Lord of the Rings, masculinity and writing back to Tolkien

[map_of_the_world]

So I've just finished Return of the King. I love Lord of the Rings so much. It's so rich and thick and complicated. I'm really interested in portrayals of masculinity and I think the Lord of the Rings is especially interesting in the way it portrays masculinity because it contains conflicting and competing masculinities and it contains non straightforward masculinities.

I think the fact that this book is partly an exploration of masculinities is why people (especially straight men) get really irate when you point out the homoeroticism between Sam and Frodo. It's as if people think that men who love men don't have a masculinity and therefore can't be men.

The films really foregrounded the homoeroticim and whenever I said "clearly Frodo and Sam were in love with each other" I almost invariably got the reply "well why cant they have just been very good friends?" They could have been but they weren't. It is a less than radical interpretation to pull out that they were in love with each other from the book. Their love for each other is not an adaptation or a retelling, it is there in the original text.



One of the things I love about this story is the deep understanding of trauma. It contains happy endings for grownups. The understanding that even if you win the war you are still left carrying greif and pain at the losses, destruction and wounding you have experienced. And that even if you win the war everything passes. everything changes, and everyone dies.


I love the Lord of the rings, but it has a fair whack of imperialism in there, and I was wondering, what if some one wrote the history from the Orcs point of view? I was moseying around google looking to see if anybody had done this and stumbled across this on wikipedia:

The Black Speech is the fictional language of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings. Sauron created the Black Speech, as an artificial language, to be the sole language of all the servants of Mordor, replacing the many different varieties of Orkish and other languages used by his servants.

I think much could be made of this. If you take someones language away, you annihilate their culture, you commit cultural genocide. So we could read LOTR as the Orks being a colonised people who were used as cannon fodder in a war between two imperialist powers.

OR the Orcs genuinely thought they were on the side of good, because the west was all run by feudal systems which suck beyond reckoning for the people at the bottom.

And we can ad some political intrigue in that maybe Aragorn WASN'T the heir to the throne, he was just some stray orphan boy and Gandalf and Elrond between them told him he was and because they told him he would be brilliant he became brilliant.

I think I would really like to do this. it would take a long time because I would need more of a grasp of the geography, history and cultures of Middle Earth but I think it would be really interesting

Comments

[kathie-d.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I've always been massively skeptical of Aragon being Islidur's (or however you spell it) heir. How do you just 'lose' several generations, and then just magically find them again? Without PCR? Hmm.

Heh, at least Jesus knew for a fact he was of the line of David.

And yes, I don't understand the whole Sam and Frodo were just friends thing. Hum.

I once read a book called (funnily enough) 'Orcs', which was a fantasy told from their point of view, with the Orcs as the heros. But not Tolkien's orcs.

[lost-letters.livejournal.com]

yeah. it totally seems like a set up. Though I'm not any more convinced of Jesus lineage to be honest. What is PCR?

I looked for that orc book but any of the ones on amazon it could have been had no synopsis.

[kathie-d.livejournal.com]

Oop, shit, sorry. I meant DNA testing. I was a bit caught up in what I was doing (i.e. playing with DNA), that I forgot that not everyone does it! >.>;;;

No, I suppose we have no way of testing Jesus's lineage, but since keeping track of these things was mega-important to the Jews... I guess they might have tried to get it right. ;)

[burningmarl.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed that! found the language stuff really interesting. I jused to be a HUGE lotr fan but I was just really upset to found that it's all flown out of my head. I remember Boromir's mother being Findulas though.

[lost-letters.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

I'm really interested in the way language is used as a tool of suppression. Almost all the post-colonial stuff we did at college was in regards to Ireland, Scotland and Wales and how the suppression of their languages by the English affected the cultures they lived in and affected the way they wrote and what they wrote about.