Feminists & Tolkien
We really do exist! And we do not all think the same way about Tolkien! Despite the mansplaining. . . .
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 really get grumpy about the ones who publish this claim with very few, or no, examples of actual feminists (or women) saying it (see: Adam Roberts’s entry on “Women” in Stuart Lee’s 2020 A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien (or, in some cases, cherry-picking a small part of a longer and more complex argument and presenting it as “evidence” while ignoring the overall argument). This hoary old argument is still being made today, despite the growing scholarship by women and feminist scholars.1
The claim is over-generalized: do some feminists (or women) dislike Tolkien’s work? Sure. And some hate it even. Of course. Feminists are not, stereotypes aside, a hive mind (and neither are women).2 It is also true that some *men* dislike/hate Tolkien’s work (and have written about it as length; some of those actually complain about the absence of women, or more often than not, the absence of “sex” (as an activity!). Nobody I know ever looks at Harold Bloom or Edmund Wilson or {fill in the blank with other names} and says “geez, men all hate Tolkien.”3
Wilson’s diatribe is online for all who are interested to see; Harold Bloom’s has to be tracked down in the anthologies he edited for a “Modern Critical Interpretations” series which churned out a whole lotta books which as far as I can tell mostly reprinted previously published essays, with Harold Bloom writing only the introductions (so it wasn’t as if he was actually doing 95% of the work of creating original [meaning not printed before] work for anthologies, just skimming off the work of people who did that work for journals).
Harold Bloom, editor. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Interpretations, Chelsea House Publishers, 2000. Modern Critical Interpretations.4
Bloom’s introduction is fairly brief, summarizing Roger Sale’s essay which Bloom describes as av“shrewd defense of what he regards as Tolkien’s and the protagonist Frodo Baggins’s heroism.” But Bloom’s own take on Tolkien is that:
I am fond of The Hobbit, which is rarely pretentious, but The Lord of the Rings seems to me inflated, over-written, tendentious, and moralistic in the extreme. Is it not a giant Period Piece?
Sale nevertheless makes quite a strong case for the trilogy, and a vast readership implicitly agrees with him. . . .
But there is still the burden of Tolkien’s style: stiff, false-archaic, overwrought, and finally a real hindrance in Volume III, The Return of the King, which I have had trouble rereading. At sixty-nine, I may be just too old, but here is The Return of the King, opened pretty much at random:5
“At the doors of the Houses many were already gathered to see Aragon, and they followed after him; and when at least he had stopped, men came and prayed that he would heal their kinsmen of their friends whose lives were in peril through hurt or wound, or who lay under the Black Shadow. And Aragorn arose and went out and he sent for the sons of Elrond, and together they labored far ino the night. And word went through the city: ‘The King is come again indeed.’ And they named him Elfstone, because of the green stone that he wore, and so the name which it was foretold at his birth that he should bear was chosen for him by his own people. 6
I am not able to understand how a skilled and mature reader7 can absorb about 1500 pages of this quaint stuff. Why “hurt or wound”; are they not the same? What justifies the heavy King James Bible influence upon this style? Sometimes reading Tolkien, I am reminded of The Book of Mormon (italics added). Tolkien met a need, particularly in the early days of the Counter-culture, in the later 1960s. Whether he is an author for the coming century seems to me open to some debate (1-2).
“Whether he is an author for the coming century is probably not open to debate in 2024! Of course, a great deal has changed in the field of “literary studies/criticism” since Bloom was the Big Man on Campus (and I suspect, strongly, that he hated all of it).
As a result of my own experiences, I am always on the lookout for interesting feminist takes on Tolkien’s work (whether in the form of fanfiction OR scholarship). And I hit a huge jackpot a while ago, so here, highly recommended, is a fascinating and *original* argument by a feminist medievalist about Tolkien’s work!8
Go, read, and enjoy: “Lord of the Rings: A Feminist Manifesto for the Boys”:
Pull quote:
A vast and compelling argument:
Forcefully forged thousands of years prior.
