Transcript
Speaker: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Queer Lodgings, the Queerled podcast about everything Tolkien. I'm Leah, and I'm here with my co -hosts, Grace. Hello. Alicia. Hello, hello. And also our producer and token man, Tim. Tolkien white man reporting for duty.
Speaker: thank you for your service. Thank you so much for joining us today. Go ahead and pull up a cozy armchair, grab yourself a cup of chamomile and lavender tea, and maybe grab a nip of whiskey as well, because today we're going to be talking about toxic masculinity and patriarchy stuff. So you're going to want something to soothe yourself with.
Speaker: It's going to be a great conversation, I promise. One that we hope will start another series about the men and different masculinities of Middle Earth. Because there are so many characters in that category and there's a lot more that we can talk about and we can really talk about just today. But we definitely want to talk about it all very soon.
Speaker: So today, we want to explore a few different men, by which I mean the gender, not the species or race with a capital M, through their presentations of different masculinities. What kinds of masculinities does Tolkien choose to portray with these characters, both overtly and maybe more unconsciously? What was Tolkien maybe trying to show us about men in his world and in our world with his characters?
Speaker: Before we get too far, let's acknowledge up front that when we talk about gender and about gender presentations, what we mean when we say masculinity is going to be highly variable, fluid, and multifaceted. There is no essential definition of masculinity.
Speaker: As Oscar Fernandez Alvarez says in his article, non -hygemonic masculinity against gender violence, gender is dynamic, culturally and socially. The stereotypes, ideologies, behaviors, and lifestyles conventionally associated with feminine and masculine vary considerably from one culture to another.
Speaker: Secondly, women and men are not universal and unalterable essences, but rather specific existences, changing and far from uniform. Masculinity is a set of constantly changing meanings, which signifies different things to different men, at different ages, in different periods, and different societies. Hence, fortunately, not all men are the same.
Speaker: Likewise, masculinity is not static or timeless but rather historical. It is not the manifestation of an inner essence but constructed socially. It does not bubble up into consciousness from biological foundations but is created by culture.
Speaker: For our purposes here, we'll be using the word masculinities and masculinity to describe different ways of being men or the behaviors, values, attributes, and roles associated or attributed to men.
Speaker: It's deliberately open enough to allow for different men with different ways of being men to be considered under an umbrella of men and masculinity, while still allowing us to hone in on and name particular expressions that have particular specific attributes, values, behaviors, etc.
Speaker: That being said, let's acknowledge the Oliphant in the forests of Ithilien. We and Tolkien live and lived in a world that historically, socially, and systemically rewards and powers and upholds a certain form of masculinity, which Robert Connell identifies as hegemonic masculinity.
Speaker: This masculinity is based on male domination over and the oppression of other genders through force and violence and upholds inequality and hierarchical power based on gender. Essentially, sorry, we live in a patriarchy and so did Tolkien. It places masculinity on this biological foundation, valuing genetic attributes like virility, libido, physical strength,
Speaker: particular heights, weights, muscle tones, skin color, body hair, and of course genitalia. It values the repression of emotions, independence, competition, and physical force over the free expression of emotion or cooperation, community, and physical restraint. It associates women and femininity with weakness, subservience, and inferiority. It does not accept gender nonconformity and forms strict definitions of what is acceptable.
Speaker: It rejects homosexuality, trans and non -binary people who are feared and abhorred, or are at best regarded as deluded or ill persons who do not realize that gender binary and cis -heteronormativity are immutable biology, in fact.
Speaker: It operates from a position of authority, which is believed to be innate and essential in regards women, children, animals, and the natural resources of the world as, at best, subjects and dependents to steward and govern carefully, and at worst, serfs, slaves, and objects to be used at their discretion and disposal. This is the stereotypical masculinity associated with patriarchal cultures, which, as descendants of North American colonizers, us podcasters all live in.
Speaker: At its more extreme expressions, it is this masculinity, this hegemonic masculinity, that we know and will name here as toxic masculinity. The reason we're really emphasizing the attributes and features of toxic masculinity here is because it's the cosmic background radiation of our world and Tolkien's world, and it's important to name it as such.
Speaker: As evidenced by the rise of the manosphere, which includes various men's rights movements, in -cell culture, the trad wife or trad life cultural movements, all of which are perpetuated and monetized by figures like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Nick Fuentes, and yeah, Tucker Carlson on the internet or in media, and these groups and movements like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, Gamergate, toxic hegemonic masculinity isn't receding or changing nearly as quickly as people think it is.
Speaker: Now, that's all very scary, and if you don't know who some of those people are, or what those terms are, we'll include some links in the show notes, but keep that k -b -m -e -l -t and whiskey handy because, woo boy! I do want to recognize that things are absolutely changing for the better in a lot of ways, and as gender studies continues to evolve and the wider culture continues to interrogate the structures of society, different forms of masculinity are becoming more prominent or favored.
Speaker: Does anyone remember the whole metrosexual thing? The rise of the dad bod or the farmer's market dad look? But also, things are changing and transforming in a highly reactionary way. Like, has anyone seen dude wipes or brogurt at the grocery store? Combined with the aforementioned movements in people and the rise in anti -trans and anti -choice legislation,
Speaker: the other efforts of Christian authoritarian patriarchy rising through our political and cultural spheres, this toxic masculinity constitutes a very real threat to marginalized genders, races, and sexualities. Anyone who isn't a Cicero white man on so many levels, and it's still the dominant and most powerful masculinity working in our society today.
Speaker: Okay, but as a cis hetero white man, how am I going to know which wipes and other toiletries I can use if they're not black or navy blue or gray? Like, come on, throw me a bone here. And if it doesn't taste like eagle fangs or whatever. You just go for the cheaper thing because the pink one is more expensive.
Speaker: Very true. Very true. Or the one that has like the most rugged marketing image on it or whatever, or the most rugged... Yes, whatever ones. Like they're the most rugged and uncomfortable are the ones that real men are using. The ones that are made of sandpaper. If there's any... Dirty Brit sandpaper. Yeah, exactly. The whole idea of the term brogurt
Speaker: The perfect image of toxic masculinity to me is Brozé and Brogert. I was like, is there any more perfect image of fragile masculinity than Brozé? I don't know. My dude, you don't want yogurt made by men.
Speaker: don't I don't think you man yogurt has a different connotation yeah it's like that fucking meme right there's that meme about this person saw a yogurt container and it listed the names of the cows at the dairy and this person was like look at all of these female names this is
Speaker: cis hetero bullshit and like female slavery or whatever and feminism has gone too far exactly and dude was like do you want yogurt made from bolts? world culture has gone too far
Speaker: The thing about this is, though, that this form of masculinity, this really toxic masculinity is super fragile. Yeah. It's incredibly fragile. It's incredibly vulnerable. And because of that, it's incredibly reactionary. And people who are embroiled in the splash out a lot. Yeah. To the point where men won't use like a pink toiletry or something like that or anything that even could vaguely be considered feminine.
Speaker: Yep, exactly. And it's unfortunately, it's like you said, Grace, it's the cosmic background radiation, sometimes like outright radiation of our society today. And it was the same for Tolkien as well. Yeah, it's not a new development. No. This is still the milieu that he was writing in. Yes. So that leads us to an important and quick tangent that we promise is needed for some of our discussion later.
Speaker: We know Tolkien's Christianity, his Catholicism, informed his work deeply, and it must be pointed out that many Christianitys played a massive role in the rise of hegemonic masculinity and subsequently many toxic masculinities. This really can't be understated or glossed over.
Speaker: Many Christian worldviews, including the medieval Christianities that so fascinated Tolkien, are based on fundamental metaphysical hierarchy with God at the top of the universe and humans below him, but conveniently above the rest of the natural world.
Speaker: Many many Christianity subordinate women to men due to the quote unquote fact that God created man first and created woman from a part of man specifically to be a helper to him. God also instructed that man fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over every living thing on earth. That's Genesis 1 and 2.
Speaker: Hegemonic and toxic masculinity finds an ally in Christianity that not only affords men superiority and power here in the world, but justifies it as literally God ordaining. This worldview is common to many modern Christianities as well and essential for understanding the Christian hegemony in America.
Speaker: We will fill many many more episodes with how we feel about this sort of worldview, about Christianity, medieval Christianity, Catholicism, modern Protestant Christianity, and their complexities and intersections with Tolkien and his legendarium. But today we'll leave it there because the relationship between Christianity and hegemonic masculinity is very very long, complex, and fraught.
Speaker: If you are interested in a great book that explores toxic hegemonic militant masculinity in America and evangelical Christianities, we highly recommend Christian Cobay -Duméz's book, Jesus and John Wayne, and her work at religious dispatches as well. Yes, sadly, we'll leave it there. You can hear us yell about Christianity. And will, you will. And will, yeah. It's coming. At many, many opportunities in the future.
Speaker: Yeah, so to Tolkien, we can't, of course, know for certain how Tolkien's Catholicism informed his own understanding of his masculinity that we can speculate. And we can also read his letter to his son Michael in 1941. It's a letter 43 in the letters of J .R .R. Tolkien. And we can cringe a bit because it seems that Tolkien indeed thought that women had a, quote, servient help -meet instinct.
