A Book a Day: Perilous and Fair

[caitri]

 Every day I'm posting an image of a book I like. Today's pick is because of one of my current projects. It's highly readable for an academic text, all the scholarship is solid af, and it's so gd useful to pull out whenever somebody wants to pull out the "no women in Tolkien" chestnut!!

Comments

[minoanmiss]

As I've gotten older and become an amateur writer, Tolkien's female characters have come to entertain me. They seem to fall into two categories: he feels they're plot-necessary (Bilbo needs a nemesis at home, we'll make her a harridan aunt; Aragorn needs a wife, we'll make her the Prettiest Woman Ever) or they kicked in his door and demanded to be written in their awesomitude (Galadriel, Eowyn, and above all else Luthien, who is based on the woman who kicked in the door to his heart and demanded he love her, or so he seemed to conceptualize it.)

[caitri]

It's an interesting combination and I don't know how non-Middle Earth work well enough, but one of the best chapters in this book is about how he was instrumental in teaching women at Oxford early on, and mentored several women students who would go on to be scholars as well. (He was rather bitter that some women who were promising scholars opted to get marry and leave the academy instead, which I've always found enlightening.)