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Guess Who's Coming to the Disaster - Page 4

© Michael Martinez

Not that traveling through perilous lands is the sole province of men in Tolkien. Arwen trots back and forth across the same mountains where her mother was taken by Orcs. People make a big fuss about how Elrond brought Arwen back to Rivendell in the year 3018 because the lands to the east were growing dangerous. Maybe so, but in Minas Tirith, Gandalf points out that if Smaug had not been killed decades before, there might have been no Queen for Aragorn (in "The Quest of Erebor", published in Unfinished Tales). When Frodo sits on the high seat at Amon Hen[[,]] he sees visions of Orcs pouring "out of a thousand holes" in the Misty Mountains. Tolkien doesn't say which way they were heading, but I don't get the impression it was only eastward (to the Vales of Anduin). If Rivendell could be brought under siege during the years when Angmar was taking out the northern Dunadan kingdoms, it follows that Sauron's forces probably had an Elven enclave or two on their list of places to attack. Thranduil's kingdom in northern Mirkwood and Lothlorien were both attacked, so why should Rivendell be spared? Of course, there is no mention of attacks on Rivendell even in the appendices; so maybe the Orcs took a wrong turn at the High Pass and ended up in the land of the Beornings. So perhaps no merit badges were earned by the Orc Scouts that week. Still, with all the sighing and longing going on, one might get the impression that Tolkien had included enough Romance cliches (or pseudo-cliches) to keep stereotypical female readers happy. Only that isn't the impression one gets. In fact, a lot of people seem to get the impression that almost no women are mentioned in the book. Who counted them all? If you go by Robert Foster's Complete Guide To Middle-earth you end up with almost as many female names as male names just in the "A" section. Girls seem to be Tolkien's best-kept secret. Is that why so many women actually like Tolkien? Or are the stereotypes and cliches just getting in the way of everyone's criticism? If I had to sum up the complaints I've heard about Tolkien's supposed lack of appeal to women, and his stories' minimal inclusion of women, I would say people feel there aren't many details concerning relationships in Middle-earth. In fact, except for The Hobbit (which only mentions one woman, Bilbo's mother, and offers a brief off-stage cameo by Lobelia at the end) and The Lord of the Rings, most of Tolkien's Middle-earth stories revolve around relationships between men and women: Beren and Luthien (boy meets girl, falls in love, makes an idiot of himself, is repeatedly rescued by girl), Narn i Chin Hurin (the only characters with less sense than the women are the men), Tuor and Idril (she saves the day by having an escape tunnel dug), Aldarion and Erendis (although she ends up embittered and diminished in the end), Earendil and Elwing (she saves the Silmaril and persuades the Teleri to man the ships, while all he does is get lost on the seas and fulfill a task long appointed him to by praying to Manwe). And most of these tales aren't just relationship stories they involve adventure, life-threatening situations, commentaries on the folly of kings and princes, and emotional irony.

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