1

Sexism in Tolkien: A Summary

Made even more popular by Peter Jackson’s adaptations,

Tolkien’s world has captured people’s excitement and imaginations

for decades. The Lord of the Rings has become quintessential fantasy

literature for every young reader growing up, and I personally

fell in love with his works at a young age. As one of the most

beloved writers of the 20th century, however, the problems in

Tolkien’s writing are often ignored, downplayed, or excused.

Tolkien was a sexist, and the amount of apologism surrounding his

works doesn’t change that fact.

A good place to begin would be where I began as a child,

picking up the biggest book at my disposal and sitting down,

captured into the world of The Hobbit. However, even as a child,

the sexism in The Hobbit was apparent to me with one major factor.

There are no women in the book. The most we get is a mention of

Bilbo’s mother, Belladonna Took, at the very beginning, used to

explain why Bilbo’s personality is the way it is (as her family

was a bit strange). The narrative even goes on to say “Not that

Belladonna Took had any adventures after she became Mrs. Bungo

2

Baggins” (The Hobbit 4). By modern feminist standards the

structure of that sentence- implying that it’s impossible for

Belladonna Took to do anything after her marriage- is bad enough.

It’s damning evidence that she is the only woman mentioned in The

Hobbit.

And yet not everyone sees it that way. Whether it is

people’s misguided attempt to justify Tolkien’s problematic

behavior or an influence of society’s push towards devaluing any

complaint a woman might have is hard to say, but I believe it to

be a combination of both. When people point out that there are no

woman at all in the The Hobbit, a common response is that it is a

boy’s tale, and that Tolkien shouldn’t have to force

representation into his story. What is, I dare ask, a “boy’s

tale?” What makes something solely for boys to enjoy (and

possibly the odd girl, if she is willing to accept that she is

not wanted in this fantasy world).

Another justification is that he wrote the story for his

children, and so he wasn’t thinking about including girls. Well,

Tolkien was the father of a little girl, and I think it’s pretty

3

poor form of him to have the only inclusion of women in the book

be little things like “He was a descendent of Girion, Lord of

Dale, whose wife and child escaped down the Running River from

the ruin long ago” when you’re writing stories for your daughter

as well as your sons (The Hobbit 288). Claiming Tolkien is off

the hook for creating a story for children that excludes half of

all children because it’s a “boy’s tale” is enforcing harmful

stereotypes that only boys can like swords and girls must go over

there and play with dresses and dolls.

While The Hobbit has no women except the barest mention of

the mother of the protagonist, The Lord of the Rings is a different

story. There are very few women that play major roles, and yet

the ones there are are often cited against any claims that

Tolkien is sexist. Look, these people like to claim, he may not

have included many women, but the ones he did are strong. Without

exception, however, the women in his most popular work are not

given equal treatment to his male characters.

I’ll start with the character Éowyn, the woman who is most

commonly cited for proof that Tolkien can write women. She is a

4

woman of the country of Rohan, which has a long tradition of

having their women be shieldmaidens, a kind of female warrior.

Éowyn is the niece of the King that does not want her to fight,

which is all her desire is. She wants to be a hero. Men and women

alike point to her decision to ignore her liege and ride into the

battlefield as written to be feminist, as a declaration of, look,

women can fight, see, Éowyn’s fighting. Many of the same women

who love that Éowyn is taking such initiative hate that at the

end of the book she puts down her weapons, deciding a life of

peace, marriage, and being a healer is for her.

Éowyn’s words on page 271 of The Two Towers, “I will be a

shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take

joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love

all things that grow and are not barren” are not an indicator of

her weakness, but of her growth as a character. Earlier in the

book she wanted to be loved by Aragorn, not because she loved

him, but so that she might be a Queen, a point missed by many

fans (including Peter Jackson). Now she is putting down her

weapons, her bloodlust, and being at peace with herself.

