Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - Queering The Lord of the Rings: An Interview with Dr. Sara Brown

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

It's a very special episode for our 2 year anniversary. We sat down with Dr. Sara Brown, Chair of Language and Literature at Signum University, to talk about her upcoming book: Race, Gender, and The Other in Tolkien. Sara leads us through a wonderful discussion about Orcs, Eowyn, Shelob, and how queer Lord of the Rings can really be. Thank you all for 2 years of listening!You can find Dr Brown on twitter @AranelParmadil or on her website https://sarabrown.academia.edu/patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Sword, Sorcery, and Socialism, a podcast about the politics and themes hiding in our genre fiction. As always, I am Asha, and I'm joined by my co-host, Ketho. How's it going, Ketho? Howdy. And we are joined today by a special guest, Dr. Sarah Brown, the chair of the language department? Language and literature. Language and literature, yeah.

Language and literature, Department of Signum University. And Dr. Brown is here to talk to us today about Tolkien. So we all know it's another Asha episode. But we brought Sarah on specifically because you have a book that you're working on, I believe. Yeah. have a a book that you're working on i believe yeah well i'm working on it with dr christopher vaccaro um who some of your listeners might have heard of who writes um very specifically queer readings of tolkien and of beowulf and many other um old literature but uh he and I wrote and delivered a course for Signum which was done last not the semester just gone the one before that the spring semester called Race Gender and the Other in

Tolkien and it took us about a year of working together to get this course together because it's a work of our hearts if you like we really did put heart and soul into it. And when we finished, and for the first time in nearly a year, we weren't Zooming once or twice a week. We messaged each other and went, shall we just turn this into a book because I miss you? So that's what we did. We decided we would write a book about it. So that's what we're doing right now. So that's going to take us at least another year because writing a book, it turns out, takes a while. Yeah, it's kind of difficult, I've heard.

Yeah, it takes a lot of time. Unless you're willing to simply apparently just do a whole lot of drugs and be Stephen King, it's apparently pretty hard to write a book. See, my problem is because I have to actually do the day job. Doing the drugs thing is probably going to get me fired. And that means I'd have to turn to other work to fund myself while doing the book. That sounds like a hassle. You don't think Corey Olson is going to be fine with you just missing class on a cocaine bench to work on your book? I'm pretty sure not.

I don't think I even have to ask him that question. I'm pretty sure. All right. I thought we'd run it by him, but you know. No, no, no. We're good. We're good. I really don't want to get fired.

Yeah. So yeah, that's what we're here to talk about, everyone, is this class you've taught in this book you're working on, on gender and race and the other in tolkien obviously all the listeners know this is a pet subject of mine and i thought it would be a great idea to bring on an expert so i don't we don't i don't have a set order of questions or anything specific we're going to talk about i can either just let you go or i can set you off with the prompt, but I think we can start with the big hitter. You want to talk about Eowyn? I always want to talk about Eowyn. If you like, I can give an overview of the main sort of things we're covering in the book,

and then we can zoom in on some particular things that you'd like to talk about if you want to do it that way sounds good to me oh all right no problem yeah sounds okay so in terms of what we're doing with the book which is probably going to be called something more like reading the other in tolkien's lord of the rings um what we're looking at is the way in which the strange, the other, the queer is very much embedded in Middle-earth and is a part of the landscape. So take, for example, the orcs, okay? So you could just say, all right, well, clearly this is where we're talking about race, but actually it's not just about race. There's a queerness about the orcs because they are othered and they are othered through all sorts of ways. The fact that Tolkien couldn't make up his mind about who they were and where they came from and how they came to be in the world is one point of contention.

to be in the world is one point of contention. Another point of contention is this idea that really they're set up to just be the faceless masses that you can slaughter in their thousands. That's what they're there to do, right? Except he then goes and names some of them and they have conversations. Now those conversations aren't about lovely things. They're not, you know, planting gardens and talking about their carrot crop or anything nice. But they still are individuals. They're not just a faceless mass. So that causes you to step back and look at that and say, well, what is Tolkien trying to work with here? And one of the things I was focusing on was the way in which they're othered through their eating habits. So looking at their cannibalism, because they will happily eat each other. And of course, they will eat other humans. But also, they have this idea of being eaten as punishment so when for example the Uruk-hai are faced by the horsemen with Eomer and they talk about how the white skins will cook you and eat you

there of course we have all sorts of things going on in that one sentence um with them calling the Rohirrim the white skins and then saying about how they will cook these orcs who don't keep up with the other running ones and that they will eat them oh gosh there's all sorts of things to dig into there and to talk about so and the other thing that I talk about because I'm very focused on gender and feminist readings, is, okay, well, that's great. So where are all the female orcs then? Please and thank you. I've wondered the same thing. Do they hide them all in, like, Mount Gundabad?

This is it. Or was Jackson right? Do they spawn out of the mud? Well, yeah. I mean, he got around it, didn't he? By having this sort of weird birthing process coming out of the slime, this sort of primordial ooze on the film. But we know from the text that that's not how it works. And because there's textually a reference to, you know,

the sort of crossbreeding of men and orcs that wasn't done that wasn't done through magic right well yeah i mean greenbeard says you know what what evil has been done here you know what is saruman up to um because if he really has been blending i mean just look at that word blending uh orcs with done lendings exactly how does that happen without rape so all kinds of things to talk about but But if you just ask the question, where are the female orcs, then that opens up a massive amount of discussion in and of itself. I mean, I've read scholarship that says that they reproduce through pathogenesis, which is a great idea. um which is that's a great idea of course there's no textual evidence for any of that there's no textual evidence for them being birthed out of these pods in the primordial ooze either

but where are the orc babies yeah like where yeah what they're essentially like it it's very wishy-washy when you think about it there's there's parts of them that have established culture like he has because i guess because tolkien was a linguistics nerd he was like i have to name them in a very like when i'm naming them that they've got to be linguistically sound so so they obviously have some sort of like linguistic culture but then also like he was like i don't want to go too far into this other culture stuff because then they would stop being these faceless masses that get killed off constantly and would start being something worthy of sympathy.

It's a weird tightrope. He tried to walk between like, again, being the, you know, the, to use like, you know,

the gamertrip, like the Zerg that you can just slaughter without thinking about it and being like living, breathing creatures that have agency. That gets into one of my favorite questions, which is, you know, like the orc soul question. Right. Because that, I mean, to be fair, that also depends heavily on whether down the orc origin story,

which is, are they derived from elves or men? Because if they're derived from elves or men because if they're derived from elves then the question i guess is like how you answer do orcs have souls really depends on whether they're sort of elf derived or man derived so i know there's no definitive answer but what what's your pet answer well i mean there is no real answer because tolkien couldn't work one out either i mean if you say that they originally derived from elves but they're not still deriving from elves i think we'd probably hear about that um so what's going on now and they certainly wouldn't have so

many right you don't have enough elves to do that. They're like derived from elves, but then became a self-sustaining population at some point. Yes. But to do that, you've got to have, you know, those who are capable of bearing orc babies. Haven't you? So how are they working that out?

Unless they do literally pathogenesis. Amoeba split. Exactly. Tolkien, if you look in Morgoth's ring, Tolkien comes up with all sorts of different ideas as he is desperately trying to work out exactly what's going on here at one point he thought that perhaps they were automata um because he has said that uh morgoth and sauron being evil can't actually create anything new right yeah um so in that case are they automata

are they built for example rather than born do androids dream of electric orcs yeah exactly so um it's i mean my if my pet theory has got to be that somewhere there are female orcs, or at least orcs capable of, you know, bearing young, maybe they look and sound exactly the same. The dwarf theory? Maybe Groshnag is female. How do we know that, you know they are there are orcs there with names right how do we know that they're all male we seem to assume that now most of the named ones we get pronouns with all right and they all use masculine pronouns okay that's great but there's hordes of other ones and we don't get to know any of their names or their pronouns. Who knows, there could be female orcs amongst them, but we're not told. So I don't know, that's a possibility. I talk about this a lot when it comes to the dwarves, just to switcheroo here for a second, because we have a similar problem with the dwarves. Where are the dwarf women? We know there are dwarf babies.

Gimli is son of Gloin, right? Yeah. And we're pretty sure that's not by pathogenesis. So we know that there are dwarf women because one of them actually gets named. And that is Dis, who is the mother of Fili and Kili. She's only named because she's the mother of Fili and Kili. And what, is it cousin or sister of Thorin, right?

Yes. Yes. Because Feely and Keely are his nephews. That's right. Yep. So she doesn't get to appear in the narrative. She just gets named in the appendices in a tiny, tiny note. And that's it. So it's a question of, well, what do we do with that then? And for someone like me, who reads Tolkien via feminist criticism and gender studies, I'm asking that question. There is a dwarf woman shaped hole in the narrative. Why is this so? What is going on here? The invisibility of the dwarf women is a really interesting question for me. Weirdly, I feel like the orc, like you said, the orc and dwarf question is very similar.

