TW: Discussions of Homophobia, and Suicide.
As we know there are so many sources that harp on Tolkien is a devote catholic that he would have highly disapproved of homosexual relationships in his writings and point to things like the elves being split as male and female souls... as well as the quotes about how the Valar were split male and female that it was more than just their raiment.
I would as a person of solid standing in the Alphabet Mafia argue against this. I think Tolkien was WHOLLY FOR it aside from his thoughts on Mary Renault who wrote about same sex relationships in ancient greece as well as one of his Fellowship from before WW1 writing what is today considered homoerotic poetry that Tolkien wrote a foreword to as well as did the editing Geoffrey Smith A Spring Harvest. Could he be MORE forward about it though? No.
The LOTR was published shortly after Alan Turing was sentenced to chemical castration for homosexuality... and later commited suicide from it, we know very little about the queer side of life from that era because anything of that sort in writing could be used to convict a person - we have one excellent example mentioned in the link provided. To be more open would have been suicide even if he wasn't homosexual to write openly about it was just as dangerous and even Lewis mentions very carefully destroying letters from fans with anything homosexual in them. We also must realize that it was only 6 years before Tolkiens death that homosexuality in ones personal home was decriminalized (but any public displays were punished more severely) so to get a lot of writings from him when he'd been creating in a world where writing homosexual literature could get you sent to jail and castrated means a good amount of his work would have to be subtle subtext that could be read as such by queer people where they could see themselves but not be publicly outed.
And this particular article: Queer readings of The Lord of the Rings are not accidents covers a lot of it very well especially the Frodo and Sam connection to the point even Sean Austin felt like many fanfiction authors in the early 2000's though I feel like it could be missing that Frodo Sam and Rosie were not just two working class people living in their rich friends house but a throuple in the purest sense. With Sam being the hinge between Frodo and Rosie (no real relationship possibly between Rosie and Frodo other than friends) making them what is commonly known as a nesting group in the Polyam world.
I also find it interesting that Bilbo found Frodo out of all of his relationships and brought him to Bag end as his heir. Now in general there use to be a practice of adoption of adults in the gay community to make sure the other was seen as family before marriage was allowed and so that property can be handed down to them legally without a fight. In this case I don't feel like this was why Bilbo adopted Frodo (for a relationship - but purely for the inheritance part) but perhaps as is mentioned both stay 'strangely' single and that Bag End was a queer place and the people were queerer it was a case of Bilbo an elderly gay man quite possibly seeing a relation similar to himself that had a tragic backstory and decided not to let him suffer on his own. In the films (and books) we see the word queer being used as a negative connotation to people that are foreign as well as to Bilbo Baggins especially after his adventure in the Hobbit.
Now we do occasionally I feel we get this coming through in other mediums (as I mentioned in my Tarot Deck rant on the LOTR Tarot 3 of Cups) purely by accident simply because the artist didn't pick up on subtle clues about the characters or the meanings of the cards we also really see it well in LOTR the films though it stops short of going beyond what Tolkien actively wrote. I can't tell you how many times I heard boys saying how gay Frodo and Sam were in the films, and finding it a strange thing to say - that we have made physical affection between men so taboo is telling that homophobia is still very much alive and well in the world as I still here 'that's gay' as an insult regularly.
There are also mentions of elves not getting married and that they are have a 'strange fate' (taken from the article) which seems to me that Tolkien though of any elf that didn't get married likely was not part of the male female binary in the sense that was written in the HoME either in that they didn't want to find the opposite sex and were likely homosexual or bisexual, possibly ace, or even more interestingly possibly Transgender. We see this in several elves in all the different ages, so perhaps this is why we don't see more information on Legolas - Tolkien couldn't write it without getting in trouble.
And it honestly makes me wonder if the man had he lived to see the 2000's would have been screaming YES!!! ALL THE GAYNESS! when it came to the fanfiction being written about his characters as while he may have lived in dangerous time for being homosexual he was not in a vacuum away from it nor did he shy away from it where he could safely interact with it.
Breadcrumbs to the Queerer side of LOTR
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Nice post! Many layers. More and less queer sides of Middle-earth? The Withywindle spot of Old Willowman is said to be 'the source of all the queerness' of the Old Forest beyond the Hedge. But the first breadcrumb is surely the 'queer sign' scratched by the wizard with the pointy end of his staff on the round door of the hobbit's hole. The story tells how the hobbit lost the respect of his neighbours, who now deemed him 'queer'. (So the queer sign described the hobbit, as it were, before the event.)
On another tangent, Turin the mathematician passed through Cambridge and through the War into the wider world, which proved fatal. How much did Tolkien in Oxford have a clue about the likes of Turin's contribution to the war effort? I don't know. He was next door neighbours of a sort with the Schrödingers, who seem queer in their own right.
