Student Publishes Extensive Statistics On the Population of Middle-Earth

First time accepted submitter dsjodin writes "There are only 19% females in Tolkien's works and the life expectancy of a Hobbit is 96.24 years. In January 2012 chemical engineering student Emil Johansson published a website with the hope for it to become a complete Middle-Earth genealogy. Now, ten months later, he has published some interesting numbers derived from the database of 923 characters. The site features a set of unique graphs helping us understand the world Tolkien described. Perhaps the most interesting ones are showing the decrease of the longevity of Men and the change in population of Middle-Earth throughout history. The latter was also recently published in the September edition of Wired Magazine."

Comments

The letter is in the mail...

[Frosty Piss]

This poor guy will probably soon receive a Cease and Desist letter from Tolken's estate...

Serious points raised?

[JoshuaZ]

This does in some ways raise serious points: A lot of classical fantasy had a dearth of women as characters. In Tolkien's case even when they are characters they are often far more passive than active. One sees how this conflicts with more modern sensibilities- look at how much screen time was given to Arwen and Eowyn compared to how much time they had in the books. (It is true that The Silmarillion also introduces some females but the overall numbers are low). Worse, when later fantasy did try to have empowered female characters, they were often more male fantasies, the classical "chicks in chainmail" and the like. One sees the extension of this to other variants as well in modern games, where in many videogames and MMOs otherwise equivalent armor is depicted as covering much less on the women and often emphasizing the female figure. And one sees a similar pattern in science fiction. Indeed, much of it doesn't even get close to passing the Bechdel test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test. Note that in the case of Lord of the Rings, it fails the Bechdel test so badly that no two major female characters even have a conversation. (Interestingly, another major foundation of the work- The Chronicles of Narnia has much more in the way of strong females.)

It shouldn't be that surprising in this sort of context that scifi and fantasy have for a long-time been seen as male-dominated genres. That's obviously not exclusively the case (I first started reading fantasy to some extent because woman who babysat me was a voracious consumer of fantasy novels), but it is a definite problem. There have been some clear changes in the genre in the last few years, especially in the Young Adult area. Thus, one has examples like Garth Nix's Abhorsen series where the main characters are to a large extent strong women, and actually strong not just skimpy-armor-strong. So the genre does seem to be changing, but there will likely always be some influence from what founded the genre.

Re:Serious points raised?

[iggymanz]

why are you bemoaning an imagined problem because fantasy and the real world don't conform to your expectations? There are some women warriors in the world, sure. but not many. most have the good sense to avoid that occupation like the plague. most women don't think it's cool to destroy, be violent, maim and kill. or to start a war to plunder or expand power. men are different in that regard, on average. get over it, we really need less of that kind of "empowered" women and men on this planet.

Re:Serious points raised?

[dkleinsc]

There are good reasons why Lord of the Rings failing the Bechdel test is hardly surprising:
1. Tolkien wrote it in the 1940's. Sexism was hardly unusual then.
2. Tolkien was actively imitating and drawing from older tales and epics, which regularly had very few important female characters. For instance, the only woman with any kind of significant role in Beowulf (a significant inspiration for Tolkein) is Grendel's mother, and she isn't even given a name.
3. One of the constant and enduring themes throughout the books is the deep bonds that form between men thrown together into really bad situations. Probably part of the point was to give folks an idea of what it was like to be at the front in WWI, where the only women in the area were nurses.

There was at least one fantasy novel I read a long time ago that had actually completely reversed the roles of men and women: The women were the tough fighters and leaders and in charge of everything, the men were expected to sit around looking pretty until the women wanted to sleep with them.

Re:Serious points raised?

[Anonymous Coward]

First, if a sword weighs 50 lbs, the blacksmith did something very, very wrong. Maybe it's a lump of gravel glued into the shape of a sword.

Second, I think you missed the point of the OP. Gender inequality doesn't have to be central theme of the book, just for women to be in it. That's a problem with historically unequal face time for female characters - it's come to mean that when they do show up, people think it's for a special reason or to 'make a point' or something. When, given that women and girls are half the population, and every man and boy will run into at least one at one point in their life (probably many more), you'd expect to see us all over the place for no particular reason because we're just that ubiquitous.

And yeah, specifically excluding us or painting us in a bad light is misogynistic. So is ignoring us because you think we only make good characters when you want to discuss women's issues. Women aren't "an issue," we're people. Just like men. If an author ends up writing a book about the lives of several characters and fails to present any women at all because they 'don't want to explore the issue of gender inequality,' there is still a problem. It's an indication that the author cannot see how women fit into the lives of 'people' (read: men). That's misogyny, too.

Re:Serious points raised?

[tnk1]

Do you really think the characters would be improved if they were more plausible as sex objects? I really never thought so, personally.

Most, if not all of the women in the story are of a noble class, either elves or of men. Noblewomen may certainly have desires and be desirable, but they also got points for demonstrating a certain subtlety in how they went about courting. Not to mention that neither they, nor often the men, were entirely free to marry on their own. If Eowyn was some sort of lower class woman, as opposed to a member of the royal family of Rohan, she might well have been more direct.

However, since she is who she is, despite her nomadic roots, she's still got certain requirements. If she's going to get Aragorn, it's going to be as a husband, because in reality, if she just bedded him, everyone would know the next day. If she's a virgin until she's married, that's because that was a common requirement for a woman of her class.

In a sense, she's a more accurate portrayal of a woman of that sort of world than the sexy Eowyn would be, because she knows as a noble and as a female, she has certain duties and responsibilities that are not easy to escape. Tolkien lived in a very class-conscious society, and in that society, men and women of certain classes operated in specific ways. Insofar as he was also describing a feudal sort of society himself, his experiences probably ring true for what woman would have appeared to be on the surface.

If you do want to call Tolkien on something, you might well call him out on Rohan itself, since he calls them Horse Lords, but they never really bore much resemblance to anything like real horse nomads. Of course, it was said that they settled down a bit when they were given their land by Gondor, so that may well explain the changes. If so, though, that is also probably why Eowyn acts more like a court lady and less like some Mongol chieftain's niece.

Anyway, I understand that some stories feature romances as motivational factors and push the story forward, but in this case, I don't see how they do anything for the story. How does a fuller description of what Aragorn thinks of Arwen in the sack add anything? In some stories, the hero is fighting for some woman, but in this story, it's pretty clear that you don't even need that sort of motivation. A very real evil is coming, and in reality, when that sort of total war is coming, your women are usually going to be doing their best to keep things going while you are away fighting and not at all acting like vixens. They may well jump you before you leave, because you may well not come back, but that would be a coupling born of dread.

I suppose of Tolkien was all you had to go by, it would be deficient in describing females, but it's almost refreshing to *not* have the heroes or heroines hooking up all the time. In the real world, there's a reason you had camp followers and that's because the women you married were at home, being protected, and also protecting things in their own way by controlling the family estates. He's describing a time where women did not go to war, and telling a story that is entirely about the action and little in the way of talking about the home front or the feelings of the population.

Re:Hobbits and natural selection

[Anonymous Coward]

I would think that with comments about hobbits being shy quiet folk, with an ability to not be seen if they don't want too, and living in 'holes in the ground' that there was a large preditors that ate all the tall ones...selecting for short, quiet (hairy footed) hobbits.

It may well have been the ent wives...since they are unaccounted for..and probably mean.

Are the ent wives counted in the stats?