Obviously, I'm not an expert and I'm not a professor of this sort of thing, but my immediate reaction to those is, I agree with you that they must exist. They must exist. I agree with you that they must exist. Like they must exist. But there's a sort of either two options there. Either they exist, like you said, with the orcs, they exist and they're around and you just don't know it. Because like the joke that Jackson makes in the women simply never interact with the wider world. You know, to me, that's kind of the other option is that the dwarven society is so inherently patriarchal that the dwarven women are simply in Erebor or the Lonely Mountain and are doing things which do not require them to interact with our other named and like narrative leading

characters or, or women are so oppressed in their society, which to be fair would fit with how orcs are generally portrayed that they are almost, you know, like, you know, they're a lower cast of creature who exist deep in their minds or whatever

and never come out at all. But it's a bit more complex than that with the dwarves. I agree with, with the Orc thing. I can see that, but it's actually, and we know it's more complicated than that with the dwarves, because again, if you look in the appendices and if you look in the peoples of Middle Earth, for example, there's lots and lots of stuff in there about the dwarves themselves. And it talks about the dwarf women. And we get little nuggets like they rarely come out of their bowers. Now, bowers is, again, an interesting word to use. It does sort of imply seclusion, all that sort of thing. to use. It does sort of imply seclusion, all that sort of thing. And you can start to think about this idea of it being such a patriarchal society. But then Tolkien talks about why there

are so few dwarf children. And that is because the dwarf women are not required to marry, and many of them choose not to. And in fact, are more interested in their crafts, rather than getting married and having children. That doesn't fit with a wholly patriarchal society. That's true. So it's really, it's more complicated because we can't put it into a nice little box saying, yep, that's just a bunch of misogynists over there. They keep their women secluded and that's that. over there they keep their women secluded and that's that um and and then we can start to unpick this whole idea that that jackson gave out as a like a joke um that you can't tell the difference because they've all got beards um and that's that's great um except again we can complicate that by saying well in that case how does a dwarf woman even know that they're a

dwarf woman when they look exactly the same as the dwarf men and they have masculine indicators like beards so what do we do with that what questions do we ask about that because again tolkien doesn't make it easy for us by saying that dwarf women get to decide if they even want to get married and have children, and many of them don't. And yet, he also says, many of them don't leave their underground caves, they don't leave the mountains. In a lot of ways, don't, like the only dwarves we really encounter in the the main narrative of lord of the rings are almost exceptions to the rule where where dwarves for the most part stay underground um with the exception of oh we got exiled and we have to come back home

Oh, we got exiled and we have to come back home. Or in the case of Gimli, one of like four dwarves who were sent to the council so that we have a very small sample size to pick from. Yeah. And it's almost like is that is that the trope you get in? Like, I think of like like Dungeons and Dragons, you know, where they have all these fantastical races you can pick from and they describe them all differently but they have to have a reason why your adventurer would be that race and would not be simply hanging out at home where things are cooler and they have to be like well even among every population there's a few that get restless and just sort of head out and hit the road to go be adventurers so like you said are you're saying catho for the dwarves is it like we're just seeing the head out and hit the road to go be adventurers. So like you said, or you're saying, Ketho, for the dwarves, is it like we're just seeing the weirdos that are the exception

that happen to leave home, and the dwarves that are willing to be out in the sun are the weird ones? Or they're the ones who are required by duty or some other reason to essentially, for the benefit of their own people have to leave or have to go. I've just thought, what if not patriarchal society, what if dwarven society

is maybe it's slightly matriarchal and they say, the women just go, I don't want to leave. You have to, little man. You little man, you're the one that has to go outside. You have to go fight. I man you're the one that has to go outside you have to go fight i don't wanna that's your job yep toodles yeah yeah that's another way toodles good luck there's some more there's some someone's got to go to rivendell i'm not going yeah i'm not gonna go

elf food yeah exactly yeah um but just to complicate that even further, because I do love to do that. I love the fact you picked up on this phrase on the road, right, when you're talking about D&D, because that's another thing about female characters in Tolkien's work. How many of the women are actually on the road? Very, very few, all right? Eowyn. In The Lord of the Rings, it's only really Eowyn. Now, you could argue that Arwen has to go on the road because somehow she gets from Imladris to Gondor, right?

But we hear nothing about it. As far as we know, she stepped through a time portal and ended up in Minas Tirith. There's nothing about her journey. It's only Eowyn that we really see on the road. If we go to the Silmarillion, who's on the road? Luthien. Okay. Powerful, right? One of the most powerful beings to ever exist. Right. Melian at the very, very beginning. Very beginning. And then simply stops moving ever again. Right, exactly.

She freezes in place with Thingol for a few hundred years and then sets up camp. I'm trying to think. Morwen? Yeah, Morwen. And Nienna. But, yeah, Nienna. I wouldn't say that Morwen moves of her own volition, though, really. No.

She's forced on the road. Right, exactly. So there's not a lot of women on the road. If we turn to the Lord of the Rings, which is kind of what we're mostly focusing on here, the only one really is Eowyn. If you look at the other female characters of any note whatsoever, you've got Goldberry, who is pretty much in the house. You've got Galadriel, who, of course, yes, we know she travels and we do get a moment of her on the road on the way back,

because there's a farewell moment after they see Treebeard, et cetera, but that's it. So we know- And we know contextually she's gone somewhere because the White Council kicked Saruman out of Golgothur at one point. So like, canonically, she has gone somewhere, but we don't ever see it. Right. It's just not part of the narrative, apart from that little bit of a moment

on the way home again, if you like. We have Arwen, who steps into the TARDIS and ends up in Minas Tirith. We've got Labilia Sackville Baggins. I'm a big fan of Lelia, actually. The most traveling she seems to do is from Bag End to prison. And back again, a hobbit's tale. Exactly. And of course, Rosie, who appears as, okay, Sam, you need a wife at the end. I know you've never mentioned her in the entirety of a thousand pages, but here you go. Have a woman and many, many children. That's about it. Does Farmer Mag go have a woman and many many children that's about it does farmer maggot have a wife is she named mrs maggot she's is it just mrs maggot yeah

yeah mrs maggot is in the farmhouse cooking bacon and muffins not gonna make my to make my joke later. How about I made like a joke on Twitter a while back. Like I called it like a queer organization of the members of the fellowship. And why I actually decided that Pippin is actually the most feminine person in the entire Lord of the Rings that we interact with. In terms of femininity, it's Pippin, then Arwen. Yeah. I mean, that's actually something I talk a lot about is feminine masculinity and masculine femininity. And just look at how Tolkien actually is playing with those

in a really interesting fashion. Well, I, again, not to make an internet review, but I made a tweet the other day. It was one of those engagement style tweets. It's like, oh, what's an actual good role model of masculinity in today's world? And my responses were Aragorn, like Theoden, all four hobbits, and like Eomer,omer i think were like my examples because that i think that one

i actually know it wasn't aomer i forgot who it was but it was it was definitely fair mirror it might have been fair mirror but it was like it my you know my point being that even your masculine characters in lord of the rings display a lot of what would otherwise by our society be deemed as sort of feminine characteristics. They sing, they cook, they heal. They take care. Yeah. They take care of each other. They cry all the time. Oh my God. By the time you get to the return of the King, they are just weeping all the time.

All the time. They're weeping and singing yes like that's and that's even leaving aside you know the famous tra la la la elves of the hobbit yes like it is i don't know almost implied that they like off the cuff sing a song about the four winds when boromir dies they're just like oh yeah we should have a song for the four winds when Boromir dies. They're just like, oh yeah, we should have a song for this. Like this is like Disney levels of breaking into song and like poetry reading. Yeah, which of course comes from the old texts that Tolkien loved so much, like the Prose Edda and the Nihala and, you know, all of those, the Fall of Arthur, all of those old stories are filled with Beowulf, people suddenly bursting into verse randomly, because it's what we have to remember is those old stories came passed down through oral tradition.

And so it was this was how they are delivered. Lord of the Rings is a musical. Yes, yeah. So that is why Tolkien has loads and loads of poetry is because he's actually harking back to those old style stories where that was very much the norm. But you're right. I mean, it's interesting how he is presenting characters because the ones who most look like 21st century ideal masculinity, which I would end up putting the word toxic in front of, is people like Boromir and Denethor.

Yeah. Yeah. The ones that have the most issues going on. Oh boy, do they have issues. Yes. Look, I have a soft spot going on. Oh boy, do they have issues. Yes. Look, I have a soft spot for Boromir. I do. But like, but yeah, obviously, yeah.

He's the one that's the most like, I'm a man's man. Like I do hunting and sporting and I delight in strength of arms. I am not. I make fire. Yeah. I make fire. I carry heavy thing. I'm aeer i have i do feats of strength and and his dad who is you know the very much like over you know weaning toxic father who

is condescending to his more effeminate son yes yes um but everybody else is this, you know, this emotional weepy man, like Aragorn is overwhelmingly portrayed as like gentle. Yes, indeed. mistakes, owns them, and tries not to make those mistakes again, and talks to people about such things. Yeah, I mean, he's set up from the beginning as someone who's going to make an excellent king, actually, because he is empathetic, and a healer, and he heals not just the physical body of the person in front of him, He heals them right down into their spiritual nature. The only good king that can actually exist, which is a theoretical one, because it actually has to have all of these qualities. Yes, yes. Would that we had someone like that in these days.

