How do you define "feminism"? #1

The devil is in the definitions: they are legion! (and so are these posts)

Photo by Félix Besombes on Unsplash

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.

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.

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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!

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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!

1. It started as one post; then it got too long for emails. I cut/pasted about half of it to a second post, but that was too long for emails. So I cut and pasted that to a third post — I suspect all three are still too long for some emails, but that tends to be my default.

2. Christopher Lockett’s latest post, Discworld Reread #2: Equal Rites is well worth reading because first, it’s about Terry Pratchett’s work, and second, it’s about how the first of the “Witches” novels starts to explore questions of gender and equality in the Discworld. Christopher’s points are excellent (and, as I told him, I agree with 93.7% of what he says). There’s also a good discussion in the comments including observations about Rowling and Le Guin’s fantasy in the context of genre and gender. I was happily posting away over there about Pratchett’s novel when one of Christopher’s observations in the discussion started my brain bouncing around in respect to my Web project:

Of the post-Tolkien fantasists from 60s-80s, Le Guin is one of the few who is doing something almost entirely at odds with the genre's currents. And no, she doesn't make gender an issue, but the consonance you see with Sir Terry is, I think, indicative of how they were on a similar wavelength.

My response was: “oops, you've done it now: "And no, she doesn't make gender an issue," means I have to now take this over to my Substack and make a post which I predict will be too long for some emails spinning off about this point . . . .”

I would argue that gender is always an issue in any text (whether or not there are any women, femmes, or nonbinary people present in a text), but a lot of people don’t (or can’t) acknowledge it unless there are female characters (or, out in the Primary World, actual women in the room). My claim is based on my own experience and the resulting ideology, so it’s more accurate to say that gender is always an issue for me!

Reading and thinking about Christopher’s comment made some of the bits and pieces on stereotypes about women reading Tolkien that I’ve been assembling for the Web during the past few months suddenly fall into place. Christopher’s other observation, that Le Guin was one of the few fantasy writers during that time “doing something almost entirely at odds with the genre’s currents,” also stuck in my brain, again, because of my experience differs (mostly because I am turning 70 this year! I was there, Gandalf!!!!!).

I agree that Le Guin was definitely doing work at “odds with the genre’s currents,” and continued to do so to an even greater extent in the years following the publication of her Earthsea trilogy. I am not downplaying the importance of her fiction (which includes fantasy AND science fiction AND children’s literature which, she used to observe, few academics paid any attention to!) or of her nonfiction reviews and essays. I’ve read a bunch of her work, but she is not my favorite feminist sff writer (Joanna Russ is).

Le Guin is important for another reason: she was (as I observed back in the early 1990s when I was in a doctoral program and plotting how to get sff into my dissertation since none of my committee knew anything about it [all I needed was Foucault]) one of two sff writers, along with Ray Bradbury, who had the most peer-reviewed scholarship published on her fiction (I haz theories about why, but that probably should be for another post!).

Based on my personal experience living through the 1960s-80s and searching for women writers in all genres, especially after becoming a feminist in the early 1980s, I found and enjoyed quite a few women writers whose work I considered (and still consider) to be at odds with the male authors’ genre currents of the time. Some of these writers’ work is currently out of print (although some work is being reissued, or the authors, after gaining control of their copyright from defunct publishers, are reissuing their work independently).

Here’s a list off the top of my head of some of the women science fiction and fantasy (SFF) writers who I read during the 1960s-1970s-1980s and loved (there are others whose work I did not read/did not love when I tried). A number of these women wrote fantasy and science fiction (and horror and other related fantastic sub-genres) where they countered the sexist stereotypes and marginalization of female characters in those genres as well (not to mention starting to win Hugo awards in the 1970s which led to a nasty backlash at the time, decades before the Sad and Rapid Puppies descended on fandom).

My sense is that the genre/publishing/critical boundaries between “fantasy” and “science fiction” were not as clearly policed in the 1960s-1980s as some would have them now, for writers and readers, or at least, I didn’t make strong distinctions (especially since some of the sff involved “psychic” powers which some scientists were trying to prove existed; but again it all depends on how you define ‘science fiction’ i.e. does it require more than cool spaceships and lasers swords or not? There’s a reason why “space opera” was coined, and also why some of us in that generation consider “sci-fi” a derogatory term.)

Anyway: my list of current-countering women writers:

Andre Norton (wrote fantasy as well as sf)

Tanith Lee (dark, horror, heckuva lot of non-con eroticism though little graphic sex compared to, ahem, some of the later writers in related genres). But dang, could she convey a whole LOT (much of it queer as well).

Joanna Russ (Alyx novels were her fantasy publications, but I will always recommend her sf as well as her criticism and feminist scholarship. Reading her short story “When It Changed” when I was a teenager changed my life; reading How to Suppress Women’s Writing which was published the year I stomped out of a Master’s in Theatre program because of the sexism set me on a five-year journey to read nothing BUT women writers which I did for five years and then just sort of kept doing although there are a few male writers (and some nonbinary writers) in my reading list nowadays. And as this very book I’m working on shows, Russ’s work is still fucking relevant.

