From: mss2@quads.uchicago.edu (Michael S. Schiffer)
Subject: Re: Male-male love in Tolkien (was Re: C.S. Lewis)
Reply-To: mss2@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 23:31:26 GMT

In article <1992Jul30.211426.15457@leland.Stanford.EDU> jchokey@leland.Stanford.EDU (James Alexander Chokey) writes:

>	Wow!  That's actually quite an exciting way of looking at things!
>Women were a very small part of Tolkien's social life (even his wife Edith
>occupied a very small portion of his time--  their relationship was not at
>comparable to that of C.S. Lewis and either Janie Moore or Joy Greshem).
>I've usually just thought that the minor and marginal position which female 
>characters occupy in LOTR, could primarly be seen as reflecting his almost 
>exclusively male circle of friends and colleagues.  (But what does that mean,
>hmm. . . )

	I'd take it to mean that friendship was very important to
Tolkien, perhaps in some ways more important than romatic or erotic
love was-- hardly unheard of or even particularly unlikely given the
atmosphere in which he grew up.  He was very much at home in the life
of the mind, whether in fantasy or philology, and in the England of
his youth women were not encouraged to pursue such avocations, nor was
it easy for men and women to form intellectual circles together given
the social conventions of the culture.  He liked to spend his leisure
time talking about relatively esoteric subjects with people who were
interested in them and shared his understanding of them, and in early
20th century England he would be much more likely to find such people
within an exclusively male group.  And he there is some reason to
think he was pretty devoted to his wife; I seem to recall that he and
she went through a fair amount of difficulty before they were finally
able to be married, and certainly he identified her with Luthien
Tinuviel and himself with Beren, characters in one of the few actual
stories of romantic love he ever wrote.  (Most romantic love seems to
take place in the background of Tolkien's stories, while Aragorn and
Arwen are bascially Beren and Luthien redux.)  Obviously, we don't
know that much about Tolkien's sex life, but what little we do know is
entirely heterosexual (both his marriage and his staunch loyalty to
and love for a religion which mandates heterosexuality), while there
really doesn't seem to be any evidence which indicates otherwise.
That being the case, the conclusion really has to be either
"insufficient data" or "Tolkien was heterosexual".

>	Of course, there are many instances of male-male love in LOTR.  (I
>can't really call it homosexual love or even homoerotic love, since sex is
>so noticeably absent from Tolkien's world.)  I've often wondered about the
>relationship between Sam and Frodo myself--  Sam's devotion to his "Master"
>is rather remarkable even for two close friends.  He caresses Frodo's
>face when he's sleeping, he lies down next to him and holds him at times,
>etc. 

	True enough.  But standards for physical contact between
non-sexually involved people vary with culture, and Tolkien was aware
of this from his knowledge of folklore, scriptural writings, and
especially epic poetry.  Not to mention that Sam's relationship with
Frodo in Mordor becomes much more like one of parent and child, with
Sam's gesture being much closer to what one does for an ill child.
There's no question that Sam loves Frodo, of course.  Their bond is
stronger, I'd say, than most marriages, and Sam _did_ fear that a
marriage to Rose Cotton would place him in a position where his
loyalties were divided.  But Sam's love for Frodo is in part the love
of friend for friend, in part the affection of a servant for a good
master, in part the recognition of Frodo's sacrifice in bearing a
burden which Sam himself could not (as he recognized when he had his
"Samwise the Strong" vision)-- the last being a pretty clear echo of
Tolkien's religious thought, of course.  But none of that really seems
to indicate an erotic or sexual component.  Indeed, I'd question what
sex would have added to their relationship anyway, regardless of the
gender of the participants.

