Fuckboy: Tolkien–a conservative, Catholic, white man in the early 20th century who has been dead for forty years–would not approve of you shipping his two same sex characters.
Me:
Tolkien – a reluctant Modernist, British Catholic, white, middle-class and highly educated Language Professor from the first half of the 20th century who has been dead since 1973 – was a long-time friend of W. H. Auden, a known homosexual poet, who wrote the first and enthusiastic review of The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien who in his Letters (fn 110) praised the work of British novelist Mary Renault, who at this point in her career had already written the Gay classic The Charioteer.
Both The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea feature positive male characters who loved and lived with men.
Tolkien who, as a medievalist, was intimately acquainted with legends of intense male warrior friendships, such as the one of Amicus and Amelius, friendships that transcend the distinction between platonic friendship and sexual love. While Tolkien’s depiction of Sam and Frodo was ostensibly modelled on the relationship of a gentleman officer and his batman in WWI (in itself not a resoundingly heterosexual relationship), the theme of the ultimate sacrifice
points towards medieval models of male-male warrior friendships.
Tolkien who, other than his close friend C.S. Lewis, never felt the need to (however humble) publicly condemn homosexuality.
Certainly, Tolkien would not have liked the sexualisation of his characters in fanfiction. But that goes for Aragorn/Arwen as much as for Sam/Frodo. There is nothing in Tolkien’s writings and life that indicates that he would have been especially appalled about fanwriters shipping same-sex characters.
“Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?
Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu?
Hwær sindon seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune!
Eala byrnwiga!
Eala þeodnes þrym!
Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm,
swa heo no wære.”
— “Where is the horse? Where the rider? Where the giver of treasure? Where the seats of the feast? Where are the joys of the hall? Alas for the bright cup! Alas for the heroic warrior! Alas for the splendor of the king! How they have passed away, Dark under night-cover, As if they never were.” – The Wanderer, An Anglo-Saxon poem of lamentation, which was the inspiration for Tolkien’s Lament of the Rohirrim. (via het-stille-woud)
Just read an excerpt from a productivity/goal setting book that concerned Tolkien.
His publisher mentioned that people wanted more about the hobbits after Tolkien published The Hobbit.
So Tolkien started another novel.
And apparently bounced between the depths of despair and the height of confidence for the entire process (he said that: “his ‘labour of delight’ had been ‘transformed into a nightmare.’”)
He gave up multiple times.
That book? Fellowship of the Ring.
You know what kept him going? C.S. Lewis’ support.
First lesson: if you’re stressing over your book, remember that Tolkien did too.
Second lesson: Writers have to support each other. Seriously. It might be the difference between a book that becomes beloved by hundreds of thousands (maybe even millions) even existing or not.
i see your ‘nowhere in the nursery rhyme does it say humpty dumpty was an egg’ and raise you ‘nowhere in the legendarium does tolkien say that elves have pointed ears’
Mary Shelley didn’t give the monster bolts.
Arthur Conan Doyle never put Holmes in a deer stalker (also “elementary my dear Watson” is never said in the books, and he doesn’t smoke a curved pipe)
There are boys at Beauxbatons and girls at Durmstrang schools
Edgar Allan Poe wrote the earliest essay on the big bang theory
Tolkien describes elf ears as “leaf shaped”. Up to you what leaf that is ¯_(ツ)_/¯ .
My point, aside from remarking that both Tolkien and Le Guin are arguing that escape means hope, and hope is one of the great virtues of fantasy, is what Tolkien says at the end of the passage: they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Because I think that’s exactly it. The denigration of “escapism” comes from an implicit belief that it is brave and necessary and heroic to face “reality,” where “reality” is grim and dark and nihilistic (“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as that tremendous pessimist Thomas Hobbes puts it), and that if you turn away from that “reality,” you are a deserter and therefore a coward.
“And that, I think, is where hope comes in. If we understand “escapism” as the Escape of the Prisoner rather than the Flight of the Deserter, then surely what motivates it, more than anything else, is hope. The hope that the prison is not eternal. The hope of communicating with other prisoners. The hope that if you keep chipping away at the bars long enough, one of them will fall out. And I refuse utterly to classify that hope as weak or foolish.”
