The Inequality Prototype: Gender, Inequality, and the Valar in Tolkien's Silmarillion by Dawn Felagund

The Inequality Prototype: Gender, Inequality, and the Valar in Tolkien's Silmarillion

Read The Inequality Prototype: Gender, Inequality, and the Valar in Tolkien's Silmarillion

It's hard to make the case that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings exhibit anything remotely approximating gender equality, but as a feminist Tolkien fan and scholar, whenever I bring up the sexist leanings of Tolkien's writings, the first rebuttal I usually hear begins with, "But The Silmarillion …"

The Silmarillion is often held up by Tolkien fans as redemptive of the boys-only club he establishes in his better-known books and proof that he really wasn't that sexist. After all, it includes competent, kick-ass female characters like Haleth, Lúthien, and Morwen. And then there are the Valar. The women of the Valar—the Valier, as they are called in the Valaquenta—don't just watch the men do the work, bring them tea, and rub their shoulders at the end of a hard day. Varda and Yavanna are high achievers, creating the stars and the Two Trees, respectively, and of Varda we are told, "Of all the Great Ones who dwell in this world the Elves hold Varda most in reverence and love."¹ Nienna, too, is counted among the Aratar, or most powerful of the Valar, and was a mentor to Olórin, who used her teachings to help the people of Middle-earth win the Ring War.² Surely, these women serve as proof of gender equality in The Silmarillion and Middle-earth in general, don't they?

Yet only about 18% of named characters in The Silmarillion are women.³ The Valar are an interesting case study of the issue, however, since they occupy a prototypical and highly influential role over the other peoples of Arda and present a veneer of equality that becomes much more complex the deeper you dig.

On Prototypes and Cultural Influences: Or Why the Valar Matter So Much

The Valar present a unique case when looking at gender [in]equality in The Silmarillion. The Valar are the greatest of the Ainur, and we are told of Ilúvatar that "he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made."⁴ The Ainur are the only creations of Ilúvatar that we get to see that have been subject to no subcreative or cultural influences outside of Ilúvatar. (Elves and Mortals are likewise "Children of Ilúvatar" but are culturally influenced after their creation by the Ainur, as I will discuss below.) The Ainur, therefore, are the best example we have of Ilúvatar's pure, unadulterated vision.

Furthermore, the Ainur were participants in the Great Music as described in the Ainulindalë, receiving "themes of music" from Ilúvatar that express his creative vision for the universe. In addition to best exemplifying Ilúvatar's pure vision, therefore, they are also the beings with the most direct access to knowledge of his intentions.

This establishes the Ainur in a prototypical role. It is reasonable to assume that patterns in and observations of their natures and behaviors best represent the order of the universe imposed by Ilúvatar, uncorrupted by mediating subcreative and cultural influences. This makes the Ainur extremely interesting for any study of social and cultural phenomenon among the peoples of Arda.

The Ainur are also of great importance to any study of social and cultural phenomenon because of the breadth of their influence over the other peoples of Arda. There are few people of Arda who have no contact, direct or indirect, with the customs and beliefs of the Ainur. The Dwarves were a creation of Aulë, one of the Valar. The Elves, as soon as they were discovered by the Valar, were meddled with, and many chose to live alongside the Ainur. Mortals are the least directly influenced, but their contact with the Elves and the Elvish tradition nonetheless acquainted them with the Ainur. Furthermore, because the Ainur are usually regarded as exceptionally wise, their customs and beliefs are accorded extra status. Therefore, beliefs and behaviors among the peoples of Arda stand a good chance of having been influenced by the Ainur, i.e., sexist practices might be overtly taught to other peoples by the Ainur or unwittingly mimicked by peoples striving to emulate Ainurin wisdom.

(I have chosen to focus on the Valar specifically for the simple reason that we know relatively little about the Maiar, who constitute the majority of the Ainur. In contrast, we know at least a little something about all sixteen Valar. Please note also that, per the Valaquenta in The Silmarillion, Melkor is not counted among the Valar. Likewise, this essay will not consider Melkor except once, and I'll make it very clear that I'm including him in my analysis.)

