Three Scenes for the Elven Queen

#14 in the series, "J.R.R. Tolkien--Smut Peddler!"

There are three scenes featuring Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings. We've now dealt with the first, in which the Fellowship encounters the White Lady of Lorien in her palace atop the mallorn. The second, which we won't get into just yet, involves only Frodo, Sam, Galadriel, and her Mirror. The third and final scene brings the Fellowship and their hostess together one last time for a ritual of considerable significance in the traditions of the fairy-tale: the ceremony of gift-giving.

From its beginning with William Morris's The Wood Beyond the World, fantasy literature has been firmly identified with medieval imagery. LotR is the type- specimen of the tradition. How many of us would have known (or cared) what a "vambrace" was if we hadn't encountered the word in the Return of the King? And of course Tolkien was a professional medievalist, an expert on the literature and life-ways of the western Europe of a thousand years ago. But why was he a medievalist? Why, for that matter, have all the Great Ones of fantasy--Morris, Dunsany, Eddison, Lewis, Tolkien, Le Guin, and now George R. R. Martin and J. K. Rowling--set so many of their tales in a medieval setting?

Let's start our journey toward an answer by following the FREPE. This is a mnemonic used by anthropologists when describing any human culture. The FREPE for a fantasy medieval society would run, very broadly, something like this:

Families are extended, patriarchal, and close-knit

Religion may be important but is usually kept in the background. Diversity of religious/metaphysical opinion does not exist--everyone believes pretty much the same thing.

Education takes place at home or in cloistered settings. Books are rare and valuable.

Politics is the business of an aristocratic elite. There are kings, nobles, ladies and lords. Commoners are seldom visible, but (contrary to actual medieval practice) serfdom does not exist.

Economics is very definitely non-capitalist.

I'd like to focus on this last point. Fantasy literature is fake-medieval for more than aesthetic reasons. Morris, the founder of the modern fantasy tradition of castles and kings, was a revolutionary socialist who spent much of his life trying to revive the medi- eval craft-guild; indeed, he is best known today not as an author or a radical, but as an interior designer and the creator of Morris furniture. Le Guin, the most honored fantasy author of all time (Hugo, Nebula, Gandalf, Lifetime Achievement and National Book awards) is an anarcho-feminist who has written the only convincing Utopian novels I have ever read: The Dis- posessed and Always Coming Home. Just about everything Le Guin has ever written has included an at least implicit attack on "propertarianism": late-imperial, industrial, statist capitalism.

So: why did Dunsany, Tol- kien, Le Guin, et al. set their tales in worlds with- out machine guns, stock-exchanges, credit-default swaps, or Great Gatsbys? It's not just the castles and sailing ships, the cobbled streets and torch-light, the flashing swords and pris- tine forests that make a fairy-tale world "medieval." The Middle Ages were the last time in history that most people on this planet could survive without turning everything (including themselves) into a commodity. Ours is a world of Bernie Madoff and Casino Jack, but once upon a time. . . . Only in a pre-modern, pre-capitalist world could Frodo travel thousands of miles across alien territories and not have to spend any money. Not a silver penny! And he can only do this because his author ignores the Invisible Hand and relies instead on the Open Hand: the gift. Fairy-tales are a collective, fading memory of a time before the Almighty Buck, of a time when not everything was assigned a numeric, monetary value. If you want to talk about gifts--as opposed to commodities--then the fairy-tale is one of the few ways we still have to do it.

In "modern" "civilization," giving is often considered a negative behavior. We can't just give citizenship to all those pesky illegals, can we? It's far too valuable!. So it may be easy to lose sight of the social significance of generosity. In most soci- eties, throughout almost all of history, most goods and services were circulated as gifts, not as things to be bought and sold. Did Jesus sell his life on the cross? To listen to Mel Gibson you'd think he had. And Yoga Journal is none too eager to remind its well-toned readers that Lord Buddha spent the last 45 years of his life as a beggar. Feudal warriors offered their swords to the local lord; lords fed and clothed their retainers. No money was exchanged; the value of a man's arm was not set by "market mechanisms." The great cathedrals of Europe were built on donated land with volunteer labor. Chinese emperors made such magnificent gifts to their Tibetan gurus that to this day the Han name for Tibet is Xizang, "Western Treasure-house."

From Shostak's "Nisa." Mother Eve would have looked like this.

Lewis Hyde refers to the gift as "anarchist property." The gift is the original ownership, the property of the original anarchists, the Ancestors. Gift-giving is in our genome: humans and bonobos are the only animals that share food with anyone other than their children, as well as being the only primates who copulate face-to-face. And those of us humans who still retain a connec- tion to the Ancestors--for example, the Zhun/twasi Bushmen--have in their !Kung language the word kxaro. This is a word for a concept almost completely alien to English-speaking culture, so much so that we have no word for it. A kxaro is a "market" where nothing is bought, sold, bartered or traded, but only given: a network of formal, ritualized gift-exchange. It wasn't until a couple of generations ago that the Bushman even learned what a commodity is. They would have been better-off without the knowledge: they hadn't needed it for 100,000 years.

