s Legendarium.” Tolkien as Heritage, Tolkien Society & Tolkinovo društvo Srbije 2024 Seminar, Virtual, December 8, 2024.

“I desire the road. . . . . [but] [r]oads were made for young men, not middle-aged women”: Ista’s Journey from Dowager to Paladin.” Mythcon 53: Fantasies of the Middle Lands, Hybrid, August 2-3, 2024. 

“Victoria Goddard’s Nine World Series: Interleaving and Resonating with J.R.R. Tolkien’s Mythopoeic Worldbuilding.” 20th Annual UVM Tolkien Conference, University of Vermont, Hybrid, April 13, 2024.

“Second Thoughts about the Second Age: Applying Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands Theory to Tolkien’s Legendarium,” Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, April 5-8, San Antonio, TX., 2023.

“‘Really I’m an atheist, but not the kind that yells at people’: Atheist Readers of J.R.R. Tolkien.” Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, March 27-30, 2024. 

“Wide Seas Islander, Autist, and Asexual: The Intersectional Mythopoeic Characterization of Cliopher (Kip) Mdang.” Mythopoeic OMS 2024, Virtual, February  17-18, 2024.

“Virtual Culture Warriors: The Alt-Right Crusade Against Diversity in The Rings of Power. The Marvelous Diversity of Science Fiction and Fantasy Symposium, Hybrid, Texas A&M University, April 13-14, 2023.

"Second Thoughts about the Second Age: Applying Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands Theory to Tolkien's Legendarium," The Second Age of Middle-earth, 19th Annual UVM Tolkien Conference, hybrid. April 1, 2023.

"How Much Has It Changed?: Racisms In SF/F In The 21st Century," When It Changed: Women In Sf/F Since 1972, Science Fiction Foundation, University of Glasgow's Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, and the Games and Gaming Lab, hybrid. Dec. 2-4, 2022. 

"What Happens when the Cauldron of Story Boils Over: How Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy Breaks Middle-earth," Northeast Popular Culture Association Virtual Conference, Oct. 20-22, 2022. 

"J. R. R. Tolkien, Culture Warrior: The Alt-Right Religious Crusade against 'Tolkien and Diversity,'" Tolkien Society, Oxenmoot, hybrid, Sept. 1-4, 2022. 

"What Happens when the Cauldron of Story Boils Over: How Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy Breaks Middle-earth," MythCon 52, July 29-Aug. 1, Albuquerque, NM., 2022, 

"J. R. R. Tolkien, Culture Warrior: The Alt-Right Religious Crusade against 'Tolkien and Diversity,'" Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, virtual, April 13-16, 2022. 

"Writing Against the Grain: T. Kingfisher's Feminist Mythopoeic Fantasy," MythCon 51, virtual, July 20-Aug. 2, 2021.

"Queer Atheists, Agnostics, and Animists, Oh, My!", "Tolkien and Diversity," Tolkien Society Summer Seminar, virtual, July 3-4, 2021.

"Race in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and in Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference Conference, Philadelphia, PA. April 2020. Cancelled. Presented at the virtual Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, June 2-5, 2021.

"Melissa Scott Queered Those Punks!", Virtual Southwest Popular Culture, Feb. 22-27, 2021. 

"Atheists, Agnostics, and Animists, Oh My!: Secular Readings of J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium," Southwest Popular Culture Association Conference, Albuquerque, NM, Feb. 2020. 

"Medievalist, Modernist & Postmodernist Readings of Tolkien's Constructions of Race," International Congress for Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI May 9-12, 2019. 

"Why White Supremacy Can No Longer Provide Cover for White Academia," International Congress for Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 9-12, 2019. 

"Atheists, Agnostics, and Animists, Oh My!: Secular Readings of J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Washington, D.C., April 17-20, 2019.

"Atheists, Agnostics, and Animists, Oh My!: Secular Readings of J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium," New York Tolkien Conference 2019, March 17, 2019. 

"The Grammar of Historical Memory in Tolkien's Legendarium: the Tales of Beren and Lúthien," International Medieval Congress, Leeds, U.K., July 2-5, 2018. 

"An Incomplete Fellowship: The Exclusion of Queer Women in Tolkien Studies," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Indianapolis, IA, March 28-31, 2018.

"'Making or Creating': Fans Transforming Orcs," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, San Diego, CA, April 12-15, 2017.

"Stylistics Analysis of "Fatherhood" in "The Tale of Fëanor," International Congress of Medieval Studies, Western MI University, Kalamazoo, MI, May 12-15, 2016. 

"The Grammar of Myth in The Silmarillion (Turin Turambar)," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Seattle, WA, March 22-25, 2016.

"The Grammar of Myth in The Silmarillion," Southwest Popular and American Culture Association Conference. Albuquerque, NM, Feb. 15-18, 2016. 

"Conflicting Audience Receptions of Tauriel in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA, April 1-4, 2015.

"The Processes of Performing Masculinity in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit," Southwest Popular and American Cultural Studies Conference. Albuquerque, NM, Feb. 11-14, 2015. 

"The Holy Family: Divine Queerness in Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion Series," South Central MLA Conference. Austin, TX. Oct. 28-21, 2014.

"Political Rhetorics of Color-Blind Racism in Racefail '09," SFF NOW Conference. Warwick University, UK, Aug. 22-23, 2014. 

"The Holy Family: Divine Queerness in Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion Series," Biology and Manners Conference. Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, Aug. 20, 2014.

"Constructions of Middle-earth in Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, April 18, 2014. 

"Middle-earth: Tolkien's Geography in The Fall of Arthur," 35th Southwest Popular and American Culture Conference. Albuquerque, NM, Feb. 21, 2014.

"Tolkien Corpus Project," 35th Southwest Popular and American Culture Conference. Albuquerque, NM. Feb. 21, 2014.

"A Roundtable Discussion of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey," Organizer, Moderator, and Presenter at special event for the J. R. R. Tolkien Archive, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, Feb. 21, 2013. 

"In Honor of Verlyn Flieger: The State of Tolkien Scholarship," 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2013.

"Tolkien and Alterity: In Honor of Jane Chance," 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2013.

"Interspecies Bromance in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey? and What Fans Will Do," Celebrating the Hobbit: A Conference on the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana. March 1-3, 2013. 

"Women and Tolkien: Amazons, Valkyries, Feminists, and Slashers," 45th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2012.

"Creating a Conceptual Search Engine and Multimodal Corpus for Humanities Research," Digital Humanities and Internet Research Special Session. Modern Language Association, Seattle, WA, Jan. 5, 2012

"The Monstrous and the Feminine in J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium," MythCon 39, Albuquerque, NM, July 15-18, 2011. 

"Grammar and Geography in Middle-earth," The 44rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 12-15, 2011.

"Racefail 09 Part Nth: Citizenship Fail," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, San Antonio TX, April 20-23, 2011

'What Do You Mean "Pleasure," White Man?': Complicating Empathic Identification and Self Insertion in Online Fan Fiction," Desiring the Text, Touching the Past: Towards an Erotics of Reception. University of Bristol, UK, July 10, 2010.

"Where No Straight Man Has Gone Before: Queering Star Trek," American Studies Division, University of Göttingen, Germany, July 3, 2010.

"The Rhetorics of Color-Blind Racism in Racefail 09," International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Orlando, FL, 17-21 March, 2010.

"'A Room of Our Own:' Women Writing Women in Fan and Slash Fiction," International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Orlando, FL, March 18-22, 2009.

"The Crown of Durin and the Shield of Oromë the Great: Spirituality and History in The Lord of the Rings," International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 8-11, 2008.

"'Harshin Ur Squeez': Visual Rhetorics of Anti-Racism in LiveJournal Online Fandoms," International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Orlando, FL, March 19-23, 2008.

"Slashing the Fathers: Who's Anxious Now?" MythCon 38, Berkeley, CA, August 3-6, 2007

"Into the Woods: Faramir as Top, Bottom, and In-Between," International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, March 14-17, 2007.

"The Theme of Mistaken Love: A Feminist Re/Vision of Éowyn," International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 10-13, 2007.

"'Tree and flower, leaf and grass': The Grammar of Middle-earth in The Two Towers" MythCon 37, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, August 4-7, 2006.

"'Tree and flower, leaf and grass': The Grammar of Middle-earth in The Fellowship of the Ring," International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 4-7, 2006.

"A Thrust in the Dark: Slash Girls' Internet Queerness," 27th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts," Ft. Lauderdale, FL, March 15-19, 2006.

"From Beowulf to Postmodernism: Interdisciplinary Teaching of The Lord of the Rings" with Judy Ann Ford. Tolkien 2005: The Ring Goes Ever On, Aston University, Birmingham, UK, Aug. 11-15, 2005.

"Epic Becomes Novel, Novel Becomes Film: Texts by Tolkien and Jackson," 40th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 5-8, 2005.

""Breaking of the Fellowship: Competing Discourses of Archives and Canons in The Lord of the Rings Internet Fandom," 26th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Fort Lauderdale, FL, March 16-21, 2005.

"'Far Green Country' or 'Shadow on the Waters'?: The Question of Valinor in The Lord of the Rings," The University of Texas-Tyler, "From Plato to Potter," March 26, 2005.

'History Becomes Legend': The Lord of the Rings in History and Literature. Collaborative Keynote Speech with Dr. Judy Ann Ford, Interdisciplinary Conference, English Graduates for Academic Development, A&M-Commerce, Sept. 17, 2004.

The Lord of the Rings: Middle Earth in the College and High School Classroom. Session: TEAMS V. Beowulf Comes to Edoras: Tolkien as a Gateway to Medieval Studies. With Judy Ann Ford. International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI. May 5-8, 2004.

Cunning Linguists: The Queer Erotics of "Words/Silence/Flesh," International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, March 16-21, 2004.

"Tolkien's Book and Jackson's Film: Adaptation, Substitution, Translation or Desecration?", PCA/ACA Conference, New Orleans, LA. April 16-19, 2003.

"Root, Branch, and Leaf: Resonances from Tolkien to de Lint," International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Ft. Lauderdale, FL. March 19-23, 2003.

"So You Want To Be . . . . More than the Stereotypical Girl: Wizardry and Gender in Diane Duane's 'Young Wizards' Series," International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, March 20-23, 2002.

"Social Constructions of 'Wizards' in Fantasy Novels by Duane, Hambly, and Pratchett," PCA/ACA Conference, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, March 13-16, 2002.

"Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Life in the Borderlands/Season Two," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Philadelphia, PA, April 11-14, 2001.

"Teaching and Preaching in the Nineties: Politics, Religion, Education, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," Second Annual URI English Studies Conference: The Uses of Popular Culture. Providence, RI, October 20-21, 2000.

"Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Life in the Borderlands/Season One," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference. New Orleans, LA, April 19-22, 2000.

"'When Worlds Collide": War on the Borderlands in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference. San Diego, CA, March 31-April 3, 1999.

"'Momutes': Momentary Utopias in Tepper's Trilogies," International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Ft. Lauderdale, FL, March 17-21, 1999.

"'The Perils of Pauline': Professing Popular Pscholarship," Sigma Tau Delta Upsilon Beta Chapter, Initiation Speaker. Commerce, TX, November 19, 1998.

"Deep Space Nine: Star Trek's Borderlands," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Orlando, FL, April 9-11, 1998.

"Feminist Movements Toward New Spaces," International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, March 18-21, 1998.

"Sheri S. Tepper: 'Webster, Witch, and Wicked/Wiccan Woman,'" Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, San Antonio, TX, March 26-29, 1997.

"'Points/Knots/Focuses:' 'Power" and "Feminism' in David Brin's Glory Season," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Las Vegas, NV, March 25-28, 1996.

"Single White Female Wants to Meet Vampire: Object, Contemporary Feminist Sex; Or, Whatever Happened to Vlad the Impaler in the 90s?", Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Philadelphia, PA, April 12-15, 1995.

"'Multiculturalism' and 'Feminism': Teaching and Working in the Nineties," South Central Women's Studies Association, Annual Conference, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, March 24-25, 1995.

"Feminist Theory in Science Fiction," Featured speaker. Interdisciplinary Conference, English Graduates for Academic Development, East Texas State University, Commerce, TX, July 30, 1994.

"Race-ing to the Stars and Back: Bodies and Culture in US SF," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, April 6-9, 1994.

"Octavia Butler and Jewelle Gomez: Crossing Boundaries," Baylor Literary and Academic Conference, Waco, TX, February 11-12, 1994.

"(An)Other Look at North American SF: Multiculturalism in Trilogies by Butler, Ore and Tepper," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA, April 1993.

"What is a Publishable Essay? A Perilous Question," Modern Language Association, New York City, Dec. 1992.

"Heroes or Sheroes?" Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, Louisville, KY, March, 1992.

"Sayers' Communities of Women: A Feminist Practice of Woolf's Theories," Detective Fiction and Film Conference, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY, Oct. 1991.

"Grass: An Epic Reversal of Dune," Popular Culture Association Annual Conference, San Antonio, TX, March, 1991.

"Movements Toward New Spaces: Feminist Theory and World Changing Fictions," Life, the Universe and Everything, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, Feb. 1990.

PROFESSIONAL SERVICE

Series Editor, Studies in Tolkien, McFarland, January 2025-present. 

Mythopoeic Society
Co-Chair with Cami Agan and Clare Moore: Online Midsummer Seminar 2025 "More Perilous and Fair: Women and Gender in Mythopoeic Fantasy, August 2-3, 2025

Popular Culture Association
Trustee-at-large, April 2022-April 2025
Area Chair: Tolkien Studies Area, 2014-2025

Member of Editorial Review Board, Mallorn, 2020- Present.
https://www.tolkiensociety.org/society/publications/mallorn/mallorn-editorial-board/

Member, Editorial Board, Journal of Tolkien Research, 2014-present
https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/editorialboard.html

Reader for AP English Literature exams. Louisville, Kentucky. June 2010; June 2011.

Tolkien at Kalamazoo, 2007-2011: Proposed and organized paper sessions and roundtables.

Reader/Reviewer, N.E.H. Panel on Summer Seminars and Institutes Applications. Washington, D.C., April 2010.

International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts
	Second Vice President, 2006-2009
	Division Head, Science Fiction Literature, March, 2003-2006

Popular Culture Association, Second Vice President 1997-2000
	Area Chair, Science Fiction and Fantasy, 1995-1997 

Welcome to part #3 of “How do you define ‘feminism’”?

“How do you define ‘feminism’” #1 is here.

“How do you define ‘feminism’” #2 is here.

Feminist Medievalists and/or Medievalist Feminists: it depends, as always, on your definitions.

The title of our session says that we are feminists interested in Medieval Studies; the term with which I'm more comfortable says that we are medievalists motivated by feminist politics. I don't want to argue today that one label is better than the other. I simply want to note the difference, to proceed to use the term with which I'm most familiar ("feminist medievalist") and to wonder (hopefully) if the emergence of "medievalist feminist" reflects a generational shift towards more assertive feminist Medieval Studies; if so, it is a shift that I welcome, despite my fuddy-duddy discomfort with the term! Indeed, it is this very shift that I'd like to encourage in my remarks today, for I want to argue that there is a critical need for feminist scholars to begin to take a more central place within Medieval Studies.

The above quote is from Judith M. Bennett’s1 opening remarks from a Roundtable on Medievalist Feminists in the Academy that took place in 1992 at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS) at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. All the medievalists I know refer to it amongst themselves at Kalamazoo or even K’zoo when casually speaking or emailing about; ICMS in used in writing although, since there is another International Medieval Congress (at Leeds University in the UK), that risks causing some confusion!

I am not a medievalist (my deep immersion in Tolkien’s Middle-earth from age ten resulted in me becoming an animist, writing a LOT of nature poetry, ongoing rhapsodizing about trees, and waters (especially the ocean). I tried a Chaucer class as an undergraduate and bombed (well, I was auditing and left after a couple of weeks, because the language was impenetrable).

I did, however, hang out and become friends with a number of medievalists in graduate school because they were the others in the literature programs I was in most likely to be fans of (or at least not dismissive of) fantasy and science fiction. The modernists could be real snobs about it, even more so after they decided “magical realism” was this amazing capital-L LITERATURE.2

After getting hired at a university, I eventually collaborated with a medieval historian of religion on various Tolkien projects (co-teaching classes, collaborating on writing articles and grants, giving talks at conferences, including K’zoo). We sort of billed ourselves as the medievalist and the postmodernist illustrating different approaches to Tolkien’s legendarium and its adaptations.

As a result, even in retirement, I having a fantastic time on Substack finding and reading feminist medievalist / medieval feminist Substacks in addition to feminist essays by medievalists in part to keep up with contemporary scholarship on the Middle Ages because “ Tolkien” and his legendarium was identified with the medieval from early on. The identification is related to his own academic specializations and sources and to the fact that the earliest academics to take his work seriously as a focus for scholarship were, not surprisingly, medievalists and folklorists who had a much better sense of what he was doing than some of the modernist critics who were, shall we say, not the best readers of his work (in this case, “best” meaning that they were neither familiar with the medieval sources that Tolkien was drawing from nor the medieval aesthetic that Elizabeth D. Kirk discusses in her 1971 essay on languages and style, and the reason why modernist literary critics (such as Edmund Wilson and Burton Raffel along with others) share as aesthetic that was not Tolkien’s (highly recommend reading Kirk’s essay if you are at all interested in questions of Tolkien’s style which has been criticized as “bad” by a number of critics and academics (Harold Bloom!) (her work is far too seldom cited/quoted by people doing stylistic analysis).3

I think that those of us us doing feminist scholarship on Tolkien (some of whom are, like myself, not-medievalists) can learn a great deal by paying attention to the current state of knowledge about (among other things) women and the Middle Ages which overlaps with gender, sexuality, and queer4 studies in medieval studies as well as with other academic sub-fields!

