War of the Rohirrim & Hollywood "Feminism"

The "woman problem" isn't just Tolkien's, and the "problem" isn't [and never has been] "women"

Dec 23, 2024

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

I haven’t seen much buzz about the War of the Rohirrim although I did find this article about the studio rushing it into production/release in order to keep the movie rights for future live-action films of interest.

However, a recent article on the film caught my eye and led to this post which is going to be another process piece thinking through some of the implications and connections:

Tanya Gold’s review/commentary1 on The War of The Rohirrim, “Tolkien doesn’t have a ‘women problem’ – no matter what Hollywood thinks.”

The War of the Rohirrim is the latest film to try to correct the writer’s ‘misogyny’. It grotesquely misunderstands the man and his work

But this is Hollywood feminism, so Hera looks, above all things, like a pencil-drawn Anglo-Saxon sex-worker. She has huge eyes, tiny lips and is, well, stacked. Her leg armour looks like white silk stockings; her hair shines well for a woman locked in Helm’s Deep for a winter without shampoo. There is another heroine: the shield maiden Olwyn but she is menopausal, and we will be dead before Hollywood makes a leading lady of her. It’s Suffragette (2015) all over again: Hollywood will honour a politicised laundress. But – as played by Carey Mulligan – she will be the world’s hottest politicised laundress, and the hotness, not the laundry, is the point of her. They can’t help themselves.2

I agree with much of what Gold says about the female characters in Rings, and in Tolkien, although I always recommend John Rateliff’s excellent discussion of Tolkien’s women students (and the women in his life, generally) in order to debunk the popular idea (which is probably due large to Humphrey Carpenter and the early scholarship on Tolkien) that his life was spent in entirely “man’s spaces,” an idea that is a part of the “man of his time” stereotype and an idea that wipes the actual women out of the story (another all-too common problem in all partriarchal spaces).3

More recent scholarship has put a dent in the “man of his time” excuse (which far too many people grasp at to defend him). For a good example, see Melissa McCrory Hatcher’s excellent essay in Mythlore (open-access!):4

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 (44).

“Presentism” which is what Hatcher, and I am talking about here, is the assumption that the “present” is inherently better than the past, i.e. that “sexism” was always/only in the past.5 Yes, there was, I know because I was alive during some of that past, but there were also women’s and feminist movements *in the past* which have rarely made it into the official HIStories because, see above, patriarchal assumptions about whose stories count.

I also totally agree about the “Hollywood feminist” representation (and let’s keep in mind just who dominates the industry [newsflash: it’s not feminists!])! The claim that somehow all of Hollywood has been infected [and is infecting the world] with the “woke mind virus” runs up against a shitload of documentation and statistics gathered over the years (I especially like the work being done by the Geena Davis Institute!). And I know that none of that sort of evidence will make the least dent in the FRE’s claims.

But if I had the power to make official proclamations, I would proclaim that in 2024, in the United States, where the regimes in many christofascist states have been working for decades, to destroy women’s rights (and the civil rights of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people), we don’t get to dismiss sexism as only a problem of the past that our enlightened present has overcome. The extent to which those state regimes will be aided and abetted by the by the Mump regime is yet to be seen.

But the other part of Gold’s article that caught my eye was the claim about Tolkien not having a “women problem” — because that phrase refers to a very specific “problem” that has been the focus of historians (and feminists, including feminist historians, an academic discipline which did not exist before the 1970s—I graduated from high school and started college in 1973 btw, so I remember!

“The woman question” [sometimes known as “the woman problem”]

Delap, Lucy. “The ‘Woman Question’ and the Origins of Feminism.” The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought. Ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys. Cambridge UP, 2011, pp. 319–348. The Cambridge History of Political Thought.

