Tolkien’s ‘Absent [Female] Characters’:

How Christopher Tolkien Expanded Middle-earth

Photo by Flash Dantz on Unsplash

The version of my essay (the sixth draft!) that I read at the Tolkien Society Christopher Tolkien Centenary Conference. They will be posting recordings of the talks on their YouTube Channel later on, but I’m posting it here because it is sort of the start of my Web project: when I was invited to speak at the conference and asked to send a topic, I said I’d be looking at how Christopher’s work on the posthumous publications expanded Middle-earth by including more female characters.

And then things just all came together in my head, including the four Éowyn posts I had made in my Substack earlier this year.

And here we are. I think that I may have to go full speed ahead on this project (after I turn in the Racisms, Race, and Racists and Tolkien ms. for peer review) and delay the atheist, agnostic, and animist project a bit longer. I just to be able to juggle multiple projects, but trying to edit two anthologies was !!!VeryHard!!!, and I don’t think trying to juggle two monographs would be any easier.

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I would like to thank Hannah McDonald and the other trustees of the Tolkien Society for their kind invitation to speak at this celebration of Christopher Tolkien, an invitation which allows me to talk about how his work opened up new spaces for feminist scholarship in the field. I also want to thank Cami Agan, Sara Brown, and Kristine Larsen for so brilliantly and presciently providing perfect examples of exactly what I’m going to be talking about!

This talk is the start of a larger project which will explore three related topics. The first is how the posthumous publications CJRT edited (from the 1977 Silmarillion to the 2018 Fall of Gondolin)¹ expand the number of female characters in Middle-earth and give us a unique view into alternate and contradictory ideas JRRT explored in his writing process. The second is how academic scholarship on his fiction is still, almost 50 years after the publication of The Silmarillion, overlooking most of the legendarium’s female characters except for a handful in The Lord of the Rings plus Lúthien.² The third is how those of us who are feminists can challenge that tendency by paying more attention to the messy, complex material about female characters in the multiple histories of Middle-earth and by acknowledging and incorporating the valuable work women and non-binary fans have been and are doing with the posthumous publications.³

This talk, and this project, exist in the current Anglophone socio-political context in which some critical theories, such as feminisms, have been dismissed as inappropriately imposing politics (and, the worst of all politics, “identity politics” which is apparently politics by anyone who is not a straight Christian white man) on literature since at least the 1980s. As Sue Kim argues in "Beyond Black and White: Race and Postmodernism in The Lord of the Rings Film”: “It is disingenuous to claim that certain modern politics apply (war, fascism, industrialization, conservation) and others do not (gender, sexuality, race), just as it is disingenuous to say that any one kind of reading necessarily discounts all other readings” (882).⁴

I agree with Kim and add that any study of the reception of JRRT’s work supports the claim that his fiction has always been politicized. Verlyn Flieger identifies how the self-generated contradictions in his work have been used over the decades to prove, variously, that he is “a medievalist, a modernist, a post-modernist, a royalist, a fascist, a misogynist, a feminist, a racist, an egalitarian, a realist, a romantic, an optimist, [and] a pessimist” (“Arch and Keystone” 8). Scholars such as Martin Barker, Joseph Ripp, and Nigel Walmsley explore what role the media coverage of the 1960s U.S. anti-war counter-culture played in creating the popular success of The Lord of the Rings, and in the past few years, the enthusiasm Italian fascists have for the novel is beginning to be explored by Craig Franson. The Anglophone media features stories on the Italian “Hobbit Camps” of the 1970s and their resurgence in the 1990s (Last), which Georgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, attended (Franson), and circulate her claim that she sees The Lord of the Rings as a “sacred text.”

Given the current global political shifts, I see no way that anyone can “save” JRRT’s work from 21st century readers and our conflicting ideas about the politics and the societies in which we live. So what should Tolkien scholars do instead? Rather than try to prescribe a single theoretical approach or promote a religious/near-allegorical interpretation as some have, I argue that we need to pay more attention to the range of critical theories that have been dismissed as too political, or wrongly political. Applying these theories to the expanded world that CJRT opened for us can help complicate the sort of simplistic readings that Flieger characterizes as “advocates with opposite views [cherry-picking] the statements that best support their position” (“But What Did He Really Mean?” 149). Careful readings of the multiple and often contradictory histories and narratives about Middle-earth can change one’s perspective on The Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit), just as seeing the nine-tenths of the iceberg which exists below the waterline changes our perspective on what we see above the water.

This work has already started. In her 2009 monograph, Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits, Dimitra Fimi argues that changes in humanities scholarship created by the “advent of ‘theory’ and cultural studies’” as well as the impact of Peter Jackson’s live-action films enabled “new analyses and approaches [that illuminate] Tolkien’s work in fresh and unexpected ways, free from some of the prejudices and the concerns that had trapped previous criticism within strict borders” (200).

