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The Queer History of The Lord of the Rings [ad free] (Patreon)

Published:
2024-02-23 19:36:19
Edited:
2026-08-23 09:19:40
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I started working on this video in 2022 as everyone was 

I started working on this video in 2022 as everyone was getting hyped about The Rings of Power. Without giving away any spoilers, lets just say I had a few ideas which I was working on but didn’t think I could make interesting in a video. And then after the last video essay, Ada wasn’t able to work on this next one with me because of the Slovenian sexual health project we’ve been working on (which I’ll probably share more about here later), so I had to think of something I could do on my own. I decided I could probably manage a very short video on this topic and got to work.

But as time went on I realised this could be bigger and that there was a lot of fun to be had with it! You will be the judges of whether I managed that! I hope you have fun watching it!

And this is for after you’ve finished watching:

I thought some of you might want to check out the fairy stories mentioned in the video, so I have collected some links. It’s very easy to come across copies of The Fairy Books because they're in the public domain. Here is “The Girl Who Pretended to be a Boy” on archive.org.

One of the oldest versions of the gender changing Prince Charming comes from the Narts Saga. I came across a cute webcomic adaptation of it here.

Here is the online PDF of the modern Romanian queer feminist version, Ana, Făt-Frumos.

And the podcast episode we made about the Lord of the Rings musical is here.

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Comments

Vince Whitacre

I'm in the middle of a vid right now, but this is next up! Looking forward to it!

c'est moi

ugh I love the way you move your lens to give us perspective. eowyn's story as this old fairy tale is incredible - thank you for the link to the archive!

Alaiksandreis

Hiya! Love the video. Was just wondering what you thought of the similarity of Éowyn to Hervör the Younger (not to be confused with Hervör the Elder, who is the one who borrows her father's cursed sword from his grave). Hervör the Younger is featured later on in the Hervararsaga, near its end, and she, like her namesake, dons male armor and defends the Gothic nation against the invasion of the evil Huns where she heroically dies in battle, kind of like what Tolkien may have envisioned for Éowyn. I always love teaching my Old Norse students about these two Hervörs as "Viking princesses with gender issues". Btw, I also really love the Nart sagaś.

Hunca Munca

Great essay as always!! One thing I wanted to say about the "mate" discussion is that context matters. Speaking in terms of "creatures" and animals, the word mate is generally meant as a life companion. The other example you pull out of Tolkien using the word mate definitely reads as the very casual British/Australian use, as in friends or comrades. They're not really equivalent examples of Tolkien's usage of the word imo. One is a dramatic scene comparing Sam to a small creature defending its mate. The other is referring to a "ruffian" and his "mates". Very different tone and context. The ruffians are kind of written as simple, working class blokes, they speak a lot more colloquially than the majority of the book's characters so it makes sense to use the word mate in that casual way for them. It makes for a less impactful simile if you talk about a small creature fighting fiercely to defend its "mate" in that context. It's too casual a use of the word so I don't think Tolkien would have chosen that for such a dramatic scene. But an animal (creature) fighting for their life partner, their whole world, evokes a much more intense emotion to the scene. However that can still be read as deep platonic devotion, as it's just a comparison to a creature and its mate, so I don't think it detracts from your main point about Tolkien not intending it to be gay. Obsessed with this essay though, it couldn't have come at a better time for me. In the middle of reading them again, they're such favourites of mine. Thanks again for another great piece!

Verity Ritchie

TBH, I do wonder if his original intention to have Eowyn die in battle was meant to be like the younger. And her actual ending is more like the ending for the elder, whom if I remember correctly settles down and has a more conventional woman's life. But also I think the younger wanted to die in battle and its meant to be a nice thing that she did? I think Tolkien would've hated that. Or at least that's what I think he was trying to say with Eowyn, that that was a horrible sad thing for a woman (or maybe just a person) to want.

Verity Ritchie

Yeah I get what you're saying and you may be right. I thought about this a lot. To begin with I was annoyed that the Polygon article misquotes the book. I couldn't find decent commentary on the line. But I think its also relevant to consider that he uses "it" as the pronoun for the animal, where I think you would expect this to be a gendered dynamic. But to be honest, I'm really not sure what species of small creature he is imagining! If he's imagining a wolf, I picture a pack of wolves, and the use of the genderless pronouns seems significant. I dunno, maybe you're right. I had a whole bit there about how the earliest use online I could find of the Polygon version of the quote was from an old early 00s fan forum. So I talked about that and other possible interpretations, but it was boring so it got cut down to this. EDIT: Also thinking of the etymology as meaning those who share food together and "comrade." As a philologist Tolkien may have had a more complicated understanding of the word than exclusively referring to breeding pairs, I think. Also, the fact that it's the narrator using the word "mate" for the ruffian, rather than the ruffian himself, may be important to consider. Does the narrator ever slip into colloquial speech? I don't know tbh, I haven't given the book that kind of analysis. But yeah, I could be wrong about this. ANOTHER EDIT: Also this: "the elven-sword Glamdring, the mate of Orcrist that lay now upon the breast of Thorin under the Lonely Mountain." Surely that use of mate is neither colloquial nor referring to a breeding pair. But I am also not familiar with the concept of swords having mates, so there we go!

