Females in the Fellowship

[Lalaith]

Thank you Lily for your kind words. I also commend you for your point about hobbits. Now, there was a bunch of gentle, domestic homebodies who proved to be remarkably tough cookies when push came to shove, hmmm?

I've also been pondering on a couple of points raised earlier in this thread by Child of the 7th Age.
Firstly, this:

But what about Tolkien? Is this just coincidence that these wise women appear in the later writings, but not in LotR?

and secondly, her(?)point that Tolkien, as a married man,was considered safe to teach at women's colleges.
Despite the era and the environment he lived and worked in, Tolkien's literary portrayal of women never (except perhaps in the case of the Entwives) displayed that crusty-Oxbridge-don misogyny we find in, for example, CS Lewis. I've always maintained that his attitudes were influenced by his interest in early north European literature, where women had unusually proactive roles.
But his work as a tutor may also have influenced him. Unlike CS Lewis, who married so late that he would have been teaching just males for most of his life, Tolkien would have had intellectual dealings with female students. This may well have opened his mind to the concept of women as intellectual as well domestic forces...hence the appearance of women like Andreth in his later writings. I'm ashamed to say I've not read Morgoth's Ring but from the way it's been described, Finrod and Andreth's debate sounds a bit like a university tutorial discussion...