[davem]

All of the bonding, camaraderie, and shared responsibility, in my opinion could have easily occured within a mixed-gender setting. Tolkien did not choose it to be so,

Perhaps I see a flaw in your argument here. You say Tolkien did not choose to have a mixed gender setting - as if he sat down with the two alternatives of mixed gender & single gender Fellowships, & consciously chose the one & rejected the other. Reading the relevant sections of HoM-e shows that he never did anything of the sort. The Fellowship went through many stages, with different numbers of members - five hobbits, four hobbits, one Man (Boromir - Aragorn was originally Trotter the Hobbit with wooden shoes).

Of course, the New Hobbit was to become in the course of time LotR, & move from another adventure quest tale (like TH) & become both the story of the War of the Ring & the culmination of the Legendarium. As a war story it would inevitably be a male dominated one, with its active participants being overwhelmingly male. This is not down to Tolkien's innate conservatism so much as to the simple fact that up to his day war was the province of males - 'warrior' = 'male'. I think this is showm by the fact that when he wants a term to cover the role Eowyn plays he has to go for 'Amazon', one of a group of semi mythical warrior women from the period BCE.

What I'm saying is, a war novel, written by a man of Tolkien's generation would inevitably be male dominated. Which is not to say that Tolkien didn't realise that women had fought in the past, when backed into a corner & in defence of their loved ones, its just that to go to war was a thing men did. And let's not just dismiss the fact that the war which Tolkien had experienced directly (WWI) was a male affair. I daresay that to Tolkien soldiers were male & he never even questioned that fact.

Of the main female characters in the Legendarium few are involved directly in battle. Erendis isn't, neither is Andreth. Even Luthien does not fight, but rather uses her magic. As far as women warriors are concerned we have Eowyn & Haleth (not sure we could include Galadriel - she does throw down Dol Guldur but I'd assume she does that in a similar way to that Luthien used to destroy the tower on Tol-in-Gaurhoth). Another problem arises in that, as I recall, Haleth was originally male.

So, women warriors in the Legendarium are the execption rather than the rule, & LotR is a story about soldiers, & therefore it is male dominated.

As to the statements in your original post:

Yet ever since doing serious research ino the fairy tale, I've discovered that you cannot always apply the rules of the tale to the rules of the real world. Therefore, all those guys talking about "women don't belong in stories of war" and "Tolkien was merely using his own experiences in WWI when it comes to women" need to shut up.

I think is confused, because, as I've said, it draws no distinction between traditional tales & the writings of Tolkien, which are two different things, & we cannot apply the same rules to them. Also, as I've said, the statements '"women don't belong in stories of war" and "Tolkien was merely using his own experiences in WWI when it comes to women" were simply true for Tolkien, whether or not the former is true for fairy tales or not.

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Fairy tale survives through its own logic and its own archetypes. Don't bring in the real world to justify the absence of females in the Fellowship, for example. This is reductive. It doesn't do justice to the fairy tale and to the real world.

I'd say that Fairy tale survived not through its own logic & its own archetypes, but rather because fairy tales were entertaining, exciting, & very often uplifting. I don't see why you say bringing in the real world is reductive & unjust in this context. Fairy story must, if it is to convince, obey certain logical rules & inner laws. The same can be said of Fantasy. Middle-earth has rules, both in the sense of natural laws (which may be different from the natural laws of our world, but are still 'laws' nonetheless), & also a set of moral, ethical, political & social standards, which Tolkien gave to it. In Middle earth women don't fight as a rule. In times of war the males do the fighting, the women don't. All we can require of the sub creator is that his or her secondary world is consistent, not that it suits us, or lives up to our expectations, or conforms to a particular literary theory.