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Originally Posted by Fordim
Put another way, having a woman in the Fellowship might have -- to Tolkien's mind -- proved to be a distraction insofar as the point of his tale is about the Ring and it's effect on Frodo and the others around him; to have a woman there so pointedly being, well, a woman and not a man might have introduced a theme or idea that does not directly 'play' to the one that the Fellowship was supposed to play toward??
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It seems to me that it would be highly uncharacteristic of JRRT to create in this manner: to consider the analytical impact of story choices as opposed to considering the artistic impact. In other words, his method seems to have been "does this work as a story element" rather than "does this work to bring out what I'm trying to say on this subject". In all the copious notes published in HoME VI-VIII, I can't remember one in which Tolkien wrestles with critical/analytical issues as your post imagines that he might. He seems to be most concerned with making his narrative work as a story.
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Originally Posted by Lush
I've successfully proven that time and time again, the subject of gender flattens the discussion to the level of the dismissive (and, in my opinion, quite rude) "Go read something else!"
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Much as I enjoy your knack for creating lively threads, Lush, I think all that's been proven here is that it's easy to provoke a certain type of response with a certain type of topic.
You started the thread off with a rant against people who dismiss questions about why there aren't more females in LotR with simple explanations. Okay, I get that it bugs you. But there are inevitably boneheaded replies to any topic, from Balrog wings to Elf ears.
As has been mentioned, the question itself is sort of self-limiting. LotR doesn't have a lot of female characters. Why? Over the years, I've seen as many reductive boneheaded replies for "why" as for "why not": "Tolkien doesn't understand women"; "Tolkien doesn't like women"; "Tolkien believes women should be pretty, barefoot, and pregnant", etc. If you have gained new insight into this question from your recent studies of Tatar and fairy-tale, I'm pretty sure you haven't really articulated them yet, and you certainly didn't share them in your first post.
There aren't a lot of female characters in LotR. In the end Tolkien didn't write them and we can only guess at why or why not. In my view it probably wasn't because of any particular conscious agenda one way or the other. Is there really a lot of meat on this bone that hasn't been chewed yet?
On the other hand, I think that the idea that gender discussions automatically produce a knee-jerk result isn't borne out by Downs history.
Over the years, there have been numerous thoughtful discussions of gender in LotR, as well as deep discussions of the individual female characters that are present in the work. Fordim's recent "Calling all women", Birdland's "Tolkien the Matricide", and Child's old "The 'Fair' Sex in LotR", for instance, all tackle Tolkien in relation to gender with interesting results (ironically, doing a quick search of "Tolkien sexist" will fetch all these topics). Topics on Galadriel, Arwen, and Éowyn have all yielded fruitful, albeit sometimes fiery, results as well.
In other words, a good topic breeds good discussion, even if there will be the inevitable amount of "noise" in the form of knucklehead replies.
Several topics have already been suggested which I bet could spin into interesting threads.