Heritage Starts with HER:

Women Writers Writing Back to Tolkien’s Legendarium

Dec 08, 2024

spider web on green grass during daytime — Photo by Flash Dantz on Unsplash

This post has a working version of my essay (the seventh draft this time) that I read at the Tolkien and Heritage hybrid seminar (footnotes expand a bit on things I didn’t have time to say in 20 minutes!). The Society will be posting recordings of the talks on their YouTube Channel later on, as well as editing a volume of the proceedings. I’m posting it here because it’s tied up with (caught in? heh) my new feminist Web project which started with the paper I gave on how Christopher’s work on the posthumous publications expanded Middle-earth by including more female characters for the Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference which probably was inspired by the four Éowyn posts I had made in my Substack earlier this year.

I’m finding that using my Substack to post some of my drafts and brainstorming is working very well, so expect more of this as I develop the book.

*waves to some of the new subscribers who came over after the Tolkien Society conferences!*

In their excellent work in progress, “Heritage as Hyperobject,” Nick Polk and Leah Hagan introduce the concept of the hyperobject, a term “used to refer to things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (Timothy Morton) They point out Tolkien’s legendarium is such a hyperobject; I would agree with that, although noting that the published legendarium, voluminous as it is, is only part of a larger hyperobject, what I call the Tolkien phenomenon which includes not only all the translations and adaptations of Tolkien’s work but also the criticism, fan and scholarly. I plan to address a relatively small part of that hyperobject today, Tolkien’s influence on three Anglophone women fantasy writers.

One of the most significant aspects of an author’s heritage is their influence on the writers who follow them. There has been a tendency in scholarship and criticism to assume that white men are Tolkien’s “natural” heirs, with Ursula K. LeGuin occasionally mentioned as the “exceptional [AKA token] woman.” While the list of women fantasy writers influenced by Tolkien has expanded in recent years, Faye Ringel is the first and so far the only scholar I know of who analyzes how Tolkien’s work has influenced women writers (Clark and Timmons). In her 2000 essay, “Women Fantasists: In the Shadow of the Ring,” Ringel interviews four white Anglophone female fantasy authors [Patricia McKillip, Delia Sherman, Greer Ilene Gilman, and Rosemary Edghill] all of whom are roughly part of the same generation, born between 1948-1956, so part of the Baby Boom. This generation was the first generation of fantasy writers who grew up in the “shadow” of Tolkien’s legendarium and went on to create the genre of fantasy.

Ringel draws on Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence to make the feminist argument that while the writers acknowledge “their debt to Tolkien’s authentic Secondary World, the inevitability of his plot, the magic of his words, the languages and history of Middle-earth” they also “declare their uneasiness with what they see as certain of Tolkien’s premises” and so reject Tolkien’s "unquestioned acceptance of medieval ideals of kingship and class structure" (165-166) and his portrayal of women's roles. As a result, their writing choices work “against the Tolkienian grain” in ways that Ringel argues fits Bloom’s definition of “the swerve” which is actually an example of Ringel making her own swerve by applying his theory to women writing fantasy. Bloom himself was most concerned with developing a theory about how male poets create “poetic misreadings” of the influencing male poet (who mostly seems to be Shakespeare).1

Given the nearly 70 years since The Fellowship of the Ring was published I think it may be useful to consider writers from later generations. The writers I discuss today were born between 1972 and the mid-1980s (Gen X). I explore how Victoria Goddard’s The Bone Harp, Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, and N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy create a range of strong misreadings of the spiritual & racial hierarchies of Tolkien’s Elves and Orcs by swerving from or “writing back” to Tolkien’s legendarium. Dallas John Baker defines the concept of “writing back” as a progressive, even radical, literary strategy used by "feminist, postcolonial, and queer writers to reclaim, re-imagine and complicate normative or marginalizing narratives that are colonial or widely disseminated" (133). The larger project of which this presentation is a part will develop a more extended comparative argument about the similarities and differences between the three writers’ works, and their responses to Tolkien. Today I’m going to briefly outline what they have said about his work and identify some of the most significant world-building and characterization swerves they make.

Victoria Goddard has a doctorate in medieval studies and lists J. R. R. Tolkien as one of her favorite authors. The Bone Harp: A Tale of Elfland is a transformative and mythopoeic reworking of the Fëanorian story. An Elven father and his seven sons swear an oath to Eternal Night to retrieve the “flame imperishable” which came from the gods. The flame was stolen by the Old Enemy who also broke the Lamps that provide light to the world. The brothers’ Oath results in all but one of them, Tamsin, dying; he cannot die because of the interaction between the Oath and the death curses of the Great Dragon and the Old Enemy whom he killed.

Goddard’s Elflands is similar to Arda in its some of its cosmological and thematic elements: the Lamps, the later creation of the Sun and Moon, music as a powerful creative force, and the immortality of the Elves who may be killed (in war, especially) but who go to the Halls of Rest with the choice of later returning to life. The Elves who take the Oath leave their homeland to go over the Sea to retrieve the flame from the monstrous allies or creations of the Old Enemy: goblins, trolls, ghouls, dragons, and other monsters.

