Yes: all of the main twelve dwarves in The Hobbit are male, as you can tell by Tolkien’s use of the male pronoun for them. As I recall Dain was male and none of his army were referred to as she. None of the named characters are female in the published book, regardless of race.
Tolkein writes a little bit about female dwarves in his more apocryphal work.
That’s cool. It’s also cool to exercise your own agency (like Kirill Yeskov did).
Tolkein’s women were, excepting Eowyn, either shadows hiding in the background, or deities beyond comprehension (like Galadriel).
It would be neat to write a story so that it’s either unclear or designed to be switched. “Pat the Dragon Hunter”?
Well it would make “Bored of the Rings” even more entertaining to read …
“Reader, I married her.”
Maybe this will be a feature of future e-books, where the reader will be able to select the sex, orientation, race, etc of characters in a story. Of course, this might simply facilitate entrenching discrimination.
A great British book from the 1980s is “The Turbulent Term Of Tyke Tiler” by Gene Kemp. But NO SPOILERS people! It’s a book for girls and boys with a great ending. Totally relevant to what we are discussing.
True, it could be used by people you don’t agree with to reinforce their stereotypes. That’s what tolerance is about.
Oh my goodness, I had totally forgotten that book until this post. Seconded, strongly.
Doesn’t “apocryphal” mean “well-known but probably not true”? I am not sniping at your use of the word, but rather asking a question: are the Tolkien works other than H and LOTR actually intended by him to be of less veracity (within of course the entirely fictional world he created)? It would make sense that he would create apocrypha (just as in Christian tradition there is the “true” Bible and the “untrue” apocrypha). I just hadn’t read that anywhere that this was his intention, and I am too lazy to try to research it! (grin) I would have myself called Silmarillion “earlier work” or “more obscure work,” etc., but not apocrypha. Then again, I could be wrong! PS I do agree with you 100% that the dwarves named were male, Tolkien himself I believe said that somewhere (again, I am too lazy to dig it up). Fun factoid (possibly… apocryphal!) I believe he also said that both male and female dwarves had beards… Anyway, I am over-thinking all this and will now move on to more crucial topics… how about that Balrog’s wings thing…
As well as being quite hairy.
In the source material (the Eddas) Tolkien drew the dwarves from, the names were definitely male. The only dwarf with a female name, IIRC, was Dis, which was more of a title than a name. Tolkien did cross-gender at least one name, “Grima”, but that character was not involved in exploring or fighting.
Quite possibly yes, but like everything related to the canonicity of Tolkien’s posthumous works it’s complicated.
I’ve no objection to doing a dynamic gender-edit if that helps the reader/listener identify with the character better. We all tend to do that for songs; “I love him” becomes “I love her” or vice versa to better express our own feelings
And I grant that there’s a historical bias in the classic literature… partly because there’s been a bias in history, or at least in documented history… which has only started evening out recently. If you’re worrying about subtexts setting biases in the next generation, I can see arguments for trying to balance that.
On the other hand… The whole point of a story is to imagine what you’d do in another situation. She may not be a boy, but she isn’t a hobbit either. When I started voraciously reading SF in 3rd grade or so, I didn’t care whether the protagonist of one of Ms. Norton’s books was male or female; I could imagine myself alongside them or in their position equally easily either way. That’s still true.
While I doubt “a better read” – I think that’s just the appeal of being forced to actually pay attention to a familiar story and re-imagine it anew – I have no doubt it’s just as good a read with these edits, because, as others have said, gender really doesn’t matter unless one is dealing specifically with sex and reproduction, and even for sex if you ignore the social conventions a lot of it reads equally well either way until one gets to the mechanics of who actually has tab A and slot B.
There should be a better balance in what’s available. The reader/listener should also develop the skills to project themselves into the story without that being a hinderance. I’ve no objection to helping a kid with the latter by doing the edit for them rather than asking them to do it, since kids are still figuring out this whole story thing anyway… but if it hadn’t been specifically requested, I do find myself wondering whether a better teaching opportunity would have been to point out just how little difference it makes – “would you have done anything differently than Bilbo did? I don’t mean if you were Bilbo, I mean if you were there instead of him… maybe a bit more grown-up, but you. Why?” That gives you a chance to actively, rather than passively, emphasize the point as well as to teach this audience skill.
Ha! This reminds me of my first ever Boing Boing post.
The point that’s missing here is that many of Tolkien’s characters, while nominally male, expose feelings and emotions, as well as wisdom and bravery, that are never depicted as solely male qualities. In fact, The Hobbit and LOTR is a story about strength of character way more than physical strength. Two tiny hobbits, weak and frightened, hold the fate of the entire world in their wise and flawed little hands. They are stronger than the strongest man, elf, even wizard: for who else is even capable of holding the ring without turning into a terrible despot? Middle Earth is a world of very deep moral wisdom based on Catholic teachings. Catholic teachings hold two Marys above all of the men. Only the son of god is in any way “above” them, and Jesus’s dependency on them for his success and survival is thoroughly explored in Catholic teaching.
I guess my main point is that in reversing Bilbo’s gender we may be focusing too much on the outward signifiers of the male/female paradigm as opposed to the inner spirit which is neither and both. If a little girl will better identify and understand Bilbo if he is made female I don’t see any problem with that. But perhaps its the parent’s role to teach that little girl to see herself in male characters as much as female. For she is also both and neither, and I’d never want to limit a girl’s vision of her capabilities and qualities because of her gender, just as I’d never want to harm a boy by cutting him off from the feminine part of himself.
I don’t really buy the argument of “if we all just stopped talking about problems, they would go away”. You need to discuss issues in order to help them go away, not just pretend they don’t exist.
I didn’t realize Scout was a girl in To Kill A Mockingbird until about halfway through, but that may have been more down to me not paying much attention. 
Not sure this deserves a discussion. If a protagonist is female I often change the gender in my mind to better identify with him. I suspect people have been doing this since day one. Now if they had changed Bilbo to female in the movie that would be a big discussion and outright sexist.