This chapter situates the ‘woman question’ as an expansive and flourishing set of debates within political, literary and social thought in the nineteenth century. These debates represented an interrogation of the basic components of liberal and republican political argument – citizenship, property, access to the public sphere and political virtue. To talk of the ‘woman question’ is perhaps misleading, because there were many such ‘questions’. To name but a few, there were questions of single (or ‘surplus’) women, of the status of married women, of authority and the ‘struggle for the breeches’ in plebeian culture, of political rights, of professional status, of rationality, and of education. This chapter gives a schematic overview of the century, and cannot possibly do justice to the complex debates unfolding in each national context. I aim therefore to show the main currents of argument in Europe and the United States, pointing to national distinctiveness and divergence as well as shared transnational arguments and emphases. As a result, the treatment is only loosely chronological; arguments are grouped together thematically and different dimensions of the ‘woman question’ are discussed in turn. I outline some historiographical trends in examining ‘woman question’ debates, and point to the literature available to those seeking more concrete information. Specific campaigns that were highly influential for the women's movement (concerning property, child custody, higher education, prostitution or suffrage) can only be mentioned briefly, for the ‘woman question’ was a broader discourse than the summed activism of the ‘women's movement’. It represented a space for political argument in which the nature, implications and origins of sexual difference might be debated, and was regarded as intensely significant for both its symbolic and its practical import. In John Ruskin's words, ‘There never was a time when wilder words were spoken, or more vain imagination permitted, respecting this question – quite vital to all social happiness. The relations of the womanly to the manly nature, their different capacities of intellect or of virtue, seem never to have been yet measured with entire consent’ (Ruskin n.d. [1865], p. 49).

Virginia Woolf [1882-1941] was pointing to the problem during her lifetime (which remember, was also during Tolkien’s lifetime [1892-1973]) of a whole fucking shitload of MEN writing about the “woman problem.” I also know of women writers who wrote about the man problem, but I only learned about those from reading feminist work by Joanna Russ, Dale Spender, and then eventually Gilbert & Gubar’s scholarship.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Diamond Books, 2024

The British Museum was another department of the factory. The swing-doors swung open; and there one stood under the vast dome, as if one were a thought in the huge bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names. One went to the counter; one took a slip of paper; one opened a volume of the catalogue, and. . . . .the five dots here indicate five separate minutes of stupefaction, wonder and bewilderment. Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? Here had I come with a notebook and a pencil proposing to spend a morning reading, supposing that at the end of the morning I should have transferred the truth to my notebook. But I should need to be a herd of elephants, I thought, and a wilderness of spiders, desperately referring to the animals that are reputed longest lived and most multitudinously eyed, to cope with all this. I should need claws of steel and beak of brass even to penetrate the husk. How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper? I asked myself, and in despair began running my eye up and down the long list of titles. Even the names of the books gave me food for thought. Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—woman, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light- fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women. Some of these books were, on the face of it, frivolous and facetious; but many, on the other hand, were serious and prophetic, moral and hortatory. Merely to read the titles suggested innumerable schoolmasters, innumerable clergymen mounting their platforms and pulpits and holding forth with a loquacity which far exceeded the hour usually allotted to such discourse on this one subject. It was a most strange phenomenon; and apparently—here I consulted the letter M—one confined to the male sex. Women do not write books about men—a fact that I could not help welcoming with relief, for if I had first to read all that men have written about women, then all that women have written about men, the aloe that flowers once in a hundred years would flower twice before I could set pen to paper. So, making a perfectly arbitrary choice of a dozen volumes or so, I sent my slips of paper to lie in the wire tray, and waited in my stall, among the other seekers for the essential oil of truth.
What could be the reason, then, of this curious disparity, I wondered, drawing cartwheels on the slips of paper provided by the British taxpayer for other purposes. Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women? (27)

And that leads to my pet peeve with the ubiquitous assumption that that sexism or misogyny is an individual person’s feelings/thoughts/intentions, i.e. “Tolkien’s” misogyny (as opposed to systems and structures that have existed for centuries and operate as the “norm.” This assumption is shown by people (including some feminists!) who simply use words like “feminist,” “sexist,” etc. without thinking they need to be defined. [And here’s where those of us who argue for the need for definitions that do more than talk about feelings often get told we’re elitists.]

And that’s where we need feminist philosophy and theory to, among other things, provide definitions of terms like “patriarchy,” “sexism,” and “misogyny” that are not “this man over here hates women.”6

And that brings me to Kate Manne’s work!

Manne, Kate. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford UP, 2018.

Manne has a Substack, “More to Hate,” which I can definitely recommend, but the exerpt below is from Down Girl.