While Flieger’s work focuses on the ever-popular “Christian vs. pagan” conflicts in critics’ and readers’ responses to Tolkien’s work, I am interested in the conflict of “feminist” vs. “misogynist” which, as it turns out, strongly correlates with the current religiopolitical conflicts in the United States where the growing dominance of Christian nationalism drives ongoing efforts to destroy the rights feminist movements fought to achieve for women. In my 2015 “History of Scholarship on Female Characters in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Legendarium: A Feminist Bibliography,” I call for “[e]xpanding the range of theories and methods . . . to incorporate cultural studies and critical theories that deal with gender, race, class, and the intersections between them . . .[which] can only enhance Tolkien studies.” (39)

What I did not realize when I wrote that conclusion over ten years ago was how similar it was to an argument made in a short essay about teaching JRRT published in 1996, in the Medieval Feminist Newsletter. The essay, titled “The Influence of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Masculinist Medievalism,” by Michael D. C. Drout, argues that “a criticism that excludes women, gender, reproduction, and sex is doomed to extinction. Some critics have chosen such extinction with their eyes open (in unpublished notes dating from around 1937 Tolkien suggests that he may be at the end of the tradition of Old English studies)” (26-27).

Since I am a feminist but not a medievalist, I only recently found Drout’s essay while searching for feminist medievalist scholarship to cite in another project. But medievalists, and Tolkienists who know medievalists, even if we are trained in other periods, know that JRRT’s fear that the “end of the tradition of Old English studies” was near was premature. Medieval and “Old English” studies not only exist today but have grown, including the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship whose newsletter was renamed in 1999 to the Medieval Feminist Forum, an online peer-reviewed journal focusing on “interdisciplinary scholarship on women, gender, and sexuality in medieval studies (“History). There are conflicts and debates about the nature of this growth (those pesky critical theories) and the scope and quality of the resulting scholarship, but that was equally true in Tolkien’s lifetime even if the types of topics, approaches, and criteria for “quality” differed.

The essay I consider to be the first feminist academic essay on JRRT (meaning the first whose author not only claims her feminism openly but uses feminist theorists to analyze his fiction) was also published in 1996. In “Power in Arda: Sources, Uses and Misuses,” Edith Crowe argues that “there are many interpretations of feminism, and some aspects are more compatible with Tolkien than others,” especially when “The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and the other posthumous works” are taken into account (ML 272). Crowe 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 relevant to my current project, her essay concludes by arguing that her “interpretation of feminism” and Tolkien’s “interpretation of Christianity. . . .“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,” by challenging the “misuse of power” (ML 277).

The question remains then, how do Tolkien scholars go about this project? I have a few ideas as a starting point. We need to start by paying more attention to the contradictory material about female characters, a task which women and non-binary fans have been doing for decades, and by learning from and adapting methods from feminist medievalists and historians which we can use to approach the “Histories” of Middle-earth which, although fictional, mirror some of the patterns in Primary World historical scholarship.

While there are more female characters in Middle-earth than we could have guessed before 1977, it is equally true that the female characters are still a minority in the legendarium as Emil Johanson explains in his LOTR statistical project: “Only 18 % of the characters Tolkien described in his works are female. This does not mean that his world lacks women but rather that most of his stories are not centered around their point of view” (emphasis added, n.p). I argue that neither the relative numbers nor the narrative space devoted to female characters can reliably dictate how readers may respond! For instance, there is little known about Queen Berúthiel and her ten cats, but as I recently posted on my Substack, Writing from Ithilien, as a childless cat lady myself, I have always been a fan.

Dawn Felagund, acknowledging that “about 18% of named characters in The Silmarillion are women” in her essay “The Inequality Prototype: Gender, Inequality, and the Valar in Tolkien’s Silmarillion,” argues that the “Valar are an interesting case study of the issue, however, since they occupy a prototypical and highly influential role over the other peoples of Arda and present a veneer of equality that becomes much more complex the deeper you dig” (n.p.). I want to see more scholarship that digs for more complexity, especially but not only, in the area of female characters and how women and, increasingly, non-binary, fans have received them (Felagund).⁵

CJRT’s expansion of Middle-earth which (some!) Tolkien fans consider to be part of JRRT’s canon has been extensively documented and debated in fandom, in forums, fanzines, fan wikis, and digital collections, but the primarily female dominated transformative works fandom has also been filling in some of the gaps JRRT left in his legendarium by writing fiction. Their stories both fill in tales he “sketched” and create different versions of the “great tales” he developed more fully (“Letter 131,” 203-4). While I have not been active in the Silmarillion fandom previously although that is changing nowadays, I know several fans who are and they have shared how some fans use the later posthumous publications to criticize some of CJRT’s editing choices in the 1977 Silmarillion, an argument that parallels Douglas Kane’s in his Arda Reconstructed (Deeprose-Peterson, Felagund). This approach can also support drawing on the multiple versions that exist as justification or foundation for their fictional alternative versions.