So, some of the stuff I’ve been reading:

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality5

The Medieval Institute Publications which publishes the journal and scholarly book series started in 1978! Besides the feminist journal, they have a book series on New Queer Medievalisms.

Substacks

15th Century Feminist 6

A monthly newsletter that aims to reimagine the women that were intentionally erased, minimized, and/or villainized throughout the Middle Ages. History has been male-centric for far too long, and this space seeks to change that while remaining conscious that men are also harmed within patriarchal social structures. It is not women vs. men, it is all of us vs. the patriarchy. (About.)

Medieval Musings

Are you interested in medieval history but. . .

• frustrated by an overwhelming focus on kings and battles?

• bored by matter-of-fact presentations of the past?

• missing the human connection element to studying our ancestors?

If so, then this is the place for you!

I’m currently studying for a PhD in Archaeology at Oxford, researching the role of women in the social and political developments of 6th- and 7th-century England and France. With a worldwide readership of over 4,400 PLUS featuring regularly in Substack’s top 100 fastest-growing history publications, I share medieval history as you rarely hear it. I combine written and archaeological evidence to share the experiences of overshadowed individuals, ask challenging questions of dominant interpretations, and recommend books and writers doing a wonderful job of unearthing the past.

And combining expertise, a great interview [click on the link not only to read the interview as a whole but also to see the footnotes]:

“Why Feminism Didn’t Exist In the Medieval World: 15th Century Feminist Interview by Holly Brown

Many writers recently have been bold in declaring that feminism didn’t exist in the medieval world. What do you think about this? Does it matter, for the feminist writer, whether it existed then or not?

I think they’re right! The language and intellectual frameworks of feminism did not exist in the medieval world; to imply otherwise would absolutely be anachronistic. But to imply that folks weren’t questioning the dominant culture; that women weren’t seeking realities beyond domination; that the lowest classes didn’t challenge imposed exploitation—which are all feminist actions—is not simply anachronistic, but historically inaccurate. Two truths can exist at any one moment, the human experience is quite expansive. Feminism as a polemic paradigm did not exist, but a proto-feminism which challenged the dominant culture of imperialist patriarchy at individual levels did exist, and has so since the inception of imposed hierarchies and enforced male supremacy.2 As second wave feminist Marilyn French noted, “subjugation generates resentment,” and there has been much subjugation under patriarchy.3

When Christine de Pizan sat to compose The Book of the City of the Ladies (1405), she was seeking to reinstate women into their rightful place within the historical annals while flexing a deep knowledge of literary devices. She was also critiquing the harm imposed by the ideologies of the dominant culture (patriarchy). Just prior to penning her proto-feminist masterpiece, Christine had very publicly engaged in a debate (1401) on the disgusting literary treatment of women within the popular Roman de la Rose, imploring the very highest seat of patriarchal governance, queen regent Isabeau of Bavaria, to take action—which she did!4

Women advocating on behalf of women within a patriarchal society is a long held practice—long before words such as ‘feminism’ or ‘intersectionality’ existed. Hauled in front of French judges in the Autumn of 1322, Jacqueline Felice de Almania fought for women’s personhood and agency in an argument she likely knew was long lost. [italicized text a block quote within the interview]

“In her own defense, Felicie argued fervently for the right of wise and experienced-even if unlicensed-women to care for the sick. With even more spirit she asserted that it was improper for men to palpate the breasts and abdomens of women; indeed, out of modesty, women might prefer death from an illness to revealing intimate secrets to a man.”5

We can now classify these individual acts as proto-feminist because we possess the language and intellectual frameworks to do so, but doing so doesn’t imply some anachronistic inception of feminist polity and I think folks often conflate the two.

In my opinion, the role of the feminist writer, especially the feminist historian, is to challenge the harmful narratives of the dominant culture. And though the women of the medieval world would have never thought of themselves as feminists, their works can be perceived through such paradigms as they inform our own patriarchal reality.

Emily Spinach who does fascinating work on medievalisms (that is, analyzing texts and materials that were created after the Middle Ages but make use of medieval tropes and materials) as well as translating medieval texts—and talking in such amazing ways about language! See “translation: the ruin, anglo-saxon landscapes and bodies, the borders you cross when you become a broken thing”:

I’m loving my Sir Gawain and the Green Knight translation a lot, but one unfortunate side effect is that putting all my translation energy into Middle English means I’m not translating any Old English. I love both very deeply and my PhD is going to involve a healthy amount of both. Middle English might own my heart very slightly more, but I loved Old English first. Choosing who I love more makes me feel trapped in the centre of a weepy teen love triangle. I love haunting elegies and I love King Arthur. You can’t make me choose when I just have so much love in my heart.

One of the things I’m most desperately excited about for my PhD is how many languages there are all together in there. For years people told me they didn’t understand how I’d manage to mash Old English, Middle English and Welsh (and now also Cornish) into one cohesive project. The fact that I’ve managed it is one of the things I’m proudest of.

Most medievalists I know identify very strongly as an Anglo-Saxonist or a Middle English-ist (is there a word for that?), and I just never have. I don’t know what that says about me. Perhaps I’m just very amateurish and still, age twenty nine, don’t have enough language skills to declare myself a specialist in either langauge. But if we’re feeling a bit more charitable towards me, I think I just love the way both look at each other backwards and forwards across time. Like an Old and New Testament, I love how they answer and fulfill each other, creating little callbacks and prophecies that get fulfilled. I love how the Middle English period reinterprets and reimagines Old English. I love, I really deeply love, the fact that even in the high Middle Ages there was still a medieval past lurking beneath English culture. I love alliterative revival poetry and medieval recreations of the earlier Middle Ages.

Shield of Skuld by Irina Manea who is an historian who specializes in Viking history looking at material culture, but also recently posted this great piece on Girl Power, Vengeance, and the Mill of Doom: How to lost your kingdom to slave women which I totally saved to use in my Webs by Women project because its about a Norse poem which features two female stone giants (and is a kickass story as well). Plus, STONE GIANTS!!!!!!!!!

Once upon a myth, the Danish king Frodi (not a hobbit) made a questionable decision: he acquired two enslaved women, Fenia and Menia, from Sweden. Little did he know they were no ordinary captives, but towering descendants of mountain giants. He brought them back not just to toil, but to operate Grotti, a magical millstone with the power to grind out anything the heart desired: gold, peace, happiness, you name it. Sounds idyllic, right? Except Frodi, blinded by his lust for effortless riches like most capitalist profiteers nowadays, demanded nonstop production. No breaks. No mercy. Just endless grinding.

This compelling story is the topic of the Norse poem Grottasöngr. The girls are taken straight to the mill to start working: the king does not even mention rest before hearing the slave-women’s tune. They accordingly set to work: the sound of industry rings out, as they adjust the machine, and the king again orders them to work. The milling, accompanied by the girls’ singing, continues until Frodi’s household is asleep, and the flour begins to emerge. Needless to say, things did not go well from here.

And imagine my astonishment when, while mousing around in the subscription databases some years ago, I found an an essay published in the Medieval Feminist Forum in 1996 by Michael D. C. Drout on “The Influence of J. R. R. Tolkien's Masculinist Medievalism” [click on link to download this short essay] where he points out the problem of students’ ignorance about medieval women:

Because many students inherit their perceptions of medieval literature through Tolkien's interpretations, they are often surprised to find women in the literature they read in their classes. When student perceptions of the Middle Ages clash with what they are taught by contemporary teachers, many students are likely to resent the "intrusion" of gender (among other topics) into their comfortable fantasy world. It seems to me that the challenge for educators concerned with gender is to complicate productively the world view inherited from Tolkien without completely destroying students' familiarity with and love for their idealized (and ideologized) view of the Middle Ages. One way to achieve this complication is to show that men have gender in Beowulf and other texts beloved by Tolkien, that this gender requires them to perform certain roles, and that these requirements often lead, to misuse one of Tolkien's more famous quotes about Beowulf, to "sufficient tragedy" (24)

Drout also argues that “a criticism that excludes women, gender, reproduction, and sex is doomed to extinction. Some critics have chosen such extinction with their eyes open (in unpublished notes dating from around 1937 Tolkien suggests that he may be at the end of the tradition of Old English studies)” (26-27).

I’m sure there are more medieval feminist and feminist medievalist Substacks out there — if you know of any, feel free to link in a comment!

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Welcome to #2 of “How do you define ‘feminism’”?

“How do you define ‘feminism’” #1 is here

“How do you define ‘feminism’” #3 is here

As many Tolkien readers know, his first job was on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (if you haven’t read The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, I highly recommend it especially if you’re a lexicography fan).

The OED is an incredible resource because it provides not only definitions (which change over time in many cases!) and etymologies (how the word in question came into English, or originated in Old English) but also quotes from as many types of sources that they can find (and I imagine validate!) from the earliest date to more recent ones, to show how the word was used.

There’s also a whole lot more information, much very specialized, which I seldom look at. If you do not have access through a university or library, a personal subscription is necessary to access all of it: the cost is currently $109 (US) a year; that’s become my birthday present to myself the last two years.

I have been a fan of the Oxford English Dictionary since I discovered it as an English major in the late 1970s when it was a whole shelf of books, way before I knew Tolkien worked on it! And in 1976, what I was reading was the *first edition* (since the second did not come out until 1989):

I know that many of us working in Tolkien studies will look words up in the OED which I discussed in regard to “queer” in The Many Meanings of Queer. But looking up the meanings of a word to use, while a good thing to do, is not the same as analyzing the histories of those words (and how they were, and are, used), and what changed over the years.

So here are my notes from a couple of deep dives into two different Webs of Words! As is often the case with the OED, I find the real richness in the citations (some of which it might be fun to follow up at some point!).

FEMINISM, n, 1989 (OED 2nd ed)

In the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), the entry for “feminism” was 165 words. The are three definitions with the earliest cited dates being 1851 and 1895 supported by five citations. Two of the three definitions are sexed characteristics (as opposed to a political stance): “The qualities of females” (1851), and the specialized (medical?) meaning: “Path. The development of female secondary sexual characteristics in a male.”

This is the unrevised text of the entry as published in the Second Edition of the OED (1989). It may contain unrevised text that was originally published much earlier.

feminism

(ˈfɛmɪnɪz(ə)m) [f. L. fēmin-a + -ism.]

1. The qualities of females.

1851 in Ogilvie.

2. [After F. féminisme.] Advocacy of the rights of women (based on the theory of equality of the sexes). (Cf. womanism.)

1895 Athenæum 27 Apr. 533/2 Her intellectual evolution and her coquettings with the doctrines of ‘feminism’ are traced with real humour. 1908 Daily Chron. 7 May 4/7 In Germany feminism is openly Socialistic. 1909 Ibid. 29 May 4/4 Suffragists, suffragettes, and all the other phases in the crescendo of feminism.

3. Path. The development of female secondary sexual characteristics in a male.

1882 Syd. Soc. Lex. II, Feminism, the qualities of a female. Also Lorain's term for the arrest of development of the male towards the age of puberty, which gives to it somewhat of the attributes of the female. 1945 H. Burrows Biol. Actions Sex Hormones xxiii. 453 The symptoms of adrenal virilism and feminism are caused by an excessive production of androgen or oestrogen by the adrenal.

FEMINISM, N 2021 (3rd ed)

The third edition of the OED (online) is updated every three months and provides additional information on the revisions. The word “Feminism, n.” was revised (I suspect substantially) in 2021 but last updated in March 2025.

There are still three definitions, but many more citations, a more detailed etymology, and a list of twelve compounds and derivative words (each with their own entry and citations). I don’t include all the citations in the excerpts below (just the ones I found most interesting, although I always include the earliest and most recent).

Each individual definition now has its own citation entry for Works Cited pages which I’ve included (rather than, as we used to do, simply citing the single entry!).

In this entry, the first two definitions are marked as rare/disused; they mirror the ones from the 2nd edition but not in the same order. The third is the most developed and refers to an ideological/socio-political system (not a biological feature). The third also references related terms (“womanism” and “women’s liberation”) with different but related definitions and connotations, especially “womanism” which (as the entry for it points out) was used by Alice Walker to describe Black Feminism as its own project, separate from [White] feminism (brackets used to denote that White was, and is, an unstated default for many). There is also a thumbnail history of western feminist history (there were feminist movements in other countries/regions of the world that are even less known about in the U.S. than our home-grown feminism: see Beyond the West: The Centuries-old Feminisms of India and What is Decolonized Feminism (Unknown Canon, Jo).

FEMINISM n

1 Feminine quality or character; femininity. Now rare. 1841- [4 citations]

1841 Feminism, the qualities of females. Webster's American Dictionary English Language (revised edition) App. 963/1

1898 It is quite different with modern women's books of the introspective type... In them the true spirit of feminism dwells. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine January 104/2

1915 As a male corset wearer and with a strong strain of feminism in my nature, I have had some years' experience of corset wearing and the use of girls' clothing. in P. Farrer, Confidential Correspondence on Cross Dressing (1997) 100

“Feminism, N., Sense 1.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, March 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1407055326.

2. Medicine. The appearance of female secondary sexual characteristics in a male individual; feminization. Now rare or disused. 1875- [3 citations]

1875 These attributes M. Lorrain designates by the terms infantilism and feminism. Medical Times & Gazette 24 July 105/1

1907 Feminism in man on the other hand is characterized by masculine genital organs, little developed, feminine attitude and gait, large pelvis, prominent hips, [etc.]. Med. Fortnightly 25 July 352/1

1945 The symptoms of adrenal virilism and feminism are caused by an excessive production of androgen or oestrogen by the adrenal. H. Burrows, Biological Actions of Sex Hormones xxiii. 453

“Feminism, N., Sense 2.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, March 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1205650814.medicine

3. Advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex; the movement associated with this (see note below). Cf. womanism n., women's liberation n. 1893– [7 citations]

post-, radical feminism: see the first element.

The issue of rights for women first became prominent during the French and American revolutions in the late 18th cent., with regard especially to property rights, the marriage relationship, and the right to vote. In Britain it was not until the emergence of the suffragette movement in the late 19th cent. that there was significant political change. A ‘second wave’ of feminism arose in the 1960s, concerned especially with economic and social discrimination, with an emphasis on unity and sisterhood. A more diverse ‘third wave’ is sometimes considered to have arisen in the 1980s and 1990s, as a reaction against the perceived lack of focus on class and race issues in earlier movements.

1893 Questions relative to the ‘Rights of Women’ are the order of the day, and Feminism gains ground from year to year in all civilized countries. Literary Digest 1 April 591/1

1909 Suffragists, suffragettes, and all the other phases in the crescendo of feminism. Daily Chronicle 29 May 4/4

1913 I myself have never been able to find out precisely what Feminism is: I only know that people call me a Feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute. ‘R. West’ in Clarion 14 November 5/2 1

1950 Unlike sociologists and other tractarians, writers of fiction have recognized feminism as lying deeper than the demand for economic opportunity or political enfranchisement. J. L. Jessup, Faith of Our Feminists i. 10

1971 In the radical feminist view, the new feminism is not just the revival of a serious political movement for social equality. S. Firestone, Dialectic of Sex ii. 16

2011 Nowadays, saying bad stuff about men is not how feminism conducts itself. Guardian 15 January 33/5

“Feminism, N., Sense 3.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, March 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6092042326.

Etymology

Summary

A borrowing from Latin, combined with an English element.

Etymons: Latin fēmina, ‑ism suffix.

< classical Latin fēmina woman (see female n.) + ‑ism suffix. In sense 2 after French féminisme (in medicine) feminization (1871 or earlier). In sense 3 after feminist adj.; compare also French féminisme (1896 or earlier), Catalan feminisme (c1910), Spanish feminismo (1898 or earlier), Portuguese feminismo (1905), Italian femminismo (1896).

“Feminism, N., Etymology.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, March 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5719779464.e

Compounds & Derived Words

These are listed chronologically (from earliest to most recent in the dictionary). In the OED, you can click on the first words to to go the entry; the text after each dash is the start of the definition provided.

anti-feminism, n. 1900–Originally: opposition or hostility to women. Now…

radical feminism, n. 1912–Advocacy of radical left-wing measures designed…

lesbian feminism, n. 1972–Advocacy of lesbianism as a political choice…

first-wave feminism, n. 1974–(Within the women's liberation or feminist…

second-wave feminism, n. 1974–(Within the women's liberation or feminist…

anarcha-feminism, n. 1976–eA socio-political theory and movement which…

ecofeminism, n. 1980–A socio-political theory and movement which…

post-feminism, n. 1983–An ethos of the period following the feminism…

third-wave feminism, n. 1987–A period of diverse strands of feminist activity…2

gender feminism, n. 1991–Advocacy of the view that the differences between…

cyberfeminism, n. 1992–A feminist movement concerned with countering the…

Link.