But alas, we have no Aragorn. I won't make any comments about your current monarch you know I want to get you in trouble. No please don't no no no no. I'm just imagining those the hands of a king or the hands of the healer and you see those little sausage fingers that Charles has. Yeah yeah. yeah yeah anyway um we're talking about oh yes masculinity and femininity yeah you brought up aomer and i just want to say aomer is the one who um he actually goes through a bit of an epiphany he He's kind of a bro at the beginning. He is a bit of a bro and he remains a bit of a bro until the Houses of Healing,

when there's a wonderful conversation between him and Gandalf. He's like, well, why is my sister here? I don't understand. She should be all happy at home. And Gandalf says, okay, sit down and listen up, right? You were fine. You went off with all your bros on your horses and you had all this stuff to do and that was fun.

And she had to wipe your uncle's ass whilst trying to avoid Wormtongue. Yeah, the episode I thought was really good. Were you on that episode of the Prancing Pony podcast where they talked about that? That was me. I was going to say, I'm pretty sure you were on that one where they talk where it's the speech that

and Kathleen you'll remember this the lines they actually gave the lines to Wormtongue in the movie the like who knows what you whisper to the deep watches of the night as the walls of your like bower close in around you like that one Gandalf actually says those to Eomer

describing his sister because Eomer does the like, well, why is my sister here? I thought she was fine. And Gandalf was like, no, who knows what she said when she was at home? Again, avoiding the incredible creep that was Wormtongue and having to be stuck as a carer for Theoden. She didn't get to do all the cool stuff that you got to do. She had no outlet for her like desire. The, the lines about being trapped in a cage. Are those from the book or just the film?

And Eowyn does actually say that what she fears is a cage to be closed in until old age accepts it. She says that to Aragorn because Aragorn says to her, what do you fear? And she does say that. But that bit about who knows what she whispered into the night,

the deep watchers of the night, that in the film is said by Wormtongue. And actually that is gandalf who says that to her brother yep yeah yeah jackson giving that to worm tongue actually makes it really super creepy rather than aomer getting yeah that's like a really creepy scene in the film uh yeah where yeah in the book it's gandalf like look basically slapping Éomer around and going, you say you love your sister, but you actually don't know anything going on inside her head this whole time. Yeah, you're right. Éomer sort of has an epiphany. It's like, oh, shit. Her life has kind of sucked. Yeah, because they've both been, I mean, if you think about it, they've both been through a heck of a lot, right?

They've both been, I mean, if you think about it, they've both been through a heck of a lot, right? They lost their father to orcs. Their mother then dies of grief. So they go to live with their uncle Theoden, whose wife has also died. And then their cousin Theodred is killed by orcs. And then Theoden seems to come under this sort of evil influence and starts to sort of dissolve into crumbly old man. Well, anyone who's had to watch an older relative succumb to Alzheimer's can know what it's like to watch a person slowly lose themselves and no longer be able to maintain conversation. And that's horrible.

Yes, it is. Yeah. Meanwhile, Eowyn is off. I mean, he's doing what he needs to do, right? Apart from when Wormtongue has him thrown into prison, of course. But this leaves Eowyn alone. And she's alone with an uncle that can no longer protect her. And Wormtongue, who is the one person, the one character in the whole text who lusts after another person because we actually talk about Wormtongue's lust

for Eowyn. I mean, we have the only other lust that we really have is connected with the ring. I think we might have mentioned that before. Maybe, Kathleen, you and I just sort of talked about it,. Is that like, or maybe Kathleen, you and I just sort of talked about it,

not an episode. Is that like Lord of the Rings is incredibly like, we'll call it like de-sexualized. Like you have love, like Error Grin loves Eowyn, but that's love in like the high minded love, right? Like it's this like spiritual connection.

Whereas you're right Wormtongue is the only one that gets this like this base sexual lust because even as opposed to when I think before the episode started we were mentioning other fantasy works other fantasy works to my chagrin as kathleen knows at times will sort of give into the like lust and sexual predation as like a story technique george rr martin um sapkowski yes and again listeners will know this is a thing for me is that so many fantasy and sci-fi authors make it weird and maybe that's something that i actually in a way enjoy about lord of the rings is i don't have to worry about like rape as a tool or a plot device in lord of the rings but you're right there's something interesting about well actually i think in the legendarium there is one other character one or two other characters that also

i think get to be sort of lustful or at least jealous oh there's lots of rape narrative in the story has a lot more the two i thought of immediately were um is it a all the dark elf oh with arithel. And his son. Yes. I always forget. It was the one that betrays Gondolin. Yeah. They definitively have this, again, like sexual lust that you don't see in any good characters.

Yes, because the son, whose name has gone out of my head as well, lusts after Idril Celebrindal, whereas, of course, the father, I mean, he probably learned it off his father, of course, his father raped Arathel. Yeah, essentially deceived and raped her. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, brings her in. And then Tolkien uses the phrase married her against her will, which is Tolkien's way of saying, I mean, was there a priest around?

Did they have a blessing in a church anywhere? I don't think so. I think it was a, you were impregnated and ergo, we are married now. Right, exactly. But of course we do have a rape narrative around Luthien when she's captured by the two sons of Feanor. There's, yeah, there's quite a bit in the Silmarillion, actually. Tompkins dances around the edges of it with his language.

Yeah, yeah, you're right. And then, of course, there's Celebrion, the, oh, sorry, the wife of, ah, oh, jeepers. Hang on a minute. Arwen's mother, Celebrion. Elrond's wife. Yeah.

She's captured by orcs and tortured nigh unto death and then has to leave Middle-earth and sail into the West for healing. When you put it that way, that does sound pretty euphemistic. Yeah. I mean, Tolkien doesn't use the word rape. No, because I don't think he would ever. He's not the kind to ever directly reference anything so overtly sexual, I don't think. But we do have married her against her will happening more than once. I mean, look at our Farazan and Tamriel. He married her against her will. So, you know,

he's not afraid to use that kind of dominance, male dominant narrative, if you like. So it's there, but yeah, in the Lord of the Rings, it's really only Wormtongue that we see doing that. And it's a way, I think, of Tolkien framing Wormtongue as a very particular kind of person. Of creepy and gross. Creepy and gross, yes. And, I mean, I think that's where, I mean, other people said it, but I think you probably do give a little bit of credit to Jackson having previously been a horror director to being like, I can make guy look creepy like I'm good at that I can make a guy look off-putting yes yeah which was really helped by Brad Dourif shaving his own eyebrows off and saying this will make me look even weirder and he sure did I mean him and John Noble for being like, I can make my character look even more off-putting

by my acting choices. Yeah, I don't think I could ever eat cherry tomatoes again. I know that. Remember, Kath, the scene where he's like, Denethor's eating the tomatoes while Pippin sings. But if we can switch to something a little more positive, I think we're talking about this sort of feminine masculinity. Can we talk about the hobbits?

Yeah. Can we talk about the hobbits? Obviously, I joked about Pippin being the most feminine character in the story. And I'm only kind of half joking when I say that. Let's, obviously we talked a little bit, we had an episode, Geth and I did, about the Shire politically. Because people have accepted, people, at least in our circles, you'll see some people talk about the Shire politically because people have accepted we people at least in our circles you'll see some people talk about the Shire sort of this you know quote-unquote idyllic place to live

and we sort of deconstructed that a little bit and the fact that like sure it's idyllic but we also see it from the perspective of our named characters who are all born wealthy, except for Sam, who is essentially born into a hereditary servantship, which isn't super cool. And he only gets out of it by being gifted the property by his master. Whereas like Pippin and Mary are both literally the scions of hereditary positions of authority. Yes. And Frodo isn't,

but he's the inheritor of just incredible wealth and let's be honest, the most important fruit of wealth in English society, which is being a landlord. Yes. So like we only see Hobbit society from the rich generally and you have a bunch of like inherited positions so it's actually not as idyllic as you might otherwise believe if you can understand why ted sandeman might be a bit

grumpy because he actually has to work for a living but that aside we we talk about like the shire and the hobbits you do get obviously some of your what i would call hallmarks of patriarchal sort of pastoralist society. You know what I mean? Like there's Mrs. Maggot who's in the farmhouse making the food and Rosie Cotton who just appears to bear an umpteen number of children. Yeah, right. But when you look at the hobbits themselves and the way they behave, even our named characters, they don't behave in what we would consider stereotypically masculine ways most of the time. And their friendships definitively are not. Right. Because they seem to be really close friendships.

They care for each other in a way that I suppose if we're looking at it through a 21st century optic, the stereotype is that men don't behave like that. That they don't hold hands with their friends and hug their friends and kiss their friends' foreheads and take baths together and all that kind of thing. It seems to be very close in friendship. There is, I suppose, because, again, I'm using sort of, using this term sort of feminine masculinity that comes via critics like Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam, where what they're doing is picking apart what we deem feminine and what we deem masculine and just simply taking those as terms and then complicating gender by reading it via these terms. So what we have with someone like Sam, for example, who you might say is, well, that's a masculine hobbit right there. You know, he has a physical job. He is a gardener and he carries the big bags

and all that kind of thing. But he also, in Rivendell, takes Frodo's hand and strokes it. And he cares for Frodo and looks after him and he does all the cooking he feeds Frodo and makes sure that Frodo sleeps and holds him in his arms as he sleeps there is a huge amount of feminine masculinity going on there that is actually it's really beautifully written of course reciprocated by Frodo whose feminine masculinity is more than Sam's in some way because he's the one that needs to be cared for all the time. I mean, he shows enormous inner strength to do what he does and to get as far as he does. And we can have a whole other conversation about this idea of Frodo failing because actually that's inevitable. of Frodo failing, because actually that's inevitable. But you have someone who is the caretaker and the one who is the cared for, but neither of them are weak and wibbly and,

you know, fainting Victorian ladies upon their couches. They're both really, really strong for what they need to do. But there's this dynamic going on there that is absolutely necessary for this to actually succeed. And then, of course, you've got Pippin and Merry. Which it's not hard at all to see why, even early on, you get a whole lot of queer readings of that relationship, right? Of Merry and Pippin.