The Silmarillion Writers’ Guild, which will be celebrating 20 years in 2025 is an independent fan archive that is, as far as I know, the oldest independent Tolkien archive still active. It offers many features to its members: an active and supportive community; an archive for uploading fanworks (“based on The Silmarillion and related texts”) which contains “fiction, nonfiction and meta, plays & screenplays, and poetry); audio fanworks; link collections; art, multimedia fanworks; playlists.” They provide author resources, and reference readers, and have monthly “challenges” that is, writing prompts on a specific topic for people to write about. As far as I can tell, the first challenge posted was in 2005, and the topic was “Strong Women”: the prompt is “Choose a female character from The Silmarillion or related texts. It could be someone like Galadriel, one of the Valar, or someone barely mentioned, such as Nerdanel or Elenwë,” and the task was to “Write a story--any length--about this character, developing a strong personality for her.” The prompt encourages people to think through the many different types of “strengths” women can have and notes that “there are still many women who receive only glancing acknowledgment or appear only as "footnote" characters--regardless, their influence on their husbands, children, and the world around them is undeniable.” The challenge allows writers to explore major canon characters if they wish, or to explore the “footnote” characters.

A non-fiction example of a fan work focusing on female characters in the Silmarillion is Elleth’s “Textual Ghosts Project” which documents 616 characters, all *unnamed* female characters who can be “inferred” to exist (specifically the wives and mothers of named male characters). Elleth explains her process and notes that her project focuses on the “‘known unknowns,’ female characters readers can assume existed but who are not named,” while pointing out that given the patrilineal genealogies Tolkien created that there must be “‘unknown unknowns’ that is, daughters, sisters, aunts and other female relations who were completely erased (not even recorded as [x number of] daughters), further upping the tally of invisible women” (n.p.).

Elleth’s approach in the “Textual Ghosts Project” is similar to that developed by theater scholars: the concept of looking at the “absent characters” who are defined as characters who are “introduced in stage directions or briefly mentioned in dialogue who have no speaking parts and do not otherwise manifest their presence” in the plays (Smidt).⁶ This concept seems appropriate given that the working drafts that CJRT organizes and comments upon in the edited volumes not only expand the numbers of characters and tales of Middle-earth and contain, in some cases, alternative information about or different story arcs/endings JRRT considered for some of the major characters (Éowyn, Galadriel, Lúthien); the drafts also introduce a number of absent female characters who are named but who are only slightly, if at all, developed. They too are absent, footnote, or ghost, characters.

I am looking forward to the 20th anniversary celebration of the Silmarillion Writers Guild, Mereth Aderfad, on July 19, 2025. The celebration will be a hybrid event bringing together presentations on “meta, research, and scholarship” with “fanworks crafted around the same topic” (the deadline for proposals is January 15, 2025). I can only hope that academia, with its own approach to time and pacing, will work on catching up to fandom. Seventy years after The Fellowship of the Ring was published in 1954, only one academic anthology on women and Tolkien exists AFAIK: Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie Donovan’s, Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien which was published in 2015.⁷

I believe that Christopher Tolkien’s work will play a significant role changing this situation in the near future, as the tenth anniversary of the publication of Perilous and Fair nears. Cami Agan, Clare Moore, and I are helping organize the Mythopoeic Society’s Online Midsummer Seminar, “More Perilous and Fair: Women in Mythopoeic Fantasy”; in addition Cami and Clare are co-editing an anthology ‘Great Heart and Strength:’ New Essays on Women and Gender in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien (the deadline for proposals is March 15, 2025).

Those who are interested in joining these feminist projects, or in creating still others to share with us, are cordially invited to join us. Thank you!

Works Cited

Barker, Martin. "On Being a 1960s Tolkien Reader." From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, edited by Ernest Mathijs and Murray Pomerance, Rodopi, 2006, pp. 81-99. Contemporary Cinema 3.

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

Drout, Michael D. C. “The Influence of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Masculinist Medievalism.” Medieval Feminist Newsletter, 22, 1996, pp. 26-27. Link.

Elleth. “The Textual Ghosts Project.” The Silmarillion Writers’ Guild. Posted 12 Dec. 2020; updated on 25 Feb. 2021. Link

Felagund, Dawn. “The Inequality Prototype: Gender, Inequality, and the Valar in Tolkien’s Silmarillion.” The Silmarillion Writers’ Guild. Link. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.