Vonda McIntyre (also wrote fantasy and science fiction and one alternate history novel)

Suzette Haden Elgin (also wrote science fiction, and is probably the ONLY writer in the genre to use Chomsky’s transformational grammar as the basic for her magic system—see the Ozark Trilogy), not to mention her feminist dystopia Native Tongue (published in 1984!) is so. much. better (in my not so humble opinion) than Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale but received none of the critical recognition.

Elizabeth Lynn (one of earliest to write fantasy with gay and lesbian characters)

Barbara Hambly (her background in martial arts and history led to some of the most amazing female characters in fantasy EVER!)

Again, not a comprehensive list — but some of the ones most important to me whose battered paperbacks I still treasure (

And for a real mind-fuck, James Tiptree, Jr. who wrote mostly feminist dystopias/sf, not fantasy, but if you haven’t read Tiptree/Sheldon, why not???? I admit their work is hard to read (it’s hard to know what pronoun to use for Tiptree), as are many of Suzy McKee Charnas’s because neither is particularly optimistic about the possibility of change.)

3. The good/bad binary applied to women is defined as sexism by Kate Manne in her excellent book, Down Girl, in which she theorizes the difference between misogyny and sexism:

Sexist ideology will also encompass valorizing portrayals of patriarchal social arrangements as more desirable and less fraught, disappointing, or frustrating than they may be in reality. Whereas, as I’ve defined misogyny, it functions to police and enforce a patriarchal social order without necessarily going via the intermediary of people’s assumptions, beliefs, theories, values, and so on. Misogyny serves to enact or bring about patriarchal social relations in ways that may be direct, and more or less coercive. On this picture, sexist ideology will tend to discriminate between men and women, typically by alleging sex differences beyond what is known or could be known, and sometimes counter to our best current scientific evidence. Misogyny will typically differentiate between good women and bad ones, and punishes the latter. Overall, sexism and misogyny share a common purpose-- to maintain or restore a patriarchal social order. But sexism purports to merely be being reasonable; misogyny gets nasty and tries to force the issue. Sexism is hence to bad science as misogyny is to moralism. Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts. (79).

4. For an authoritative rebuttal to the claim that Tolkien’s work can be reduced to this simplistic “worldview,” please see Verlyn Flieger’s “The Arch and the Keystone” (or, although it’s harder to get ahold of if you don’t have access to JSTOR, “But What Did He Really Mean?”

5. Roberts mostly ignores The Silmarillion until near the end when he suddenly drags Nienna (misspelled “Nenna”) as the “female, Nenna, who ‘dwells alone’” and who was the one who “originally redeemed” Melkor’s masculine marring (484), and who is apparently totally Catholic.

6. The “we cannot blame Tolkien because he is a Man. Of. His. Time” appears alongside the stereotype of feminist shrews on a regular basis. Had Roberts done any actual research on relevant scholarship, he might have run into an essay that refutes that lazy presentism which I discuss in another Substack post in response to another man who has the same anti-feminist view as Roberts.

Hatcher, Melissa McCrory. “Finding Woman’s Role in The Lord of the Rings,” Mythlore, vol. 25, no. 3, article 5, 2007, pp. 43-54.

In The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien gives the 20th century a fantasy epic of medieval proportions. It is a story of the littlest person, a hobbit, overcoming the tides of war. In his trilogy, Tolkien fashions a narrative that forcefully asserts the idea that wars should only be fought to protect and preserve, not to conquer and destroy. While a number of critics have accused Tolkien of subsuming his female characters in a sea of powerful men, one heroine, Éowyn, the White Lady of Rohan, is given a full character arc in the novel. After being rejected by Lord Aragorn, Éowyn searches for meaning in life, choosing to follow her brother, Éomer, to fight in the War of the Ring. The White Lady of Rohan chooses as her fate to die in battle with glory and honor. However, after being wounded by a Ringwraith and restored in the courts of healing, she decides to give up life as a warrior and become a healer. Modern scholars have seen this as a choice to accept conventional female submissiveness. However, in choosing the path of protecting and preserving the earth, Éowyn acts in accordance with Tolkien’s highest ideal: a fierce commitment to peace. Rather than submission, Éowyn embodies the full-blooded subjectivity that Tolkien posits as essential for peace. While other characters—most notably Sam —also embody this ideal, it is Éowyn who most successfully fulfills the role. In making this argument, I hope to show how modern criticism has misread the role of women in Tolkien’s epic, and has thus overlooked much of the importance of his vast and compelling work.

Many modern scholars discount this fantasy epic not only because of its genre, but for its mass‐market appeal and its seeming lack of depth. Feminist critics, however, have been even harsher in their dealings with Tolkien. While a professor at Oxford, J.R.R. Tolkien formed a male literary club. The Inklings, including C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, were the first audience to hear The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. This male‐dominated institution inspired Candice Fredrick and Sam McBride in Women Among the Inklings to pose the idea that “Middle‐earth is very Inkling‐like, in that while women exist in the world, they need not be given significant attention and can, if one is lucky, simply be avoided altogether” (108). Tolkien’s world of men seems, to most, very chivalric in its philosophy of leaving women behind, and some female readers feel abandoned by Tolkien’s lack of women characters. There are only three significant ones: Galadriel, Arwen, and Éowyn. Hobbit women are mentioned, but only as housewives or shrews, like Rosie Cotton or Lobelia Sackville‐Baggins.¹⁴ Tom Bombadil’s wife Goldberry is a mystical washer‐woman. Dwarf women are androgynous, while the Ents have lost their wives. When discussing male and female characters, it is important to note that only the real humans achieve emotional fullness, and the mythic individuals attain only romanticized futures.