It is incredibly easy like even though tolkien never says it that you just put it on a plate like yeah how much they go on about how much they miss each other after being apart for like a day and a half or whatever it is like in the book it feels much longer but when you actually look at you know like the time frame for when like pippin goes to god door and mary you know and mary goes with the road here they're apart for like four days yeah it's not very long but like they go they speak about it as if they've been separated from their life partner for months and it is very very easy to see where a queer reading of that would come in.

I think even more so sometimes in Frodo and Sam. And both Pippin and Merry have their moment of taking care of the other. So that's also part of it because they are at certain points in the narrative. One is dependent on the other for whatever reason. And they are cared for because of it. And they have an incredibly close bond that, as you say, it's easy to have a queer reading of it. It's not just easy. In some ways, it's kind to have a queer reading of it um it's not just easy in some ways it's kind of obvious it's it's right there uh for anyone to see um it's one of the great things about tolkien um i've been yelled at on twitter for you know how dare you have oh queer readings yeah of course

of course because here's the thing about tolkien right First of all, he doesn't care. He's dead. The best answer. Right. Secondly, the great thing about his work, and this is what a lot of these idiots miss, is that it is so multifaceted, so multilayered, so complex, that you can read it in whatever the heck way you want to, right? If you insist on only reading Tolkien through a Catholic lens, well, you know, bless you, I think you're missing a lot, but you go ahead, because you can do that, right? You can absolutely do that. I can read Tolkien through a feminist lens, because it's right there to do that. And people who say to me, but there aren't enough female characters, I'm missing the point about feminist criticism right and they clearly don't understand about masculine femininity and feminine masculinity and don't get me started on she-lob

why can't you have a queer reading because it's it's all right there um to be read in that way because that's one of the great things about this book um the reason why it is still so popular decades after it was published i mean before we know it we're going to be coming up on 100 years of uh the lord of the rings uh exactly okay we've got another 30 years to go but you know we're getting there um and it wouldn't surprise me i won't be around to see it if in 2155 there isn't a 200 year anniversary tolkien society big event somewhere because it continues to speak to people in whatever way they want to read it damn it well i mean that's that's ultimately the thing about great literature in and of itself it's like right if it wasn't able to be read in

all these different ways it wouldn't be as monumental and it wouldn't be as well regarded because not as many people would find something to read in it you'll never get those people to acknowledge that or even see it by trying to claim that these sorts of readings can't happen you're just detracting from the value well i mean part of part of our whole our whole thing on the show is this weird balance where we like try we try to tease out i mean too obsessed with authorial intent was at that while also trying to discuss what you can what is included that they didn't intend at all because there's clearly times where you read a book and like oh I know what the author was going for here like we have unfortunately read um the original starship troopers and his what his authorial intent is is pretty clear it doesn't beat around the bush with it

you know like society's going down the tubes because nobody beats their kids anymore and you're like all right neat but then there's a lot of books where we can read and you go okay you know i don't think brian jock intended this to be part of the story, but it is something that I've noticed and I feel like maps on pretty well. Like I don't, you might not be, I don't know, you know, what your political theorists or whatever you're familiar with, but I look at the setup of Red Wall Abbey and I see a lot of parallels to a movement known as communalism, sort of purported by Murray Bookchin. And I see

a lot of communalist ideas put into practice in the way Redwall was set up. Did Brian Jock Mead intend that to be the case? No idea. Probably not. But it doesn't matter because I look at it and I see it happening.

Did he intend for his books to also be weirdly specious and have like this vein of like by being born a rat you're inherently evil probably not but it does kind of come across as racist because the one story that features a main character of an evil creature being raised by Redwallers still turns out evil. Like the Outcast of Redwall book, they have like a ferret who gets raised by Redwallers and he just implicitly, as he gets older, starts doing bad things and gets somebody killed or almost killed. Because he's a ferret. So it's essentialist. It's essentialist, which is not good to be this like essentialist, but like, do I think Jacques meant for that to happen?

No, I don't think so. I don't think he was as weird, like race essentialist. I think he was actually genuinely seems like a very nice man, but like, it's those sorts of things that, you know,

we're here to talk about and told, like we've been saying, one of the beauties of the Lord of the rings is there is a lot of room for you to put your own intent on it i mean we did a whole episode a few months ago that was essentially a rant on my part about what i have taken so much for like my personal life from lord of the Rings and it comes down to that sort of, I guess, sort of Beowulfian, like, do I think I can win my fight? No. Do I think it's my job to do it anyway? Yes. And that's the perspective I've come at a lot of my life from my perspective as, you know, as an anarchist, my perspective as a queer person, right? Is that like, do I think the goals I have set out

or I believe are morally correct? Do I think I'll succeed in them? No. Do I think it's my moral duty to fight for them anyway? Yes. And I can trace that opinion that I hold for myself directly back here to Lord of the Rings. And that's why Theoden's my favorite character, because he's the one to me that most exemplifies

I'm not going to win, but I'm going to do it anyway, sort of thing. And it's that sort of reading that I think is so like joyful about the work. And we can do that now. And there's no reason you can't do that with queer stuff with these characters absolutely i think uh authorial intentionality is a bit of a red herring actually um it's something that people use to say oh you you can't read it in that way because it's not how the author intended but yeah if we ask questions of the text, like, do you think Tolkien intended to be racist in his portrayal of the orcs? No, I don't think he intended that. And yet it kind of is.

Yes. So, you know, if we're going to talk about authorial intentionality and, you know, you want to stick me with this and say, I'm sorry if the author didn't intend it, then it doesn't happen. It's a red herring because it really doesn't allow for a reading of the book in any way other than a very narrow, usually dictated by this one person who says, I know how the Lord of the Rings must be read and there is no other way. I will say it reminds me quite a lot of the sort of American version of strict scriptural Christianity, where it's like we can only be Christians in such a way as the Bible explicitly lays out. And it just so happens that what we think the Bible explicitly lays out is the type of Christianity that we personally believe in. That sort of like, sort of very direct reading of law, if it says that it is,

if it doesn't say it, it isn't. But even that fail falls on its face because you have to at base determine whether, like you do with law, is law All that is allowed is what is explicitly allowed or all that is banned is what is explicitly banned. And like, which way do you fall in that? And authorial intent falls apart immediately. As soon as you apply that test, like is only what's allowed,

what the author explicitly states or not, because you immediately throw out all sorts of things that even these strict readers will have already accepted as fact when you point out that like the author never said that in the first place right well yeah like to to bring this into my wheelhouse for 10 seconds like i think of leguin's usage of he him pronouns as neutral pronouns as gender neutral pronouns in the left hand of darkness and it's like when you think about authorial intent it's like was she intending to be kind of not necessarily transphobic but like but probably but like just kind of uh exclusionary and especially in a book all about non-gendered like like beings um but then even her herself

in the next like 10 20 years would be like oh that was a that was a big mistake like i shouldn't have done that it's still him being the default is still there in the book whether you whether she meant it that way or not yeah don't you love when people learn yeah i mean leguin i think that's partly why we can hold her up so much is because she is one of the queens of being like i looked at my earlier work and this is why it sucked like this is what i did wrong and i wish i had done differently in retrospect because i think what she said in one of her interviews that she realizes she was catering to what she thought audiences at the time wanted or expected. And she was like, that was a mistake because fuck what they want.

I can't write the book that I, I wanted. I mean, like if she was writing what audiences wanted, she never would have, she never would have written left Hand or, you know, The Dispossessed. Because if you say, do audiences want a book about anarchists on the moon? I don't think most people would have said, yes, that's what we want from our sci-fi. more sci-fi yeah but it's it is one of the things that i love about ursula le Guin is that she actually had the inner strength uh and understanding of herself to look back at her older work realize the mistakes that she'd made um own them and then actually put it right not by going back and rewriting or anything, but by showing her own progression, by writing differently, writing something new. Another of my favourite authors, another of my

favourite authors is TJ Klune. I don't know if you know Klune's work at all. I highly recommend, by the way. He made a mistake in one of his books, which is more kind of YA and he put that right in the second book, in the first book he had the father of one of the main characters was a police officer and there was a sort of a report about how he'd hit one of the prisoners while he was

sorting them out and it was nothing in the book and then he was on Twitter going actually that was shit and i really shouldn't have done that and i completely understand in the next book uh he had the character's father resign from the police force because he'd understood he'd actually done something really terrible uh and that he shouldn't have done that and and um do something else instead. I like it when authors do something really bad and then understand what they've done is bad

and then rather unrolling-like, they don't just double down on it. They actually do their best to learn and put it right. I would rather 100 TJ Klunes to even 0.1 of a rolling or for other other ya stuff there's people like um it's a rick riordan i think yeah who's also just like yeah my books unabashedly have like queer people in them because queer people exist and they they are going to exist in a story whether you like it or not well to to kind of bring it full circle i feel like that issue of of intent and like not wanting things to be