However, Goddard’s worldbuilding and characterization of the Elves swerves in major ways from Tolkien’s: female characters are more numerous throughout, and several major characters are female POV: Klara, a co-protagonist and POV character, is Tamsin’s lifelong best friend, fellow musician, friendly rival, and lover; Tamsin’s mother Alina still lives and joins with Klara to play a significant part in bringing Tamsin home. Two young elf maidens, River and Ash, befriend Tamsin when he wakes alone in the Elflands, centuries after the war ends, without knowing who he is, and travel with him to the Old City.

The history of the Elves, including the long war overseas to regain the flame and the changes in Elfland during that war, is told primarily through Tamsin and Klara’s memories narrated in a series of flashbacks. The first section of the novel, “West of the River,” opens with Tamsin waking up, healthy, and back in the Elflands, but amnesiac and traumatized by his experiences. The quest in the novel is Tamsin’s healing journey, with River and Ash, back to his home. The climax of the section is the two final chapters which describe the crossing of the bridge of the dead. All travelers in the Elflands who travel from the West to the East must confront all of their dead: Tamsin faces the thousands he killed in the war as well as all the other living beings—insects, animals, fish—that he has killed, including those for food, throughout his life. In these chapters the “deathless” Elf must face the realities of the deaths he caused; he is able to complete this journey in part because of his friends.

In the second section, “The Old City,” Klara, who, along with many Elves, did not take the Oath, remembers the events leading up to the original Oath to “cast down the Old Enemy and regain the fire, or be damned into the Eternal Night” as well as the millennia after the war was fought, and after it ended, with the flame imperishable returning to the Elflands. Tamsin did not realize the role Klara played at the time. In the third and final section, “Fair Elflands,” Tamsin and his companions complete their journey to the Old City, and he reunites with his seven brothers, who returned from the Hall of Rest, his mother, and Klara.

Katherine Addison2 criticizes genre fantasy’s reliance on quests and coming of age stories and on the limited roles for female characters. She points out Tolkien's "pastoral nostalgia, his ingrained racism, [and] his equally ingrained adherence to a utopian version of the class structure of pre-World War I England" ("Women in SFF Month"). She answers the question of how she got the idea for The Goblin Emperor in an interview:

Well it was when The Lord of the Rings movies were coming out and I was thinking about elves and the very tall very pale very beautiful people and thinking it seems very unfair to Goblins that they always have to be sort of dark and slimy and unpleasant. What if what if goblins too were a noble people? (Steampunk Journal)3

The Goblin Emperor does a strong misreading of the “missing heir” trope (where the son of a king is raised in isolation then suddenly comes to power). The storyline focuses on Maia who is the mixed-race son of the Elven Emperor and his fourth wife, a Goblin Princess. Yes, his name is the same as the singular form of the Maiar, Tolkien’s spirits who accompany the Valar to Arda. Maia is exiled from court as an infant, along with his mother, and raised in isolation after she dies. He becomes Emperor of the Elflands only 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 half-breed abused exile to emperor of the Elflands, facing the distrust of the Elven nobility at court because of their racism against Goblins, and his struggle to learn enough to be able to rule justly.

Addison creates two Empires, one ruled by Elves, one ruled by Goblins, which share a border. These competing empires are modelled on later historical periods than Tolkien's early medieval world; in the cities, they are moving into the early stages of industrialism (airships, factories); there is growing trade between the empires, leading to the development of a middle class who exist in the cities and outside the noble’s estates where the “nobility/serf” class structure still exists; there are different systems of imperial governance, complicated by a third nomadic culture in the north that has been locked in a multi-generational guerilla resistance to Elvish imperialism; and polytheism is institutionalized in a network of different churches and priesthoods, some of whom have spiritual powers, powers I hesitate to call "magic" since that term is never used in the novel. Religion in Addison’s novel is foundational in the sense of the institutional elements of religion serving multiple gods, practicing multiple rituals and prayers, and with competing priesthoods who have a history of involvement in the political maneuverings of Empires.

Racial hierarchies and prejudices exist, but while the Elves look down on the Goblins, the Goblins, with their own empire, equally look down on the Elves. While the centers of power in both empires are Elven or Goblin dominated, by the present of the novel, there has been a long history of interactions along the borders and in newly-built settlements and towns that include trade and inter-marriage between Elves and Goblins and thus to the growing number of mixed-race characters at all social levels, now, including the Emperor. The effects of these movements and mingling of populations are, if judged by current historical scholarship on the history of people of color in medieval and pre-modern Europe, probably more {air quotes} "accurate" historically than Tolkien's world with its isolated strongholds and xenophobic peoples (see th work of Lynn T. Ramey, and Geraldine Heng). Maia becoming Emperor undercuts some of the nobility’s Elven isolationism and classism, and he begins to establish a foundation for systemic changes that will improve the lives of those who are not part of the hereditary nobility as well as the relationship between the two empires.

