The Lord of the Rings: Good Beyond Hope

It's one of the iconic stories of my life, told over and over again until it becomes myth.

How, in fifth grade, I stumbled across a copy of The Hobbit in the folklore section of the Denkmann School library, and read for the first time: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

I spent the next two days immersed in a new world, Middle Earth,with hobbits, elves, dwarves, goblins, magic swords, giant spiders, a dragon, a gollum,  and a beautiful, evocative map.

And no damsels-in-distress to gum up the works; Middle Earth was occupied entirely by men.

How, two years later, in seventh grade, the Scholastic Book Club offered The Two Towers, blatantly advertised as the "sequel" to The Hobbit.  I ordered it, waited patiently, and when it arrived, rushed home and began to read eagerly.  Aragorn, Boromir, Frodo..who were these people? This was not a sequel at all; it was the second book in a trilogy.  I had been swindled!

How I snuck a ride to the Readmore Book World downtown and bought the rest of the trilogy, and read...well, most of the Fellowship of the Ring.  The Shire scenes, with gay couples Frodo and Sam, Merry and Pippin wending through the Old Forest, fighting off Dark Riders and Barrow-Wights, meeting Tom Bombadil, reaching Rivendell, setting off with a fellowship of nine, including gay couple Legolas and Gimli.  Around the time they reach the Mines of Moria, it bogged down, and I started to skim.

The Two Towers was mostly unreadable, sheer boredom.  I skimmed through everything except for Merry and Pippin among the Ents.

The Return of the King, more of the same, with Frodo and Sam, especially Frodo, suffering for no reason, as if Tolkien delighted in torturing his heroes.  I skimmed through everything until the end, when they return to the Shire to discover that it has been broken up by the Industrial Revolution.

I couldn't bring myself to admit it for many years, but The Lord of the Rings is not a great novel, or even a good novel.  30% of it is torture porn (let's see what other horrible things can happen to Frodo!), and 60% is repetitive, ponderous, and dull.  Everyone has twelve names, everyone's sword has twelve names, and they're always stopping the action to sing.

And talk about anachronisms:  The Shire is 18th century England; one expects to hear the bothersome War of Independence being fought in the Colonies. But outside the Shire, it's the early-Medieval world of the Anglo-Saxon thanes.

Yet still I thought of it as the greatest book ever written.  I pressed it into the hands of my friends as if it were a religious tract.  I revered it as sacred writ.  I began working on my own fantasy world in imitation, with my own elves and dwarves, magic sword, and fabulous maps.

It seems like a paradox.

But the Lord of the Rings wasn't for reading.  It was for gazing at the covers.  The artist, Barbara Remington, had not read or even seen the book before drawing the covers, so she drew from magic and myth.

My favorite was The Two Towers, with its stylized sharp mountains, red sky, and dark flying riders.

It was about reading the cover blurbs, with quotes from Loren Eisley, W. H. Auden, and C.S. Lewis (none of whom I had heard of yet): "Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron; here is a book that will break your heart....good beyond hope."

That line is better than anything in the book itself.

It was about gazing at the maps, and marveling at all of the mysterious places. I particularly liked the edges, the places not mentioned in the books: Rhun, Far Harad, the Ice Bay of Forochel, and Carn Dum ("here was of old the witch-realm of Angmar").

It was about reading the appendixes, with the languages, the indexes, the genealogical charts, and the timelines, with the discussions of what happened to the characters after the War of the Rings ended.

And it was about discovering the fates of the gay couples:

Merry and Pippin lived together for the rest of their lives

Legolas and Gimli crossed to the Elf paradise together

Frodo crossed over alone, while Sam pursued a heteronormative life of marriage and children.  But at the end of his life, he, too crossed over.

Was there ever a book so filled with gay romances?

That's what, in the end, rendered The Lord of the Rings "good beyond hope."

See also: The Lord of the Rings

The Top 10 Hunks of "The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance"

I never saw the original Dark Crystal movie. In December 1982, I was in the middle of my first year in grad school at Indiana University, and I didn't have time for "The Lord of the Rings with Muppets."  Seriously, why didn't the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien sue? 

And I'm not actually planning to watch the prequel series, The Dark Crystal: Age of Reason  (2019).  The opening monologue is ridiculously long and complicated, the Hobbits....look ridiculous, the characters are impossible to keep track of, and the plot is the standard yawn-inducing defeat the Darkness.  

As far as I can figure, the plot involves capitalist vulture-monsters called Skeezix or something, who oppress the gentle, nature-loving Hobbits...um, I mean Gelflings, who don't even realize that they are being oppressed  (talk about false consciousness!).  The Skeezix are all dying, but they've found a way to stay alive by eating the pink soup that is the Gelfling life-essence.