Given the economic structure implicit in Middle-earth's medievalness, we can anti- cipate that Galadriel will give gifts to her guests, gifts "fit for a queen," as we still say. And given the powerful charge of symbolic energy the Lady of the Golden Wood carries with her whenever she appears, we can also anticipate that her gifts will carry a good portion of that emotional electricity. Tolkien, as usual, does not disappoint us: every one of the gifts Galadriel gives to the members of the Fellow- ship is not only sumptuous, but charged with hidden meaning.

Readers of modern literature are used to thinking of the "meaning" of objects in terms of symbolism, of "objective correlatives." Hollow men with heads full of straw stalk the pages of our poetry; bits of cutlery sum up a woman's failed relationship with her mother. But in the non-literary world every gift is, by the fact of being a gift, a bearer of meaning--namely, the meaning of the emotional bond between the giver and the recipient. What is the "meaning" of a piece of cheap plastic crap from Walmart? Utterly nothing--unless it was bought for you by your child with her lunch money. Poof! The piece of crap is crap no more. The magic that can trans- form even Walmart junk into something marvelous is the decision to give it away rather than to sell it or hoard it. And if that decision is motivated by love, no spell of Faerie is mightier.

Magic is something Galadriel is famous for. On the other hand, we don't usually associate the Lady of the Golden Wood with cigars. . . . TBC

homage to Christina-Taylor Green

may she find refuge from suffering in the bardo

"Womanly Words, Manly Deeds"

Happy 119th birthday, J.R.R. Tolkien!

What is a four-letter word that ends in "K" and means "intercourse"? Talk.

Followers of this blog should know by now that if you want the kind of "good time" promised in countless public restrooms thoughout the land, don't bother calling that number--just reach for the works of that sultan of smut, J.R.R. Tolkien. Who was the first to give us sex between and an Elf and a Dwarf, eh?

As we saw in our last installment, Galadriel, in her role of Mysterious Lady of the Deep, Dark Forest, has been busily seducing the local Young Man Seeking His Fortune, the Young Man in question being Gimli son of Gloin. And she seduces him--in the very nicest sense of that somewhat disreputable word "seduce"--by speaking to him in his native tongue. Khuzdul is a secret language, never spoken around strangers; to learn it one must either be a Dwarf or be extraordinarily cozy with them. Even Gandalf must rely on Gimli "for words of the secret Dwarf-tongue that they teach to none," yet here's this Elf-lady, of all people, speaking words that prove (a) her respect for Dwarvish culture, (b) her excellent sense of timing, and (c) her desire to make Gimli feel good.

The scene of Gimli's encounter with Galadriel, up a tree without a grappling hook, is a sex scene and nothing less. Granted, there's no T & A: no one breaks a sweat, creates a fetus, incubates a disease, or mentions word one about con- doms. And the sensuality of the scene seems to have flown beneath the radar of most critics: despite a deep understanding of his work, even Ursula Le Guin--inheritor of Tolkien's mantle as Grand Master of Fantasy-- asserts in her essay "The Staring Eye" that "there's no sex" in the Lord of the Rings. Perhaps in a world where girls barely into puberty wear bombshell bras, it is unreasonable to expect people to recognize sexuality unless it's expressed Nicky Minaj-style. (Though I daresay there's plenty of folks who know more about the subject than I do, including the esteemed Ms. Le Guin.)

An image from Rolling Stone, slightly modified

Not that i'm knocking knockers here, but could sexual expres- sion have other, more subtle options? There must have been such options in Tolkien's day, even if men back then weren't supposed to talk about their own underwear let alone anyone else's, and women were sup- posed to lie back and think of England and not of orgasms. Yes, sexuality was suppressed during the Edwardian era, yet truth will out, and Tolkien--who grew up during the reign of Victoria the Virginal and Edward the Uptight, and who spent his adolescence under the care of a priest--got his ya-yas out anyway, through the medium of his writing. There's no escaping the erotic imagery of seduction in LotR, of one party sweet-talking away the other's resistance, of penetrating and being penetrated. Like Galadriel's beauty--or Gimli's--it's there to be found. If you're willing to find it, that is, and if you're willing to accept what you find when you do.

And if you want to make a hard and fast distinction between metaphorical/symbolic/sublimated/displaced lust versus what you'd see on RedTube, go right ahead. I'd only point out that without the metaphorical kind the more physical kind would never get off the ground, or on it. Neither we nor the Dwarves are animals: we don't go around smiffing each others' butts and then presenting. We need a bit of foreplay. And that almost always means . . . talk.

Note Islamist date-palm and crescent moon.