FEMINIST, ADJ. AND N

This entry was last revised March 2012 and modified in March 2024.3

ADJECTIVE

Of, relating to, or advocating the rights and equality of women. Cf. feminism n. 3. 1852– [6 citations}

1852 Our attention has happened to fall upon Mrs. E. O. Smith, who is, we are informed, among the most moderate of the feminist reformers! Debow's Review vol. 13 269

1898 The lady Parliamentary reporter is the latest development of the feminist movement in New Zealand. Daily Chronicle 15 October 5/1

1955 Certainly in America, our lives are easier, freer, more open to opportunities, thanks—among other things—to the Feminist battles. A. M. Lindbergh, Gift from Sea iii. 51

1980 Basic to much recent feminist practice has been the idea of sisterhood, which..involves a determination among members of the women's movement to work together as equals. J. R. Richards, Sceptical Feminist i. 28

1999 Now, 40 years after pioneering remote-working and high-powered careers for women, she should be hailed as a true feminist heroine. Financial Times 9 October (Weekend Magazine) 34

“Feminist, Adj.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, March 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1052830563.noun

NOUN 1887– [6 citations]

An advocate or supporter of the rights and equality of women.

Often used specifically of women.

eco-, post-, radical feminist, etc.: see the first element.

1887 The question over which the fight arose was the admission of male delegates, and after a very close vote..the Liberalists beat the Feminists. Bury & Norwich Post 1 March 4/5

1897 If all husbands were sent to gaol for trivial assaults on their wives, there would not be enough prisons to contain them. Yet this is exactly what our Feminists are aiming at. Social-Democrat July 205

1966 It is about forty years since the pioneer feminists, several of whom were men, raised such a rumpus by rattling the cage bars. B. Brophy, Don't never Forget 38

1976 Men (when not being intimidated by puritanical feminists) are at worst only ‘insensitive to women's rights’. Mother Jones August 2/2

2008 We still call ourselves feminists and insist—vehemently, even—that we're independent and self-sufficient. Atlantic Monthly March 78/1

“Feminist, N.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, March 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1185921504.

Compounds and Derivative Words

feministic, adj. 1852–

anti-feminist, n. & adj. 1899–A person who is opposed to feminism, sexual…

radical feminist, adj. & n. 1905–adj. Reflecting or promoting radical feminism…

unfeminist, adj. 1918–Not feminist; contrary to or not in accordance…

post-feminist, n. & adj. 1919–Originally: a woman who rejects traditional…

pre-feminist, adj. 1933–Of, designating, or characteristic of a period…

proto-feminist, adj. & n. 1951–

neo-feminist, n. & adj. 1969–

lesbian feminist, n. & adj. 1971–a n. A supporter of lesbian feminism;

anarcha-feminist, n. & adj. 1974–a. n. A person who is both an anarchist and a…

fem, adj.³ 1975–Of, relating to, or advocating the rights and…

ultra-feminist, n. 1979–

ecofeminist, adj. & n. 1980–Of, relating to, or characteristic of…

femocrat, n. 1981–An influential female civil servant or…

feminazi, n. 1987–slang (chiefly North American) (derogatory). A…

Link (requires access through institution or personal account)

And now, moving to another type of reference work, one I used to recommend regularly to my students, especially majors and early graduate students, as being useful for people starting to learn the ins and outs of theoretical terms (words that often had more general meanings as well!) because it covered many areas of critical theory, was developed, created, curated, and run by academics, and was open-access/free to all, with superb bibliographies and excellent metadata.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy currently lists 235 “documents” in response to the search term “feminism,” and 360 documents in response to the search term “feminist.” In contrast, there 626 documents for “women’s liberation,” and 6 documents for “womanist.” I suspect there is likely to be overlap between those different search results but no way would I try to establish that.

I am sharing the information information above about this resource and the excerpts below *not* because I think everybody should read or have read everything they are talking about (I sure haven’t — my areas involves feminist and gender approaches (methodologies) in the context of humanities/literary studies and, often, even more specifically in the context of feminisms within sff communities).

What I want to be able to explain (at much less length, of course!) in the book is the extent to which “feminisms,” historically and today, consist of complex webs of ideas, beliefs, and political activities (some of which are in conflict with each other as the “Compounds and Derivatives above show!); and, that as the OED citations document, are over a century old as part of public (print) media; but that (as Part #3 will show with the feminist medievalists, older than that if you count “proto-feminist” ideas about “women” by women in earlier periods); and, that as the SEP entry explains fairly early on, have multiple definitions.

The first document for “feminist” is on “Feminist Philosophy” and is an excellent introduction, overview, and explanation of the topic in the context of the discipline of philosophy.

First published Thu Jun 28, 2018; substantive revision Fri Jul 14, 2023

This entry provides an introduction to the feminist philosophy section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). Overseen by a board of feminist philosophers, this section primarily takes up feminist philosophy of the twentieth and twenty-first century. It has three subsections of entries (as can be seen in Table of Contents under “feminist philosophy”): (1) approaches to feminist philosophy, (2) feminist interventions in philosophy, and (3) feminist philosophical topics. By “approaches to feminist philosophy” we mean the main philosophical approaches such as analytic, continental, psychoanalytic, pragmatist, and various intersections. We see these as methodologies that can be fruitfully employed to engage philosophically issues of feminist concern. The second group of entries, feminist interventions in philosophy, includes entries on how feminist philosophers have intervened in and begun to transform traditional philosophical areas such as aesthetics, ethics, the history of philosophy, metaphysics, and political philosophy. Entries in the third group, feminist philosophical topics, take up concepts and matters that traditional philosophy has either overlooked or undertheorized, including autonomy, the body, objectification, sex and gender, and reproduction. In short, this third group of entries shows how feminist philosophers have rendered philosophical previously un-problematized topics, such as the body, class and work, disability, the family, human trafficking, reproduction, the self, sex work, and sexuality. Entries in this third group also show how a particularly feminist lens refashions issues of globalization, human rights, popular culture, race and racism, and science. Following a brief overview of feminism as a political and intellectual movement, we provide an overview of these three parts of the feminist section of the SEP.

In addition to the feminist philosophy section of the SEP, there are also a number of entries on women in the history of philosophy, for example, on Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Astell, Jane Addams, Rosa Luxemburg, Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Murdoch, and others. Additionally, dozens of other entries throughout the SEP discuss facets of feminist philosophy, including, to name just a handful, the entries on global justice, respect, contemporary Africana philosophy, multiculturalism, privacy, and Latinx philosophy.

• 1. Introduction

• 2. What is Feminism?

• 3. Approaches to Feminism

• 4. Interventions in Philosophy

• 5. Topics in Feminism

• Bibliography

• Academic Tools

• Other Internet Resources

• Related Entries

One can also browse the “Table of Contents,” starting with the “F” section which lists 37 entries grouped by the three categories listed above (feminist philosophy, approaches; feminist philosophy, interventions; and feminist philosophy, topics).

There’s no entry for “literature” which is included in the entry on Feminist Aesthetics!

My second graduate course in linguistics (a discipline which can often be found lurking in “English” or “Literature and Languages” departments!) was on lexicography (how dictionaries are compiled!). One of the articles which I loved was about how people generally resisted using dictionaries as any sort of authority for how they spoke (I seem to recall some data on how most people used dictionaries to look words up for Scrabble or other word-games!). And of course there’s the huge prescriptivist vs. descriptivist conflict/debate which played out in the U.S. during the 1960s over Webster’s Third (which I recall because my father refused to buy it: I LOVED the huge Webster’s unabridged 2nd edition which lived in the den, on its own shelf, for easy reference—my parents let us read any book we wanted but insisted we look up the words we did already know instead of asking them although we also used it to settle Scrabble debates)!

So it’s not surprising that many people simply use the word “feminist” (or related words) without ever defining any of them (such as Tolkien complaining about “American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production” which he foresaw spreading all over the world after WWII ended [Letter #53, to Christopher Tolkien, 9 December 1943, p. 91 Revised and Expanded Letters] [and I would not say he was wrong, though I don’t think we got feminism out as much as one might like :>] which, if you read the complete context reads to me a lot like a generalized complaint about likely American dominance and technology overall rather than a specific attack on “feminism” which it is often used to support!). And in general conversation, letters, informal contexts, sure.

But I would expect a bit more when an academic writing for a specialized audience engages (in the context of peer-reviewed scholarship which is what this series of posts focuses on) than just using the word without definition (or, at best, with a standard dictionary definition) because as Tolkien knew, words and their meanings and their histories *matter.* And, although the programs are now coming under attack (and were fairly controversial and underfunded for all the decades of my professional life), there are academic programs and publications relating to feminism and gender which exist who have developed specific terms of art that can be used in work on the topic even if the scholar in question is not a “feminist.”

And yet they are ignored . . . . (if the scholars in question even know they exist; it could be that said scholars are so ignorant that they have no idea what does exist out there). . . .

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There’s a new book out on Tolkien’s Catholicism as the key to his fiction; the publisher is Emmaus Road Press which describes itself as publishing “books and tracts” to proclaim “the gospel of God’s grace” which I think makes quite likely that Ben Reinhard’s The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination tends toward the allegorical/proselytizing genre of non-fiction rather than any sort of analysis of the complexities and contradictions in Tolkien’s fiction.

I do not plan to read it (although I may have to for my next book on atheists, agnostics, and animists readers of Tolkien’s legendarium), but it is also connected to my Web project1 because of the extent to which conservative/ authoritarian Catholics such as JD Vance (as well as other alt-right/white supremacists/neo-fascists/Silicon Valley dudes) claim Tolkien as their own to use their interpretations of his work in their crusade against women’s rights (as well as the rights of LBGTQ+ people, BIPOC, immigrants, and religious minorities). See this recent Substack by Craig Franson critiquing how a NYT feature writer covering the phenomenon manages to underplay ignore the “fascism” by focusing on the “weird.”

So I’m doing a fairly quick post, quick, because I’m sharing excerpts from two published essays as well as a links that directly challenge some of the ways that some conservative Christians tend to allegorize and weaponize Tolkien’s work. I don’t know if Reinhard is doing more than allegorizing, but even if he isn’t, other will use his book (as they use Tolkien’s fiction and the Bible and a lot of other publication) in their culture war. (A number of the U.S. scholars doing this are evangelicals/Christian nationalists who emphasize “Christian” and downplay “Catholicism” (by never mentioning it!) in their work in ways that would make me, were I a Catholic, nervous, given the history of prejudice against Catholics in the U.S.2)

Here’s a link to a review of Reinhard’s book at Jokien with Tolkien: in the review, he acknowledges that there are two sides to the debate (I wonder if Reinhard does as much), but that whatever side one is on (I think there are more than two myself; it’s a bad habit, I admit), we have to take into account the oft-quoted Letter #142: “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision” and explains that Reinhard ffocuses on the meaning of “fundamentally” for his analysis.

Jokien with Tolkien

💎 LOTR/LEGO Book Nook, 'The High Hallow Review,' and more! - Tolkien Treasures #024

Hello all! Mae govannen…

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a year ago · 26 likes · 1 comment · JRR Jokien

So my question, were I reviewing/evaluating Reinhard’s book, is whether or not he takes into account the letters in which Tolkien essentially contradicts himself about the ways in which Christianity/Catholicism manifests, or does not, in The Lord of the Rings, and, since the book is apparently recently published, does the author take into account the increasing diversity of “religion and Tolkien” scholarship in which “religion” is NOT a synonym for “Christianity”? 3 while all other religions are relegated some some sort of “not as good as WE are” category?

I only write about “religion” in the context of my atheists, agnostics, and animists project (haven’t published much because it’s going to be a book), and I don’t do theology!

But here are excerpts from two essays in Tolkien Studies which are about religion adn Tolkien and I think *must* be taken into account when writing about this topic. Tolkien Studies is a hard-copy annual journal which is available online only in Project MUSE which is also subscription only so available only through academic or large library databases.

Verlyn Flieger, “But What Did He Really Mean?” Tolkien Studies, vol. 11, 2014, pp. 149-1464

I am excerpting the first seven paragraphs paragraphs which give a sense of Flieger’s overall argument and some of the specific examples she develops at length in the body of the essay (which I highly recommend for anyone who wants to write about Tolkien’s work in any context because failing to take into account the contradictions in what he wrote leads to problems.)5

Almost from the date of its publication, The Lord of the Rings has been subject to conflicting interpretations, appealing equally to neo-pagans who see in its elves and hobbits an alternative to the dreary realism of mainstream culture and to Christians who find an evangelical message in its imagery of stars and light and bread and sacrifice. Tolkien was more patient with enthusiasts of both sides than many authors would have been, but he was also ambiguous, even contradictory in stating his own position—for example in his letters as to whether there was intentional Christianity in The Lord of the Rings, or in his essay “On Fairy-stories” (written before The Lord of the Rings but strongly influencing it) whether elves (aka fairies) are real.

Thus he could tell one correspondent that The Lord of the Rings was “fundamentally” religious and Catholic (Murray, Letters 172) and another that he felt no obligation to make it fit Christianity (Auden, Letters 144). He could, in “On Fairy-stories” both as published and in its rough drafts, argue for elves as real yet on the same page—sometimes in the same paragraph—call them products of human imagination. He could in one breath talk about Faërie as an actual place and in the next say it was the realm of fantasy. There are many such turnabouts, reversals of direction that not only make him appear contradictory but invite contradictory interpretations of his work, permitting advocates with opposite views to cherry-pick the statements that best support their position.

One result of this ambiguity is that the same cherries can be picked by both sides to support contending positions. For example, the same passage in a letter to Robert Murray is cited by Joseph Pearce to defend Tolkien’s Christian orthodoxy (Pearce, Man and Myth 109),and by Patrick Curry to support his intentional paganism (Curry 109, 117–18). Maybe this is what Tolkien intended. Maybe not. Michael Drout’s 2005 article “Towards a Better Tolkien Criticism”6 points out that the “overreliance of critics upon the Letters guides Tolkien scholarship down the narrow channel” of finding a single theological meaning in Tolkien’ works (21). Hoping to find broader avenues of meaning, I have divided my discussion into three sections, the first on the question of intentional Christianity in his fiction, the second on the ancillary reality (or not) of elves and Faërie, and the third on the related meaning of his term Faërian Drama. The question in my title, “But What Did He Really Mean?” is not intended to provide an answer, but to use the ambiguity as a guide to what may have been issues as unresolved for Tolkien as they were for his admirers.

Christianity

I will begin with the question that has caused the most controversy among Tolkien’s readers, critics, and scholars—whether Tolkien consciously built Christian references and imagery into his work, especially The Lord of the Rings. As with any correspondence, Tolkien tailored his letters to their particular addressees. His most definite—and most negative—statement came in a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman of the Collins publishing firm. The letter was written to persuade Collins to publish Tolkien’s fictive mythology, the Silmarillion, together with the then-unpublished The Lord of the Rings, and it is therefore more descriptive and rhetorical than conventionally chatty. Persuasion notwithstanding, it is important to note that although Waldman was a fellow Catholic, Tolkien did not use shared Catholicism or even shared Christianity as a selling point for his work. On the contrary, he went in the opposite direction, telling Waldman that what disqualified the “Arthurian world” as England’s mythology was that it was “involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.” He conceded that “myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth . . . but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary world,” which explicitness seems to him “fatal” (144). The word fatal is the key, and means exactly what it says— “lethal,” “death-dealing.” Connecting a fictional mythology to one from the real world would literally kill the fiction, reducing it to a gloss. Robbed of independence, it would become allegory in which every element would point to the other story.

Yet to another fellow Catholic, Robert, who read The Lord of the Rings in 1954, Tolkien took the alternative position (often cited as proof of Christian content in his fiction) that his book was “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” We should consider the possibility that since by this time the book had been not just accepted for publication (by Allen & Unwin) but was well on its way to publication (Murray read galley proofs), Tolkien now felt more confidant in affirming a Christian stance. Yet he followed this affirmation with the rather odd explanation, “That is why [my emphasis] I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism” (Letters 172). This takes some unpacking. At first glance it seems to be saying that the work is so suffused with Christianity that explicit reference is superfluous.

However, a closer look reveals words so carefully arranged to say both everything and nothing that they practically invite competing arguments. Joseph Pearce uses them to show that Tolkien meant The Lord of the Rings to be “theologically orthodox” (Pearce 109), while Patrick Curry cites them to support the book’s blend of “Christian, pagan, and humanist ingredients” (117). Pearce calls the statements paradoxical. Curry describes them as “syncretism.”

Pearce is not far off the mark. It does seem paradoxical to cite the religiousness of a work as your motive for cutting out religion. Moreover, for an author who emphatically disavowed allegory to invoke the “symbolism” of a work seems disingenuous to say the least. But Curry is not wrong either. To omit all reference to religion opens the door to a wider, more syncretistic and ecumenically inclusive audience, allowing Curry, for example, to point out that the Valar “are related to the ancient elements (fire, earth, air, and water) in a characteristically pagan way” (Curry 110–11). Such widely differing readings may tell us as much about the scholars quoted as they do about Tolkien, but it is significant that Tolkien opens the door to both. The key to this apparent inconsistency may lie not just in the differing philosophical adherence of the interpreters but also in the relationship of the writer to the addressee. While Tolkien was writing to Milton Waldman, he was speaking through Waldman to William Collins, chairman of the publishing firm. The wording of the letter makes it plain that he was seeking to get acceptance on its own terms for what he knew was a highly idiosyncratic work and was thus forestalling comparison.2 He likens his Valar to “the ‘gods’ of higher mythology, which can be accepted—well, shall we say baldly, by a mind that believes in the Blessed Trinity” (Letters 146), pointing out the difference, not the similarity. (149-151)

From endnotes: 2 And even here his position is somewhat suspect, for his own note to this statement to Auden says, “take the Ents for instance. I did not consciously invent them at all” (Letters 211), whereas Christopher Tolkien’s examination of the relevant material in The Return of the Shadow and The Treason of Isengard makes it clear that at least enough revision went on to change Treebeard from his original character as Treebeard the Giant to Treebeard the Ent, and from bad guy on the side of Sauron to good guy on nobody’s side but the trees.’ (164 n2).

