Transcript
Speaker: Hi everyone! Welcome to Queer Lodgings, the queer -led podcast about everything Tolkien. I'm Grace, and I'm here with my usual co -hosts, Alicia and Leah. Hello! Hey there!
Speaker: Thank you for joining us today. Let's settle in to gaze at the blooming flowers in our gardens and green spaces and appreciate the honeybees as we refresh ourselves. Perhaps with some lemon bars, beer, brood, and birch tubs and the method that Tolkien waxed poetically about in his letters and conversations, even going so far as to call birches his totem tree.
Speaker: or some excellent local fruit because today we'll be discussing some of the criticism which has been leveled at us in the past several months. This is part two of our Tolkien Would Hate This podcast series and we're tackling the critique that Tolkien would hate us because it's queer.
Speaker: going to look at this topic from several angles, readings available regarding the text itself, information from his letters and contemporaries, the historical contexts of Tolkien's life and times, and the scholarly work that's been undertaken on this topic.
Speaker: But to start, we're going to address the criticism about sex itself being present in Middle Earth, which we have as our heading titled, No Sex, Please. This is Middle Earth. This is Chast Middle Earth. This is Chast and Holy Middle Earth, where puppet children spring out of holes in the ground.
Speaker: So some of the criticisms that we've heard in the past few months have been grounded in a deep misunderstanding of the history of sexual consciousness and awareness in the past. Yeah, because sex didn't exist until 1960. Exactly. Just like women didn't exist or something. We all know that history, right? We all learned that in school.
Speaker: Right. So we wanted to kind of start out with a little bit of grounding in what was going on during Tolkien's life. What was he alive for? What did he witness during his life in terms of the sort of sexual revolution and the various waves of feminism that began in the 19th century and the turn of the 20th century and some of the other awarenesses and research and
Speaker: important points in history for queer lives in particular. So here's some of that historical context very briefly that Tolkien was alive for, and we'll get into a little bit more of the nitty gritty as we go on in this episode.
Speaker: So Tolkien was alive and born during the first wave of feminism, which of course was rooted in the suffragette movement. And it drew a lot from women in related movements like the abolitionist and temperance and labor and socialist movements. So he would have had an awareness of the growing power of women in public society for certain.
Speaker: So during this period, though obviously still socially condemned, lesbian and gay secret groups and bars began to emerge. Women were enjoying more traditionally masculine things like independent finances, wearing trousers, the horror.
Speaker: from the earliest 20th century, ideas of sexologists and inverts sort of arose. This led to equate female masculinity with lesbianism. This obviously is kind of a very brief sort of history, addressing these points again. We'll kind of get into it a little bit more later.
Speaker: The 1920s to the 1940s was a pivotal point around which ideas around gender and sexuality began to shift, especially. Pulp fiction began to circulate, lesbian, gay, and bisexual sexualities, among other quote -unquote deviances.
Speaker: continued to be viewed as perverse, but the awareness began to shift, especially during the work of Magnus Hirschfeld as he set up the Institute of Sexology in 1919, which is a lot earlier than a lot of people think. A lot of people kind of think that gays and lesbians and trans people and bisexuals didn't exist until the 1970s or something. And nope, we've we've always been here.
Speaker: Institute achieved a global reputation for its pioneering work on transsexual understanding and calls for equality for homosexuals, transgender people, and women. Hirschfeld himself was a passionate advocate for homosexual rights and had long appealed for the repeal of the law that criminalized homosexuality in Germany itself.
Speaker: And we note this because the seizure and the destruction of the Institute in May 1933 took place only three months after Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany, therefore making this attack on progress in understanding sexualities and different genders and gender identity one of the first casualties in, honestly, in the Holocaust and in the genocide that wasn't acted during World War II.
Speaker: So in the mid -1940s, societal views of the role of sex began changing from a predominantly procreative activity to one focused on individual satisfaction and self -expression. Obviously, this was kind of the ground in which the second wave of feminism would later emerge.
Speaker: and Tolkien himself witnessed the very beginnings of the second wave. Simone de Beauvoir, of course, published The Second Sex in 1953, and Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963. At the end of his life, he witnessed contraceptive pills becoming available in Britain and abortion becoming legal in Britain in 1961 and in 1967, respectively.
Speaker: So Tolkien was present for this part of the ongoing sexual revolution and some of the most wide -threaded, enduring effects of this was a significant change in how sex crimes are classified and regulated throughout the world. And again, we'll get more into that a little bit specifically, but this is all just kind of to kind of
Speaker: briefly give you a foundation of what Tolkien was aware of and alive for and put to bed some of the accusations that Tolkien would have had zero awareness or zero understanding or zero interest in what was going on around him when clearly there was a lot going on around him and a lot happening.
Speaker: And in fact, he sometimes had commentary on that in letter 49 to C .S. Lewis. He references men's present sex psychology, which demonstrates that he's obviously aware of non -Catholic teachings about sex when that letter was written, which was 1943.
Speaker: Yeah, Tolkien wasn't naive and he wasn't cloistered. He had an awareness around the world around him. And I think it's sort of disrespectful and sort of, again, sort of infantilizing in a lot of ways to suggest that Tolkien would have, number one, not known about any of this and number two, that he would have dismissed it or not been really super interested in it.
Speaker: I do think that study that we're touching on a little bit here in terms of the societal views in the 1940s and that shift is really interesting. We will link to it in the show notes. It actually shows a pretty clear pathway from people quietly being gay and everyone being okay with that directly to the 1960s. This whole sexual revolution started decades before we
Speaker: were aware that it started and that we were taught that it started. Yeah. I think that's really interesting. Yeah. The seeds were planted really early. And again, in the destruction of the Institute of Sexology, those seeds were kind of birthed back to the ground and a lot of progress was set back or sort of delayed and it wouldn't really emerge again until the 60s or the 70s. We lost so much. It's like the library of Alexandria, right?
Speaker: Really? Yeah, it really, really is. You can kind of speculate a bit about what the 40s and 50s would have looked like, what the 60s would have looked like if that research hadn't been lost. And what would the history of our queer ancestors and our queer elders, what would they have experienced had that knowledge not been lost?
Speaker: Part of just looking at any of our history through a queer lens is to recognize how many times it has burned to the ground and has to restart and rebuild. It's a constant, cyclical
Speaker: aspect to just what our history is. And it's the Holocaust and it's the AIDS crisis. And it's these current, don't say gay, trans bathroom bills, like attacks on healthcare and everything like that. We are in another cyclical wave where we are having to fight to keep that history alive and present so that we can continue to build toward something better. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: So with that foundation of Tolkien's, dare I say, sexual awareness? Possible sexual awareness. Possibly. Let's kind of get into sex in Middle Earth, as Tolkien wrote. Cool, there's not a lot of it. Don't be short. Yeah, done.
Speaker: There honestly isn't a lot of depictions of intercourse that sounds so clinical and disgusting in the Lord of the Rings. I'm sorry, is it better if we say there's not a lot of banging? There's not a lot of fucking... I don't know, there's just something about the word intercourse, I don't know. Yeah, I agree.
Speaker: In Warm Beds Are Good Sex and Libido and Tolkien's writing, Chai Rosenthal says that sex is marginalized in Lord of the Rings and it is a destructive undercurrent in the Silmarillion and is given rare yet frank mentions in Tolkien's extensive backstory of Middle -earth. He's talking about laws and customs of the Eldar there.
Speaker: Passionate love, transgressive desire, denied sexual fulfillment, and the R word are plot points in several stories in the Silmarillion primarily. Yeah. Within the Lord of the Rings, sex is really talked about kind of like as a tertiary thing. You, you see that characters are having sex based on the fact that they are procreating. So like,
Speaker: Aragorn and Sam are rewarded for a job well done by having children. Sam, a whole bunch of kids. Aragorn, just a few.
