The Online Supplement
For “Perilous and Fair” in “A Bleak, Barren Land”: A Feminist Responds to Dylan Lee Henderson’s Essay
Substack is warning us that this post is too long for email!
The essay to which this piece is an “Online Supplement” will be published in the upcoming Spring/Summer 2025 edition of Mythlore. It is one of my favorite journals: open access, meaning *all* their back issues and the latest ones are online, all free of charge. When that issue goes live, I’ll add a link to this post.
My essay is titled: “‘Perilous and Fair’ in ‘A Bleak, Barren Land’: A Feminist Responds to Dylan Lee Henderson’s Essay.” My response (the essay plus this Online Supplement) is a companion to an earlier response written by Clare Moore and Leah Hagan which has already been published!
The response will be published in the “Notes” section of the journal; it is not a peer-reviewed essay. Responses are more informal and dialogic in nature although I admit that mine is a bit longer than Notes. The reason that the “Online Supplement” is here is that when it was part of the response, it was over 12,000 words long.1 Mythlore also publishes a hard copy of each issue and has to set word limits (postage costs a pain).
After writing this response, I had to split off a large chunk of it into a post that became part of my Web Project series: Éowyn as An Exemplar of Systemic Failures to "See" Women. I suspect that writing the response was a big kickstart to this whole Web book project (which involves tossing out a lot of first thoughts, process drafts, and *stuff* generally) which will eventually be gathered together (and revised!) for what I think is likely to be the first feminist monograph on “Tolkien” (one which focuses not only on his legendarium but on adaptations and, throughout, on feminist readers!).
“The Women [Whose Work] Men Don’t See”
The subtitle of this supplement is a slightly revised title of one of my favorite of James Tiptree, Jr.’s stories, “The Women Men Don’t See.” There are two things about the story, and the author, that inspire me to use this title: first, the story is about a male narrator-protagonist marooned with a mother and adult daughter after a small plane crash. When the three meet aliens, the narrator is shocked and confused when the women ask to leave with the aliens and then do so, rather than stay with him. (If you haven’t read Tiptree, why not?)
Second, “James Tiptree, Jr.” is one of Alice B. Sheldon’s pseudonyms; the other being “Racoona Sheldon” who had a hard time getting her fiction published until “Tiptree” wrote a letter recommending her work to one of his editors.2 If you are unaware of the herstory of Sheldon/Tiptree (I remember, in 1977, the shockwave that went through the sff community at the news that “James Tiptree, Jr.,” long thought of as one of the few, if not only, rather feminist male sff writers, was actually Alice B. Sheldon), you might enjoy following up on it (Julie Phillips wrote a fantastic biography).
Anyway!
Yes, the women (and their work) that men do not see is the point of my response and this supplement. I should note that the essay that evoked these responses is not unique: Henderson is repeating assumptions and stereotypes I have heard all my life (and which pre-exist me by centuries). But the increasing salience of sexism and misogyny in recent years has, you might say, impelled me to start pushing back in ways that I remember doing decades ago. At some point, I’ll work on defining terms (sexism, misogyny, feminisms, etc.) for the project, but for now, I’ll just note that I will be writing about oppressions as systemic, not as individual emotions.3
Introduction
As Clare Moore and Leah Hagan note in their essay, “A Bleak, Barren Take: A Response to ‘Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings,’” a consistent problem with Dylan Lee Henderson’s essay is his “carelessness” with the scholarship on the topic of “women”:
Henderson does cite many of the essays published or re-published in the 2015 volume Perilous and Fair, but how the citations are handled exemplifies another way in which his scholarship is careless. Other than mentioning these essays as if they are a checklist to get through before he can ignore them and proceed to his own argument, he fails to deeply engage with their arguments and at times seems to completely misunderstand or ignore their main points. On a most basic level, Henderson seems to define “feminist” as “women,” meaning pertaining to female characters or scholarship written. (228).
They note this carelessness also applies to other topics, ones relating to systemic oppressions which co-occur with misogyny such as racisms, anti-environmentalism, and queerphobia.4
I agree with Moore and Hagan’s critique of Henderson’s essay, and the reason I also wrote a response is my concern is that readers of Henderson’s essay who do not know the body of scholarship he mis-represents (or that he ignored a significant percentage of what is in print, including a number of the essays in the anthology) will accept his evaluation of it, and of feminists, without reading any further (and go on to repeat it in their own work, lather, rinse, repeat). As Croft and Donovan note in their introduction to their 2015 anthology, Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien, there is a problem with “recent works [echoing] views from earlier periods” (2).
