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Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien
Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien
Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien
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Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien

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Since the earliest scholarship on The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, critics have discussed how the works of J. R. R. Tolkien seem either to ignore women or to place them on unattainable pedestals. To remedy such claims that Tolkien’s fiction has nothing useful or modern to say about women, Perilous and Fair focuses critical attention on views that interpret women in Tolkien’s works and life as enacting essential, rather than merely supportive roles.

Perilous and Fair includes seven classic articles as well as seven new examinations of women in Tolkien’s works and life. These fourteen articles bring together perspectives not only on Tolkien’s most commonly discussed female characters—Éowyn, Galadriel, and Lúthien—but also on less studied figures such as Nienna, Yavanna, Shelob, and Arwen. Among others, the collection features such diverse critical approaches and methods as literary source study, historical context, feminist theory, biographical investigation, close-reading textual analysis, Jungian archetypes, and fanfiction reader-response.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 14, 2015
ISBN9781887726023
Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J. R. R. Tolkien
Author

Janet Brennan Croft

Janet Brennan Croft is an Associate University Librarian at the University of Northern Iowa. She is the author of War in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien (Praeger, 2004; winner, Mythopoeic Society Award for Inklings Studies). She has also written on the Peter Jackson Middle-earth films, the Whedonverse, Orphan Black, J. K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Lois McMaster Bujold, The Devil Wears Prada, and other authors, TV shows, and movies. She is also editor or co-editor of many collections of literary essays, the most recent (before this one) being ‘Something Has Gone Crack’: New Perspectives on Tolkien in the Great War (Walking Tree, 2019) with Anna Röttinger. She edits the refereed scholarly journal Mythlore and is archivist and assistant editor of Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy+. You can follow her work on Academia.edu.

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    It's quality, not quantity, that counts.One of the strongest criticisms of the books of J. R. R. Tolkien -- apart from the fact that critics fail to realize that they are romances, not novels, and should be judged by the standards of medieval romance, not modern novels -- is that they don't contain many women. The purpose of this book is to argue that, although women are rare, they are vital to the work of Tolkien.I can't say that this point is indisputable, since it's disputed, but I think the evidence for this view is strong. It's not unusual to see women be rare in romance -- taking a not-so-random example, the greatest English-language romance of all, Chaucer's Franklin's Tale (which gave Tolkien one of his personal mottos) has four major characters. Only one of them, Dorigen, is female. But without Dorigen, there would have been no Tale.Of course, Dorigen is rather a weak reed of a character. But is anyone going to claim that Lúthien, or Galadriel, or Éowyn, is a weak reed? Beautiful, yes, and judged by beauty-contest standards -- but that's the stuff of romance. As one author pointed out, of Tolkien's guardian powers, several (notably Varda) are "female." And, as John Rateliffe notes, in real life a disproportionate share of Tolkien's advanced students were women -- at a time when sexism was still so strong that one of them, Simone d'Ardenne, felt the need to publish as S. R. O. d'Ardenne to hide her sex. Furthermore, this was at a time when Tolkien's friend C. S. Lewis was still giving his female characters orders to submit to their husband's orders in marriage! Tolkien was not a feminist, but this book makes clear that he respected women and considered them fully intellectually equal to men. (And, for someone like Tolkien, that's the attribute that counts!) Were they part of his armies? No. But neither were they part of the armies that fought the World Wars; he followed the convention of the time.Not every essay in this book is good. Melissa A. Smith's article on War Brides would have benefitted from having a lot less on one particular war bride (Ruth Fuller) and a lot more on the whole folklore phenomenon of wives who fought alongside their husbands. ("The Soldier Maid." "Jackie Monroe." "The Female Rambling Sailor." "William Taylor." Some of these have the women end up high officers, and on merit!) And as for Leslie A. Donovan's piece on valkyries -- well, if anything you don't find in your back yard is a valkyrie, which seems to be her definition, then yes, Tolkien is full of valkyries. But to look to valkyries as a characterization of a woman giving gifts (Galadriel, or Éowyn again) is just perverse. This is Tolkien we're talking about; think Wealhþeow in Beowulf, Dr. Donovan! I eventually stopped reading that particular essay, which surely managed to get in only because it's by the book's editor (and a high power in the publishing house, too).But these are exceptions. Most of the essays are scholarly, and highly relevant, and prove their point: Tolkien wasn't neglecting women. He honored women. They simply were part of another realm.

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Perilous and Fair - Janet Brennan Croft

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