I don't like Foz Meadows or agree much with her brand of feminism, but I think she's got a point here .
That is, you're writing in a fandom whose canon is -- by its author's choice -- almost uniquely devoid of female characters. And by "uniquely devoid" I mean that no war in history and no epic poem in the history of literature has had so few and so limited female roles.
Historic wars have camp followers and vivandieres and colonels' ladies and the Duchess of Richmond and the Countess of Derby and Artemisia of Halicarnassus and Eleanor of Aquitaine and Laskarina Bouboulina and Grace Hopper and the Night Witches and the women of SOE and Bletchley and the WRNS and VADs and women who grab pitchforks to defend their homes and wives, mothers and sisters who mourn the fallen. They have the mademoiselle from Armentieres and Judy O'Grady and Mary Seacole and James Miranda Barry and a whole mess of unclassified and unclassifiable women, some of whom are sewing shrouds for soldiers and some of whom are digging for victory and some of whom are in the process of waking up and finding they are strong. That was the history that Tolkien either studied or lived through and chose not to put into LOTR (I can't really talk about the Silmarillion because I read it once, many years ago, and didn't get into it.)
And as for epic poems - well, you've got Maedh of Connaught getting her period at quite the most inconvenient moment, and Athena, Aphrodite and Hera butting in wherever they can cause the most trouble; you've got Helen and Hekabe and Juturna and Grendel's Mother and Penthesilea and Briseis and Chriseis and Calypso and Circe and Cressida and, again, various mothers, sisters and wives (or sisters, cousins and aunts, if you prefer).
But what Tolkien does is strip all of that complexity and variety out and what we've got are pure and very limited archetypes without much wiggle room - isn't it odd the way only two of the Fellowship (nine blokes, off to war together) have any hint of a "girl back home", none of them talk about it, they don't even write home to their mothers! (Have any of them got mothers? I mean, we get Aragorn's mother prematurely offed at 50 or so, despite being from a line which regularly reaches 200, we've got Frodo's mother drowned, we've got Bilbo's mother dying before he's fifty in circumstances which lead Gandalf to refer to her as "my poor Belladonna", Boromir's mother died of pining for the fjords, Sam's mother has vanished mysteriously from the scene....)
That is, I think there are a lot of underlying biases in effect, some of them internalised, but the original erasure of women was Tolkien's choice* and putting them back is an equally legitimate choice and in some respects more naturalistic
*In the same way as it was his and Lewis's choice to stop the Oxford University literature syllabus at 1832 and so erase the Brontes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and a whole host of others.
no subject
That is, you're writing in a fandom whose canon is -- by its author's choice -- almost uniquely devoid of female characters. And by "uniquely devoid" I mean that no war in history and no epic poem in the history of literature has had so few and so limited female roles.
Historic wars have camp followers and vivandieres and colonels' ladies and the Duchess of Richmond and the Countess of Derby and Artemisia of Halicarnassus and Eleanor of Aquitaine and Laskarina Bouboulina and Grace Hopper and the Night Witches and the women of SOE and Bletchley and the WRNS and VADs and women who grab pitchforks to defend their homes and wives, mothers and sisters who mourn the fallen. They have the mademoiselle from Armentieres and Judy O'Grady and Mary Seacole and James Miranda Barry and a whole mess of unclassified and unclassifiable women, some of whom are sewing shrouds for soldiers and some of whom are digging for victory and some of whom are in the process of waking up and finding they are strong. That was the history that Tolkien either studied or lived through and chose not to put into LOTR (I can't really talk about the Silmarillion because I read it once, many years ago, and didn't get into it.)
And as for epic poems - well, you've got Maedh of Connaught getting her period at quite the most inconvenient moment, and Athena, Aphrodite and Hera butting in wherever they can cause the most trouble; you've got Helen and Hekabe and Juturna and Grendel's Mother and Penthesilea and Briseis and Chriseis and Calypso and Circe and Cressida and, again, various mothers, sisters and wives (or sisters, cousins and aunts, if you prefer).
But what Tolkien does is strip all of that complexity and variety out and what we've got are pure and very limited archetypes without much wiggle room - isn't it odd the way only two of the Fellowship (nine blokes, off to war together) have any hint of a "girl back home", none of them talk about it, they don't even write home to their mothers! (Have any of them got mothers? I mean, we get Aragorn's mother prematurely offed at 50 or so, despite being from a line which regularly reaches 200, we've got Frodo's mother drowned, we've got Bilbo's mother dying before he's fifty in circumstances which lead Gandalf to refer to her as "my poor Belladonna", Boromir's mother died of pining for the fjords, Sam's mother has vanished mysteriously from the scene....)
That is, I think there are a lot of underlying biases in effect, some of them internalised, but the original erasure of women was Tolkien's choice* and putting them back is an equally legitimate choice and in some respects more naturalistic
*In the same way as it was his and Lewis's choice to stop the Oxford University literature syllabus at 1832 and so erase the Brontes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and a whole host of others.