Well the Hobbit is arguably told from Bilbo’s POV. If he couldn’t tell and none of the felt like correcting him (because when filling roles considerd intrinsically MALE by non-dwarves it’s simpler to not correct people) they could have been male DESPITE the pronoun used.
Perhaps The Hobbit (as is) is 100% male, but maybe you just need to read it a little more carefully! 
Well first look at what Tolkien gives us in Appendix A of Lord of The Rings
“Dis…she is the only dwarf-woman, named in these histories”
“There are few dwarf-women, probably no more than a third of the whole people”
“They seldom walk abroad except at great need”
"They are in voice and appearance, and in garb if they must go on a journey, so like to the dwarf-men that the eyes of other peoples cannot tell them apart…
“the kind of the dwarves is in peril when they have no secure dwelling.”
One might ask, why does Tolkien even give us this information? Where does this come into play in his tales? Well, all these scraps of information call to mind the circumstances of Thorin’s Company…except the first about Dis. That item would seem to be saying none of Thorin’s company could have been female. But firstly, “named in these histories” can be read as saying Dis is the only dwarf ‘revealed’ to be a woman. Why is Tolkien choosing to be coy? Then notice that most Thorin’s company are NOT named in the Tolkien’s HISTORY on Durin’s Folk, but are only mentioned in a footnote to the family tree of Durin’s Line. At this point, one might begin to wonder if the good Professor is putting us on.
Which might send the curious to reread the Hobbit with an eye toward more clues (or at least more jokes!). Sure enough, not all the dwarves are specifically described as having beards. And then note Tolkien’s use of personal pronouns. There are several of the company (I think Bifur and Nori are among them) whom, at no point in this rambling adventure does, the author EVER apply the singular masculine pronouns: he, him, his. There are, I admit, at least two occasions where Tolkien’s these pronouns to describe the actions of all of the dwarves in series…something like “each member of the company looked to his heart…”. But accepted usage, in Tolkien’s day, accepted this usage to a group of mixed gender. Tricky Perfesser!
Not idly do the pronouns of an Oxford don fail.
Then of course, Peter Jackson/Walsh/Boyens picked up on the joke and ran with it in the conversation between Gimli, Aragorn and Eowyn on the road out of Dunharrow.
One major aim of the Quest of Erebor is to restore the Dwarven society and ALL THAT ENTAILS. It isn’t bowing to “political correctness” to play off the idea that there might be a female in Thorin’s Company. That possibility has ALWAYS been there.
Also, go back and check out some of the Dwarves in the Rankin&Bass version of the Hobbit. There are one or two members of the company who never speak and keep their faces obscured with scarves. In other words, I’m saying someone involved in that production also honored this little joke…and it went right over nearly everybody’s head.
Think about Bifur and Nori as the most likely:. Aside from the reasons outlined above, I’d note that these two have a few curious things in common…they each travel in the company of TWO near relatives (some extra precaution?) and they each travel with a brother (or cousin) who wears a hood that matches their own. (this business of having a ‘body double’ could be yet another precaution)
My reading took place a few years ago after i read the Tolkien note about lady dwarves being indistinguishable. It just struck me as odd and I went back to the Hobbit text, expecting to quickly establish that all of Thorin’s company were male…but page after page was filled with frustrating ambiguity on the subject of a few members of Thorin’s company…even though the matter is quickly settled for the character of Gandalf, Bilbo, Elrond, Beorn…etc…then I reread to LOTR through the same prism and found all the characters (including someone named Merry, for pity’s sake) all have their genders are sorted out conclusively right off. Then, with this doubt now firmly planted in my mind, I rewatched portions of Rankin/Bass The Hobbit and began to feel I’d been punked…as if I was the last one to catch on to a secret.
I think the Rankin/Bass Hobbit played it perfectly. Its something that just kind of goes by and very few catch on to what might have been slyly suggested.
One objective of these new HOBBIT films is to give us a glimpse of the culture that produced Gimli (with whom the film audience will be familiar and who has commented himself that there ARE dwarf-women). And once you do introduce dwarf women…and if you follow Tolkien’s lead you’re going to have to introduce them as co-equal and nearly indistinguishable from the men…and as equally desperate to restore a Dwarven society that is dysfunctional and failing…then to say explicitly that there are NO dwarf women in Thorin’s Company is, in a way, more contrary to Tolkien’s line than if you leave it, at least, ambiguous.