On Equal Interest: Or a Promising Start for Equality

For a start, the Valar are evenly split in terms of biological sex: There are eight Valier and eight male Valar.⁵ This suggests that an even split in biological sex is normal among the Children of Ilúvatar, and this certainly makes sense, considering that Arda is equivalent to our own solar system, and we can observe a nearly even split in biological sex among humans. This observation becomes less simple, though, when considering that the sixteen Valar were merely part of a much larger group of Ainur, some (many? most?) of whom chose not to descend into Arda.⁶ We know nothing about these Ainur who chose to remain with Ilúvatar. We don't know how many there were and what they would have perceived as their biological sex.

What is interesting about these circumstances, though, is that they show that equal numbers of women and men chose to descend into Arda. This is a rather surprising deviation from traditional gender roles, which would posit that women prefer to stay home while the men roam about and have adventures. Assuming the Valar as illustrative of Ilúvatar's vision and occupying a prototypical role, this suggests that women and men have equal interest in subcreation, power, and governance. One could easily conclude from this that Ilúvatar, when proposing a difficult task, expected equal numbers of women and men to raise their hands and volunteer. This seems a promising start for equality in Arda.

On the Aratar: Or Equality Starts to Go Pear-Shaped

But we don't get to celebrate for long. After an equal number of women and men among the Valar choose to enter Arda and labor hard to see their music come to fruition, we get a classification of some of the Valar into the subgroup of Aratar, the most powerful of the Valar. The Valaquenta identifies them as "Manwë and Varda, Ulmo, Yavanna and Aulë, Mandos, Nienna, and Oromë."⁷

Equality among the Valar no longer looks so rosy. Three out of eight on that list are women, or 37.5%. And it actually gets worse. While Melkor was removed from the ranks of the Valar⁸ and so isn't under discussion here, before he was banished from amongst the Valar, he was considered one of the Aratar, making this the one time that I will bring him up in this essay. So among the original Aratar, only one-third (33.3%) were women. Ouch.

How to interpret this? It's nearly impossible—at least from my vantage point, although I will discuss narrative point of view in relation to this issue below—to see this as anything but sexist, a statement that, while both sexes may have equal enthusiasm for creativity and governance, men overwhelmingly possess more actual talent for it. Women, on the other hand, only dabble about in the margins, much as women throughout history have been permitted to take up art or music or even science to keep them occupied and out from underfoot but without the intention that they should employ those skills in any way that would advance achievement or understanding in those disciplines. This was commonplace among middle- and upper-class women in the late Victorian era in which Tolkien was born. We see a similar mindset in his letters, where his sons pursue academic and vocational opportunities while his wife and daughter stay home and where he wrote to his son Michael, "How quickly an intelligent woman can be taught, grasp [a male teacher’s] ideas, see his point – and how (with rare exceptions) they can go no further, when they leave his hand."⁹ This antiquated view appears to be at work in his writing of the Valar. Perhaps those "rare exceptions" are the few female Aratar he allowed.

On the Roles of the Valar in The Silmarillion: Or *Flush* Equality Officially Goes down the Drain

One could still argue, I suppose, that the imbalance between male and female Aratar is not as awful as it seems. After all, two of the female Aratar are Varda and Yavanna. As noted above, these two women are the high achievers among the Valar, responsible for perhaps the two greatest examples of subcreation in all of Arda: the stars and the Two Trees, respectively. (Tolkien calls the making of the stars by Varda the "greatest of all the woks of the Valar since their coming into Arda."¹⁰ He doesn't rank Yavanna's singing the Two Trees into being [with the help of Nienna, the third of the female Aratar] but says of the Trees that "[o]f all the things which Yavanna made they have the most renown."¹¹ However, I can think of no other subcreation by anyone in The Silmarillion—with the exception of the stars—on the order of Yavanna's Two Trees.) Given the achievements by the three women who represent the Valier among the Aratar, perhaps it took five male Valar to manage achievements on the same order.

If it seems like I'm stretching on this one, that's because I am. There are not only more male Aratar, but the male Valar in general play a bigger role in The Silmarillion than the Valier do, even those among the Aratar.