I would add that another aspect of this ongoing problem is mis-representing work which does not fit the misogynistic stereotype of “feminists” (Hopkins-Doyle, et. al.).5 While I was working on my response, I became frustrated when I began to compare Henderson’s citations (quotes and paraphrases) to the original sources. I decided to document the gap between those sources and Henderson’s description of them which led to this Supplement when the list became too large to integrate into the text of the essay, then too large to fit into an Appendix, and then threatened to take over the world if I wasn’t careful! That problem is why I focus on the first two pages of his essay, and the four examples below.6
Henderson cites these sources to support his claim that, since 1971, “many feminist scholars have condemned Tolkien’s depiction of women as inadequate and denounced Tolkien himself as a misogynist” (88).7 Please note the loaded language Henderson uses:: condemned (to death?) and denounced (to what authority?). Those nasssssty feminist scholars!!!!11!!! ripping men to shreds!!!1111.
Below are excerpts from the first two paragraphs of the essay: the first, a part of the long introductory paragraph which primarily describes Tolkien’s female characters and Henderson’s evaluation of them;8 however, amongst his judgements, he does cite two sources, Duggan and Rawls, declaring Rawls to be “correct” while Duggan “went too far” in his argument.
The second excerpt is the complete second paragraph which mostly cites the nasty feminist scholars along with introducing a hypothetical “unngenerous reader [who] might say, not entirely without justification, that most of Tolkien’s women belong to one of two types: the shrew and the goddess” (44). I have a bit to say about this hypothetical reader later on!
Formatting note: In the Henderson quotes below, I italicize the scholars’ names, the titles of their essays, and direct quotes from those essays. If Henderson paraphrases (summarizes in his own words) what he says the author is arguing, I bold it. I do not attempt to reproduce Hendersson’s footnotes: the superscript numbers are placed in square brackets.
Excerpt 1:
It might be going too far to assert, as Alfred Leo Duggan does in his 1954 review of The Two Towers, that “women play no part” in Tolkien’s epic (817), but Melanie A. Rawls is surely correct when she states that “none are pivotal characters,” there being “no female counterparts for Gandalf or Sauron, Aragorn or Saruman, Frodo or Gollum” (99).
Excerpt 2
The subject has not failed to attract critics, and considering the scarcity, and apparent superficiality, of women in The Lord of the Rings, it is hardly surprising that many feminist scholars, beginning with Doris T. Myers and her 1971 essay “Brave New World: The Status of Women According to Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams,” have condemned Tolkien’s depiction of women as inadequate and denounced Tolkien himself as a misogynist [2]. Kenneth McLeish, for instance, considers Tolkien’s female characters no better than stereotypes, paper dolls that never live and breathe in the way that Sam or Frodo or even Gimli does (125). An ungenerous reader might say, not entirely without justification, that most of Tolkien’s women belong to one of two types: the shrew and the goddess. The former irritates and troubles the men in her life; the latter inspires them with her love and, even more so, her beauty. At times, Goldberry, Arwen, and even Galadriel certainly feel more like archetypes, symbols of domestic bliss and feminine wisdom, than flesh-and-blood women. And yet, to complicate matters further, even the romantic relationships that these women symbolize seem shallow compared to the rich friendships that bind the novel’s male characters together. Rosie Cotton, as Brenda Partridge points out, constitutes a poor replacement for Frodo, and her marriage to Sam a poor substitute for the emotionally intimate friendship Sam and Frodo share. Going one step farther, Candice Frederick and Sam McBride assert 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).9 For the perceived inadequacies of Tolkien’s female characters, scholars have not hesitated to blame Tolkien himself, charging him with the promotion of misogynistic or, at best, antiquated conceptions of women. Even Melissa Hatcher, who argues for the centrality of Éowyn to some of Tolkien’s most cherished themes, admits that “Tolkien himself, in reality, probably was the stodgy sexist Oxford professor that feminist scholars paint him out to be” (44).
The following are the excerpts from the original sources that are the part of the essay from which Henderson chose his quotes (or paraphrases). I list them in order of their original date of publication (chronological).
