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.

An Old Tolkien Interview, Reprinted

I just came across an article from last years Telegraph which is, in turn a reprint of an interview with Tolkien first published in 1968. The reprinted title is JRR Tolkien: 'Film my books? It's easier to film The Odyssey'. It is a fascinating insight into the masters thought process.

Among the highlights for me:

1. Tolkien never expected to make money from TLOTR or The Hobbit:

   “I never expected a money success,” said Tolkien, pacing the room, as he does constantly when he speaks. “In fact, I never even thought of commercial publication when I wrote The Hobbit back in the Thirties.
   
   “It all began when I was reading exam papers to earn a bit of extra money. That was agony. One of the tragedies of the underpaid professor is that he has to do menial jobs. He is expected to maintain a certain position and to send his children to good schools. Well, one day I came to a blank page in an exam book and I scribbled on it. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

2. He has only a vague idea of where the name hobbit came from:

   “I don’t know where the word came from. You can’t catch your mind out. It might have been associated with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. Certainly not rabbit, as some people think. Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place.”

3. The road to publication of The Hobbit was more than a bit fortuitous:

   Tolkien let a few of his Oxford friends read The Hobbit. One, a tutor, lent it to a student, Susan Dagnell. When, some time later, Miss Dagnell joined Allen & Unwin, the publishers, she suggested it as a children’s book. Sir Stanley Unwin assigned his son, Rayner, then ten, to read it. ("I gave him a shilling,” Sir Stanley recalls.)

4. Allen and Unwin believed from the beginning that TLOTR was a work of genius:

   Sir Stanley Unwin, whose com­petitors called him mad when he pub­lished the first two volumes in 1954, told us, “I was in Japan when the manuscript arrived. Rayner wrote to say it seemed a big risk. It would have to be published in three volumes, at a guinea each – this at a time when 18 shillings was top for a bestseller. But Rayner added, ‘Of course, it’s a work of genius’. So I cabled him to take it.
   
   “Of all the books I’ve brought out in 63 years, there are few that I can say with absolute confidence will sell long after my departure. Of this one I had no doubts.”

5. C.S. Lewis was closely involved with the writing of TLOTR:

   Tolkien’s friend and fellow author, the late C. S. Lewis, “was immensely immersed” in the development of the Ring, but not always mutely admiring. “He used to insist on my reading, passages aloud as I finished them, and then he made suggestions. He was furious when I didn’t accept them. Once he said, ‘It’s no use trying to influence you, you’re uninfluenceable!’ But that wasn’t quite true. Whenever he said ‘You can do better than that. Better Tolkien, please!’ I used to try.”

6. Tolkien had strong opinions on what constituted a fairy tale and on what, if any, meaning could be deduced from TLOTR:

   parallel to scholarship has always run his strong preoccupation with the mystic land of Faerie.
   
   This, to him, is a rich and wondrous realm filled with beauty, peril, joy and sadness – to be relished for its own sake, and not dissected.
   
   So, naturally, he resists the earnest student who tries to read “meanings” into the Ring. “The book,” he said, “is not about anything but itself. It has no allegorical intentions, topical, moral, religious or political. It is not about modern wars or H-bombs, and my villain is not Hitler.”
   
   Must fairytales be confined to legendary times and places, or could they be staged in modern settings? “They cannot,” he said, “not if you mean in a modern technological idiom. The reader must approach Faerie with a willing suspension of disbelief. If a thing can be technologically controlled, it ceases to be magical.”

7. He also had strong opinions on what constituted good writing for children:

   Tolkien regrets that, over the centuries, fairytales have been downgraded until they are considered fit only for very young children. Most of all, he dislikes the story that moralises: “As a child I couldn’t stand Hans Andersen, and I can’t now.”
   
   He has written: “The age of childhood-sentiment has produced a dreadful undergrowth of stories adapted to what is conceived to be the measure of children’s minds and needs. The old stories are bowdlerised. The imitations are often merely silly or patronising or covertly sniggering with an eye on the other grown-ups present. ...”
   
   He said to us: “Believable fairy-stories must be intensely practical. You must have a map, no matter how rough. Otherwise you wander all over the place. In The Lord of the Rings I never made anyone go farther than he could on a given day.”

8. Tolkien did not want TLOTR to be filmed, although perhaps this reflected the possibility of the plot being crammed into a 90 minute film:

   “You can’t cramp narrative into dramatic form. It would be easier to film The Odyssey. Much less happens in it. Only a few storms.”

9. Tolkien did not like being compared to other epic writers:

   C. S. Lewis once declared that Ariosto could not rival Tolkien. To us Tolkien said, “I don’t know Ariosto and I’d loathe him if I did.” He has also been likened to Malory, Spencer, Cervantes, Dante. He rejects them all. “Cervantes?” he exploded. “He was a weed­killer to romance.” As for Dante: “He doesn’t attract me. He’s full of spite and malice. I don’t care for his petty relations with petty people in petty cities.”

Although I have excerpted liberally from the article, there is plenty I left out and I encourage you to read the full thing.

Tolkien's Map of Middle Earth

The Guardian reports that a copy of a map of Middle Earth, annotated by Tolkien himself, has turned up and is on sale for 60,000 pounds: Tolkien's annotated map of Middle-earth discovered inside copy of Lord of the Rings. The map was found loose inside a copy of The Lord of the Rings owned by illustrator Pauline Baynes who had produced a color map of Middle Earth for a 1970 Allen & Unwin reprint.

The annotations by Tolkien, in black and green ink, show that he was obsessed with the details of the map. It includes extra place names, corrections of others, suggestions about flora and fauna, and details of the latitude of various places.

Hobbiton ... “ is assumed to be approx at latitude of Oxford”

 The map also makes reference to Belgrade, Cyprus, and Jerusalem, and indicates that

the city of Ravenna is the inspiration behind Minas Tirith.