(The title of this installment is taken from the official motto of the great state of South Carolina. The words were originally chosen to be blatantly sexist, but let us be charita- ble. Afterall, words are deeds--as any politician or preacher will tell you--and deeds can relate to each other in a kind of syntax. So perhaps the good citizens of South Carolina are trying to tell us that the ideal human being is a hermaphrodite. Put that on RedTube and smoke it!)

Alright--after all this argument you're finally willing to accept the idea that there really is s-e-x in the LotR, that Tolkien had something to say about sexuality, and that for reasons cultural and personal he chose to say it in the language of the fairy-tale. But let's face it: his "sex scenes" aren't very . . . well . . . sexy. It's not as if they're, um, arousing or anything. If we're going to say that Tolkien is writing pornography, shouldn't we at least see a little cleavage?

Cleavage, you say? Very well! Rest assured, o reader, that at Welcome to Weird World what you want is what you get! But you might also want to be careful what you pray for. It's easy to forget that "cleavage" can be something created by the scrunching of a pair of breasts--or it can be something created by the slashing of a sword. . . .

to be continued

Perp Walk

#11 in the series "J.R.R. Tolkien--Smut Peddler!"

So far we've seen Galadriel's sexual energy encountering--and recoiling from--two of the eight remaining members of the Fellowship. We've got six to go: rather a crowd. Tolkien could line each of them up in front of the elf-queen and give us their reactions (and hers) one by one. Instead, like any good porn-writer he streamlines the process so we can get to the good stuff quicker. What's the "good stuff"? Why, sex, of course: finding out who gets down and dirty with Galadriel.

 To understand Tolkien's streamlining strategy we must divide the Fellowship into two groups: the hobbits and the non-hobbits. Such a division is justified thematic- ally and stylistically, and not just in this instance but throughout the story. The hobbits talk and act very differently from their larger Fellows--they're more like "us," and are thus the point-of-view characters, the reader's portals into the tale. We see the Big People mostly from the outside, as sets of traits and behaviors; the hobbits are made more familiar, easier to identify with. It's hard to visualize Aragorn stopping by the side of the trail to piss on a tree, whereas it's easy to imagine beer-swilling Sam anointing more than his fair share of shrubbery.

Within each group there is, as they said in the Middle Ages, a place for every man, and every man is firmly in his place. Hierarchy is everywhere in Tolkien's writings: we find it even in the Fellowship, his closest approach to egalitarianism. Aragorn as king is the highest ranking non-hobbit; he is followed by Boromir (son of the ruler of Gondor), Legolas (son of a minor elf-king), and finally, as offspring of a mere nobleman, Gimli. The hobbits are similarly arranged, with Frodo as a member of the landed gentry at the top, Merry and Pippin as sons of prominent families next, and lowly Sam, our only peasant, at the bottom.

To the modern nose this insistence on rank smells . . . well, rank. But Tolkien has uses for hierarchy beyond a fondness for medieval sociology. In the Lord of the Rings rank serves, among other things, to structure the movement of libido, to direct our attention to where it "should" go. For example, Aragorn may have sexual access to Arwen only after he has become ruler of Gondor and Arnor, i.e., when he has a rank more or less equal to her own. (I'm assuming, of course, as Tolkien would have, that both are virgins at the time of their marriage.) Knowing a character's rank sets up certain expectations as to whom he or she will find attractive, as well as telling us that when such expectations are NOT met we should sit up and take notice.

And when we first meet Galadriel what we notice is that libido, like Jesus, prefers the hot and the cold. Erotic energy is attracted to extremes, which is why in the scenes featuring the elf-queen the least active, least interesting characters are those in the middle of the Fellowship's hierarchies. Legolas is, in his own words, "an Elf and a kinsman here," making him too incestuously close for comfort, so he's out. Merry and Pippin have not yet developed enough personality within the story to be interesting in much of any way, erotic or otherwise; their time as characters has not yet come. Boromir's macho makes him, ironically, off limits.

As for the extremes, Aragorn is easily identified as also being too close to Galad- riel (although in another way). Frodo as Ringbearer is in a position somewhat like that of Boromir: he's brought evil into Lorien with him, though it's not of his own making as Boromir's is. Boromir in fact grills Frodo about what Galadriel offered to tempt him (thus diverting attention from his own guilty conscience), but Frodo--unlike Sam or Merry--refuses to divulge even the tiniest hint. And this is a hint that


Frodo's sexuality is not going to be an issue. We'll see later what kind of relationship he establishes with the Mysterious Lady; for now we'll treat him as eliminated from consideration.

We've already seen how poor Sam reacts to the elf-queen's telepathic probing, and can easily deduce the sexual nature of his temptation. In fact, his reaction is so powerful we can imagine Sam running away from his own erotic instincts at full speed; the energy of eros is so strong that, though it would like to alight, it can't keep up with its moving target. (At least, it can't until Rose Cotton catches up with it.) For now, at any rate, Sam's also out of the picture.

