His friend Geoffrey reveals that he was in love with him. Then we have a whole long sequence where he's trying to find him in war. Was he gay for him also? They didn't really seem to clear this up. Seemed like a strange love triangle that went nowhere.
shareYou do realize people can be friends without wanting to fuck eachother? Or is friendship alien to you?
shareThis, precisely. And men during Tolkien's youth had especially powerful bonds of friendship that could unashamedly be called love, without having any sexual connotations. (And yes, for some men, there were certainly sexual connotations as well.) But male society in the 19th century, stretching into the 20th, constituted an intense depth of feeling & brotherhood among friends. Those true friends were the ones that a man trusted most, friends who could be depended on under any circumstance. It was like the unbreakable, shared bond that soldiers often form in war, but permeating all of everyday life.
shareExactly. I was writing almost the same in my comment.
shareI doubt that even Geoffrey was gay. People back then used to talk openly about how they loved each other, without meaning anything sexual. This is likely a modern interpretation according to our times.
Nowadays a man says he loves a friend, and we're thinking he's gay, but that was not the case a century ago. Modern movies portray people from the XIXth century and early XXth as strict and stiff. But the truth is that while in public it was important to keep the composure, in private they were very emotional, more than us. It's no coincidence that the main artistic movement in the XIXth was the Romanticism.
Excellent & accurate comment. One only has to read the poetry, letters, journals of men from that era to understand this.
shareYeap. There's a common inability to walk in the shoes of people from other ages or cultures. You have a BBC series where a woman travels back in time to XIXth and, of course, people love her because she's so alive while they were so stiff and boring. The truth is that for a person from the XIXth, a modern person would lack sense in public and sensibility in private.
And I'm not saying that that way was better, in my opinion the huge gap (and tension) between the behavior in the private and the public spheres of life had to be exhausting. But XIXth century was not the parody often represented in modern narrative.
Oh, absolutely. For me, trying to imagine the mores & everyday lives of people from different times is part of the appeal of stories set in the past, whether recent or distant. As you say, the lived reality was far more complex that the one-dimensional clichés that we absorb by unquestioning osmosis from current culture. Even if I find some past mores & customs bad or downright appalling by my standards of today, I'd still prefer to try & understand them from their point of view, as that gives at least a somewhat more accurate picture of the past..
shareSo true... Some people desperately want all the classics to be gay... Every male friendship, every painting or sculpture that has a man is coded gayness...
If you look at everything through a queer lens, you'll see gayness everywhere... It's because of the lens...
There are some people that want to remove any masculinity in history in attempt to rewrite it.
share"If you look at everything through a queer lens, you'll see gayness everywhere... It's because of the lens..."
Not strictly true. There have always been people who engaged in homosexual activity, and through much of history they've hidden themselves and their preferences. You actually need the "queer lens" to see things that were true, but deliberately obscured.
Although of course, the "queer lens" is far from 100% accurate. Especially when used on hotties.
This has been much debated in the fandom. What the fandom knows is that in real life Prof. Tolkien loved his wife to the point of worship, and that he also had deep and lasting friendships with other men, both when he was young and after he lost all the friends of his youth in the war. We also know that in his imagination, he created a world where men kiss each other and declare their love for each other, and the narration constantly refers to Sam's deep love for his master. So the arguments in the fandom have gone back and forth, with one side saying "Middle-Earth was modeled on the Dark Ages, when women were excluded from public life and men kissed each other in public, plus during the Edwardian era when Tolkien was young, it was common for close same-sex friends to talk about love without meaning sex, etc.", and the other side says "Oh please, have you never met a closet queen??".
In the end, we'll never really know what was in Tolkien's heart of hearts, or his trousers. What we can know is that Tolkien had a great capacity to love other human beings, and that he was such a virtuous Catholic that if he'd had homosexual impulsive, he is extremely unlikely to have acted on them.
"Was Tolkien gay? I really really really want him to be gay."
share