Luna's first Call for Papers, 'Gender Identity and Sexuality in Fantasy and Science Fiction' will be released on Wednesday the 9th of August. Explore the ten brilliant papers you will find in the book.
Today, we would like to introduce you to Jyrki Korpua (Finland), PHD in Literary studies and Lecturer. Researcher.
He is presenting the paper: "What about Tauriel? From Divine Mothers to Active Heroines - The Female Roles in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Legendarium and Peter Jackson’s movie adaptations".
Jyrki says:
"J. R. R. Tolkien’s fiction is often considered to be male-dominated. Tolkien’s Legendarium - his writings on Middle-earth - has its background in medieval myths and romances, where gender identities are quite conservative in the eyes of the Western 21st century reader. At a glance, Tolkien’s stories seem to consider male characters as dominant and active, and female characters as passive. Representations of gender roles are therefore seemingly old fashioned. Perhaps because of this conservative attitude, the treatment of gender in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit has been challenged. In the first movie, Jackson changed the male character of Glorfindel to the active female character of Arwen and, in The Hobbit he created a brand new female character, Tauriel. These changes have been scrutinised by both fans and scholars on numerous occasions.
This article focuses on the question of female roles in Tolkien’s Legendarium and the corresponding Jackson movie adaptations. Firstly, I will examine female characters and their roles in Tolkien’s main opus, before discussing the changes to the roles introduced by Peter Jackson’s adaptations. Secondly, I will examine how audiences have reacted to the female roles in the movie series, concentrating on the non-canonical character of Tauriel. The latter part of my article is based on the results from the Finnish sub-project, to the global The World Hobbit Project, which was a study on audience reception. Although I am using Finnish data as a background for my reading, these figures echo the results that can be seen in the global data."
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