5

A rather good narrative, you might say. Except for one

thing. Éowyn is the only woman in The Lord of the Rings to wield a

sword. She is the only shieldmaiden we meet, the only

representation of a fighting woman, and while her putting down

her blade at the end of the trilogy is the right choice for her,

it was a choice that, without any other examples of women

continuing to fight because it was what they wanted, showed

generations of young female readers that being a warrior woman is

not something that lasts. It shows those young women reading that

a woman fighting is the exception rather than the rule, that they

must be above and beyond to quality on the same level as every

man does. For example, it said in The Histories of Middle Earth that

Galadriel takes part in the First Kinslaying (slaughter of Elves

against other Elves) and is the only woman to do so, and she was

the only woman in The Silmarillion to stand with ‘the princes’ on

pages 82-83.

The motivations behind the creation of Éowyn were not pure,

either. It has long been speculated that Éowyn was created to

change up Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which had the plot twist of

having a character with a prophecy about how no man born of a

6

woman could kill him- but Macbeth was born via C-section.

Apparently Tolkien found that dissatisfactory so included his own

prophecy spoken by Glorfindel, the character that Arwen replaced

in the still sexist, but less so, adaptation of The Lord of the Rings

by Peter Jackson. “Not by the hand of men will he fall” said

Glorfindel about the Witch-king on page 373 of appendix A of The

Lord of the Rings, and it is Éowyn who kills the Witch-king, with the

help of a hobbit, technically also not a man. It says a lot that

Tolkien thinks the Witch-king being killed by a woman is less

likely than someone born of a C-section showing up and killing

the bad guy.

Éowyn is an outlier in the formula that Tolkien usually sets

up for his women, with few exceptions. For instance, Haleth from

The Silmarillion becomes a great female leader. She never marries or

has children, however, and while you might say, isn’t that an

example of progessiveness on Tolkien’s part? I rather think

Tolkien is implying that if she had married she would have lost

the leadership, so she didn’t, as well as giving her male traits

in the way she carries herself- in Tolkien’s world, if a woman is

7

in power, she is not feminine. This translates directly to my

next point, as Galadriel exemplifies that.

Galadriel is a perfect example of the way the majority of

women in Tolkien’s works are treated. She is the Lady of

Lothlórien, one of the most powerful Elves in The Lord of the Rings

trilogy and in the Legendarium (a term used to describe Tolkien’s

works about his fantasy world as a whole). She is a woman with

strong ambitions, with strong wants, and therefore is unfailingly

described as manly and unfeminine. For Galadriel is “no less tall

than the Lord” and when she speaks her voice is “clear and

musical, but deeper than woman’s wont” (The Fellowship of the

Ring 419). Galadriel, in the main text of The Lord of the Rings, is

almost entirely flawless. She is put on a pedestal, and her

beauty and otherworldliness, coming as most from her womanhood as

it does of her Elven nature, is unapproachable. Her looks are

such an overwhelming trait of hers that Gimli finds her so lovely

that he falls in love with her, to the point where he and Éomer

almost come to blows because Éomer thinks Arwen is more beautiful

than Galadriel.

8

Galadriel is one woman in a long line of Tolkien women whose

role is to stand on a pedestal and be inspirational to the men.

She gifts the Phial of Galadriel to Frodo, and the light of that,

taken from the evening star and as pure as can be, is unambiguous

in its representation of good. Galadriel lived for a time with

Melian, a Maiar (a godlike being similar to Gandalf, more

powerful than Elves), and Melian had much of the same symbolism

attached to her. Melian married an Elf, Thingol, and together

they ruled the kingdom of Doriath. More accurately you might say

that he ruled and she kept up the Girdle of Melian, the magical

fortification that protected the entire nation from evil. Melian

is presented as a symbol of good and purity that men look up to,

maybe asking for advice but never relating to her.

However, Galadriel in The Silmarillion did do wrong- and that’s

why she is given those manly characteristics I spoke about. She

took part in a Kinslaying and wants for power, something

unwomanly and also, in Tolkien’s works, a bad thing to do in

general. Women who attempt to do anything but stand on the

pedestal Tolkien puts in their feet are punished, and sometimes

harshly. The tale of Erendis and Aldarion demonstrates this.

