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The Forgotten Women of Middle-earth
Aug. 21st, 2008 01:10 pmOnly the introduction of my Mythcon paper got written out in full - the rest was delivered from notes - and for the benefit of those who weren't at Mythcon, and those who were there but not at the paper (for it did get crowded, and it was early on the first day while people were still arriving and checking in), here's that introduction.
The answer to the question is, forgotten by Candice Fredrick and Sam McBride. Seven years ago, they published a book titled Women Among the Inklings, intended as a frank look at the lives and work of Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams through the lens of turn-of-this-century Christian feminism. I gave this book a fairly positive review at the time, feeling that despite its flaws it was usefully provocative on some important questions. With the passage of time I've become more dismayed at its tendentiousness, particularly in the biographical sections.
But the authors' forgetfulness lies in the material on women in the authors' work. Here they treat Tolkien quite differently from his fellow Inklings. Frederik and McBride are diligent in tracking down and discussing every female character, no matter how minor, in the published fiction of Lewis and Williams. But their coverage of Tolkien is limited to The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, where they make the expected critiques of Éowyn, Galadriel, and Arwen, and are unfairly dismissive of Lúthien - of whom more later.
This, of course, omits not only such interesting characters as the Fairy Queen in Smith of Wootton Major, but the entirely of Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-earth. There is no excuse for this. The History of Middle-earth, after 14 years of publishing gestation, had finished appearing five years before Frederik and McBride's book was published, and by this time Unfinished Tales was 21 years old. Whether Frederik and McBride were too intimidated by Tolkien's posthumous output to consider it, or whether they merely assumed it could contain nothing of significance I do not know. But as a result they missed Tolkien's most interesting writing on women and male-female relationships, in particular his two most interesting female characters.
How many of you know the name Erendis? Andreth? [About half did.] If so, you're way ahead of Candice Frederik and Sam McBride. These not-particularly feminine-sounding collections of onomastic phonemes identify the Forgotten Women of Middle-earth, and their fascinating stories - the most interesting and subtle, in my opinion, and possibly Christopher Tolkien's, that J.R.R. Tolkien ever contributed to his legendarium, and far more feminist in sensibility than readers of The Lord of the Rings might be inclined to credit Tolkien for.
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This session is called "The Forgotten Women of Middle-earth" and our first question has to be, forgotten by whom? For there are those, many no doubt in this room, who know everything there is to be known about even the obscurer characters of Tolkien's legendarium.The answer to the question is, forgotten by Candice Fredrick and Sam McBride. Seven years ago, they published a book titled Women Among the Inklings, intended as a frank look at the lives and work of Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams through the lens of turn-of-this-century Christian feminism. I gave this book a fairly positive review at the time, feeling that despite its flaws it was usefully provocative on some important questions. With the passage of time I've become more dismayed at its tendentiousness, particularly in the biographical sections.
But the authors' forgetfulness lies in the material on women in the authors' work. Here they treat Tolkien quite differently from his fellow Inklings. Frederik and McBride are diligent in tracking down and discussing every female character, no matter how minor, in the published fiction of Lewis and Williams. But their coverage of Tolkien is limited to The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, where they make the expected critiques of Éowyn, Galadriel, and Arwen, and are unfairly dismissive of Lúthien - of whom more later.
This, of course, omits not only such interesting characters as the Fairy Queen in Smith of Wootton Major, but the entirely of Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-earth. There is no excuse for this. The History of Middle-earth, after 14 years of publishing gestation, had finished appearing five years before Frederik and McBride's book was published, and by this time Unfinished Tales was 21 years old. Whether Frederik and McBride were too intimidated by Tolkien's posthumous output to consider it, or whether they merely assumed it could contain nothing of significance I do not know. But as a result they missed Tolkien's most interesting writing on women and male-female relationships, in particular his two most interesting female characters.
How many of you know the name Erendis? Andreth? [About half did.] If so, you're way ahead of Candice Frederik and Sam McBride. These not-particularly feminine-sounding collections of onomastic phonemes identify the Forgotten Women of Middle-earth, and their fascinating stories - the most interesting and subtle, in my opinion, and possibly Christopher Tolkien's, that J.R.R. Tolkien ever contributed to his legendarium, and far more feminist in sensibility than readers of The Lord of the Rings might be inclined to credit Tolkien for.
*
And how about you? Do you know these names, and where to find them, and would you like to read more?