Those rare readers and scholars who dissent from the majority of critics often cite presentism as their chief defense, arguing that we, as readers in the 21st century, should not judge Tolkien by our modern feminist standards. Claiming that Tolkien lived in a different time where women were more subservient, these scholars justify this idea by insisting that “[s]exism was the norm and not subject to evaluation and attention” (Fredrick and McBride xiv). This idea of presentism, however, fails both to adequately explain Tolkien’s own sexism and to take seriously the powerful female characters in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s contemporaries were Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group and Gertrude Stein and her Paris writers group. Tolkien himself worked with several strong female scholars at Oxford such as “medieval historian Margerie Reeves and Mrs. Sutherland, a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall specializing in Provençal studies”(Fredrick and McBride 4). Moreover, when Tolkien was writing his masterpiece, from 1937 to 1948, women were even controlling the home front in England—taking over “male” jobs during World War II. He and the Inklings were aware of the women’s movement and lived at a time when it was impossible to ignore. Therefore, it is certainly not adequate to make the argument of presentism to defend a man living only fifty years ago (43-44).

Tolkien himself, in reality, probably was the stodgy sexist Oxford professor that feminist scholars paint him out to be. In a letter to his son Michael he says, “How quickly an intelligent woman can be taught, grasp [her professor’s] ideas, see his point—and how (with rare exceptions) they can go no further, when they leave his hand, or when they cease to take a personal interest in him” (Letters 49). Despite Tolkien’s beliefs in the modern woman’s intelligence and value, The Lord of the Rings and its characters should be judged on their own internal merit, without considering the biography of its author. This is not an attempt to defend any anti‐feminist ideas in Tolkien’s own life, but in his work, where in the character of Éowyn we are given a complete individual who fulfills Tolkien’s theme of peace, preservation, and cultural memory.

7. Note for self: I need to make a list of the slanted verbs used in these mansplaining critiques. The word “charges” comes up a lot (as it does in work on race and racisms and Tolkien as well) as if there’s a Sekrit Feminist Court that the poor man is being dragged in front of for sentencing! In this case, I gotta admire how Roberts both sort of compliments Friedan’s book *and* manages to continue the longstanding macho masculinist tradition of accusing feminists of violence through figures of speech; in this case, The Feminist did not just use a regular knife to stab the patriarchy right in its tender bits but a “poignard” which Wikipedia defines as “a long, lightweight thrusting knife with a tapering blade and a cross-guard, used in medieval and Renaissance Europe” (so a Great Big Phallic Symbol Knife but well appropriate to the medieval setting in Tolkien if not to the 20h century USA that Friedan was writing about).

Having read Friedan’s book myself back in my beginning feminist period (early 1980s, when I was in my late twenties), and then later (late 1980s/early 1990s in a doctoral program) reading the feminist critique of her solution to the FM problem (middle-class white women should hire other women which tended to be women of color to do all the terrible soul-destroying housework and childcare, an argument which was not truly radical in any sense of the word).

8. The two essays were completely oppositional in nature:

Craig, David M. "'Queer Lodgings': Gender and Sexuality in The Lord of the Rings." Mallorn, vol. 38, Jan. 2001, pp. 11–18. Link. Rpt. “Queer Lodgings: Gender and Sexuality in The Lord of the Rings - Reprinted with a New Introduction by the Author.” Mallorn, no. 61, 2020, pp. 20–29. Link.

Timmons, Daniel. "Hobbit Sex and Sensuality in The Lord of the Rings," Mythlore, vol. 23, no. 3, article 7, 2001, Link.

9. Lee’s second edition contains two fantastic additions: the first, Chapter 36, on “Difference and Otherness” by Christopher Vaccaro has sections on “The Abject,” “Concerning Race,” “Women and the Feminine as Evil,” “Gender Studies and the Queer,” “Peter Jacksons Films,” and “Tolkien Studies Today” and fills in all the gaps in Roberts’s attempt to corral Tolkien for a single allegorized “Catholic” reading. The second, Chapter 41, on Fandom by Cait Coker covers “Tolkien’s Early Fandom: 1950s-1960s,” “The Emergence of Transformative Fandom: 1970s-1990s,” “Film Fandom and Mega-Franchises: 2000s-2010s,” and "Looking Forward: 2020s and Beyond” which is a superb overview of fan receptions of Tolkien’s work (and the larger reception on the cultural level in terms of adaptations, and their effect on fandom). So, if you have to get a copy of Lee’s collection, I’d suggest going for the second edition.