I especially like the Ursula LeGuin quote: ‘it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can’
As someone who loves happy endings and hope (but ALSO let’s be clear misery and weeping in the hills) and who loved Sarah Monette’s work, I am super looking forward to reading Katherine Addison. 😉
I’ve been posting some of my old Tolkien themed watercolor illustrations in my instagram lately so why not here as well, for old times sake. Lil hobbitses heading to adventure! Forests! Ents! The gaiety of the elvish feast!
what she means: the words “christmas tree” are used in the hobbit, and since we know that bilbo is the author of the hobbit, hobbits must have christmas which means there must be a middle earth jesus. but hobbits seem to be the only ones who have the concept of christmas which means it was probably a hobbit jesus. but frodo says in return of the king that no hobbit has ever intentionally harmed another hobbit so who crucified hobbit jesus?? were there other hobbit incarnations of religious figures?? was there hobbit moses?? did jrr tolkien even think about this at all??
Wait wait I might actually have an answer
Tolkien wrote The Hobbit like waaaay before he even dreamed up the idea for Lord of the Rings, so when he DID dream up LotR, he had a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense. Like plotholes galore
Like for example in the first version Gollum was a pretty nice dude who lost the riddle contest graciously and gave Bilbo the ring as a legit present and was very helpful and it was super nice and polite and absolutely nobody tried to eat anyone because this is a story for kids and that’s very rude
But that doesn’t work with LotR, so Tolkien went back and re-released an updated version of The Hobbit with all the lore changes and stuff to fix everything that didn’t work
This is the version we know and love today
BUT rather than pretend the early version never existed, Tolkien went and worked the retcon into the lore
If you pay attention in Fellowship, there’s a bit where Gandalf is telling Frodo about the ring and he mentions how Bilbo wasn’t entirely honest about the manner in which it was found
To us modern readers, this doesn’t make a ton of sense, so mostly we just breeze by it–but actually that line is referencing the first version of The Hobbit
The pre-retcon version of the Hobbit is canonically Bilbo’s original book. The original version with Nice Gollum is canonically a lie Bilbo told to legitimize his claim to the ring and absolve him of the guilt he feels for his rather shady behavior
Then the post-retcon version is an in-universe edited edition someone went and released later to straighten out Bilbo’s lies
So it’s 100% plausible that the in-universe editor who fixed up Bilbo’s Red Book and translated it from whatever language Hobbits speak was a human who knew about Christmas Trees and tossed the detail in to make human readers feel more at home, because that’s the kind of thing that sometimes happens when you have a translator editor person dressing up a story for an audience that doesn’t know the exact cultural context in which the original story was written
Tolkien was a medieval scholar and medieval stories are rife with that sort of thing, so like… yeah
Not only all that, but Tolkien was also working within a frame narrative that he wasn’t the real author, but a translator of older manuscripts; so, in-universe, the published The Hobbit isn’t actually Bilbo’s book, but rather Tolkien’s copy of an older copy of an older copy of an older copy of Bilbo’s book. So when errors and anachronisms came up, he would leave them there instead of fixing them, and he may have even put some in intentionally; what we’re supposed to get from the “Christmas tree” bit is that the first scribe to translate the book from Westroni to English couldn’t come up with an accurate analogue for whatever hobbits do at midwinter.
Yes. Another example of tolkien doing this is him using, for instance, Old High Gothic to represent Rohirric – not because the people of Rohan actually spoke that language, but because Old High Gothic had the same relationship with English that Rohirric had with Westron (Which is the Common Language spoken in the West of Middle-Earth). There’s tons of that stuff in the book.
Like, Merry and Pippin’s real names (In Westron) are Kalimac Brandagamba and Razanur Tûk, respectively (to pick just one example of this). Tolkien changed their names in English to names which would give us English-speakers the same kind of feeling as those names would to a Westron-speaker. Lord of the Rings is so much deeper than most readers realise.
IIRC, the original Hobbit also referenced policemen and China, neither of which really “fit” into Middle-Earth as we know it.
Tolkien’s color pencil sketch of Smaug means a lot to me, not least that it was the cover of my first Hobbit book and I was convinced, pre-reading, that that twisty flying thing WAS The Hobbit. With feathery red plumes on its head and a little smiley face where Smaug’s chin is.
But I digress. Check out Tolkien’s notes on the margins. “Bard the Bowman should be standing after release of arrow at extreme left point of the piles”, “Dragon should have a white naked spot where the arrow enters”, and best of all, “The moon should be a _crescent_: it was only a few nights after the New Moon on Durin’s Day”. Oh Tolkien you wonderful nerd.
Did I ever tell you guys how much I love book Bilbo.
Door: *opens*
Thorin: Bilbo I’m really glad we have someone as BRAVE and LUCKY and HANDSOME as you, to go check the mountain for dragons LIKE YOU AGREED.
Bilbo: Thorin I would be well within my rights to tell you to shove it *entirely* up your arse at this point. But I didn’t come all this way to *not* go into your mountain, so you can unclench.
Thorin: Bilbo could you grab some milk on your way–
Avelera 