>	I can't help but think that there's even a hint of a more erotic love
>that Sam has for Frodo during the "mind-reading" episode in Lothlorien.  When
>Galadriel looks at and probes the desires of all the members of the Fellowship,
>Sam has a markedly embarrassed reaction of all, for he "quickly blushed and
>hung his head."  Pippin later comments on Sam's blushing, saying that he
>hoped it was nothing more than a plot to steal one of his blankets.  "'I never
>thought no such thing,' answered Sam, in no mood for jest. 'If you want to
>know, I felt as if I had nothing on, and I didn't like it.  She seemed to
>be looking inside of 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." (pp. 372-3, in the Houghton Mifflin edition of
>FOTR)
>	Why does this thought make Sam so embarrassed?  Why is he in no mood
>for jest when  none of the others in this party have such an angry reaction.  
>(Boromir is a little suspiscious, but that's because he does have a "darker
>secret" that Galadriel has pulled out of him--  that he desires to possess
>the Ring).  Personally I think the reason why this possibility of returning
>home to a domestic setting is so embarassing to Sam lies hidden behind the
>dash in the "a nice little hole with--".  Sam pauses here , and then adds
>the "with a bit of garden of my own," but I don't think that's what he was
>really thinking.  I've always thought that he was likely to say, "with Rosie
>Cotton," whom he eventually does end up marrying, but that still doesn't 
>explain the great embarassment, anger, and feeling of violation that Sam seems
>to feel here.  I can't help but wonder whether Sam was on the verge of 
>blurting out, "a nice little hole with Frodo."  Just as Boromir didn't
>realize until this moment that he wanted the Ring, Sam hadn't fully realized
>until now that he wanted Frodo.

	I don't really think so.  It seems more likely that Sam was
simply embarrassed at the thought of Galadriel seeing his naked mind
for much the same reason he would be embarrassed at her seeing his
naked body.  Recall also that Sam is relatively young, and is likely
embarrassed that someone-- particularly a beautiful and majestic
woman-- would see his crush on Rosie.  It's a bit closer to the way an
adolescent would react to his parents discovering the love poetry he's
been writing to the girl in his English class (never daring to send
it, of course), than the way someone would react in a society like
Middle-Earth's (which doesn't acknowledge the existence of
homosexuality at all, in any of its legends) on being discovered to
harbor such feelings.  (Given Tolkien's background, in a culture which
routinely characterized homosexuality as "vice" or "deviance" and a
religion which roundly condemned it, it seems more likely that if it
entered the work at all, it would be regarded as bearing the same
relation to heterosexuality that the orcs did to the elves.)

>  	Even once they return to the Shire and start get rid of Saruman, Sam 
>admits that he finds himself "torn in two" between Rosie Cotton and Frodo,
>and, of course, he ends up marrying Rosie (it's interesting that Frodo tells
>him to do so "as soon as you can") and moving into Bag End with his master.

	As noted above, certainly Sam feels torn in two-- but he
hardly would feel so unless he were truly attracted to the idea of
marrying Rose.  Yet Frodo is his master and his dearest friend, and
he's been _hurt_-- so badly hurt that he can never find healing in
Middle-Earth.  How, Sam thinks, can Sam leave him to pursue his own
happiness?  Which leaves Frodo obliged to give Sam permission, and
even urging, to do what his heart wants to do-- because Frodo loves
Sam, too, and desires Sam's happiness (enough to tell Sam to stay
behind at their final parting).

	But none of this requires a sexual component to the
friendship.  To a certain extent, this seems to me to be, to some
extent, a turnabout of the old stereotype that men and women can't be
friends without sexuality getting in the way.  Plenty of very
important human relationships need have little or nothing to do with
sex, even if they come near it (or surpass it) in importance and
intensity.  There are many different ways humans can love one another,
only a few of which have a sexual component, and the presumption that
a strong friendship (whether between men, between women, or between
men and women) must have an erotic component seems to me to
misunderstand the nature of friendship.  It seems perfectly correct to
say that Frodo and Sam loved each other, and Gimli and Legolas loved
one another as well, but I think that there would need to be some
internal evidence before we presume a sexual component, particularly
given what we know of the author.

Mike
-- 
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS	"Workers of the world, forgive me.
mss2@midway.uchicago.edu	 You had more to lose than I thought."
mike.schiffer@um.cc.umich.edu	 -- Karl Marx (1990) as imagined by
mss2@usite-next.uchicago.edu     Jim Koncz (konc@midway.uchicago.edu)