10. Moseley published in 1997; he didn’t have access to Hatcher’s 2007 refutation of the “man of his time” stance which Roberts does (and ignores). Also, since Substack does not allow for double-block-quoting, I’m italicizing the quotes from Moseley inside the Roberts’s excerpts.

11. Note to self: count up how many times this obvious fact is stated!

12. I may have thought, upon occasion, when reading male authors complaining about the lack of sex, er, female characters, that the sex was a greater concern to them than lack of female characters. And I think complaints by a lot of the modernist male critics in the 1950s have to do with literary-cultural shifts (i.e. more writers writing more about actual sex in the post-WWII period: Fellowship was published in 1954; Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel prize for literature that year, and in 1955 Lolita was published, for a bit of context.)

13. I remember Tolkien claiming in a letter I will have to track down that Gandalf calling Gollum’s grandmother a “matriarch” didn’t mean the culture was matriarchal (heaven forfend!), but something something, older women after death of male/patriarch, something something!

14. Moseley gets points for talking about The Silmarillion and NOT just The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings which Roberts nearly fails to do (Waitaminnit! this may be another indication of the kind of publication that falls back on “few female characters. . . . feminists hate Tolkien”). OTOH, as Dawn Felagund has so aptly shown in The Inequality Prototype: Gender, Inequality, and the Valar in Tolkien’s Silmarillion, only 18% of the named characters are women. OTOOH, there’s some interesting scholarship on how, when women make up 20% - 30% of a group, they are perceived as being the majority/taking over (by women as well as men; will have to dig out the sources I have for this a bit later).

15. I have to admit I’m baffled here: a gerund is a form of a verb that functions as a noun (marked by -ing; such as “running is fun,” vs. “she was running to school.” Passivity is a noun; passive is either an adj. or a noun; they have a different etymology than “passion.” But I’d have to do some more research to evaluate whether “passion is the gerund of passivity” [or of passive] is accurate). Three pages after Roberts makes the claim about passion as a gerund, and right after the claim about the The Lord of the Rings as “immanently Christian,” there’s a paragraph that focuses on “passion” which claims it is “linked etymologically to concepts of passivity” though Roberts says that may not reflect contemporary connotations of “passion as a positive force” (482). After discussing a number of observations about various meanings of passion, Roberts claims that the “passive suffering of the Christ. . . .[is done] of his own free will,” which means Christ models how “we must actively surrender our individual will and desires in other to gain what we desire, and get our will. It is precisely the paradox of salvation” (482).

Seems to me this is a pretty allegorical reading that has little to do with any of the definitions of feminism I’m aware of—and definitely more than a little special pleading.

Then in the next paragraph, Roberts leaps into Hegel to offer “[a]nother way of framing the thesis here.” See note 19 below!

16. While avoiding others, presumably, where Tolkien, as Verlyn Flieger has documented in “But What Did He Really Mean?” contradicts himself when writing to different corrrespondents.

17. Methinks that Tolkien is not the only one with a “higher regard for [Elvish} women than for men, because he saw them as existing on a higher, purer, more spiritual and beautiful plane,” not to mention giving up All that Power so passionately.

18. Two of the six feminist not-Tolkien scholars are cited only in footnotes. Sunderland in note 4, where her book about language and gender in children’s fiction is cited to describe the “long anti-feminist tradition” that exists in children’s literature: her point is that “even ‘feisty’ female characters loved by generations of readers are written in order to embodying a limiting ideological conception of what ‘woman ought and could be,” describing several well-known characters who “overcome their desires for adventures and feelings of rebellion. . .and transform them into acceptable feminine qualities of inner strength and imagination” (485). I assume Roberts wants to make a parallel to some readings of Éowyn’s narrative arc. Halsema is quoted in note 5 where Roberts is gracious enough to acknowledge briefly that “Christian feminism is not the only discourse to explore the range of feminist valences of ‘passivity,” quoting Halsema on Luce Irigaray — no explanation of what relevance, if any, Irigaray’s work, or Halsema’s, has to Roberts’s analysis—but since it’s the only place that Roberts acknowledges that not all feminists are a hivemind, I’ll take it. I agree with Sunderland’s point, but I never could make much sense of Irigaray.

19. Reader, I did *not* see Ch. 30!

20. The next source Roberts bring in is Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic,” a philosophical framing that has often been used to interrogate and hierarchy of traditional gender roles” (482). Not having 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 next leapfrogs into talking about 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. 28)” (483), and I’m, well, ok, but . . .this is used as a transition to talk about a whole slew of male characters’ relationships with each other: sauron, Frodo, Gollum, San, Gandalf, Wormtongue, Aragorn, Boromir, Denethor, and then the Ring (gets a whole paragraph about its Hegelian representation), but this is supposed to serve the purpose of “the question of gender representation in Tolkien’s writing” and doing this more “radical reading (politically of ideologically speaking) than has often been the case with critics, fied as they often have been on Tolkien’s personal traditionalist, Catholic and conservative affiliations,” means that, tah-dah, “[r]ead this way, Tolkien’s female charactere no longer seem marginal, becoming rather crucial deramatizations of what way passivity and passion interrelate.”