So who do we have left? Who in the Fellowship does the Lady of the Golden Wood actually bond with on a sensual level? To put it more baldly: who's gonna get a piece of Galadriel? Here's another hint: it's not going to be her husband. . . .

(to be continued)

Confessions of a Macho Man

(#10 in the series, "J.R.R. Tolkien: Smut Peddler!")

Boromir is one of many characters in the Lord of the Rings well worth watching, and not just because he's interesting in his own right. For as we observe in the reactions of certain people to Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton, Boromir walks among us. And not just the part of him that is envious of Aragorn and craves power and glory. I mean the other part: the part that can't stand even the thought of a powerful woman.

To be fair, Boromir's macho isn't entirely his fault. His mother died when he was young; he's spent his adulthood slaying monsters; his father has pushed him into the role of Gondor's savior. With this kind of background, it's small wonder he's never had the time or inclination to get to know women. (Hard for a fella to get a date while drenched in orc-blood.) Certainly the cause of True Love has gotten little encouragement from Boromir's stern, grim father, still in silent mourning for his long-dead wife. And Boromir's hostility to Galadriel is more than a response to deeply buried sexual drives, for he's so gynophobic he turns up his nose even at the harmless "old wives" who tell nursery-tales of Fangorn Forest.

It's interesting how many characters in the Lord of the Ribngs lead double lives. Gandalf appears to be a frail old man; Saruman appears to be kindly and wise; Aragorn appears to be a wandering scruffy. And Boromir? Listen to this descrip- tion from Appendix A: "Boromir was a great captain, and even the Witch King feared him. He was noble and fair of face, a man strong in body and in will." Sounds just like our man . . . except that this is a description of Boromir the First, a Gondorian general who died a half a millenium before the War of the Ring. Our Boromir is the second man in Gondor's history to bear the name, as Aragorn is the second Chieftain of the Dunadain to bear his. And what our Boromir shares with his long-ago relative--in addition to his qualities as a military leader, and a father also named Denethor--is suffering. "He received a Morgul-wound in that war which shortened his life, and he became shrunken with pain and died twelve years after his father." Boromir I is maimed physically; number II suffers emotional stunting, as Denethor II  seemed to foretell when he named him.

Boromir has a wounded heart, and it is this that makes him the outwardly tough, inwardly vulnerable man that he is. Macho doesn't come out of nowhere, as some feminists (Andrea Dworkin, Valerie Solanas, even Ursula Le Guin) seem to believe. Nor is it the fault of ideology, or the Y chromosome, or "testosterone poisoning" (an expression first made-up--as a joke--by Gloria Steinem). Macho has an emotional cause, and that cause is whatever awful thing it is that makes a man give up on love. Our intuitive knowledge of this cause is what allows us to feel sorry for Beowulf, Boromir, and Quaritch, even as we see that character is destiny and that their destiny is doom. Boromir's death-scene is genuinely moving, Aragorn's tears for him realistic and right (as Marion Zimmer Bradley recognized). It is easy to imagine Tolkien himself witnessing more than one such scene in the trenches of World War I. As Boromir floats off on his final journey we grieve with his companions, and wish him well.

And we can rest assured that his final journey will have a happy destination. Boromir's soul has been saved--and not just by his sacrifice for the sake of the hobbits. Aragorn is the last descendant of the kings of Numenor, who alone among the Men of Middle-earth had the authority "to call the One to witness." As the One is, in effect, the God of the Catholic Church, the kings of Numenor and their descendants are, in effect, priests. Thus, Aragorn is empowered to hear Boromir's confession ("I tried to take the Ring from Frodo. I have failed.") and to grant him absolution ("You have not failed. Be at peace!"). Boromir is well aware of Aragorn's status as priest-king (though those who haven't read Unfinished Tales may not be), and he dies with a smile, his tormented soul at ease at last.

Boromir's reactions to Galadriel are "realistic" in the sense the term is usually employed in modern fiction, and can serve us as a critique of the wall of separa- tion between "realistic" and "fantastic" literature. I've spent extra time on the poor guy to demonstrate that Tolkien is as ready to confront an Awful Truth of human sexuality as anyone working in the so-called mainstream--to wit, the Awful Truth of gynophobia. It's an truth all of us living under patriarchy have to confront at some point, and the guidance that Tolkien offers us on this subject can be profoundly useful. That the son of Denethor carries an aurochs horn and fights cave-trolls should not obscure for us a simple fact: Boromir is the kind of guy we could meet on any street, on any day.

Or, for that matter, the kind of gal. For if current events are any guide, men aren't the only ones who think we're supposed to be impressed by their ability to field- dress a moose. . . .

to be continued

Macho Macho Man Man

(# 9 in the series, "J.R.R. Tolkien: Smut Peddler!")

