The Mothers of Tolkien’s Middle Earth Lord of the Rings/Hobbit Screen Adaptations
A recent article here on Medium by someone named Jessicah Lahitou makes the exaggerated claim that “LOTR exists in a motherless Middle Earth.”
The Six Tolkien Movies
After a data analysis of the characters in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings movies, it is clear that this claim taken is quite false because there are seven (7) characters who are themselves mother figures in the movies, while there are seventeen (17) father figures. Half of the named female roles are mothers across all six movies! Nine (9) characters in the films have known mother figures whether from the films themselves or from the books, while twenty-one (21) have known father figures.
These data come from a total of fourteen (14) female roles, and seventy-three (73) male roles listed on the main Wikipedia page of The Hobbit film trilogy, and the main Wikipedia page of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, combined. (Therefore, 17% of the roles in the movies were for females.)
The names of the mother figures with named roles in the films are: Mrs. Bracegirdle, Rosie, Mrs. Proudfoot, Arwen, Morwen, Belladonna Took, and Betsy Butterbur. Out of the seven mother figures, there is no dwarf mother, there is only one elf mother, two human mothers, and the rest of the…