I’ve been thinking recently that literary studies is aware that narrators (in fiction) can be crafted to be unreliable (whether they are aware of it or not); I’m now thinking it might be useful to acknowledge that “authors” when narrating their own writing process years, sometimes decades later, cannot be assumed to be all-knowing and completely reliable either. Historians have been long aware of that issue and teach how to critically analyze sources (especially primary but also secondary as well).

Richard C. West, “A Letter from Father Murray” Tolkien Studies, vol. 16, 2019, pp. 133-139

Since Substack does not allow “blocking within a block quote,” I’m italicizing the blocked excerpt from Father Murray’s letter to set it off from West’s information about the letter. Unlike Flieger’s essay, West is not making his own (original) argument: it’s in the “Notes” section of the journal, and the point is that Father Murray, the recipient of that letter with the Quote that Must Be Quoted, actually wrote a letter to a young scholar who was apparently one of the early proponents of Tolkien’s work as a Catholic allegory (and who, apparently, as many do, confuses symbolism as a literary element with allegory as a genre). I also think it important to note (as Verlyn says we should do in any use of any letter) that when Tolkien wrote That Letter, Murray was not yet a priest even though the way the letter is introduced as a letter to “Father Murray!”

There is a now-famous passage in the letter of 2 December 1953 in which Tolkien responds to these comments by telling the not-yet priested Murray that the not-yet-published The Lord of the Rings “is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision” (Letters 172). This letter has become very well known since Letters was published in 1981, but Fr. Murray quoted extensively from it earlier, including this passage, in his 1973 “Tribute” to his friend, then recently deceased. One of the earliest scholars to follow this up was Michael A. Witt, who, while a graduate student at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, wrote his master’s thesis on the influence of Catholicism on Tolkien. This project was begun in the spring of 1978 and the final version submitted in July 1980. While working on his thesis, Witt consulted people closely associated with Tolkien. As a result he was later (in 2009) able to donate to the Library Archives of Marquette University a short letter from Fr. John Tolkien (dated 30 May 1979), three letters from official biographer Humphrey Carpenter (dated 9 September 1978, 4 May 1979, and 14 May 1980), and two letters from Fr. Murray (dated 20 May 1980 and 15 July 1980). These are housed among the Tolkien Papers, Series 5.1, Box 6, Folder 8. While Fr. Tolkien declined to give out any more information about his family than had already been published, he raised no objections to Mr. Witt’s undertaking beyond a caution to remember copyright law when making quotations. However, Mr. Carpenter and Fr. Murray were very generous with their time. Carpenter (who was filling in answering mail for Christopher Tolkien, then heavily engaged in editing) mostly answered factual questions, and advised that, while there was then still much to be published, what Mr. Witt proposed would not contradict what was already available. He also gently suggested that the differences between allegory and symbolism had not been stated with sufficient clarity, something that Mr. Witt fixed in his final version. Fr. Murray’s first letter noted that he had been “in the States for a couple of weeks” beginning on May 4, 1980, but was now (May 20th) back but at the “beginning of my own heavy exam period which goes on through most of June.” Keep in mind that from 1963 on, Fr. Murray was on the faculty of Heythrop College, University of London, and a teacher’s life is very busy. Nevertheless he told Mr. Witt that when he had a chance, after the exam period, “shall read the chapter with pleasure.” Fr. Murray’s second letter (dated 15 July 1980) is worth quoting in its entirety. It can be made public here thanks to the kind permission of Fr. Murray’s estate, the British Province of the Society of Jesus:

Dear Mr. Witt,. . . .

Tolkien was a very complex and depressed man and my own opinion of his imaginative creation is that it projects his very depressed view of the universe at least as much as it reflects his Catholic faith. I don’t know how you react to such an opinion: it goes in a very different direction from your interpretation but on a different plane. All in all I don’t think I would care to say more than that on one level the values underlying Tolkien’s imaginative works are Catholic in a rather mediaeval form. But I would subsume all theological evaluation under a literary appreciation of them as works of imagination inspired by ancient and mediaeval literature. Aragorn, for example, is certainly a type of sacral kingship, and sacral kingship lies behind the Christian evaluation of Jesus as the Christ; but I would not like to relate Aragorn to Christ any nearer than that. As for the women characters, while I would not unsay what I said nearly 30 years ago, I am much more impressed now by their cardboard unreality and what this has suggested to many readers about Tolkien’s own psychology.

I hope my remarks are not too dampening. There is a case to be made about Tolkien the Catholic, but I simply could not support an interpretation which made this thekey to everything. In my opinion the key lies in Tolkien’s imaginative response to the heroic literature which had always gripped him. (133-35).

You didn’t say whether you wanted this xerox copy back. In view of the cost of postage would you mind if I do nothing until I hear from you?

With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Robert Murray S. J. [signature]

Robert Murray, S. J. [typed]

And finally, some excellent scholarship by progressive Christians I know who are very much trained in theology but occupy a very different strand of the religion than the conservatives who have tried to claim Tolkien as their own, special, sacred book! Both publications are in the open-access journals, and both have Substacks, BONUS! All highly recommended.

Tom Emanuel’s Substack, Queer and Back Again

Emanuel, Tom. "'It is 'about' nothing but itself': Tolkienian Theology Beyond the Domination of the Author." Mythlore, vol. 42, no. 1, #143, 2023.

In this essay, I want to examine how Christian scholarship drafts Tolkien, the imperfect human sub-creator, to perform Michel Foucault’s “author-function” by suppressing his tensions and contradictions and painting a figure whose life and works speak with a single, authoritative voice. I will show how this project is bound up with the doctrine of univocal biblical authority as a means by which to regulate orthodox and heretical interpretations of texts. Then, drawing on progressive Christian and Jewish hermeneutics and Tolkien’s own writings on intent and the freedom of the reader, I will propose a theological framework for reading Tolkien that honors his Catholic foundations, the sub-creative integrity of his secondary world, and the religious diversity of the readers who find it so enchanting. In so doing, I am not seeking to dismiss all existing Christian interpretations of Middle-earth as incorrect. Nor is it my intent to enlist Tolkien as an unequivocal proponent of my favored positions of religious and interpretive pluralism. Rather, I want to offer a hermeneutics of Tolkienian inspiration which treats Tolkien as a traveling-companion on a journey into the heart of the myths that give our lives meaning, rather than a semi-divine figure before whom readers must prostrate themselves. In short, I want to take him seriously enough as an artist not to idolize him, and I want to take his secondary world seriously enough not to ventriloquize it. Having hopefully succeeded, I will loop back to that brisk April day in 2012 and take another look at my moment of eucatastrophic insight, to see if it might open any new horizons for exploring Middle-earth.

Nick Polk’s Substack Tolkien Pop!

Polk, Nick. "Evaluating Bad Theology and Making a Case for the Ethical Priority of Religious Diversity in Tolkien Studies," Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 19, iss. 1,article 16.

The field of Tolkien Studies, as a community comprised of humans, contains a variety of voices and viewpoints. Among communities emerge both value as well as violence. Inevitably, as multiple ideas surface, they are met with those that are complimentary and contradictory. The exchange of ideas leads to dialogue, dialogue leads to conflict, and conflict leads to transformation. How communities handle this process contributes to their qualitative future and their effect on the world.

My aim is to submit a proposal as a contribution to this process in hopes of helping to direct the trajectory of Tolkien Studies at large and, within it, the realm of theology in particular. In large, theology in Tolkien Studies has been a monolithic affair. What I mean by this is that the theological engagement has been mostly comprised of Christian perspectives. Tolkien was vocal about his Roman Catholic faith, so it follows that Christian theologies would hold the majority in commentary and criticism. Where Christian theologies have given and continue to give invaluable insights into Tolkien’s life, writing, and future research, Tolkien Studies loses when it remains complicit to the Christian monopoly in the field of theology. For we have done a disservice to both the diversity of Christian theologies as well as those outside of the label of Christianity by assuming the term theology belongs to a reductionist construction of what many call the “Christian tradition.” Theologizing was conducted before Christianity’s rise in history and there is theologizing being done outside of Christianity today! Further, there is no singular “Christian tradition” in history. There were always a diverse array of traditions and theologies in the rise of Christianity and this diversity continues to grow under the larger umbrella of religions carrying the label of Christian.

Recognizing theological and religious diversity as a natural reality that is good rather than a problem to be solved opens up the theological possibilities for Tolkien Studies and beyond. However, I am not arguing that all theologies that arise out of religious diversity are good. In fact, I plan to demonstrate those theologies in Tolkien Studies that are bad, namely, those that attempt to shoehorn Tolkien into a particular theological cage. In this paper, I will present selections of theological Tolkien criticism for the purpose of evaluating them through practical theologian Leah Robinson’s definition of bad theology. I will then argue that bad theology in Tolkien Studies needs to be identified and replaced this with the openness of theologian John Thatamanil’s criteria for embracing religious diversity and conclude by offering a prioritizing of religious diversities as an ethical imperative for future theological endeavors in Tolkien Studies.

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Ha, I am informed by Substack that I am only “NEAR’ email length limit making this one of the *ahem* shorter pieces I’ve posted!

Please feel free to share your definitions of feminism in the comments and/or links to definitions by others whose work you enjoy and/or examples of what you consider to be feminist takes on Tolkien as well as adaptations and transformative works.

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Welcome to “How do you define ‘feminism’”? part #1 (of three).1

The working title of my book is Webs of Women: Feminist Receptions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Legendarium. The title it is likely to be changed by the time it’s published: in fact, I’m thinking about a shift to “Webs BY Women” for the main title even at this stage!

But the word “feminist” will remain either in the main or sub title because that’s the point, and I will be clinging to the web imagery no matter what. I suspect the main title will need to have more relevant key words like “Tolkien” and “Feminist” instead of my great image of women creating webs (which could move to the subtitle).

Today’s post is the first in a series about defining “feminism(s)”(and starting to think about related words and phrases) (and how other people do, or do not, define the term when they use it). It is one of the key words I need to discuss early in the book because they are contested terms (just wait till you see *all* the definitions, compounds, and derived words: the OED entry is almost 6000 words long (that counts the citations which I consider one of the most valuable aspects of the OED’s work).

Other key words are: gender, woman/women, and queer (which I have already made a start on). I will be analyzing how these words are used (or not used!) in some Tolkien scholarship (unfortunately, usually those where the author does not define the term and assumes there’s one single [dictionary] definition that everybody agrees with). But I’m also on the lookout for scholarship where the authors do the real work of engaging with the complicated webs of feminist movements!

The second post gets into the nitty-gritty of multiple definitions by discussing the entries/definitions of “feminism” and “feminist in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and then how another major reference work (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [SED]) handles the topic of feminism in that discipline (at that point, we’re talking theory!)

The third post looks at and recommends work that feminist medievalists (or medievalist feminists) (or both!) have been doing for decades and are currently doing (with some links to some wonderful Substacks as a bonus). I am not a medievalist, but Tolkien’s legendarium has always been associated with “the medieval” in many people’s minds although “the medieval” and what it means change over time. Given the extent to which the “Middle Ages” is contested in today’s political debates (as is “Tolkien”), one question is more or less which version, or definition, of the “Middle Ages” people are thinking about.

This post is a lengthy close-reading/explication of a single chapter in a reference work (interspersed with my snarky personal responses). This sort of thing is part of my writing process so that I can eventually summarize and critique it in a paragraph or two.

Today’s post is connected to a post from last December where I wrote that:

One of the inspirations (a polite term for that hammer that my brain keeps smacking me with) for my Web of Women project on Tolkien is the ongoing problem I see with [some] men mansplaining in critical/academic publications to women (including but not limited to feminist) readers that women and/or feminists hate Tolkien because no female characters/few female characters/etc.

I talk about Harold Bloom and Edmund Wilson in that post (as examples of male critics/scholars who disliked Tolkien’s fiction immensely). However, nobody ever says “men hate Tolkien because X” (X=the various complaints made by Bloom and Wilson which, by the way, do not usually concern the representation of women which they mostly ignore all on their own).

I made a post about a recent peer-reviewed publication that made the same. old. argument. about feminist readings of Tolkien’s legendarium which is also part of the hammer-inspirations. (The linked post is an “Online Supplement” to a response in Mythlore that has since been published).

The impetus for this particular post, now a series, was a comment on another Substack. I am putting the information about that post and the comment below because I am neither writing directly in response to the post, nor disagreeing with the post, or the comments, and I highly recommend reading them all on their own!2

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One of the Web chapters will be on the topic of academic scholarship, specifically the actual feminist scholarship on Tolkien that does not fit the stereotype that occurs in some spaces (even if at times the that work is cited to prove how much feminists hate Tolkien). In order to show the contrast, I’ll need to summarize the stereotype and where it appears (specifically in specialized reference works on Tolkien as well as a few essays that rely on stereotyping scholarship on women, gender, or feminism, I suspect so that the writers can position themselves as bravely fighting back against the shrews).

So, first up: Adam Roberts’s chapter on “Women” in Stuart D. Lee’s A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien. The link leads to the entry at The Tolkien Gateway which has the table of contents for the 2022 second edition which has five chapters that the first one did not have. Chapter 32, “Women,” was in the original edition and was only minimally revised for the 2022 edition. The Tolkien Gateway also provides this information about the Companion: “It is a part of the Blackwell Companions to Literature series, which have been praised as prestigious reference works” (my emphasis).

Adam Roberts who, for no good reason I can fathom, was chosen to (or volunteered to, perhaps?) write the entry on “Women” for Stuart D. Lee’s 2014 Companion, opens his chapter with the following statement:

“Tolkien and Women” might be thought an unpromising topic for critical inquiry. The truth is that Tolkien is little praised, and indeed is often actively deprecated, for the way women are represented in his writing. (473, bold emphasis added)

Not just “deprecated” but “actively” so. Given that Roberts’s eventual argument about Tolkien’s female characters is that they are positively/theologically passive because of their passion for renouncing power, not the bad “enforced passive” of the patriarchy, he characterizes his argument as as a “challenge” to the “negative case” that “Tolkien’s treatment of women is fatally limited” (473). The implication is that active actions (speech or otherwise) by women, especially making a ‘negative case’ against a man, means they are bad women in the sense of Manne’s term, meaning they are doing what women are not supposed to do.3

As is often the case with this sort of claim, Roberts provides remarkably little evidence from published feminist work of all this “active [deprecation]” either in the introduction or in the body of the chapter. Instead, he identifies the “two main focuses" of feminist criticism as he sees them:

One, few female characters;

Two, that “the ideological assumptions of his body of writing: conservative, Catholic, traditional, a worldview in which women, however cherished (by men), play as it were second fiddle in the musical ensemble of life” (Roberts also asserts Tolkien would have hated the word “ideological; I suspect Roberts also dislikes that word and what it implies about his ideas). (473).4

The two lengthy paragraphs of evidence to support the claims about these two critiques never mention a single feminist scholar, instead consisting of Roberts’s summary of The Hobbit as “an egregiously male book” (all male characters) and the “less monogendered” [I’d describe it as male-dominated myself! while pointing out that not everyone evaluates the importance of characters based on the number of them] The Lord of the Rings (that starts with a character count of male Fellowship, and the assertion that “there is such a dearth of female characters that even Hollywood, not a place generally known for progressive gender politics, felt that intervention was necessary” (474),” followed by:

there is a case to answer that femaleness in The Lord of the Rings is more awkwardly rendered than its simple absence in The Hobbit . . . . female presence is both rare enough to invoke many of the same cultural biases as complete absence would, while at the same time such presence as there is is liable to prove even more unpalatable to modern feminist sensibilities. (474).

Those modern feminists, so many feelings, so little reason, so much a hivemind, so easily summed up in a few words!

Roberts’s support for this claim are that the “three main female characters [Galadriel, Éowyn, Shelob] . . . . embody three distinct but equally unfortunate modes of how a ‘woman’ can fit herself into a fundamentally masculine world" (474).5 The three are: “the unattainable, mystic queen, the sexually ‘pure’ wielder of strange magic who otherwise takes no place in the action; or she can be the sort of woman who is, as it was almost as good as a man: brave, battle-skilled, strong. Finally she can embody the Monstrous Feminine; an externalization of all the most grotesque and unreconstructed male fears about female fleshiness, malice, broodiness, and hostility to all masculine projects” (474), plus the afterthought fourth way: “wives, mothers, and healers” (474).

And the reason for this awkward problem in Tolkien’s fiction: he was a "“product of his time generally, and of his literary peer group the Inklings in particular” (474).6

A few pages later on, Roberts quotes an actual scholar making “the feminist critical case against Tolkien” — I discuss that case in detail below, but for now, will simply note that the scholar quoted is Charles Moseley, and that his 1997 book Roberts quotes from is apparently 96 pages long).

Speaking of secondary sources, Roberts’s list of references is remarkably skimpy for a reference work: there are twelve. Six are probably sorta kinda feminist sources which are not about Tolkien (Annemie Halsema’s 2011 essay on “The Time of the Self” [from Time is Feminist Phenomenology, eds. Christine Schüles, Dorothea Olkowsky, and Helen Fielding] Peta Tancred’s 1988 Feminist Research: Prospect and Retrospect; Betty Friedan’s 1992 Feminine Mystique; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s 1993 book Between Men; Rosemary Radford Ruether’s 1998 Introducing Redemption in Christian Feminism; and Jane Sunderland’s 2010 Language, Gender, and Children’s Fiction).