Speaker: And you see like the failure of sex in some people such as the Ents. Is a lack of sex really sex though? That's basically the most explicit it gets that the other stuff that you actually see are Aowan and Farmer kissing, right?
Speaker: which are indicative of sex that's going to happen, but it doesn't actually. All it happens in the appendices is us when they get their kid, right? So there's so much room there for non -procreative sex that you could easily read into it.
Speaker: where sex is implied in the narrative is as Tolkien works through or inserts into the narrative like inheritance laws and models like primogeniture or things that are in counterpoint to that that suggest familial relations and how
Speaker: those come to be, but it's all very removed from the acts that actually make kids happen and the sexual acts that would be fun in the interim. A lot of Tolkien's more erotic writing centers around, we've mentioned this before, hair
Speaker: He also uses the word enchanted as another word for like sexual love and you can see it in how he describes Galadriel specifically.
Speaker: in like Luthien and Arwen. Yeah, like these like really powerful players in Middle -earth themselves. And yeah, that word enchanted is, it holds a lot in there, kind of like the word seduced.
Speaker: holds a lot in it, which Tolkien uses very strategically and often not in relation to women. He usually reserves the term enchanted for the women.
Speaker: in queer lodgings, gender and sexuality in the Lord of the Rings, which is something we're going to be referencing a lot today. Also the namesake of our podcast. Yeah, he talks about how this idea of enchantment is
Speaker: both an object of religious devotion and also that of human love, and that to be the object of this kind of enchantment is to be very powerful and to weaponize your own sexual allure, like your danger is in that you could capture men and turn them to your own purpose. Because when you hear people talk about Galadriel, like the Rohirrim, they're all terrified of her.
Speaker: Gimli at first terrified of her. And yet she is also a almost divine creature that inspires just like selfless love.
Speaker: Yeah, it inspires this divine love that it seems like almost like almost purer than the kind of base lust, I guess, of humans or embodied creatures that would feel lust in terms of a physicality. It's very much a chivalric type of love.
Speaker: Yeah, 100%. In fact, even as he's talking about, you know, parentage of children and characters, you know, begetting children or whatever. The specifics of those customs are contained in other texts and other pieces of his legendarium that he was working out outside of of the narratives that are like the novelizations and epic poems and all of that. So.
Speaker: We barely even are told in Lord of the Rings that Galadriel and Celeborn have a child, and Tolkien can actually decide how many children they have at various points in time as well. But the impact and importance of what that means within their lives and what that
Speaker: process may have looked like is contained in Laws and Customs of the Eldar. You have to go into a completely different volume of scholarly texts to find anything that informs the very sanitized information that's in the narratives. It's not something that Tolkien himself seems to be interested in. He's only interested in
Speaker: the act of sex when it has a larger historical meaning, as in when it begets children that then change narratives. Or in the case of the Silmarillion, when the sex itself is obvious and becomes a plot point, I'm talking about you, Ayle. Yeah, gross. Fuck that guy, it's terrible. Except not. Also, Jordan.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Turin's my boy, but yeah, I can see that. The Silmarillion has a lot more sex to be blunt about it. There's a lot more romance too. I mean, the core of the Silmarillion is the romance of Battered and Luthien, right?
Speaker: but there's actually a lot more like overt, it's weird to say overt hints at sex, but in the case of Eil and in Turin, it's like Höppen gets closer to basically describing sexual transgression like much closer than he ever gets to in Lord of the Rings or you know obviously The Hobbit.
Speaker: Yeah, it's interesting in one of the earlier traps at the Silmarillion, Luthien doesn't sing for Morgoth. She dances for him, and it's way more sexualized than what we ended up getting in the published Silmarillion. And you have to take into account the published Silmarillion's not J .R .R. Tolkien's sole work. Christopher picked what was going to be in the Silmarillion.
Speaker: And he purposefully picked what he did. Now, did he pick it because he thought that it was more correct for it to be less sexualized? It's hard to really say. But at least at some point, it was even more sexualized than it is now. And it's already there's already a fair amount of sex discussed, even though blatant onscreen sex is not happening. Right. And to make the case that there are
Speaker: isn't sex in Middle Earth is just incorrect, both in the fact that
Speaker: people have children and therefore they probably had sex because IVF isn't happening in Middle Earth, but also in that is explicitly happening in the Silmarillion. Yeah, the Silmarillion is a really interesting case in that there's a lot of implied, like, lust. Again, going back to Luthien, you know, in various texts, there's sort of like more kind of overt
Speaker: references to like her sexual appeal in luring and loaning Morgoth. There's also an implication that Morgoth will plan to sexually assault her. And also, you know, thinking again, like at the beginning about Aiol, there's that really, Tolkien's favorite euphemism for sexual assault and unwilling marriage. Aiol comes upon the string elf lady Erethel and quote, takes her to wife by force.
Speaker: You know, it's important to note that he, in a later draft, he did change this so that Erefel was drawn to Aiol by his enchantments and was, quote, not unwilling. But I do think that that phrase, that taking her to wife by force is a pretty, it's a pretty telling one and a pretty important one. And I know that there's a lot of fanfic that has kind of spawned around this dynamic and around this
Speaker: around this relationship for sure. But again, to kind of dismiss the idea that there just isn't any sex and that there isn't any sexual assault in Middle -earth is... He does a similar thing with Tamriel and Arcarzon and as we look at the Numenoreans. Right. And that civilization then ends at that point before
Speaker: there is any notation as to whether there are children from that forced marriage. But he also goes back and edits later and tries to make it a more consensual marriage to take out the problematic elements of
Speaker: force and in doing so creates many more problematic elements. Yeah. Yeah. I do think it's sad that almost every single depiction we get of sex is assault. Yeah. It's either assault or dot dot dot children. Right. Or attempted assault or near assault.
Speaker: I do just want to be clear, laws of customs among the Eldar, despite some problems within it, I do want to be clear that Tolkien does write that in order for the elves to have the children, they spend like a hundred years creating the children, which is a lovely euphemism for banging.
Speaker: There is implied that within these very Catholic frameworks that he works fictionally into the narrative, there is a lot of sex and joyful sex that's happening. We just don't see those stories. Yeah. You would think we would if it takes a hundred years to form a child.
Speaker: Is it like hurdles, right? When they're just like fucking for, you know, it's like a couple of hours, right? My reading is that they do a lot of joyful practicing before they actually get around to the idea of like, we are now ready to do the child making and put the essences of themselves into the intentional creation of a child. About like just fucking for a hundred years.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm kind of like, oh, that's kind of where my brain was going. Like friction, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's implied that they take breaks, but it's not implied that they enjoy being distracted from the task during this time.
Speaker: But yeah, on kind of a more serious note, I think it's very clear that on the subject of sexual assault, that Tolkien had very clear ideas about the rightness and the wrongness of force and of consent. And I think that the few sort of attempts that he sort of makes when discussing Adafel's and Eyal's relationship in Arfarizon and Miriel's relationship,
Speaker: that it's really clear that this is a transgression. This is something that is clearly deeply, morally reprehensible and unthinkable and something that he wants to avoid as much as possible in terms of depicting occurring by his heroes and to his heroes. Did we talk about Thanos and stuff? Yeah, do we need to talk more about Turin?
Speaker: Yeah, I feel like there were a few examples in here that we didn't talk about yet. So I was like, I don't want to jump the gun. I feel like we should maybe mention Feanor though, just because like, my personal read is like Feanor's jealousy about like him having a stepmommy is part of the reason why he's like such an asshole and so many things go wrong. And everyone's like, yeah, if his dad could have just kept it in his pants. I'm like, this is not a realistic.
Speaker: That's fair. Yeah, blaming it all on his mom because she died of basically a postpartum depression. Like his dad rushed into this marriage with somebody else after like a few millennia or something. It's like, it's like, God, if his mom is just abandoned him and you're like, Jesus Christ, you guys, come on. Yeah, that's the compassion.
