My, these old threads keep popping up at the bottom of the page. I'm beginning to suspect there's some sort of Algorithm
Troll at work, always trying to stir the pot; not to mention goad me into another necropost -- something I find as difficult to resist as the temptation of
the Ring!
I'll surrender to temptation (again) to try to address the subject. Female characters in romance can have various roles, of course; one important one is to be the counterpart of "wise old man",
the White Queen to his White King, to use a chess analogy. Their opposites, the Black King and Queen, are the Dark Magician and
Evil Mother.
As the function of the senex is to set the action in motion, and then retreat to allow the protagonist to make his way, so hers is to watch over the action at a distance, as a benevolent mother-figure, sometimes in the role of sibyll, like
Galadriel with her Mirror.
These female characters seem to be more connected to the natural cycle, especially the lunar cycle, than male characters, and often appear to open and close the "cycle" of the story. They can function at any level: on the mythical plane, for instance, we notice how
Elbereth appears in the song sung by the first
Elves Frodo encounters; she reappears in the episode that closes the story, as does her romance-mode counterpart, Galadriel.
Another form of this character is as a bride, a Solveig-figure, on whose behalf the quest is undertaken; she will normally be introduced at the beginning, then wait patiently for the hero's journey to be completed, when she will reappear to close the cycle.
Arwen is the most obvious character of this type, and whether you like her or not depends, I guess, on how willing you are to accept the convention.
Again, this figure can operate at any level. In the children's fairy tale of The
Hobbit, for example, her role is taken by
Bag End, the female attributes of which no one could miss. In fact, "she" combines the two aspects, appearing as mother at the beginning of the story, to which the rather infantile
Bilbo is still attached by the symbolic umbilical cord of the pipe he sucks, and at the end, as the "bride" he saves from desecration by usurpers.
This is all very well in a children's story, but would seem out of place and disturbing, even somewhat perverse, in the far more adult world of LOTR; and in fact her role as bride-mother is almost immediately taken over, on the return to
the Shire, by
Rosie Cotton.
One problem in romance with making this figure the hero's potential or oath-sworn bride is that it severely limits his adventures with the other female characters he encounters on his quest, particularly the ones he rescues from "fates worse than death", who often seem to be tied naked to
trees, for some reason.
One way of getting around this is shown by the 19th century wtiters whose work was influenced by romance. They commonly present two heroines, one dark, one light. The dark one, to use Northrope Frye's description, is "passionate, haughty ,plain, foreign, or Jewish, and in some way associated with the undesirable or with some kind of forbidden fruit like incest". When both are associated with the hero, the dark one must be gotten rid of, or converted into some other relationship, if the story is to end happily. Otherwise the story can become a tragedy, as it does in the tale of
Turin, who chooses the dark one, who turns out to be his sister.
It is notable that
Tolkien reverses this light/dark duality in
Aragorn's story. The reason for this may have had to do with the fact that his wife was dark-haired, and as we know, he modelled
Luthien, Arwen's forbear, on her. But in the context of the story, it was associated with redeeming the darkness and night.
I guess the significance of this breaking with long convention on the part of Tolkien is not as recognized as much as it should be. Which is not to say he was the first to do so: Dickens did it in David Copperfield, one of his most autobiographical
novels. In that one, the light character dies.
In any event, Tolkien resolves the dilemma of the polarization of the "Lady of Duty" and the (at least potential) "Lady of Pleasure" by marrying off the latter. But it is notable that Aragorn has already repudiated her, refusing the temptation to break faith, though "temptation" is probably too strong a word. It is a resolution in the direction of the moral; a "Christian" resolution, you could say.
. 
