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Jan 11, 2023

King of the Golden River: Boy Meets Dwarf

Shortly after I was born, my parents bought a set of Colliers Encyclopedia and The Junior Classics, an anthology of mostly Victorian-era stories like Alice in Wonderland and Jackanapes. During my earliest childhood I often took them from the shelves and leafed through them, marveling at the odd illustrations.  I first tried reading them at age 8 or 9, but the antiquated language and obscure references made it well-nigh impossible.  Still, their very impenetrability was attractive, suggesting hidden codes and secrets, so over the years I tried again and again, finally encountering some amazing gay subtexts.

The King of the Golden River (1841) begins with a blustery, round person, "The North Wind," visiting an extremely girlish young man named Gluck.   From there, things get even more bizarre.  Gluck battles his older, bullying brothers, Hans and Schwartz, for a golden mug, which turns out to contain the imprisoned spirit of the dwafish King of the Golden River.  

Someone must travel to the source of the river and sprinkle it with "holy water."  The evil brothers try, but fail, and are turned into black stones.  Gluck tries, but gives the water away in acts of kindness, and is rewarded when the river turns into a river of gold.





There is no same-sex romance, but Gluck (played by Thor Bautz, left, in a gender-transgressive 2009 stage version) is quiet, sensitive, feminine, gay-coded.

And,  bucking the tradition of fairy tales ending with "they were married and lived happily ever after," he never meets a girl.  At the end of the story, he is old, wealthy, well-respected by the community, with no wife.  

That was, in itself, a revelation.






The author of King of the Golden River was John Ruskin (played by Tom Hollander, top center, in the 2009 tv series Desperate Romantics).  He was apparently heterosexual; like Lewis Carroll, he liked young girls.  But there is no evidence that he had a physical relationship with anyone.

His marriage to Effie Gray was annulled after six years, not consummated because "there were certain circumstances in her person which completely checked passion."  There have been many theories about what those circumstances were, but probably not the nude female form itself. (Effie later married his friend, pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais).

He was a scholar of the Renaissance, who became aware of the practice of "the bestial vice."  Although he was quite homophobic, revealing that same-sex practices occurred at all helped to create the image of the "queer Renaissance," where gay people didn't have to hide.  Oscar Wilde said that studying under him at Oxford was one of the turning points of his career.

3 comments:

  1. That reminds me of this Lakota story about two brothers who need arrows that never miss to fight a water monster. One's blind, which is important because anyone who sees the monster dies in four days.

    In Lakota culture, making things is for women. So they seek out an old hag who knows the secret of arrows that never miss. All she demands on return is a night with them, physically. In some versions, the brother who can see tells his brother he can't, she's so ugly; in others, they both offer themselves. This breaks the curse, but if the older brother refused, now he wants her, but she refuses.

    Regardless, they kill the monster, and now they have its heart. So long as they do what it asks, they get anything they want. But, it's no fun without having to work for it. And it's a serious taskmaster, demanding new things every day and they have to keep doing the old things Eventually they stop, and the heart explodes and burns itself out.

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  2. hey boomer ca va? :) good article, but i think you lost a line in composing the text. you suddenly start talking about tom ruskin in the last ~1/3rd of the article without setting any context (or even mentioning him) before that?

    (was he the author of king of the golden river, or...?)

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  3. Sorry, I thought everyone knew that he wrote the story. I guess not everyone had a copy of "The Golden Classics" lying around the house.

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