Stephen Lang, the actor who did such a great job portraying Colonel Quaritch in Avatar, gives us a brilliant insight into his character's psyche. In an interview in Energy Times (Nov/Dec 2010) he says, "[Quaritch] comes [to Pandora] as a victim. He's been dehumanized. . . . In many ways [he] presents some very fine qualities . . . but it got so twisted in these filthy wars back on Earth that part of him has just been burned away, that part being is soul. What's left is pure function." Lang--who specializes in playing tough guys--has hit the nail on the head. "Pure, soulless function": a superb description of the Colonel, of Beowulf, of your typical orc . . . and very nearly of Boromir. It's also a perfect description of others less overtly violent, such as Avatar's corporate lackey . . . or of those Republican congressmen mindlessly forcing the government to give worthless tax breaks to billionaires. It appears the Nazgul walk among us as well.

"I don't think much about why I do things."--G. W. Bush

(A buddy of mine once had the opportunity to see a Nazgul up close and personal. He said that even from 100 feet away he could feel the Black Breath; it literally made him sick to his stomach. Pretend Nazgul have cool-sounding names like "Gothmog" and "Angmar." The real thing had a more prosaic name: George W. Bush.)


The Colonel's lack of soul is why it makes such perfect, poetic sense when Neytiri puts an arrow into his heart: she's only making up for what he's missing. Since he won't let female power enter him, he'll have to have it inserted by force. And to reinforce the message, Neytiri gives him two arrows: one for her beloved father, and one for the courageous young war-chief who would have been her mate. The Colonel dares to penetrate the Bush with evil in him--and the Bush penetrates right back.

For there is no evil in this Bush unless a man brings it there himself. Then . . .
let him beware.

(It would seem a lot of fantasists like tall women. Neytiri is nine feet tall . . . so how tall is Galadriel? According to Tolkien's precise calculations, she's two Elvish rangar, which works out to be 6 feet 4 inches. The Lady of the Blue Wood and the Lady of the Golden are both tree-top lovers, and in more ways than one.)

Lang's insight into the character of Miles Quaritch lends a depth to his portrayal that aligns it with the fairy-tale tradition. Lang, Tolkien, James Cameron, and the unknown author of Beowulf all agree: the warrior virtues, noble in themselves, are not enough --not for the man, and not for his people. They also agree that a society run by warriors is likely to function more like a baboon-troop--or a modern corporation--than a healthy human community. Through the artistry of his portrayal, Lang shows us both the seductive charm and the deadly brutality of the warrior, and helps us to see (as Tolkien's Boromir does) the fatal flaw at the heart of the warrior mystique: the warrior is not a whole man. There's a hole in the middle of him where his heart should be. To be a whole man the warrior must Seek His Fortune . . . and heed the advice of the Lady when he finds her. Jake does--and awakens to a new life.

(Incidentally: those are Lang's real muscles, not CGI. He worked out for eight months to get the right build for the role.)

It's important for our appreciation of the Lord of the Rings that we realize Boromir is a "good guy." He's not there just to be shadow to Aragorn's light, or to represent Aragorn's "shadow side," or even to show us what Aragorn might have become if the Ring had gotten to him. Boromir is a tragic hero in Aristotle's sense, a good man with a character flaw that leads to his undoing. But here's another way in which Tolkien gives us more than we might have bargained for at the fairy-tale bazaar: Boromir has two such flaws. He's no ordinary macho man--he's a macho-macho man. But there's one more thing about Boromir--and about Aragorn--that even the Village People may not have known. . . . .

(to be continued)

Teeth, Tolkien, and "Twilight"

Ask anyone who's read them what they find least satisfying about the Twilight novels and they'll likely tell you it's their utterly unrealistic view of human sexuality. You get a couple of teenagers making goo-eyes at each other for several hundred pages, and now the elders are out of town, they're in the bedroom together, half their garments have gone AWOL, and . . . nothing happens. First base, second base . . . the baseball diamond has gone straight-edge. Bella and Edward don't even have the condom discussion. Perhaps vampires are unusually sensitive to fluoride? 

Most of us assume that if you put a straight man and a straight woman in a room together, extraneous factors being ignored, it's likely there will be at least a tiny smidgin of sexual tension between them. And if there's more than two people in the room, or if the would-be sex object is for some reason inap- propriate or unavailable, then--like a fly bumping around in a bottle until it finds a way out--the sexual energy will hover until it finds someone (or something) it can fix on. Until it does, everyone involved is going to feel the buzzing of frus- trated libido.And as any human being who has ever had wisdom teeth can tell you, libido doesn't like being frustrated.