Random thoughts sparked by your post @Fuin Elda, for which, again, thanks. Who or what is more queer in Middle-earth than that hazy River-woman and her Old Willowman?
On another tangent, Turin the mathematician passed through Cambridge and through the War into the wider world, which proved fatal. How much did Tolkien in Oxford have a clue about the likes of Turin's contribution to the war effort? I don't know. He was next door neighbours of a sort with the Schrödingers, who seem queer in their own right.
Random thoughts sparked by your post @Fuin Elda, for which, again, thanks. Who or what is more queer in Middle-earth than that hazy River-woman and her Old Willowman?
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Thanks Chrysophylax! And yes the word queer really does get a work over in the books a fair bit doesn't it in regards to both Bilbo and Bagend over all and that is an excellent notion with the sign Gandalf scratched, I almost wonder if that was an incidental thing not meant in the same way but Tolkien later decided to roll with it as it continued throughout LOTR.
Honestly with the River woman and her Old Willowman I'm not sure they are the most queer beings in Middle earth at least in those terms they are strange and I think it is the fact that he does describe them as queer that really lets Tolkien cover any tracks that the other uses of it might have been for homosexual context. A beard as it were for the people that would have found that mortifying and illegal during that time.
As for the war effort, and Turing and Tolkien I would guess at very limited, simply because of the classified nature of it - I feel like that would have gotten Turing straight up executed as that stayed classified a good long while. Tolkien really had no part in that... I would think if anything it would be more likely that he would have had an inkling that tha man was homosexual before he would have had an idea of just what he had done for the war effort. (That he had some part in it was likely assumed but what roll would likely have been kept under wraps for a good long while)
Honestly with the River woman and her Old Willowman I'm not sure they are the most queer beings in Middle earth at least in those terms they are strange and I think it is the fact that he does describe them as queer that really lets Tolkien cover any tracks that the other uses of it might have been for homosexual context. A beard as it were for the people that would have found that mortifying and illegal during that time.
As for the war effort, and Turing and Tolkien I would guess at very limited, simply because of the classified nature of it - I feel like that would have gotten Turing straight up executed as that stayed classified a good long while. Tolkien really had no part in that... I would think if anything it would be more likely that he would have had an inkling that tha man was homosexual before he would have had an idea of just what he had done for the war effort. (That he had some part in it was likely assumed but what roll would likely have been kept under wraps for a good long while)
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@Fuin Elda,
I don't mean to distract from discussion of the relationship between Sam and Frodo, which was the central theme of your post. But your post implicitly raises the curious notion that Tolkien was an early exponent of 'queer theory'. Consider first The Hobbit, a story about the 'outing' of Bilbo Baggins.
The narrator tells us that Bilbo Baggins likely inherited something 'a bit queer in his makeup' from his mother, which was waiting 'for a chance to come out'. That coming out begins when the wizard scratches a queer sign on his door and concludes at the end of the story when the neighbours recognize him as queer.
A few years later, writing a sequel, 'queer' is at first used all over the place - to describe Bilbo and Bagend and Buckland and the Old Forest, and the hobbits eventually arrive at 'the center from which all the queerness comes'. But then Tolkien composes his essay 'On Fairy-stories, where he introduces the notion of a 'fairy element': adjective-noun combinations like *magic ring* or (indeed) *queer sign*, which are the basic ingredients of a fairy story and the expression of which, he says, is the beginning fantasy and sub-creation. I think that from this point use of the word 'queer' disappears from the story, but this seems to reflect his shift to the new term 'fairy'.
I have to be honest and admit that I have never (knowingly) read any modern queer theory. So I have no idea if there really is any resonance with Tolkien's ideas about language and reality and story. I also don't think Tolkien is thinking specifically of gender or sexuality when he uses the words 'queer' and 'fairy'. But I do wonder if Tolkien was exposing something about who we are, who we think we are, and the role of language in all this that has some intimate connection with the more modern thinking, a celebration of queerness in all its aspects, perhaps?
I don't mean to distract from discussion of the relationship between Sam and Frodo, which was the central theme of your post. But your post implicitly raises the curious notion that Tolkien was an early exponent of 'queer theory'. Consider first The Hobbit, a story about the 'outing' of Bilbo Baggins.
The narrator tells us that Bilbo Baggins likely inherited something 'a bit queer in his makeup' from his mother, which was waiting 'for a chance to come out'. That coming out begins when the wizard scratches a queer sign on his door and concludes at the end of the story when the neighbours recognize him as queer.