9

Erendis is a woman who loved a mariner, the Prince of

Númenor, and grows increasingly more upset the longer he spends

away from her. When she complains, he looks at her like a nag,

and the narrative shapes around her to paint her as a bad woman,

a shrew (the old shrew character is a Tolkien staple, with both

Lobelia Sackville-Baggins and the old healer Ioreth, showing that

old woman are not respected but are sources of comedy). There is

little sympathy for the woman that ages faster than her husband,

and yet instead of spending what time he can with her he goes out

to see and spends years and years away from his family. Erendis

surrounds herself with women and keeps their daughter Ancalimë by

her side, but her daughter grows to love her father more

(Unfinished Tales 206-215).

Aldarion changed the laws of Númenor so that the firstborn

child, not the firstborn son, inherited the throne so his

daughter could. This is commonly regarded a point of

progressivism on Tolkien’s behalf, but I don’t believe it is.

Aldarion did it to anger his estranged wife, and while Tar-

Ancalimë was a fair enough ruler (but not excellent, abandoning

her father’s interests in Middle-earth), the few other ruling

10

queens either didn’t marry, such as Tar-Telperien (reference

Haleth, who also did not marry) or were incompetent, such as Tar-

Vanimeldë, who cared little for ruling and preferred music and

danced (Unfinished Tales 230-232). When Númenor was destroyed,

Gondor never went by absolute primogeniture except when there was

a battle for the throne several thousand years later, and the

claim was refused.

Aredhel, a princess of the Noldorin Elves, suffers a worse

fate than dying in bitterness for liking hunting and wanting to

leave the confines of her brother’s kingdom. She tells her

brother “I am your sister not a servant, and beyond your bounds I

will go as seems good to me” (The Silmarillion 131). For it, she

is entrapped by the Dark Elf Eöl, who she is married to while

being “not wholly unwilling” (The Silmarillion 133). The amount

of people who try to explain away the implications of rape,

forced marriage, and abuse in this passage of Tolkien is frankly

disgusting to witness when it is clear that Aredhel is forced to

live with Eöl- especially evident when, to leave, she must

escape. She is killed by her husband in the end, when her husband

attempted to kill their son.

11

Aredhel wanted to go adventuring and she died for it. But

what about Lúthien, the woman in Tolkien’s works most cited,

besides Éowyn, to be a paradigm of strength and empowerment for

women reading his stories? Put simply, she’s not. Yes, she does

amazing things. She and Beren, the man she loves (like her

mother, Melian, she is a ‘creature’ of beauty and magic who falls

for a male being below their status and loves him inexplicably),

together steal a Silmaril from Morgoth (a stronger Sauron is a

quick way to describe him).

Lúthien does amazing things in this tale, such as cloaking

herself in her own hair to escape her father’s clutches and

dances so beautifully that the Dark Lord Morgoth is put to sleep.

But Tolkien himself wrote some fairly concise words about how we

should view her heroics, probably the most incredible and

difficult achieved by any woman (and almost any person) in the

Legendarium. As Tolkien wrote in Letter #131, “It is Beren the

outlawed mortal who succeeds (with the help of Lúthien, a mere

maiden even if an elf of royalty).” It’s worth mentioning as well

that the ways Lúthien defeats the Dark Lord are all tied to her

femininity, whether it is dancing or singing or flitting around

12

like the Nightingale her moniker Tinúviel means, even

unconsciously using her sexuality in ways that would never occur

if she was a man (Lúthien and the Female Other).

As Dawn Felagund of The Heretic Loremaster says, “We are not

supposed to see a hero who earned her place as a corner in

legends of her people. Nope, she is a mere maiden. She proves to

the rest of us that, on occasion, even the inherently weak can

“help” the privileged and powerful accomplish good things.” This

is probably one of my favorite quotes about Tolkien’s sexism I’ve

ever read, because it’s so true. Even when a woman does something

extraordinary, it is not enough to be valued as highly as a man’s

work, and is just added onto his accomplishments. To Tolkien,

Lúthien will never be anyone but the woman, whose heritage

doesn’t matter because of her gender, that “helped” Beren along

the way.

And why do they steal the Silmaril in the first place?

Because Thingol, Lúthien’s father, refused Lúthien’s hand in

marriage to Beren unless he brought him a Silmaril in his hand.