While conducting research for another paper, I noticed that female characters from the family trees in The Silmarillion tend to receive fewer mentions in the text than the male characters from the family trees do, even when the women exist right alongside male characters and perform similar roles. For example, Beren is mentioned 146 times in The Silmarillion, but Lúthien is mentioned only 137, despite being the more operative of the two (and another favored character to trot out when purportedly disproving sexism in The Silmarillion). I decided to repeat this procedure with the Valar—indeed, the results are what inspired this essay. The procedure was simple: I used my Kindle Silmarillion eBook to count the number of times each character was mentioned in the text. I did not count mentions in the appendix materials. When characters' names are equivalent with place names (Mandos and Lórien), I did not count mention of the places. I did, however, count when the character's name was used in the genitive—eagles of Manwë, for example, or Doom of Mandos—since those instances refer to an object, location, or concept as a possession of the character. Also, naming something after a character is itself indicative of that character's prominence. When characters had multiple names, I searched for all of their names and counted each mention, unless the two names were combined into one. For example, Námo Mandos, although containing both of the character's names, would count only once. The chart to the right shows the raw data, with the women in orange and the men in blue.

The graph below shows the same data, as well as the average (mean and median) number of mentions for male and female Valar in The Silmarillion. It further breaks down the Valar by whether or not they are considered one of the Aratar.

This is pretty bleak. Male Valar dominate The Silmarillion. Even the most-mentioned Valië—Yavanna—receives fewer mentions than the mean average for the men. While status as one of the Aratar strongly predicts the number of mentions a character receives in the text, being an Arata is no guarantee of attention. Varda—Varda!!—receives fewer mentions in the text than all of the male Aratar. Compared with the other Aratar, Nienna is barely mentioned at all, and Tulkas—not an Arata and best known for pummeling things and then laughing at them—is nonetheless mentioned 2.5 times more than she is. But of course Nienna only aided Yavanna in bringing forth the Two Trees and mentored the greatest of Istari. Nothing to see here, folks. Look, I think Tulkas just uploaded his latest fight video to YouTube.

The poor Valar who share the double misfortune of being women and not being Aratar are in a category all to themselves. You can see them there in orange at the far right of the graph, which I have dubbed The Bottom of the Barrel. These women are mentioned, assigned a domain, and given a relationship to a [male] character, and then we never see or hear from them again. They are presumably the women Tolkien mentioned in his letter to his son Michael who are not the "rare exceptions" of Varda, Yavanna, and Nienna but rather possess the "the servient, helpmeet instinct" normal to women and "can go no further, when they leave [their husbands'] hand."¹² It is perhaps telling that, despite knowing almost nothing about some of these women in The Bottom of the Barrel, we know which male Vala they are married to.

The number of women who do almost nothing in the story begins to explain why the men dominate the story, but as the graph shows, it is not that simple. Even the female Aratar are neglected. Why? Given the ambitiousness of their accomplishments, one would think that Varda and Yavanna would receive a lot of attention in the texts.

The graphic below shows a rough timeline of the deeds of the Valar during the Years of the Lamps and Years of the Trees. The women are in red/orange and the men are in blue/aqua. Without even reading the graphic, just sit back and look at the [im]balance of colors, which show that the male Valar do a helluva lot more than the women do.

Some more granular observations of the graphic above: Part of the imbalance comes about because Tolkien seemed to have no trouble assigning great deeds to women—to exceptional women, anyway—but seems to have had difficulty imagining them playing a role in the more commonplace activities that might have been required of their role. Again, we see this manifest most strongly in the nonexceptional, non-Aratar bottom-of-the-barrel women. Only one of these women does anything at all: Estë, who prays for a period of darkness in the early, unsettled days of the Sun’s cycle. Notably, she does this in conjunction with her husband Irmo.¹³ However, we see it overall as well. The men go places and do things that often aren’t terribly noteworthy; they converse and interact with each other and other characters; they debate each other and hold forth on their opinions.

The Valier, on the other hand, are almost silent in The Silmarillion. The men speak at counsels and share opinions, but Yavanna is the only Valië who is given dialogue. While it is stated that Varda and Nienna sometimes speak, we never actually hear their voices. In contrast, all the male Valar are given dialogue except for Oromë and Irmo, and the male Valar are given more than four times the dialogue of the Valier … well, Yavanna really, since she is the only woman to actually speak. None of the other Valier are even suggested to have spoken.

