Critics often criticize Tolkien for the lack of women in his novels. While, admittedly, there are not very many prominent women in his works, Tolkien does create his women in powerful and influential roles.
The role of women in literature, as in life, is continually shifting. Many women of the nineteenth century, tired to “embrace the dominant middle-class Cult of True Womanhood by constructing a poetic voice that is pious, pure, submissive, and concerned with the domestic sphere” (Cane, 151). However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a…