As Lúthien and the Female Other says, “Lúthien is never really allowed

13

to become human the same way Beren is, because she is presented

as a prize to be won.” Lúthien is never allowed to grow as or

even be her own character because she is, as is every single

woman in Tolkien’s works, defined by her sex. And Tolkien does

that with multiple women, not just Lúthien.

Arwen, her role in the books far reduced from her more

prominent one in the movies, sits in Rivendell and sews a banner

for Aragorn, whose has been given a deal- he isn’t allowed to

marry Arwen until he is King. She is a prize the same way Lúthien

is, the same way even Rosie Cotton the hobbit is for Sam at the

end of The Lord of the Rings. Women are motivations for men in

Tolkien’s works, they are reasons for men to come home at the end

of a war (Tolkien’s own experiences in World War I likely

influenced this writing). The women in Tolkien’s writing are

defined by the men around them, rarely allowed to be their own

complex beings. They are idealized to the point of being

unrelatable and then are given as prizes to the men who did all

the fighting.

14

Tolkien’s writings are a reflection of the man behind them,

and Tolkien himself viewed women as other, and certainly not

equal. He believed that women’s actions were determined by men,

guided by men, and that most of everything they did was for or

because of a man. They are, he says in Letter #43, “Very ready to

enter into all the interests, as far as they can, from ties to

religion, of the young man they are attracted to.” Not only that,

but “How quickly an intelligent woman can be taught, grasp his

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.” Tolkien goes on, talking about how

men and women relate to each other, how when a woman is

interested in a man she really wants to have his children, but I

don’t want or need to quote any more of it here. It’s perfectly

clear how Tolkien viewed woman- as lesser, as an accessory to

men, as people whose lives are defined by them.

This is not just a “man of his time” disposition, either.

The argument that Tolkien was a sexist as his peers is one that

does not stand, as it is both admitting that Tolkien and his

peers are all sexist (his close friend, C.S. Lewis, did bar the

15

character Susan from heaven for wearing lipstick and liking boys)

and it is dismissing Tolkien’s problems without addressing them.

There are no excuses for sexism, especially not on the level

Tolkien displays- sexism in every story he writes, every time

there is no mother named for a character but a father is, every

times a woman exists only to be a man’s wife. His works are

steeped in his beliefs that women exist next to man, their

primary interests invested in him.

As page one of Tyellas’s paper Warm Beds are Good: Sex and Libido

in Tolkien’s Writing talks about, Tolkien was not even a “man of his

time.” He had unusually conservative views on divorce, second

marriages, chastity, and impropriety because of his Catholic

beliefs and privileged upbringing. As Tyellas points out, this

wasn’t the norm in Oxford at the time, where British men had a

rare refuge for gay subculture and was fairly progressive.

Tolkien didn’t have anything to do with said side of Oxford, but

it is proof that not everything fit into the neat little

heteronormative, masculine boxes he wants them too. Even if he

was a so-called “man of his time” it would not be an excuse.

16

Claiming that everyone in a specific time is sexist does not make

a specific individual less so.

His views on sex and marriage clearly influence his works,

both in the rare and arguably somewhat stale romances and the

absence of women in general. His works strictly adhere to the

gender roles set by society, and because of that women who defy

that standard are rare to come by, as the stories are focused on

battles, a typically men’s area, and not the sewing of Arwen’s

banner of the making of lembas by Galadriel, since those are what

Tolkien sees as women’s jobs. His works concentrate on friendship

between men instead (and oftentimes the intensity of these

friendships, because of the lack of women in these stories, are

very homoerotic, to the point that they are easily read for same

sex attraction and feelings).

LotrProject has gathered the statistics of all the characters

and found that eighteen percent of Tolkien characters are female.

This brings us back to my original point, that there are no women

in The Hobbit. The reason that Tolkien’s works do such a terrible

job representing women is not just the badly written women

17

themselves, or that most of them are an idealized model instead

of a character (after all, it’s arguable that some of Tolkien’s

male characters are idealized to fit a certain level of kingship

and masculinity), but that there are so few women to look at.

None of the members of The Fellowship of the Ring are female.

