10 great female characters from The Lord of the Rings

Amazon is making a show called The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It’s not the story we all know, the one with Frodo and Gandalf and the Ring and all that. It’s set thousands of years earlier, during the Second Age of Middle-earth. The producers are drawing on the appendices at the end of J.R.R. Tolkien’s iconic The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Amazon is throwing a ton of money at the project to make sure it’s a success.

But there’s an issue with basing an epic TV show on what is essentially a list of bullet points: the story isn’t well-developed; we know the general arc of what happens, but not many details. That’s where Amazon’s writers come in. Watching the trailer, they’ve added a lot of new elements to Tolkien’s world:

In particular, they’ve added a lot of new characters. Nazanin Boniadi plays a village healer. Sophia Nomvete plays a dwarven princess named Disa. Megan Richards and Markella Kavenagh play a pair of harfoots (that’s what hobbits are called during this time). Amazon wants this to be a huge show, so it has a huge cast.

It’s notable that all of the new characters I just mentioned are women, which Tolkien didn’t have a lot of. I don’t know if I’d say that his books have bad female representation, because he wrote some memorable female characters. It’s more that there’s just not much in the way of representation period.

Scholars and critics have debated the reasons for this paucity of women characters. Maybe it’s because Tolkien went to all-boys schools and then into the all-male army and was just writing what he knew. Maybe he was aiming his story at boys, who were thought back then to comprise the principal market for tales of adventure. Maybe he simply didn’t think to include women because he was writing over 70 years ago and there was little to no discourse about representation.

Whatever the reason, the ratio of men to women in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien is really high, but the ones who are there make an impression. If the new characters in The Rings of Power are half as interesting as these women, we’ll follow them unto the Cracks of Doom.

Éowyn, shieldmaiden of Rohan

Éowyn is the best female character J.R.R. Tolkien ever wrote because she’s the most relatable. A lot of the women in The Lord of the Rings tend to be remote and ethereal, like Galadriel and Arwen, impossible Elven paragons of beauty and power. But Éowyn is a human woman, a niece to King Théoden of Rohan and a shieldmaiden who wants to fight for her country.

The problem is that she’s not allowed to; she’s expected to stay home with the rest of the women. Instead, she disguises herself as a boy and rides to war, making friends with the hobbit Merry along the way. She performs acts of heroism, slaying the Witch King of Angmar during the
Battle of the Pelennor Fields and fulfilling her dreams of glory.

It’s those dreams that make Éowyn so compelling. It can be hard to tell what a character like Galadriel wants; she seems beyond our understanding, an almost divine being who operates according to her own designs. But Éowyn wants. She wants glory, she wants love, she wants a chance to be useful. And as a human woman, she’s vulnerable in a way that Galadriel isn’t, vulnerable to death and injury and heartbreak. I’d argue that all of this makes Éowyn’s story one of the most compelling of any character in The Lord of the Rings, male or female.