What did boromir do in rivendell?

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by radagastly

I'm guessing you mean Shelob?

Oops! My error.

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

That isn't actually the case.

Yes, I was exaggerating, but only slightly.

The problem is that Tolkien may be seen as naively sexist, writing an heroic romance in part based on medieval tales that are also sexist because the society was sexist and the authors were almost all male. For most of his life Tolkien lived in a society in which it was taken for granted that even bus drivers and postal workers were all male.

But since The Lord of the Rings is arguably the third most popular book ever written (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books ), it seems that this supposed sexism has not hurt the sales much. I suspect it is because it is not really sexism at all.

Partly The Lord of the Rings gets away with it because Tolkien personally appears not to have had any problems with women and partly because a good writer can get away with anything and partly because he is so obviously concerned with the morality of his characters and partly because he writes Galadriel and Éowyn so strongly.

Given all that, and given that Tolkien nowhere proposes that any real or fictional society would be improved by females being given less voice than males, it is not worth making much of it. Those who try don’t get very far. Rightly so I think.