I organized the bibliographic essay I wrote for Perilous and Fair (P&F) by date of publication because I saw some significant changes in the criticism and scholarship over time. Acknowledging the original dates of publication in a review of scholarship can reveal significant differences, as well as similarities, in the methods, arguments, and evidence, reflecting the dialogic and changing nature of academic discourse as well as the extent to which scholarship, like Tolkien’s fictions, originates in a specific time and place. Although Henderson gestures at an historical argument (“feminist scholars sinc 1971 have denounced and condemned”) he makes no attempt to acknowledge changes over time (or in feminist theory and praxis).10
I emphasize the significance of the original sources by providing the excerpts from those first, following them with the Henderson excerpt (how he cites them in the text of his essay), and then ending with an excerpt from my bibiliographic essay summarizing what I see as the scholars’ overall arguments.
Prepare yourself for the horrors of feminist denunciations and condemnations! You have been warned!!
Doris T. Myers
1971: Myers, Doris T. “Brave New World: The Status of Women According to Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams.” Cimarron Review vol. 17, 1971, pp. 13-19.
Another type of world-making fiction, easier to recognize than to define, plays on our conviction that all life is stranger and more wonderful than the fustian of daily existence, and this is the sort of fiction written by “the Oxford Christians”: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams.
Each of these authors creates a world which operates on a set of assumptions different from the world as we know it. Tolkien takes us into the dim, dim past—the Third Age which preceded any history or pre-history of today’s man, a time when there were many sorts of rational talking creatures. Lewis assumes a universe in which outer space is peopled by spiritual beings and engages his human characters in an inter-planetary, heavenly war. Williams’ novels are based on the premise that an unseen world—whether the world of the dead, of magical arts, or of Platonic ideas—impinges on the everyday world. Since each of the three creates a world virtually ex nihilo, each is free to postulate any sort of relationship between the sexes that he wishes. Thus to the women’s liberationist looking for some new vision of what could be, the “otherworldly” novels of the Oxford Christians are of great interest. . . .
Since they shared a religious outlook, read the same literature, and wrote under each other’s tutelage, nothing could be less astonishing than that they would have similar attitudes toward women. Nevertheless, the worlds created by Tolkien and Lewis are indisputably “man’s worlds” based on the traditional masculine-feminine stereotypes, while Williams creates worlds in which Men and women are equally human, equally important, and equally unique individuals (pp 13-14).
Henderson, Dylan L. “‘A Bleak, Barren Land’: Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore, vol. 42, no. 1, article 6, 2023, pp. 87-106.
[M]any feminist scholars, beginning with Doris T. Myers and her 1971 essay “Brave New World: The Status of Women According to Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams,” have condemned Tolkien’s depiction of women as inadequate and denounced Tolkien himself as a misogynist (88)
Reid, Robin, “The History of Scholarship on Female Characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium: A Feminist Bibliographic Essay.” Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan, Mythopoeic P., 2015, pp. 13-40.11
Doris T. Myers’ essay appeared in 1971 in Cimarron Review and is the second essay the journal published on Tolkien. She looked at the status of women in the three “Oxford Christian” authors’ fiction. Tolkien’s work is set in the past; Lewis’ in “outer space . . . peopled by spiritual beings,” and Williams’ in an “unseen world” that connects with the material world. Noting that fantastic genres allow creators to create any type of gender system, Myers asks what “the women’s liberationist,” a hypothetical and distanced phrase, would find in these authors’ new and fantastic worlds (13-14). She argues that Tolkien’s and Lewis’ works reproduce the characterization of women found in Medieval and Renaissance literature but that Williams’ work does not. Myers concludes that none of the three authors considered showing any change in the “present social system” (which Myers sees as outdated and sexist), but that Williams’ characters, male and female, are different enough from the other two authors’ that she considers his created world “better for women—for people—than the worlds of Tolkien and Lewis” (19).
Brenda Partridge and Melanie Rawls
1983: 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 and Barnes & Noble, 1983, pp. 179-197.
Sam remains and marries—the only function of the marriage lies in Tolkien’s habitual tidying up of loose ends; Sam’s children will grow up and flourish in the new world. The marriage also ensures that Sam, bereft of Frodo, will not be completely alone though the companionship it provides will never reach the depths of passion and spiritual intensity of the relationship of Sam and Frodo (187).