Tolkien knew this as well as anyone--even though he wore dentures. (Which, incidentally, he liked to give instead of money to unattentive cashiers at the grocery store, just to see their reactions.) Being a professional medievalist, the Master of Middle-earth tended to adopt at least some portions of the medieval world-view and its sundry symbolic displacements, so that his own sexuality, even in his private letters, tends to be skillfully and modestly hidden. Carpenter's Biography speaks of Tolkien's intense need for privacy in regards to his marriage, and there's no reason for us to speculate on the nature of his relationship with Edith. Unlike her beloved husband, SHE was no smut-peddler.


So here I'll just mention the simple fact that J. R. R. Tolkien was more than a scholar. Yes, he was a devout Catholic who got up at the crack of dawn to ride his bicycle five miles to church so he could take communion before early Mass. . . . but he was also a man who, after the birth of his fourth child, had to sleep in a separate bed because getting his wife pregnant again might have killed her. (Afterall, being a devout Catholic in his day meant he couldn't even discuss condoms, let alone use them.) Heavily sublimated as his feelings may have been, Tolkien knew about sex, and about sexual frustration. He also knew how to write about them.

Libido's need for a nesting place is especially obvious in literature. Authors can't just conjure up sexual imagery without doing something with the resulting emo- tional urgency, in either their characters or their readers. The "head" of pressure (as it were) must be released. Even the most skillful author can't make the pressure simply disappear, because they've used sex to arouse the reader's expectations, and it's answering the reader's "and then what?" that keeps them with the story. Copulation needn't be the only way to release the tension, but the power of libido must in some way be acknowledged, or the reader has been cheated. And I can't imagine that Mormon housewives approve of cheating any more than non-Mormon non-housewives--even when they're doing just that.

Tolkien has set up his own, fairy-tale equivalent of a bedroom scene when the Fellowship meets Galadriel. And (unlike some authors), he has no intention of cheating his readers. We've already seen how sexual tension is present, and thick enough to cut with a charmed knife forged by the Men of Westerness. The source of the tension is, of course, Galadriel; indeed, it's almost shooting out of her like a laser. But unlike the traditional fairy-tale, in which we get to see everything from only one point of view--i.e., the male's--Tolkien lets us also see the sexual energy through female eyes. That is: what is the goal of Galadriel's libido? Where should her desire come to rest? Who should she want?

According to the canons of the classical fairy-tale, the fixation object should be Aragorn. (Big Pointy Things--chick's dig 'em.) But as we've seen, Aragorn is engaged to be married. In a "modern" novel this would present no problem: gal and guy could do the wild thing or not, with plenty of soul-searching agony thrown in to make the encounter "realistic" (think Bridges of Madison Country.) But even within the "fantasy" setting Aragorn has a perfect reason to avoid Galadriel's libido, and she to avoid his: the elf-queen is the future king's future grandmother-in-law. Even in a "realistic" story this could be expected to dampen his ardor, and maybe even hers. (This isn't The Graduate.) So Aragorn, Big Pointy Thing notwithstanding, is out of the game. One down, seven to go. . . .

So who's next in line? It should be Boromir. Strong, handsome, courageous, noble, Boromir has the cajones to battle hordes of orcs yet is gentle enough to carry the hobbits piggy-back down from the Redhorn Pass. Well-connected, too: he's the heir of the cur- rent ruler of Gondor, and the leader of Gon- dor's army. There's just something about a man in uniform . . . particularly when he's got a great big horn. What's not for a (straight) woman to like?

Unfortunately for the cause of True Love, it's what Boromir doesn't like that's the problem. . . .

(to be continued)

Nice Hole!

Part Six in the series "J.R.R.Tolkien--Smut Peddler!"

Now our heroic Young Man has penetrated The Bush, along with his seven would-be-merry men. The seven buddies aren't in the script--the classic fairy-tale script, that is--but then, Tolkien isn't quite the "traditionalist" many would like to believe. Every so often he is wont to take fairy-tale tradition and mess with it. You could say that the whole of the Lord of the Rings is such a "messing": whereas in the typical fairy-tale the hero is trying to find the Magic Dingus, in Tolkien's tale the hero is trying to lose it. Such modifications of tradition--even reversals--come thick and fast when we get to the scenes featuring females. And no one in Tolkien's work is more female than Galadriel.

Ah: there she is! A vision of loveliness--if we so chose, and we do. But hold (as they say in Middle-earth)! The Mysterious Maiden we find in Lorien isn't your typical young virgin living in an enchanted forest with no visible means of support. For one thing, Galadriel isn't exactly young--unless the yonder side of 6,360 years old is considered "young." (I imagine immortals have a different standard for when a woman enters "cougar" territory.) And she's no virgin: she's married, and has been for literally ages. There's a vague implication that the lost elven-prince Amroth is Celeborn and Galadriel's son . . . and a quick check of Appendix B reveals that they also have a daughter named Celebrian--the wife of Elrond, and thus the mother of Arwen. And so . . . Galadriel, our supposed Mysterious Maiden of the Deep, Dark Wood, is a grandmother. Oops! So much for her maidenhood, and maidenhead.

