[davem]

I honestly don't care if in the 'real' world outside the page Tolkien was a man, who served in a war with other men. His own life and his own experiences and his own intentions can only take me so far. I don't doubt their importance. But, as I've already written, the process of reading and experiencing the book belongs to each individual reader, and cannot be taken away from us.

But the point is that, unlike traditional tales, the Legendarium was written by a single man, with a biography. His experiences shaped him & produced the stories he wrote. Because of this we cannot leave his personal history, experiences & values out of any analysis.

Of course, we can just read the stories & let them work on us as they will, open us to new perceptions & ways of thinking. But once we start into analysis we have, first & foremost, to take into account the man. Yes, the process of reading and experiencing the book belongs to each individual reader in a sense but that kind of claim to ownership can be dangerous if you start thinking 'this means whatever I choose it to mean. These are just words until I give meaning to them. Tolkien actually had something specific to say, & there's a difference between discovering your own meaning in the text & ignoring Tolkien's, or at least giving preference to your own over his - which is one thing - and denying that there is any intentional meaning there at all.

I pay very close attention to gender specifics and the way they apply to the females that come up in LotR, but never to the males. .... But the story of the Fellowship has impacted and inspired me in such a way as to render his own views on gender and gender roles to be inconsequential to a reader such as myself.

You seem to want an analysis of the roles (or lack thereof) of women in LotR - what do they do, why don't they do other things, why aren't there more of them, what does the lack of prominence of females in the story tell us about Middle-earth, but you rule out the only real explanation for all those things - Tolkien the man & the things that shaped him - from the analysis. Hence, whatever theory you manage to come up with will be flawed. You can either just enjoy the stories, or you can attempt an in-depth analysis of them - which must include Tolkien himself. Any analysis of a writer's work which attempts to account for it as if it had just appeared spontaneously, or as if it were reportage is bound to fail (imo).