21. Roberts cites Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as the source and puts several phrases in quotation marks but does not supply a page number, nor is Hegel’s work listed in the References at the end. In the next paragraph, Roberts quotes Terry Pinkard’s argument in his book (Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason) about the need to contextualize the “master-slave” relationship “as a social relationship” (483) “in which each party (let’s say man and woman)” discovers ‘that [s/]he cannot identify what is [her/]his own without reference to the other’s point of view—without, that is, reference to the sociality common to both . (Pinkard 1994, 62)” ((483).

22. Chapter 28, “Evil,” By Christopher Garbowski, never mentions the issue of female characters in Tolkien’s fiction though he does cite a number of women scholars writing on the issues of good vs. evil, philosophy, and religion which are directly relevant to the topic.

23. 1970-1979

Myers, Doris T. “Brave New World: The Status of Women According to Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams.” Cimarron Review, vol. 17, 1971, pp. 13–19.

1980-1989

Jenkins, Sue. “Love, Loss, and Seeking: Maternal Deprivation and the Quest.” Children's Literature in Education, vol. 15, no. 2, June 1984, pp. 73–83, doi.org/10.1007/BF01151772.

Partridge, Brenda. “No Sex Please-We're Hobbits: The Construction of Female Sexuality in The Lord of the Rings.” J. R. R. Tolkien: This Far Land, edited by Robert Giddings, Vision; Barnes & Noble, 1983, pp. 179–97.

Rawls, Melanie. “The Feminine Principle in Tolkien.” Mythlore, vol. 10, no. 4, article 2, 1984, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol10/iss4/2. Rpt. Perilous and Fair, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie Donovan, 2015, pp. 99–117.

1990-1999

Crowe, Edith L. “Power in Arda: Sources, Uses and Misuses,” Mythlore, vol. 21, no. 2 article 40, 1996, pp. 272-77, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol21/iss2/40. Rpt. Perilous and Fair, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie Donovan, 2015, pp. 136-49.

Doughan, David. “Tolkien, Sayers, Sex and Gender.” Mythlore, vol. 21, no. 2, article 53, 1996, pp. 357-59/ dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol21/iss2/53.

Fenwick, Mac. “Breastplates of Silk: Homeric Women in The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore, vol. 21, no. 3, article 4,1996, pp. 17-232; 51, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol21/iss3/4.

Green, William H. “'Where's Mama?' The Construction of the Feminine in The Hobbit.” The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 22, no. 2, 1998, pp. 188–95, doi.org/10.1353/uni.1998.0024.

Honegger, Thomas. “Éowyn, Aragorn and the Hidden Dangers of Drink.” Inklings: Jahrbuch Für Literatur Und Ästhetik, vol. 17, 1999, pp. 217–25.

Hopkins, Lisa. “Female Authority Figures in the Works of Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams.” Mythlore, vol. 21, no. 2, article 55, 1996, pp. 264-66, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol21/iss2/55.

2000-2009

Benvenuto, Maria Raffaella. “Against Stereotype: Éowyn and Lúthien as 20th-Century Women.” Tolkien and Modernity 1, edited by Frank Weinreich and Thomas Honegger, Walking Tree, 2006, pp. 31–54.

Chance, Jane. “Tolkien and the Other: Race and Gender in the Middle Earth.” Tolkien's Modern Middle Ages, edited by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 171–86. The New Middle Ages.

---. “Tolkien's Women (and Men): The Films and the Book.” Mallorn, iss. 43, July 2005, pp. 30–37.

---. “Tolkien's Women (and Men): The Films and the Book.” Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, edited by Janet Brennan Croft, Mythopoeic P, 2004, pp. 175–94.

Craig, David M. “'Queer Lodgings': Gender and Sexuality in The Lord of the Rings.” Mallorn, vol. 38, Jan. 2001, pp. 11–18, journals.tolkiensociety.org/mallorn/article/view/145/139. Rpt. “Queer Lodgings: Gender and Sexuality in The Lord of the Rings - Reprinted with a New Introduction by the Author.” Mallorn, vol. 61, 2020, pp. 20–29.

Dickerson, Matthew. “Finwë and Míriel.” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D. C. Drout, Routledge, 2007, pp. 212-3.

Donovan, Leslie A. “The Valkyrie Reflex in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: Galadriel, Shelob, Éowyn, and Arwen.” Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance, Routledge, 2003, pp. 106–32. Rpt. Perilous and Fair, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie Donovan, 2015, pp. 221–57.

Doughan, David. “Women, Oxford and Tolkien.” Mallorn, iss. 45, 2008, pp. 16–20.

Enright, Nancy. “Tolkien's Females and the Defining of Power.” Renascence, vol. 59, no. 2, winter 2007, pp. 93–108. Rpt. Perilous and Fair, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie Donovan, 2015, pp. 118-35.

Fisher, Jason. “Galadriel.” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D. C. Drout, Routledge, 2007, pp. 227-8.

---. “Goldberry.” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D. C. Drout, Routledge, 2007, pp. 244-6.

---. “Melian.” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D. C. Drout, Routledge, 2007, pp. 412-3.

