Margaret Atwood on Gender Balance in Tolkien

There has been a minor uproar about Margaret Atwood's comments on Tolkien delivered at Book Riot Live and written up in The Guardian Margaret Atwood: 'In Tolkien, there are hardly any women at all'. The remarks, as part of an interview conducted by N.K. Jemisin, have a lot of interesting things to say about writing women in SFF and fiction more generally from both Atwood's and Jemisin's perspectives.

For example, according to Jemisin

“It was not until I was about 17 though that I decided to write a book featuring a woman ... I didn’t know how to write women because all of the books I read featured exclusively male protagonists, specifically white male protagonists.

“And it was another few years before I tried writing someone who was a black woman. I didn’t know it because I hadn’t seen it.”

As for Atwood's controversial remarks

Atwood went on to comment on the lack of women in science fiction and fantasy literature she read as a young woman in the 1950s: “In Tolkien, there are hardly any women at all, only two, but three if you count the spider, which I do.

“With a name like Shelob you really can’t miss it,” she added to the laughter of the audience.

Jemisin complains about the lack of diversity in "golden age" SF:

“I was initially recommended to read the classic golden-age novels which is one of the reasons why I wrote about so many white men. It was very clear the weighty treatments of any topics in science fiction did not include all people as serious and worthy of interesting consideration. I decided to write my own.”

The uproar about Atwood's remarks comes from people with the view that she harshly treated Tolkien. Wasn't Tolkien just a writer of his time? Wasn't he just reflecting his influences, such as the male centric Icelandic sagas? Weren't the characters of Eowyn and Galadriel well rounded? And wasn't that progressive for the time it was written?

I have a little bit of sympathy for these arguments, but only a little. It is a simple fact that there are no substantial female characters in The Hobbit and only a few in TLOTR. It is only natural that some female readers and aspiring writers would be prompted to write a different type of fantasy populated with characters that they could relate more easily to when they had the chance.

I also seem to remember a story---although I can find no trace of it in an online search---that Tolkien's vision for TLOTR had less female characters and that he only introduced more in response to a request from a young female relative (daughter? niece?) Is there any truth to this? If so, this further suggests that Tolkien was writing with a conscious or unconscious bias against women (similar to his racial and class biases).

I still love Tolkien's creations. I still love the books. But I think it is important to read them with eyes wide open to the fact that they are not perfect and reflect the author's biases, whether intrinsic to Tolkien or simply as a reflection of the time he lived.