The White Council

Re: SEX in Middle Earth

Tolkien and Inklings Discussion

: I thought that might get your attention. Seriously though, does anybody have any theories as to why, in the three sexual relationships that we know of between elves and humans, are they all conducted between human males and elven females? If you catch my drift.

: Personally I suspect that it might have something to do with Tolkien's own relationship with his wife Edith, Tolkien seeing himself as Beren with Edith as Luthien,but this is only speculation. Did the master himself, ever write anything relating to this question?

: Also, Dwarves - how did their population manage to recover so well after the disaster of the orc wars when so few of them were females and these were jealously guarded? (certainly goes some way to explaining dwarvish avarice - suppressed sexuality perhaps?)

: Any theories on orc reproduction anyone?

As for the male Men (oy vey, that sounds wierd!) marrying female Elves, personally, I think it has to do with some supositions Tolkien had in his head, and how he thought of his two races. Not that he ever said anything like this; it's simply an underlying impression I get from Tolkien. And this isn't the most complete answer I could give during a proper debate (over several mugs of beer). And I can bet I'm gonna get flamed for this, but here goes anyway.

For Tolkien, elves were the elder race. Superior in almost every way. The three marriages between the edain and the high elves were important because in each of those, the men had achieved greatness. It's as though they became good enough, and had passed enough tests to be rewarded with such trophies. (OK. That's putting it harshly, true. And to clarify: it's not really the case with Beren and Luthien (the tests are put in place after they fall in love); only kind of the case with Tuor and Idril; and definitely the case with Aragorn and Arwen.)

And if this is the case, then for Tolkien, how could a mere mortal woman ever hope to become so great?

Now you can argue that Tolkien was a sexist. Or you can argue that he sympathized with the subordinate position of women, and called attention to it, but recognized that none would ever really have the opportunity to achieve so much as to be "rewarded" with an elven mate. But to me, that's all speculation. (Unless Tolkien actually said something on the matter; I don't think he was a womens-libber, but I suppose I could have missed that.) The result in his literature is the same.

But as for non-high-elven intermarriages, I'm pretty sure that Tolkien hints that there have been quite a few others (i.e., between humans and the Sindar), and we don't know what the genders of either involved would have been.

As for dwarves, after the War of Dwarves and Orcs, they probably were able to recover so quickly because probably very few dwarven women died during the conflict. Tolkien states that dwarven women were around 1/3 of the population. This means that even if all dwarven women chose a mate and had kids, still half the male dwarves would have no children. This means that dwarves could loose roughly half of their male population in war and still reproduce at roughly the same rate. Interesting...

As for orcs... hmmm... do we know that orc females didn't fight in the armies? I mean, since this is Tolkien we're talking about here, I am assuming he didn't think they would. But then again... I haven't read much of the Tolkien esoterica (UT, HoME, Letters, etc.) lately. So I'm not the best person to answer that.

As for random speculation though, I could put in my two bits, given what I know of Tolkien's attitudes. Probably there was no formalized marriage among orcs, though no doubt some took permanent or semi-permanent mates (chieftains and the like). Since orcs could reproduce so rapidly, it is probable that either multiple births were common, and/or the gestation period of orcs was short. Orclings probably learned to walk, run, and kill by the age or one or two. ;)

OK, I'm done.

And as for the stuff about Tolkien's views on women, to paraphrase Eomer, I would gladly learn the praise of Tolkien's progressiveness under the loving strokes of a poster's flame. ;)

Dave C-Q