N. K. Jemisin knows Tolkien's work well; she describes her life-long love for science fiction and fantasy that her father shared with her. But when she began writing fantasy, she began to question the whiteness of epic fantasy, wondering if “paying so much attention to the power fantasies of disenchanted white men” was a betrayal of her own realities as an African American woman (“Dreaming Awake”). In Tolkien’s work, she saw “a man trying desperately to dream,” which Jemisin values, but, as she notes: dreaming requires myths, and if people “don’t have enough myths of our own, we’ll latch onto those of others—even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves.”

Tolkien's description of his Cauldron of Story is of one full of tales of Northwestern Europe that were important to him, tales that primarily focus on heroes, princes, gods and kings. Jemisin shares Tolkien’s love for mythologies and histories but she had to seek out the stories of her family, her ancestors, and world epics outside those of England and Europe in order to create the Broken Earth trilogy. Her quest led her to discovering:

plenty of epics . . . which feature people like me. Sundiata’s badass mother. Dihya, warrior queen of the Amazighs (sic). The Rain Queens. The Mino Warriors. Hatshepsut’s reign. Everything Harriet Tubman ever did. And more, so much more, just within the African components of my heritage (“Dreaming Awake”)

In her Broken Earth trilogy, which won three Hugos, one for each novel [NOTE: Link leads to a review with some spoilers!], Jemisin writes back to Tolkien’s legendarium, the genre of epic fantasy his work inspired, and the faux universality of what is in fact only one of many global mythologies. One element Jemisin subverts is Tolkien's Elves. Her long-lived mythological beings are the Stone Eaters who are made of living rock rather than flesh, long-lived but not indestructible; they move through stone (by “phasing or fusing with it”) and their origins are a mystery that is solved only near the end of the trilogy. They are aware that the planet, known by all as “Father Earth,” a major twist in itself, is sentient, and trying to destroy all surface life in revenge for actions taken millennia ago. Although the human characters have stories of "Father Earth" and his destructiveness, none of them know the history behind the stories or that the war between Father Earth and the people living on his surface has lasted over forty thousand years.

Jemisin’s series breaks the binary of the racist hierarchy of superior White people who enslave the inferior black and brown people. In this world, the orogenes are those who are enslaved but not because of their skin color or because their land was invaded by colonizers (although the Sanzed Empire was a colonizing power) but because the orogenes have the genetic ability to manipulate rock. Their name derives from our geological term, “orogeny,” which means “a process in which a section of the earth's crust is folded and deformed by lateral compression to form a mountain range” (Britannica).4The Sanzed empire initiated a millennia long system of slavery in order to use the orogenes to control, to some extent, the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that Father Earth creates on a regular basis, allowing their empire to last longer than earlier ones.

The novel opens with one of the orogenes breaking the tectonic plate in which the world’s supercontinent is embedded which will lead, over time, to a complete destruction of the planet. The novel’s plot centers around two journeys, the first, that of a mother, Essun, an orogene who escaped slavery, to save her daughter who has been taken from her. The second journey is Nassun’s, the daughter, who was taken by her father after he killed her young brother who manifested his orogeny. Nassun has learned to hide her power from her father, and eventually has to save a Guardian who saved her from her father and then helped educate her in how to use her orogeny more powerfully. When Essun and Nassun come together at the end, they are able to resolve their conflicts and work together to save the world as well as end the millennia-long system of slavery.

Jemisin asserts the rights of everyone to dream, and to create futures from those dreams as well as to create new mythologies. "We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what’s been taken from us or what poison we’ve internalized or how hard we’ve had to work to expel it--we all get to dream." Goddard, Addison, and Jemisin, and many others, are part the hyperobject of Tolkien’s heritage, although I suspect that how they have responded to his work is beyond anything that he could imagine. They are the mythopoeic writers who will help more of us dream. Thank you!

Works Cited

Addison, Katherine. Goblin Emperor. Tor Books, 2014.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Yale UP, 1997.

Baker, Dallas John, "Writing Back to Tolkien: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in High Fantasy." Recovering History Through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives, edited by Dallas John Baker, Donna Lee Brien, and Nike Sulway, Cambridge Scholars' Publishing, 2017, pp. 123-43.

Goddard, Victoria. The Bone Harp. Victoria Goddard, 2024.

Jemisin, N. K. The Fifth Season. Orbit, 2015.

---. The Obelisk Gate. Orbit, 2016.

---. The Stone Sky. Orbit, 2017.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. U of Minnesota P. 2013.

Polk, Nick, and Leah Hagan. “Heritage as Hyperobject.” 2024. Working Paper.

Ringel, Faye. “Women Fantasists: In the Shadow of the Ring.” J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth, edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy, no. 89, Greenwood Press, 2000, pp. 159-171.

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