{"id":139,"date":"2003-12-18T05:59:44","date_gmt":"2003-12-18T10:59:44","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=139"},"modified":"2003-12-18T05:59:44","modified_gmt":"2003-12-18T10:59:44","slug":"sex-and-tolkien","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=139","title":{"rendered":"Sex and Tolkien"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, I went to my local instantiation of the all-three-LOTR-movies<br \/>\nmarathon on Tuesday, and enjoyed it immensely.  The movies were a<br \/>\ndelight; Peter Jackson&#8217;s <cite>Return Of The King<\/cite> fully lived up<br \/>\nto the promise of <cite>The Fellowship of the Ring<\/cite> and <cite>The<br \/>\nTwo Towers<\/cite>. Despite minor flaws and some questionable omissions,<br \/>\nTolkien fans have reason to be vastly grateful both for Jackson&#8217;s vision<br \/>\nand the fact that Hollywood actually allowed him to make these movies<br \/>\nas good as they are.<\/p>\n<p>The marathon was also quite a geekfest.  The theater was<br \/>\nwall-to-wall with SF and fantasy fans, SCAdians, computer hackers,<br \/>\nand the like.  A very intelligent, cerebral, imaginative crowd.  My<br \/>\nkind of people, talking and meeting and mixing with each other<br \/>\na great deal more than your typical movie crowd does. The fact<br \/>\nthat many people showed up hours early to get good seats, and the<br \/>\ntwo half-hour intermissions, helped a lot.<\/p>\n<p>In a refutation of stereotypes, many of those attending were<br \/>\nfemale.  And attractive.  And often dressed to display it in Arwen or<br \/>\nEowyn outfits.  Had I been actually trying, I believe I would have<br \/>\ntaken home at least three phone numbers, which is a significant datum<br \/>\neven given that I&#8217;m a lot more self-confident about the flirting thing<br \/>\nthan most geek guys.<\/p>\n<p>Part of me was in anthropologist mode, contemplating the mating<br \/>\nbehaviors on display, even as I was chatting with the pretty redheaded<br \/>\ntheater student from State College, the massage therapist in the seat<br \/>\nnext to me, the blonde in the concession-stand line, and the buxom<br \/>\nbig-eyed wench in the Ramones T-shirt who told me all about re-reading<br \/>\nthe Rings every year since she was eleven, and I&#8217;ll be <em>damned<\/em><br \/>\nif she didn&#8217;t mean that as at least a bit of a come-on.  I wondered<br \/>\nwhat Tolkien, Edwardian prude that he was, would have said of the<br \/>\nhuman tendency to turn the appreciation of his works into a sort of<br \/>\npickup scene for the high-IQ crowd.  That led me to consider ribald<br \/>\nparodies like the hilarious <a href='http:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/misc\/vsd\/'>Very Secret Diaries<\/a>,<br \/>\nwhich at least two of the women I chatted with obviously knew quite<br \/>\nwell and I&#8217;d bet money the other two did too.<\/p>\n<p>I was also thinking, during the movies, about Liv Tyler. Long-time<br \/>\nreaders will be aware that I have warm and lusty feelings about our<br \/>\nLiv.  OK, so I will cheerfully concede that Miranda Otto is a dish and<br \/>\nwell into wouldn&#8217;t-kick-her-out-of-bed territory, but her Eowyn<br \/>\ndoesn&#8217;t nail the releaser circuitry in my hindbrain quite the way<br \/>\nTyler&#8217;s Arwen does.  During the first movie I found watching Arwen&#8217;s<br \/>\nlips as she spoke Elvish quite an erotic experience.  (And it&#8217;s not<br \/>\njust me.  My sister Lisa reported, after I mentioned this, having been<br \/>\nstartled to discover the same reaction in herself.  This is amusing<br \/>\nbecause I have never had any reason to doubt her report that she&#8217;s<br \/>\nnormally as straight as a laser-beam.) Arwen isn&#8217;t any less sexy<br \/>\nin the third movie.<\/p>\n<p>So I was well-primed to read the essay <a href='http:\/\/www.ansereg.com\/warm_beds_are_good.htm'>Warm Beds Are<br \/>\nGood<\/a> this morning.  This is an extended and thorough consideration<br \/>\nof sex and sexuality in Tolkien&#8217;s works. Towards the end, the author<br \/>\nmakes the telling point that eroticizing various elements in Tolkien&#8217;s<br \/>\nmythos is one of the ways in which modern readers adapt it to their<br \/>\nown fantasy needs.  