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

Everybody knows.

[sunking2]

Dwarf women often get confused with the men.

Re:Everybody knows.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the beards.

Nerds!

[LucidBeast]

I'll come to insult you more - after I go through these numbers and make sure they are correct.

19% female is pretty good.

[slackware 3.6]

That is better than most circles of geeks around here.

Re:19% female is pretty good.

[morcego]

That is better than most circles of geeks around here.

Actually, there are plenty of women around. They just don't want to talk to you :)

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?

[Black Parrot]

A lot of classical fantasy had a dearth of women as characters.

Whereas the typical male fantasy has lots of women and only one guy.

Re:Serious points raised?

[Baloroth]

At the risk of sounding like a misogynist... is the lack of women really a bad thing in and of itself? It's certainly quite "realistic" (as much as a fantasy setting can be): in medieval cultures, women weren't adventurers or warriors, and LOTR is focused almost exclusively on adventure and fighting. And for good reason: it's a simple biological fact (source, warning that the picture at the top is full frontal male/female nudity, so probably NSFW) that men have a greater upper body strength than women, on average, and when wielding 50+ pound swords and 100+ pound draw weights on bows, upper body strength is kinda important (which is not to say women could not be fighters and archers, but the average woman would be worse at it than the average man: obviously, some women are far stronger than most men).

There is also the fact that LOTR isn't concerned with gender inequality: it's simply not one of the themes of the book, so if you expect it to deal with it, you will obviously be disappointed. I'd say that isn't even the point of the genre, as a whole. It's like expecting sci-fi to explore what it's like to be a single person living in New York city: it's kind of missing the point. Gender equality is an issue in our day-to-day world. Writing fantasy to explore the issue, while possible, is a bit underwhelming. The point of fantasy is it can explore grand themes of the struggle between good and evil and power/corruption in a way no book set in everday life ever could. OTOH, a book set in everday life can explore the issues of gender inequality in a way that fantasy can't, because fantasy is by definition disconnected from the real world, so exploring real-world issues using fantasy will create some issues in the translation.

Mind you, I'm not saying you should write a book to specifically exclude women or paint them in a bad light, that would be misogynistic. But simply ignoring the issue isn't a problem, IMO, if you don't mean to be dealing with it.

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?

[Simon Brooke]

I think it's more nearly the truth that Tolkien (like many men of his class and generation) was quite alienated from women. I don't think you'd exactly call him a misoynist - although many of his attitudes look very misoynistic to modern eyes - but he had no sympathetic ability to understand what it was to be a woman, not to write from a woman's view point. His understanding of women is pretty much as sexless and passive creatures. The outstanding exceptions to passivity are Eowyn and perhaps Luthien, but Eowyn at least is clearly unable to express the sexuality of her feeling for Aragorn[1], and is apparently virgin until her marriage to Faramir. I don't remember the Luthien narrative in detail, but my memory of it is that he pursues her, not the other way around; so again there's little evidence of any erotic feeling on her part. The only couple in the whole damned epic (I include the Silmarillion and the Hobbit) to appear to have anything approaching what we'd describe as a normal healthy sex-life are Sam and Rosie Gamgee, and that happens in a few pages at the very end of the text.

I have very conflicted feelings about Tolkien, and this is one of the issues. In the end he's telling a very reactionary story, a story of primogeniture, divine right, and male supremacy. A story, undoubtedly, influenced both by his Catholicism and his experience of the Great War. But seriously, do you see Arwen as good in the sack? Do images of Galadriel have you writhing in the night? No, didn't think so. Me neither. And, actually, I think the story would be stronger if they did.

Perhaps the reason that the population of Middle Earth is so small and doesn't grow in anything like a natural way is that Middle Earth women just don't like sex very much? Or perhaps Middle Earth men just aren't very good at it?

[1] I'm not suggesting that Eowyn 'ought' to have made an unsubtle pass at Aragorn; there are plenty of societies in which young women are very inhibited from doing that, although it's a little surprising in the robust horse-nomad society of the Rohirrim: but there are plenty of subtle ways in which Eowyn could have made a pass at him, and she just doesn't. She mopes about waiting for him to make a pass, and then when he doesn't goes all fey and suicidal.

Re:Serious points raised?

[mrbester]

The Tale of Beren and Lúthien was written by Tolkien as an epic love story deliberately casting himself and his wife as the characters.

Re:Serious points raised?

[thelexx]

"wielding 50+ pound swords"

Swords do not weigh that much. The Wallace Sword is five feet six inches long and weighs six pounds. It's at the upper end of claymore size/weight and of swords generally.

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.

Sorry the site is down!

[Anonymous Coward]

As the creator of LotrProject I can only offer my deepest apologies for the site being down. My host has temporarily shut it down -_-
Being featured on Slashdot is a dream come true.

Best,
Emil

Re:Hobbit life expectancy skewed

[OldBus]

I guess the way this comment was phrased is why it is at -1, but it is essentially true. There appears to be no evidence that going to Valinor gave immortality (see especially the whole farce of the attempted invasion by the Numoreans). Tuor is mentioned that he *might* have become immortal, but in the context that this is uncertain, and definitely very unusual.

writing out of one's element

[KingAlanI]

I first thought bad female characterization was a problem with amateur writers such as myself, but even very good professional writers sometimes have issues with it. This can come up even if the writer is not bigoted, or trying not to be.

As a male, I worry about my ability to write female characters. I want to try, but I don’t want to screw up by doing it badly. I don’t want to make well-meaning mistakes. I want to include it without forcing it in. I can and should have good female characters without covering female-specific issues, but I want to try writing that too. I’m not actively trying to fail Bechdel, but I’m not actively trying to pass it either.

Perhaps understanding the group better helps write about them well, whichever comes first.

One woman advised me to make them well-written characters in general and not to overplay stereotypes.

Other differences (sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, social class, et cetera) present similar challenges. Although it’s not as much of a social issue, writers from a nondominant group might have trouble writing characters from the dominant group.

This could be a subset of “write what you know”. Also, people are often inspired by works similar to them.