In the text, by my count only five members of Thorin’s Company are individually identified as having beards (Dori, Balin, Dwalin, Fili and Kill).
…more striking, nowhere over the course of a +300 page story is the gender of either ORI, NORI or BIFUR clearly identified…and to any reader-so-inclined, FILI could be assumed simply to be a hirsute she-dwarf until page 154 (when the identifier “he” is first applied to FILI).
For comparisons sake, In LOTR Frodo’s gender is made clear on the first page of Chapter 1 (the first page where he is mentioned), Sam is described as a “son” on the very next page (the first page where Sam is mentioned), Pippin and Merry are introduced ambiguously on page 76 as “special friends” but by page 79 Pippin is undeniably a dude and Merry, who does not even join the company until page 106, is referred to as a “him” on page 101. etc, etc. All I’m suggesting is that “not idly do the pronouns of Tolkien fail”
Nori travels in the company of two blood relatives(see page 18) , wear’s a purple hooded cape(also page 18) and plays the flute (page 21). If NORI is a gal then odds are ORI is a dude (sisters among dwarves must be as statistically rare as twins among modern humans?). Then with BIFUR, who like NORI travels in the company of two male relatives, Tolkien seems to have left the sexual identity to the imagination of the reader.
On page 47: “As each dwarf came up and looked at the fire, and the spilled jugs, and the gnawed mutton, in surprise, pop! went a nasty smelly sack over his head, and he was down”
And a similar such reference on page 70; “…discussed what each would do with HIS share.”
In both of these circumstances Tolkien is using the masculine singular to describe what a series of dwarves would do. In modern usage, one might feel compelled to avoid this sentence construction completely when discussing ‘mixed company’ or be expected to wrestle with a PC qualifier like “him and/or her” , but in the not so distant days of the Twentieth Century the masculine pronoun was more easily read as gender neutral in these sorts of circumstances.
It is telling that our first (and presumably best) bit of evidence against “Gal Nori” is tantilizingly ambiguous.
Even if I were to accept that NORI isn’t female, the notion that we could erase all reference to his/her gender in THE HOBBIT by cutting two words from a +300 page work of literature is not much of a testament to importance of gender in terms of the story being told.
I am, however, NOT READY to concede the two cited passages as anything better than ambiguous. Here are a few online references related to this very problem of English’s lack of a third person gender neutral pronoun.
newark.rutgers.edu/~jlync…ing/s.html
. . Leaving his and her, or some combination of the two. “Each student is responsible for revising his papers” is the traditional usage, and assumes the masculine pronoun stands for everyone, but to some readers it suggests male chauvinism.
“…According to grammarians, 3rd person masculine singular pronouns are gender neutral and refer to people whose sex is not known or groups including women and men…”
“…English doesn’t have a “grammatically acceptable” gender-free third-person singular pronoun to reference a person…”
"…“He” started to be used as a generic pronoun by grammarians who were trying to change a long-established tradition of using they as a singular pronoun. In 1850 an Act of Parliament gave official sanction to the recently invented concept of the “generic” he. In the language used in acts of Parliament, the new law said, “words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females…”
Its almost like, very late in the game, Tolkien realize he hasn’t adequately explained the society structure of Durin’s folk. So he incorporates the tale of Dis and explains that the women are few, and secreted, and then almost as if it just occurs to him…he tosses in a few details with a wink about “going about at great need” and their being indistinguishable from the men. Thorin’s company in exile would seem to be just the sort of circumstance he is describing here. cheeky bastard!
There may be references in Tolkien’s drafts and background materials which may reveal conclusively that none of the 13 are female. But the fact we have to go to those lengths is what I find so amusing (and a bit frustrating).
Bottom Line:
If Jed Brophy turns out to be playing a girl, someone owes me a beer!
3 Likes
and Lobelia
I was going to say this reminds me of when some people emphasize “colorblindness,” as if to say that race no longer matters in our “post-racial” society, as if the only people who still bring it up are racists or people “playing the race card.” It can become an excuse to discourage discussion of race.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t discuss gender. It’s ironic that we would idealize a situation where characters are “genderblind,” yet we obviously still have a lot to say about it. We’re not there yet. I agree with Cory that female characters or the topic of gender are sometimes dealt with clumsily in fiction, but it almost sounds like he’d prefer genderblind stories.