Meanwhile Darkness is coming, some sort of eco-catastrophe, and it's up to the Chosen One and her ragtag band to defeat it and the Gelfling-eating vulture-monsters.   The maguffin is the Dark Crystal, which used to be the source of all life on the planet, but has recently gone over to the Dark Side.  

I read ahead -- at some point between the end of the series and the start of the movie, all of the Gelflings are killed.  No parallels with the Holocaust there.

But apparently the tv series is gay-positive.  Deet, one of the main characters, has two dads, and there's a lesbian relationship between Tavra and Onica.

No beefcake in a show featuring Muppets, of course, but I thought maybe some of the voice actors or puppeteers would exude some hotness.

1.Harris Dickinson (top photo) as Gurjin.  He previously starred in Beach Rats, about a teenage boy who identifies as straight but has sex with men.

2. Charlie Condou (left), previously of the British soap Coronation Street as Mitjan.  Charlie is gay, adding to the long list of gay actors in the series, everyone from Harvey Fierstein to Benedict Wong.

3. Taron Egerton as Rian.  He played a young Elton John in Rocketman (2019), and is apparently gay, also.

4. Jason Isaacs, best known in a blond wig as Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter series, as the Skezix Emperor.

5. Victor Yerrid, shown here in the midst of furry S&M cosplay, as the puppeteer who portrays Hup.

6. Theo James as Rek'yr (don't worry, the apostrophes don't have any phonetic significance, they just look cool).  He played Four in the Divergent-Insurgent-Allegiant movie series.

7.  Ralph Inerson as The Hunter.  Apparently he has a frontal nude scene in The Witch (2015)

8.  Shazad Latif  as Kegan.  

That's only 8, but I'm too busy to finish.  I have to figure out why this tv series is getting so many rave reviews.

And what's up with all the beards.

See also: The Muppet Show

The Lord of the Rings

I had a friend in high school who claimed to have read J.R.R. Tolkien's  Lord of the Rings trilogy straight through 38 times (for a fast reader, that would take 2 hours per day, every day, for 5 years). I barely made it through once, with lots of skimming, , but I returned to certain passages over and over again.  They were "good beyond hope."

A company of men.  Working together, fighting, rescuing each other, hugging, saving the world.

Heterosexual desire almost absent: Tom Bombadil is devoted to Goldberry, the Ents pine away for the Entwives, Aragorn pines for Arwen (though not as much as in the movie series), and a few poems and songs say things like "Little Princess Mee -- Lovely was she," but nobody read them anyway.

And lots of same-sex romance.

1.  Everyone today sees a romance between Frodo and Sam, especially as portrayed by Elijah Wood and Sean Astin in the movie series.  But I didn't see it.  Tolkien was highly class conscious, and Frodo and Sam are master and devoted servant.  At the end of the story, Frodo goes to the Undying Lands by himself, and Sam goes home to his wife.

But I did notice that Frodo is gay.  He surrounds himself with men and never once mentions a woman.  (He reveres Galadriel, but as a goddess to be worshipped, not as an object of desire). 

2. Merry and Pippin (played by Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd in the movie) are devoted to each other.  They go through deadly danger for each other, and when they are split up, each pines for the other.  After the War of the Ring, they go to work for Aragorn, so they can stay together forever.

3. The Elf Legolas and the Dwarf Gimli (played by Orlando Bloom and John Rhys-Davies in the movie) are sworn enemies, working together only to fight a greater evil.  But as the novels progress, they develop a grudging admiration, then a friendship, then a romance.  Neither seeks out a wife.

After the War of the Rings, when Legolas goes to the Undying Lands, Gimli comes with him. Tolkien comments:

It is strange that a Dwarf should be willing to leave Middle Earth for any love, or that the Eldar (Elvish Gods) should receive him, or that the Lords of the West should permit it. . .More cannot be said about this matter.

This is a curious way to end the discussion, suggesting not that Tolkien has no more information on the subject (of course he does, he wrote the books and he could invent any information he wanted), but that he is forbidden from saying more.  What is forbidding him?  It seems that, in attempting to understand Legolas and Gimli, their love for each other, and their motive for forsaking Middle Earth together, Tolkien is drawing dangerously close to acknowledging a love that he dare not acknowledge, and he abruptly forbids himself from considering the matter further.

 Tolkien was no doubt quite as homophobic as others of his generation, or moreso, a conservative Roman Catholic who eschewed the modern era.  But his subject matter  -- Medieval epics like Beowulf and The Nibelungenlied -- traditionally minimize heterosexual exploits to concentrate on the manly love of comrades.  Tolkien couldn't help but acknowledge it, on some level, whether he wanted to or not.