Quote:
Originally Posted by Belegorn
Well, I don't know about this because it is shown that "Felagund strove with Sauron in songs of power" (Of Beren and Lúthien)
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Well, but that wasn't them fighting each other. That was Finrod trying to maintain the magical disguise that made Beren and him appear like Orcs.
How exactly that works in detail isn't make explicit there, but one assumes that Sauron could not see who they truly were before he won that 'battle' despite the fact that Finrod sang of rather obvious Elvish themes in the song. That most likely means we cannot take this as literal fact but rather as that both Sauron and Finrod used magical songs to either maintain the illusion (some Orcs standing in front of Sauron) or breaking the illusion (Sauron suspecting that the guys standing in front of him are not, in fact, Orcs).
However, in general it is clear that this kind of behavior would, in a gendered discussion, not be coded as 'male'.
You can certainly say that Beren would have been completely doomed without Finrod's and Lúthien's help but in the end the story has him cut the Silmaril out of Morgoth's crown and not Lúthien. And it is he who heroically dies in the fight against Carcharoth. And he is the guy who is later praised for the whole thing.
One can also say that Finrod and Lúthien are very much Beren's sidekicks, not the other way around.
It is not just black-and-white, though. I think there is something to this fact that many of the few strong women in Tolkien's world are more powerful and nobler than their future husbands that can be interpreted in a more progressive gender role way - however, the fact that Thingol, Celeborn, and Aragorn are the rulers and their powerful wives, in a sense, the prices at their sides cannot be denied, either.