This makes sense; giving a luscious version of<br \/>\nArwen screen time and playing up her thing with Aragorn is not just a<br \/>\ncrude sell-it-with-sex maneuver, it&#8217;s a way to make the mythos<br \/>\nfundamentally more intelligible to a viewer in 2003 than the rather<br \/>\ndessicated and repressed account of <cite>The romance of Aragorn and<br \/>\nArwen<\/cite> in Appendix A of <cite>The Lord of the Rings<\/cite> would<br \/>\nhave been.<\/p>\n<p><cite>Warm Beds Are Good<\/cite> fails to grapple with the most<br \/>\ninteresting question of all, however, which is how Arwen and Aragorn<br \/>\ncould possibly have developed the hots for each other in the first<br \/>\nplace.  It turns out to be rather hard to come up with any theory of<br \/>\nElvish reproductive biology under which Arwen&#8217;s behavior makes<br \/>\nany sense at all.<\/p>\n<p>Aragorn&#8217;s end isn&#8217;t that much of a mystery.  He&#8217;s an alpha male of<br \/>\na warrior culture, chock full o&#8217; testosterone and other dominance<br \/>\nhormones guaranteed to make him into a serious horn-dog.  She&#8217;s a<br \/>\nbeautiful princess, broadcasting human-compatible health-and-fertility<br \/>\nsignals in all directions.  If she doesn&#8217;t actively smell bad, tab A<br \/>\nfits slot B just fine from the point of view of <em>his<\/em><br \/>\nmating instincts.<\/p>\n<p>No, the fundamental problem is Arwen&#8217;s lifespan.  She is supposedly<br \/>\nsomething like two thousand, seven hundred years old when she meets<br \/>\nAragorn.  That&#8217;s an awful lot of Saturday nights at the Last Homely<br \/>\nDisco West of the Mountains; if she has a sex drive anything like a<br \/>\nnormal human female&#8217;s, she ought to have more mileage on her than a<br \/>\nLiberian tramp steamer.  On the other hand, if her sexual wiring is<br \/>\nfundamentally <em>different<\/em> from a human female&#8217;s, what&#8217;n&#8217;thehell<br \/>\nis she doing with Aragorn?  He shouldn&#8217;t look or smell or behave right<br \/>\nto trigger her releasers, any more than a talking chimpanzee would to<br \/>\nmost human women.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;B-b-but&#8230;&rdquo; I hear you splutter &ldquo;This is<br \/>\n<em>fantasy!<\/em>&rdquo;, to which I say foo!  Tolkien was very<br \/>\ncareful about logical consistency in areas where he was equipped by<br \/>\ntemperament and training to appreciate it; he invented a cosmology,<br \/>\nthousand of years of history, multiple languages; he drew maps.  He<br \/>\nlectured on the importance of a having convincing and consistent<br \/>\nsecondary world in fantasy. Furthermore, Tolkien never completely<br \/>\nrepudiated the intention that his fiction was a mythic description of<br \/>\nthe lost past of <em>our<\/em> Earth, and that therefore matter, energy<br \/>\nand life should be consistent with the forms in which we know<br \/>\nthem.<\/p>\n<p>Therefore, it is entirely appropriate to analyze Middle-Earth as<br \/>\nthough it were a science-fictional creation, to assume Elves and Men<br \/>\nboth got DNA, and to ask if the freakin&#8217; biology makes any sense at<br \/>\nall under this assumption.<\/p>\n<p>And one of the facts we have to deal with is that humans and elves<br \/>\nare not just interfertile, they produce fertile offspring.  That means<br \/>\nthey have to be genetically very, <em>very<\/em> similar.  If there<br \/>\nare dramatic differences between elf and human reproductive behavior,<br \/>\nthe instinctive basis for them must be coded in a relatively small<br \/>\nset of genes that somehow don&#8217;t interfere with that interfertility.<br \/>\nIn fact, technically, Elves and Men have to be subspecies of the<br \/>\nsame stock.<\/p>\n<p>When this came up on my favorite mailing list just after the first<br \/>\nmovie came out, my hypothesis was that elves (a) have only rare<br \/>\nperiods of vulnerability to sexual impulses, and (b) imprint on each<br \/>\nother for life when they mate, like swans.  This pattern is actually<br \/>\nwithin the envelope of human variation, though uncommon &mdash; which<br \/>\nmakes it a plausible candidate for being dominant in another hominid<br \/>\nsubspecies.