The simple act of hearing a character's dialogue fleshes out that character in the story. Námo's voice sounds different from Tulkas's. Silenced, the women lack this element of characterization. Their characters feel flat as a result. Seeing the male Valar in debate or sharing their opinions on various matters also makes them appear more assertive and involved in the story. It is hard to connect to the women who are seemingly without opinion in the important matters debated by their brethren. We are told that Varda, Yavanna, and Nienna all care deeply for the occupants of Middle-earth, but the story does not show this because they remain completely uninvolved in the debates deciding their fates. Not a single woman among the Valar contributes to the debates of her people. (They do, however, ask permission: Yavanna—our Chatty Cathy among the Valier—asks for permission to makes the Ents and then to use Fëanor’s Silmarils. None of the men make requests: They advocate, declare, mentor, urge, and, in Aulë’s case especially, would rather ask for forgiveness than permission.)

The male Valar interact with the Elves, assisting them in coming to Valinor and mentoring them once they arrive. Again, the women are absent from these scenes. While Yavanna, Oromë, and Ulmo all journeyed to Middle-earth before the discovery of the Elves, Oromë and Ulmo are permitted to interact with them once they're found, but Yavanna never does. We receive very specific information about the activities of the men: Oromë riding around Middle-earth, Tulkas chasing things, and Aulë making stuff. Once the women have completed their grand designs, they drop back from the story. If there is something to be done after that, you can be sure a man will be doing it. These actions inflate the men's numbers, but they also give the men a presence in the story and fuller characterization that the women lack.

If we accept the Valar as a prototype of the correct order of the universe as created by Ilúvatar, these revelations are pretty dispiriting. They suggest that women and men have equal willingness to become involved in the world, but women lag significantly behind the men in terms of both skill and actual involvement. Even if we reject that Tolkien was deliberately attempting to represent the inferiority of women to be part of the natural order of his universe, when considering the influence the Valar wield over the other peoples of Arda, we can see how these views spread to other cultures who might otherwise achieve a more egalitarian society.

On Varda: Or a Case Study in Inequality

When I ran the initial data for this research, the character whose depiction struck me as the most unjust was Varda. The Valaquenta tells us that Varda is the Queen of the Valar and the Vala most beloved by the Elves; she and Manwë enjoy a synergistic relationship where they are most powerful in the other's company. We are told that Melkor "hated her, and feared her more than all others whom Eru made."¹⁴ As noted above, her creation of the stars is explicitly identified as the greatest act of subcreation by the Valar. Varda is a powerful, kickass woman character.

Varda is also almost wholly absent from the story. She is mentioned only thirty-four times in The Silmarillion; despite the fact that the Valaquenta says Manwë and Varda are almost never apart,¹⁵ Manwë receives four times as many mentions as she does. What is Varda doing in the scenes where Manwë is active or outspoken in some way? Why do we never see her in these scenes, even indirectly via her influence over him?

Varda never speaks in The Silmarillion. Not once. In the chapter "Of the Sun and Moon," we are told that she "changed her counsel" and "commanded the Moon," but we never actually hear her speak in those instances. In most of the councils where important decisions are being made, one wouldn't even know that Varda was present. Not only do we not hear her voice, we don't even learn what her opinion is. For a Queen of the Valar, her silence is not only odd but almost unbelievable.

Varda is named in the Valaquenta as the most beloved of the Elves, and we are told that "they call upon her name out of the shadows of Middle-earth, and uplift it in song at the rising of the stars." We are told also that she "hears more clearly than all other ears the sound of voices that cry from east to west, from the hills and the valleys, and from the dark places that Melkor has made upon Earth."¹⁶ Yet we don't know why the Elves revere her so—aside from her making of the stars—nor do we see her act in any way upon the cries made to her. Aside from being present at a few rituals, we never see her interact with the Elves. We never even see her advocate for them, even though she is given several chances to do so.

