Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien (2015) ed. Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan
Journal of Tolkien Research
Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R .R . Tolkien (2015) ed. Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A . Donovan
Deidre A. Dawson
Part of the English Language and Literature Commons; and the Women's Studies Commons
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Article 8
This excellent collection of essays is long overdue, for in spite of the breadth and
depth of scholarship dealing with female characters or feminist themes in
Tolkien’s work, there has not been, to my knowledge, an entire volume devoted to
this topic. Furthermore, as Croft and Donovan note in their introduction there
remains “a continuing and alarming tendency among some current Tolkien
scholars to remain unfamiliar with or to disregard outright the more positive
readings of Tolkien’s female characters and gender politics found easily in both
classic and recent research”(2). Examples are Candice Frederick and Sam
McBride’s Women Among The Inklings: Gender, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and
Charles Williams (2001) and more recently Adam Roberts’s essay “Women” in A
Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien (2014). Croft and Donovan express dismay that in
spite of the impressive amount of scholarship on female characters in Tolkien,
Roberts stresses “female passivity” in The Lord of the Rings (2). Similarly, Nancy
Enright’s essay cites Frederick and McBride’s categorical statement about gender
roles in The Lord of the Rings: “Men are the doers, workers, thinkers and leaders.
Women are homemakers, nurses and distant love interests” (119) as an example
of the erroneous and oft-repeated assumption that Tolkien was biased against
women, simply because he worked in a primarily male environment and was a
members of the Inklings, which Frederick and McBride decry as “blatantly sexist”
(119). To rectify these misapprehensions about the role of women in Tolkien’s
life and work, the editors have included here seven “classic” essays published
between 1984 and 2007, and seven new essays “that build on past studies and
point to new directions for the topic.” Croft and Donovan present their collection
of essays as a “representative sample, rather than a definitive canon,” and explain
their choice of the words “perilous” and “fair” as a metaphor for the rich and
complex “issues of female power” explored in the essays (3). The essays are
grouped under thematic headings: Historical Perspectives, Power of Gender,
Specific Characters, Earlier Literary Contexts, and Women Readers. My review
does not always follow this arrangement, however, for my own reading of the
volume sometimes led me to find connections between essays from different
groups.
Robin Anne Reid’s “The History of Scholarship on Female Characters in
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium: A Feminist Bibliographic Essay,” is far more than
an expanded annotated bibliography, because Reid not only comments on the
essays and articles presented, she also draws connections between them and thus
provides a comprehensive overview of the relevant work. The essay is organized
chronologically, which allows Reid to trace the evolution of scholarship on
Tolkien’s female characters over time, revealing “not only the increasing attention
paid to these characters, but also a growing application of newer critical theories
and methods” (13). For example, in the 1970s only two articles specifically about
female characters in Tolkien’s work were published; in the 1980s, this increased
to four; in the 1990s, there were only three. By contrast, Reid notes, “During the
first decade of the twenty-first century, twenty-three articles and book chapters
were published on Tolkien’s female characters” (23). As milestones in the
evolution of Tolkien scholarship Reid cites the publication of the first
encyclopedia devoted to Tolkien’s work, The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia:
Scholarship and Critical Assessment (ed. Michael D.C. Drout, 2007) and the
transition of Tolkien-themed publications such as Mythlore from fanzines to
peerreviewed journals. Reid concurs with the MLA International Bibliography,
however, that work that has been published outside of traditional peer-reviewed
academic journals, such as Mallorn, the Minis-Tirith Evening Star and early
issues of Mythlore should be included in bibliographies of scholarship on Tolkien,
for they often contained pioneering work. For example, of the ten articles dealing
with female characters in Tolkien published between 1971 and 1996, six appeared
in Mythlore. Regarding scholarship on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films
(The Hobbit had not yet been released at the time this essay was written), Reid
discusses “essays that, in dealing with the film, also develop an original analysis
of female characters in Tolkien’s text to the extent that the discussion includes
new and relevant approaches to them” (26). Reid’s bibliographical excavations
reveal a “daunting” amount of Tolkien scholarship—in a footnote she mentions
that a search she conducted in June of 2014 on Tolkien subjects not related to film
returned “1,89 (...truncated)