Henderson, Dylan L. “‘A Bleak, Barren Land’: Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore, vol. 42, no. 1, article 6, 2023, pp. 87-106.
[E]ven the romantic relationships that these women symbolize seem shallow compared to the rich friendships that bind the novel’s male characters together. Rosie Cotton, as Brenda Partridge points out, constitutes a poor replacement for Frodo, and her marriage to Sam a poor substitute for the emotionally intimate friendship Sam and Frodo share (88).12
1984": Rawls, Melanie A. “The Feminine Principle in Tolkien,” Mythlore, vol. 10, no. 4, article 2, 1984, pp. 5-13.
One cannot acquire much insight into Tolkien’s view of women from The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings--too few women appear in these books and none are pivotal characters. Of the women who appear in LotR, only Éowyn of Rohan is depicted in any detail of character, desire, motivation and activity. Arwen, Elrond’s daughter, is a half-glimpsed dream. Galadriel is a mighty elven ruler, and we learn something of her thought and powers; but she is peripheral to the action and we learn little of her history and relationships. There are no female counterparts for Gandalf or Sauron, Aragorn or Saruman, Frodo or Gollum.
But open The Silmarillion. The feminine presence abounds and in such a manner as should satisfy any inquirer into the nature of the Feminine Principle as presented by J.R.R. Tolkien.
From the opening pages of The Silmarillion, it is clear that Tolkien believes that gender and sex are not one and the same; and that gender, or Masculine and Feminine, is a condition of the universe which goes deeper, higher and wider than sex, mere male and female and the necessities of reproduction (5).
Henderson, Dylan L. “‘A Bleak, Barren Land’: Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore, vol. 42, no. 1, article 6, 2023, pp. 87-106.
Melanie A. Rawls is surely correct when she states that “none are pivotal characters,” there being “no female counterparts for Gandalf or Sauron, Aragorn or Saruman, Frodo or Gollum” (88).
Reid, Robin, “The History of Scholarship on Female Characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium: A Feminist Bibliographic Essay.” Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan, Mythopoeic P., 2015, pp. 13-40.
I would argue that two, Partridge and Rawls, have a feminist purpose; although they make very different arguments, that disagreement is typical to feminist commentary on Tolkien’s work.. . . . The next two essays (Partridge, 1983, and Rawls, 1984) move away from a specific focus on female characters to larger thematic issues of female sexuality and the feminine principle respectively, drawing on Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic theories. The two pieces differ in tone, focus, and methodology: Partridge’s is more critical of the construction of female characters in The Lord of the Rings while Rawls’ analyzes paired male and female characters in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings to argue the complementarity of feminine and masculine characteristics in a more positive evaluation of Tolkien’s work. Partridge’s evidence includes biographical as well as textual explication whereas Rawls focuses solely on a close reading of the texts: thus, Partridge’s argument extends beyond the scope of the fictional texts to claim the existence of sexism “in the conventions and symbolism of literary and religious tradition. . . . which reflect conscious and subconscious conflicting attitudes to sexuality and the definition of the economic and political role of men and women in society” (195). Despite their differences, the essays share a common psychoanalytic approach. Rawls’ essay is one of the classic articles selected to be included in this anthology (17-18).
Melissa McCrory Hatcher
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.13 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).15
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.
Henderson, Dylan L. “‘A Bleak, Barren Land’: Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore, vol. 42, no. 1, article 6, 2023, pp. 87-106.
For the perceived inadequacies of Tolkien’s female characters, scholars have not hesitated to blame Tolkien himself, charging him with the promotion of misogynistic or, at best, antiquated conceptions of women. Even Melissa Hatcher, who argues for the centrality of Éowyn to some of Tolkien’s most cherished themes,16 admits that “Tolkien himself, in reality, probably was the stodgy sexist Oxford professor that feminist scholars paint him out to be” (44).
Reid, Robin, “The History of Scholarship on Female Characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium: A Feminist Bibliographic Essay.” Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan, Mythopoeic P, 2015, pp. 13-40.
