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mask131 · 18 days

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The Tolkienesque Renaissance and the woman-wizard

A long time ago I made a brief post about my personal vision of a certain "Tolkienesque Renaissance" era within English-speaking literature, following/coexisting with the "Tolkien Subversion" era that was formed by Earthsea, Elric, The Black Company and other classics.

It was meant to be the first post in a whole series but I kind of got busy with other things... That being said I do want to make this post about one of the fascinating traits of the Tolkienesque Renaissance. A trait which seems to be overlooked or misunderstood today due to the very polarizing matter and the quick shifts occuring in our societies about this topic, but needs to be highlighted: the gender roles. Well more specifically the gender roles within the magic part of the fantasy world.

In 1985, Terry Pratchett created a talk/article which was forgotten for a given time, until it popped up on the Internet in the 2000s/2010s, and was more recently reprinted in book format (in posthumous anthologies of his talks, articles and essais) and even translated in other languages (the only French translation of this text dates from a few years ago). This text is called "Why Gandalf never married", and it is a very important mini-essay when it comes to the English-speaking fantasy literature because it highlighted very well (and in Pratchett's usual humoristic way) the gender "norms" within the Tolkien-model of fantasy ; but more importantly how this gendered system was carried on, consciously or unconsciously, by other authors in the fantasy genre.

I strongly suggest you go check out the original article, it is disponible for free on several websites, and I won't recap it here. But it made a point that many other analysists and historians of the fantasy genre relayed. The Tolkien model of the magic-use has magic lying within the hands of a men, and escaping the hands of women. In The Lord of the Rings the magic is the domain of the Wizards - which is an order of exclusively male entities. That's the Gandalf of the title. There is no female Wizard in the Tolkienesque world, and the closest thing we get to a female magic user within The Lord of the Rings is Galadriel - but Galadriel is in this specific plotline a secondary character with not as much importance or active power as the likes of Gandalf and Saruman, and she even denies herself that what she does is magic, carefully explaining that Elves merely consider what others call their "magic" advanced craft, technology and skills. Galadriel has the appearance of an enchantress, but in truth is not, and all the true magic relies within the male-only Gandalf.

And this model was carried on into a lot of the fantasy series and novels that followed the publication of The Lord of the Rings, even those that were created specifically to subvert the "Tolkienesque fantasy". In his article, Pratchett ranked alongside Gandalf as the celibate wizard-heroes of male dominance, Ged from Earthsea... by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is an author as far from woman-hating as the Sun is far from Pluto. And yet... Pratchett did point out that in the Earthsea series it is made extremely clear that only men can be true wizards, the "wizarding school" of this setting only teaches men, and when a woman has magical power, she is a secondary and weak witch with only a handful of simple abilities, unable to match any great "true" wizard. Even worse: when a woman actually shows some great talent and manages to challenge or outbeat the wizard... it is because she derives her power from malevolent sources and evil entities. It is true in Earthsea.

Or at least it was true. Indeed, we have to put things back in context: when Pratchett made this analysis, Earthsea was just a trilogy. Not just "a" trilogy, but rather a halted series: Le Guin had written the first three Earthsea books, and she wanted to return to writing more Earthsea but in her own words something felt wrong, she didn't find how to go on, she sense there was a problem with Earthsea though she could not identify what exactly... This is part of why the fourth book of the series was released 18 YEARS after the third. And the exact reason Le Guin was weirded out by her own series is precisely what Pratchett pointed out - and something Le Guin herself had to re-discover within her own work (Now I cannot claim that Pratchett's article actually helped Le Guin see this "gendered flaw" within her own novels, because I have no reliable source about Le Guin reading Pratchett's text or being aware of this talk - but given I heard it had quite an influence upon its release I do think it played a part in it). This is also why Le Guin returned to Earthsea by the late 80s: she had identified the problem in her own work, women were trapped in a gendered system denying them access to "true magic". And from "Tehanu" onward, she worked to - not correct - but improve this worldbuilding fact, for example by pointing out the inherent misogyny of her own world, by explaining the reasons that led to women being excluded of the art of magic, and by revealing that women and men are in fact equal in magic by nature but not by society.

[Note: I do wish to say that it is not an inherently bad or evil thing to have a "gendered" magic system within your fantasy work. The entire point of the fantasy is that you can do everything and anything and explore any possibility. You can have a magic system where only one gender can have magic ; you can have a magic system where spells are bound to a specific age ; you can have magic system where only rocks can perform magic because flesh cannot stand it - in itself, it is not a bad thing... The problem here that Pratchett denounced was how a specific gendered-model of magic bearing misogynistic traits within it was spreading around and becoming an untold law of the fantasy genre, to the point even feminist writers applied it without realizing it.]