Speaker: So one of the things that's mentioned in Lace is laws and customs amongst the elder. I never would have guessed among there. One of the things that's mentioned is that elves can essentially only marry once because Tolkien's a Catholic.
Speaker: No way around it. That's kind of what it distills down to. Tolkien's a Catholic. Tolkien's monogamous. He wants his good Mary Sues to also be monogamous. One of the chief problems with that comes in the Silmarillion when Feanor is born.
Speaker: And his mom's just like, no, I'm good, and lays down and dies. And his father chooses to remarry, which is like, it's a sin. Yeah, it's not just like a cultural sin. It's like law against the fundamental laws of the universe sin.
Speaker: He's eventually granted it. Yeah, the gods have to like weigh in on it and make a decision about it. They have opinions. Yeah. But his his first wife can never rehome her soul. Essentially, she has to stay in Mandos because she can't exist in the same land as him and his new wife. It's it's very
Speaker: convoluted and kind of dumb in my opinion. But that's another episode. Yeah, exactly. What is happening here is that Fenway wants to get remarried and have additional children. So it's really Fenway's libido that kills all those elves. Because if he had just stayed a single father of Feanor and not remarried, Feanor
Speaker: in all likelihood.
Speaker: would not have gone the way that he did, because his dislike of his position having a stepmom and half -brothers didn't really go well for him. So are you saying the Silmarillion is because Finway's dick? I mean, to be fair, I think the Silmarillion is because Manway is a dick, but you can also say it's because of Finway's dick. Yeah. I think it's kind of like Manway blaming Finway's dick.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, I like that. Like, we're just gonna pass the buck a little bit. What I'm saying is I'm going to call out to Megan from very far away that Feanor wasn't wrong. Like, look, he made a lot of poor choices, but he had a point. So essentially, it's the rift between Feanor
Speaker: and the rest of the elves that kind of invites that evil to even come into being in all seriousness. And yeah, I do think I stand by that. I think it's Fenway's dick that started the events of the Silmarillion, and you should blame him and not the animal. Okay, counterpoint. Controversial, yeah. I think that it's the jealousy issue that's silly and that we, like, polyamory could have solved the Silmarillion. I'm just saying.
Speaker: What a hot take. You heard it here, folks. Heard it here first, folks. Well, actually, as we go into a little bit more of Tolkien's conceptualization of monogamy and everything, we also have some moments in letters that he talks about monogamy in Middle Earth and relationship structures in Middle Earth.
Speaker: Letter 214, he makes it clear that Middle -earth absolutely prioritizes monogamy. But he does this in almost an anthropological observer, ethnographic sort of way. And he's answering a question. He says, as far as I know, Hobbits were universally monogamous. And then
Speaker: He briefly explores the possibility of a polyandrous hobbit society. His words, and though he concludes that that's unlikely, he also very much acknowledges that there are other relationship frameworks that exist within Middle Earth, despite his clear preference that the era that he's writing about has a more catholically recognizable monogamous norm.
Speaker: He says monogamy was at this period in the West universally practiced and other systems were regarded with repugnance as things only done under the shadow. So that's certainly judgmental, but also he's acknowledging that there's other modalities for relationships and relationship structures and other ways which societies are structuring their norms within Middle -earth.
Speaker: And then he's just judging the fuck out of them. But under the shadow might just need to be my new screen name or whatever. Yeah, put that in your bio. Yeah, he's clearly expressing a preference and being like, obviously this way is the only right way. But he's not denying that they exist. He's not saying that, like, obviously no one does this in Middle Earth. He's not saying P and B or nothing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: He just has a clear prioritization of what he thinks is better, but, you know. Yeah, and he's not saying zero polycules and, you know, no one. No, he's actually going through and talking about the potential for a polyandrous hobbit society.
Speaker: essentially based on Gollum's story of how the ring was a birthday present and what the family structures at that point were and - Oh, because they were matriarchal, right?
Speaker: So there were patrilineal and neither patriarchal nor matriarchal because he says he doesn't think that it would have been a matriarchal or a polyandrous society. And he's talking about inheritance and who was the head of the household and talking about how there were no dowagers in the hobbit societies that people who were married then
Speaker: if one of them passed, the other just assumed or continued to be the head of the household. And so the absence of a father figure in that particular context, he says, he's essentially saying could point to a major art girl or polyandrous society, but he doesn't think that's the case. Considering that he made all of the things up and then he made up thoughts about whether they were polyandrous,
Speaker: Clearly he knew about some words. So that brings me to this point. As to the idea that Tolkien didn't want there to be sex in Middle -earth, or didn't want that depicted, wouldn't write it down or anything like that, it's only couched in bakeries, etc. That he didn't conceive of such things beyond strictly procreative necessity for the historical record, we actually have his answer on that.
Speaker: given to Clyde Kilby in the summer of 1966. Kilby had gone to help him arrange his notes on the Silmarillion that summer. Kilby writes that, quote, I was invited to dinner with some of the faculty at Christchurch. And afterwards, one member asked me if the Silmarillion had any sex in the modern sense in it.
Speaker: Next day I mentioned this to Tolkien, and to my surprise, he said that he had written a couple of sex stories, though he did not volunteer to show them to me.
Speaker: Release the token smut. Release the token smut. I have seen how some male fantasy authors do try to write the sex into their stories and maybe it's better if we don't. Maybe it's just better as a dream in our hearts. I want it to be bad.
Speaker: I would be okay with it being good, but what I really want is it to be very fast. But I do note that this is specifically framed in the modern sense of an idea of what we're talking about as sex and sexuality and sex stories contemporaneously in the mid -60s.
Speaker: right, with all this historical context that we've just talked about. And Kilby goes on to say, like, certainly he'd seen pieces that were like Eric Gordon Arwin's love story, but that wasn't what they were talking about there. He wasn't talking about the more archaic sort of chivalric ways of telling that story. They were talking about sex stories.
Speaker: You were talking about smut. Smut. Hashtag release the token smut. You cowards. Come on, Simon. It was a solid.
Speaker: Come on, Simon. This is your next task. Take through Grandpappy's smut papers and release them, please. Until then, we should just start, like, open up a collection on AO3 and have people write what they think they might be. The worse they get, the more likely we are to get the get -ro. Oh, my God. Yes, we need people writing as token, writing as a story in the Middle Earth. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, my gosh.
Speaker: So much fun. So with that in mind, that absolutely Tolkien did write sex stories and he did have a conceptualization of different types of relationship structure and everything. We're going to move into one of the most resounding, just constant criticisms that we get having put queer in the same breath as Tolkien in our podcast title.
Speaker: Which is that because of the Catholicism, there can't be any queerness in Middle Earth. And for this, I am just going to need our Tolkien white dude to pop in and just give us this criticism in the flavor that it is usually levied at us. Tolkien was a Catholic, therefore no homo.
Speaker: So this is like Grace's soapbox time, right? All right. One of the places where this argument on belief falls apart is Tolkien's long friendship with W .H. Auden, an out gay man and leftist. Auden has 25 entries in the index of letters, either letters Tolkien wrote to him or references he made to Auden in letters to others.
Speaker: He also spoke about Auden to his visitors. For example, Tolkien discussed his friendship with Auden during the summer of 1966 with Clyde Kilby. As a note there, Tolkien was self -admittedly from a time and social class structure in which last names were used to address others. He made note of how significant it was when he asked someone to call him by his first name, or when he addressed someone by their first name.
Speaker: So it's very notable that in some of these letters, particularly the later ones, he addresses Auden as Weissdan. Now, usually, if one brings up Tolkien's friendship with Auden, people who are uncomfortable with queerness coming too close to Tolkien will immediately launch an attack on a few fronts, bringing out quotations to use like biblical copper passages.