Fredrick, Candice, and Sam McBride. “Battling the Woman Warrior: Females and Combat in Tolkien and Lewis.” Mythlore, vol. 25, no. 3, article 4, 2007, p. 29-42, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol25/iss3/4.

Hatcher, Melissa McCrory. “Finding Woman's Role in The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore, vol. 25, no. 3, article 5, 2007, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol25/iss3/5.

Hesser, Katherine. “Éowyn.” J.R.R Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D. C. Drout, Routledge, 2007, pp. 168-69.

Houghton, John Wm. “Ungoliant.” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D. C. Drout, Routledge, 2007, pp. 687.

James, Caryn. “Are Women Just Bored Of the 'Rings'?” New York Times, vol. 153, no. 52704, 21 Dec. 2003, p. 31.

Kisor, Yvette L. “'Elves (and Hobbits) Always Refer to the Sun as She': Some Notes on a Note in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien Studies, vol. 4, 2007, pp. 212–22, doi.org/10.1353/tks.2007.0023.

Klinger, Barbara. “What Do Female Fans Want? Blockbusters, The Return of the King, and U.S. Audiences.” Watching The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien's World Audiences, edited by Martin Barker and Ernest Mathijs, Peter Lang, 2008, pp. 69–82.

Lakowski, Romuald I. “'Perilously Fair': Titania, Galadriel, and the Fairy Queen of Medieval Romance.” Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language, edited by Janet Brennan Croft, McFarland, 2007, pp. 60-78.

Leibeger, Carol A. “Women in Tolkien's Work.” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D. C. Drout, Routledge, 2007, pp. 710-12.

Libran Moreno, Miryam. “Greek and Latin Amatory Motifs in Éowyn's Portrayal.” Tolkien Studies, vol. 4, 2007, pp. 73–97, doi.org/10.1353/tks.2007.0025.

McKenna, Elise. “To Sex Up The Lord of the Rings: Jackson's Feminine Approach in His 'Sub-Creation.'“ How We Became Middle-Earth: A Collection of Essays on The Lord of the Rings, edited by Adam Lam and Nataliya Oryshchuk, Walking Tree, 2007, pp. 229–37.

Michel, Laura. “Politically Incorrect: Tolkien, Women, and Feminism.” Tolkien and Modernity 1, edited by Frank Weinreich and Thomas Honegger, Walking Tree, 2006, pp. 55–76.

Neville, Jennifer. “Women.” Reading The Lord of the Rings: New Writings on Tolkien's Trilogy, edited by Robert Eaglestone, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006, pp. 101–10.

Pretorius, David. “Binary Issues and Feminist Issues in LOTR.” Mallorn, iss. 40, Nov. 2002, pp. 32–38.

Reid, Robin Anne. “Thrusts in the Dark: Slashers' Queer Practices.” Extrapolation, vol. 50, no. 3, Jan. 2009, pp. 463–83, doi.org/10.3828/extr.2009.50.3.6.

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, Greenwood (Praeger), 2000, pp. 159–71.

Ripley, Aline. “Feminist Readings of Tolkien.” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D. C. Drout, Routledge, 2007, pp. 202-3.

Seaman, Gerald. “Lúthien.” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D. C. Drout, Routledge, 2007, pp. 396-7.

Smol, Anna. “Gender in Tolkien's Works.” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D. C. Drout, Routledge, 2007, pp. 233-5.

Thum, Maureen. “The 'Sub-Subcreation' of Galadriel, Arwen, and Éowyn: Women of Power in Tolkien's and Jackson's The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, edited by Janet Brennan Croft, Mythopoeic P, 2004, pp. 231–56.

Tubbs, Patricia. “Juliana.” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D. C. Drout, Routledge, 2007, pp. 313-7.

Yates, Jessica. “Arwen the Elf-Warrior?” Amon Hen, vol. 165, Sept. 2000, pp. 11–15.

Zettersten, Arne. “Ancrene Wisse.” J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D. C. Drout, Routledge, 2007, pp. 15-16.

2010

Carter, Susan. “Galadriel and Morgan le Fey: Tolkien's Redemption of the Lady of the Lacuna,” Mythlore, vol. 25, no. 3, article 8, 2010, pp. 71-89, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol25/iss3/8.

24. Roberts is a professor whose specialization is19th century literature who also writes science fiction and video games and who also publishes science fiction; I do not believe he is unaware of how “high brow literature” (or, more specifically, the lit writers, critics, and academics who write about it) looks down, equally, upon science fiction, mystery, romance, and all other “popular genres” which makes for a pretty crowded women’s room, it seems to me. As someone in the UK, his ignorance of the extent to which cultural studies has changed the “literature” curriculum in the US may be due to geography, but in fact throughout most of my academic career during the last century, I saw a pattern where the Dead White Men’s books were joined by a lot more, ahem, diverse authors and media, including video games which he also creates, in literature departments. Those changes are reflected in Tolkien scholarship (which has grown and become more diverse in terms of period training and theoretical approaches since Jackson’s film, although it is still extremely White as a field). There are always purists/snobs about Capital L-literature (the Dean of the Graduate School at the university where I worked, who was a chemist, told my department head he’d feel a lot more comfortable about the quality of my scholarship if I wrote about T.S. Eliot instead of science fiction; I believe my dept. head said something along the lines of the chemist could trust the other faculty in my department to be able to evaluate my work!)

