Never fear
Phantom that I shall call you sexist – I’ve heard much worse in my day!
(I would say, however, that on the issue of men vs women as combat soldiers, it’s important to remember that wars are not fought by Olympic athletes; that is, you don’t have two groups of men in the absolute peak of physical perfection going at one another but to rather large groups drawn from the populace at large and trained to work as a team and not as individuals. Given that war is (sadly) a group and mass effort, individual differences between two people -- be they the result of gender, height, age, racial qualities -- matter very little; herendethelesson)
The point that I would like to make in response to your post has to do with the hobbits and their mode of heroic ‘doing’. I don’t think there’s anyone as can make a great claim for their abilities as warriors, including themselves. Their heroic ‘doing’ is defined by far more than their ability to wield swords (although Merry does wield a sword – alongside a woman – to conquer the most terrible enemy at the Pelennor Fields…). What they do could easily have been done – from the purely physical stand-point – by any of the women we’ve been talking about.
This raises two interesting points: first, given that there is a mode of heroic
action that is explicitly defined as not-sword-wielding (which is what the women are excluded from) then their absence in the heroic doing becomes more pointed. That is, while I can see how in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth it doesn’t make a lot of sense for, say, oh, I don’t know, Arwen to ride a warhorse against the Nine and brandish a sword (
), I can’t see any reason why a woman couldn’t march doggedly toward Mount Doom with the express purpose of avoiding combat altogether. The physical weakness of the hobbits only throws into starker relief that the women are being excluded from such tasks for reasons far beyond the fact of their (supposed) feminine-weakness (and I would just
love to see someone argue as Frodo is more physically capable or strong than Galadriel!).
The second point is that this opens the door to the idea that perhaps the manner in which Sam and, in particular, Frodo ‘do’ their heroic deeds is somehow ‘feminine’? This ties in with the point made above by
tar-ancalime that Frodo uses the phial of Galadriel to defeat Shelob, meaning that the anti-feminine ideal is defeated by the feminine-ideal, and not by men (like the Witch King, who is done in by a hobbit and a woman, not a “man”?). This would tend to support the idea of men and women in partnership – with Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli off doing the ‘manly’ sword waving (with, again, and notably, a significant bit of sword waving from Éowyn) while Pippin, Merry, Sam and Frodo are off doing the more ‘womanly’ jobs of saving the defenceless (it’s Pippin after all who saves Faramir and brings him to Ioreth in the Houses of Healing); caring for one another; bearing the phial of the ‘goddess’ Galadriel; and fulfilling prophecies that specifically call for heroes who
aren’t men.
If this holds water then my thread began in the wrong way – rather than looking for the roles of women in relation to men, perhaps we should be looking at the relation of the feminine and the masculine, as these manifest in men and women both???
(Note to
Bethberry: lemon is for fish, dearie, use honey in your tea.)