too problematic is partially why tolkien could never come to a conclusion on the orcs is like it's he was just too he was like this his own personal philosophy about things like evil and what that even looks like made it too difficult for him to come to a conclusion on that without him being like oh that implies that like they're just inherently evil and he's like but I also kind of made them like the death puppets of this entire series. He's like, yeah, because you get into the whole like because, yeah, because if again, yeah, you can't bring it to a conclusion because either conclusion you bring to ends up being contradictory to something else that he believes. else that he believes because either they're either they originally came from elves in which case they have like an immortal thea which will be re-en is called by mandos after death and then they can still go to the halls of the dead and be rehoused i guess or they descended from men in

which case they can then be are part of the race of men and have the gift of men and can die and can therefore be transcend the bounds of Arda as men's souls do but how can Morgoth and Sauron create anything that can fire those things yeah but they can't create because evil can't

create but also are orcs just inherently evil because Because if they're inherently evil, then you've created a world in which is sort of not in line with a lot of Christian theology, which is that evil is an extant force of its own. You know, evil is the absence of good. And so orcs on their own can't be inherently evil if they came from elves or men. And suddenly it's just all contradictions. And so I think the best thing he did was like you said Katha was simply not solving that issue

yes yeah he just I'm not going to touch that Christopher's like I will not decide here's simply the things he struggled with that issue until he died and then they passed it off to his son and his son was like I'm not going to make it a good statement and that leaves us with plenty of things to talk about so actually thank you that works that's fine

that's why we have hobbies and jobs um exactly and again talk i i don't think we were talking about these other authors i don't know if colkin ever really he never really did the like i i did this wrong and i'm going back to make amends but i think he came close with the i'm constantly rewriting the things i wrote before because none of it makes feels right to me like i'm gonna go back and change it because i realized that that didn't come out the way i intended it to and i think it's just sort of a lower level version of like you know i screwed it up and now i'm like i'll do better in the future is is instead well i'm just going to keep fiddling with this story until the end of time which is

exactly what he did of course i mean if you look through the history of middle earth all those volumes all all 12 of them then you can see how he kept going back and going back. And, you know, very tiny passages would get loads and loads of rewrites. So on a micro level, he was constantly niggling at the text. On a bigger level, he was asking himself some really, really big questions, like, can I possibly have a race of creatures that are damned from the moment of their birth and that cannot be uh saved in any way because that goes against everything he believes in um and then also again right up until just a couple of days before he died he was still trying to work out galadriel um because when he got as far as Lothlorien in all of his drafts,

he suddenly comes up with this Galadriel figure. At first, she's just the pretty person on the arm of Celeborn. And then, of course, Celeborn just becomes the pretty person on the arm of Galadriel. But he has to then decide, well, who's Galadriel? So he has to go back and actually create a backstory for Galadriel. And that's fine because Galadriel is a penitent. She has done all of this stuff and now she's here and she can't go back until she's done X, Y and Z.

And makes her a good story. Makes her a good story, except then later in life, he tries to rewrite her into a kind of Marian figure where she is, you know, she's Mary. Well, that can't work if she's a penitent, because that's rewrite the backstory of somebody to fit with um you just think well if he could have just moved on and said okay i'm just gonna have to leave that i'm gonna write about the second age now think what we would have had could actually know more about you know all of numenor and you know all of the kings and how the gondorians managed to recolonize middle earth yes we just get the snippets that we find in which you know by the way sociologically that is to me such a weird concept that like the numenoreans were like an ennobled you know group of of men who fuck off for a while then after a while realize they get tired of living in basic

near paradise and are like you know what we should do colonization yeah we need to do we need to have some colonies i think our our society our mere perfect society is missing something something inherently no offense but something inherently english oh no i need some offshore colonies somewhere and so then they i think it's also because they can't go to aman yes they're like well i'm just gonna go this way and suddenly you have like they're recolonizing the place from which they originally came and they're coming to these men who did not have the privilege of being enabled of being ennobled and being like don don't worry, I'm here to save you. Don't worry. And you're like, they come on with the world's biggest savior complex

and being like, oh, don't worry, you poor, dirty little men. Yes. We're here to bring our knowledge and wisdom to you. We'll take care of that. Let's ask how the Druidon feel about this. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that... Speaking of the other in the Lord of the Rings,

we can talk about the dark... Yeah, like the Druidon and, of course, all the other men that were still in Middle Earth during the dark times in the second age. Yes, yeah. I mean, the one thing that we can say in Tolkien's favor is that one of the reasons why he has the Numenoreans start this colonization

is because it's indicative of the fall. Yes. He's showing it as a bad thing. It is a bad thing, yeah. Yes. So that's actually pretty interesting for a guy who grew up with the british empire who was born in a colony right he was born in south africa born in blumfontein yes yeah at least he didn't get the accent

well he did leave when he was three so that's yeah a little difficult yeah yeah um so at least he is in this particular case he is actually using uh colonization as an indicator of the of the fall from grace and that's really interesting because at first of course it's it starts off as you know the the white man cometh yeah uh and then it slowly over many many hundreds of years turns into well now we're just going to take what we want we're not asking anymore at first at first they're like gift givers and sharers and And then eventually they're like, actually, we're going to set up a city here. Actually, I'm in charge of the city here. Yes.

Yeah. And actually, I'm going to take you, you, you and you as slaves. And then actually, I'm going to take all of these slaves. I'm going to give them to Sauron and he can sacrifice them on the altar to Morgoth. Yeah, we're going to get into our weird human sacrifice era. Ketha, I don't remember how much of the Silmarillion you'll remember, but eventually on

Numenor, when Sauron gets there, he eventually gets into them to doing literally a human sacrifice cult, where they're sacrificing people to Morgoth. And so they're taking human slaves from Middle-earth, from the non-ascended men, taking them to the the island and then

literally doing like human sacrifice in the name of morgoth yeah yeah it's that's that's the uh the the ultimate fall if you like because of course it's fear of death that brings them to that point. They want to give back the gift of Iluvatar. They don't like the gift of Iluvatar and so fearing death, that's why they listen to Sauron, who tells them that he knows the way to avoid death and that it's all the El's fault and they're withholding eternal life from you and you should just take it. And Morgoth can help as long as you, you know, kill lots of humans to do that. And then you need to build this enormous navy and go sailing west and stick a flag in the

beach over there in Valinor and say, this is ours now. And yeah, that does not work out so well. Can I say, I just noticed a really weird parallel because we did just recently read um as we said the chronicles of narnia in the magician's nephew upon the creation of narnia diggory is sent to go get the apple from the tree and what happens jadis our favorite jadis i'm sorry We decided that Jadis is possibly the most interesting character. She's very interesting. Throughout the series.

Jadis is there just munching on this apple being like, you know these apples will just like heal your mom, right? Like you can eat this and she'll be healthy and you could eat one and you could be immortal like me. You could just do it. And Aslan is withholding this from you so jadis is essentially doing that same bargain saying that you have immortality here you just have to reach out and take it and aslan is keeping it from you and we actually pointed

out that realistically diggory turning her down is actually kind of stupid because as far as he he's just met aslan so far as he knows aslan isn't anyone more special than jadis well he did just see jadis terrorize an entire like community of people and he did just see aslan create a world true but like he doesn't know aslan you know you're can say he doesn't know him from Adam. Like he's just, he's just this weird lion, but he does have, I mean,

obviously the pun here is he is taking it on faith that Aslan is, Aslan is, is the correct choice. But of course it has to be an apple, right? Because it's the temptation. But just pointing out that like Jadis there is doing the same temptation that Sauron offers the Numenoreans,

which is immortality is yours for the taking. If you simply reach out and take it. But we did come to the conclusion. So I know that Jadis is possibly the most interesting character throughout most of Narnia. And that I, you know, apparently just do have a fondness for a seven foot tall,

strong woman willing to beat people with a metal pole. Three cheers for the queen of Colniac. And the fact that the first king of Narnia is just a cabbie. Yes, Frank. Frank, poor Frank, Frank the cabbie. And also that his, the horse that becomes a Pegasus is just a trans character, whether you like it or not.

Oh, I'm happy to hear that. Strawberry the horse becomes a pegasus with a new name, and they actually catch themselves calling the horse by the old name and correct themselves. They stop themselves from dead naming the horse, which is interesting. It's brilliant. That's brilliant. That hadn't occurred to me.

That's fantastic. Essentially dead naming the Pegasus. Speaking of authorial intent, that's not the intention. I do not think that was Lewis's intent was to have a trans horse. What's that sound? Oh, it's Lewis spitting in his grave. Well, hey, if we're going to mention weirdly sort of almost explicitly homoerotic relationships, we can talk about the last battle and the last king of Narnia and his boyfriend, the unicorn.

Oh, boy. Yeah. Let's not talk about what is an explicitly a gay relationship. We have to find something good about the last battle because it's so terrible about it it's the other gay relationship between the king and his and his like unicorn friend uh-huh his unicorn friend yeah that's yeah now talking of trans characters let's talk about eowyn yeah please let's do um i'm gonna be giving a paper oxenmoot actually uh in just a few weeks time um where that is essentially my argument that um looking at you know the eowyn dirnhelm thing um there's this wonderful line where Merry looks at Eowyn, who is actually Durnhelm at this point, and confronting the Witch King. And the line is, Eowyn it was and Durnhelm also.