25. 2011-2019

Agan, Cami D. “Lúthien Tinúviel and Bodily Desire in the Lay of Leithian.” 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. 168–88.

Amendt-Raduege, Amy. “Revising Lobelia.” Tolkien and Alterity, edited by Christopher Vaccaro and Yvette Kisor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 77–93.

Błaskiewicz, Maria. “Tolkien's Queen-Women in The Lord of the Rings.” “O, What a Tangled Web”: Tolkien and Medieval Literature, A View from Poland, edited by Barbara Kowalik, Walking Tree, 2013, pp. 69–91.

Coker, Cait, and Karen Viars. “Looking for Lothíriel: The Presence of Women in Tolkien Fandom.” The Lord of the Rings, edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Intellect Books, 2015, pp. 74–82.

Croft, Janet Brennan, and Leslie A. Donovan. Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien. Mythopoeic P, 2015.

Crowe, Edith L. “Power in Arda: Sources, Uses and Misuses,” Perilous and Fair, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie Donovan, 2015, pp. 136-49. Rpt. from Mythlore, vol. 21, no. 2 article 40, 1996, pp. 272-77, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol21/iss2/40.

Darvell, Lilian. “'Beautiful and Terrible': The Significance of Galadriel's Hair in The Lord of the Rings and Unfinished Tales.” Mallorn, iss. 56, 2015, pp. 22–24.

Donovan, Leslie A. “The Valkyrie Reflex in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: Galadriel, Shelob, Éowyn, and Arwen.” 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. 221–57. Rpt. from Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance, Routledge, 2003, pp. 106–32.

Downey, Sarah. “Cordial Dislike: Reinventing the Celestial Ladies of Pearl and Purgatorio in Tolkien's Galadriel.” Mythlore, vol. 29, no. 3, article 8, 2011, pp. 101-17, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol29/iss3/8.

Downs, Jack M. “'Radiant and Terrible': Tolkien's Heroic Women as Correctives to the Romance and Epic Traditions.” A Quest of Her Own: Essays on the Female Hero in Modern Fantasy, edited by Lori M. Campbell, McFarland, 2014, pp. 55–75.

Du Plessis, Nicole M. “On the Shoulders of Humphrey Carpenter: Reconsidering Biographical Representation and Scholarly Perception of Edith Tolkien.” Mythlore, vol. 37, no. 2, article 4, 2019, pp. 39-74, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol37/iss2/4.

Enright, Nancy. “Tolkien's Females and the Defining of Power.” 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. 118–35. Rpt. from Renascence, vol. 59, no. 2, winter 2007, pp. 93–108.

Filipczak, Dorota. “Éowyn and the Biblical Tradition of a Warrior Woman.” Text Matters, vol. 7, no. 7, Nov. 2017, pp. 405–15.

Holub, Christian. “Edith and Her Sisters.” Entertainment Weekly, no. 1558/1559, Apr. 2019, p. 63.

House-Thomas, Alyssa. “‘Fair as Fay-Woman and Fell-Minded’: Tolkien's Guinevere.” The Inklings and King Arthur: J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield on the Matter of Britain, edited by Sørina Higgins, Apocraphile P, 2017, pp. 333–66.

Jensen, Anika. “Flowers and Steel: The Necessity of War in Feminist Tolkien Scholarship.” Tolkien Studies, vol. 16, 2019, pp. 59–72, doi.org/10.1353/tks.2019.0006.

Lakowski, Romuald I. “The Fall and Repentance of Galadriel.” 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. 153–67.

Larini, Gloria. “To Die for Love. Female Archetypes in Tolkien and Euripides.” Tolkien and the Classics, edited by Roberto Arduini, et al., Walking Tree, 2019, pp. 25–34.

Larsen, Kristine. “Guinevere, Grímhild, and the Corrigan: Witches and Bitches in Tolkien's Medieval Narrative Verse.” Journal of Tolkien Research, vol. 4, iss. 2, article 8, 2017, scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol4/iss2/8.

---. “Medieval Organicism or Modern Feminist Science? Bombadil, Elves, and Mother Nature.” Tolkien and Alterity, edited by Christopher Vaccaro and Yvette Kisor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 95–108.

---. “The Power of Pity and Tears: The Evolution of Nienna in the Legendarium.” 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. 189–203.

Linton, Phoebe C. “Speech and Silence in The Lord of the Rings: Medieval Romance and the Transitions of Éowyn.” 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. 258–80.

Măcineanu, Laura. “Feminine Hypostases in Epic Fantasy: Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling.” Gender Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, Dec. 2015, pp. 68–82, doi.org/10.1515/genst-2016-0005.

---. “Masculine and Feminine Insights into the Fantastic World of Elves: J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Muriel Barbery's The Life of Elves.” Gender Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, Dec. 2016, pp. 270–83, doi.org/10.1515/genst-2017-0018.

