Her WHAT?!?!

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

In all this talk of love and lust in the Lord of the Rings, one poor guy seems to have been left out completely. Our wallflower's name: Frodo.

My personal fave

Frodo is, on one level (of the many possible) the story's Christ-figure. We might expect a devout Christian to weave a Jesus into his tale; plenty of others more talented than C.S. Lewis have done so, and even agnostics like Faulkner have had a go. But Tolkien goes beyond them all by giving us not one but three Christs: there's Gandalf, master of elemental powers and ageless wisdom, and Aragorn, rightful and righteous king, and Frodo . . . sacrificial lamb. We might also expect a typical Christian not to attach any sexual energy to Jesus. Though the Bible portrays him as an ordinary human man who like good food, good wine, and good foot-rubs, the traditional view of Jesus was of someone who--despite being awful chummy with Mary Magdalene--had not the slightest sexual aura

By Tim Kirk, from the 1975 Tolkien Calendar

Surely Frodo has no such aura. He isn't as much as chummy with a single female of any species throughout the entire story. Galadriel is one of only three women with whom he has any kind of contact, and she is more mother than mate. (Recall that Frodo is an orphan and was raised by his uncle. And of the other females, Goldberry is a Maia, and Arwen he talks to only after she's married.) I've already asserted that the Phial of Galadriel is not a sexual symbol, and I believe the above data reinforce this view. Frodo's suffering, his receipt of the Phial, and his lack of any percepti- ble libido, make him otherworldly in a way that even Elves are not: other- worldly in the way of wizards. After his wounding with the Morgul blade he even becomes slightly dematerialized: there is a certain transparency about him that can be detected by those with eyes to see like Gandalf. As a Catholic, Tolkien was taught that sexuality and spirituality are not compatible: note St. Paul's "I would that all men were like me." And Paul means not merely abstinent, nor celibate, but "chaste": not even thinking about sex. This was the ideal of the "spiritual" life that Tolkien lived with on a daily basis from childhood--between the ages of 12 and 21 he was even raised by a priest. We can say, then, that the kind of otherworldliness we find in Frodo is a defining characteristic of "spirituality" as Tolkien understood the term. "My kingdom is not of this world," said Jesus, and neither is Frodo's, in the end.

But all that Frodo might have had in this world he bequeaths to Sam. And unlike his ethereal master, Sam is . . . well, Sam is downright earthy. Sure, he's a gardener, but that in itself should clue us in to the central role fertility plays in his life. We've already seen the overtly sexual nature of his temptation by Galadriel, and his powerful reaction to it. We know exactly with what Galadriel is tempting him--or rather, with whom--and we also know he's been fantasizing about this certain someone throughout the story. He thinks about her in Lorien, he thinks about her in Mordor--on the very slopes of Orodruin!--and no sooner is he back in Bywater than he's getting his mack on with Rosie Cotton before the War of the Ring is even over. Shy stumble-bum he may be, but he knows what he wants. And he wants it bad.

And Galadriel knows it. Which is why her gift to Sam is particularly dirty. Literally.

"G" marks the spot

It's . . . dare I say it? . . . a box. Her box. It's even got a G-rune on it. A box full of dirt. A bunch of dirt with a seed in it. A white seed. And Sam knows just what to do with his seed. After marrying Rosie, that is. Forget the darn mallorn--and remember that Sam and Rosie end up with thirteen children.

La vala Manwe! No more! I can't go on . . . it's all too smutty . . . her box . . . oh, the humanity . . . parents, tell your children. . . .

And how does our "gardener and lover of trees" respond to Galadriel's act of generos- ity? "Sam went red to the ears and muttered something inaudible." So, I imagine, have many young men upon receiving the gift of a lady's . . . box.

Galadriel devotes more time to describing Sam's gift (and telling him what to do with it) than she spends on any other gift she bestows--with one exception. That exception is the entire (paperback) page she spends on her gift to Gimli. And at first she doesn't even know what she's going to give him. But if the previous interaction between the Elf-queen and the Dwarf is any guide, we know that--in the immortal words of James Brown--whatever it is, it's got to be funky. . . .

to be continued

"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)

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)