Speaker: And their gift is to be receptive. Oh, God, this is real hard to read. Your gift is to be receptive, stimulated, fertilized in many other matters than the physical by the male. Oh, thank you for clarifying that JRR token. That's all that. Oh, boy. Oh, it hurts me to fucking read that.
Speaker: And they are also, quote, instinctively when uncorrupt monogamous and that falling in love for, quote, an unspoiled natural young woman means that she wants to become the mother of the young man's children, even if that desire is by no means clear to her or explicit.
Speaker: Sure. On my dude. Yikes. I mean, so much of this letter will go more into it in a minute. Reads to me like, please don't knock anyone up while you're off at work. She really does. And I get that. But also I in just hearing that right, I'm like, cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Very cool. Very good. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: Now let's hear what he thinks about men. A young man does not really, as a rule, want friendship, as in quotation marks, with women, even if he says he does. Men are not monogamous. No good pretending. Men just ain't. Not by their animal nature.
Speaker: For a Christian man, there is no escape. Marriage may help to sanctify and direct to its proper object to sexual desires. Its grace may help him in the struggle, but the struggle remains.
Speaker: God, I really hated hearing my name in that line. And I just say, I am taken aback that Tolkien would use Ain't, and even in an informal capacity. I felt very justified as a Texan. I was like, see? Ain't a proper grammar. It all works. Yeah. Oh man.
Speaker: So that's a letter that we just all read and it's pretty cringy, but it also gives us some insight into how deeply Tolkien's faith informed his relationship with his wife for all that his affirmations about men and women and how falling in love isn't really a thing that can be attained in a fallen world were completely contrary to his own experience of falling in love at 18, bitterly agreeing to not see her for three years and then getting engaged and married to her at 21 against everyone's wishes.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a long letter. Those are just some choice quotes that we pulled out because he goes into actually quite a long story about his experience and kind of how he was like, I actually did everything wrong in opposition to this advice that I've just given to you, young Michael.
Speaker: And it's kind of a fascinating letter to me because it reveals a lot of interesting things about Tolkien's thought processes and also what he thinks about his own experiences. I just have some thoughts that are just just bouncing through my mind right now on the topic of women and monogamy in John Ronald Rolle's worldview.
Speaker: was not Edith engaged to another man at the point that she broke that engagement and then got engaged to John?
Speaker: She was, yes. Fascinating what interesting conclusions he's drawn from that. Well, okay. So there are two papers that kind of touch on this like wartime bride situation. And one of them is the one I was just referencing is called the Young Parish in the Old Linger Withering J .R .R. Tolkien on World War II by Janet Brinnett Croft. And there's another paper that is in parallel isn't there. And it is called
Speaker: at home and abroad, Eowyn's twofold figuring as War Bride and the Lord of the Rings by Melissa Smith. And it goes specifically into the heightened emotional stakes of a wartime relationship and how quickly things move. And like that is so entwined with what he's talking about in this letter and also his own personal experience. The letters written surrounding World War Two, his experience was surrounding World War One.
Speaker: Like, yes, he loved Edith, but he was also under an artificial timeline where if he wanted to do that, he had to pull the trigger. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Not to say that literally anything he wrote is OK, because all of that's real gross. It's like, thanks, Jurt. Thanks for your thoughts on how women are only meant to be like, like,
Speaker: That is particularly egregious. But I think that he is at this point looking back at his own experience with feeling like he had to plunge ahead with Edith and lock that down to get married.
Speaker: because he's in this situation of war and he wanted to prevent his son from doing the same thing but did it in the most disgusting way possible. It's also a fascinating contemporary resource from, you know, this era of history, the primary resource that shows us world views that were present at the time, but I would
Speaker: Also caution that this is when we look at reading Tolkien as a man of his own time or whatever part of that is recognizing that this worldview is not necessarily a standard or common one for that time or the not the only dominant thing that people would have been thinking this is this is a bit out there even for his time.
Speaker: Y 'all have brought this up before, but keep in mind what has been released of Tolkien's writing is heavily curated. If they decided to release this, but there are other things that they have decided not to release, that is concerning for the potential content that could be, you know, some of it could just be, oh, it's really been all and doesn't really have anything of value, but some of it could potentially be very damaging to his legacy.
Speaker: And I think it's worthwhile for us to examine it on this level of this highly critical level that it deserves because certainly there are a lot of people who are working in bad faith to use sort of the worst possible pieces and the worst possible interpretations of Tolkien's work and writings and letters in order to justify an even more extreme worldview.
Speaker: Yeah, so let's do the same thing, but opposite. Let's look at how Tolkien actually talks about masculinity in terms of Middle -earth.
Speaker: We're going to look at a few characters and explore the Masculinities that they enact and uphold, and see how those characters subvert or uphold the patriarchal hierarchy that underlies Middle Earth and our primary world, and what kinds of Masculinities they show us. And we're starting with Tim with a great example of someone who embodies the best of the worst, Kaldarion.
Speaker: This is a deep cut, you guys. Yes. Toxic masculinity. Deep cut. Yeah.
Speaker: So the story, Aldarion is a character in Aldarion and Erendis, the Mariner's wife, which is from Unfinished Tales. I first read this only last year when we were kind of going through our Rings of Power book club, which everybody was a part of at some point where we were reading through all Tolkien's Second Age materials in order to kind of, you know, give an idea of what we might see in Rings of Power.
Speaker: It is probably one of the most frustrating bits of Tolkien's writing that I have ever read for a number of reasons. And I know it's unfinished tales. Some people might not be familiar with it. So let me give sort of a quick recounting. This is a sort of mid second age story. It starts with Tar -Manldur, who is the king of Númenor at the time. And his passion is studying the stars. He's kind of an astronomer.
Speaker: His son is named Inardiel, but ultimately he becomes Aldarian when he becomes King later, spoiler alert. So we'll just call him Aldarian also, because that's my fucking title. Aldarian is one of these like sort of mariner sailor archetypes that just feels compelled to sail the seas. And his dad doesn't like this because, you know, he wants him to be an astronomer or whatever like him, you know, family business kind of thing. He also wants him to stay in the country because he's going to be the king.
Speaker: Yeah, stay on Numenor rather than, you know, vaunting off to the far reaches of Middle Earth or whatever.
Speaker: When Aldarion gets older, he starts making voyages from Numenor to Middle -earth by boat, obviously, and founds like this guild of adventurers. He eventually meets this woman, Arendis, who is not highborn, so she is not of the line of Elros, and so there's a big disparity in between their lifespans, which plays into some tension in between in their relationship, and also almost puts an interracial kind of aspect into the dynamic of their relationship as well.
Speaker: And he's attracted to her, eventually pursues her, Orrendus is like, nah bro, it's pretty fucking obvious your first love is the sea and then I'd just like be playing second fiddle the whole time, which is exactly what fucking ends up happening.
Speaker: Eventually, Aldarion wears her down after some pretty creepy stalker behavior, which goes right into that toxic masculinity, like I'm owed relationship, sex kind of love, and makes a bunch of hollow promises to her that he's gonna spend less time at sea and spend more time with her. Arendis finally agrees to get engaged to Aldarion, and after a long engagement, they finally get married.
Speaker: But this whole time, Aldarian is constantly fucking off with his crew for years at a time on these long voyages, leaving Arendis alone to basically just like stew and pine for him. Even after they have a daughter in Kalamey, Aldarian continues to go on these years long trips with his bros. Arendis finally gets sick of this bullshit and takes her daughter back to the part of Numenor where she grew up, which is more in the interior because she wants to be away from the sea because
Speaker: It just reminds her of her absent husband.
Speaker: And she doesn't tell Adarian about this. He gets back from one of these voyages and finds their house empty. He eventually finds where Arendis has gone back to and is living now. And she basically tells him to get fucked. And she like raises Encalame entirely surrounded by women, like all the handmaids and the house servants, which is another whole thing, are all female. And, you know, she's entirely trying to make sure that Encalame is like shielded from male energy in her upbringing.
Speaker: Then there's finally this moment that's meant to be redeeming somehow for Aldarion, where actually the voyage he returns, and he finds that Arendis has taken Uncalameha away. He brings a letter to his father, Tarmen Eldur, a letter from Gil -galad, which reveals that Aldarion has, over these many years and these many voyages, has been secretly forging this alliance with the Elves of Linden, and he's established this outpost of Vinyalande
Speaker: at the mouth of a river that's helped to defend against Sera Sauron's rising forces that have been, you know, amassing throughout the Second Age, and Gil -galad asks for further help from Numenor. So that's kind of where Tolkien stopped writing. Basically, from there, Menldur says, I'm too old for this shit, I don't know what to do, and he advocates the throne, and Eldarion takes over.