Minor characters met along the way are almost exclusively male.

For a woman to be in a work of Tolkien’s, she must be a man’s

wife, a man’s daughter, a man’s love interest, or, very rarely,

serve a purpose in the plot, as in the cases of Nessa from The

Silmarillion and Ioreth from The Return of the King.

Most of that eighteen percent of women are not major

characters. The only women who play major roles in The Lord of the

Rings are Éowyn and Galadriel. There are none in The Hobbit, and

while The Silmarillion features several prominent women (Lúthien,

Aredhel, Morwen, Haleth), they are either relegated to a side

role or treated badly by the narrative or by Tolkien. I would say

probably ten percent of the women in Tolkien are names that are

dropped once or twice, people that are only given to use as the

mother of someone, the wife of someone. There are many Elves

18

whose entire lives are detailed by the story but all we know of

their wives are their names, such as Fingolfin’s wife Anairë.

There is one group in Tolkien’s works with a gender balance

that is almost equal, and those are the Valar, the race of god

beings that rule under the one higher god, Eru. However, these

female beings are all, with one exception, the wives of the male

ones- and out of the eight most important Valar, only three of

them are female. The female Valar, who are generally weaker, all

engage in traditionally feminine acts. There is a Vala of

weaving, Vairë, a Vala of dancing, Nessa and a Vala, Vána, whose

description is just “the ever-young. This all perfectly fits into

Tolkien’s neat little depictions of traditional gender roles.

A quote that serves well to describe Tolkien’s overall end

of the day view of women is one from page 196 of The Book of Lost

Tales Part 2, “Now the number of women was few because of their

hiding or being stowed by their kinsfolk in secret places of the

city.” Women, to Tolkien, are to be stowed like objects. Stories

should be told about men because men are the people who matter.

Not only this, but the next sentence goes on to say that this

19

death of the women is a tragedy because they were “as fair as the

sun and as lovely as the moon and brighter than the stars.” Not

because they’re people. Not because they’re humans- in this case,

Elves- who deserve a future the same way their male counterparts

do.

In Tolkien’s writing, women are put on pedestals so high no

one can relate to them or are ripped down from them for daring to

be too ambitious. They are objects to be passed from father to

husband, as with Lúthien, and to be treated like objects or like

cattle, to be stowed away when needed. Women are gifts given to

the male heroes at the end of the day or objects of desire for

wicked (and sometimes not so wicked) characters. Their beauty is

their number one trait and supersedes any personality they might

have. Of course, this is when they are included at all- and

eighty two percent of the time, they’re not.

Tolkien’s writing doesn’t comes from a void. It stems from a

flawed man who wrote some of the greatest literature (or at least

some of the most popular) of the past few generations. The

writing in our world represents the viewpoints and opinions of

20

people living in it, and denying and explaining not only the

beliefs of a man, but the works that inspired thousands of people

to become writers. People who spent their childhoods with his

books try to argue with anyone who dares criticize him, but they

need to accept that he was wrong about things, especially his

views of women and, while I didn’t touch on it here, anyone who

isn’t white. Defending him gets us nowhere. Tolkien was sexist,

but as long as we acknowledge and talk about it, there’s nothing

wrong with enjoying his works or the world he created.

21

Work Cited

Felagund, Dawn. Lúthien: A “Mere Maiden”? The Heretic Loremaster. 2010.

Web. 12 April 2015.

Lotrproject. 2014. Web. 12 April 2015.

MZL. Lúthien and the Female Other. Tolkien: Medieval and Modern. 22

April 2011. Web. 12 April 2015.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Book of Lost Tales Part 2. Ed. Christopher Tolkien.

New York: Random House, 1984. Print.

---. The Hobbit. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1937. Print.

---. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. New York: Random

House, 1955. Print.

22

---. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. New York: Random House,

1955. Print.

---. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. New York: Random House, 1954.

Print.

---. The Silmarillion. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: Houghton

Mifflin Harcourt. 1977. Print.

---. Unfinished Tales. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: 1980.

Print.

Tyellas. Warm Beds are Good: Sex and Libido in Tolkien’s Writing. Tolkien

Society, 2003. Print.