Speaker: The first is from letter 327 to Robert H. Boyer in 1971, which begins, quote, I did not know Auden personally as a young man. And in fact, I have only met and spoken to him a very few times in my life. So the TLDR on that is that they basically were the equivalent of internet friends today. They wrote and they visited, but they often lived in different continents.
Speaker: This passage is used to assert that Auden and Tolkien barely knew each other, but it conveniently ignores the beginning of the third paragraph of the letter, which reads, I am, however, very deeply in Auden's debt in recent years. His support of me and interest in my work has been one of my chief encouragements.
Speaker: And the fourth and final paragraph of that letter, which reads, I regard him as one of my great friends, although we have so seldom met except through letters and gifts of his work. I tried to repay him and express part of my feelings by writing a commendatory poem in Old English, which appeared in a volume of Shenandoah celebrating his 60th birthday. Oh, he wrote him a poem in Old English. Writing a letter to poetry is so hard.
Speaker: so sweet. Yeah, they like didn't know each other. Yeah, they weren't they weren't pals. Yeah. One of the other things that gets used is Tolkien's request for out and not to write a proposed biography of him. That's often cited alongside the not friends claim in letter 284 to out and himself
Speaker: Tolkien expressed that he found very little use for biographies unless they were written by a close personal friend or in consultation with the subject, which Tolkien did not have time for in his schedule, and even then he felt them to be distasteful, characterizing the subject of a biography as, quote, a victim.
Speaker: There's also a pair of unpublished letters from the spring of 1966 to Roger Rareholst, in which Tolkien takes to task a number of people on exacting details of inaccuracy regarding biography, both a project about Charles Williams and one proposed for Auden to write, in which he reiterates that he's opposed to the idea, as Auden doesn't know him well enough to be able to write such a project without error,
Speaker: and Tolkien's feeling that he would have to be continually consulted on any biographical project, which he did not consent to do, as a result of how much time and attention it would take. He wanted to leave that until after he had published the Silmarillion, if he ever did engage on that level. I do kind of get the impression reading that letter that Tolkien didn't have anyone in mind who would better suit, however, he just didn't want the project to occur.
Speaker: Often I've seen people contrast that proposed biography with the fact that there's a well -known authorized Tolkien biography written by Humphrey Carpenter and come to the conclusion that this was Tolkien's preferred biographer instead of Auden. Just a few points here. Carpenter's biography was authorized by Tolkien's publishers and released four years after his death. W .H. Auden died 27 days after Tolkien did.
Speaker: was therefore never considered by the publishers as a viable option of a biographer. Not of course that this stops people from assuming that they have a direct line to
Speaker: token and out in the afterlife. But lots of necromancers out there. Yeah. You know how sometimes you're going through a cemetery and you see like a couple headstone and it's always like the man dies first and the woman lives for like 20 more years. But when the woman dies first, the man dies almost immediately after. I don't know why I'm thinking about that at all. Yeah. Thinking about that at all.
Speaker: We'll get into a little bit later who the love of Adam's life was as well. The next level of trying to claim that Tolkien didn't really like his queer friend is that folks try to go a little bit deeper and select some facts about a beef that they had in the mid -1960s.
Speaker: out and made some disparaging remarks about the Tolkien's decor choices at a Tolkien Society meeting in Brooklyn, stating that their home was hideous, with hideous pictures on the wall.
Speaker: Both J .R .R. and Edith were hurt by this. That is reflected in Tolkien's letters and also in conversations that both Tolkien's had with Clyde Kilby, even inviting Kilby to sit in the same chair that Auden had sat in to assess the artwork for himself from the same vantage point. I had to have been so awkward. Especially because Kilby is like, this is the nicer house that I'm ever gonna have. Yeah.
Speaker: But that effort that they felt wasn't just that comment from a friend, it was compounded by the ways that the British press seized upon the remark and the Tolkien's were inundated by the press coverage and the response from the press to that assessment. Thereafter, they were a lot more careful about only allowing friends rather than reporters and professional acquaintances into their home to reduce the chance that people were merely trying to assuage their curiosity.
Speaker: that does not seem to have barred out, however. Notably,
Speaker: Tolkien told Kilby in the summer of 66 that he hoped that the disagreement with Auden might be wiped out when they got together in the autumn, and Auden remained friendly with the Tolkienists. But in that letter, that letter 284, written in February of 1966, in which Tolkien confronts both the issues of the callous remarks and his request that Auden not write a biography, it's also full of praise of Auden.
Speaker: Specifically, he thanks Auden for sending him a copy of his latest poetry book about the house and tells Auden Wiestan to Tolkien in this letter that he took it with him to the seaside while convalescing from the flu and reports that, quote, I took it up to read one night when I was about to get into a warm bed about midnight. At 2 .30 a .m., I found myself, rather cold, still out of bed reading and rereading it.
Speaker: We have to talk about that! Tolkien read and reread this collection of poetry by an author he considered a dear friend even when they had had a recent disagreement. He was captivated enough by it to read it more than once and to stay out of bed in January to do so. Why does that matter? Because the poetry collection is very gay!
Speaker: To talk about this, we have to come back to some context. The book was published in 1965, in June of 1965, pre -Stonewall. It's going to be another four years before members of the queer community stand up to the helmeted officers marching in formation down Christopher Street, physically fighting back against oppression with bricks and bottles and parking meters. But this statement is still out in a different way for a different era.
Speaker: This is a queer man publishing poetry, which was very obviously queer, at least to anyone who knew what to look for at the time. And he's writing this poetry through the framework of the rooms of a house and domestic life. Queer domestic life.
Speaker: As Stephen Vitter points out in The Queerness of Home, the history of queer homemaking has been largely absent in scholarship, and LGBTQ history has primarily been explored and documented in public spaces rather than domestic ones. Gay bars, rooming houses, YMCA, molly houses all come to mind, particularly as sites of community formation. They're hugely important, but not the entire picture.
Speaker: And since the 1990s, there's been appropriately to consider, although we probably need extremely nuanced interpretations here, a tendency among scholars to link queer domestic frameworks with assimilation. But at the time that Auden is writing this and the time that Tolkien is reading it, normalizing the idea that queer people are living their lives and building homes is arguably audacious.
Speaker: Choosing to present queer creative works through the lens of domestic iconography and making the assertion that Auden and his partner Chester Kalman form a domestic unit is significant. And Auden does that here. In the poetry collection, one of the poems, The Common Life,
Speaker: is dedicated to Chester Kellman. He frames an intimate we as thou and I." Tolkien, a philologist, absolutely recognized that importance because he used that in his writings, for example, having Eowyn switch to the familiar thou instead of the formal you when Aragorn is leaving for the passage of the dead, and noted how intentional that translation was in Appendix F.
Speaker: Auden describes intimate details of their domestic life together and asserts that homes should be fortresses safe from observation of external forces. Notably, in this time period, the state was what queer households needed to be protected from. We hadn't yet reached the point of state -level protection such as marriage being a protected class or even the freedom to not have our homes raided in the night.
Speaker: Make no mistake, though, that's not the only type of queerness that Auden writes about here in this volume and that Tolkien reads and rereads. There's all sorts of references to the aesthetic movement at Oxford, as well as brothels, bathhouses, sexual relationships between comrades and arms, and glory holes. Oh, God. Tolkien rereading the one about glory holes. Yeah. I'm just sayin'!
Speaker: What a beautiful image. I would love to see someone try to walk that one back from like a Catholic perspective. It's the glory of Christ, obviously. It's the glory of the Holy Spirit.
Speaker: Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord. We broke ourselves. So sorry. She read this, right?
Speaker: Yeah, I actually, hello, I am holding it here in my hand as we speak. Does he actually use the term glory hole? He does. Oh my god. Oh my god. That's beautiful. I wonder if it inspired any of Tolkien's sex writing.
