Tolkien studied

[calimac]

Found in some of those journal articles I was perusing yesterday:

Gay landsmanship argument no. 1: When Sam finds Frodo in the Tower of Cirith Ungol, Frodo has been stripped naked by his captors. Nudity = sex, therefore Sam and Frodo are gay.

Gay landsmanship argument no. 2: W.H. Auden was wildly enthusiastic for The Lord of the Rings. Auden was gay, therefore - since he liked it so much - The Lord of the Rings must also be gay.

Gay landsmanship conclusion: Tolkien may have been married for decades to a woman and had four biological children, but either 1) he was gay; 2) he was subconsciously gay; 3) since he was writing a mythology for England, he realized that England was gay.

Moooviefan argument: Tolkien's dialogue is stiff, wordy, and antiquated. It's boring for Eowyn to say "But no living man am I," but when J-Eowyn says "I am no man!" instead, that's hot stuff, and the audience cheered because Jackson's dialogue is so much better, not because of the exciting plot crux. (You don't hear them cheering when they read the book, do you?)

Moooviefan misprision: OK if you want to write an article about Jackson and not about Tolkien. You are, after all, writing in a film studies journal. But in that case, why put Tolkien's name in your title, and not Jackson's?

On the other hand, I was convinced by the proposition that George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire owes less to The Lord of the Rings than to Lord of the Flies; and I chuckled at this anecdote (unrelated to Tolkien, but good) from an interview with Peter Beagle in Foundation:

I can remember being the middle man on a panel in Oregon State. Lord, this would have been 1975–76, with Ursula Le Guin on one side of me and Vonda McIntyre on the other; they’re both old friends, both marvellous writers. For me, Ursula is still the master. And I was enjoying myself immensely just listening to the two of them, but there got to be rustling and grumbling in the back of the hall, a number of male students complaining they had come to hear talk about some good ol' rocket-jockeying science fiction, and not all this 'shrill feminism'. I remember the phrase. And as though they had been planning for it, Ursula peered around me and said, 'Vonda, I don't know how many times I’ve told you about being shrill.' And Vonda, without missing a beat said, 'No, Ursula, dear, I’m strident. You're shrill.' I remember that as a great moment in show business, me in the middle just listening.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Heh!

[supergee.livejournal.com]

In his diary Edmund Wilson said that Auden's love for LotR indicated the immaturity of all homosexuals.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's worse than what he wrote for public consumption, which was "certain people - especially, perhaps, in Britain - have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash." But it's also more honest about what he really feels, especially in, by putting the statements together, agreeing with the above-made suggestion that the British are all really gay.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Some years ago I read a biography of Rudyard Kipling, another of my favorite authors. The biographer concluded that Kipling was homosexual. Why? Well, because we know a fair bit about his personal relationships, and he had almost no close friendships with women; other than his wife, all the adults he was close to were male.

And I thought

1. That was true of a huge number of Victorians and Edwardians of both sexes (for that matter, it was still largely true of the Inklings): Friendship in general was with members of one's own sex. Shouldn't you know about the customs of the era before you write biographies of its people?

2. Kipling's wife was quite protective of her husband, and I expect she would have been doubly so if another woman tried to befriend him.

3. It's quite possible to have a close relationship that is purely a friendship without a sexual aspect. (And people think the Victorians were morbidly obsessed with sex!)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I've seen a lot of literary biographers taking the same tack, all based on the same fundamental assumption: that the only reason people would want to hang out together a lot is to have sex. This strange assumption has been around for a while: C.S. Lewis mocked it back in the "Friendship" chapter of The Four Loves.

It's particularly strange given what we know about human behavior. Openly homosexual men often make many friends among women, perhaps in part because they tend to be less macho than other men, and women consequently find them tolerable. Nor is it unknown to find strongly heterosexual men who hate and fear women, avoiding them as much as possible except for sexual purposes, and spending the rest of their time with men of similar bent. These are the men who talk about how all women are insane or aggravating (I was once the victim of such a man, who went on about how all women do this or that annoying thing. I kept saying "My wife isn't like that," but he paid no attention.*) In their cups, they'll sometimes say they wish they were homosexual; then they could ignore women altogether.

It happens the other way around too. I've seen the theory among right-wing anti-gay groups that gay people are actually just putting on a show, their goal being to épater la bourgeoisie.

*Why didn't I just go away? Because we were standing in a long line waiting for something, I forget what.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

A quibble, since you hit me on a sore spot. My dad was married to my mother for two and a half decades, and I am the eldest of his four biological daughters, and my dad was gay -- but so far in the closet he might as well have been in Narnia. Until he was outed, he was a fundamentalist minister.

I think that too often scholarship dependent upon the hidden sexuality of a writer or politician is basically bullshit and fantasy. People are incredibly strange, and their relationships are, pretty much always, more complex than you can guess at. I hate the way any friendship depicted in fiction is automatically assumed to have a sexual component. Nor does finding "hidden gayness" tend to be in the least bit illuminating, except of the interlocutor's personal obsessions and interests. Also, I know a bunch of writers, and assuming you can tell secret things about their true life based on their fiction writing is...yeah, no. That thing I said about people's relationships being weird? It applies triply to the relationship of the writer to his own text.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Sure, that can happen, but to claim that it has, one has to have evidence. The actual outing of the man in question would count. But bringing up the marriage and the children only for the purpose of dismissing them against such supposedly iron-clad proof of homosexuality as writing a novel in which a man sees another man naked, or that a known gay man liked the book, strikes me as pretty weak evidence that it's happened in this case.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Of course England is gay. And "the United States has a very special relationship with the United Kingdom."

[(Anonymous)]

Nobody tell the first author that all the main hobbit characters are described as naked at one point or another in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings--as are Gandalf and the dwarves in the former.

-MTD/neb