Sex and Tolkien
<p>Yes, I went to my local instantiation of the all-three-LOTR-movies<br />
marathon on Tuesday, and enjoyed it immensely.  The movies were a<br />
delight; Peter Jackson&#8217;s <cite>Return Of The King</cite> fully lived up<br />
to the promise of <cite>The Fellowship of the Ring</cite> and <cite>The<br />
Two Towers</cite>. Despite minor flaws and some questionable omissions,<br />
Tolkien fans have reason to be vastly grateful both for Jackson&#8217;s vision<br />
and the fact that Hollywood actually allowed him to make these movies<br />
as good as they are.</p>
<p>The marathon was also quite a geekfest.  The theater was<br />
wall-to-wall with SF and fantasy fans, SCAdians, computer hackers,<br />
and the like.  A very intelligent, cerebral, imaginative crowd.  My<br />
kind of people, talking and meeting and mixing with each other<br />
a great deal more than your typical movie crowd does. The fact<br />
that many people showed up hours early to get good seats, and the<br />
two half-hour intermissions, helped a lot.</p>
<p>In a refutation of stereotypes, many of those attending were<br />
female.  And attractive.  And often dressed to display it in Arwen or<br />
Eowyn outfits.  Had I been actually trying, I believe I would have<br />
taken home at least three phone numbers, which is a significant datum<br />
even given that I&#8217;m a lot more self-confident about the flirting thing<br />
than most geek guys.</p>
<p>Part of me was in anthropologist mode, contemplating the mating<br />
behaviors on display, even as I was chatting with the pretty redheaded<br />
theater student from State College, the massage therapist in the seat<br />
next to me, the blonde in the concession-stand line, and the buxom<br />
big-eyed wench in the Ramones T-shirt who told me all about re-reading<br />
the Rings every year since she was eleven, and I&#8217;ll be <em>damned</em><br />
if she didn&#8217;t mean that as at least a bit of a come-on.  I wondered<br />
what Tolkien, Edwardian prude that he was, would have said of the<br />
human tendency to turn the appreciation of his works into a sort of<br />
pickup scene for the high-IQ crowd.  That led me to consider ribald<br />
parodies like the hilarious <a href='http://www.ealasaid.com/misc/vsd/'>Very Secret Diaries</a>,<br />
which at least two of the women I chatted with obviously knew quite<br />
well and I&#8217;d bet money the other two did too.</p>
<p>I was also thinking, during the movies, about Liv Tyler. Long-time<br />
readers will be aware that I have warm and lusty feelings about our<br />
Liv.  OK, so I will cheerfully concede that Miranda Otto is a dish and<br />
well into wouldn&#8217;t-kick-her-out-of-bed territory, but her Eowyn<br />
doesn&#8217;t nail the releaser circuitry in my hindbrain quite the way<br />
Tyler&#8217;s Arwen does.  During the first movie I found watching Arwen&#8217;s<br />
lips as she spoke Elvish quite an erotic experience.  (And it&#8217;s not<br />
just me.  My sister Lisa reported, after I mentioned this, having been<br />
startled to discover the same reaction in herself.  This is amusing<br />
because I have never had any reason to doubt her report that she&#8217;s<br />
normally as straight as a laser-beam.) Arwen isn&#8217;t any less sexy<br />
in the third movie.</p>
<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 />
Good</a> this morning.  This is an extended and thorough consideration<br />
of sex and sexuality in Tolkien&#8217;s works. Towards the end, the author<br />
makes the telling point that eroticizing various elements in Tolkien&#8217;s<br />
mythos is one of the ways in which modern readers adapt it to their<br />
own fantasy needs.  This makes sense; giving a luscious version of<br />
Arwen screen time and playing up her thing with Aragorn is not just a<br />
crude sell-it-with-sex maneuver, it&#8217;s a way to make the mythos<br />
fundamentally more intelligible to a viewer in 2003 than the rather<br />
dessicated and repressed account of <cite>The romance of Aragorn and<br />
Arwen</cite> in Appendix A of <cite>The Lord of the Rings</cite> would<br />
have been.</p>
<p><cite>Warm Beds Are Good</cite> fails to grapple with the most<br />
interesting question of all, however, which is how Arwen and Aragorn<br />
could possibly have developed the hots for each other in the first<br />
place.  It turns out to be rather hard to come up with any theory of<br />
Elvish reproductive biology under which Arwen&#8217;s behavior makes<br />
any sense at all.</p>
<p>Aragorn&#8217;s end isn&#8217;t that much of a mystery.  He&#8217;s an alpha male of<br />
a warrior culture, chock full o&#8217; testosterone and other dominance<br />
hormones guaranteed to make him into a serious horn-dog.  She&#8217;s a<br />
beautiful princess, broadcasting human-compatible health-and-fertility<br />
signals in all directions.  If she doesn&#8217;t actively smell bad, tab A<br />
fits slot B just fine from the point of view of <em>his</em><br />
mating instincts.</p>
<p>No, the fundamental problem is Arwen&#8217;s lifespan.  She is supposedly<br />
something like two thousand, seven hundred years old when she meets<br />
Aragorn.  That&#8217;s an awful lot of Saturday nights at the Last Homely<br />
Disco West of the Mountains; if she has a sex drive anything like a<br />
normal human female&#8217;s, she ought to have more mileage on her than a<br />
Liberian tramp steamer.  On the other hand, if her sexual wiring is<br />
fundamentally <em>different</em> from a human female&#8217;s, what&#8217;n&#8217;thehell<br />
is she doing with Aragorn?  He shouldn&#8217;t look or smell or behave right<br />
to trigger her releasers, any more than a talking chimpanzee would to<br />
most human women.</p>
<p>&ldquo;B-b-but&#8230;&rdquo; I hear you splutter &ldquo;This is<br />