Sexism vs. Misogyny

I propose taking sexism to be the branch of patriarchal ideology that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal social order, and misogyny as the system that polices and enforces its governing norms and expectations. So sexism is scientific; misogyny is moralistic. And a patriarchal order has a hegemonic quality. Over the course of these three chapters, which theorize the ‘logic’ of misogyny, I argue that my analysis has several important theoretical and practical advantages. Here are the main benefits I argue accrue to my analysis, in the order in which I tout them:
It enables us to understand misogyny as a relatively unmysterious, and epistemologically accessible, phenomenon, as compared with the naive conception, which threatens to make a mystery of misogyny--epistemologically, psychologically, and metaphysically speaking.
It enables us to understand misogyny as a natural and central manifestation of patriarchal ideology, as opposed to being a relatively marginal, and not inherently political, phenomenon.
It leaves room for the diverse range of ways misogyny works on girls and women given their intersectional identities, in terms of the quality, quantity, intensity, experience, and impact of the hostility, as well as the agents and social mechanisms by means of which it is delivered. Misogyny may also involve multiple compounding forms of misogyny if she is (say) subject to different parallel systems of male dominance (depending, again, on other intersecting social factors), or required to play incompatible roles in virtue of multiple social positions which she occupies simultaneously.
It enables us to understand misogyny as a systematic social phenomenon, by focusing on the hostile reactions women face in navigating the social world, rather than the ultimate psychological bases for these reactions. Such hostility need not have an immediate basis in individual agents’ psychologies whatsoever. Institutions and other social environments can also be differentially forbidding, “chilly,” or hostile toward women.
It yields an extension for the term “misogyny” broadly in keeping with recent “grass-roots” semantic activism, which has already pushed the term’s usage, and to some extent its dictionary definition, in this more promising direction. It also helps to explain what various apparently disparate cases have distinctively in common.
It delivers plausible answers to many of the questions about misogyny that have been controversial recently, in the wake of some such cases.
It enables us to draw a clean contrast between misogyny and sexism. In chapter 4, I go on to consider one central substantive dynamic of misogyny under a white heteropatriarchal order in the milieux on which I focus. In this economy of moral goods, women are obligated to give to him, not to ask, and expected to feel indebted and grateful, rather than entitled. This is especially the case with respect to characteristically moral goods: attention, care, sympathy, respect, adminration, and nurturing. (Manne, 20-21).

Melissa McCrory Hatcher (2007)“Finding Woman’s Role in The Lord of the Rings”

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. 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 21^st 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.

I subscribe to a number of feminist Substacks but have the strong sense that too many of the women writing these well-written, passionate, and intelligent posts are re-inventing wheels that I remember from my first forays into feminism in the early 1980s (reading the feminists who published in the 1960s, 1970s, and then eventually ones from even earlier [Charlotte Perkins Gilman being one of the outstanding ones], and I remember my surprise as my reading took me into more of the histories of feminisms in the U.S. and elsewhere. I remember thinking just like Celeste Davis does as described in her two-part series: “Women tell other women that they are not crazy, dumb, or inferior: a 600-year history.”

Matriarchal Blessing

Women tell other women that they are not crazy, dumb or inferior: a 600 year history. Part 1.

A few years ago I was in a spiritual director training program so I could learn to help people transitioning out of Mormonism…

18 days ago · 326 likes · 48 comments · Celeste Davis

Matriarchal Blessing

Women tell other women that they are not crazy, dumb or inferior: a 600 year history. Part 2.

I recently started writing some of the scripts for Breaking Down Patriarchy’s YouTube series Patriarchy 101…

11 days ago · 193 likes · 27 comments · Celeste Davis

Similar work has been and is being done on “racism,” “bigotry,” “systemic racism,” “aversive racism,” etc. And, of course on how the intersections between these systems intersect and affect some people more than others. I provide some links to “Multi-Disciplinary Critical Race Scholarship” in my bibliography on racisms and “Tolkien.”

Brian Walter

Dec 23

So pleased to see Kate Manne’s definition of misogyny from “Down Girl” brought in at the end. Have quoted the “law enforcement branch of the patriarchy” many times in class and in personal conversations since its publication — such a useful insight. Thank you!

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