I presented some of this data and some initial thoughts on my blog, The Heretic Loremaster, on July 22, 2015. Lady Brooke took my analysis a step further by investigating how the Valar are discussed in The Lord of the Rings. The names Varda and Elbereth are mentioned twenty-five times in the story itself (again, I am not counting appendix materials). Brooke notes that the only other Vala to be mentioned in the story itself is Oromë, whom I found twice (once under the name Araw), although Aulë and Manwë also appear in appendix materials. Nonetheless, even these three men combined cannot touch Varda's numbers in The Lord of the Rings. Tumblr user Anghraine makes a similar observation, noting that Elbereth appears in three songs and functions as "the elvish expletive of choice" in The Lord of the Rings (the latter is noted in the tags on the post).

If you look at the references to Varda in The Lord of the Rings, they are precisely as Brooke and Anghraine note. They don't show Varda in an active role. Her name is taken in vain a lot and, at most, is invoked in a protective capacity, but we don't know why (or if) this works. Is she truly watching over Middle-earth and intervening when she is called upon? Does invoking her name enhance the speaker's courage and fortitude because she or he believes Varda is going to intervene? Does the name repel enemies, who fear the possibility of her intervention? (Sam specifically notes that Elbereth is a good password because Orcs would never speak her name.¹⁷ ) Is it just sheer superstition and actually has no effect at all? As noted above, we see no evidence to suggest that, aside from making the stars, Varda ever actually advocated for much less intervened on behalf of anyone in Middle-earth. The discrepancy between her identified role and what we actually see her doing brings to light another complicating factor in all of Tolkien's texts: how reading the books as historical texts, taking into account narrative point of view, affects the credibility of what we see in the books.

On the Lost Cult of Varda: Or How Historical Readings Muddle My Conclusions

Potentially rescuing Varda and the other Valier from silence and obscurity is the fact that the legendarium was intended by Tolkien to serve as a historical account told by chroniclers who lived through or received the tradition from others. The latter is especially salient in the case of the Valar, since few of the Children of Ilúvatar would have been privy to the conversations of the Valar reported in The Silmarillion. In short, The Silmarillion accounts of the Valar are largely hearsay and perhaps reflect the cultural and gender biases of the chroniclers and other keepers of the tradition.

Do I think Tolkien deliberately orchestrated a gender-biased narrator and, in fact, imagined the Valier to have fuller roles equal to those of the men? No, I don’t. The equal number of female and male Valar, especially when compared to the gender disparities among other groups of characters, suggests that he may have aspired to equality and maybe would have even asserted, based on the numbers alone and the indispensable roles of the female Aratar, to have achieved it. In the male-dominated academic world of the early twentieth century, it is likely that he didn’t have a full picture of what gender equality looked like, in part because the historical and literary tradition of Western civilization was (and still is) heavily skewed toward men and did not present many options for imagining the role strong women characters might play in a narrative beyond their rare imposition into the roles of men. We can see this even in the present day, where traditional women’s work remains undercompensated (when it is noticed at all), and even in professions that have achieved gender parity, women are called upon less often than men to speak as experts. They are the Vardas: On paper, they are giants of intellect and creativity who nonetheless seem to do or say very little, less a comment on their actual achievements than how our culture perceives those achievements. In Tolkien’s work, it is perhaps telling that the women most often identified as "strong female characters"—Èowyn, Haleth, Galadriel, Lúthien—play a martial or questing role at least part of the time. It is as though Tolkien had a difficult time imagining how characters in a more traditionally feminine role—for example, Varda’s advocacy for the defenseless or Nienna’s emotional nurturance of the suffering—could equal the strength and dignity of male pursuits centered on conquest and power. These are biases Tolkien held—these are biases most of us hold—and likely his fictional chroniclers and narrators as well.

So while I do not believe that Tolkien intended his gender-biased in-universe narrators to deliver a wink and a nudge to readers, who would understand that the Valier only do and say far less than the men, and so appear less interesting and fully realized as characters than the men, because of those narrators’ biases, I do think that this framework upon which he built his story offers potential for redeeming even the Nessas and Vairës of his imagined world (to say nothing of the Vardas and Niennas). Their silence, their lack of achievement are not absolutes; they are only flawed perceptions. In what Tolkien scholar and fanfiction writer Una McCormick called "reparative reading,"¹⁸ readers and fanworks creators can look past the biases and imagine fuller roles for these characters without contradicting (and indeed paying a sort of homage to the structure of) the canon. It is not hard to imagine a story where Varda, for example, acts in a way that explains both Melkor’s terror of her and the adoration of her by the peoples of Third Age Middle-earth.