Speaker: Oh. You know? You know. He read this in January of 1966 and he answered Clive Kilby in the summer of 1966. So who knows? It's a small window. That's when he was writing them. There is a possibility that there might be canon glory hall. And if they didn't want us to assume this, Simon should really release the
Speaker: Okay, but Auden isn't the only queer person in Tolkien's life, right? There are other folks as well.
Speaker: Tolkien was part of a committee to nominate Ian Forster for a Nobel Prize. He was a semi -positive gay man and a secular leftist at Cambridge. He also very famously admired and carried around a quote about death from Simone de Beauvoir, who was a French philosopher and a bisexual woman with a complicated legacy.
Speaker: He also recommended the works of Mary Rinalt. He recommended books very sparingly. Rinalt was a queer woman and former student whose opinion Tolkien valued, stating that a card from her was, quote, perhaps the piece of fan mail that gives me most pleasure. I believe she was also an early reader of the Lord of the Rings novels as he completed them.
Speaker: Renault, who lived with her partner, Julie Mullard, in a community of gay and lesbian British expatriates in South Africa until her own death in 1983, recalled that Tolkien was born in South Africa, both campaigned against apartheid and anti -homosexuality laws, and later expressed skepticism toward the tone of the gay liberation movement, having fears about what harms queer people might be subject to and demanding visibility.
Speaker: Her books were some of the rare examples of love between people of the same sex being presented as a natural part of life rather than a problem. But these are the works that Tolkien was wholeheartedly recommending. I also have in my hand, which you can't see because this is a podcast.
Speaker: the specific book that he was recommending in this letter, letter 294, The King Must Die and the Bull from the Sea. These are a set of groundbreaking novels set in ancient Greece that discussed homosexuality in an appropriate historical context. These are not the books that have the highest percentage of homosexual content in them.
Speaker: But it is certainly present. I read a passage earlier today that was the members of an army looking upon the main character and another man and wondering if they were going to make love with each other or not. Even though no acts are depicted in that regard, that normative question is just part and parcel of the narrative and Tolkien is recommending.
Speaker: this book. He was open -minded enough to appreciate intellectually works that discussed homosexuality in appropriate historical context. And it's notable that
Speaker: Rinalt's treatment of historically accurate homosexuality caused controversy at the time. They were historically and folklorically accurate on many levels in a pre -Christian setting, and she also wrote significantly about the queer relationships between people who were comrades in arms.
Speaker: et cetera, which I'm just going to note that Tolkien did serve in the military. And as he's recommending these works with a historical lens and even a contemporary lens, it's significant that he's not concerned about this depiction, but is in fact recommending it. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: I do want to jump in about her moving to South Africa with her partner. It is very specifically because South Africa was more open to queer people than the UK or America was at the time. Yes, she could write safely from South Africa in a way that she could not in either of those other countries. Yeah.
Speaker: So having talked about some historical context, we're going to dig even more into this historical context around queerness and what Tolkien would have understood about queerness, the laws and societal norms around queerness throughout Tolkien's lifetime.
Speaker: People who doubt the idea that Tolkien didn't hate, loathe, or despise queer folks will often snark something along the lines of like, Tolkien wasn't marching in any pride parades. And while that's technically true, that brings us to some things that we have to talk about in terms of the historical context of Tolkien's lifetime and view of homosexuality. And just as a quick example of why context matters in terms of the ways that these critiques are levied, like what is good faith?
Speaker: The first pride parade in the UK was held in London in 1972. Tolkien died in 1973. And the first pride parade in Oxford was held in 2008. Whoa. Marching opportunities were thin on the ground for his generation, so we're going to need to dig deeper.
Speaker: To start, we're going to look at the legal landscape. And fair warning, some of this isn't going to be pretty. We're going to, out of necessity, reference homophobia, oppressive legal structures, and suicide a few times throughout this section. Take care of yourselves. Please skip ahead if you need. Our history has a lot of painful chapters, and it is OK not to be in a good headspace to revisit the details on any given day.
Speaker: Tolkien was born in 1892. He was three years old and living in South Africa the year that Oscar Wilde's trial for 25 charges of gross indecency occurred. That year, newspapers across Europe, the British Empire, and even rural American cities were crowing about the trial and speculating as to whether Wilde was going to commit suicide. He was convicted. The following year, after the death of Tolkien's father, the family moved to England from South Africa.
Speaker: Queer stories were in the news from the time that Tolkien was a small child. In 1900, Tolkien's mother converted to Catholicism. Contemporaneously, nonfiction books like What Can a Woman Do? published in 1893 were advocating for acceptance of relationships between women that were, quote, as considerate of each other's peculiarities of any wedded couple I ever knew and that few marriages are more beautiful or more happy.
Speaker: neither the existence of queer people, the stigmas against them, or the pushback against those stigmas were wholly unknown to people of Tolkien's time. England, of course, has a long history, and Hugh Lemmy and Ben Miller point out in Bad Gays, the history of persecuting queer people there is inextricably linked to the Catholic Church. But maybe not in precisely the ways we'd assume, though? See, in 1533, the Bug React was passed.
Speaker: It was the first civil sodomy law in England. Previously, sodomy was handled by the ecclesiastical courts. Not a picnic, but also not what was about to happen. Because this law made it a civil crime that carried the death penalty. And along with that, the lands belonging to those convicted were forfeited.
Speaker: This law made it possible to try, convict, execute, and strip lands from people who couldn't even be tried for murder at the time. Priests and monks. That was the original purpose of the law. Huh.
Speaker: Yeah, it's almost like the seeds of capitalism and the primacy of private property is at the root of so much persecution. This is part of the tension between the Church of England and
Speaker: Right, and splitting from the Catholic Church and all that, and it goes back and forth a little bit. The law remained in effect, except for a brief repeal by Queen Mary I in 1553, and then being reinstated by Elizabeth I in 1564, see how we go along with Church of England here, for another 300 plus years.
Speaker: until 1861 when the Offences Against the Person Act of that year reduced the penalty for that conviction to a minimum of 10 years imprisonment extending as far as life. Next came the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 which went a step further in persecution making any male homosexual act illegal whether or not it was witnessed or a witness had been present.
Speaker: That's the law that Wilde was prosecuted under. It's often referred to as the blackmailer's charter since during the time it was in effect as much as 90 % of all blackmail cases in the UK targeted weirmen. Wow. Yeah. It's bonkers. We're going to jump over the war a little bit here and then the two world wars and fast forward to 1954.
Speaker: That's the year that the Two Towers was published, to put it in a Tolkienian context. It's also the year that the Wolfenden Report is commissioned to consider homosexuality and prostitution in Parliament. The next year, in 1955, the UK's armed forces officially banned homosexuality within its ranks. That hadn't been the case previously, though civil law still applied. They were seeking to codify the ban if civil law changed.
Speaker: A couple years later, in 1957, the Wolfenden Report is released, concluding that homosexuality between consenting adults should be decriminalized, though they set 21 as the age of consent to be considered, five years higher than the age of consent for male and female couples. It wasn't until 1967, 10 years after the report comes out, that the recommendation is taken, and even then, it didn't change the military's queer ban and only applied to England and Wales.
Speaker: So the lived experience of queer people in Britain throughout Tolkien's lifetime was this. To engage in sexual, domestic, or romantic relationships with other queer people was to risk prosecution and imprisonment. That didn't mean people weren't queer then, it just means that documentation is a challenge within the historical record. We often have to rely on subtext and a honed sense of reading for intentionally veiled reference. It takes practice and context to access the fullest possible understanding.
Speaker: Letters and diaries that depicted queerness or acceptance of queer people were routinely destroyed by individuals or their heirs to prevent them from being used maliciously. Silence from friends was often compassion and protection rather than the condemnation that we might read it as today. Right, right. So now we're going to go back and look at Tolkien and the war and the idea of queerness. One of the places that we have to dig back in his personal history is that context.
