FEMINIST NUMENOREAN SQUIRRELS, SAVE ME FROM THE HORRORS OF TOLKIEN'S THOUGHTS ABOUT PREGNANCY.
One of the greater sensations of relief in my life was hacking my way through that section (the formatting of which literally fritzed my e-reader, lol) and finally coming to the note, "What of Maeglin?" -- marking the moment when Jonald clearly threw the whole section and everything in it into the barrel from whose bottom Hostetter scraped it decades later. I don't think I could take it if any of these was any more canonical than Tinfang Warble! "Genuine peculiarities" is so right.
I might add, what of Morwen Steelsheen?! Morwen Steelsheen and her five children by Thengel, starting when she was about 26, and in the middle of whom she ups stakes, moves countries, assumes a queenship, and then has more children? Moreover, if one considers Edain to be proto-Numenorean in any way, which I think Tolkien does, we see some women (including the most proto-Numenorean of them all, Morwen Elfsheen) doing all kinds of things while pregnant and immediately post-natal that do not mesh with this idea of spiritual depletion and postpartum exhausted seclusion at all.
The whole section, honestly, left a really bad taste in my mouth. I found the stuff about postpartum seclusion in particular less "interesting new quasi-canon" and more, frankly, something of a pitiful kind of post hoc gymnastics to try to retroactively justify the absence of women from JRRT's narratives. Not to mention all the stuff trying to wank it around so that it makes toooootal sense why Elven, Peredhil, and Númenorean women would/should always marry older men, ugh. It just doesn't line up with what we see in LOTR or the published Silm, to my profound relief. Having it in NoME is more than enough! One must think of poor Edith, too… Wonder if she got a nice secluded rest after her kids' birth…
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One of the greater sensations of relief in my life was hacking my way through that section (the formatting of which literally fritzed my e-reader, lol) and finally coming to the note, "What of Maeglin?" -- marking the moment when Jonald clearly threw the whole section and everything in it into the barrel from whose bottom Hostetter scraped it decades later. I don't think I could take it if any of these was any more canonical than Tinfang Warble! "Genuine peculiarities" is so right.
I might add, what of Morwen Steelsheen?! Morwen Steelsheen and her five children by Thengel, starting when she was about 26, and in the middle of whom she ups stakes, moves countries, assumes a queenship, and then has more children? Moreover, if one considers Edain to be proto-Numenorean in any way, which I think Tolkien does, we see some women (including the most proto-Numenorean of them all, Morwen Elfsheen) doing all kinds of things while pregnant and immediately post-natal that do not mesh with this idea of spiritual depletion and postpartum exhausted seclusion at all.
The whole section, honestly, left a really bad taste in my mouth. I found the stuff about postpartum seclusion in particular less "interesting new quasi-canon" and more, frankly, something of a pitiful kind of post hoc gymnastics to try to retroactively justify the absence of women from JRRT's narratives. Not to mention all the stuff trying to wank it around so that it makes toooootal sense why Elven, Peredhil, and Númenorean women would/should always marry older men, ugh. It just doesn't line up with what we see in LOTR or the published Silm, to my profound relief. Having it in NoME is more than enough! One must think of poor Edith, too… Wonder if she got a nice secluded rest after her kids' birth…