This is the third attempt to answer you, Naemanson. The first was prevented by the school ISDN timer. The next by my laptop battery, without its usual standby proceeding.

I made a mistake in my last posting - the Riders would NOT have been sheep!

I'll go along with you on the end of LOTR, but can still quibble on the women. True, Tolkein was the inhabitant of a world in which women had a minor place (see Shadowlands), and the product of the Victorian changes in the way women were seen, but even that world knew of heroic women, such as Florence Nightingale and Edith Cavell, (though a Catholic might not have known of the Marys Slessor and Kingsley), and Tolkein would have known of the women saints of his Church who were heroic in alternative ways.

By the time he wrote LOTR, he would have known how the women of London coped with the Blitz (I imagine the women of Rohan more like the people who went down into the Underground or Chiselhirst Caves when they were supposed to be closed and converted them into air-raid shelters).

Leaving aside the heroic women of Homer, Virgil and Malory, Tolkein would have known of historical and semi-historical women in the literature of the period he studied. Aethelflaed of Mercia (yes, I know she led her army) could have knocked spots off the filmic, though not the bookish Eowyn, and there was the historical Brunnhild of the Burgundians. In the sagas, there were plenty of "real" women - such as Freydis, who saw off a bunch of raiding Americans by beating the flat of a sword on her naked breasts! (Not someone I identify with, I should say, but no wimp!)

It is partly his time, and place, but it is also Tolkein himself. I do make allowances, but I don't enjoy the books as much as I did before I noticed the women's absence - and I do have two plastic crates of stuff I haven't read yet!

Penny