It took me an awfully long time to realise that Legolas was played by Orlando Bloom, that Bloom was the name of that guy from Pirates of the Caribbean, and that that guy and Legolas were the same. In my defence I was around toddler age when the LotR films came out. It must have been a great time having LotR and Harry Potter plus other fantasy being put out.
The 2000s were a pretty great era for film and tv. LOTR and HP as you said, plus the first couple of Spider-Man movies with Toby McGuire, X Men, and the Star Wars prequels were very exciting, albeit disappointing. TV was great then with Lost, Jack Bauer, and House in full stride. And the Matrix! Holy fucking shit man, you'll never understand being in the theater opening weekend and seeing Trinity beat up those cops with bullet timing for the first time. Whole theater lost its shit, we'd never seen anything like it.
I feel like that was the end of the era where there were some core anchor shows and movies that EVERYONE saw. Now there's just so much content on so many platforms, and big budget movies and tv shows are intentionally bad (google fan baiting) so the culture is changing. Who knows where it'll go from here.
The idea that female medieval warriors only exist in fantasy is made up by misogynists to gate keep female representation.
Here is a list of named women that participated in battle. Keep in mind that this is just the tip of the iceberg given the erasure of women in history
Joan of Arc
Eleanor of Aquitaine
Æthelflæd
Artemisia I of Caria
Zenobia
Matilda of Tuscany
Margaret of Anjou
Tomoe Gozen
Grace O'Malley
Isabella I of Castile
Fu Hao
Teuta
Joanna of Flanders
Lozen
Jeanne Hachette
Caterina Sforza
Khawla bint al-Azwar
Lagertha
Sikelgaita
Mavia
Dihya
Isabella of France
If you want women in your fantasy novels, why not - it's fantasy.
Let's be real though - sexual dimorphism is very pronounced in humans, and the women you listed were absolutely the exception. Militaristic societies overwhelmingly used men for fighting, if only because women were too valuable for their ability to bear children.
It's impossible to overstate the importance of women throughout history, but they don't have to have been physically fighting in wars for that to be the case.
LOTR is not set in the medieval period. Its a made up era with made up cultures and made up magic. And if you're going to get all Thermian argument about it, LOTR lore has many female warriors.