WhatCulture.com explains “9 Reasons Why Harry Potter Wipes the Floor with Lord of the Rings” – MuggleNet agrees

by · February 22, 2013

In the first place, if you’re on this website, we already suspect how you feel about this question. As you know, The Lord of the Rings series originally written by J.R.R Tolkien is well-written, epic, has great depth, and for those reasons is truly deserving of merit; however, its fan following worldwide has been quite adamant about its greatness, to the extent that some have been moved to claim it is greater than the Harry Potter series.

Now – of course – we all know that’s just plain wrong! But we would like to plug WhatCulture! today which ran a post written by Jacob Savill listing “9 Reasons Why Harry Potter Wipes the Floor with Lord of the Rings.” We agree with all of his reasons, of course – they are incredibly well argued – and encourage you to check out the original article.

Here’s a taste of the argument from Reason #6, that there are few influential female characters in The Lord of the Rings:

“In Harry Potter, female characters have much more of a central impact and an important place in the story than in The Lord Of The Rings. Hermione Granger (a female character) is one of three leading characters in the series, however unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Just tell me this, how many females are present in the Fellowship? The World Of Middle Earth seems very much like a masculine-based society and the only purpose of female characters in Middle Earth, such as Eowyn and Arwen is as love interests for Aragorn, rather than as main aspects of the plot.”

I find this argument incredibly valid, though Tolkien fans may answer back, “What about Galadriel?” Well, yeah, what about Galadriel? The truth is she has a great deal of power in the series, but aside from playing the occasional host, giving gifts and healing wounds, is she, herself, important to the plot outside of providing various services to the Fellowship (all male) along the way?

If you would like to weigh in on this question about which book series is better with an editorial, (on either side, in fact), please e-mail me at Noah@staff.mugglenet.com. We love hearing your feedback.