#anyway this is absolutely not a Proper Post abt this‚ that would require more rereading

[aeide-thea]

this tolkien meta points out some parallels i'd never particularly considered before, but the main thing it made me realize, which is tangential (and also negative) so i'm sticking it in its own post, is—why is tolkien so obsessed with niblings?

thorin has nephews. bilbo has a nephew. théoden has niblings. and with both thorin and théoden we know they're the children of a sister who gets no screentime. (denethor's sons via a long-dead wife get an honorable mention in this category also.) and part of me thinks: isn't this basically, conscious or not, a strategy that lets tolkien write about dynasties while effectively eliding the sex and marriages—and women!—that produce them?

which is easy to shrug off with the argument that those things aren't the stuff of Adventure, but rather of the society the adventurers leave behind them; but at the same time, it's all of a piece with the deeply sexist, deeply catholic ('sex must occur only within the confines of marriage, which becomes a euphemistic container for it') sensibilities that permeate tolkien's work more generally. like—look at homer. look at vergil. the domestic and familial can absolutely appear in epic. women can appear in epic.*

and of course you can say, well, tolkien's work is really more in dialogue with anglo-saxon and germanic traditions, and i'd have to admit i haven't read those stories since i was a preteen (watch me now get really into the nibelungenlied/völsunga saga/eddas…); but iirc even those featured fewer women who were always-already-dead!

⸻ * obviously éowyn does in fact get significant screentime in lotr! and even in a way where she's involved in Actual Affairs and not, like goldberry and galadriel, just a pretty symbol of the adventurers' temporary reentry into a settled sphere. but you notice that she both has to take on a male role in order to take part—she can't just fight, she has to become 'dernhelm' to do it—and that she's restored tidily to proper wedded femininity by the end of the story (hoo boy can we talk abt faramir literally wrapping her in his dead mother's mantle). anyway. loved éowyn growing up and also very vehemently think people (often women!) who claim her narrative isn't in fact sexist because it's about tolkien ~valuing healing~ are closing their eyes to how that narrative functions when it's applied to a woman specifically.