Speaker: But there are some notes for the rest of the story that indicate that Arendez just became more and more of a misinterest and can you really fucking blame her at this point and pass all of this on to her daughter? And eventually she just gets so forlorn in her longing for her absent husband that she just walks into the port, walks into the sea after him distraught and just fucking drowns.
Speaker: Geez. So, that's the general gist of Altarion and Arendis. To be honest, it does have some nice bits to it, bits of lore. It's the origin of where the kings and queens of men in Middle -earth wear like a white jewel on their brow as a circlet rather than a crown. That's ultimately what Aragorn wears when he becomes king, so that's kind of cool, but like we're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about the way masculinity is portrayed in this story, and it is not great.
Speaker: So just right from the outset, Aldarion's relationship with his father Menldur has some toxicity to it on both sides because Menldur is pressuring Aldarion to follow on in the family business, you know, this like traditionalism, you know, you need to carry on our family's honor or whatever. But Aldarion just wants to kind of like shirk off his responsibility, wants to sail around the world, be like a free spirit at the start.
Speaker: That just always reminds me of Andy Bernard from The Office, like the latter seasons where he just like fucking takes off on his family's yacht and shirks all his actual responsibilities right down to leaving his girlfriend, leaving Aaron behind because he's got to go on this fucking ill -advised journey to find himself or whatever. Sheesh.
Speaker: And so, Aldarian really comes across to me as an example of that rugged individualism that can become part of a toxic masculinity, this sort of mariner -sailor kind of archetype that has this just compulsion or whatever, some need to sail the seas and explore the world by boat.
Speaker: So I think that's really interesting for this to be such like a hetero view of toxic masculinity because like when you think about sailors in the Navy, you generally don't think about hetero people. I was going to say, it sounds like he's, you know, going off for years and years with his bros on a boat. Yeah. Sometimes it's really hot and they have to take their shirts off. Yeah.
Speaker: And you know, the sea spray and the... But the thing is, there's a long history of in these sort of like single gender cultural spaces that are like for men only, the sailors and et cetera, there's a long history of misogyny. Yeah.
Speaker: that is promoted as a way to be able to preserve that way of life, that is, that is promoted as a way to be able to preserve that culture because the dominant societal culture also wants to take that down. And those are things that, you know, the men's rights activists of today absolutely tap into in order to argue that those sort of monocultures should exist and how they should be created.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that's what ended up being like men's only clubs and bars and country clubs and that sort of thing. It's all the same sort of vibe, right? We need to have this place where we can be men and ladies can't come in and pollute our masculinity, our dude space or whatever.
Speaker: One of the things that's truly fascinating about this story is that Tolkien is critical of that sort of like single gendered culture, but only for the ladies. It is only the women's household that is critiqued in this. And the dudes are dudes off on the ships are like, no, no, they're the good guy. That 100 percent doesn't have any placement in his real life at all, does it? Inklings. Not not at all.
Speaker: DCBS, right? Yeah. Oxford. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that is at least one area where Tolkien seemed to be trying to make a difference was in opening up Oxford to more female scholars. Still, yeah, still a lot of a lot of male -only spaces. We talked about that hegemonic culture. Yeah. So I think Tolkien like sort of intended Alderian to be read as like this wanderlust hero that, you know, was just
Speaker: a little removed and a little cold and stoic. And so he couldn't open up to his wife or whatever. Honestly, he comes off to me just kind of like a privileged asshole. And at the start of this, Eldarion's framed is like very irresponsible because we don't know that he's forging this alliance with the elves. And Tolkien, as the author, purposefully keeps this information from the reader until such time as he gives the letter to Menel Dorff from Gilgalad.
Speaker: But even when we find out about that, it still reads to me as reckless and irresponsible because he's been going on these long, often dangerous journeys with just himself and his crew, instead of just having a fucking conversation with his father, asking him for a little more help and explaining why what he's doing is important. Sauron's forces are rising again. We should go help the elves because if they get past the elves, Numenor's next kind of thing, right?
Speaker: And it's just that typical, you know, men will do anything to avoid having a meaningful discussion with each other. It's just like that prideful unwillingness to ask others for any sort of assistance whatsoever. Like, I can do this. I'm the only one that can take this on, take this challenge on sort of thing. The lengths that men in our society today will go to to avoid therapy.
Speaker: And the thing is too, if it was just Aldarion on his own, fucking off on the sea. If he had like a little boat, he was just taking these voyages. I wouldn't have such a problem with it, but he's also risking the lives of the crew, which, you know, some of them are probably friends of his and enjoy the, have the same, you know,
Speaker: mariner spirit or whatever that he does. But some of them are just duty bound to him. Like these are people, you know, he's he's high born. He is heir to the throne. He has people that have to do what he says kind of thing. Yeah. And for him to just continue to go off on these missions on his own rather than asking for more help just is not. I mean, yeah, it's not. It is really interesting to think about all all Darion in comparison with Erendel. They're very similar characters and yet they're
Speaker: relationships with other people are very different. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, let's talk about horrendous because the the title of the story is the mariner's wife. There's obviously the primary focus of the story, even though kind of all the action and the larger lore is happening around all Darion, horrendous is supposed to be the character, I guess, that we're more sympathetic to. I'm not I'm more sympathetic to her, but I don't think that's the way she's written.
Speaker: And Eldarion just treats horrendous absolute garbage. She has no feelings of her own, and once he's won her by getting her to agree to marry him, he treats her more like a possession than a person. He expects her just to wait for him forever because he's got quote unquote important things to do that he's the only one that can possibly do them. But the problem is he never even communicates that much with her.
Speaker: Like, as far as she knows, he's just going off on these adventures for fun because he has this passion to explore the sea. And Melanie Rawls wrote about this in The Feminine Principle on Tolkien, which is also in Perilous and Veria. Gonna get a lot of Perilous and Veria quotes this episode because we're talking about gender roles. She writes, Aldarion is very masculine, a wandering sailor and builder of ships. Arendis is very feminine in her attachment to her home.
Speaker: Though their love is great, they never reach a balance or a blend of masculine and feminine characteristics. They become estranged. Significantly, Eldarion becomes more outer -directed, voyaging further and longer, often behaving rashly, and ever more resistant to any moderating influences of counsel. Arendis withdraws into her home and creates an all -female household wherein she attempts to confine their daughter. She turns inward, nursing her grievances of pride.
Speaker: don't necessarily agree 100 % with the way that Rawls characterizes Arendis there. It seems a little off -base, but I think she's got Aldarion pegged. And Aldarion just refuses to accept any blame for his estrangement from Arendis. He sort of entertains the notion once or twice, like Tolkien writes a little bit of internal sort of monologue for him.
Speaker: But he always ends up telling himself that, oh, it's just that she's like a cold, unfeeling woman, or she's just upset because her lifespan is shorter than his because, yeah, that makes fucking sense. Like these years don't mean as much to you as they do to, you know, this, quote unquote, low born woman who's not gonna live as long. And there's just no self -awareness or introspection whatsoever. This just reminded me a lot of like the principal Skinner meme,
Speaker: Could I be the problem in this relationship because I keep leaving my wife alone for years while I sail around on these seemingly pointless voyages? No. It's the woman who's wrong. And Arendis really has a really good line that I picked out when I was reading through this the first time that I think sums up a lot of toxic male behavior. She says that men, quote, turn their play into great matters and great matters into play.
Speaker: So think of like the toxic male figures that become so obsessed with achieving like this ideal maleness, like fucking Andrew Tate, you know, former MMA fighter and that sort of thing. Or, you know, these, these guys that are just obsessed with peak masculinity, whether it's physical or psychological or whatever, or, you know, relationship based, you know, dominance over women, all that sort of stuff. Or the ones who get like so worked up over depictions of men in media, like this is play.
Speaker: that men are becoming more feminized or whatever in depictions of media or gaming or whatever. You know, they always want to see men depicted as these like super alpha male kind of types. And then on the flip side, there's like the alphas, quote unquote, that look at things like the stock market or politics or things that like can and do have really huge far reaching impacts, especially on marginalized groups of people. These are people that see those areas as games to be one.
Speaker: They want to game the system. They want power for the sake of power. They just want to win the money. They don't care what the results are, what impact it has. That's turning great matters into play.
Speaker: So honestly, I think we could probably spend a while talking about the depiction of women in femininity in Eldarion and Arendis as well, but that's not the topic of this episode. Maybe we'll do that another time. The other thing I want to touch on with Eldarion is kind of the idea of the masculine ideal of like dominance over nature, like subjugating nature to your will.
Speaker: Environmental stewardship is a common theme in Tolkien's legendarium. It comes up a lot, and it's often associated with kind of general concepts of good or evil. So good people steward the environment and live in harmony with it, whereas evil people tend to exploit the land and kind of bend the environment to their will. Aldarion deforest big chunks of Numenor to make his ships, but Tolkien makes a note of saying that he doesn't replant these forests, so he's not as respectful as
Speaker: nature, there are other cases where there are specific mentions in Numenor of people, you know, when they do cut down trees, they replant those forests to make sure that they grow for future generations. Youth Crow writes about this in Power in Arda, sources, uses, misuses, also in Perilous and Fair. Quote, it is Arendis who values the trees for themselves in their natural state and Aldarian who is more concerned with their domestication for human use.