Pratchett completed his trio of "male-dominated and somehow misogynistic" magic systems by adding to Gandalf and Ged the figure of Merlin from the Arthurian romances and epics, as one of the main cultural influences of magic within fantasy... but also one of the roots of the unconscious misogyny that was growing within fantasy. Because in the Arthurian world, not only is Merlin the most prominent wizard and enchanter, he is seen as the "source" and "true bearer" of magic, with the two famous Arthurian sorceresses, Viviane and Morgan, being explicitely his students - women learned magic from a man. And not only did they learned it from him, they both used it in a bad and negative way. Morgan to become a wicked witch and the enemy of the heroes ; Viviane to betray her own mentor and trap the wizard forever (with in many versions this being seen as a selfish action, some authors even pushing it as far as making Viviane one of the instruments of the Arthurian downfall). Of course there are very interesting talks, debates and analysis to have about this strange triangle of magic-users - especially since one of Merlin's gifts was prophecy and foresight, and it is implied that he knew what he was doing when he taught these women magic, somehow accepting that his lessons would be used against him and his work... But that's a talk for another day and it doesn't change how it influenced mid-20th century fantasy in a bad way.

As such, from Merlin to Ged passing by Gandalf, Pratchett made this conclusion: in English-speaking fantasy as it existed in the mid 80s, "true" wizards were men, and magic belonged to the male gender. And when a women practiced magic (if they could even practice magic), they were either depicted as weaker and inferior to men, either as evil antagonists corrupting magic or using it for nefarious purposes. Hence "Why Gandalf never married".

This talk is also very important to understand the very origins and building of Pratchett's own brilliant parody-deconstruction-reconstruction of the fantasy genre, his "Discworld" series. In his Discworld books Pratchett prepared several entire plotlines to explain, dissert and explore the gendered cliches and normative stereotypes of magic in fantasy, with the archetype of the male-magic through the Wizards and of the female-magic through the Witches. "Why Gandalf never married" was created in 1985... two years before Discworld's third book "Equal Rites", which is a brilliant parody of these same gender norms as a girl becomes fated to become a Wizard and fights for it, in a cloistered world where women can only hope to be Witches and nothing else.

Now, all of that being said, I return to my point about the Tolkienesque Renaissance. And I will claim that this "movement" actually inherited Pratchett's point or was conscious of it because, interestingly, all these revivals of the classical Tolkien-like fantasy worked very hard to break the gender norms of magic, and have prominent female magic users not depicted as evil. Mind you, they never went as far as Le Guin or Pratchett did in their own work, and in fact several of these works came to be criticized by later generations for being themselves too-gendered, too-cliche, or even misogynistic... However I do believe that it is important to highlight how these works, which might not fit our own modern gender equality or our modern view of women, still were a first step forward, a certain breakthrough, in a fantasy landscape where women were either denied magic or locked withn the "wicked witch" stereotype.

The Fionavar Tapestry series has one of the main female characters becoming The Seer, a benevolent and respected magic user. She is not of the same "type" as the wizards of the setting and lacks a magic as powerful as them, but is still an heroic supernatural character on which the story focuses. There is also an exploration of the gendered norm by having a Council of Mages from which women are lacking (and coming with historical explanations about the role of women in relationship to them) clashing with an all-female order of priestesses of a Great Goddess (a conflict which itself also is echoed by a gendered pantheon of Great Gods and Great Goddesses working in mysterious ways towards each other).

The Belgariad makes a clear effort by "doubling" the typical wizard-mentor into a duo, Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress, with Polgara being a powerful magic user equal in strength to Belgarath and working alongside him, but staying a benevolent and heroic character (though there is a dark side to her from her stern and harsh personality to a worldbuilding prophetic element about her possibly turning evil).

The Wheel of Time seems to avoid the topic entirely by completely reversing the norm: all magic-users are female, the male magic-users were all wiped out, and if they exist they have to be deprived of power else they will become evil. Now we still have a more nuanced approached in terms of moral since the Aes Sedai mix in one go the all-benevolent Gandalf-like figure with the manipulative and dreaded wicked witch - but the gender treatment and balance within "The Wheel of Time" has been debated and discussed a LOT so I won't go further into this.

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn literaly has a female Gandalf in the character of Geloë. There's still a bunch of evil witches throughout the series outgrowing in number the rare positive female magic users, but Geloë stands out as the big powerful helpful witch of the "hero's party".

As I said, these characters are of course not perfect. There are things to be said against them in a more modern light, or they might be judged as not good characters at all... But it doesn't change the fact that Geloë, Polgara and Moiraine are quite important in the history of fantasy as breakers of a system that was imposed by Merlin, Gandalf and Ged - and while they cannot answer the question of "Why Gandalf never married", they are proofs that "Gandalf can be a woman".

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