Melissa McCrory Hatcher, in a 2007 essay, argues that Tolkien’s presentation of female characters and the roles they play, specifically the narrative arc of Éowyn, has been has been criticized by feminists who “[overlook] much of the importance of his vast and compelling work” (43). The primary feminist critics Hatcher (and Enright) identify as interpreting Tolkien’s work in this way are Candice Fredrick and Sam McBride in their monograph, Women Among the Inklings. Hatcher joins Enright and others in arguing against the claim that Éowyn’s marrying Faramir is an example of “conventional female submissiveness.” Instead, Hatcher argues that Éowyn not only “embodies the full-blooded subjectivity that Tolkien posits as essential for peace,” but is the most complete example of that ideal (43). Hatcher foregrounds the historical context of Tolkien’s time as one of social changes, noting Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein were contemporaries of Tolkien, that he worked with important female scholars at Oxford, and that he saw women taking over the jobs of men during World War II. She concludes that Éowyn “embodies the persistent struggle of women in the West to assert their voices and presence, to avoid erasures, and to figure in history (and fiction) as they do in life” (45).
Works Cited
Croft, Janet Brennan, and Leslie Donovan, editors. 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.” Mythlore, vol. 21, no. 2, article 40, 1996, https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol21/iss2/40/, pp. 272-77. Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie Donovan, Mythopoeic P, 2015, pp. 136-149.
Duggan, Alfred Leo. “The Epic of Westernesse.” The Times Literary Supplement, 17 Dec. 1954, p. 817.
Enright, Nancy. “Tolkien’s Females and the Defining of Power.” Renascence, vol. 59, no. 2, 2007, pp. 93-108. Rpt. Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie Donovan, Mythopoeic P, 2015, pp. 118-35.
Fredrick, Candice and Sam McBride. Women Among the Inklings, Gender, C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Greenwood Professional Guides in School Librarianship 91. Praeger, 2001.
Hatcher, Melissa McCrory. “Finding Woman’s Role in The Lord of the Rings,” Mythlore, vol. 25, no. 3, article 5, 2007, pp. 43-54, https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol25/iss3/5/.
Henderson, Dylan L. “‘A Bleak, Barren Land’: Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore, vol. 42, no. 1, article 6, 2023, pp. 87-106, https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol42/iss1/6/.
Hopkins-Doyle, Aífe, et. al. “The Misandry Myth: An Inaccurate Stereotype About Feminists’ Attitudes Toward Men.” Psychology of Women Quarterly, vol. 48, iss. 1, 2024, pp. 8–37, https://doi.org/10.1177/03616843231202708.
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McLeish, Kenneth. “The Rippingest Yarn of All.” J.R.R. Tolkien: This Far Land, edited by Robert Giddings, Vision P and Barnes & Noble, 1983, pp. 125-136.
Moore, Clare, and Leah Hagan. “A Bleak, Barren Take: A Response to ‘Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings.’” Mythlore, vol. 43, no. 1, aricle 13, 2024, pp. 227-34, https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol43/iss1/13.
Myers, Doris T. “Brave New World: The Status of Women According to Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams.” Cimarron Review, vol. 17, 1971, pp. 13-19
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 P and Barnes & Noble, 1983, pp.179-197.
Rawls, Melanie A. “The Feminine Principle in Tolkien,” Mythlore, vol. 10, no. 4, article 2, 1984, pp. 5-13, https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol10/iss4/2/.Rpt. in Croft and Donovan, pp. 99-117.
Reid, Robin Anne. “Bibliography: Feminist/Gender/Queer Tolkien Scholarship (1971-present).” Writing from Ithilien. Substack, 25 Nov. 2023, https://robinareid.substack.com/p/bibliography-feministgenderqueer.
Reid, Robin Anne. "Éowyn as An Exemplar of Systemic Failures to 'See' Women." Writing from Ithilien. 30 Sept. 2024, https://robinareid.substack.com/p/eowyn-as-an-exemplar-of-systemic.
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---. “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.
Republicans Against Trump. “Donald Trump’s VP nominee JD Vance: ‘We are effectively run in this country…by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made. And they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.’” Twitter, 16 July 2024, https://archive.ph/CGQ1Z#selection-499.36-499.244.17
Smith, Melissa. “At Home and Abroad: Éowyn’s Two-fold Figuring as War Bride in The Lord of the Rings,” Mythlore, vol. 26, no. 1, article 12, 2007, pp. 161-72, https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol26/iss1/12/. Rpt. in Croft and Donovan, pp. 204-17.