Speaker: And there's also a case where Aldaren is giving a sapling by the Eldar that the Eldar treasure it for its beauty. And immediately his thought is, there's going to be a great wood for making ships with. I don't know why he's southern now. Yeah, why southern? Why not like Boston or something? He's from South Numenor. Sure.
Speaker: Yeah, so that's Eldarion, maybe pinnacle in the Tolkien world of toxic masculinity. Yeah. Can't discuss his feelings. Yeah, man. That piece about his use of the environment where he sees the trees as only resources to be used for his own ends. I feel like that's such an important part of what we were talking about earlier with the stuff from Genesis about, you know, the Dominion
Speaker: over Earth and overall living things in it. I feel like that's such an important part of toxic masculinity to me is the perception of other beings and the world as simply objects to be used and not regarded as simply for their own sake. Yeah, lesser
Speaker: And as the resident animist and hippie dirt worshiping weirdo, like that's always what sticks out to me in Tolkien is how different people live and use their environment. Moving on. Yeah. All right. I'm going to talk about my boy Faramir. He is my favorite character, at least my favorite character in The Lord of the Rings.
Speaker: And Faramir's an interesting character because he is Tolkien's author insert. Tolkien explicitly says this in letters. It's a note on page 232. And it is, quote, as far as any character is like me, it is Faramir, except that I lack what all my characters possess, courage.
Speaker: So Tolkien also gave Faramir a dream that famously haunted him of the inelectable wave that destroyed Numenor. He gives that dream to Faramir to further mesh himself and Faramir together. And John Rose Grant in his new book, Tolkien Enchantment and Loss,
Speaker: says that Tolkien attributed his own trauma reactions to his time in World War I to Faramir, that his physical wounds weren't the main ones he suffered from. It was the loss of love that happened throughout that war that really wounded him.
Speaker: And that's definitely something that happened with Tolkien. When you read the foreword to the Lord of the Rings, he talks of the TCBS. He's saying that the Lord of the Rings is not an allegory for World War II, but in saying that, he talks of the TCBS in terms of, by the end of World War I, all my friends were dead.
Speaker: And in a lot of ways, Faramir kind of goes through a very similar thing when he awakens after battle. His entire family is dead at that point. His mother dies when he's five. His brother dies on a journey that Faramir should have gone on, but he didn't because of his dad. We'll get back to that in a second. And then his dad suicides himself. So like it's everyone's dead and he's having to rebuild from scratch.
Speaker: And we have spoken already about Melanie Rawls, the feminine principle in Tolkien. That's something that's very important here. She talks at length about Faramir. So her central thought here is that if you want to achieve good in Middle Earth, you have to
Speaker: embody both feminine and masculine characteristics. And she identifies those as feminine characteristics are understanding and inwardly facing, and masculine characteristics are power base and outwardly facing.
Speaker: And Faramir is a pretty balanced character. This is from Appendix A. It says, quote, he reads the hearts of men as shrewdly as his father, but what he read moved him sooner to pity than scorn. He was gentle and bearing and a lover of lore and music. And therefore, by any and those days, his courage was judged less than his brothers, but it was not so, except that he did not seek glory and danger without a purpose.
Speaker: And that's really exemplified in the famous quote, I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. So Faramir is
Speaker: He has a type of soft masculinity here, like he is stepping into a role that he has to step into because Boromir is no longer there, they need a military captain, but that's not where his true desire lies. He is, as Denethor said, he's a wizard's people, like what he wants to do is he's bookish, he's gentle, he
Speaker: wants to steward the land in every sense. He doesn't want to go to war, but he will do that if he has to because he has that nobility of wanting to protect what is his to protect. And it is that understanding and empathy that Faramir has that makes his relationship with Eowyn possible. He has insight that other characters don't
Speaker: Because as problematic as this is, the blood of Numenor runs nearly true in him. So he can understand more than the face value of things. So when he meets Frodo and Frodo has the ring and he knows that if he sees the ring, shit's going to go bad because he can see
Speaker: what probably tempted Boromir and he's kind of the same way with AO1 that he sees AO1 and the things that she lacks and knows how to help her through that. He sees in AO1 someone who's close to his brother and who needs love in the same way that he does. Yeah.
Speaker: He, in this instance, being far amir, not Boromir. Boromir didn't give a fuck about love. Wow. That's fucking canon, my dude. In terms of Boromir, also in Appendix A, he is said to be a man after the sword of King Airner of old, taking no wife and delighting chiefly in arms, fearless and strong, but caring little for lore.
Speaker: save the tales of old battles. And often when people talk about Faramir and the type of masculinity he shows, they talk about him in comparison with Faramir. Makes sense, right? They're essentially opposites. Faramir is the warrior. Faramir is the bookish second son who probably would have gone into the priesthood if he wasn't part of a noble family and despair.
Speaker: But I think a better comparison there is Denethor because Denethor and Boromir are alike in a way that Denethor and Boromir aren't.
Speaker: Gandalf says, of Denethor, he is not of other men of this time Pippin, and whatever his descent from father to son, by some chance the blood of Western Es runs nearly true in him, as it does in his other son Faramir, yet did not in Boromir who he loved best. He has long sight he can perceive. If he bends his will tither, much of what is passing in the minds of men, even those that dwell far off, it is difficult to deceive him and dangerous to try.
Speaker: I think that Denethor is like a negative expression of the same kind of masculinity that Faramir has. Denethor covets Boromir for being the Alpha Chad, because that's what he wants to be. And he looks down upon Faramir as being a fellow Omega.
Speaker: for being a beta cuck soy boy Faramir. I was not expecting the word Omega. Alicia has just fired so much fanfic. Omegaverse Faramir. No, please no.
Speaker: I am doing an AO3 tag search right now. Oh, no, no, no. I won't do that to you. Maybe. Going back to Melanie Rawls, she would probably classify what happens to Denethor as a negative, feminine expression. So as Denethor becomes more withdrawn, he turns more and more and more inward. And as Faramir heals, Faramir turns more and more and more outward.
Speaker: Denethor then succumbs to despair and Faramir goes on to have a successful relationship, become the Prince of Ithilien, fix all of that land going back to environmental stewardship.
Speaker: I think Faramir is the most balanced of the masculine characters and what gives him balance is that he is emotionally available in a way that is often frowned upon in terms of the moors of toxic masculinity. You're supposed to be stoic, as Tim was talking about earlier.
Speaker: I'm just self -aware, right? It's having that self -awareness to know, yes, I'm not perfect. And if I see the ring, it will tempt me. I know that you have it, but I can't see it. That sort of thing. There's so much in just that decision.
Speaker: And a lot of people really focus on the thing where he says if he saw the ring on the side of the road, he wouldn't touch it because he vowed not to and how that is outside the realm of like mortal temptation, but that he does say that. But then he also has the presence of nine to be like, no, keep it hidden. I don't want to see it. I don't want to fall like my brother.
Speaker: Bora Mere would totally see a therapist, like weekly. Yeah. Yeah. And he should. Dennethor fucked him up. Yeah, he should be in like family therapy with Dennethor. There's no way Bora Mere would ever know. No. Bora Mere would have to be dragged there.
Speaker: Well, Faramir did nothing wrong. So this is obviously I'm just talking about book depiction of Faramir because the movie depiction of Faramir's character assassination, in my opinion. Because like, Faramir as a character in the movies is
Speaker: just daddy issues. He has daddy issues, the character. And there's so much more to him than that. It's not a very compelling character because like movie Faramir is, I want daddy to love me. Daddy doesn't love me. Daddy loves Boromir. Dot, dot, dot. Oh, here's a hobbit with something that daddy would really like for me to bring to him. Let me take him the hobbit. Dot, dot, dot. Oh, wait, I fucked up.
Speaker: dot dot dot holding hands with Aowin. There's so much more in the book that's just not in the movie. And without it, it doesn't make him a very compelling character. Hmm. You miss out on so much of his introspection. Yeah. And like, that's where he really shines as a character and like getting the quiet courtship of Aowin.
Speaker: is such a healing respite in the middle of so much battle. It does a similar job to what in the movies the Intmute does, but in a much less frustrating way. Like you slow down, you get to take a breath, but you also get to witness like the blossoming of this love of two broken characters who fill in each other's gaps in a very beautiful way.
Speaker: Yeah, we're definitely going to do an episode on those two. And I feel like we could do an episode on adaptation of different characters and how that transforms their portrayals of different masculinities and kind of how we perceive them for sure. And yeah, we can go into a whole dissection of Faramir, Loramir, and Danathor.
Speaker: Like their dynamic would make a really compelling series about like family, you know, like a succession kind of series or something, or like, you know, some kind of wild, like, or even like the Sopranos or something where it's just all about like the family dynamic of these men trying to navigate their repressed feelings. Yeah. In some cases, trying to outman each other in a weird way and being ashamed about it.