Speaker: he fought in World War I, and he supported his sons who fought in World War II.
Speaker: The First World War had a dramatic impact on the relationships between social classes in British society. It also had a stirring impact on queer history. In many countries, especially in Germany, but also in England, movements began in the interwar period, asserting that queer people were deserving of full rights and recognition, particularly because they had fought and died for their country. Historians have in fact called the interwar years, 1930s specifically, the homosexual decade.
Speaker: We should of course never make the mistake to believe that the common impression is accurate, that there was less queerness in the historical past.
Speaker: Graham Rob and Strangers Homosexual Love in the 19th Century brilliantly documents at least a thousand years of hand -wringing complaints that homosexuality has just recently grown common. But they've been complaining about TikTok and social contagion making your kids gay for a thousand years. So the thing is, homosexuality was a known fact of life for members of Britain's military in World War I.
Speaker: The person regarded as the most famous and celebrated military leader for England in World War I, Lord Kitchener, who was on all the recruiting posters and everything, was a queer man. Though many weren't aware of it at the time, it certainly became a known fact later on.
Speaker: Famed poets, actors, and artists who were World War I veterans were known to be queer. Records of queer men who served in World War I are notoriously harder to find than records of queer soldiers in the Second World War, for one simple reason. Very few soldiers from the First World War lived to see the days of gay liberation in the 1970s and the efforts for documenting and preserving queer history in more recent decades. Yeah.
Speaker: Basically an entire generation of men died. Yes. Yeah. And there was such a silencing structure as well. Yeah. We lost access to the stories of men and women who lived queer lives before queer identities were even recognized as existing. Queer history has been hidden for the safety of those who would otherwise be persecuted and prosecuted and has routinely been destroyed. See,
Speaker: For example, my perpetual soapbox around the fact that that most famous picture of Nazi book burnings are actually of queer history and queer research from Magnus Hirschfeldt's previously referenced Institute for Sexual Vishenshaft being consigned to the flames as the Institute was destroyed. A fact which is conveniently largely forgotten and left out of history books and lectures. Yeah. Often, the places where we're able to find records of queerness are in records of trauma.
Speaker: court documents, documents for members of the military who were cashier, jailed, or handed dishonorable and stigmatizing blue discharges. We find evidence of our queer ancestors and death records, suicides, murder, hate crimes, and convictions of people sentenced to hard labor or death for being queer. In Stephen Bourne's Fighting Crowd, which covers the stories of gay men who served in either World War I or World War II, we see plenty of that documentation, people who were court -martialed, detained, discharged.
Speaker: committed suicide after being prosecuted or who like Captain Edward Britton placed themselves at the head of charges or made themselves easy targets for snipers bullets rather than faced inquest and condemnation when they were caught or when their letters were reported by censors and their queerness discovered.
Speaker: The Born also documents stories that don't end in tragedy, like Montague Glover and Ralph Hall, who served in World War I and World War II respectively, and used the class relations that were normative in Britain to live together and set up a household together. Ralph posing as Monty's servant for decades, and sending letters back from the front talking enthusiastically about sharing a bed in full defiance of the censors.
Speaker: Tolkien, of course, is well -documented as being mindful of the censors when writing to his sons and expressing frustration with them or appealing to them to let through phrases in other languages, including Elvish. You can see that in letters 53 and 61. What a nerd writing things to his sons at the front in Elvish.
Speaker: Absolutely, absolutely. But everyone was aware of the censorship that was present. And it's so moving to me that Ralph is just like, no, no, no, no, Monty, I'm, I'm gonna I'm gonna put in here how excited I am to get back to bed with you. As soon as I leave this forum, I dick you down good. Sweet. Oh,
Speaker: It's worth noting that much of the documentation that we have tells us as much about queer life as documenting violent thunderstorms tells us about the weather. Knowing the extremity allows us to know the intensity of the threat people lived under, but not the full variety of experiences being had. Strikingly, what emerges as a theme in a great deal of scholarship about queer people in the world wars is the roles that officers and others in power played in whether queer people were prosecuted or protected.
Speaker: Officers called to testify at cart marshals simply stating that the lights weren't on when two soldiers or sailors were observed was often sufficient to stave off a conviction. Ellen Berube documents several instances of officers with the power to report men under their command deliberately looking the other way and not calling attention to queerness. A quote from Berube's research in Coming Out Under Fire, which does focus on World War II in particular, gives a couple of examples.
Speaker: Robert Gervais recalled that during late watch one night on his destroyer, the lieutenant commander came by to chat a little bit about the signals or stuff like that. Adam Pegged is a queer disciplinarian, and so both of us looked down in number two turret there, and two guys were having sex. You could just see it in the moonlight. So I looked down there, and he looked, and he looked at me and said, Gervais, would you go down there and tell those men to move under the turret out of side of the bridge?
Speaker: to get their names or stop what's going on or bring them up to the bridge just move out of sight just get out of the light get out of the moonlight so that he has the ability to say no I saw nothing yep just get out of the moonlight on a similar night Burt Miller went up to the conning tower of his LST to read switched on the light and quote here was one of my radar men and one of my signal men in a 69
Speaker: Miller immediately switched the light off and never reported the men. Nice. Sometimes the gaps in what isn't present in the record give us insights and information. Here for Tolkien, a man who was a Catholic and an officer has, to the best of our knowledge, never been documented as reporting queer people to military or civil officials. While many seeking to purify Tolkien today for a reductive agenda would have us believe that Tolkien's Catholicism
Speaker: or his time period mean that he would hate the gays, there is nothing in the historical record that suggests this to be an accurate assessment. In fact, the trend towards silence may indicate the precise opposite. Absolutely.
Speaker: All right, so I have a hot take. When Tolkien said that those other types of sex happen under the shadow, maybe he was referring back to the fact that men needed to not be under the light. They needed to be out of the moonlight.
Speaker: I love it. Yep. Also, not for nothing under the shadow does make me go like we're sore on cannon. Oh, it's cannon now. It's cannon now.
Speaker: So after the war, Tolkien settled into his life as an Oxford Don in 1925, and he served there as the professor of Anglo -Saxon until the 1940s. And during that time, Oxford became known as one of the few real refuges for young gay Brits, according to gay histories and cultures and encyclopedia. We spoke about Mary Reynolds before,
Speaker: Tolkien was her tutor while she was at Oxford and she was described as one of his favorite students. This isn't necessarily related to queer stuff, but I do want to point out that Tolkien tutored many female scholars that other Oxford dons would not tutor because they thought that it was a waste of resources because they were just going to go be mothers.
Speaker: token bonus icon. Hashtag. Look, when everybody else around you buries the bar in the dirt, just stepping over it is a nice thing. You say just brushing the dirt off of the bar is good enough, man.
Speaker: While I don't think anyone has seriously argued that Tolkien was queer in the big Q -way, he was a cishet man and a long -term hetero -marriage after all, he did have some peculiarities that might lead one to think he was little Q -queer, at least by modern standards. He's often referred to as being homosocial and spent an awful lot of his social life in solely male company.
Speaker: Before the war, he was in the TCBS, the Tea Club Barovian Society, which is lovingly depicted in the Tolkien biopic. And there's some real queer undertones there, guys.
Speaker: We should watch that and do a commentary track. That'd be great. And afterwards, of course, he was a central part of the Inklings. There's even evidence that his long hours away from home in his male company was a strain on his marriage. As noted in Carpenter's biography, Tolkien said of dealing with his unhappy wife
Speaker: quote, if worth a fight, just insist. Such matters may frequently arise, the glass of beer, the pipe, the non -writing of letters, the other friend, et cetera, et cetera. Are we sure we want those sex stories?
Speaker: These are deep, supportive friendships that honestly read a little gay in a time where none of us socialize to think that showing any sort of emotion is weak, feminine, or otherwise homosexual.