Thum, Maureen. "Hidden in Plain View: Strategizing Unconventionality in Shakespeare's and Tolkien's Portraits of Women." Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language, edited by Janet Brennan Croft, Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy 2, McFarland, 2007, pp. 229-50. Rpt. pp. 281-305.
Tiptree, James, Jr. “The Women Men Don’t See.” Warm Worlds and Otherwise, Ballantine Books, 1975, pp. 131-164.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. Harper Collins, 2004.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien. William Morrow, 2022.
Treisman, Rachel. “JD Vance went viral for ‘cat lady’ comments. The centuries-old trope has a long tail.” Pop Culture, NPR, 29 July 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/07/29/nx-s1-5055616/jd-vance-childless-cat-lady-history.
Wills, Matthew. “The Woman Behind James Tiptree, Jr.” JSTOR Daily, 26 July 2018. https://daily.jstor.org/the-woman-behind-james-tiptree-jr/.
This sort of response may become a habit: I published my first ever response to an essay in 2022: "A Queer Atheist Feminist Autist Responds to Donald Williams's "Keystone or Cornerstone? A Rejoinder to Verlyn Flieger on the Alleged 'Conflicting Sides' of Tolkien's Singular Self.”
For more information about Tiptree, and the story, see Lee Mandelo’s and Matthew Wills’s essays.
I’ll be drawing on work by Kate Manne, Sara Ahmed, and (an author I’ve just discovered from a recommendation on one of the Substacks I read), Nancy Fraser.
The more I worked through analyzing what essays he selected to cite and what ones he failed to cite, specifically in his claims about Éowyn, I started to think the problem goes beyond simple carelessness. This experience was a major inspiration for my Web Project (and I wrote a whole post disagreeing with Henderson’s claims about Éowyn specifically since I ran out room in the original essay).
For an example of contemporary misogynistic rhetoric, see Sahil Kapur on the politics of JD Vance, the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, as well as Vance’s tweet expressing the unsupported claim that “[w]e are effectively run in this country…by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made. And they want to make the rest of the country miserable too” (Republicans Against Trump). NPR published an article tracing the long history of negative associations of cats and women (especially single women), originating in the 14th century witch trials (Treisman).
I also realized the more time I spent on documenting the instances, the worse it was for my mental and emotional health and that I needed to do something more positive which apparently my brain decided meant “let’s write a book!”
There are several citations given in the first two pages I did not include, including the two men’s, which are the first ones after the “denunciation since 1971 claim” Duggan’s 1954 quote is from a one-page review; McLeish’s essay, published in the same anthology as Partridge’s, is not interested in the female characters at all but in the:
absence of femininity. . . the lack of any true gentleness, grace, or what the Oxford Dictionary what the Oxford dictionary calls ‘passivity in the characters,’ of any vision of behaviour beyond gruff comradeship (or its mirror sycophancy), bully-boy rant (or its mirror fortitude) and, to remind us now and then that our heroes are really just like us, the brushing away of a furtive but manly tear” (125).
McLeish’s example of “profundity” in great literature which includes true “femininity” is apparently Homer’s Iliad which is full of “yin-and-yang harmonization” (126), and McLeish goes on to compare Tolkien’s work to a smorgasbord of classical and contemporary authors, concluding that he is “ one of the finest writers of escapist fantasy in any language and of any time” (135). McLeish does not specify what he means by “escapist,” but his essay’s tone is negative from the start.
Shelob is not a part of the group of female characters: in his first footnote, Henderson cites scholarship about Shelob but explains that he is grouping Shelob with Tolkien’s Orcs on the grounds that she is not a “woman.” I know of some fascinating work in progress by feminists on how Tolkien’s "monstrous women/monstrous feminine” characters includes more than Shelob which I eagerly anticipate recommending when it is published!
Frederick and McBride’s book fell outside my bibliographic essay’s focus on “women and Tolkien,” because beyond focusing on the repesentation of women in the works of the Inklings, they seem to be really interested in arguing how the Inklings felt about “women” (which veers close to the authorial fallacy) and take more of a gender studies focus that includes masculinity.