An all consuming force, to the detriment of all.
A force which dictates behavior, divorcing you from who you want to be, molding you into who it needs you to be.
A looming threat, forcing action, driving decisions.
Men lay slain by the thousands—millions even—to posses its power.
Enforces violent hierarchal structures that benefit few and harm many.
Devastatingly alters the Earth’s climate in support of constant production in service to it.
Socially normalizes brutality, hate, and in-fighting as it was devised to oppress, especially from within.
Requires constant sacrifice.
Disregards the dangers of forced reproduction and diminishes the necessity of care.
Can only be overthrown through community/fraternal efforts.
Is it the one true ring, forged in the fires of Mordor, or is it the Patriarchy?
From:
And then let’s talk . . . .
One of the planned chapters in WEB will include looking at some of the earlier collections/anthologies as well as the reference works (Companions, Encycylopedias, etc.) published since that identify the growing “status” of Tolkien’s work in educational/academic contexts. I’ll be discussing not only the demographics of he contributors but the negative aspects they pointed out.
During my first ten years in a tenured position, my “research agenda” was feminist speculative fiction which included editing the first women in sff encyclopedia. At that point, I used to joke that all of us working on feminist sff could have a party in a large-walk-in closet and still have lots of room for dancing. The field has grown since then and much diversified (and I still dabble in it on occasion). When I ended up in Tolkien studies, some of my friends there were slightly bewildered (you LIKE that stuff? they would ask me, and I struggled to explain it). They would tell me they could never get into it, but my main point here is that they also never wrote scholarly essays on how bad and evil and sexist Tolkien was. One could not describe them as disliking or hating Tolkien; they’d never read his work, or read it once and never went back, or tried to read it and stopped. It simply wasn’t a thing (nobody can read all the books every written; we all make choices!).
Granted, both of them are dead, Jim, but then so is Tolkien!
To make things even more confusing, Bloom also edited a series on “Modern Critical Views” in which he published two different editions on Tolkien: you can see a list of the content in both editions here.
I am, in fact sixty-nine, as well, but of course I’ve been reading Tolkien’s work on and off (sometimes more immersively/intensely, sometimes less so, and with occasional gaps) for fifty-nine years! Plus, I don’t believe Blooms’s claim that the passage was randomly chosen, nor do I believe that a single passage, of 124 words can be the basis for any legitimate evaluation of a 1200-page novel’s style (although that is certainly the rhetorical strategy taken by most of the detractors of Tolkien’s style!). And it so happens that later scholars in literature and linguistics have, erm, challenged Bloom’s characterization of Tolkien’s style!
For example, Elizabeth Kirk’s brilliant and under-acknowledged essay on Tolkien’s style as reflecting medievalist rather than modernist aesthetics is one of the best examples I know of in this vein. You can read an interesting summary about Kirk’s essay on this blog, or you can register and get free access to JSTOR content (reading only, not downloading, but it’s better than nothing) to Kirk’s essay here.
I must point out that Harold Bloom was an English professor at Yale (holding a named chair) and considered one of, if not the, most important literary critic of his time—but he doesn’t bother to give a citation for this quote which is one of the basic rules of academic litcrit—that your reader should always be able to backtrack and read the source of the quote. I imagine he thought it was so “famous” he didn’t need to do it, but I’m still judging his work!
Meaning only unskilled, immature [juvenile???], and most of all uneducated readers who have not been trained as Harold Bloom was!
By original, I mean that as far as I know, there is no published scholarship making this argument, and I wrote the first feminist bibliography on Tolkien and women, and tend to keep up with this topic in Tolkien studies though it’s harder these days without easy access to the subscription databases - as always, if you know of publications, I could add to my “Feminist/Gender/Queer” Bibliography on Tolkien’s work, or on my “Web of Women” Bibliography on Tolkien’s work, please let me know!