Five are publications about Tolkien/the Inklings: an article in the Guardian about a Tea Party candidate praising Tolkien’s women in 2010 (Flood) ; Fredrick and McBride’s Women Among the Inklings (2001); an essay in Science Fiction Studies (Elaine Good, 2002) on “Angels in the Inklings House,” Charles Moseley’s J. R. R. Tolkien (1997) and Joseph Pearce’s 1998 Tolkien, Man, and Myth.

The last is a book on Hegel (Terry Pinkard, 1994, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason).

My first response upon reading the list was WTAF leads somebody to choose Betty Friedan’s book for an essay on the representation of women in Tolkien, which led to me checking out the other sources and how Roberts uses them.

Roberts uses Friedan’s concept of the “feminine mystique” to evaluate an argument by an American Tea Party woman politician (“women in Tolkien are celebrated as women rather than judged as men (Flood, 2010)” (475) which Roberts paraphrases as:

Tolkien was drawn in particular to the portrayal of Elvish women like Galadriel, Arwen, and Lúthien, because he had a higher regard for women than for men, because he saw them as existing on a higher, purer, more spiritual and beautiful plane. This appears to be a non-starter, a clunky iteration of the ‘feminine mystique’ so brilliantly poignarded by Betty Friedan’s celebrated 1960s polemic” (475, bold emphasis added).

For those not familiar with Friedan’s book, Roberts provides her definition in an endnote.7

Flood and Friedan are invoked early on to make it clear that Roberts is “not [asserting] that Tolkien’s representation of women can be redeemed for modern readers from within the ideological assumptions of modern Conservatism, although of course there are Conservative critics who suggest that it can” (475).

It all depends on what you mean by “Conservative” of course, which Roberts fails to define, but I don’t see Roberts’s chapter as being anywhere near a liberal or progressive one given his praise of passionate passivity and complete ignorance of the actual published feminist scholarship.

Roberts barely mentions Sedgwick at the end of his discussion of marriage in the novel (as the “the fourth role for women”) which lists the straight marriages, starting with Sam and Rosie’s, and ends with the claim that:

the other four surviving members of the Fellowship of the Ring pair off with one another, into relationships that can best be categorized by invoking Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s discourse (1993) of the homosocial: Merry and Pippin making one couple, and Legolas and Gimli another” (474).

I wonder just how *daring* Roberts felt at that moment as he oh-so-carefully avoids considering the homosociality and potential queerness of Frodo and Sam’s relationship (the subject of quite a bit of queer scholarship in Tolkien studies which started in 2001 with David Craig and Daniel Timmons essays).8 Roberts is apparently as ignorant of gender and queer approaches to Tolkien as well as feminist approaches given his habit of never citing any of the the relevant scholarship, a habit which falls well below the minimum standard I’d expect in a “prestigious reference work.”9

I suppose that, since Roberts clearly wants to avoid the *bad* women, when he does eventually get around to providing an example of “the feminist critical case against Tolkien” (on page 475-6), he never mentions any pesky activist feminist women on Tolkien and goes to straight to a man (man-mansplaining!): Charles Moseley’s 1997 book from which Roberts quotes three paragraphs in support of the claim that:

[the] topic [the representation of women is one] upon which even the best [AKA MEN] critics can appear defensive. As Charles Moseley states:

No fiction can satisfy every orthodoxy, least of all those that are differently conditioned from its own time. Tolkien’s texts do reveal values that are Eurocentric, white, middle-class, patriarchal—those of the majority of his generation in England, in fact. (1997, 63).10

This is, of course, true; and bears repeating. That said, one has reservations about the way Moseley seeks to bring Tolkien’s representation of women back into the fold. (475)

Then follow two paragraphs from Moseley’s book stating the “feminist case against Tolkien” which are fairly long, so let’s summarize: the first paragraph begins by saying that the “overwhelming majority of characters are male,”11 and goes on to argue that little time is spent on love (affairs, marriage, sex, as opposed to the other types of love which are “things, and places, and for family and friends”), and that “we are simply told of love; it is analysed neither physically nor psychologically”12 and the focus is on “male fellowship and supposedly ‘male’ values of heroism, courage and endurance [that] are critical. (1997, 64).” (476).

Roberts says that Moseley “permits himself a 'yet’ in the second paragraph: ‘[y]et Tolkien does give us glimpses of other possibilities,’” and goes on to kusrHaleth, the “matriarchal Stoors” [“Gollum’s people”],13 Melian, Galadriel, and, of course Éowyn who has to “[discard] her identity and [become] Dernhelm” (64-65 ).”14 (476).

Roberts claims that Moseley’s “critique of Tolkien is in other respects sensitive and intelligent, but where gender is concerned it feels a little like special pleading” (476).

Roberts then sets up the next section of his chapter to lead us to his conclusion which answers the “question of enforced female passivity [which] is present in all three of the main female characters of The Lord of the Rings, inflected differently in each case” (476).

What follows this claim is a multi-paragraph section that tends to bring in a number of not always clearly related examples/evidence:

Two paragraphs on Shelob (a “grotesque caricature” influenced by Milton, and concluding that Tolkien’s description of Shelob (the BELLY!) “speaks to the novel’s larger sense of ‘the female,’” and by “[appropriating] Robert Graves’s laconically sexist apothegm, ‘woman is, man does,’ [arguing that] then Shelob embodies a ghastly Gothicized parody of mere is-ness: waiting, brooding, devouring, killing.” (477).

Seven paragraphs on Éowyn who “sharply [differs] from this parodic fleshy femaleness: no sagging, swaying female curves on her, and certainly no ‘stench’ emanating from Tolkien’s euphemistically named between-legs lower ‘belly” (477). Instead, Roberts describes Éowyn’s metallic sharpness and “[repeated links with metal weapons]”: turns out that despite all the metallic/weaponization, she is passive (in the past “enforced” sense) “because she herself is a weapon . . . .[a] situation which dramatizes the passivity of this situation in a double sense” (478), and which is the “passivity as female confinement and restriction that modern feminism has so exhaustively critiqued,” which is solved by giving up her love for Aragorn and its “transference” to Faramir which Roberts says is described “with a haste that looks at best unseemly, and at worst psychologically improbable (478).

Éowyn’s sudden switch, Roberts claims, “presents the [unnamed? hypothetical?] critic with problems,” but, Roberts argues “there’s more going on than this reaction [to her sudden change] because her “being-in-the-world as an unstereotypical female ‘sword,’ a steely weapon deployed against the enemy, was also a life defined by a kind of passivity; commanded in battle, in the service of others.”

He pauses to acknowledge that might seem kind of “reactionary,” (gee, it just might what a shocker) but luckily he can pull out the winning card: the Passion of the Christ (“passion” being “the gerund of passivity”15 as “the logic under which we can most fruitfully read Tolkien’s elaborate fantasy of Catholic sacrifice and atonement” (479) (which by the way as we learn in the concluding paragraphs of the essay is all about an elaborate fantasy of a masculine god whose masculine Creation makes Tolkien’s sub-creation “femininzed” (484) which I expand upon below.

This fruitful Catholic reading of Éowyn takes five paragraphs which cover her comment to Merry about will (as a theme in the novel), followed by a paragraph warning against reading Tolkien’s novels as allegories and advising us to instead focus on “incarnation” which seems to mean reading selected letters16 where he “deeply . . . meditated the incarnation as the central mystery of Christianity,” then another paragraph about the need to “read the novel’s fascination with ‘will,’ ‘wilfulness,’ passivity,’ and ‘passion,” and the difficulty of balancing “free will, moral and practical choice” (while avoiding either being “too passive” or “too wilful” — all of which is harder for “kings and generals,” than for us “ordinary mortals” let alone teh wimminz (479-80).

Then comes a leap to a paragraph on the problem of the Ring as a “moral [dilemma] that [tempts characters in power] to make the wrong decision” (480). This claim allows Roberts to talk more about men (Boromir, Saruman, Sam, Tom Bombadil, Frodo, and Gandalf —and then at the end, Galadriel hoves into view! I’m not sure what happened to Éowyn in the midst of all this skipping about (or how this applies to Shelob the third of the three main characters forced into passivity—apparently it doesn’t, so we’ll just let her slink back into the fecund Darkness).

But enforced passivity seems to suddenly disappear because at the end of the paragraph, Roberts informs us that unlike Éowyn, “Galadriel’s choice is not styled in terms of giving up masculine social roles and assuming feminine ones. It is, rather, an existential crisis that has been averted; Galadriel, by resisting temptation [and giving up power], is able to remain Galadriel” (481).17

So bear with me as I attempt to sum up what’s going on (it may take me a few more revisions later on): somehow Galadriel giving up Big-P Power is sort of like some of the male characters who give up Big-P Power which is good because Tolkien says that action “is as great an act of heroism as storming into battle brandishing your sword” (481).

I cannot help but notice that the MALE characters get to storm into battle and wave swords around AND still be King even though they relinquish Power; Éowyn has to go back to the fourth/role (wife and mother and healer) as Roberts argues we are supposed to see that the “change in her, from winter to summer, could perhaps be described as the motion of grace within her; and central to that motion is the subsuming of individual agency into something larger” (481).

If this is Christian feminism, it looks like the plain old patriarchal binary essentialism, but then I am an atheist, so . .

But hold! Roberts is not done:

It is in this sense that the gender-politics of the novel (and how heartily Tolkien would have hated that term!) elide with the larger religious thematic. Passivity in this novel is a passion. That is the heart of the matter; for it might seem axiomatic that one of the major battles of feminism has been against the sense that passivity is a woman’s ‘natural’ state, whilst activity and agency are reserved for men” (481)

Now actual citation of actual feminist scholars occurs (not feminist Tolkien scholars, hey, let’s not get carried away here!); first, a definition of (not-Christian) “feminism” from Tancred18:

Feminism makes it clear that women need to break out of conformity and passivity moulds [sic]. We can neither conform nor be passive, and, as we discover the extent of our oppression, we refuse to let patriarchy do the thinking, talking, and naming for us (1988, 81). (482).

After stating that “it is hard to disagree” with Tancred’s point, Roberts shifts:

to one of the contexts of feminist thought that see the question of passivity as more complex, and one of those contexts is Christian feminism. To quote Rosemary Ruether:

Some of the earlier ventures of feminist ethics suggested that women’s sins are primarily the sins of passivity, of failure to develop an autonomous self, leaving in place the assumption that men sin primarily through pride . . . But dividing it by gender is too simple. Although women have been directed to accept passivity, acquiescence and auxiliary existence to men as ‘feminine virtues’ they also exist within class and race hierarchies where they can exercise exploitative hauteur toward those under their power. (1978, 72)

There is some point in theorizing Tolkien’s writing via Christian approaches to literary criticism and feminism if only because The Lord of the Rings in particular is so immanently Christian (see also ch. 30).”19

While I have read neither Tancred or Ruether’s work, I tend to agree with what the quotes are arguing (though in the case of Ruether, I would gloss her main argument in the context of intersectional feminism, such as the feminist history about white women’s participation in the abuse and enslavement of African and African Americans—which doesn’t exactly seem to be how Roberts is using the quote given how he retreats to the simplistic gender binary).

When I looked up information on Ruether’s book, I found it’s clearly a work of theology that has nothing to do with literary criticism and feminism. And that’s fine — one can definitely cite theory in literary criticism. I do it all the time. I just expect scholars to to also cite the relevant scholarship on the literary text that the theory is being applied to.

Nor do I see much connection between Ruether’s complicating of the idea of passivity by citing “class and race hierarchies” with Roberts’ leap to the link between “passion” (as in the Passion of Christ” and “passivity” which is a very different context and/or complexity than the quote from Ruether seems to show.20

Roberts now turns to Hegel’s “‘master-slave dialectic,’ a philosophical framing that has often been used to interrogate and hierarchy of traditional gender roles” (482).21 I have not read Hegel or Terry Pinkard who appears in the next paragraph to gloss Hegel’s dialectic as a “social relationship” (483).

Neither Hegel nor Pinkard write about Tolkien (or literary criticism, or feminism, I’d guess), but Roberts connects them to Tolkien with LotR being a book “very much concerned with questions of mastery and slavery, a novel precisely about the proper and improper boundaries of power, about relationships between masters and servants (see also ch. 2822)” (483).

This shift to Hegel gives Roberts another chance to talk about male characters’ relationships with each other—Sauron, Frodo, Gollum, San, Gandalf, Wormtongue, Aragorn, Boromir, Denethor—and to give the Ring a whole paragraph about its Hegelian representation without ever explaining how it section relates to “the question of gender representation in Tolkien’s writing” (483).

I am expected to accept without questioning Roberts’s declaration that this application of Hegel to male power relationships makes the chapter’s argument a “much more radical reading (politically or ideologically speaking) than has often been the case with critics, fixed as they often have been on Tolkien’s personal traditionalist, Catholic and conservative affiliations” (484).

Note that just as Roberts fails to cite feminist scholars on Tolkien, he also fails to cite those fixated critics, but he almost manages to make a second-wave feminist claim, probably by mistake, given what follows: “Man/woman is more than one more example of a master/slave; it is at the heart of human power relations” BUT tah-dah, “[r]ead this way, Tolkien’s female characters no longer seem marginal, becoming rather crucial dramatizations of the way passivity and passion interrelate. It suggests a way in which what appear on the surface, radically incompatible views (twenty-first century feminism and twentieth-century Catholic traditionalism) in fact approach similar insights in the complexity of hierarchized models of gender relation” (484) (bold emphasis added).

I might acknowledge the potential of this argument and the earlier one about the importance of men relinquishing power if Roberts was not pretty much saying the same thing as an actual feminist scholar, Edith L. Crowe, did in her 1996 essay “Power in Arda: Sources, Uses and Misuses.” She also emphasizes that there are different types of power (not just “macho” and “girly” which seems to be Roberts’s default).

I quote from my current draft of the Web project where I summarize her major arguments (the ML in the parenthetical citation refers to the Mylore publication rather than to the reprint in Perilous and Fair):

In “Power in Arda: Sources, Uses and Misuses,” Edith Crowe argues that feminist scholars (acknowledging the existence of a range of definitions of “feminism”) should consider The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and the other posthumous works” in the context of which of the “many interpretations of feminism . . .are more compatible with Tolkien than others” (ML 272) and concludes by arguing that “a person of feminist persuasion, while not necessarily agreeing with Tolkien’s attitudes in toto, can find much to appreciate in his work,” including the extent to which Middle-earth “is a world in which attitudes and values associated in the Primary World with the feminine are highly valued. . .though not always incarnate in female bodies” (ML 277). In addition, and extremely relevant to my current project, her essay considers “the similarities between her “interpretation of feminism” and Tolkien’s “interpretation of Christianity” which have “a great deal in common,” and share a common goal “in the Fourth Age [which is] to resist the temptation to divide and dominate,” and to challenge the “misuse of power” (ML 277).

I am not claiming that Roberts plagiarizes Crowe’s work.

I am claiming he could not be bothered to do even the sort of rudimentary search that the subscription databases make easy in order to find, read, and engage with the published scholarship by women and feminists on Tolkien’s female characters and on his varied representations of gender before he began writing his chapter on “Women” for the 2014 Companion.

I provide in the note below a chronological listing of forty-plus secondary sources, a number of which are peer-reviewed, on sex, gender, women, and Tolkien published between 1971-2010 (making them available presumably before Roberts began writing his chapter, allowing for academic writing/publishing schedules). I think it’s reasonable to say that at least some of them should have been acknowledged as doing something OTHER than “deprecate” Tolkien, not to mention as showing a lot more complexity in the discussion than Roberts seems able to believe exists (can we say “straw-feminist”? Sure we can!).23

And then there is that penultimate paragraph which I shall proceed to quote in full because I don’t trust myself to summarize it fairly. This paragraph follows the claim about Roberts’s reading being a radical one, and an intervening paragraph about the “ethics and. . .aesthetics of renunciation of the strength that can only be found via weakness,” shown by Tolkien’s creation myth being “marred by a malign male agency, Melkor [while] also [being] originally redeemed by a female, Nenna [SIC!], who “dwells alone” (484). Roberts quotes the description of Nienna from The Silmarillion, followed by a quote from Joseph Pearce comparing the excerpt with one by a Catholic writer (484), then goes immediately into this gem of essentialism:

This is the heart of the question of femaleness in Tolkien’s art; a complex repudiation of masculine values of "agency” and “action” in favor of what is, at root, a religiously informed concept of passionate passivity.” The world, for Tolkien, is neither to be rejected nor conquered, instead we must somehow master it and surrender ourselves to it. Moreover, Tolkien’s “sub-creation” is a notionally “feminized world-building, defined in relation to the notionally “masculine” divine creation of the actual world, yet at the same time existing in a way that unpicks precisely the supposed hierarchy between “real” and “fantasy.” Fantasy—the entire mode in which Tolkien worked—is in this sense not only the woman of literature (looked down upon by “masculine” highbrow liteature, belittled by the academy and so on), but the woman of creation more generally. (484)24

The actual last paragraph goes into purity which I am not touching with a ten-foot pole at the moment!

SECOND EDITION, NO REVISION

Even more evidence of Roberts’s lack of interest in actual feminist scholarship about women is shown by minimal revision Roberts did of his chapter for the second edition of Lee’s Companion. It was published in 2022, eight years after the 2015 publication of Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie Donovan’s Perilous and Fair: Women in the Life and Works of J. R. R. Tolkien! In the note below is another list of forty-plus sources published between 2011-2019 that includes two peer-reviewed collections/anthologies dealing with sex, gender, etc.25

Now, mind you, Roberts does acknowledge the existence of Perilous and Fair in the second edition apparently because he just had to tell the feminists just how wrong we are. He writes a single paragraph about a single claim in the “Introduction” by Croft and Donovan in which they explain that they find Roberts’ claim about the “enforced female passivity. . . in all three of the main female characters of The Lord of the Rings” to be “troubling after so much research effort and printer’s ink has gone to correct similarly ill-informed positions” (2).