The anthology reprinted seven essays as well as seven written for the anthology. The reprints are essays by Crowe (1996), Donovan (2003), Enright (2007), Lakowski (2007), Rawls (1984), Smith (2007), and Thum (2007).
The purpose of a bibliographic essay is solely to analyze the relevant scholarship which means I could write longer summaries than I do in my work on other topics where a more compressed “review of the scholarly literature” is necessary to the context of what has been argued on the topic. That means being able to summarize major (overall) arguments in a sentence or two, with the goal of being able to identify areas of consensus, areas of disagreement, and gaps (what has not been yet touched, like those icky female characters!) in the scholarship which shows that one has engaged enough with the work to understand it and to contribute something original. Henderson’s “Background” section is an attempt to do just that, but I think it is one that could have used more work before appearing in print.
Or, well, that’s my understanding of the whole thing, and what I’ve tried to do, and tried to teach my students (it’s hard to write an accurate summary of an argument one completely disagrees with!). As I’ve often noticed, as an autist, I tend to glom on to a certail idealized (I’m told by my historian friend) idea of goals/guidelines/rules and go overboard. If you’re still reading these notes, you’re probably floating around in the water with me!
Partridge spends a lot more time on the homosocial groups in Tolkien’s life and what she calls the “subconscious attraction for Tolkien and Lewis” in their “portraying of male intimacy, physical as well as mental in a context which [physical contact between males] is socially acceptable. . . .” (184). But as I note in a footnote to my summary, I found more nuance in her arguments about the male friendships, male characters, and about Sam and Frodo which surrounds the Freudian material than Partridge has been credited for when others cite her work. Henderson ignores that element of her essay entirely, or, only presents a shallow paraphrase in characterizing Sam and Frodo’s “rich friendship” as “emotionally intimate” (and generalizing it to all the male characters) when Partridge’s claim is specific to Sam and Frod whose relationship has “the depths of passion and spiritual intensity” that Sam can never find with Rosie.
I am going to have to think more about how women scholars are not immune to stereotyping “feminists”—and also that I don’t consider Fredrick and McBride’s book to be one informed in any way by feminist theories/approaches (although they make some gestures at “feminism” but, if I am recalling correctly, toward “Christian feminism”). But that is for later development because I only noticed it was I was proofreading this post!
Amy Amendt-Raduege published an excellent essay in 2017, “Revising Lobelia,” that counters the dismissive stereotype of Lobelia as merely a shrew by contextualizing her characterization in medieval literature:
[c]loser examination reveals that [Lobelia’s] character is more complex and compelling than is generally supposed. She is proud, stubborn, unwilling to accept less than her due, and eager to display her status to society: all traits commonly found in the heroes of the medieval poems and sagas that Tolkien so diligently studied. She is also intelligent, forthright, and capable of unexpected generosity” (77, bolded emphasis added).
Hatcher’s essay (which is my favorite of the four essays) was published in 2007, and her focus was not Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. But that’s the whole point of scholarship as dialogic in nature: I haven’t done an official search, but I would bet Amy’s essay is the *first* to focus entirely on Lobelia, and she completely shifts the argument with the *radical* idea that one (at least) of Tolkien’s female characters could have been influenced by the medieval texts that most of the other medievalists have spent looking at to analyze the male characters (with the exception of those who, like Leslie Donovan, look at the Valkyrie materials)!
Amendt-Raduege, Amy. “Revising Lobelia.” Tolkien and Alterity, edited by Christopher Vaccaro and Yvette Kisor, Palgrave, 2017, pp. 77-93.
This brilliant takedown of presentism (assuming that the past was somehow worse than our progressives selves) is perfect and needs to be a lot more widely circulated everywhere! Plus, in 2025, nobody in Tolkien studies gets to play the card that “we’re not sexist anymore, but we can’t judge the PAST,” when the christofascist regime is barrelling full-tilt into destroying the “progress” made during my lifetime!
Notice that Henderson cannot bring himself to acknowledge those themes “peace, preservation, and cultural memory,” perhaps because they are in conflict with his “cherished theme” of um, barrenness and sterility because women aren’t having enough white babies.
The URL provided leads to an archived copy of the tweet. When citing sources from alt-right and/or fascist blogs or platforms, I archive the individual source in question to avoid giving clicks/money/support to the blogger or platform while still directing interested readers to the source I cite. And X/Twitter is now one of those sites.