“That would be no good,” said the witch, “not without a mighty Warrior, even a Heroine.”
There’s been an article going round in the last few days about a mother whose daughter insisted that Bilbo Baggins was a girl. Accordingly, she began to read The Hobbit to her recasting Bilbo, and then Gandalf too, as female, and found the results exhilarating.
Various people pointed this article out to me because of my previous work on genderswitching classic novels, and I found I was keen to see what a few chapters of The Hobbit would look like with a full genderswitching. As with my previous attempts, the exercise gave me a whole new perspective on the book. I’ve love The Hobbit (and Lord of the Rings) since I was a child, and as an adult I became aware that it barely contained any female roles; but the books you love as a child feel beyond reproach, and I thought it didn’t bother me.
But I’ve genderswapped the first three chapters and it’s really striking. There are no female characters in those pages. Even the ponies are male. Bilbo’s mother is referenced, but other than that this might as well be an exclusively single-sex world. Of course, in my version, it still is, but a different sex.
And I love this version. The dwarfs especially. I’ve left them with beards, because the beards are so central to their identity, and because (in Terry Pratchett’s canon at least) female dwarfs have beards too; but they don’t feel any less female for that. I can picture Thorina and Balina and the others more easily than I can Thorin and Balin. And speaking of Pratchett, Gandalfine the witch takes on something of a Granny Weatherwax aspect, perhaps: grumpy, certain of herself, not always around but always to be trusted.
The most complicated part was rejigging the songs where a change of gender unbalanced a rhyme.
For ancient king and elvish lord
There many a gloaming golden hoard
They shaped and wrought
became
For ancient queen and elvish dame
There many a gloaming golden flame
They shaped and wrought
which I’m quite pleased with.
The other striking point, slightly in contrast to my earlier point, is that Bilbo himself is very feminine. The hobbit world in general comes across as (what Tolkien would have seen as) a female world: gossipy, non-violent, concerned with domesticity, contrasted with the masculine, harsh rest of Middle Earth . The story of The Hobbit is essentially that clash: Bilbo becomes more of a ‘man’, and also influences his companions to respect the ‘female’ world more. So the genderswitched Bilba becomes perfectly believable as a young female hobbit who develops into a tomboyish warrior.
Anyway - here is the first part of Chapter One, and here is a Google Drive document with the first three chapters in full. I hope you find them enjoyable.
(Disclaimer: as with all the other genderswitching, this exercise does not claim to be anything profound, and I’m aware it’s quite a binary thing to do, so it doesn’t challenge the status quo to any major extent. But I think it’s interesting, and a fun thing to do, and helpful in some ways.)