Roberts brave stands by his “‘passivity thesis,” ignoring the validity of the editorial description of his chapter as “ill-informed” 26and plays the typical mansplaining trump card of being the One Dude Who “fully understand[s] Tolkien’s achievement” (2022, 451). 27

Other Tolkien scholars altogether repudiate “passivity” as the proper way of apprehending Tolkien’s representation of women. . . . It is worth noting that Croft and Donovan single out (amongst other works) an earlier iteration of this very chapter for dispraise. They argue that the claim made therein, that “enforced female passivity is present in all three of the main characters of The Lord of the Rings” is “troubling,” ill-informed,” and “indicative of a continuing and alarming tendency” in Tolkien scholarship “to disregard the more positive readings of Tolkien’s characters.” The present author cannot, of course, be oblivious to such a case, not least since it represents a dominant aspect of more recent scholarship.28 If the “passivity” thesis remains herein it is not out of contumacy but rather because the very fact that ‘passivity’ as such—whilst of course, a term in common usage with straightforwardly diminishing and negative implications—also carries a radically if perhaps counter-intuitively positive theological valence, and that this latter context remains an important one to fully understand Tolkien’s achievement” (451. bold emphasis mine).

Croft and Donovan do not bother to point out the extent to which Roberts ignores the pre-existing scholarship (including the seven reprints of classic essays on the topic of women and Tolkien in their collection), but I am pointing the problem out (in spite of friends’ advice to just ignore him) because the chapter is in a reference work that is likely to be fairly widely read. It was was widely enough read that the publisher issued a second edition fairly quickly. While some experts in the field29 will purchase the book, I suspect that additional readers will use library copies to learn about the scholarship on Tolkien’s legendarium, or rather, not learn about it.30 And of course, both editions are still available (the first one at a lower price) which is why Roberts’s failure to revise is so egregious.

On a personal level, as an animist and atheist, I tend to reject any claim that assumes a single (allegorical!) correct interpretation (or “full understanding”) of Tolkien’s work is even possible, or one that otherwise demands that we acquiesce to the scholars’ ideas of Tolkien’s religion, and I think it is unfortunate that somehow Roberts’s work went through the whole editorial and publication process without anybody catching what I see as some significant problems.

A quick list of earlier examples of publications on that I want to cover in the book that mostly do a better job than Roberts (and which he probably should have looked at, but oh, well):

Michael D. C. Drout’s J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment (published in 2007) has an entry for “Women in Tolkien’s Works” (Carol Leibiger) and another for “Feminist Readings of Tolkien” (Aline Ripley) which do a good job of covering the topics as well as the gaps in the scholarship. The fact that both Ripley’s and Leibiger’s entries include a longer list of relevant scholarly sources than Roberts’ entire chapter does highlights what I consider his most egregious failure which is not, despite my atheism, his passion for female Christian passivity, but his inability to acknowledge the existence of scholarship on Tolkien’s female characters that does not conform to his ideology.

Leibiger’s concluding paragraph does a good job of summarizing the state of feminist scholarship on Tolkien at the time of writing:

Feminist readings of Tolkien can be identified in various approaches, from Christian feminism, to Jungian interpretations, to literary-historical interpretations generally. Thorough studies from the perspective of feminist and gender theorists such as Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, or Luce Irigaray would also be valuable (Donovan 131), as would further examination from a feminist perspective of Tolkien’s work on medieval texts for or about women, such an Ancrene Wisse or Juliana. (203)

Robert Eaglestone’s Reading The Lord of the Rings: New Writings on Tolkien’s Classic (Continuum 2005) has some interesting choices in chapter topics. Jennifer Neville’s chapter is on “Women” while Holly A. Crocker’s chapter is on “Masculinity,” and Esther Saxey’s is on “Homoeroticism” (Chapters 7, 8, and 9 in the section on “Gender, sexuality and class”; Chapter 10 being on “Service by Scott Kleinman.”) As is typical in Tolkien scholarship of the time, nobody is mentioning race/racism.

Neville’s chapter is, I think, flawed by the opening paragraph in which she, like Roberts, claims that it “is a commonplace that the women in Tolkien’s fiction are disappointing,” although, unlike Roberts, Neville does provide citations and a useful bibliography/list of references. The problem is that her short summaries of what she claims the scholarship says is not particularly accurate since she sets up the binary of people either “damning” or “defending” Tolkien’s fiction in this one paragraph review of scholarship (which is, again, more than Roberts could be bothered to do although I notice that he thanks Neville and Alan Jacobs for feedback in the drafting process in note 1 (485).

Her essay’s main argument is an intriguing, but it focuses only on Éowyn with the argument that her characterization is an artifact of the sexist Old English scholarship found in:

nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship [on Old English poetry which] left no room for active women. . . and late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century feminist criticism of Old English literature continues to create an image of the powerless, voiceless and hopeless women who can do no more than weep” (102).

I cannot evaluate the validity of Neville’s claim about medieval feminist scholarship at the time of writing the essay, and I strongly suspect that she, like the others, had fairly strict limitations on the length of her chapter, but certainly she provides evidence of the importance of a feminist re/vision of female characters in Old English poetry (some of which I assume has been done in the following twenty years).

Finally, I’ve just become aware of Alex Lewis and Elizabeth Currie’s The Uncharted Realms of Tolkien: A Critical Study of Text, Context and Subtext in the works of JRR [sic] Tolkien which has a 48-pg. chapter on “Realms of Gender,” with sub-chapters or sections on “Tolkien and ‘The Woman Question,’ “Elves and Wild Women; The ‘Silmarillion’; “Lily-maids and Amazons in Middle-earth,” and “The Professor and the Mariner’s Wife” (Medea Publishing, 2002). I have not had time to read this chapter yet and look forward to it a coming from a different perspective (although even glancing over it, the small font and text-block appearance of the pages means it’s going to be hard to read even with my bifocals!).

“How Do You Define Feminism” part #2 is here!

“How Do You Define Feminism” part #3 is here!

Over the past few days, I’ve been gathering all the drafts, notes, and secondary sources from the presentations I’ve given this year, then organizing the key chunks of them into what might be described (if you were feeling kind) as a mutant outline.1 That means I’ve copied/pasted key parts of the presentations into chapters for the book, moving paragraphs from one or more of the presentations variously into a preface, introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The resulting draft is 12,500 words long which isn’t bad for a start (the final draft will be somewhere between 70-100K).

The presentations that have been part of the process for this project are:

1. “Tolkien’s ‘Absent [Female] Characters’: How Christopher Tolkien Expanded Middle-earth” (Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference, Tolkien Society)

2. “Heritage Starts with HER: Women Writers Writing Back to Tolkien’s Legendarium” (Tolkien Society Hybrid Seminar 2024 – Tolkien as Heritage)

3. A ‘Tolkien’ of One’s Own: Women Making Our Own ‘Tolkiens’ (Tolkien Studies Area, Popular Culture Association Conference)

4. An Incomplete Academic Fellowship: Excluding Queer Feminist Women from Tolkien Studies (GIF.Con, Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations)

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I’ve published quite a few essays and contributed chapters to anthologies in previous years, but never managed to complete whole book. I have a couple that I tried to do, back in the feminist speculative fiction days, plus a third attempt coming out of fandom experiences, but they sort of stumbled to a half at different points.

This project feels very different for whatever reason or reasons.

One reason may be that, although I am drawing on my academic/research background, I plan to write this for a more general audience (albeit a fannish/nerdy kind of audience) which takes off a certain type of pressure (allowing me to still work on peer-reviewed essays!).

I’ll be posting primarily updates like this one(rather than process pieces/drafts) in future.

I have a bunch of other bits and pieces relating to the legendarium, Jackson’s film, and related topics I’ll post in between the other things — including some of my fandom meta from my LiveJournal/Dreamwidth days, or presentations that didn’t get developed (I have one on Ungoliant, and one on the reception of Tauriel), and who knows what else I might find in in the groves and thickets of my files . . . .

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I had a fantastic time at the 2025 PCA annual conference during the past week.

Here is the text of my presentation which is an early draft of the proposal I’ll be writing for the book which I’ve realized will not be a peer-reviewed monograph but will be written for a more general audience!

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Content Note for an analogy using spider webs & spoilers for three fantasy novels!

This presentation explores several strands of my current book project which has the working title, The Web of Women. My goal is to trace some of the complex web of Anglophone women’s and nonbinary people’s receptions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Legendarium.

First, my web analogy explained! According to Jo-Anne Sewlal, a Trinidad and Tobago arachnologist, a web has four main parts:

the hub or centre of a web where the spider usually rests, the frame threads or borders of the web, the sticky spiral or insect catching area, and the anchor points like the guideline attaching the web to the substrate (Sewlal)1

Tolkien's legendarium provides anchor points. Reception theory assumes different readers will respond differently to the same text. Those of us writing about Tolkien’s legendarium (the substrate) have different anchor points. For example, some of my points to which I attach my webs (whether scholarly writing or fanfiction) are Middle-earth (who I see as a character), Éowyn, and Ioreth who have been recently joined by my newest one, Berúthiel, who became a part of my web thanks to J.D. Vance’s widely-broadcast fear of childless cat ladies! Their web of stories will have their own chapter.

The center, or hub, of my project are women and nonbinary readers who write about Tolkien in one or more of the following discursive modes: fan meta, fan fiction, academic scholarship, and fantasy. I discuss them more below.

Some frame threads structuring my Web are from Dallas John Baker, Verlyn Flieger, John Rateliff, and Nicole du Plessis.2 I place the proper noun, “Tolkien,” in quotation marks because Dallas and Flieger offer evidence that the subjective experiences of many readers are not outweighed by the concept of a single, homogenous “Author” with easily discernible “Intentions.” Baker describes at least four ‘Tolkiens,’ all “the Tolkien of history, the actual person. . . [Tolkien as] the subject of numerous biographies. . . the Tolkien as imagined by the, perhaps millions, of people who have enjoyed his novels or the film adaptations. . . and the Tolkien as constructed in the scholarly research about his writing” (125). Flieger goes further, arguing that the multitudinous contradictions in Tolkien’s writing fiction and non-fiction, are the primary cause of the conflicting interpretations of Tolkien’s work because

when we look at Tolkien we are likely to see ourselves, and thus to find in his work what we want to see. This is as true of his most devoted fan as of his nastiest critic. . . .the more I read about Tolkien the less homogenous a figure I find. (8-9)

Flieger identifies as the “misogynist vs. feminist” conflict [in list of all the contradictory takes on Tolkien in “Arch”]. John Rateliff’s “The Missing Women: J. R. R. Tolkien's Lifelong Support for Women's Higher Education," provides a needed correction to Humphrey Carpenter’s claim that Tolkien's life was spent almost entirely in the company of men. Rateliff draws on evidence from from Tolkien, from and about women in his family, women scholars Leeds and Oxford, and women students he tutored, as well as one of his male professors described by Rateliff as an “early advocate of women’s degrees” (50). Rateliff re-examines the often-cited “Letter to Michael,” arguing that it shows Tolkien’s inability to perceive or comprehend systemic sexism women faced.

Nicole du Plessis’s critique in “On the Shoulders of Humphrey Carpenter: Reconsidering Biographical Representation and Scholarly Perception of Edith Tolkien," points out how Tolkien scholars have “often consulted but seldom questioned” Humphrey Carpenter’s “authorized” [by the family] biography, especially in regard to his claims about Edith Tolkien “about whom, objectively, very little is known, but whose relationship with her husband is invoked in analyses of women in Tolkien’s works, in discussions of his religious beliefs, in evaluations of his friendships, and in general accounts of his character” (40)

Since there are still many people who are apparently unable to acknowledge the existence of systemic inequalities in any context, I am not inclined to single Tolkien (the human being) out especially given the current context of the cascading catastrophe wrapped in a clusterfuck that has been metastasizing for decades in which we are currently living.

I perceive the “sticky spiral” as what writers use to catch and hold their ideas after finding anchor points, attaching their webs, and identifying the frame threads! I suspect, however, based my analysis of the far-right extremist “Culture Warriors’”3 backlash against the Tolkien Society’s “Tolkien and Diversity” Seminar that some will perceive this project as attempting to capture their “Hero of Western Civilization,” their “Object of Worship,” by means of our sticky “Feminine Wiles” in order to suck him dry, destroy his work, and the Patriarchy they cling to so desperately.

I don’t care what they think.

In my remaining time today, I will briefly trace my ideas about the strands of three other webs which will become three chapters of the book. These webs connect with each other through strands of what bell hooks calls “feminist movement.”4 I see these webs as a dialogic and communal process: Sewlal explains that there are about 20 species of spiders who create “combined webs because they can make more webbing to catch more prey and bigger prey.”

My chosen strands from fandom, scholarship, and fantasy all challenge the remarkably resilient (meaning I’ve been hearing/ reading some version of it for sixty years) but usually unsupported claim that [usually unnamed] women and/or feminists and even occasionally, “girls,” dislike/ condemn/denounce/criticize/hate Tolkien’s work. There will be a section in the book citing examples from people making that claim, as well as some examples of individual girls/ women/ feminists who dislike Tolkien’s work but rarely write long condemnatory screeds. And, of course, #notallfemininsts.

Fan Meta & Fan Fiction: The Silmarillion Writers’ Guild

The Silmarillion Writers’ Guild (SWG), founded by Dawn Felagund, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year by having a hybrid con, Mereth Aderthad (SILM: King Fingolfin’s “Feast of Reuniting”) that pairs scholarly and transformative fan presentations.5 The SWG is the oldest independent Tolkien fan archive still active and offers many features to its members: an active and supportive community; an archive for uploading fanworks (“based on The Silmarillion and related texts”) which contains “fiction, nonfiction and meta, plays & screenplays, and poetry); audio fanworks; link collections; art, multimedia fanworks; playlists.”6 They provide author resources, and reference readers, and have monthly “challenges” that is, writing prompts on a specific topic. The SWG is a wonderful example of a collaborative set of webs, one that has (in fan history terms) a deep history and one that has, over the years, actively worked to challenge the internalized sexism of fanfiction writers’ hostility toward women characters.

The first fanfic challenge posted was in 2005 and was on “Strong Women”: the prompt is “Choose a female character from The Silmarillion or related texts. It could be someone like Galadriel, one of the Valar, or someone barely mentioned, such as Nerdanel or Elenwë,” and the task was to “Write a story--any length--about this character, developing a strong personality for her.”7 The prompt encourages people to think through the many different types of “strengths” women can have and notes that “there are still many women who receive only glancing acknowledgment or appear only as "footnote" characters--regardless, their influence on their husbands, children, and the world around them is undeniable.”

The SWG archive also contains numerous examples of fan meta, or scholarship, and a notable one focuses on female characters in The Silmarillion. Elleth’s “Textual Ghosts Project”8 documents 616 characters, all female characters who can be “inferred” to exist (specifically the wives and mothers of named male characters) but who are not named,” while pointing out that, given the patrilineal genealogies Tolkien based his on, there must be “‘unknown unknowns’ that is, daughters, sisters, aunts and other female relations who were completely erased (not even recorded as [x number of] daughters), further upping the tally of invisible women” (n.p.).

Academic Scholarship: Who is published, what do they write, and when did it change?

The bibliographic essay I wrote for Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie Donovan’s 2015 anthology, Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien, covers criticism and scholarship published between 1971-2013, analyzing significant changes over time, including the increasing number of publications each year (especially after the release of the Jackson live-action films), the range of theories and methods used, and the type of publications (fanzine, literary journal, academic journal, book) and moving from single articles to anthologies. There has (not yet) been a feminist monograph focusing on the reception of Tolkien, but I am planning to change that.

Not surprisingly, given it’s academia, this part of the Web is likely to be the most difficult to trace, in part because of the large (and always increasing) body of scholarship. But given the longevity of the claim about girls/women/feminists and Tolkien, I plan to start by looking back at what women scholars in Tolkien studies were writing from early on. I’ve started collecting some information, some of which is summarized on your handout which covers a selection of anthologies published between 1968-2015 (I’ll be adding others). You can see the PDF of the handout below!

I look at the total number of chapters in each anthology, the number and percentage of chapters written by women, and the topics. I identify whether the focus is on Male or Female characters (or are on “universal” themes where characters are rarely or never mentioned—these categories will be refined as I develop the project, and suggestions are welcome!). I’ll be expanding on identifying when feminist or gender theories and analytical categories are used, and how.

Fantasy Authors: Challenges to Tolkien’s hierarchies (spoilers)

The tendency in online commentary and criticism is to assume that white men are Tolkien’s “natural” heirs, with Ursula K. LeGuin occasionally mentioned as the “exceptional [AKA token] woman.” While the number of women fantasy writers has increased, with some acknowledging in various ways Tolkien’s influence, Faye Ringel is the first and so far the only scholar I know of to explore how Tolkien’s work influenced specific women writers.9 She interviewed four white Anglophone women fantasy authors [Patricia McKillip, Delia Sherman, Greer Ilene Gilman, and Rosemary Edghill] in 2000, all of whom are roughly part of the same generation (born between 1948-1956), the first generation to grow up in the “shadow” of Tolkien’s legendarium. Ringel asked them what narrative and world-building elements they accept and what they reject from Tolkien’s work.