Ruxandra Grecu

loved the video! left a bigger comment on the video for the algo, but also sharing this with my scifi book club community, a lot of Tolkien-heads there <3

Birdie

fuckin awesome, and i know jack all about lotr. i really appreciate you guys' realistic and genuine queer perspectives. i feel the hesitancy to interpret sam/frodo as romantic, because their flavor of love is such a unique depiction, impacted by hobbit culture in such a way that their intimacy is explicit but not what that /means/ exactly to the characters other than "devotion", and i think the best queer love stories are hard to define.

Comfort and Adam

We're about to head out to Seattle for a big comic convention, but we cannot wait to watch this! So freaking excited you guys ❤

Karoliina Ollikainen

Sorry, just losing my goddamn mind over your research into Tolkien and Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books in the middle of my work day. It’s so rare and exciting to see such definite proof that an author engaged with a text that seems to have influenced them (it so often is something vague like, well, this book was available at the time and the author was interested in the topic, so……). I’ll definitely go read the fairy stories now. I am that annoying person who will pause the Return of the King every time just before Eowyn kills the witch king to recite her full speech from the book because I don’t like her one liner in the film so figures I would love this video, I guess. (My wife wants to kill me only a little bit.)

Verity Ritchie

haha, I love that you give the extended Return of the King a 5 hour run time!

Alaiksandreis

Something that I do really suspect is that the romanticist painting "Hervors død" by Peter Nicolai Arbo may have influenced Tolkien. The painting really stresses the return to feminity of the protagonist, after the shield maiden fell in the "greatest battle for civilization" (as it was considered back then).

Artemus

barbara😂

Artemus

"so lets investigate😬"

bundaga borbo

i had to pause the 'girl who isn't afraid of a bear' tangent so i could say out loud to my monitor "god i love you", and just sit in that appreciation for a second

Hunca Munca

All super interesting points! In the full quote he mentions a, "desperate small creature armed with little teeth alone" which doesn't read "wolf" to me (and also doesn't sound like a dramatic enough comparison to a little hobbit vs Ungoliant's Spawn, as a wolf is famously a pretty tough animal to be faced with - the fellowship fights a pack in the first book), to me it evokes something more like a rodent. (Less relevant cause they're not examples from the same text but makes me think of something like Ged's otak or Nausicaä's Teto - the bit where it bites her with its little teeth) And the adversary in the quote is described as "a tower of horn and hide", so maybe a big bull or something similar. Also "it" is a fairly standard way to refer to animals and I also don't think gendering the animals in this scenario would really add to the analogy. Unless I'm misunderstanding your point on that part? Good point in your edit about Glamdring and Orcrist as well! Neither colloquial nor romantic, but a secret third thing 👀 English is so interesting (and irritating) in that way that words can hold so many different meanings based on context and poetic usage. (Sorry for replying to this like two months late, I just got up to that bit in the book again and it reminded me)

Hannah Grace

My first beloved fandom was LOTR—I turned 13 in the year 2000, and so the books and then the movies hit me like a pubescent freight train. Loving this video already, halfway through! I would say: Tolkien’s sexuality in the books and his other writings isn’t just WWI era and Catholic, it is distinctly English! He’s sooooo… culturally asexual. From my perspective as an American, English culture is all over his books.

Hannah Grace

Such a well reasoned argument!! In ancient Norse culture, women were warriors—the more we learn from the physical evidence (sans 19th & 20th century gender ideas getting in the way), the more we see that there was no cultural restriction against women fighting as we’ve come to see it in later eras of European culture. So it doesn’t make a lot of sense for a *Norse woman to pretend to be a man to get to fight: that’s later centuries, or other places. To wit: if Eowyn was a Valkyrie, it would have been very normal for her to ride to battle—her and all the other women warriors. Interestingly (I’m not done with the vid, maybe you get to this later): for casting in Peter Jackson’s trilogy, they ended up needing way more strong riders to be the Rohirrim than they had men, so a ton of the riders we see following Eomer & fighting in the Two Towers are women actors and stunt riders 😎 On the topic of fairy tales: you NEED to know about this book, and listen to this podcast ep (if you haven’t yet)! I’m obsessed with the fact that Fairy Tales as we know them were originally created by a 17th c group of radical French women writers (some queer), and then (ofc 🫩) written out of the story by the Brothers Grimm & others… book: Women of the Fairy Tales Resistance, by Jane Harrington; Whatshername episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/whatshername/id1320638747?i=1000786905942

Hannah Grace

I’ve found that in 19th & 20th c writing, they loved to have things have a “mate”, especially matched pairings like socks, gloves, candlesticks, etc. I think it’s fallen out of common usage, but for a while there, a thing having a mate was a cute little way to say that there are two parts of a pair—not necessarily referring to a romantic or sexual meaning of mate, or even a friend meaning.

Hunca Munca

I noticed that usage in LOTR in the chapter where the fellowship set out from Rivendell! Gandalf has Glamdring, "the mate of Orcrist", girt at his side. It's honestly such an apt term to evoke the concept of a bonded pair. Although I kind of love the idea of tragic sword boyfriends, longing for their mate lain upon the breast of Thorin under the Lonely Mountain lmao