<em>fantasy!</em>&rdquo;, to which I say foo!  Tolkien was very<br />
careful about logical consistency in areas where he was equipped by<br />
temperament and training to appreciate it; he invented a cosmology,<br />
thousand of years of history, multiple languages; he drew maps.  He<br />
lectured on the importance of a having convincing and consistent<br />
secondary world in fantasy. Furthermore, Tolkien never completely<br />
repudiated the intention that his fiction was a mythic description of<br />
the lost past of <em>our</em> Earth, and that therefore matter, energy<br />
and life should be consistent with the forms in which we know<br />
them.</p>
<p>Therefore, it is entirely appropriate to analyze Middle-Earth as<br />
though it were a science-fictional creation, to assume Elves and Men<br />
both got DNA, and to ask if the freakin&#8217; biology makes any sense at<br />
all under this assumption.</p>
<p>And one of the facts we have to deal with is that humans and elves<br />
are not just interfertile, they produce fertile offspring.  That means<br />
they have to be genetically very, <em>very</em> similar.  If there<br />
are dramatic differences between elf and human reproductive behavior,<br />
the instinctive basis for them must be coded in a relatively small<br />
set of genes that somehow don&#8217;t interfere with that interfertility.<br />
In fact, technically, Elves and Men have to be subspecies of the<br />
same stock.</p>
<p>When this came up on my favorite mailing list just after the first<br />
movie came out, my hypothesis was that elves (a) have only rare<br />
periods of vulnerability to sexual impulses, and (b) imprint on each<br />
other for life when they mate, like swans.  This pattern is actually<br />
within the envelope of human variation, though uncommon &mdash; which<br />
makes it a plausible candidate for being dominant in another hominid<br />
subspecies.</p>
<p>This &lsquo;swan theory&rsquo; would be consistent with Appendix A,<br />
which (a) has Arwen meeting Aragorn when he was garbed like an elven<br />
prince and (as near as we can tell through Tolkien&#8217;s rather clotted<br />
chansons-de-geste style) falling for him hard right then and there,<br />
and (b) has Arwen&#8217;s family apparently operating under the assumption<br />
that once that had happened, the damage was done and she wouldn&#8217;t be<br />
mating with anyone else, noway, nohow.</p>
<p>One of the techies on the list shot the swan theory down by finding a<br />
canonical instance of an Elf remarrying (Finwe, father of Feanor;<br />
first wife Miriel, second Indis).  In subsequent discussion, we<br />
concluded that it wasn&#8217;t possible to frame a consistent theory that<br />
fit Tolkien&#8217;s facts.  The sticking-point turned out to be the<br />
half-elven; Tolkien tells us that they get to <em>choose</em> whether<br />
they will have the nature of Men or Elves, and it is implied that they<br />
do so at puberty.</p>
<p>Since that&#8217;s true, the difference between Men and Elves can&#8217;t<br />
properly be genetic at all.  It must be in the cloudy realm of spirit,<br />
magic, and divine interventions.  This is not an area in which Tolkien<br />
(a devout Catholic) gives us any rules or regularities at all.  Elvish<br />
sexual behavior could be arbitrarily variant from human without any<br />
reasons other than that Eru keeps exerting his will to make it so,<br />
and He very well might be intervening to keep elf-maidens&#8217; hormones<br />
from getting them jiggy Until It&#8217;s Time.</p>
<p>Helluva way to run a universe, say I.  Inelegant. A really<br />
craftsmanlike god would build his cosmos so it wouldn&#8217;t require<br />
constant divine intervention to function.  It&#8217;s a serious weakness in<br />
Tolkien&#8217;s ficton, one that runs far deeper than anachronisms like<br />
domestic cats (which didn&#8217;t reach northern Europe until late Roman<br />
times) and tea (to Europe in 1610) in the Shire.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, back in this universe, I&#8217;m kind of wishing I&#8217;d asked the<br />
buxom big-eyed wench in the Ramones T-shirt for her phone number.  Too<br />
many alpha-male horn-dog hormones, that&#8217;s me.  Tolkien wouldn&#8217;t have<br />
understood a sexual culture in which that was even conceivable<br />
behavior for a happily married man. much less one in which the wench<br />
and wife would have then been more likely to become friends than not;<br />
his only category for it would have been debauchery.  But I think his<br />
fantasy continues to work partly <em>because</em> it&#8217;s so repressed.</p>
<p>Sexual love (and all the mutability of human custom that goes with<br />
it) is essentially a side issue in Tolkien&#8217;s work, primarily a symbol<br />
of reward for valor (Faramir and Eowyn; Sam and Rosie; Aragorn and<br />
Arwen, for that matter). His Edwardian restraint produces a nearly<br />
blank ground on which Peter Jackson can project Liv Tyler and readers<br />
can project all their own sexual dramas and hopes, from the romance of<br />
Aragorn and Arwen to the rather weird ones like Gimli/Legolas slash<br />
fiction.  Certainly that&#8217;s what the women in Arwen and Eowyn costumes<br />
were doing.</p>
<p>And for a good laugh, there&#8217;s always the <cite>Very Secret<br />
Diaries</cite>.  Rather than launch into a postmodernist-sounding rant<br />
about irony and appropriation, I&#8217;ll just finish by observing that all<br />
of these things modulate each other; that not only do we project our<br />
sex onto Tolkien&#8217;s sex, we read Tolkien&#8217;s sex differently after<br />
the <cite>Very Secret Diaries</cite>, or after seeing Liv Tyler<br />
speak Elvish, than we did before. That much, Tolkien would<br />
have had no trouble understanding.</p>