Speaker: So as Grace mentioned earlier, Tolkien was born in the latter part of the 19th century at a time when the concept of a romantic friendship was relatively popular. These were same -sex relationships that were homo -romantic or homo -erotic without being actively homosexual.
Speaker: they fell out of favor around the turn of the century but not in the UK where the literary reaction to World War I kind of bolstered these types of relationships.
Speaker: And, uh, warm beds are good. Ty Rosenthal makes a connection between these romantic friendships and Tolkien's quote, intense friendships in his literary clubs. Not implying that the Inklings are gay, but rather that the boundaries between homosexuality and male friendship were more fluid when they were active as a society. Hmm. Mm -hmm.
Speaker: We were talking earlier about the war and the, like, literary movement that came out of the war. A lot of that is very homoerotic poetry. And it celebrates the friendship of men as being this highest form of love, which part comes back to the enchantment of Galadriel and how that is depicted as the highest kind of form of love.
Speaker: It's really hard to read that in a way that's not explicitly homosexual. So C .S. Lewis takes great pains to depict homosexual men as weak and effeminate, which is generally the way that modern people have done that when they use the word gay as being disparaging.
Speaker: uses his view of homosexual men as being weak and effeminate as a way to split that off from the, quote, manly love and affection of warriors. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Sure. Sure, Jack, whatever.
Speaker: Going back to clear lodgings, David Craig makes a really interesting point that if you abandon the idea that male homosexuality is a categorically different form of human behavior, which must manifest itself in certain ways, we can argue that what is called homosexual desire can be part of male friendship. And that male friendship is an important mode of expression for men who felt themselves attracted to other men.
Speaker: And not saying Tolkien's gay, but also staying so homosocial is a little gay. And it's something that shows up in the Lord of the Rings as well, because the Lord of the Rings is also a homosocial group of people. And the blending of masculinity and femininity within that group of people is a little queer. And it's based directly on
Speaker: his time in the war where he saw these sorts of masculine and feminine gender roles kind of collapse. Yeah. It's very evident in Frodo's relationship with Sam where Sam is essentially acting as his Batman as a feminine influence when you were talking about traditional gender roles of keeping up with Frodo. Right.
Speaker: There's also a phenomenal song that's frequently referenced in scholarship around queer folks in First and Second World War. The song is called My Buddy. It's music written by Walter Donaldson, words by Gus Kahn.
Speaker: published in 1922, so in the interwar periods in response to the wartime relationships and these very intense trauma bonds which were often homoromantic, if not homosexual, and then popularized again in the Second World War for members of the armed services.
Speaker: And the chorus is, like, nights are long since you went away. I think about you all through the day. Buddies through all of the gay days. Buddies when something went wrong. I wait alone through the gray days. Like, this song was a way that men who had experienced these homosocial, homoerotic trauma bonds of war
Speaker: were able to express the emotional depth and connection that they had even after the wars had ended because these were things that played on the radio that people could sing and that were accessible as ways to express themselves in society.
Speaker: Certainly that resonance is present in a lot of the letters that we see from Tolkien in the TCBS and certainly something that is normative for Tolkien and his contemporaries of this being an accessible thing that was on the radio that people were singing, that people were referencing. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: It is a disservice to men in 2023 that they are societally conditioned to not have these types of deep emotional relationships with other men. I mean, whether it is homoerotic or not, like straight men should be able to have this type of like soft, masculine care for each other. Yes. Yeah. 100%. Clearly.
Speaker: We've been talking a lot about queer people and queerness sort of existing in the landscape that Tolkien himself lived in. I think that that means that a criticism that we'll summon Tim for again, a very, very common criticism that we have gotten over the past few months.
Speaker: Tim, you wanna? Queer and gay and trans people clearly don't belong in Tolkien.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that this sort of statement, this sort of declarative statement about belonging and about any kind of, it's sort of like finding a natural place in Tolkien's invented landscape holds no water when it was clearly a part of his actual lived landscape that he lived in and he saw and was a part of. I find it
Speaker: pretty much impossible to think that he would exclude this from his invented landscape when it was so clearly present in his life.
Speaker: And he didn't exclude it when you look at the Silmarillion and how the Valar are able to clothe themselves. They put on bodies as we would put on clothes. They can change them at will. They don't even have to take anthropomorphic shapes. Ivana sometimes appeared as a great tree, which is interesting to think about when you think about Ivana's relationship with Ale.
Speaker: They have habitual shapes that they clothe themselves with, and they generally are anthropomorphic, but sex in terms of the biological difference for nature of the spirit isn't tied to masculinity or femininity, as Tolkien says in letter 212.
Speaker: The Valar are ginger fluid, definitely. I don't know what you would call turning into a tree, what kind of fluid that would be. Dendrofluid? Dendrofluid. Very, very much non -binary. Very much.
Speaker: very much non -binary. Yeah, like this statement of his makes it pretty clear that the Valar at least are not very bio -essentialist, are they? Like, I feel like it's pretty clear that sort of like for Tolkien, I think that that quote kind of makes it sort of clear that sex and gender are rightly understood as different matters and different expressions and not tied to each other.
Speaker: I think it's just such a beautiful piece of trans visibility in a place you wouldn't necessarily expect it.
Speaker: Yeah. Again, going back to laws and customs, which again, we keep threatening, we're going to make an episode on. It's definitely going to happen, you guys. I feel like that there can be a lot of bio -essentialism in a lot of Tolkien's thoughts about the Eldar, but seeing this expression with the gods, you know, with the Valar themselves.
Speaker: I think it offers something really important and really affirming in a lot of ways that we might not necessarily find elsewhere in Tolkien, but we do find it here. So that looks at some of the trans and non -binary aspects, but there's also queerness and potentially gay identity that is included within the text as well.
Speaker: There are a lot of places that we could look at this, but we're going to, for the sake of the episode length, sort of constrain ourselves to just Frodo and Sam for a minute here. For a minute. For many minutes. We will do additional episodes on Frodo and Sam and, you know, Bilbo and all that. We have some exciting guests who we want to have on to talk about this as well.
Speaker: But we're just going to talk about this a little bit in the idea of how much is textual against the argument that there's no place for this in Middle Earth. Yeah, to begin with, Frodo and Bilbo are both referred to as being queer in the text. And they are both coded female, according to Charlotte Spivak, that Frodo
Speaker: What she's talking about is that the Lord of the Rings lacks female characters, but it still has a bunch of feminine themes, and Frodo is rejecting traditional masculine values, and through that is undermining the patriarchy as a feminine hero. I think that's a very interesting argument.
Speaker: Yeah, it's an argument that I find absolutely fascinating in Tolkien's assertion that the hobbits don't have a patriarchy as well. I don't think that I agree with his assessment there, but I understand that he was hopeful in his intent. Yeah. So in Unfinished Tales,
Speaker: Gandalf explains why he chose Bilbo to go to Erebor, and his reasoning is, he had never married. He was already growing a bit queer, they said, and went off for days by himself. Or in another version, he had never married. I thought that odd. I guess he wanted to remain unattached, for some reason deep down, which he did not understand himself, or would not acknowledge, for it alarmed him.
Speaker: My eyebrows are like way up at the top of my forehead right now. Yeah. My like demisexual a -spectrum heart is kind of like, oh, for some reason deep down. Oh, interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, and in a lot of ways Bilbo and Frodo are both positioned that same way except Frodo has Sam who is accompanying him and Sam's entire task is to just be there for Frodo and love him and carry him across the finish line. Absolutely.
Speaker: And his devotion to Frodo is so physical when they are still in the Shire talking to the elves that they meet there, you know, in the books and not the movies when they actually talk to the elves. Sam falls asleep on Frodo's feet and refuses to leave him.