It seems our fairy-tale expectations have been dashed on both sides of the gender wall: our Young Man is no gawky stripling, our Lady no blushing maiden. Yet at least part of the classic script IS adhered to: from the moment we meet Galadriel the sexual tension is there. How do we know this? Check out the fine gentlemen of the Fellowship for the classic symptoms: staring, stammering, blushing, head-hanging, general bashfulness, inuendo . . . and temptation.

One of the traditional functions of the Mysterious Lady is to serve as a temptress. Particularly in stories from Christian countries, the Lady acts to divert the hero from some appointed task such as finding the Holy Grail. And she does this, delicate and defenseless as she may appear, by wielding her sexuality as a weapon. The hero has his Pointy Thing, and she has hers. In LotR we see Galadriel perform exactly the function of temptress, using her telepathic powers to try to talk her guests into abandoning the Quest of Mount Doom. And the nature of the temptation is quite explicit. How "explict"? How do we usually use that word nowadays?

If you want to know [says Sam], I felt as if I hadn't got nothing on, and I didn't like it. She seemed to be looking inside me and asking me what I would do if she gave me the chance of flying back home to the Shire to a nice little hole with--with a bit of garden of my own.

Let's get this straight (and we are being quite hetero here): Galadriel gets Sam naked, and then she offers him a nice . . . little . . . hole.

A hobbit hole! That's what he means! Of course he does! Something to live in . . . I mean with furniture! And bathrooms! And a--oh, a "garden," is it? Yes, a garden. A nice, quiet, secluded garden. A nice fertile garden. A garden chock full of . . . roses. Maybe a particular Rose. Maybe the one who will eventually give her husband thirteen children.

You mean to tell me you've been reading the Lord of the Rings all these years and you didn't notice that "nice little hole"? Get thee to a Viagra factory!

Who'd'a thunk it? Samwise Gamgee, the baby of the bunch, is the only member of the Fellowship to have explict (very explicit!) sexual fantasies. And Aragorn, our Young Man With Pointy Thing, is the one least affected by Galadriel's wiles. But then, this isn't the only ironic twist on traditional themes that Tolkien pitches us. For despite his patriarchal upbringing, Tolkien was a lot more comfortable with strong women than many authors, traditional or modern. Though he was no feminist, the Master of Middle-earth seemed not to be disturbed that his female characters occasionally climbed down off their courtly pedistals and . . . wanted. Eowyn wants Aragorn, Shelob wants to eat up the world, Ioreth wants someone to listen to her, and Galadriel . . . she wants something, alright. She wants it bad. And it ain't the Ring of Power, bucko!

(to be continued)

"Oh, It's Me and My Crew, We've Come For a . . ."

Awhile back, I talked about how some critics have had fits trying to encompass the works of J. R. R. Tolkien within their theories. The following quote seems to me to capture some of their difficulties with The Lord of the Rings quite nicely:

"Far from redeeming . . .  not fully satisfy . . ." Are these cool and cautious phrases what one really wants to say about this novel? If the question seems odd, perhaps it is because modern criticism does not fully encourage one to rely upon personal feelings when discussing a book. . . . [This book] raises no great problems of interpretation: most literate readers are likely to share a common view of its meaning. By now its impact is also a matter of common knowledge, those who detest the novel offering evidence as forceful as those who admire it. But when it comes to estimating the value of [this work], a notorious silence overcomes the critics, perhaps because they sense that here neither approval nor dismissal matters as much as recording faithfully one's primary response.

If you've been following me so far (this being post #5 in the series) you've got an idea that fairy-tales, pornography, and the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien all have something in common, and that this something is sex. Tolkien knew fairy-tales like the back of his hand: such lore was part of his job as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. So of course he knew a dozen or more versions of Young Man Seeks His Fortune. And despite the way he's treated in various critical hagiographies, he knew about sex: he was a married man with four children, none of whom was conceived in a petri dish. As for his knowledge of pornography . . . let's just check out what he did with his own Young Man, and his Fortune, and find out for ourselves. But be warned! For in so doing we must now leave the cozy world of scholarly disputation and plunge headlong into a festering cesspool . . . of smut!

For behold! Here, in chapter 6 of Book II of LotR (that is, in the second half of The Fellowship of the Ring) we witness the approach of our handsome Young Man with his long, sharp Pointy Thing. And there right before him is the enchanted Forest, just begging to be--ahem--penetrated. So far, nothing you wouldn't find in Old Ethiopia, or Little Golden Books.

But hold! It seems our Young Man has brought some buddies along. Seven buddies, in fact. Whoa! That's not in the script! The story's gone kinky on us already, and we haven't even gotten to the penetrating part.