And my argument is that Durnhelm is not a disguise. That is Eowyn. Durnhelm is Eowyn is Durnhelm. Can I just say offhand, I want to give you a big prop before we even discuss this further for discussing pro-trans theories in the UK.

So thank you for that. Some of us deeply appreciate that. So thank you for your bravery. Well, I think also props to the Tolkien Society for actually being very welcoming to queer readings of The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's work, because I am not the only one doing a queer reading of The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's work, because I am not the only one doing a queer

reading of the Lord of the Rings at this oxen moat. Don't let the Guardian into the oxen moat, and I think we might be fine. Oh, but I mean, there's a wonderful book that the Tolkien Society just put out, which is a collection of the papers from the diversity seminar that was held a few years ago. And there are some wonderful essays in there. Cough, mine as well. And mine is on the invisibility of the dwarf women. There's a lot of really good stuff actually coming through the Tolkien Society.

They are very open to lots of different readings of Tolkien. I think that's to their credit. I think that's wonderful. And I was a little trepidatious at proposing this because I thought, will they accept it? Won't they accept it? They accepted it. And I thought will they accept it won't they accept it they accepted it and I know that they accepted it over other proposals because there were more proposals than were accepted uh and um a friend of mine called Mercury they are doing a queer reading um alongside me we're in a little panel of two which which is fantastic. But like I said, even we are not the only ones who are doing queer readings. And it's fabulous. It is.

That we are having an audience for alternative readings of Tolkien. And wonderful. It is. And it's one of those things where I find being a fan of Tolkien and like him being a fan of what I call his source material, you know, say again, like the Edda or, you know, these more sort of, dare we call them like Scandinavian related,

like Iron Age, like type things. You often find yourself unfortunately sharing some space with a much more reactionary element of readers. Because there's no shortage of people out there that want to read tolkien as this like sort of white supremacist screed oh sure they've co-opted him for exactly it and or you know again take like you know the sort of scandinavian

norse mythos that he's borrowing from and making it a you white, it was between numerable white supremacists that, you know, have co-opted sort of Norse symbology. Yes. Giorgio Maloney amongst them, of course, the premier of Italy, big fan of Tolkien. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where I'm so glad that stuff like the Tolkien Society is going in this direction because it would be just as easy for them to lean into this group of people that are reading. They would pull a Nietzsche on Tolkien where they would take their work and then have its interpretation be an explicitly fascist one, which when I have discussed on the show before is not what Nietzsche intended either. But now a lot of people think of Nietzsche and they think of the Nazis because of the way his

sister promoted his work, not the way he did. And I, I, I find myself uncomfortably in like being a Tolkien fan, you know, being near these, like, I got a Volkanut tattoo, you know, type people that I don't appreciate having to be around. Yeah, yeah. Well, luckily, those kinds of people don't tend to come to the Tolkien Society events. That's good. They're not really welcome. There was an incident at a tolkien society seminar um last july so not this july just gone last july um where there was somebody who was immensely disrespectful and

said some really really terrible things and was thrown out um they were there in person and they were asked to leave and they were not allowed to come back in again and I thought that was absolutely brilliant and completely right but you know I think that the Tolkien Society are standing up for people in a way that is laudable and I love to see it and I have to just put this out there that Will Sherwood, who organizes the Tolkien Society seminars and also then organizes the publication of papers afterwards with the diversity seminar, Will received death threats and he had a lot to cope with. And I think it is also incredibly laudable that he was still prepared to go through with the diversity seminar, because it was very important that it was held. He should not have

had to put up with what he had to put up with. And many of us who are friends of his did not realize just how bad it was. But yeah, exactly. I think I can say probably for, you know, for Kathleen and I both, next time you speak to him, you can say that there are, you know, very specific queer people out here who appreciate, you know,

what he did and went through to make that happen. Because there are some of us out here again who are, you know, queer fans of Tolkien and, you know, take quite a lot from this work and wish to be able to continue to be part of the community, you know? And when you see someone like Georgia Maloney being like, ah, Tolkien's great. And I'm like, yes, look, you want to make the joke with her. We're like those white supremacist circles. If you go far enough in them, you find the white supremacists who would argue that Georgia Maloney isn't even white because she's Italian. So you don't think you want to dig into that pond scum too far, even though

it is occasionally in the way that it's fun to watch the two worst people, you know, punch each other to see when like you get like Italian fascists being called non-white by you know like northern european fascists and you're like this is a very you know the italians invented it right yeah like that's the thing about evil isn't it it just ends up eating itself yeah it sure does yes and look or may it do so makes life easy for the rest of us but i will admit that i hadn't even you know as a trans person myself i'd never put together the you know trans mask eowyn that wasn't one i had i had put together what how how'd you get around to that one or what brought you to that well there's always this argument isn't there that oh eowyn she's the shield maiden and

she kills the witch king and it's awesome and then she just decides to get married he becomes a healer and that's it um and it's been one of those criticisms of tolkien that has been bound up with the is tolkien a misogynist question um and i actually thought hang on i think eowyn might be a little bit more interesting than that um and so when i was uh working on this um race gender and the other lecture series i decided i was going to do a deeper dive into um the drawing of her character and i was And I was particularly interested in her reasons for being Durnhelm. And it's really noticeable in the book that once it's Durnhelm, all the pronouns are masculine. It's not like the film where we know from the start that this is Eowyn in disguise. All right. They show Eowyn in disguise as they don't really use the name Durnhelm at all,

which, of course, means secret helmet, which is interesting. Right. But in the book, it's it's very clear. As soon as it's Durnhelm, it's masculine. there's masculine pronouns are always used. And it's only right at the moment where Eowyn reveals, when Durnhelm reveals himself to also be Eowyn, when confronting the Witch King, that if you've not read the book before, that's the moment when you realize that Durnhelm and Eowyn are one and the same person. OK, and when Eowyn responds to the Witch King, when he says, you know, no living man may hinder me. The response is you look not not upon a man, you look upon a woman. a man, you look upon a woman. To me, that's actually both genders are playing in the same body at the same time here. It's really fluid because we've had these chapters where Dernhelm is definitely presented as masculine. This is a masculine body performing a masculinity,

masculine. This is a masculine body performing a masculinity, which is riding into battle, right? Then in confronting the Witch King, of course, what we then have to ask ourselves is, well, why does Eowyn say you don't look upon a living man, you look upon a woman? Because it's a badass line, mostly? I don't know. It's an incredibly badass line. But there's also, you then have to ask the question of why does Eowyn embrace the Durnhelm side of herself in the first place? Why must she be Durnhelm? And we know why it's because she, she's told that, you know, men get to go to battle. Okay. In that case, I will be a man and she does become a man um it's not eowyn in disguise

durnhelm is eowyn is durnhelm then when the confrontation with the witch king comes about we have masculine pronouns right up until the moment the helmet comes off. It's revealed to be Eowyn. And to me, what we've got here is it's not a disguise. This is a fluidity of gender. And there comes a point where Eowyn actually accepts the Eowyn-ness of herself, as well as the Durnhelm-ness of herself. Because up until the point where Eowyn-ness of herself as well as the Durnhelm-ness of herself. Because up until the point where Eowyn rides into battle,

there's been a lack of acceptance of the Eowyn-ness of herself because she hates it. She hates the way in which she is caged, in which she is being essentialised into her gender. The role which she's forced to perform. Exactly. She is performing a femininity that she does not want to perform. She doesn't, it's not her at all, but it's a role that she is forced into. She is more comfortable performing masculinity and being Durnhelm and taking that on. Confronting the Witch King is a moment where Eowyn understands that she could also accept the Eowyn in her,

as well as the Durnhelm in her, that both are powerful. Durnhelm is powerful because he can ride into battle. He can be with the rest of the riders of Rohan. He can take Merry with him. He can stand over the dying body of Theoden and defend him. He can do all of these things that Eowyn thought she could not do. And then there comes a point where Eowyn understands actually she is also powerful in this moment and can be both. So there's a really fluid gender reading of Eowyn that's possible here. And that's what I'm going to be arguing at Oxenmoot. I like that a lot, actually. I like that a lot.

I would say also as I'm thinking about this, something that never occurred to me is that you could probably do some sort of reading in the like that the no man can hinder the witch king. If you're looking at like from a gender role perspective, that the things that men are expected to be aggressive warrior, that that sort of behavior can never be the undoing of a being such as the witch King who will do those things better than you will. Where the only way you could undo a creature of such violence and malice is by being what it cannot be. Right. Yeah.

You know, so like accepting her femininity as Eowyn, that in a way gets rid of that weird question of like, well, Tolkien uses man to mean the race of men sometimes. Only when it's capitalized. Yeah. But, but you've seen some people try to say, well, how does she kill him if she's also of the race of men or whatever, but you can't avoid that by being like, well, it's because in that moment, then when she accepts being Eowyn, she is no longer performing the role of being a man. She's accepting the non-masculine, the more feminine parts of her being, which are the things that are necessary to undo the kind of creature that the Witch King is. King, to me anyway, is like a hyper exaggeration of the negative characteristics of masculinity. It's power, it's domination, it's violence. Yeah, it's violence. So it's not just the like,

I can't be killed by a man. It's like, my evil cannot be done by traditional masculinity, which is also the other person who stabs him is Mary, who we already talked about, is not really performing any general, you know, typical masculinity basically ever. He wants to hang out and talk. He wants to hang out, you know, with his life partner and talk about plants. Yes. And eat. Have fun. Yeah.