Speaker: Yeah, I will say in the terms of the adaptation, they don't actually change the quality of the masculinity in Boromir, Faramir, or Denethor. They just tear it down so much you lose nuance, you know, unlike Aragorn. Yeah, they crank it up or make it very obvious.
Speaker: But yeah, well, let's talk about Aragorn since we have mentioned him. So when I Google Aragorn and masculinity or toxic masculinity, it's really fascinating to me that I see so many articles and video essays pop up that describe and argue that Aragorn is actually like the paragon of positive, non -toxic masculinity
Speaker: This is especially true, I think, of the adapted Aragorn, heretofore known as Viggo Aragorn of the Peter Jackson films. And again, I feel like we could honestly do an entire episode about Aragorn and Faramir in adaptation as, you know, sort of reflections of our slowly evolving and changing hegemonic masculinity to one that is gentler and more introspective among other things.
Speaker: But I have to say, to be honest, that I think that Aragorn, to paraphrase Grace when we were talking about this episode, Aragorn is kind of the best sort of man that you could ask for in a really shitty patriarchal system.
Speaker: And he fails because he does not interrogate that shitty patriarchal system. Like, for all of Aragorn's positive qualities, he embodies what Hilary Wheaton in her dissertation about masculinity in Lord of the Rings, which, side note, is actually a really interesting paper and is also explores slash fanfiction on
Speaker: its impact on masculinities in Lord of the Rings, she calls what I think Aragorn embodies a fraternal masculine or fraternal patriarchy. That is, Aragorn's masculinity and the rising hegemonic masculinity of Middle -earth itself
Speaker: that will be established by Aragorn as he takes a throne and initiates the dominion of men, is one that elevates fellowship, is gentler, more in tune with their emotions and nature. It's more vulnerable and open to alternate ways of thinking than just authoritative male sort of logic and independence.
Speaker: Unfortunately, it is still a masculinity that upholds and supports a patriarchal culture where men, both in terms of gender and race, have dominion. So she cites other scholars on masculinities, R .W. Connell and David Bookbinder, in this construction of fraternal patriarchy.
Speaker: And she also cites, especially John Miller, who's, again, another side note, whose article, Alternative Masculinities and the Dominion of Men in the Lord of the Rings, which I think would have been perfect for this episode, but I could not get my hands on, is cited in a couple of places, including an article that John Miller wrote in Mythlore called Mapping Gender in Middle Earth.
Speaker: He kind of explains a little bit more about how the dominion of men is not just about the race of men ascending, but is also about a new masculinity and a new patriarchy, which
Speaker: replaces the alternative masculinities that Tolkien shows us in Middle -earth with the other races like the Hobbits, the Ents, and especially the Elves, which I find a really fascinating idea and maybe will be another episode, but I just wanted to mention it really, really briefly and before I kind of move on, because I think that the term fraternal masculinity is like the perfect sort of term for Aragorn's sort of brand of masculinity.
Speaker: So when talking about Aragorn, I will try also to kind of mostly stick to Book Aragorn. It's sort of inevitable that Viggo Aragorn will come through because I feel like I'm kind of always comparing him with Book Aragorn.
Speaker: because I've said it before and I'll say it again, I would die for Viggo Aragorn and would renounce all of my anarchist, communist, leftist leanings for Viggo Aragorn, but a lot of the times I really want to slap book Aragorn like upside the head.
Speaker: So I think the biggest attribute of this fraternal masculinity of Aragorn is, of course, his instinct to heal. He wants to protect and preserve life from treating Frodo of the Morgal Wound, and after he is stabbed in Moria,
Speaker: He literally saves Eowyn and Faramir and countless other soldiers in Minas Tirith. He's literally recognized first as a healer, and it is that aspect that leads the people of Minas Tirith to begin to acknowledge him as a king. The famous quote being, from Eorath, the hands of a king are the hands of a healer.
Speaker: He also prioritizes fellowship and cooperation in establishing friendships. I feel like he knows basically everybody important in Middle Earth. He forms relationships with the other kingdoms of Middle Earth and makes peace with Harad and the Easterlings. He makes the Shire officially off limits and self -governing when he ascends to the throne.
Speaker: This fellowship and this cooperation comes through so strongly in his loyalty to his friends. He not only is so loyal to them, he works on those friendships. He finds time to write poetry with Bilbo in Rivendell after
Speaker: a long journey with Frodo. He finds the time to have a pipe full and smoke with Marion Pippin after a really kind of horrific battle, basically. And he's really committed, especially with the Hobbits, he's committed to serving and protecting those who are physically smaller or weaker than him.
Speaker: He spends years helping to protect the Shire and I feel like this also is sort of reflected in that moment at the end of the turn of the king when he is crowned king. He sort of recognizes that his kingship was not solely his own doing. His kneeling down to Sam and Freddo after they destroyed the ring
Speaker: He has Frodo and Gandalf crown him. He explicitly says, me coming into this inheritance of mine was the labor of so many others, not just me. And speaking of becoming the king, he didn't have to do
Speaker: decades and decades of wandering the earth, meeting other cultures, learning other languages, meeting other people and forging friendships with other people. He didn't have to do that to establish a claim to his kingship, right? He basically did what I've been calling a decades long internship to be a good king. And he didn't have to do that, but he did.
Speaker: He doesn't command others to do things that he wouldn't, like walk the paths of the dead or ride to Mordor.
Speaker: And he wouldn't even command an army of the dead to come with him up the river to help save Minas Tirith. He honors his word and releases them of their oath after the liberation of Pelargir. Personally, I think that this was handled better in the movie because it robs a lot of drama. And it's sort of like, well, wait, you didn't really fulfill the oath to whatever.
Speaker: That's fine. Whatever. He kept his word. He said that he would release them. That's a pretty honorable thing, I think. And lastly, he shows his emotions openly. Fairly often, he is unafraid to express his grief and his doubt. The anguish that he feels at the breaking of the fellowship
Speaker: and to the decision that he has to make and openly expresses to everybody else that to like a lesson in land who are left over how hard of a decision this is for him. He ultimately decides to go after Marion Pippin again that that loyalty coming through
Speaker: But in a lot of ways, he's unafraid to show kind of what he's going through and what he's thinking about to his loyal friends. And of course, I feel like the beautiful image of the best of Eric Lunt's fraternal masculinity, I think, is that beautiful gentle kiss on Cormier's brow.
Speaker: and him weeping over Formir holding his hand when he passes away. I feel like that's just such a lovely image of this sort of fraternal fellowship masculinity that Aragorn embodies. And all that's to kind of butter everybody up and be sort of like, you know, these are a lot of the points that get covered in a lot of these essays and video essays about Aragorn being an antidote to toxic masculinity.
Speaker: I want to kind of push back at that a little bit because for all of these beautiful positive qualities, Aragorn still fails in a lot of ways to truly be a feminist and somebody who wants to
Speaker: elevate other genders and other races to an equal status with men. He is often fairly condescending to other women. I am thinking of the moment with Joris in the Houses of Healing, where he also has kind of an asshole sort of streak when it comes to joking around with his pals. There's a moment in The Prancing Pony when he is speaking to the hobbits and trying to convince them he is who he is and that he wants to help them.
Speaker: he kind of confronts Sam and says, if I had killed the real Strider, I could kill you and I could have killed you already without so much talk. If I was after the ring, I could have it now. And he kind of makes a really intimidating and kind of frightens the hobbits sort of like into silence. And then he says, JK, I am the real Strider.
Speaker: And he kind of does this again way later on to Baragond when he is king. He sort of confronts him about, because you defied an order of the citadel of the guard, you must be exiled from Minas Tirith. And this shocks poor Baragond into just despair.
Speaker: And then he says, JK, that's because you're going to a thillion with your best bro, Prince Faramir. Isn't that great? And it's kind of like, that's, that was kind of unnecessary. You didn't have to do that. Yeah. A split second of I'm going to let your child starve is too much. Yeah. It's like, kind of like, wow, dude, we're okay. Anyway.
Speaker: You can see that he's got a little bit of that power drunkness to him kind of thing. There are definitely times where you can see that he has a little bit of fun having authority over others. And it's a little bit too much at the expense of the people with him who ostensibly have lower status and overpowered by him. I feel like it's a little too much punching down there, Aragorn.
Speaker: He also, in Lothlorien, when he is receiving gifts from Galadriel, he says, What praise could I say more of Galadriel, the Lady of Lorien, of whom were Sprung, Kilibrean, and Arlen Evenstar? What praise could I say more? What praise could be greater than that?
Speaker: And I'm kind of like, wait, you just told Galadriel, one of the most powerful beings in Middle Earth, that her greatest contribution to him was birthing somebody? Like, what? I'm not convinced here, buddy. I don't think that that's as high praise as you think it is. Thanks for making my girlfriend.
Speaker: Thanks for making my girl, thanks for being a mom because that's the most important thing you've done.