Conclusion: Or the Power of Prototypes

The Valar are not the only Children of Ilúvatar—far from it—but they are the only Children of Ilúvatar to receive guidance and instruction directly from Ilúvatar rather than an intermediary. As such, their society and behaviors can be inferred to most closely reflect Ilúvatar’s intentions in creating the universe. Even before we discuss their own roles lending guidance to other groups in Arda, this prototypical role marks them as important in delineating how Arda is intended to function. If we find sexism there—and I hope I have demonstrated that we do—then this is the way it’s supposed to be. A dispiriting thought, but one that is not strange to actual women, who have been told for millennia (and are still told today, in various ways subtle and overt) that they are not as capable as men.

If you want to start a flamewar in the Tolkien fan community, pose the question, "Was Tolkien sexist?" It doesn’t matter how you answer it, you will upset someone. The Valar, through their status as prototypes, provide compelling evidence that, yes, Tolkien was sexist. He imagined a world with a foundation where women were equally interested in participating in the world but far less capable of doing so in a meaningful way or where their accomplishments weren’t interesting enough to write about. His words to his son Michael that women were equally able to learn as men but far less adept at making something of that learning are worth revisiting. He is describing his prototype of the Valar.

Now is the point where some readers will be only half-listening to what I say because they will already be rehearsing how they will tell me that I am being unfair in holding J.R.R. Tolkien—who began work on The Silmarillion more than a century ago—to modern views on sexism. To these readers: I can feel your hands itching to type, and I ask you to wait for just a moment longer. Do not mistake my intentions in calling Tolkien sexist. He joins the rest of us—including me, although I try not to be—in his sexism. It is not to retroactively condemn his work or to advocate against its importance in twentieth-century literature. In fact, it’s justifiable place in the Western literary canon is precisely why I bring it up.

Because just as the Valar are important for their prototypical status, so is Tolkien. Tolkien’s work is, likewise, a prototype: the model that shaped modern epic fantasy, one of the twentieth century’s most important genres. Countless books, stories, films, and other popular culture media were patterned after Tolkien’s prototype, more often than not unwittingly echoing the same sexist patterns that formed a component of his imagined universe. This doesn’t compel blame and certainly not censorship, but it does encourage awareness, so that we can strive to do better, to break—and eventually, hopefully, remake—the prototype.

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Works Cited

1. The Silmarillion, Valaquenta, "Of the Valar."
2. The Silmarillion, Valaquenta, "Of the Maiar."
3. This is equivalent to the legendarium as a whole; see Emil Johansson, "Population by Race and Sex," LotR Project, 2014, accessed July 8, 2018.
4. The Silmarillion, Ainulindalë.
5. The Silmarillion, Valaquenta, "Of the Valar."
6. The Silmarillion, Ainulindalë.
7. The Silmarillion, Valaquenta, "Of the Valar."
8. Ibid. "Melkor is no longer counted among the Valar, and his name is not spoken upon Earth."
9. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, "43 From a letter to Michael Tolkien."
10. The Silmarillion, "Of the Coming of the Elves and the Captivity of Melkor."
11. The Silmarillion, "Of the Beginning of Days."
12. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, "43 From a letter to Michael Tolkien."
13. The Silmarillion, "Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor."
14. The Silmarillion, Valaquenta, "Of the Valar."
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, "The Tower of Cirith Ungol."
18. Una McCormick, "Finding Ourselves in the (Un)Mapped Lands: Women’s Reparative Readings of The Lord of the Rings" in Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan (Altadena, CA: Mythopoeic Press, 2015), 310.

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Chapter End Notes

This essay is crossposted to my blog, The Heretic Loremaster. Comments and discussion are welcome (and appreciated!) in both places, but if you prefer a threaded discussion, you might want to head over the HL.