On Mon, 20 Oct 1997, MARINA YERESHENKO wrote:
> I just finished reading the last part of The Lord of the Rings. I read
> Hobbit and the first two parts several years ago, and was absolutely
> fascinated. This time it was a little different. I still liked it a lot,
> but I think the author had really ambivalent feelings towards women. When
> I read the first three books, I was convinced that J.R.R. was gay,
> because women were practically absent from his world whatsoever, even as
> sex objects to be "rescued", which are mandatory for fairy-tales. The first
> half of the final, fourth book seemed pretty misogynistic, but towards the
> end, he seemed simply confused. There was this great powerful character,
> Eowyn, and she did not even die in the end, but the guy she was in love
> with, of course, married a half-elven beauty who hardly said a couple of
> words throughout the story and spent most of it in a safe, protected place of
> her father till "bad times" were over. The former was ready to die for the
> man she loved, the latter would not even marry him unless he won the war and
> became a king, and she's got the guy in the end.
>
> And what you all think about Tolkien?
>
Tolkien wasn't gay. By all accounts he was a happily married man and,
by the lights of his culture, a good husband and father. He wrote The
Hobbit for his kids.
What he was, however, was an Oxford don, which is to say that he was a
man who spent most of his life among men, with relatively little contact
with or intellectual interest in women.
At Oxford Tolkien was occasionally referred to as the Lord of the
Strings, due to his talent for university politics. He was an arch
conservative who fought long and hard to keep modern literature (and
incidentally most literature by women) out of the curriculum.
Mike Levy
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