LOTR is Strange

The Lord of the Rings is strange. This is not going to be particularly insightful or thoughtful. I hadn’t seen the movies since over a decade ago, and I think my mom was telling me that the anniversary of their release was coming up, so I had the brainworm that—you know—they feel like winter movies. I just ran out of Sex and the City. While I’m frozen inside, why not put on nine hours of fantasy epic turned hack-and-slash blockbuster? Not my cuppa, as they say over there, but it’d probably still be fun.

Tolkien liked his pizza with extra sausage, and his books too. The Hobbit has basically no named female characters except for Bilbo’s mother who’s just mentioned at the beginning and not really a full-fledged character. If The Lord of the Rings is a threefold improvement over The Hobbit, some quantifiable evidence might be that it has three female characters: Arwen, my stunning half-elf queen and DL girlfriend of exiled human heir Aragorn whom she loves to the point of forsaking her own immortality; Galadriel, the literal Queen of the Elves whose big moment is being tempted by the power of the Ring but refusing it; and Eowyn, a sort of Anglo-Saxon woman who rises above her lowly station to fight in battle, where she herself defeats the Witch-King (“No living man am I!”). If The Lord of the Rings, to no one’s shock, expresses a twentieth-century Catholic Englishman’s attitude towards what the virtuous woman should be or do, should we blame it for that? One part of men reads this and are like, fuck yeah, these are good virtuous women. Another part of men is like, aww come on, this is such a tired discourse. Let me enjoy it!

But that’s not the strange part of The Lord of the Rings for me. It’s not the lack of women, but how conspicuous that lack is. The same actor playing two characters ends up having two monologues in the same film about where all the women are: as the dwarf Gimli, he says everyone thinks they haven’t seen a female dwarf because they all look more-or-less the same as the male dwarves (of which, in any case, there’s Gimli plus some background dwarves in the first film); as the ent Treebeard, he explains that the ents all used to have ent-wives before they left and went missing. I think the linguistic relationship between “ent” and “ent-wife” clues us into how Tolkien conceptualizes the relationship between “man” and “wo-man” (which means, as he would have known, “wife-man”). Although “ent” and “man” are theoretically abstract identifiers for any member of the sets of “ents” and “men”, the default member of one of those groups is presumed male, whereas the subset of members who are or would be wives are set apart from the core members of the set. This is why the three female characters are sometimes praised (I’ve noticed) not just for embodying virtues deemed aspirational for women, but for being specifically female and distinct from one another in a world otherwise centered on men (whereas some female characters in literature have no choice but to always be Eowyn in order to be considered significant by the author or by readers).

No! Get back on track! The Lord of the Rings isn’t about women, and frankly neither is this. Schrodinger’s wif-dwarves. Divorced trees. What I’m interested in, and what struck me on this viewing after years and years, is why all the men are conspicuously single. Literally for the first fifteen minutes of the first film, I was looking at Gandalf and Bilbo and Frodo and was like, wait, aren’t all these guys like super fucking gay? Theatrical elder gay, quirky gay uncle, beautiful gay boy-man. Their homosexual vibe seems related to their propensity for adventure compared to everyone else in Hobbitland: they are not concerned with worldly desires like indulging in food, marrying women, having children; they strive for more than what the simple domestic life offers, and women are creatures of the simple domestic life. Samwise Gamgee for his part is bisexual: he both wants a simple life with his crush Rosie, and wants to go on an adventure as the faithful companion of Frodo. When Frodo leaves for Elf-heaven, his last words to Sam are narrated over a scene of the latter returning to his new family after seeing Frodo off: “My dear Sam, you cannot always be torn in two. You will have to be one and whole for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be and to do. Your part in the story will go on.” None of the other companions seem to have heterosexual pairings at all, except for Aragorn who (mind you!) for the greater part of the story has to be with his beautiful half-elf girlfriend in secret.

I’m both being silly and trying not to understate how strange this is. Here’s my reading: J.R.R. Tolkien, the Catholic Englishman and World War veteran, struggles with how men are asked to find meaning in manly virtue (through war and kingship, et cetera) while also fulfilling their duty as husbands and fathers. The domestic life is boring and perhaps even feminizing, and the only place for a man to realize himself as such and relate to other men is on a grand quest such as war. One wonders if Tolkien, like poor Sam Gamgee, had come back from the Great War only to realize how disappointed he was to finally return to the woman he had always wanted to marry. Is men’s self-realization fundamentally tied up in relationship with and recognition by other men? Is heterosexual marriage just a dull duty compared to the heightened moral and mortal stakes of going on a homosocial quest with the bros? Did Tolkien miss exploring his compatriots' bodies in the trenches?

I’m not a guy, but this seems to clarify a lot of guy behavior. Huh.