I have not seen similar work being done with other fantasy writers in academic scholarship (and I will also be exploring fan meta more deeply), but I have been doing some work on fantasy by three of my favorite writers who were born between 1972 and the mid-1980s. They have written variously about the influence of Tolkien on their work: Victoria Goddard’s The Bone Harp, Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, and N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy. I analyze how they challenge and/or transform Tolkien’s Elves and Orcs in regard to his spiritual, racial, and gender hierarchies.

Victoria Goddard’s The Bone Harp is a transformative mythopoeic reworking of the Fëanorian story about a father, seven sons, an oath, and curses.10 Goddard’s worldbuilding of the Elflands is similar to Arda (the later creation of the Sun and Moon, the power of music; the immortality of the Elves; their war with the Old Enemy and his created monsters). The ending of the story differs because one of the seven sons, Tamsin, survives because of help from two female characters. Klara, a co-protagonist and POV character in the novel, is his best friend, fellow musician, friendly rival, and lover, and Alina, Tamsin’s mother (who does not die!) both use their powers to help Tamsin survive and come back from the war. When Tamsin wakes, centuries after the war ended, he meets two young Elven women, River and Ash, who befriend Tamsin then bring him with them as they travel back to the Old City.

Katherine Addison (an open pen-name for Sarah Monette) transforms the “missing heir” trope in The Goblin Emperor by creating a world in which two Empires exist--one ruled by Elves, one by Goblins.11 There are no humans, hobbits, Ents, Dwarves or other supernatural creatures. The novel focuses on Maia who is the mixed-race son of the Elven Emperor and his fourth wife, a Goblin Princess. Maia is exiled from court as an infant, along with his mother, and raised in isolation after she dies when he is eight. He becomes Emperor of the Elflands after his father and his first three sons die in an airship disaster. A tight third-person point of view, limited to Maia, immerses readers in his experiences of going from being a half-breed abused exile to Emperor, facing the racism of the Elven nobility at court (a racism that many Goblins, including Maia’s grandfather, direct at the Elves), struggling to rule justly, and beginning to change the inequalities in his empire.

N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy,12 which won three Hugos, is the most radical of transformations not only to Tolkien’s legendarium but also to the genre of epic fantasy his work inspired, and the faux universality of his mythology which is in fact only one of many global ones. The plot of the trilogy centers on Essun’s search for her daughter Nassun, stolen by her father, in the middle of an apocalypse, Father The long-lived mythic beings of power are the Stone Eaters who are made of living rock rather than flesh, long-lived but not indestructible; they move through stone. The planet, Father Earth, is sentient, and trying to destroy all surface life in revenge for actions taken millennia before the events of the trilogy. Jemisin breaks the binary of the racist hierarchy of superior white people who kill or enslave the black and brown people; instead, those with the genetic ability to manipulate rock, the orogenes, are enslaved because of their ability to help communities and citiessurvive the tectonic instability of the planet. Essun and Nassun, both orogenes, are able to avert the total destruction of the planet.

Although I will not be attending PCA in future, you can read more about my Web project on my Substack. Thank you!

Anthology Data Tolkien Our Own

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Data on selected anthologies published between 1968-2015 (which will be expanded for the book). Contains information on editors of anthology, total number of chapters in each anthology, the number and percentage of chapters written by women, and the topics. I identify whether the focus is on Male or Female characters (or are on “universal” themes where characters are rarely or never mentioned).

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I’ve been catching up with All the Stuff I pushed onto “do later on” lists while I was getting the latest anthology copyedited and off to McFarland—it went off, finally, early last month! *happy dances*

And then I suddenly realized I had not posted (stacked?) here for a month plus! In my defense, I have *five* posts (which included this one until I posted it!) in draft form on my Dashboard. Apparently Substack has given up on reminding me I started a post and didn’t finish it, probably in frustration, because there are so many stacking up. Don’t worry, Substack: you are not alone! I have that effect on a lot of people!

So let’s try to start getting some of those drafts public in between All the Other Things on my list . . . .

First, I am thrilled to announce that the Studies in Tolkien Series webpage is now live at McFarland, and I am ready to hear from people who want to write a book in the genre of Tolkien academic scholarship:

Studies in Tolkien is a series devoted to scholarship in all areas, period specializations, disciplines, and critical theories about Tolkien’s work, its adaptations, transformative works, translations, and reception. The primary goals of the series are to add significant original contributions to Tolkien scholarship by developing, creating, and supporting greater diversity in the field by embracing a wide definition of what Tolkien scholarship includes in relation to authors, texts, topics, theories, and methods.

Tell your friends!

p.s. As often happens, this post is too long for some emails to open.

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Second: I managed to clear enough piles and do enough organizing to generate a list! of things I am doing that are due in the next few months [granted, some deadlines are more concrete than others]:

April ?: Turn in my essay for Asexuality and Aromanticism in Tolkien’s Legendarium for editorial review (the editors are doing a themed issue for the open-access [really open-access by which I mean nobody pays anything to read or to submit to it!] Journal of Tolkien Research at some future TBD date! Current title of essay: “Here, There, Maybe there? Oh, Yeah, HERE! (But Never Back Again): An Asexual Autist’s Meander.” The deadline was March 31, but Other Things leapfrogged to the top of the list (the reviewer reports for “There are many paths to tread: Queer Approaches to Tolkien's Middle-earth came in, and we are trying to get revisions from contributors and turn the final draft in before April 30; then the proof for my “Note” for Mythlore arrived, and I need to check that and return by April 7).

April 16: Present a paper relating to my Web Project at the Popular Culture/American Culture Conference in NOLA: “A ‘Tolkien’ of One’s Own: Women Making Their Own ‘Tolkiens.’” [scroll down to the second half of linked post to read about this one!]

You can see a list of all presentations given at the Tolkien Studies Area since 2014, including the list for this year at the Tolkien Studies Area PCA/ACA page on my Substack.

Actually, most of my presentations this spring/summer are parts of the Web: and yes, I am leaving heavily into web and spider imagery! Bwah-hah-hah!

PCA/ACA is the only f2f conference I have this year, and it will be the last PCA (or f2f conference) I attend in the forseeable future—due to health, economic issues and, oh yeah, the dismantling of the FAA along with so many other federal agencies turning this country into a christo-techno-fascist hellhole! I plan to attend only virtual and hybrid conferences in the future.

May 8: Present my paper, “An Incomplete Academic Fellowship: The Exclusion of Queer Feminist Women from Tolkien Studies,” at GIFCon 2025, "Queering the Fantastic” (Online, free, May 7-9, a fantastic programme, check it out!). This paper is also part of the Web project.

July 5-6 is when The Tolkien Society’s Seminar 2025, “Arda’s Entangled Bodies and Environments” happens. My presentation, should it be accepted (and the TS gets so many amazing proposals that I am not assuming it will be!), will be on “Race-ing to Gender Arda: A Stylistics Analysis” [scroll down because the linked post has info about three presentations!]. This presentation is only sort of orthagonally related to the Web project (which is a big messy reception study rather than a textual analysis though a bit of that may creep in, especially relating to Éowyn, Berúthiel, and Ioreth). But the common thread is a focus on female characters/women, and intersectionality.

This presentation will focus on Goldberry and Galadriel and will be an intersectional “phenomenological and stylistics analysis of how Tolkien’s narrative voices entangle female characters and Middle-earth, resulting in a racialized (White) gendered (feminine) world.” It’s sort of a proof of concept: if it works, I will probably expand it to include more female characters (possibly *GULP* including some from the 1977 Silmarillion).

July 19: I’m putting this in although I am *not* presenting—but will be attending— because it’s going to be so much fun and some of you might like to also attend: Mereth Aderthad 2025, Silmarillion Writer’s Guild, in celebration of their 20th anniversary!

August 2-3: Online Midsummer Seminar 2025, More Perilous and Fair: Women and Gender in Mythopoeic Fantasy. Registration: $20. I’m one of the three co-chairs, and we have a bunch of *fantastic* proposals, so reading those, meeting with the others, and notifying presenters is also on the list for this week in April.

Third, as my list above shows, I’m spending a lot of time thinking/writing (writing is the major way I do most of my thinking) about Tolkien, his work, his readers, all in the context of genders and sexualities. And when that happens, I tend to drag all sorts of things relating to what I am thinking about that I see around me into my web (thus, the topics of some of those draft posts lurking on my Dashboard).

So this post, Discworld Rules by Venkatesh Rao, is one I saw in my “Notes” (I guess the way that works is I see posts that people I subscribe/follow restack maybe? I’ve found a lot of great Substacks that way!).

Rao’s post compares LotR (Rao focuses only on that book, ignoring the rest of the legendarium) with all of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (except the Tiffany Aching series which. he. has. NOT. read!!!). The point of comparison and evaluation is which of the two authors’ works is the "best “ allegory for the world and technology” for “technologists” whoever they are.1

For those not familiar with Pratchett’s work (there may be a FEW out there!): The Discworld portmantetau series (meaning many sub-series making up a huge SERIES!) apparently consists of 41 books published over 32 years [Source: Discworld Books Reading Order]).2

I love Pratchett’s work; I also love Tolkien’s work (some parts more than others in both cases). I first read Tolkien when I was in grade school; I started reading Pratchett in my early years as a tenured academic after a great academic presentation by a friend of mine (on wizards vs. philosophers in Pratchett’s Discworld), probabably at some point in the 1990s (fuzzy on dates, but it was when I was chairing the Science Fiction and Fantasy Area at PCA which was in the 1990s). Both authors changed my view of the world (as did others), but not in in the rather transactionsl forced “allegorical” way that Rao seems to be talking about. They are also one of a group of writers (of fiction, poetry, and theory) that also affected my view of the world (and humanity).

My immediate response to Rao’s post was that I love reading a good polemic even if I disagree with parts of it. I think in some respects “Discworld Rules” is a good polemic. It strikes me as coming straight from the heart, written with passion and concern by someone who wants to make a difference. He states his purpose early on, claiming that The Lord of the Rings is “brain-rot for technologists,” and if they’d just read Pratchett, they (technologists) and (I presume) the world, or perhaps “their thinking about the world,” would be better.)3

Discworld Rules

This post is an extended argument that as a lens for thinking about the world, The Lord of the Rings, is a work that you should “not set aside lightly, but throw across the room with great force,” and that in place of Middle Earth, you should install Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

I won’t get into whether Discworld is better or worse as a fictional universe than Middle Earth. That is a matter of taste and which elements of craft you admire. But as an allegory for technology and society, Discworld is so radically, vastly superior, and LOTR is so terminally bad, it is not even a contest.

The thing is, other than agreeing that “Discworld rules,” I disagree with the majority of Rao’s argument (i.e. I don’t think Middle-earth, or Tolkien, the author, drools.). Nor do I blame Tolkien for what the technologists think or do in the world. And, getting right down to the nitty-gritty, I do not think any work of fiction causes “brain rot” (any more than a work of fiction [all on its own] somehow enobles a reader; and yes, I have grave doubts about the recent iteration of that sort of thinking because I doubt “reading [fiction] makes you more empathetic.”4

I did not comment on the post, especially after reading the other comments, because I am fairly sure I am not Rao’s audience and that we inhabit completely different worlds (both in the Primary World and in our perspectives on fictional texts). I do admit, as a long-time (65-ish years!) reader and fan of sff, I do have a few Thoughts of my own on what the technology dudes (who may or may not be the Rao’s “technologists”) have done and are doing in the world, especially in fucking 2025.

I admit those thoughts are not particularly developed, mostly coming down to “what the fuck makes you think those books are instruction manuals, DUDE!”) [using Rao’s concept, I’d be willing to accept the answer of “pre-existing brain-rot” as opposed to blaming Tolkien’s fiction for causing “brain-rot.”]5

These excerpts make me think that Rao and I might possiby sort of more or less agree on that aspect of things:

I’ve thought about this a lot in the last few months, and I’ve concluded the whole program [AKA “meme a revanchist Great Power world back into existence” apparently one based on LotR, Ayn Rand, and Girard] is in fact exactly as stupid as it sounds, and will fail in profoundly stupid ways, doing a lot of irreversible damage (Brexit was a small scale model of what’s in store for us here in the US).

Agree!

But then he says:

But to some extent I’ve made my peace with what’s coming, and have no desire to convince you that this is where things are headed. If you’ve bought into that, have fun being miserable in Middle Earth.

HUH? First, I haven’t made my peace with it (whatever that means), but I also don’t see their extremely stupid plan resulting in anything I would recognize as “Middle-earth” (although it all depends on how you interpret the novels, and which PART of Middle-earth).6

The Whole Web Thing involves a lot of reading what different people read Tolkien’s work and what they think it means *means* and how they respond to it compared to how I read, think, and respond. And once you get out of the “either/or” (or the good/bad binary), things (I think) become a lot more interesting.

My expanded response to Rao’s essay is directly connected to my current Web project in the sense that my theory of why my reading/interpretations of Tolkien’s work (and probably also Pratchett’s since the main interest I have in his work is NOT the worldbuilding/technology) differs notably from Rao’s (and from that of a whole bunch of other people’s ideas, mostly but not entirely men’s ideas).7

My theory for the differences has nothing to do with how the texts are written, but with the theory of how people read (in the sense of making meaning of the text). This theory makes sense to me in large part because I taught English classes (literature, theory, business writing, and creative writing) for over three decades.

It is fairly simple to state the theory, but complications arise once you start delving into it: different readers interpret (and evaluate) books based primarily on their own experiences. Part of that theory (sometimes called reader response, sometimes reception theory) involves the complicated concept of reader communities that are one part of how we read/interpret texts.8

Nobody has explained the results of this theory in operation better than Verlyn Flieger (I consider her one of the three founding scholars of Tolkien studies) in her brilliant essay, “The Arch and the Keystone” which I highly recommend reading in its entirety.

However, if you don’t have time, here’s my favorite paragraph from it.

And the main point (italicized in the paragraph below) to keep in in mind to understand my approach (to Tolkien, to Rao, and to, well, a lot of things) is” “when we look at Tolkien we are likely to see ourselves, and thus to find in his work what we want to see. This is as true of his most devoted fan as of his nastiest critic.”9

We have pasted labels on him, called him a medievalist, a modernist, a post-modernist, a royalist, a fascist, a misogynist, a feminist, a racist, an egalitarian, a realist, a romantic, an optimist, a pessimist. He’s been variously characterized as homophobic and homo-social in both work and life. His fiction has been interpreted as Boethian, Manichean, Augustinian and Aquinian. He’s been typed as a radical and a conservative, a Christian apologist and a pagan, a Catholic who believed in Fairyland, a monarchist who exalted little people, a Tory whose political views leaned toward anarchy (Letters #52, p. 63). The fact that all these labels can find a fit only adds to the confusion. . . .when we look at Tolkien we are likely to see ourselves, and thus to find in his work what we want to see. This is as true of his most devoted fan as of his nastiest critic. It is as true of me as it is of Edmund Wilson or Germaine Greer. Or, I dare say, of Peter Jackson. But the result is that the more I read about Tolkien the less homogenous a figure I find. What I find instead is increasing fragmentation and polarization. Everybody has their own private Tolkien--more Tolkiens than you can shake a stick at (8-9, emphasis added).

All the readers who see different Tolkiens exist in communities that have, in part, influenced what labels we use. One of Rao’s reader communities is, I suspect, fellow (?) technologists. Or the ones he thinks have avoided the stupid “brain-rot” of using Tolkien’s novel to understand the world.

One of the most important differences I have with Rao is that I don’t believe any book can, or should be, read as or given the status of the “allegory for society and technology” (in the sense of being a model, I guess?), or that a book can somehow be the primary cause of “brain-rot” although I’m not sure if Rao is arguing LOTR causes brain-rot; or that brain-rotted technologists somehow seize upon the book for "an allegory” to live their lives by; or that something else is at work.

It seems likely that one of Rao’s inspirations for this post was how a bunch of the Silicon Valley Fascists name their companies after some of Tolkien’s technology, but that raises the questions of why Rao doesn’t call them fascists (or authoritarians, or oligarchs, etc.) as opposed to the general but more neutral term “technologists.” I guess it’s possible he does consider them oligarchs (but is appealing to other “technologists,” which he defines in some other way).10

If my guess is accurate, then fair enough—I was disgusted to learn that JD Vance (who came out of Silicon Valley and is connected at the hip to Peter Thiel and the other technofascists—credits LotR with developing his “conservative view” of the world. But I don’t think that even if he had somehow avoid reading Tolkien, his view/ideology would be that different (although apparently he zipped pretty fast from condemning Trump as Hitler to sucking up to him in every way possible, so who knows). And I doubt Trump (and many of his minions) ever read LotR so where did their “brain-rot” or fascist tendencies come from?

I doubt any of that group is going to sit down to read Terry Pratchett to “correct” their Tolkien/Rand/Girard-influenced views of the world and technology (they’re too busy trying to destroy everything to make themselves lords of their own corporate controlled nation-states). Even if somehow somebody convinced them to read a Terry Pratchett, there’s no guarantee they’d get the same “message” (allegory?) out of it that Rao does.

Speaking of which, those of you who read Pratchett, what is the one you would recommend people start with? I asked my friend who gave the presentation that got me hooked on Pratchett for a starting place, and he recommended Small Gods which is a pretty damn good place to start, I thought. If he’d suggested a Rincewind one, I’m not sure I’d have kept reading.

Some of us in Tolkien studies (who draw on Marxist, feminist, critical race, queer, and intersectional theories to analyze Tolkien’s work which we love while acknowledging its problematic aspects) are finally calling some of those people out (not for reading Tolkien wrong, but for, you know, trying to destroy everyone’s rights and lives).