Yeah. And then when you get to the chapter, the steward and the king, when Eowyn decides that she will marry Faramir, this is where people get stuck and say, well, this shows that Tolkien just wants her to become a wife and mother and that's it. And off she pops. But actually, again, it's much more complicated than that. In accepting Faramir, this is Eowyn able to make a choice about her own life for the first time. And she makes the choice. And Faramir, very And she realizes she actually can make a choice about her own life for the very first time. But also in deciding that she's going to become a healer rather than a warrior. This is not her, you know, just sort of being subsumed into femininity. No, no. This is Eowyn understanding that she can balance the masculinity and the femininity within her and embrace both. Because healing is not a feminine pastime in Middle Earth. In actual fact, it's a feminine masculinity. The healers are male, right? Yes, we've got Yoreth, my woman Yoreth. Oh, Yoreth. Absolutely, yeah. But she is, you know, she is not the healer in the houses of healing.

You've got the guy, who, by the way, is rubbish. Yeah, the old lore master. Exactly, yes. But when it comes to healing, that is not a feminized thing to do. No, the greatest healer in Middle in Middle Earth is Elrond. Right. Yeah. And Aragorn, who comes from the line of Luthien. Yeah. Right. It was, yeah, you've got here with Eowyn in deciding, she's not accepting wifehood. She's deciding to choose that. But this isn't going to make her lesser she's instead going

to balance the femininity and masculinity and accept all of that within herself and be both and actually i think that's way more interesting um it does not get tolkien off the hook of can he actually write female characters but i think there's a lot yeah which i think he does kind of fail the writing female characters there's a lot about his female characters that are more complicated than they seem on the surface you know so eowyn is definitely one of them there's a heck of a lot more to say about Eowyn, especially if you are willing to just stop and think about the benefit of a queer reading of Eowyn. It actually gives you a better insight into what is going on with that character than just by dismissing her as, OK, so she does this and then she kills the witch king and then she becomes a wife. And that's that. And that's Tolkien being a terrible writer of women. There's a number of examples of historical examples of women who became Durnhelm in order

to do things that society would not allow. I mean, I can't remember his name off the bat. There was one who became like the most famous doctor ever. Yes. Yes. Oh, they were on. There was something on Twitter about them just the other day. Became like the most famous doctor ever. And they only realized that this person had not been born like male when he died. There was a, one of my other favorites is a man who fought in the Mexican revolution for Miliano Zapata as a soldier and who fought as a man, lived as a man,

had a wife. And if anyone ever tried to like a dead name him or bring up that past would threaten to shoot them dead, which is an energy I can respect. Oh, you're going to call me a woman. I will kill you. And so like, there's a number of examples of that like throughout history of like, of, you know,

pulling a Dern helm and being like, no, this is a person that I am. Now, you know, you'll hear the sort of the bigots trying to argue that this, the people only did this because patriarchy would not allow them to perform that role as a woman. But I think it's, as you just pointed out, it's definitively more complicated than that. It is. Because I think during like the Mexican revolution, if a woman had said, I'm going to shoot people, Zapata would have been like, great, cool, welcome to the team. We need more of you. Being masculine with it was a choice on his part.

That woman a gun. Absolutely. I absolutely agree. So, yeah, I think that, well, hopefully there'll be an interested reception of the paper at Oxenmoot. I think that there will be, because I think that complicating Tolkien's characters makes them way more interesting. So you were saying that he still fails. Yeah, in some ways, yes. But there are lots of interesting things to say about some of his female characters that are um again more interesting if we look at them from different

through different optics it's difficult not to be a little more dismissive of Arwen for example because she doesn't seem to do a lot apart from so banners turn up get married and give Frodo her ticket to west yeah I'm not gonna do this one here we go yeah there's not a massive amount extra I mean I will be happy if somebody says oh but you haven't thought of reading her this way and they come up with something different I would love that so I'm hoping somebody at some point will do something like that. But as it stands now, she is very, very sidelined and flat. Yeah, because her story only appears in the appendices. And even then, there's there's not much that really gives us a vision of who she really is

that is one thing Jackson at least did do, you'd live Tyler well he kind of had to, didn't he if you're going to have Aragorn's love interest then you're going to have to weave her in somehow I mean some of it was nonsensical yeah, obviously Arwen's fate is tied to the fate of the ring

really? how? exactly I'm not sure i understand that someone please explain that to me thank you you know just just roll with it you know that's a very you know some say some say it's related somehow don't don't think about it too hard um i mean i was i was thinking earlier that you know i'm sure you know you're you know familiar with the very, very basic like screenwriting thing of like the Bechdel test, right? Which the Lord of the Rings can't pass in any capacity. The Hobbit can't pass.

And I don't think the Silmarillion can either. Yeah. I mean, we know that Galadriel and melian have discussions yeah not in real time like it says they discussed it but it's not like you don't see it happen no there's it's not and obviously the backfill test does have flaws and like because you can have strong you can have strong female characters without it but i find it to be an interesting place to at least start looking at a lens and you're like oh there's barely enough women for them to speak to each other to even have them speak to each other because they're not enough of them yes it's funny because allison bechdel herself is like

well i didn't really intend for that to be a measure but okay that was a joke but okay that's what i said i like it as it as like a jumping off point to allow you to then have a better discussion about the gender politics of whatever piece of media you're looking at. It's not like the end all be all of it, but it's a fun place to start. You're like, well, you know,

The Hobbit doesn't have any women in it, I think, except for Lobelia. I think, honestly, I think Lobelia might be the only female character in the habit yeah okay yes okay yeah yeah yeah but i want to pick up on your phrase they're strong female characters because i've got a a little bit of a thing about that phrase what i'm wrong about. No, no, no, no, it's not wrong.

It's just my personal bugbear with that phrase because we don't use that as a phrase about male characters, strong male characters. It's not really the same sort of thing. There's kind of like this onus on a good female character must be a strong female character. And what on earth do we mean by that? I mean, there's no one. Is it ones that are performing more as we'd expect men to do?

Well, see, that's the thing. I mean, there's no one way to be female. There's no one right way to be female. What I would prefer in films and books, et cetera, is not strong female characters, but well-written and well-rounded female characters that actually have agency and a part to play in the narrative rather than just being an arm ornament or something like that the phrase strong female character which of course we

could then add to someone like eowyn i mean mean, okay, she's a strong female character, but does a good female character have to be an Eowyn? And actually, my answer is no. Look at Yoreth. I think Yoreth is a great female character, actually, and has way more lines than... Has direct influence on the events that happen in the story. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. direct influence on the events that happen in the story. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So what I would prefer people to start thinking about is that we can actually have female characters who are as well-written as the ubiquitous male characters, because one of the reasons why I've stopped going to the cinema is they're all men's stories they're all stories about men I'm bored frankly by that I want to see more women's stories but they don't have to be strong female characters they just have to be well-written women you know um and I think you know we're a long way from that yet because so many films that come out are men's stories and it irritates the living hell out of me.

But that's a whole other story. I don't remember what author it was, but there were talk to him about like writing characters because his book had been received as saying like some of the women characters were really well written. You know, the women characters had personality and drive and ambition and all the things you expect from just like just well-written characters and they were like well how do you write women characters that well and i can't remember for life me who it was but they basically responded oh well the secret is i don't i just write characters. And then after I'm done, I just assign gender to them afterwards. It was like this character that he was admitting that like, yeah,

he, he, that he wasn't good at being like from a female perspective, writing a character. It was that he simply wrote a character. And then at the end thought, I actually think the story would be better if this was a woman and then changed nothing else about the character at all. And I thought that was at least an interesting perspective from an author admitting that he couldn't really see things from

a female perspective, but simply going, well, I write characters. I'm just simply, some of them will be women and I'm not going to like make a big, like it's not going to affect my writing process. Not that that's the perfect way to do it, but I think it was an interesting point that like you simply just write a good character. Yeah. Yeah. Like regardless of how you intend this character to be perceived by the audience afterwards. You know what I mean? Like I just write good characters. It doesn't need to be, how do I make the woman good? Yes. Or, oh goodness, I've written this without any female characters.

I need to throw a couple in there. Or my male main character needs a love interest. I know, I'll chuck a woman in here. I'll just make one of these a woman. It'll be fine. I think that's what often plagues a lot of, I think, modern cinema and often adaptions of older books that don't have good female representation. It's just like, well, we'll just gender swap a character and call it good.