Why break the long-standing tradition of boys reading “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret” ?
All this fooforall…
Read your kids The Witches of Karres. When your kids graduate to Schmitz’s Hub books, they’ll thank you. His books aren’t completely gender-blind, but, perhaps, given that many (maybe most) of his protagonists are very competent young women, gender-unimportant (and they’re a lot of fun as well).
Incidentally, studies indicate that raising your children ‘colorblind’ to evade your own discomfort in addressing race actually tends to make your kids more racist, as they are pretty much then left to their own devices when trying to make sense of race, and, unsurprisingly, the intuition of toddlers and preschoolers isn’t always terribly refined or compassionate or correct (this is only exacerbated by the fact that young children are category-creating machines and the same drive that leads them to sort tokens by color in preschool exercises also manifests as a tendency to sort people by color…).
2 Likes
There was only one dwarf in The Hobbit. The fact that he had twelve different names and bodies did nothing to eliminate this fact.
So… the tl;dr of your analysis: you can tell Tolkein wrote dwarf women because they are the wholly unremarkable and undiferentiated characters.
Yeah, I am not buying what you are selling.
…what you are smoking on the other hand…
“…English doesn’t have a “grammatically acceptable” gender-free third-person singular pronoun to reference a person…”
Not sure what your authority on English language pronouns is, but mine, the Oxford English Dictionary, says “they: 2 [ singular ] used to refer to a person of unspecified sex: ask a friend if they could help.”
Singular “they” is colloquially acceptable, but many still think it sounds wrong enough that they (plural) are continuing to fight this trend.
Take religious flamewar as given; I hope we can just note that a disagreement exists and should be discussed elsewhere if at all…
She’s gonna find out about Santa someday too. The horror!
As I heard it, someone asked George R R Martin (Games of Thrones) how he came to write women “really well and really different?” And he said, “You know, I’ve always considered women to be people.”
4 Likes
Or children in general.
1 Like
Well, Belladonna Took is mentioned at the very beginning, and it’s said that Bilbo could have taken his adventurous spirit from her side.
1 Like
By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green, and the hobbits were still numerous and prosperous, and Bilbo Baggins was standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his woolly toes (neatly brushed) - Gandalf came by.
Yeah, genderswitch-illustrate that!
No reason a woman can’t smoke a pipe, of course. (JRRT suggested that pipeweed was probably a variety of nicotinia, but declined to say for sure – and noted that hobbits had smoked other herbs before adopting this one.)
Agreed, but still would be a fun sight, combined with hairy toes, rotund complexion and the fact that Bilbo was fifty at the time the adventure found him. So, they genderswitched him ― but did they also note that the resulting lady was if not old, then at least of considerate age?
How do you define “considerable”? Remember, Hobbits were considered to “come of age” on their 33rd birthday. Admittedly Bilbo’s 111th birthday was remarkable, but the evidence is that they’re longer-lived on average than humans would be expected to be in a similar culture in our world… probably closer to our modern life expectancies. 50 is certainly middle-aged, but that isn’t “old” for us and wouldn’t be for them.
1 Like
For a time I started on a personal project to sort of rewrite Harry Potter, changing all the character names and many descriptions, but keeping basic plot as similar as possible, except that instead of a magic school for wizards, it’s the kid’s school for a semi-posthuman hi-tech enclave that exists alongside but apart from the rest of the world (which is actually a recreation of the original Earth created by godlike AIs to examine what life would be like without a fast-take-off singularity, most of humanity is simply unaware and think they’re living a 21st century life). Instead of the Philosopher’s Stone, for example, the first book would probably be about The Last Cornucopia, a nanotech Assembler which lacks the built-in restrictions of most of the others in the world and can be used to do various restricted things…
Anyway I changed the Harry Potter analog into a girl (Hagrid’s analog was a human from a colony bioformed for a high-gravity environment, as I recall). Since I figured in a world where high technology is the equivalent to magic, nobody would really care about what gender you’re attracted to (and gender would be changeable anyway to anybody who really wanted), I didn’t bother gender-swapping any of her potential love interests- I mean, if she’s also gay (or leaning heavily in that direction), it doesn’t really matter, does it? And as I went on, it appealed to me more, even though I lost steam long before I ever got to where young romance was a factor anyway.
Sometimes I think about going back to it.