See: Robert Tally’s Tolkien's Deplorable Cultus and my posts that link to sources on far-right extremism. For years, the Tolkien scholars have been ignoring white supremacist fans/readers, or dismissing them as reading Tolkien “wrong.” That stance is dangerous nowadays: the Tolkien fans who are in conservative and far-right ideologies have been around for decades as a friend of mine, Craig Franson, who studies the far-right appropriations of Tolkien’s work has been analyzing for a book he is writing.

I don’t know if Rao is aware that non-technological christo-fascists fascists are also fans of Tolkien, and not just in the U.S., or if Rao is aware that the fascist lurve for Tolkien is just part of their appropriation of an imaginary Pure White Manly Male Past of the Classical period, especially the Romans, and of the Medieval period, especially the Crusades. Even if the technologists took Rao’s advice and read Pratchett and, I guess, began agreeing with Rao, that wouldn’t solve the problem Rao identifies.

I do know that classicists and medievalists in recent years have been reporting on their current work which presents a much different (AKA “not White”) view of their respective historical periods and cultures (often facing death threats as a result).

But that’s a whole other complex topic, and my main critique of Rao’s discussion of Tolkien and Pratchett’s work is the how he completely ignores the existence of female characters in Tolkien’s and Pratchett’s worlds, and the (implied) absence of, well, women (technologists or otherwise) in this whole discussion. I have another post in the draft stage about this phenomenon in other contexts—it’s not at all original to Rao, or unique to fantasy; it’s part of the kyriarchy.

In his discussion of Tolkien vs. Pratchett, Rao cites “Chiang’s Law” which is described at length in the first issue of Protocolized: Stories, Studies, Science (of which Rao is an editor/founder/contributor) which grew out of the “Summer of Protocols”11 Protocolized explains that:

We hope to do for protocols what Astounding magazine, one of our inspirations, did for science fiction and technological literacy in its 1940s golden age. Or what the Whole Earth Catalog did for technology-adjacent counterculture in the late 60s and 70s.

How that goal seems to get applied in the “Discworld Rules” piece is that those who aren’t content to be miserable in Middle-earth can read this piece and “truly learn to think in pluralist there-are-many-alternatives ways. . . . with the rules of Discworld.”

If by “pluralism” Rao means how to avoid the “Chosen One” script that he claims (without much evidence) that Tolkien’s work is based on. By the way, I don’t disagree that some people, almost entirely men, do start to consider themselves the Chosen Ones after reading Tolkien, as does the author of a brilliant post that I recommended a while back, argues. Tony Ginocchio’s “The Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence” (in his Substack, Grift of the Holy Spirit,” is written to argue that JD Vance’s appropriation of LotR means it’s time for Cathlics, especially, to replace Tolkien’s novel “as the definitive Catholic fantasy epic” with Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series.

I tried to choose a few paragraphs to quote here, but as Ginocchio points out, the series is “insanely more complicated” than a plot summary can convey, so, you know, if you haven’t read Wolfe’s series (I did years ago, appreciated it was one of the most brilliant works of speculative fiction every written, and could never re-read because of the torture element).12 But I highly recommend reading Gnocchio’s post for a good argument about an entirely DIFFERENT work that should “replace” Tolkien’s for Catholics at least (since I’m not Catholic—lukewarm Presbyterian childhood, wiccan for a couple of decades, then atheist but still an animist because of Tolkien—I don’t have to choose “either/or” and don’t). I think that some of the technologists might benefit from reading Gene Wolfe’s series although perhaps in a different way than Ginocchio images for Catholics.

Back to my main critique of Rao’s argument: ignoring ALL the female characters and women generally.13

So, by my quick count, his essay is 6234 words long (I cut/pasted it into a Word document for word count, FYI, but did not save it). With his focus on the Great Chosen Manly Hero. who is all he can see in Tolkien, Rao makes no mention whatsoever of female characters (yeah, right, I know “there are more male than female characters in Tolkien, blah blah blah sexist,”—men have been pointing that out for decades while claiming “feminists hate Tolkien”). And all that pointing out proves that a lot of men suck at paying attention to what women (let alone feminists!) say about . . . .anything.

Edith Crowe pointed out in 1996 that, especially when you look at The Silmarillion, the question of “Power in Arda” is a bit more complicated than many readers acknowledge. It’s not just all about “Great/Chosen Men.” The theme of renouncing power is an important one (plus, there are different types of power):

Abstract: Power and renunciation of power has long been recognised as an important theme in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. This paper will examine the issue of power with particular attention to Riane Eisler's dominator/ partnership model of power relations and the power within/power over dichotomy. It will consider the sources of power: spiritual, political, physical; and how these are wielded by the various peoples and individuals of Middle-earth.

I consider this essay to be the first feminist essay on Tolkien’s legendarium (because Crowe identifies herself as a feminist, and she uses a feminist theorist).

Here is her concluding paragraph which knocks the stereotype that to be a feminist is to hate Tolkien into a cocked hat:14

This, then, is why I conclude that a person of feminist persuasion, while not necessarily agreeing with Tolkien’s attitudes in toto, can find much to appreciate in his work. Arda is a world in which females share power in spiritual and temporal realms, although not always to the degree one might wish. More importantly, it is a world in which attitudes and values associated in the Primary World with the feminine are highly valued. Indeed, these “feminine values” triumph at the end of the Third Age, though not always incarnate in female bodies. Though Tolkien’s road was his interpretation of Christianity, and Eisler’s (and mine) our interpretation of feminism, the destination seems to have a great deal in common. Our mutual task in the Fourth Age is to resist the temptation to divide and dominate, whether we characterize this misuse of power as that of the Blade or the Ring. May Varda look with favour upon our efforts. (277, emphasis added)

And there have been a lot of women (and a few men) (and nonbinary and genderqueer readers and critics) writing feminist, gender, and queer approaches to and about Tolkien’s work—since 1971!

Now the profession of “technologist” has for much, if not all, of its existence, done its best to exclude/ignore/drive out and erase, women technologists (coffcoff Ada Lovelace coffcoff) so I am not particularly surprised by Rao’s focus on the male characters in Tolkien and, mostly, in his discussion of Pratchett).15

Rao does mention a *few* female characters, mostly in a 69-word-paragraph (out of over 6000 words) sort of about the witches in Discworld:

The Witches novels, featuring a milieu of witches in the countryside, with Granny Weatherwax as the no-nonsense elder. Like the wizards of Unseen University, they too don’t really make much actual use of magic, preferring to solve problems through wisdom and skeptical common sense, frequently battling Chosen One ambitions in their own ranks. They hold the wizards of Unseen University in affectionate contempt, as wild theorists doing weird experiments.

And I cannot help but note that of the three whole sentences devoted to this not very important topic, two start with the the wizards at the Unseen University [only men allowed]. Now, as a faculty brat, and graduate student, and then a tenured academic [in one of those nasty cultural marxist feminist postmodernism queer disciplines, AKA “literature”], I freely admit that I *adore* the skewering of academia in the UU novels

BUT, I am also quite aware that Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Magrat Garlick, Agnes Nitt, and *YES* Tiffany Aching are doing a whole lot of important work in their communities in Ramtops and on the Chalk that is completely fucking missed/ignored/dismissed here where they are described only in relation to the wizards (and only as a group, with only the “leader,” Granny Weatherwax being named).

And a careful reader engaging fully with all the “Witches” novels might notice some important developments (evolutions?) about the witches (and the wizards) and constructions of gender and power generally throughout the various sub-series.

But to fully see that, the careful reader would have to read Tiffany’s series which Rao never did.

From The Discworld Wiki:

Pratchett said that Tiffany Aching "...started with a girl lying down by a river, on the first page of The Wee Free Men". In his youth, Pratchett was "fascinated" by a nearby chalk pit, and like Tiffany knew how to read words before being able to pronounce them. The Wee Free Men features "a lot of [his] past" in its descriptions. A lot of Tiffany's understanding of the world is based on Pratchett's own experiences. Pratchett said, "It sounds amateurish to say that characters invent themselves, and in truth they don't. That's just a short-hand phrase. Of course the author invents them. But while the creative channel is being held open, all sorts of memories and thoughts creep out, somewhat to the owner's surprise." With Tiffany, Pratchett wanted to "restate" the purpose of magic on the Discworld and the relationship between wizards, witches and others. He included ideas of responsibility and "guarding your society" as he felt it drew closer to the reality of a witch – that is, "the village herbalist, the midwife, the person who knew things". Throughout the series, Tiffany grows both as a young girl and woman and as a witch. Pratchett chose a young protagonist because when you're young "you have to learn". He chose the name "Tiffany" because it evoked anything but a powerful witch. Given Tiffany's relationship with Preston, the doctor in the final book, The Shepherd's Crown, it would have been interesting to see what Pratchett did with the historical dichotomy between doctors and the village witch but unfortunately that was not to be (emphasis added).

The excerpt above is the opening paragraph in the fan wiki: there’s much more in the article. Anyone who hasn’t read Tiffany Aching’s books perhaps because of the stereotype that they’re childish/for children [I believe Tolkien warned us about somewhere!] might want to read this excellent article and re-consider their life choices.

In addition to the 69 words, a few other references appear (very brief):

• Granny Weatherwax is mentioned twice (in lists of major/important characters, all the others being male).

• Tiffany Aching (one of my many favorites) is mentioned once when Rao says that her series is the only sub-series in the Discworld that he didn’t read (OK THEN!). The built-in punishment for anyone who does not read Tiffany’s series is that they are, all unbeknownst to them, not only missing nout on Tiffany Aching, but also on the majority of the Discworld books in which the Nac Mac Feegle appear!

• And, finally, there’s slighting reference to Margaret Thatcher (in context of neoliberalism because no manly men/technologist? ever promoted it). Now I remember Margaret Thatcher and have friends in the UK and know something about the impact of her policies, but it’s not as if she operated in isolation from or was uniquely different from oh, Ronald Raygun, and other neoliberal dudes in politics. But let’s blame the woman, right? If it’s not neoliberalism, it’s an apple.

Rao does note the systemic racism of Middle-earth which is more than many do:

Revealingly, Roundworld isn’t even modeled in the Middle Earth cosmology, except via vaguely racist and lazy allusions (In Middle Earth, I’m presumably one of those turbaned men-from-the-east riding an Oliphaunt and uncritically allied with Sauron).

But he doesn’t acknowledge Discworld novels where Pratchett deconstructs British colonialism and racism (Rao devotes whole sections to “Gods and Monks” (not all the gods are male/masculine, of course, but that’s not acknowledged); the Elves (no mention of the Queen of the Elves, I notice!), and a section on Discworld is about how it evolves, and the technology (which isn’t wrong—it does—but is very limited).

Rao’s focus on technology reminds me of a quote from a review essay by Joanna Russ who wrote extensive criticism about science fiction (mostly published in in sf magazines but some in academc journals).

This quote comes from her essay, “The Image of Women in Science Fiction,” [published in 1970 in The Red Clay Reader; reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews.

In science fiction, speculaton about social institutions and individual psychology has always lagged far behind spculation about technology, possibly because technology is easier to understand than people (p. 207).

That might be something that people who are aiming at re-creating the effect of the 1940s Astounding might want to think about.

While it may make sense that Rao doesn’t bother to acknowledge any of the female characters in Tolkien, anyone familiar with all of the Discworld novels should see that Pratchett’s Discworld evolves more than Tolkien’s in regard to the scope and development of female characters.16 Here’s a fan wiki list of the Female characters in Discworld.

There are ninety entries.

Ninety.

Rao only considers one (or two if you count Tiffany!) of them important enough to mention in over 6000 words. I have to stop writing this stack now (it’s been worked on for days) but at some point, I am promising myself to write about all the female characters in Pratchett that I adore, just to get it out (I already did a bunch of posts in the “Web” series on Éowyn, and I might add some of Ioreth and Berúthiel (I was never that much a fan of the Elven characters; in fact, although I’m sure it’s blasphemy for some of the Elven fans, I really *liked* the Galadriel in The Hobbit best of all the “Galadriels”).

So, yeah, here we are, in very different worlds.

And the ultimate irony (and really my very first response to reading this polemic), is that Terry Pratchett was in fact a FAN of J. R. R. Tolkien’s work.

Pratchett wrote a fan letter to Tolkien which appears in the recent Pratchett biography (the original of which I read at the 2018 Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth exhibition at the Bodleian at Oxford).

John Rateliff, who wrote a brilliant essay on how Tolkien scholarship (misled to some extent by Carpenter’s biography), has ignored the importance of a number of women (family, friends, and students) of Tolkien’s,17 posted a transcription of Pratchett’s letter to Tolkien at Sacnoth’s Scriptorium

I don't know what there was in it that moved me to write this letter. It was something that 'The Lord of the Rings' never possessed except in very short measure, that feeling of recognition. You said something in 'Smith' which I hope I grasped, and there was a feeling almost of recognition. An odd feeling of grief overcame me when I read it. I cannot explain my feelings any clearer. It was like hearing a piece of misic from way back, except that it was nearer poetry by Graves's definition. Thank you very much for writing it.

Granted, Pratchett felt a strong identification with “Smith of Wootton Major,” not LotR, but later in life, he made a brilliant observation about the importance of Tolkien’s work to fantasy literature (presumably including his own!):18

J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.

So here we are at the end (not of all things! though it may feel like it) of this post! I wish I had some stunning conclusion—but, maybe not, given the whole web thing, I dan say this piece is one more strand of the web and links to some others in terms of different receptions of “Tolkien.”

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I would argue that Pratchett’s novels got a lot better later on; I also think that any implication that the “rules” of Discworld [what Rao calls “clues about how the world works, how it evolves in response to technological forces, and how humans should engage with those forces”] changed a good deal over the course of the developing series, as did some of the characters (Granny Weatherwax in Equal Rites changes over the Witches novels/series, I think, and there is the sense of that accumulated characterization that comes from a series that is impossible to achieve in a single novel).

I found the earliest Discworld ones (especially with Rincewind) rather tooth-grindingly irritating (except for the Luggage; I love the Luggage; I would happily give the Luggage a home although I might worry a bit about how it will get along with my cat at times). OTOH, Hild, my cat, while still fairly young faced down and smacked around two terrier-chihuahua mixes:

Audrey (white & apricot) and Daisy (tri-color), the two TERRORS of the universe. But not of Hild.

Hild, the Majestic:

There are so many amazing spider web photographs in the “stock” photo gallery — I think I may have to do different ones, and have two in each post!

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I had almost forgotten submitting a proposal to GIFcon 2025, “Queering the Fantastic”! It’s in early May, and online. I’ve just heard back from the organizers that my proposal has been accepted (YAY!!). This presentation is part of (surprise!) a larger project that has been percolating away since 2017 as I discuss in “The Morass of Feminist/Gender/Queer Approaches to “Tolkien” Part 1” (gotta get around to Part 2 sometime! *makes a note on actual paper*).

The upside of this is that I am not starting from scratch. The downside of this is that my most recent “draft in progress” is 9100 words long (about twice as long as the standard requirement for an academic print journal/anthology). And presentations are limited to 20 minutes (which in my experience means about eight pages NYT 12 CPI DS). So that will be a fun task!

Before then I have to finish my Aspec essay and my PCA essay!

An Incomplete Academic Fellowship: Excluding Queer Feminist Women from Tolkien Studies

The question of how academics recreate, reinterpret, and validate queer approaches to fantasy intersects with my oingoing project on the exclusion of queer women and non-binary people (whether characters, theorists, fans, academics), a question further complicated by the multiple definitions of Queerness (Doty).

Early perceptions of Tolkien as excluding female characters has been challenged, if not demolished, by Croft’s and Donovan’s 2015 Perilous and Fair, but it was not been followed by additional books on the topic until recently, with Cami Agan and Clare Moore’s “Great Heart and Strength” project (deadline March 15, hint hint hint!).

Queer scholarship on Tolkien primarily focuses on Tolkien’s and Jackson’s male characters (Vaccaro, Yandell; Battis, Chance, Cuntz-Leng, Kaufman). In the first bibliographic essay on Queer Tolkien scholarship, Yvette Kisor identifies only two categories of “queer”—‘homosexuality’ and ‘alterity’—avoiding other terms common in contemporary queer communities and theories. Jane Chance’s 2016 monograph, Tolkien, Self and Other: “This Queer Creature,” devotes eight of nine chapters to male characters while declaring her purpose is to defend Tolkien as a “humanist and a feminist.”

This presentation considers the current “morass of feminist/gender/queer” Tolkien scholarship and imagines what acknowledging queer women and non-binary people of all ethnicities as part of an academic Fellowship might look like. I draw from fan studies (Kroner, McCormack, Reid, Sturgiss, Viars and Coker) and medieval feminist queer scholars who identified the tendency to focus on "gay male history and queer male sexualities” and to sideline “women and femininity” fifteen years ago (Watt 452). In 2010, Diane Watt identified a model created by medieval feminist queer scholars who viewed “heterosexuality and homosexuality not merely as linguistic anachronisms but as categories intrinsically unable to serve the complex array of self-perceptions, legal definitions, and visual and literary representations of medieval sexualities” (17). I will start to map how queer women and non-binary people make "Tolkien" their own despite systemic marginalization in academia (Reid; Healy, Savonick and Davidson).

Too rushed to put together a specific Working Bibligraphy for this proposal, so have a link to the Never-Ending Feminist/Gender/Queer Tolkien scholarship!

And another Web picture!

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