<\/p>\n<p>This &lsquo;swan theory&rsquo; would be consistent with Appendix A,<br \/>\nwhich (a) has Arwen meeting Aragorn when he was garbed like an elven<br \/>\nprince and (as near as we can tell through Tolkien&#8217;s rather clotted<br \/>\nchansons-de-geste style) falling for him hard right then and there,<br \/>\nand (b) has Arwen&#8217;s family apparently operating under the assumption<br \/>\nthat once that had happened, the damage was done and she wouldn&#8217;t be<br \/>\nmating with anyone else, noway, nohow.<\/p>\n<p>One of the techies on the list shot the swan theory down by finding a<br \/>\ncanonical instance of an Elf remarrying (Finwe, father of Feanor;<br \/>\nfirst wife Miriel, second Indis).  In subsequent discussion, we<br \/>\nconcluded that it wasn&#8217;t possible to frame a consistent theory that<br \/>\nfit Tolkien&#8217;s facts.  The sticking-point turned out to be the<br \/>\nhalf-elven; Tolkien tells us that they get to <em>choose<\/em> whether<br \/>\nthey will have the nature of Men or Elves, and it is implied that they<br \/>\ndo so at puberty.<\/p>\n<p>Since that&#8217;s true, the difference between Men and Elves can&#8217;t<br \/>\nproperly be genetic at all.  It must be in the cloudy realm of spirit,<br \/>\nmagic, and divine interventions.  This is not an area in which Tolkien<br \/>\n(a devout Catholic) gives us any rules or regularities at all.  Elvish<br \/>\nsexual behavior could be arbitrarily variant from human without any<br \/>\nreasons other than that Eru keeps exerting his will to make it so,<br \/>\nand He very well might be intervening to keep elf-maidens&#8217; hormones<br \/>\nfrom getting them jiggy Until It&#8217;s Time.<\/p>\n<p>Helluva way to run a universe, say I.  Inelegant. A really<br \/>\ncraftsmanlike god would build his cosmos so it wouldn&#8217;t require<br \/>\nconstant divine intervention to function.  It&#8217;s a serious weakness in<br \/>\nTolkien&#8217;s ficton, one that runs far deeper than anachronisms like<br \/>\ndomestic cats (which didn&#8217;t reach northern Europe until late Roman<br \/>\ntimes) and tea (to Europe in 1610) in the Shire.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, back in this universe, I&#8217;m kind of wishing I&#8217;d asked the<br \/>\nbuxom big-eyed wench in the Ramones T-shirt for her phone number.  Too<br \/>\nmany alpha-male horn-dog hormones, that&#8217;s me.  Tolkien wouldn&#8217;t have<br \/>\nunderstood a sexual culture in which that was even conceivable<br \/>\nbehavior for a happily married man. much less one in which the wench<br \/>\nand wife would have then been more likely to become friends than not;<br \/>\nhis only category for it would have been debauchery.  But I think his<br \/>\nfantasy continues to work partly <em>because<\/em> it&#8217;s so repressed.<\/p>\n<p>Sexual love (and all the mutability of human custom that goes with<br \/>\nit) is essentially a side issue in Tolkien&#8217;s work, primarily a symbol<br \/>\nof reward for valor (Faramir and Eowyn; Sam and Rosie; Aragorn and<br \/>\nArwen, for that matter). His Edwardian restraint produces a nearly<br \/>\nblank ground on which Peter Jackson can project Liv Tyler and readers<br \/>\ncan project all their own sexual dramas and hopes, from the romance of<br \/>\nAragorn and Arwen to the rather weird ones like Gimli\/Legolas slash<br \/>\nfiction.  Certainly that&#8217;s what the women in Arwen and Eowyn costumes<br \/>\nwere doing.<\/p>\n<p>And for a good laugh, there&#8217;s always the <cite>Very Secret<br \/>\nDiaries<\/cite>.  Rather than launch into a postmodernist-sounding rant<br \/>\nabout irony and appropriation, I&#8217;ll just finish by observing that all<br \/>\nof these things modulate each other; that not only do we project our<br \/>\nsex onto Tolkien&#8217;s sex, we read Tolkien&#8217;s sex differently after<br \/>\nthe <cite>Very Secret Diaries<\/cite>, or after seeing Liv Tyler<br \/>\nspeak Elvish, than we did before. That much, Tolkien would<br \/>\nhave had no trouble understanding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, I went to my local instantiation of the all-three-LOTR-movies marathon on Tuesday, and enjoyed it immensely. The movies were a delight; Peter Jackson&#8217;s Return Of The King fully lived up to the promise of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. Despite minor flaws and some questionable omissions, Tolkien fans have reason&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=139\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Sex and Tolkien<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}