Speaker: Yeah, it's, there's kind of countless moments in the rest of Lord of the Rings where he kind of gets into his speechifying mode where he says, I am the heir of Isildur and I'm coming into my own and the sword of Elendil will come to Minas Tirith and you know, I am the heir of Elendil and I'm the heir of Isildur and it reveals something about Aragorn which I
Speaker: because of my politics I don't enjoy because he never really questions him deserving the kingship or he never kind of questions the idea that he shouldn't be king and obviously that's kind of a greater problem with Middle -earth than just Aragorn
Speaker: just monarchy in general really. Yeah and patriarchy and it's just kind of like so I that's that's kind of a bigger topic but I I find that for all of the wonderful qualities of this fraternal masculinity that Aragorn embodies he is still committed to
Speaker: patriarchy. His masculinity is something that supports the literal dominion of men. And it's not just, again, it's not just a race thing. It's the dominion of men over everything in Middle Earth. We talk about how he grants the Shire to be self -governing. He grants the slaves of Mordor their own land. He grants Rohan to be a self -governing, independent country.
Speaker: However, the Shire still is ostensibly a part of the kingdom. He still has dominion over the entirety of Middle Earth. And that's never questioned. That's always an assumption that everyone is very cool and okay with. In fact, when he stops at the boundary of the Shire and won't cross into it and holds up to his own bargains and everything, and that is
Speaker: lovely and wonderful on an individual level. But it always strikes for me that that is a system that works for one man's lifetime. And it is not a sustainable system. Yeah. He's not constructing anything.
Speaker: Yeah, and you kind of have to wonder, what's Eldarion, his son, what kind of man is he going to grow up into? At the very best, he might benefit from the wisdom of his mother and the wonderful cooperation and community that Aragorn has fostered.
Speaker: He might also turn out to be like so many monarchs in our primary world who have grown up in peace and prosperity. They might turn out to be absolute shitheads and tank all the hard work that their fathers did in managing and creating the privilege and peace that they enjoy.
Speaker: So yeah, all of this is to say, I, again, I would die for Vigo Aragorn. And I think that this fraternal masculinity is something that can be really positive, especially as something to aspire to far more than a lot of the masculinities that are presented by, say, Alderian or Denethor or people in our primary world.
Speaker: But I kind of can't get past that Aragorn still enjoys the patriarchy and still enjoys having power. And that's something that doesn't sit well with me. Listen, as someone who had a poster, more than one poster, of Viggo Aragorn on her ceiling growing up,
Speaker: All right, I am here with you for Vico Aragorn. There are some key differences between, you know, the movie adaptation Aragorn and book Aragorn, one being, you know, book Aragorn would not have a beard.
Speaker: As much as I'm joking about that. There are distinctions that were made in the adaptation and there's actually a serious point to that. The whole very troubling blood purity thing that Tolkien goes into in terms of the lines of Numenorean kings and all that.
Speaker: Aragorn is situated as someone who is the best possible version at that time of the system that is being enacted that continues on from the system that Aldarion, this terrible example of toxic masculinity, is enacting, and continues on in Tolkien's estimation
Speaker: to the primary world today, that's the conceit, that it becomes this primary world which is also suffering so much with toxic masculinity and toxic patriarchal structures. And Aragorn is situated right in the middle of that.
Speaker: He's meant to embody the best of men and, to a degree, elves. His being raised by elves, I think, makes a big difference. That access to the masculinities that are offered by elves, I think, has really informed Aragorn's character to a really important degree.
Speaker: And I think that him being sort of like the middle of this, like the hinge on which this rests and the point from which the dominion of men is guaranteed. It's a yes and sort of existence where it's like, yes, it's true. And he's a pretty good king.
Speaker: He's still a king. And that's great. It's good to be king. It's not always great to be the guy serving the king.
Speaker: Yeah, I do want to just bring up in terms of the adaptation, one change they made in that adaptation that I think went the farthest to make Aragorn more palatable, specifically for a left leaning audience. And that's his reluctance to take up the scepter. Exactly. Exactly. It's so important. And for as much as like right wing people really want to glom on to this movie as being the end all be all of
Speaker: monarchy and you know all of that loaded bullshit he didn't want to be fucking king all he wanted to do was just fuck Arwen in peace but the only way to do that was to become king yep yep which is like it's a plot point in the book too but it's so much less because he has all of this other shit a long way to go for a piece of tale
Speaker: It's a piece in the adaptation where you can see the line through to where it was adapted out of the books and where it comes from and ties back in. But the treatment within the adaptation makes a tremendous difference. It really does. It plays into the stereotype of the people who should be in leadership are always the ones who don't want to be in leadership.
Speaker: And it allows us to see these moments that kind of get passed over so often in the book where we can see him wrestling and making hard decisions and expressing how much doubt he has about those decisions. We can really see it on the screen really, really well, and we can see how that
Speaker: kind of endears him to everybody else around him. And I feel like, again, this is present in the book because, again, he makes a lot of friends and a lot of people say openly, like, I love him and I will follow him. And men want to be him. Women want to be with him sort of thing. And it's so much more palatable in the film because you can kind of see him not only
Speaker: getting grubby and dirty and bloodied up with his friends around him. You can kind of see him work through some of his insecurities and his sort of wrestling with kind of like not his ultimate goal of becoming king, but
Speaker: What's the next right thing to do here? What's the next right thing for me to do to protect my friends? What's the next right thing for me to do to protect these people? And that makes it so much more appealing than just straight up, I'm going to be the king. This is my duty. This is my birthright.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. The point you made about people who desire power not being the people who should have power, I think hits differently than it would have in Tolkien's time. That's one of those situations where if it had been adapted the way Tolkien actually wrote it in the early 2000s, it wouldn't have hit well in a post Thatcher, post Reagan in the middle of George W. Bush kind of world
Speaker: big time. Yeah, I can't even, well, I guess we'll, we might start thinking about it with the whole new deal that are happening around movies, but I can't imagine how it would hit now post the 45th president, post Charlottesville, post so many other things occurring in this world. So it's pretty sobering to think about. And I think, yeah, you're
Speaker: You're right that we're going to have to be having those conversations and thoughts in the news of new adaptations, considering who is in charge of Warner Brothers Discovery at this point in time, and that David Zaslab is the most disproportionately compensated CEO in the United States.
Speaker: has all kinds of, like I could go on a soapbox for about a 10 minute rant on this man's behavior. And I will spare all of our listeners today, but you can always tell me about it.
Speaker: Another episode. Yeah. Just like this one guy in particular. Grace gets real mad at David Zaslav. There's all kinds of racist stuff, all kinds of misogynistic stuff, all kinds of like all of it. Yeah, I'm sure Tim can come in on comic stuff and everything too. My poor DC moves. I have qualms. But Middle Earth.
Speaker: back to Middle Earth. We talked about a lot of men. So there's one more man that we definitely want to talk about today. And he directly relates to that whole difference in adaptation for Aragorn in terms of, you know, wants to be king, really wants to just be able to go off and smooch Arwen and needs to be king to do that, that distinction. And that is talking about Elrond. So
Speaker: Arand is a character that I really like to look at in terms of masculinity in Tolkien because he's fairly complex and has a lot of sort of like positive and negative qualities here. There's a lot of amazing aspects of his masculinity that I am going to get into in a second, but one of my big bugaboos is he leaves a little bit to be desired as a father.
Speaker: He does a lot of trying to control his daughter's love life. He does a lot of, like...
Speaker: very judgmental, very controlling, very patriarchal, like father knows best sort of things. He has a lot of discussions with Arwen, with Aragorn and all of this that are very deeply keyed to this idea that this woman who, this elf woman who has spent several centuries upon Middle Earth has no ability to know her own mind, at least for a period of time.
Speaker: He does eventually come around, he does accept it. It's certainly filtered through his lens of grief of knowing that if she stays in Middle -earth, he is not going to get to see her, but not for nothing. He leaves for the Undying Lands and we have no record of any of his kids actually going. There's some tension there.
Speaker: He gives off really big, like that dad that sits his daughter's prom date down to see, you know, these are all the rules. Yeah. What was that show? Like, you know, 10 rules for dating my teenage daughter or whatever sort of feeling like, you know, you will bring her home by 10 PM. Yeah. And then.
Speaker: And then they take the fucking shotgun picture kind of thing that's supposed to be all cutesy. Yeah. Yeah. I don't get the weird incest vibe from Elrond that I get from almost every single one of those men who do that. Yeah, it is in the same vein. Yeah. Elrond is definitely a less toxic version of masculinity than that. But in that particular vector, like
Speaker: This is not great, but there are so many great examples of non -toxic masculinity from him in other vectors. He's a warrior and a leader. He is a herald of Gil -galad, but he's not a warhawk. We don't see him advocating war for the sake of war.
Speaker: We don't get a lot of information from Tolkien on him leading forces. There's not a lot of details there. Tolkien doesn't fetishize the details of war. He talks about its impacts on people, but you're not going to find a lot of glorious battle descriptions in Tolkien's writing.
Speaker: summary is an important information and I've noted in a previous episode that a lot of our, you know, famous warrior characters don't, their grand weapons aren't even named until their deaths, until they fall in battle. It's not glorified in the same way that we see in a lot of a lot of fantasy literature and adaptations and everything now.