Yeah. And you can kind of tell sometimes. Yeah. Like, oh, we just gender swap this character to have a different character in it. Really haven't thought about the nuances of what you've decided to do, have you? really haven't thought about the nuances of what you've decided to do, have you? Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

that happened with even movies. I like Mike, the newest Dune adaptation where they, they gender swapped the ecology professor, I think just because they felt like they should. Yeah. And that's the problem. A lot of the time it's done because they want to tick a box rather than they tick the box when actually the,

the character of the ecology professor is actually very important as like the father figure of the Fremen religion. That's a whole, again, talk about a whole other episode that we'd have to get into. We've talked about Dune before a little bit. I do love Frank Herbert, despite his. Yeah, eccentricities. Well, we got about, I think, 15 minutes left here, I think. Was there anything you specifically wanted to go into that we haven't covered yet that you think is a thing that people definitively overlook

or something that you really is going into like your new book that you think really isn't like specifically talked about enough. Oh, I want to talk about Shelob. Okay. I'll talk about Shelob. Let's talk about Shelob. There's a book coming out, hopefully this time next year, which will be a collection of essays that are all queer readings of Tolkien. And mine is on Shel lob as a queer mother exactly see this is the thing that people overlook is that you know they think of she lob and they think horrible spider the whole purpose of she lob is simply to be this um

obstacle in the way of frodo and Sam getting into Mordor, and she's totally horrific, etc, etc, etc. But again, it's more complicated than that. And I love it when it's more complicated than that, because it really is. Because what a lot of people miss is that Shelob is actually a maternal figure. She's not what we in our society today would term a good maternal figure, but she is one anyway. And that I find fascinating. So this chapter I've written is on looking at how she is performing a masculine femininity, even to the point of her maternal body. Because of course, if there's just this little bit, it's a couple of sentences where it talks about her offspring, with whom she mates, and then she kills them, and she eats them. So, you know, she's a bad mother,

eats them um so you know she's she's a bad mother that's for sure um but it's just fascinating that he that Tolkien has created this uh evil figure in a maternal body um so I'm reading that via things like the the monstrous feminine so you can connect that to like Alien, for example. There's a monstrous feminine right there. But also, if you know your Beowulf, Grendel's mother. I think Grendel's mother gets a lot of bad press, by the way. What did she ever do? She is grieving her murdered son. Now I ask you, would you not be slightly annoyed by the fact that somebody has killed your son and that you want revenge?

And if that was the father figure, would the father figure be as demonized as Grendel's mother is? I'm thinking no, because that's a masculine thing she's doing, taking revenge against the murderers of her son. But I digress. Okay, so I think there's fascinating things to say about Shelob. Another thing that a lot of people seem to miss is that Shelob is probably not actually a spider. No, isn't she is a being in the, in a a form in the body and form of a spider, not actually one. She simply that is the form she inhabits, because that's to my mind anyway, the a form that Engoliant chose to inhabit. Exactly. It's not their form as such.

It is the form that they have chosen those are the only two beings that tolkien described as being legitimately evil like in his or irredeemably evil well it's well my my weird quick digression i don't know if you call it like theology or eschatology about that is like also in goliath is sort of like this anti-tom bombil. Yes. Where like, there's no origin. They simply are. Which goes back to our talk earlier about where evil comes from. Because in Goliath seems to stand outside

the Christian paradigm of evil is a perversion of good or an absence of good. Or Goliath just is, which is more of a dualistic thing to think than it is a sort of Christian monotheistic thing. But yeah, like you said, Kethel, they're like irredeemably and just naturally evil, which is not something you get from anyone else. Even Morgoth was good and then foul, whereas Ungoliant just is. And I don't know if that plays into sort of, as were saying this sort of spider this form that they've chosen to take

Is Tolkien just very scared of spiders? Well spiders I think for most people hashtag not everybody, some people like spiders, weirdos but Tolkien of course is tapping into one of our instincts which is

spiders, ew, right so he would not for example choose a snake because there are two obvious connotations there with snake in the garden of eden and a snake is another one of those creatures that we have like this instinctive fear and horror about but a spider is a good choice because spiders creep most people out um i mean there's a big difference between a little itty bitty thing that most people could ignore um and something ginormous that wants to eat you so yeah you know it's tapping into our base instincts um which is i think one of the reasons why he chooses the spider form. But he makes it quite clear in the text that she is in spider form, not necessarily an actual spider.

And then if you look at his description of her body, I mean, he uses the word monster and monstrous over and over again, over like two or three pages. But then his description of her body is fascinating. Splayed legs, swollen belly that sways the stench from between her legs. And it's like, jeepers, Tolkien, what were you smoking that day? talking what were you smoking that day um that you know there's there's a lot in there if you look at the description that is uh it's meant to repulse um but it is unmistakably feminine right it's matriarchal it is but if we take a step back and think, what is she doing that's so bad? Actually, what is so bad about her behavior? These hobbits have come into her house and she's hungry, right? She's doing what any creature would do. Food, I'm hungry, I hunt, I kill, I eat. That's how it works, right?

I hunt, I kill, I eat. That's how it works, right? Her evil comes from her inherent dislike of the light, because light is inherently good. Yeah, that's what we're meant to infer, isn't it? And because she eats living sentient beings, which is something that orcs also do. Yes, but it's something that spiders in the primary world do.

Yeah, but I'm just working through what it could be. It's that she doesn't like the light and she eats sentient beings. That's what we have on her that makes her evil. That and the narrator essentially telling us, this lady be evil. Yes, exactly. I i mean we're meant to be upset about it because of course um we followed frodo and sam up here and and we don't want frodo and sam to be eaten by shelob uh and so oh shelob evil because she's going to attack frodo and sam and frodo and sam are the good guys so So that must mean that she lobbies bad. Right. But if we break it right down to what she actually does, even the fact that it says that she eats her own offspring,

that form of cannibalism is a very natural behavior in a multitude of species in our primary world. behavior in a multitude of species in our primary world. And she's condemned for it. Her behaviors are all condemned via the narrator in such a way as to make her condemned by the reader. And I just find that interesting that she's condemned for her actions, that if you actually break them down, her actions are not evil. They're natural.'re natural they are i'm just putting a spoke in the works by saying she love is she really so bad no i mean she's like we don't have time to fish off but i want to say she's like yeah evil only in such a way as like you can make, like a horror movie can make like a wolf evil. Yes. Or, you know what I mean?

Like it's only evil in that it's a threat to you personally. It's not evil in an existential way because it is simply being. Yes. And it's just the fact that it's being is a threat to you makes it evil. More like a wild animal than it is sauron it's less like intentional evil and more like the sort of evil that can't be reasoned with like there's no there's no space to reason with something that's just hungry and naturally doing what it does yes and it's like an unconscious evil in a way because it because it would still be a bad thing in the grand scheme of the world if even for shelob if if yeah sees it as existing she's living but the narrator makes us think her action is evil because it describes her

as yes hateful yes and brooding vomit darkness and all of it yeah that she vomits darkness and that she's hateful of the light and that she's brooding and like the narrator tells us she is all these things yes before we even see her Personification of a being that exists, of a spirit that exists. Yeah, we get all of that before we actually see her. Yeah, we're imposing our views of good and evil upon her, which reminds me of, I'll wrap it up full circle, an Ursula Le Guin quote about dragons which is that dragons are not constrained by human morality they are beyond they're above it and they're beyond it they

simply act and be and do like they don't have these questions yeah which is a quote le Guin had about dragons in her world where to to us, they are evil to them. They are simply, they just are. They just are. Yes. And so they simply have to be and do. They don't have these moral quandaries,

which though I am not like a human, like exclusionist from nature, we do seem to be just about the only creature that so far has come across these moral quandaries that we have to deal with on a regular basis. Yeah, yeah. It's not like Shelob is doing Sauron's bidding. No, no, she's explicitly not. Wasn't Morgoth like a little bit scared of Ungoliant?

Ungoliant nearly, no, Ungoliant nearly killed him. He was saved by his legion of Balrog. Yeah. She explicitly is not. Ungoliant nearly killed Morgoth and Shelob is explicitly not doing Sauron's bidding. He simply is just like, I like her there.

I'm just not going to bother that. She is not his pet. I'm just not going to touch her I'm just not going to touch her. Yes. Probably very wise. Yeah. We associate her with Sauron because we associate her with evil. We associate her with Mordor because Torah Ungol is right there on the

borders of Mordor. Actually not related at all. Yeah. So anyway, it seems a good place to leave it is Shelob. Is she so bad? I love it. I love it.

I love it. Dr. Sarah Brown, thank you so much for being on the podcast. This has been a wonderful discussion. You are welcome back anytime. Oh, just keep asking me. This or other books, you can come back and talk about Pratchett or Le Guin or God knows who else we've got coming up on the docket. I want to say this episode is dropping as our two year anniversary. Oh, cool. Wow. I love it.

All of our listeners out there, thank you for sticking with us for two whole years. Lord knows why anybody's done that. But you have and we love you and a special as always a special personal uh thank you to all of our patrons we all love you personally we i will we'll come around and tuck you into bed later for all of your support not in a creepy stalker way nope no we've a bit no look our our patrons ones we have have been with us for quite some time and we have decided to abandon the parasocial and make it social. No, we all love each,

each and every one of you personally. No, thank you all so much for listening. Shout out to our patrons for being with us this whole time. Thank you again, Sarah, everyone to be on the lookout for Sarah Brown's work, follow her on Twitter,

her I'll put her Twitter handle in the show notes and, you know, do more queer readings of your authors, whether they like it or not, who cares what they like? A lot of them, most of them are dead. Honestly,

if they're alive, it's even funnier. It's much funnier. It's funnier to do readings because they hate it. That queer reading of Ender's Game. Let's go. Yeah, please.

Well, thank you everyone so much for listening. And we'll be back next time with I don't remember what we'll figure it out goodbye bye bro are you fucking real, man?

Come on.