Speaker: He cries on Weathertop out of concern for Frodo. And he ran to Frodo and took his left hand awkwardly and shyly and stroked it gently and then blushed and turned hastily away when Frodo awakens in Rivendell. And tying that physical intimacy with Sam's embarrassment,
Speaker: It's so hard to read that in a way that's not expressly clear. And that is why Ian McKellen made Sean Astin grab Elijah Wood's hand. Yes, yes. And when you look at when the fellowship breaks, Sam is
Speaker: distraught that Frodo tries to leave him and use it as a rejection and starts rushing away his tears at the thought of being rejected. He fiercely loves and is protective of Frodo seeing Gollum as a threat. So he's jealous. And later when they're wandering through Mordor, Frodo lies back in
Speaker: quote, Sam's gentle arms closing his eyes. Sam felt like he could sit like that in endless happiness, but it was not allowed. Oh, it's astounding to me that a straight man wrote that. Because it's hitting so many buttons. Yeah.
Speaker: It's one of the passages that really resonates with queer people across the spectrum of our community. There's so much in there that's just wholly resonant. Yeah, just ending it with, but it was not allowed. Yeah. And in the earliest versions of the story,
Speaker: Sam was not going to get married to Rosie. Sam and Frodo were projected to go to live in a green land by the sea together. Tolkien wrote in a letter in 1951. And essentially what happens at the end is that Sam has to choose between the love of Frodo and the love of his wife
Speaker: and the actual words that Sam says change. So when Tolkien's talking about the last words that Sam says, he quotes them as saying, well, I've come back. And although Christopher Tolkien says that there are no drafts that have that particular reading, that it is very different from, well, I'm back, as if hinting that maybe Tolkien
Speaker: viewed this choice that Sam was making as one that he might make to go with Frodo as opposed to go back to Posey. Right. And I feel like that, that phrasing of like, well, I've come back, it does kind of bring to mind the experience of being a veteran, you know, and sort of you've chosen to come back or you've kind of forced back and you kind of have to make the choice to come back wholly if you can.
Speaker: you now kind of have to choose between your life before that experience and what your life is going to be after that experience. And sometimes there's a lot of influences that sort of make your choice for you. And it kind of gives me a little bit more poignancy in terms of who's able to choose to come back from the war and who
Speaker: who didn't and who kind of never had that choice and who was taken away before such a choice could be made. I feel like that this kind of like it's kind of haunting to me in a way to to think that this is what Tolkien was thinking about when he said that and but it's very different from what the draft that he wrote down actually turned out being.
Speaker: Yeah, I also just not for nothing. I love the fact that before Frodo goes into the West and everything.
Speaker: Frodo moved Sam and Rosie into Bag End with him. They all live there together. Sam does not have to choose between Frodo and his wife for the duration of the time that Frodo is in the Shire. He is right there with both of them. Love that for them. And I know Tolkien said that he thought that it wasn't a polyandrous society, but I don't know if Rosie Cotten Gamgee would agree.
Speaker: She doesn't have to choose. Sam doesn't have to choose. I mean, I definitely look at this as a V relationship with Sam in the middle, but like, sure. Sam does not have to choose. Right. Is really the essence here. He doesn't have to choose. I mean, like, canonically, Sam doesn't have to choose either. He just temporarily goes back to Rosie and then he ends up with Birdo.
Speaker: That's very true. That's very true. Polyamory's love story is a beautiful one. Polyamory makes every ending a happy one. You know, I think I'm on board with Grace's assessment. It really seems like if Tolkina just embraced polyamory, Middle Earth would have been a better place in a lot of ways.
Speaker: We can fix it in FIC. So many problems, just completely avoided. With so many things. We talked a lot about queerness and we talked a lot about queer identity and sexuality and sex, kind of everything that was kind of swirling around Tolkien. I think it's pretty clear that from the discussion that we've had today that
Speaker: queerness and sex both absolutely have a place in Middle Earth and people who want to say otherwise have a very particular agenda in mind.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a them thing. That's not a textual thing, and it's not a contextual thing. It's somebody imposing that either through maliciousness or through misunderstanding, but it has, for me, no real support. Yeah.
Speaker: It's very clear that Tolkien knew queer people. He had queer friends. He knew about queerness. It's very clear that Tolkien knew about sex. Tolkien wrote stories about this within his universe. He might not be thrilled with like every single tag on AO3 fits, but like that's his thing to bear. I'm going to keep just enjoying all the creativity.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a hymn problem, perhaps. But it's definitely not a Middle Earth problem. Nope. There is space for all this and more in Middle Earth, and that's very apparent in what we know about Tolkien and what he included in his works.
Speaker: But there's also this key piece. Even if it wasn't, even if there wasn't all of this support through the context and the text itself and what have you, it doesn't matter. Because we as readers get to look at what exists and see what we are taking out of it in the year 2023. It doesn't have to be constrained to just what was published in 1953.
Speaker: And by us being queer readers, reading queer themes into Tolkien,
Speaker: That's not us inserting politics that aren't there. Primarily because who I am as a person is not a political stance. And I'm honestly sick of seeing those two things being conflated. Like me reading Rosie and Sam and Frodo in a polyamorous relationship in no way is inserting
Speaker: modern politics into this book in some sort of irrevocable way that it changes it for you. Just shut up and let me fucking enjoy things. Amen. That's like the subtitle of like this entire podcast is just shut the fuck up and let us enjoy things. Like you can read everyone as just straight people that hold hands and that's fine.
Speaker: You can do that. I'm not going to tell you to not. Just let people be happy. Yeah. We've talked previously about gatekeeping is not the presence of additional readings or contradictory readings. You lose nothing from one reading by another existing. Gatekeeping is only telling folks that they can't look at that reading and see any validity in it. Amen.
Speaker: Well, on that note, we are going to be back with some more episodes in this series, looking at some of the different topics that we continue to receive such beautifully phrased criticism on from very nuanced thinking individuals on the internet.
Speaker: intellectual juggernauts that folks tend to be. So we will continue to explore these within this series and we'll also be having some guests on in future episodes and continuing some of our other series. So there's a lot of exciting things to come that are in the works and in order to
Speaker: find us and be able to follow us and find more of those content pieces as they come through. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or you can stream our episodes directly on SinCaster. That's sincaster .com slash queer lodgings, the Tolkien podcast with hyphens in between all those words, or still kind of brand new and exciting. We now have a website at queer lodgings .com.
Speaker: Go check it out an actual marketing push here. Go check it out because we list all of our sources on the website. And at some point in the future, we will be getting, uh, transcripts up. It's slow going because we say a lot of words. We say a lot and no auto -transcripting program that we use to assist us is thrilled with trying to spell names of Pokemon characters.
Speaker: They don't know things like teleporter. I think we were like 14 different spellings that the AI piece thought there was for Celebrimbor in our first episode. So we're still, we're still fact checking some of those. Yeah, it's coming. Sorry. Please leave us a rating, like, share, and subscribe. You can find us on Facebook at Facebook .com slash queer lodgings or on Twitter at queer underscore lodgings.
Speaker: And if you want to talk to us or give us some sort of episode ideas or, you know, tell us we suck, whatever, we'll take it. You can email us at queer and lodgingspodcast at gmail .com. Address those links to Alicia. I'll just tell you to eat shit.
Speaker: If you'd like to be featured on a future podcast where we dissect your very nuanced critique of why we suck, then sure, please do email us and look forward to us ripping you a new one. You gotta bring it if you're coming with that kind of criticism. It's gotta be fucking based in fact. Alright, thank you everyone for coming. Thanks everyone, bye! Thank you.
Speaker: you
Speaker: I think I need to do more research about, like, straight Victorian sexuality. Yeah. I only know queer people, okay? Yeah. Straight people's sex in the Victorian age hasn't been a research interest of mine, funnily enough. Weirdly enough. It seems very boring.