Madsen, Catherine. “A Woman of Valour: Éowyn in War and Peace.” Mallorn, iss. 52, 2011, pp. 28–33.

McCormack, Una. “Finding Ourselves in the (Un)Mapped Lands: Women's Reparative Readings of The Lord of the Rings.” 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. 309–26.

Miesel, Sandra. “Life-Giving Ladies: Women in the Writings of J. R. R. Tolkien.” Light beyond All Shadow: Religious Experience in Tolkien's Work, edited by Paul E. Kerry and Sandra Miesel, Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2011, pp. 139–52.

Miller, John. “Mapping Gender in Middle-Earth.” Mythlore, vol. 34, no. 2, article 9, 2016, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol34/iss2/9.

Nicholas, Angela. “Female Descent in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth Mythology.” Amon Hen, vol. 252, Mar. 2015, pp. 11–18.

Phillips, Zur-Linden, Vanessa. “Arwen and Edward: Redemption and the Fairy Bride/Groom in the Literary Fairytale.” Mallorn, iss. 50, 2010, pp. 37–41.

Rateliff, John D. “The Missing Women: J. R. R. Tolkien's Lifelong Support for Women's Education.” 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. 41–69.

Rawls, Melanie A. “The Feminine Principle in Tolkien.” 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. 99–117. Rpt. from Mythlore, vol. 10, no. 4, article 2, 1984, pp. 5-13, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol10/iss4/2.

Ray, Stella M. “Constructions of Gender and Sexualities in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.” Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 72, no. 4, Texas A&M University, Commerce; ProQuest, Oct. 2011, UMI 1303.

Rees, Shelley. “Women Students and The Lord of the Rings: Showing Them Where They Fit In.” Approaches to Teaching Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Other Works, edited by Leslie A. Donovan, Modern Language Association of America, 2015, pp. 150–56.

Reid, Robin Anne. “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. 14–40.

---. “Light (Noun, 1) or Light (Adjective, 14b)? Female Bodies and Femininities in 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.

Sanguineti, Barbara. “With Light Step through the Threshold: Female Characters, the Gothic, and the Meditatio Mortis in Tolkien and Poe.” Tolkien and the Classics, edited by Roberto Arduini, et al., Walking Tree, 2019, pp. 217–27.

Schroeder, Sharin. “She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Ignored: Gender and Genre in The Lord of the Rings and the Victorian Boys' Book.” 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. 70–96.

Smith, Melissa A. “At Home and Abroad: Éowyn's Two-Fold Figuring as War Bride in The Lord of the Rings.” 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. 204–17.

Solomons, Sunny. “Tauriel in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.” Amon Hen, vol. 246, Mar. 2014, pp. 13–14.

Vaccaro, Christopher, and Yvette Kisor. Tolkien and Alterity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Viars, Karen, and Cait Coker. “Constructing Lothíriel: Rewriting and Rescuing the Women of Middle-Earth From the Margins.” Mythlore, vol. 33, no. 2 , article 6, 2015, pp. 35-48, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol33/iss2/6.

Wallace, Anna. “A Wild Shieldmaiden of the North: Éowyn of Rohan and Old Norse Literature.” Philament, vol. 17, Aug. 2011, pp. 23–45.

Williamson, James T. “Emblematic Bodies: Tolkien and the Depiction of Female Physical Presence.” The Body in Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on Middle-Earth Corporeality, edited by Christopher Vaccaro, McFarland, 2013, pp. 134–56.

Workman, Sarah. “Female Valor Without Renown: Memory, Mourning and Loss at the Center of Middle-Earth.” A Quest of Her Own: Essays on the Female Hero in Modern Fantasy, edited by Lori M. Campbell, McFarland, 2014, pp. 76–93.

26. Which I’ve just spent mumble mumble thousand words documenting in no doubt exhausting as well as exhaustive detail.

27. This kind of claim (which I call an allegorical reading, meaning the one making it is claiming there is the one accurate/correct reading of the meaning of elements of the text) gives me intellectual hives whenever I see it as I explained in my response to Don Williams who wrote an essay explaining how Verlyn Flieger was reading Tolkien wrong because she didn’t know Christian eschatology.

28. But he can and does refuse to acknowledge and engage with the scholarship or even cite it as existing which would provide evidence to readers of his chapter that there are a range of conflicting arguments about the topic which, again, I would consider is one of the goals of a chapter in a “prestigious reference work.” To do that, he would have to acknowledge that just maybe there is more than one interpretation of Tolkien’s representation of women. He would not have to agree with any of those alternative perspectives, but it might undercut his claim to be the Man Who Fully Understands Tolkien as (wait for it) IMMANENTLY CATHOLIC!!11!!!!

29. Experts in Tolkien scholarship on a variety of other topics, not only on the topics of women, gender, and feminisms!

30. Some reviewers praise the Companion highly while others note some variation in quality across the chapters which is fairly common in this sort of large reference work that requires an editor to juggle a number of contributors: you can see reviews by David Elton Gay and Andrew Higgens and Jason Fisher (scroll down).