[Kalimac]

Lush - people tend to assume the worst when it's one girl and bunch of guys out on their own for weeks at a time, don't they? [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]. Though frankly, even if there HAD been a female human/Elf in the fellowship, it's hard to picture anything happening; for one thing, they'd all be too tired, and for another thing, nothing kills romance like (a) complete lack of privacy, (b) the constant risk of getting pulled awake at 2 AM to flee something and (c) being a good adventurer, you'd have to keep a weapon at hand at every moment. Eh, maybe not.

That being said, no, I don't "miss" having females in the Fellowship; if JRRT had written it with a woman or two, I wouldn't have objected, but as it is it never bothered me. To be honest, when I was first reading the books (I was ten) I identified much more with the hobbits than with anyone else, albeit they were all male and at least twenty years older than me. That didn't matter; what mattered was that their world was closest to mine and theirs were the eyes I was seeing things through. I saw Galadriel and Arwen as distant, impressive creatures, and Eowyn was only marginally less so, given that she was trained to fight and bear arms and ride horses and so forth, whereas I was much more Pippin-like in the sense at not being much of an expert at much except breaking things. The fact that Eowyn et al were female really didn't register with me as something to identify with; I may have been too young.

Also, I'd like to second what Child said about Tolkien's background; I don't think that's the sole reason that he may have had difficult writing about three-dimensional women, but being raised almost in an almost exclusively male environment like that (especially with having the vague memory of a beloved mother to idealize) couldn't really have helped. Like Jack London, writing about women just wasn't his forte - the same way that writing about legendary creatures and philologies just isn't Michael Cunningham's thing. I wouldn't call it a weakness, more of an absence - plenty of male writers can write convincingly about women, after all, but very few can create worlds like ME.