Why did Tolkien have so few strong female characters?

Question

It's always been pretty sexist in my opinion, that not a single female was in either the Dwarf party in The Hobbit, or in the Fellowship of the ring! Oh sure, he had a few token female characters, but they had barely any personality, and it was evident that Tolkien just wasn't interested in writing them or giving them meaty roles. Was it just sheer sexism? Did he have something against women?

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

He was a professor of Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a scholar of mediaeval literature.  That was the tradition his mind was trained to, the idioms he thought in.  Instead of just slagging him off, how about you pick up a damn biography of the man?  How about expanding your own repertoire and looking at the literature that inspired him.  Is Beowulf too unrealistic for you?  Try the Song of Roland or El Cid.  You'll see how the times those stories were set in influenced his world building.  He lived and breathed the "Dark Ages."  It was a time when men and women lead separate lives.  Tolkien was telling the men's story - mostly, see the appendices etc.  You think he "drags," imagine if you had to read about what the entwives were up to.  You'd be complaining about that too!  The women are up to all sorts - the ghost of their movements are all over his work.  He doesn't have to tell you everything and if he did you'd complain about him doing so with too many words.  So, either read around Tolkien or abandon his work and go read something you enjoy.  I just don't see what you're getting out of this.

Andrew · Answer

Everything you know about women could be inscribed on a cockstud in Entish.

? · Answer

Barely any personality! - you haven't really read LotR, have you?
What about the formidable Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, the Elf Queen, Galadriel, Eowyn the warrior - that's already more women than you usually get in a heroic saga, which is what LotR is.
Idiot.

Anonymous · Answer

Why is this an issue? Tolkien isn't sexist just because he didn't want to add females on the journey with Frodo or at a party

bluebellbkk · Answer

You know, there is no law forcing anyone to enjoy Tolkien's books. The fact that they are so immensely popular decades after his death shows that people like you are in the minority.

That's entirely up to you. But it does seem a waste of your life to spend so much of it ladling bile over books that you happen not to enjoy, while millions of others do.You are very far from the first person to point out that strong female characters are thin on the ground in LOTR. But they are there none the less. I personally have never found it made tuppence worth of difference whether there were two, or two hundred, characters of a particular sex in any novel I've read.

Why did Tolkien have so few strong female characters?

5 Answers