Speaker: Elrond is associated with the hearth and the home. He found Rivendell like under these birch trees and it's the last homely house and it's a place of refuge and safety and it's a sanctuary. It's a place of healing. It's a place of learning. It is a place to counteract false information. It's where characters go to to get on course.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a place where a lot of characters have a lot of introspective sort of self -examination kind of moments, which is something that's very much against the alpha male masculinity idea. And where that's fostered and allowed to flourish and supported and all of that. There's the healing aspect too. Like he's a healer. He heals Frito. He heals other characters. He is known for his ability to do this.
Speaker: And that's a really key piece in the more positive aspects of Tolkien's masculinity is that men are allowed to and rather expected to be healers. The hands of the healer are the hands of the king. Aragorn is a healer. Elrond is. This is something that it's not just to destroy, but it's to repair is important. I just had a thought that whole
Speaker: Hands of the healer, hands of the king, and Elrond also being a healer. Do you think that might just be a family trait? Yes, but I think it means it in a blood purity way. You know, since Elrond is - Don't think you're wrong. It is Aragorn's great, great, great, great, however, uncle, and foster dad, which is another thing. For all that there are,
Speaker: issues in some of the few scenes that we get with Elrond and Arwen. Elrond has a long history of fostering the Sons of Numenor. He takes on this supportive
Speaker: fatherly role and is present in the lives of generations of children. And that's not necessarily something that is often teased out in adaptation or anything. I don't think there's a lot of times that we see that there, except for maybe some fan -made films and things like that.
Speaker: It's lovely too because he's paying back what happened to him and his two dads. I think there's part of a racial aspect to that as well because a lot of the positive masculinity characteristics that Aragorn exhibits are more elven in nature than they are mannish in nature. Man as race rather than man as masculine.
Speaker: in middle earth like you know the healing the insight the council all that sort of thing are things that you can either directly or sort of insinuate came from Aragorn's elven upbringing. Hot take is the blood of Numenor actually just elvishness? I would probably I want it to be that so much instead of literal blood yeah
Speaker: But like the next level of that meme is that it's not actually anything having to do with like elvishness or blood or whatever. It's just that like a slightly less patriarchal, slightly less toxic than the norm manner of upbringing carried through generation to generation.
Speaker: It's just we're doing the galaxy brain meme now. Yeah. Just patriarchy. What? And so we've talked a lot about that particular paper from Rawls that's in parallel and fair. And that's a paper that I every time I read it, I have a lot of dialogue with it because there are things that I deeply agree with and things that I definitely like
Speaker: I'm taken aback by it and you know I'm not sure we'd phrase that this way today but the point is is a key one and all that. So as we're talking about that paper as folks are reading it, it's one that I am frequently in tension and dialogue with but it has a lot of really good things too. She kind of breaks different characteristics of people in Middle Earth down into
Speaker: binary gender categories, which that's one of the things that I think we wouldn't quite do the same way today. But a point that she makes in there is that Elrond embodies a blend of these masculine and feminine traits and feminine principles like healing, insight, counsel, love, mercy, compassion. These are all things that Elrond exhibits and embodies throughout the text.
Speaker: And she also makes the point that having that blend of characteristics is better than any extreme. The characters who are presented as most favorable are the ones who have the best balance, essentially. One of the things that I really like about how Elrond and a lot of other men in Middle -earth are portrayed
Speaker: is the activities that we see them doing and how we see those traits and qualities exhibited in those behaviors. And here I want to take a moment to talk about emotional labor.
Speaker: So emotional labor is basically the amount of unseen, unacknowledged, unpaid, uncompensated work that goes into so many of the things that make society or a household or a relationship
Speaker: function. And disproportionately, emotional labor is done to a far greater degree by women or people who are coded more feminine in their relationships and situations. And what is fascinating to me about a lot of the men of Middle Earth is that
Speaker: we see them. Whether it's Elrond, Aragorn, the Hobbits, you know, we see men cooking, cleaning, tending to hearth, giving information, sharing insight, being self -reflective, planning out the logistics of things, executing plans large and small, just going through all of the steps that it takes to manifest any action.
Speaker: Partly that's because women aren't shown doing a lot of things in a lot of detail in Tolkien's Middle -earth. But some of that is just that there's a view of masculinity that is not as rigid and binary and toxic as what we are subjected to in our everyday day -to -day.
Speaker: And I think emotional labor is something that is really important to talk about because in some ways it seems very small in comparison to some of the other toxic things that we deal with. But the disproportional amount of emotional labor that occurs within our society is something that even in the most egalitarian relationships we are still struggling with.
Speaker: and we can still be improving on. It is a place where at every level of everything that we see, we can be doing better and we can be working to acknowledge.
Speaker: this soapbox rant brought to you by the number of times that I've listened to the Paris Paloma song, Labor, on TikTok recently. I would just like to point out for our listeners, literally in our show notes, all that is written here is emotional labor rant, all caps. I have a soapbox. I have several.
Speaker: Now, I do think that emotional labor is that point that you're making is very important because in this particular context, what we see in Tolkien is there is nobody weaponizing incompetence.
Speaker: Hmm. Yes. Mm hmm. Because that is where a lot of this emotional labor breakdown ends up happening. When you read articles about it, it counterpoint movie, a win making that shitty stew. I'll allow it.
Speaker: uses. But you usually read articles about the emotional labor falling on the feminine people in relationships and the surrounding things like, Oh, well, my husband purposefully lows the dishwasher in a way that is going to break plate. So I keep doing it. He doesn't do it anymore. And like, that's not really
Speaker: I will grant the stew, that's not really something you see in Tolkien. Everyone is capable of keeping their own lives running in a way that Western society has a tendency to infantilize men while still pumping them up as these strong alpha creatures and it's not something that happens in Tolkien. Big time.
Speaker: I mean, going off topic a little bit, but in The Hobbit, Bilbo gets very upset at the dwarves, you know, risking breaking his plates and everything like this, like being able to keep house to manage one's domestic affairs, to manage one's everyday logistics is something that is taken as
Speaker: just a standard operating procedure. No one is going around and saying, well, you know, I can't plan the route or whatever. Like I just want to, I want to go here and you have to figure out how we're going there or whatever. There's discussion, equal discussion between the different stakeholders of, you know, what route we're taking as the fellowship and everything. Like just all along the way,
Speaker: that emotional labor piece is not just up by the wayside. I also want to look at Elrond and adaptation.
Speaker: So in pretty much every adaptation that we have, we see that wisdom and insight, the capacity for counsel and all of that, no matter what his appearance is or how he's depicted. If you look at like the Bakshi and the Rankin Bass animated versions, the depictions of Elrond are wildly different, like stunningly, wildly different. I don't think that we have an adaptation so far that is an agreement as to what Elrond's hair looks like.
Speaker: Yes, short hair in the back sheet and then short hair again and rings of power. Yeah, but he always has this like gravitas and care and intellect and what have you. When we get to the live action adaptations, though, Hugo Weaving plays him brilliantly and plays him with all of those nuances across all of everything. But I think that we can't set aside the cultural impact that
Speaker: the, that actor being cast in that role, that gives the people who are advancing this manosphere agenda
Speaker: the ability to map other things on to just the depiction of Elrond. Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson. Mr. Anderson. Exactly. It's a joke we all get because most people don't know Hugo Weaving, their first association past Lord of the Rings is not, you know, Priscilla Queen of the Desert. It is Mr. Smith. Agent Smith. Yeah. Agent Smith. Sorry.
Speaker: It's Agent Smith that is our first connotation of the infamous roles that he's played in other films, and that joke crosses over into Lord of the Rings.
Speaker: That movie, which is a movie, The Matrix, is a movie that is written, directed by trans filmmakers that is frequently read as a trans allegory, that there's a lot of support for that reading for and everything, is also what is being referenced by all of these Manosphere folks talking about red -pilling. And the iconography from that film is something that is often twisted and mapped on to really hateful ideologies.
Speaker: And I don't think that we can set aside that piece of adaptation, that connotation that people have even subconsciously. Then as we get to the live action adaptation of Rings of Power, the internet has some spicy things to say, at least a subsection of it does, about not liking Elrond in the adaptation because, and these are just a few quotes that I pulled in a three second Google search,
Speaker: He's not high status enough in that adaptation. He doesn't have enough power. He looks like he just sits on a couch all day and watches Netflix, and that he lacks Hugo Weaving's charisma.
Speaker: Those points might sound familiar to anyone who's ever had the misfortune of hearing, you know, entertain men's right activists, pickup artists and all that speak and give their presentations. Those themes are things that come through in both of those spheres. Like, do they think Hugo Weaving look is crazy built or something? He's also like,
Speaker: He's just still a wiry dude. He doesn't look particularly powerful or anything. But his charisma. Yeah. He's going to say maybe his aura. They're all reading his aura. You know, he just exudes doodliness. I mean, and again, I'm like, I'm also like, you know, I see Hugo weaving and I see Elrond and I also see Priscilla near the desert.