But then, this IS the modern world. As I pointed out in an earlier posting, modern writing just ain't the real thing unless it has at least one murder, orgy, cannibal feast, or rape. Faulkner's Sanctuary--what some regard as the first "modern" novel in this sense--was twenty years old when Fellowship was published, so the reader experienced in 20th-century literature should feel well-prepared to endure Tolkien's smuttiness. What's an eight-ply gang-bang compared to what happened to poor Temple Drake? And LotR is a fairy-tale, anyway: everything's symbolic. (Didn't Joseph Campbell say so?) We're not going to SEE anything. This isn't Cormac McCarthy we're reading here, let alone William Faulkner. Buck up, stalwart reader.

(Oh yes: the quote above, though it looks like it could be about LotR, is actually about Sanctuary. It's taken from Irving Howe's William Faulkner: A Critical Study, originally published in 1951, just after Faulkner got his Nobel Prize. And 1951 was the same year The Fellowship of the Ring was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.)

But hold, again! It seems that in Fellowship the fairy-tale script isn't just being ignored, but trampled into the dirt. For our Young Man isn't exactly young. In fact, he's 87 years old! And he's engaged to be married! And worst of all: only one of his seven buddies is even human! What kind of story IS this? Maybe it's just as well we don't get to see anything. Even on the "symbolic" level we're being set up for something rather beyond mere kinky.


And while we're preparing ourselves for the worst . . . have you solved my riddle yet? You're going to need the answer when we get to the part with the dwarf. . . .

(to be continued)

Into the Bush--And I Don't Mean Dubya

I read an anthropologist once who claimed that if you're parachuted into the middle of an isolated valley in, say, New Guinea, and you need to get in with the locals as quickly as possible, just strike up a conversation on any of these three topics: (1) death/disaster/dismemberment, (2) the wicked ways of those strangers yonder, or (3) sex. A quick glance at the typical blog (such as this one) reveals the wisdom of this advice. I'm "in" with you, correct? And not because of sliced-up eyeballs or those wicked strangers over the next hill.

The great theme of all story-telling---and Joseph Campbell wasn't the first to notice---is the human life-cycle. Whether it's a story about a young girl growing up, or of a young man finding a mate, or of a newlywed dealing with hostile in-laws, or of a child dealing with a parent's jealousy, or of anyone confronting sickness, old age, and death, the fairy-tales of every culture encode that culture's collective experience about the passage of the human personality through time. And some of the most popular stories in world literature are those that deal with the theme I'm calling "Young Man Seeks His Fortune."

Here's the standard scenario: a young man somewhere between puberty and full adulthood takes leave of his (often widowed) mother and, armed only with her blessing and a few ancestral gew-gaws inherited from his (usually vanished) father sets out in search of . . . well, the story-tellers are usually a bit coy about his goal. No sooner has our Young Man taken a dozen steps out the door, however, than he finds himself in a forest. A deep forest. A dark forest. A mysterious forest that professional mythographers writing for Parabola magazine would have us believe is a stand-in for the collective unconscious, but which an audience in, say, 25,000 BC Ethiopia---lacking a copy of The Portable Jung---would probably have thought was something more obvious. Namely, that universal non-archetype: The Bush.

A scary place, The Bush. It must be: otherwise, why does our Young Man need a sword? And if not a sword, some other ancestral gew-gaw from the long-and-pointy department. With the help of his Long Pointy Thing the Young Man penetrates into the farthest recesses of the deep, dark, scary Bush. And having reached the deepest, the darkest, the very scariest nook/corner/cranny/recess of The Bush, what does our stalwart Young Man discover?

(Cue voice of Goofy) Gorsh! It's . . . a lady!

And such a lady! Drop-dead gorgeous, of course. Tall, well-proportioned, pale . . . not a lot of sunlight in your typical deep, dark forest. Long hair, natch---unless she's from the Kalahari, or the Young Man is a young lesbian looking for the butch of her dreams. And why not? Fairy-tales can take place in the 21st century . . . and maybe they had butch-dyke goddesses back in 25,000 BC Ethiopia, too. Venus of Willendorf, anyone? At any rate, the story makes it perfectly plain the Mysterious Lady---or whatever we call her---can be any fill-in-the-blank sex-object you wish. The point isn't what she looks like (or even her gender), but where the story is leading us. And it isn't down the road paved with good intentions. Or maybe it is.

For it's inevitable (the story assures us) that something wonderful will happen: our Young Man is going to fall in love with the Lady of the Deep, Dark Wood. But to win even the finest love, as we all know, is a struggle. For the hand of his beloved, our Young Man must do battle. And Tolkien's young man? The Lady of his dreams is no ordinary Mysterious Lady. And he's no ordinary Young Man. And the Lord of the Rings is no ordinary fairy-tale. For Tolkien's young man isn't quite following the traditional fairy-tale script. Among other things, it appears he's brought along reinforcements. . . .

(to be continued)