A few years later, writing a sequel, 'queer' is at first used all over the place - to describe Bilbo and Bagend and Buckland and the Old Forest, and the hobbits eventually arrive at 'the center from which all the queerness comes'. But then Tolkien composes his essay 'On Fairy-stories, where he introduces the notion of a 'fairy element': adjective-noun combinations like *magic ring* or (indeed) *queer sign*, which are the basic ingredients of a fairy story and the expression of which, he says, is the beginning fantasy and sub-creation. I think that from this point use of the word 'queer' disappears from the story, but this seems to reflect his shift to the new term 'fairy'.
I have to be honest and admit that I have never (knowingly) read any modern queer theory. So I have no idea if there really is any resonance with Tolkien's ideas about language and reality and story. I also don't think Tolkien is thinking specifically of gender or sexuality when he uses the words 'queer' and 'fairy'. But I do wonder if Tolkien was exposing something about who we are, who we think we are, and the role of language in all this that has some intimate connection with the more modern thinking, a celebration of queerness in all its aspects, perhaps?
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@Chrysophylax Dives
You make an excellent point with the Hobbit a story about the 'outing' of Bilbo Baggins, and I feel like Tolkien was both very careful in how he worded things as well as perhaps pushing the limits of it as far as he dared. Fairy stories were for adults in general very rare at that point (I can only find a few mentioned though since I haven't read them yet - I am trying to get them on order at the library so I can see if there is some connection to how Tolkien uses Fairy/Queer to previous fantasy being written or if he goes so far off of the script that it pushes me to believe he knew exactly what he was doing in his use of those particular terms. I feel it will be a long time for that though.
And that you are very right in his changing from the term 'queer' to 'fairy' both of these terms gaining popularity between the two World Wars from my understanding while it is definitely an American term and I'm not sure if it was in the UK I have no doubt that someone that was as interested in language as he was (and with the friends and the push he had for the poetry after his friend died in the first war would be well aware of the connotations of both terms meaning very much the same thing.
It could very well be the evolution of him learning the new term in the time it took to write the sequel as I am not sure WHEN the term Fairy came into use between the wars. I would say as someone that honestly was willing to take pages to describe beautiful things like nature, and as few pages as possible for war and battle in general, that he could be simply celebrating intimate connections no matter what they were and that perhaps it is a modern take on his writing from a perspective of someone that is safe to be themself on the Queerness specturm allows for a deeper appreciation of what he writes because even if he ISN"T doing it on purpose it can certainly read as queer friendly.
And that it DOES read queer friendly is telling because I can tell you right now C.S Lewis writing does not come across the same way at any point
You make an excellent point with the Hobbit a story about the 'outing' of Bilbo Baggins, and I feel like Tolkien was both very careful in how he worded things as well as perhaps pushing the limits of it as far as he dared. Fairy stories were for adults in general very rare at that point (I can only find a few mentioned though since I haven't read them yet - I am trying to get them on order at the library so I can see if there is some connection to how Tolkien uses Fairy/Queer to previous fantasy being written or if he goes so far off of the script that it pushes me to believe he knew exactly what he was doing in his use of those particular terms. I feel it will be a long time for that though.
And that you are very right in his changing from the term 'queer' to 'fairy' both of these terms gaining popularity between the two World Wars from my understanding while it is definitely an American term and I'm not sure if it was in the UK I have no doubt that someone that was as interested in language as he was (and with the friends and the push he had for the poetry after his friend died in the first war would be well aware of the connotations of both terms meaning very much the same thing.
It could very well be the evolution of him learning the new term in the time it took to write the sequel as I am not sure WHEN the term Fairy came into use between the wars. I would say as someone that honestly was willing to take pages to describe beautiful things like nature, and as few pages as possible for war and battle in general, that he could be simply celebrating intimate connections no matter what they were and that perhaps it is a modern take on his writing from a perspective of someone that is safe to be themself on the Queerness specturm allows for a deeper appreciation of what he writes because even if he ISN"T doing it on purpose it can certainly read as queer friendly.
And that it DOES read queer friendly is telling because I can tell you right now C.S Lewis writing does not come across the same way at any point
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Very good linked article @Fuin Elda
I liked that it also mentioned Mary Renault and Geoffrey Bache Smith. I feel that there's a subtle queer undertone in the Tolkien biopic between Tolkien and Geoffrey, especially that scene where they both watch fencing and as Geoffrey speaks of the pain of unrequited love they briefly touch hands. It's a very Freudian scene.
I liked that it also mentioned Mary Renault and Geoffrey Bache Smith. I feel that there's a subtle queer undertone in the Tolkien biopic between Tolkien and Geoffrey, especially that scene where they both watch fencing and as Geoffrey speaks of the pain of unrequited love they briefly touch hands. It's a very Freudian scene.