Fimi, Dimitra. Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits, Palgrave, 2009.

Flieger, Verlyn. “The Arch and the Keystone.” Mythlore, vol. 38, no. 1, article 3, 2019, pp. 5-17, Link.

Flieger, Verlyn. “But what did he really mean?” Tolkien Studies, vol. 11, 2014, pp. 149-66.

Franson, Craig. “The Great Italian Post-Fascist Tolkien Takeover.” Interview by Angelo Boccato. Tribune Magazine. 31 Oct. 2022. Link.

Frederick, Candice, and Sam McBride. Women Among the Inklings: Gender, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, Greenwood, 2021. Publisher Link. Review.

“History.” Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship. Link. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.

Johanson, Emil. “Middle-earth in Numbers: The Statistics of LOTR Project.” LOTR Project, Link. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.

Kane, Douglas Charles. Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion. Leihigh UP, 2011.

Kim, Sue. "Beyond Black and White: Race and Postmodernism in The Lord of the Rings Film,” Hughes, pp. 875-907.

Last, John. “How ‘Hobbit Camps’ Rebirthed Italian Fascism.” Atlas Obscura, 3 Oct. 2017, Link.

Tolkien, J. R. R. Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien. George Allen and Unwin, 1981.

Medieval Feminist Forum (MFF). Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship. Link. Acceessed 25 Nov. 2024.

Reid, Robin Anne. "The History of Scholarship on Female Characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium: A Feminist Bibliography." In Croft and Donovan, pp. 13-40.

Reid, Robin Anne. “Queen Berúthiel is a Childless Cat Lady!” Writing from Ithilien, 2 Nov. 2024, Link.

Ripp, Joseph. "Middle America Meets Middle-Earth: American Discussion and Readership of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, 1965-1969." Book History, vol. 8, 2005, pp. 356-86. Link.

Smidt, Kristian. “Shakespeare’s Absent Characters.” English Studies, vol. 61, iss. 5, 1980, pp. 397–407, Link.

“Strong Women.” The Silmarillion Writers’ Guild. Sept. 2025. Link.

Walmsley, Nigel. “Tolkien and the ‘60s.” J. R. R. Tolkien: This Far Land, edited by Robert Giddings. Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1983 (Great Britain), 1984 (US), pp. 73-86.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Hogarth Press, 1929. An e-version can be found at this Link to Project Gutenberg Australia.

1. There are three additional publications that fall into the category of “posthumous publications,” that were published between 2021-2023, but they are not edited by Christopher Tolkien: ublications edited by others: The Nature of Middle-earth. Ed. Carl Hostetter, The Fall of Númenor. Ed. Brian Sibley, and The Battle of Maldon Ed. Peter Grybauskas. I have not had a chance to look at these, so am putting them here until I can review them. For a comprehensive list of major works published by “Tolkien” (JRRT and CJRT), see the excellent and chronologically organized Books by J. R. R. Tolkien (Charles Noad) maintained at the Tolkien Society website.

2. Expand in longer work about how the scholarship on women and Tolkien expanded greatly from 2000 on, especially after the release of Peter Jackson’s live-action films (Fimi, Reid)

3. While I focus on writing/text-based works in this project, I know that fans also do fan art, fan vids, and create costumes, but those are areas of fandom that I am not familiar with and so cannot speak to. I encourage those who are to do so!

4. Another fantastic quote from this essay which I highly recommend that I am pretty sure I want to use in the larger project: “The films, like postmodernism itself, both invoke and deny the discourses and politics of race, while sweeping other salient and concrete issues under the rug. What we need to do, in the spirit of Tolkien or not, is to reclaim both freedom of interpretation (applicability) as well as some sort of ethical, moral, and/or political ground upon which to stand” (875-6).

5. When expanding this, get demographic data from Dawn Felagund’s Fanfiction Survey!

6. Need to get page number eventually, but don’t really want to pay $53 for it at the moment. Quote is from Wikipedia entry which I don’t trust without finding it in the original, but I may be able to find another more easily accessible essay on the same topic!

7. Some Inklings scholars may bring up Candace Fredrick’s and Sam McBride’s Women Among the Inklings: Gender, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams – published as part of Greenwood Press’s Contributions in Women’s Studies, published in 2001. But this book, despite its series publication, is not about women (and not really a “feminist approach” by my definition anyway): the two authors describe it as filling a “missing component in the library of Inklings books [which is] the gender study, an examination of their lives and writings that emphasizes their concepts of masculine and feminine.” (xi). Only one of their six research questions (as listed in the Introduction) focuses on women (OK three questions in that one bulleted item): the rest all focus on the Inklings and their ideas about “women.” Will be quoting and applying Virginia Woolf’s and all the books by MEN on WOMEN!