Speaker: I remember when they cast it, like when they cast Hugo Weaving and I was like, really? He's such a weird looking dude. That he's an elf. Yeah. I mean, it works, but it's it works if you if you consider that the last adaptation before that I think was the I actually don't remember whether Rankin Bass or Bakshi came out later, but he looks a lot more like the Rankin Bass version than the Ralph Bakshi version. Yeah.
Speaker: Also, of all the elves to have a problem with the casting and rings of power, really Elrond is the one you're going with? Elrond. In complete fairness and complete disclosure, most of those spicy comments, when someone did respond to them, they were not endorsing the spicy comment. They were instead saying that, you know, Elrond and Doran forever, so. Elrond, Doran, and Isa forever.
Speaker: Yes. Amen. Amen. So yeah, anything else that you guys want to throw in here before we wrap up? But one of the things I wanted to touch on when I was talking about Faramir and then I got all flustered because Faramir. Yeah, we often think about
Speaker: swords in a very masculine way. And it comes up with Aragorn as well. Like, Aragorn is I am bringing the sword of the Lindeel to Minas Tirith and Faramir is like, no, man, I'm good. Like, I don't like swords at all. And I'm just doing this because I absolutely have to and
Speaker: I'm still kind of partially writing this paper in my head about how Faramir and Eowyn's relationship is really fucking queer. Stay tuned. Yeah, there's definitely like a Freudian way of reading all of that. Faramir, I don't need your phallic symbol. You can keep that. You can keep it. I am confident in nothing by manhood.
Speaker: I definitely recall an undergrad writing a paper about the Easter uprising of 1916 in Ireland, and that being the first place we're in a source from about the 1940s or 50s, so you know when Tolkien is writing. That being the first place that I personally encountered a full
Speaker: full chapter length description of the idea that the researcher had that swords and blades were phallic objects and the appeal of violence is also a sexual appeal for men in war and all of that. And so knowing that that's a contemporary review point from the point in time when Tolkien was writing, I do appreciate the Faramir approach.
Speaker: I was going to say about Aragorn, one of the moments that probably points to something deeper when he leaves Narsil at, or I guess at that point, it's not Narsil anymore, but when he leaves his sword at the doors of Meduselt and it takes some
Speaker: a long time to acquiesce to the request. He is like, I don't want anybody else touching this. Nobody else can touch it. If you're going to, if you draw the sword of a land deal and you're not an heir of a land deal, you're going to die. And it takes him a really long time to part ways with it. And I'm kind of like, there's something going on there.
Speaker: something deeper just beyond, you know, this is my point. I want it. It's my end reel. This is my flame of the West. Yeah. You're not going to get to start calling it that. Yeah, maybe I'm not reading too much into that then it seems.
Speaker: going to say that there's some Freudian support there for you. And then to go back to the movies, that fucking shot of Aragorn unwielding handrail for the first time when you're just like, sword for so long.
Speaker: I'm sorry, after the camera has lovingly gone up and down his v -neck chest in his underwear. Yeah, I remember that scene. I may have used that scene in a video edit last week.
Speaker: This tastefully unlaced red shirt, just showing just a lovely, lovely little taste of what's going on. It's posted in a mid chest, mid chest. Yeah, some behind the scenes information. We were just I forgot what we were discussing, but I believe it was Leah posted a picture of Eric. No, it was Grace posted a picture of Eric Warren. So I made a fan vid that features 100.
Speaker: Yeah, because she was like, okay, who else has unbuttoned shirts and fantasy? And I was like, the sluttiest man in Middle Earth? And Grace was like, where does this come from? And I was like, oh, I know exactly where it came from. Like, I needed to know the timestamp to find it and put it in the stand that I was making. It has 105 different fandoms in it. And it's about just how, you know, men on screen are allergic to buttons on their shirts. You know, it's a highbrow concept.
Speaker: And my beloved podcast folks here helped me find that and then the vid does end with everyone looking at Proto's mithril shirt. Nice. Nice choice. Perfect. Yeah, I saw like that red unlaced shirt and I was like, that's when Elrond's giving him the sword.
Speaker: You can write a whole protein analysis on that scene alone, man. Oh gosh, yeah. In the tent with his dad. Also, this man just walking up and being like, I am taking this meeting in my underwear.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a fucking power move. I'm taking this meeting with dad in my underwear, basically. My dad slash future father -in -law. It's big like Wall Street, like come talk to me while I'm at the urinal energy or something like that, right?
Speaker: I'm too important. I'm too important. We can have this meeting while I'm shitting. In all honesty, one of my favorite things about Aragorn is the Council of Al -Ransin, in which essentially everyone is showing up. They're doing all the sharing of information and whatever. And Foramir has this very put together appearance and he has his mission and he has his self -importance and all that.
Speaker: Aragorn is sitting over there in the corner, essentially just like wearing sweatpants to the meeting. He can get away with it. He's the future king. Yeah. He's allowed. Power move. Going back to the daddy slash father -in -law thing and how Elrond had such a hard time with
Speaker: Arwen wanting to marry Aragorn, I was thinking, what if horrendous didn't have such a shitty family? And they actively tried to talk her out of marrying Aldarion because they were obviously mismatched into life expectancies and everything as well. As much as we read Elrond as being
Speaker: toxic there as a like a toxic father. I don't know. I can understand why he would be upset about that relationship. It doesn't give him leeway to try to end it because Arwen is, you know, thousands of years old at that point. But I think about Arendelle and how some counsel probably would have helped her in that situation. Yeah, it doesn't give him leeway to be kind of like,
Speaker: You have to be the king to marry my daughter. I won't let anybody less marry her.
Speaker: Also the audacity of saying, you have to be king to marry my daughter, my dude. She can make that decision. Yeah, like anyway. Well, that was another piece of Aragorn, I guess, is that in in a couple of different places, he he sort of likens Arwen to treasure and to something that he's kind of obtained or like has been kind of given to him, you know,
Speaker: Definitely some modification there. Yeah and it's sort of like on one level it's kind of like oh yes of course she's she's his treasure how sweet and romantic and on the other you're kind of like well hold on is hold on who's who's giving who to whom and who are you really likening a woman
Speaker: to something that you've grabbed out of the, I don't know, treasure chest. It's kind of like, I don't know, it feels, again, much like a lot of other stuff about Aragorn, it rubs you the wrong way sometimes.
Speaker: So what's our takeaway from our long conversation here today? I guess when we were talking about putting this episode together, I sort of found myself thinking that I'm really a lot less interested in articles on the internet that sort of assert one of two things, whether Tolkien's characters are perfect men and perfect ideal antidotes to toxic masculinity or
Speaker: On the complete opposite end, Tolkien was clearly a misogynist, and all of his characters are, they're all toxic, he and they should be cancelled. Obviously, neither of those are wholly true, especially the Tolkien was a toxic misogynist bit. If we cancelled Tolkien, we wouldn't have a podcast, so I'm not interested in those sorts of takes. Personally, I'm more interested in what
Speaker: values we praise or reject in different masculinities, what that says about our underlying values and ideals, and how we can embody and admire what is the best of these men and these masculinities in Tolkien. While recognizing that our ideals
Speaker: may or may not be supported in these masculinities that are embodied by these characters. I'm a lot more interested in queering the men of Tolkien than I am in sort of assigning labels of toxic and positive to each of them. We're looking for apex homosexuals, not alpha chads.
Speaker: So thank you all so much for joining us today and listening to us yell a bit about the patriarchy, one of our favorite pastimes. But more than that, talk about how much we love these particular characters and how these alternative expressions of masculinity really shine through in Tolkien and are something that we can really admire and look to.
Speaker: And we also really want to shout out friend of the pod, Elise, who pointed out her thoughts about Alvarian and masculinity to us. And we loved it so much that we incorporated that into the podcast. If you listeners have any other characters that you'd like to hear us discuss, especially in this sort of masculinities and gender sort of frame, again, please feel free to reach out to us. Send us an email and contact us through Messenger on Facebook as well.
Speaker: You can find us and future episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or you can stream episodes directly from Zancaster, which is zancaster .com slash queer lodgings, a token podcast dashes in between all of those words.
Speaker: Leave us a reading, like, share, and subscribe. Find us on Facebook at Facebook .com slash queer lodgings. You can find us at Twitter at queer underscore lodgings. And if you'd like to email us your feedback or ideas for future episodes, you can find us at queer lodgings podcast at gmail .com. Thanks again, you guys.
Speaker: Grace, stop you right there. You mispronounced Tucker Carlson's name. What did I say? Tucker Carlton.
Speaker: Oh, fuck. Hi, guys. Now, that's the end tag. Here's the thing. He's a shithead. We don't misname people, so. Sorry, I wanted to catch you before you got like really on a roll. We're going to just reread that last paragraph there.
Speaker: Tim, cut that later. We'll see. Make me sound smarter. It's just going to be like, it's going to be Grace mispronouncing Tucker Carlson's name and then Mr. Smith. I'll give you the end.
