See, these are the odd little kinds of remarks that are very unusual for a man who was brought up as an Edwardian. His father died when he was young, he was mostly raised by his mother (with an aunt of whom he was very fond and girl cousins he seems to have played with), so when you read things like "Oh yeah, in my world, the guys do the everyday cooking", it's not the typical assumption of 'a woman's place is in the home' and you can't put it down to 'well, maybe his father liked cooking and/or his mother was a bad cook' because that influence can't be traced there.

So at least I'm seeing a second wave (so to speak) of fans talking about the books and a move away from 'there needs to be more women on horses waving swords' to a recognition that women needn't be portrayed in what would have been typically male roles to be portrayed as strong, independent, or playing an important part. We can certainly argue that we should see more women (and that is going to be the complaint about the films of "The Hobbit" which will be justifiable - I hope we do get to see Lobelia Sackville-Baggins in action in the last one!), but then again, characters like Ioreth seem to get overlooked and although she only gets a small amount of novel time, she's certainly vivid and complete, not just 'anonymous attendant who is on hand to hold the basin while Aragorn does his thing with the athelas'.

That's why I wanted to bring out the point that it wasn't because he thought women couldn't do it, it was because he thought nobody should learn how to be what amounts to being a trained killer. Yes, Tolkien suffers from the assumptions of his time and culture, but his reasons for doing things may not be the ones we assume they are.

And Maedhros probably did end up doing the cooking, since I imagine Feanor's idea of 'home-cooked' was 'can I BURN IT WITH FIRE in the forge?' :-)