12/2/2023 0 Comments Was sam and frodo gayA reader still needs to know what a "nunnery" meant in Shakespeare's day in order to interpret a statement including a reference to a nunnery. The idea that the final written product of the author, rather than the author's mind, is the right place to look for meaning, is called "intent of the text." When I was in graduate school, we all learned to start our thoughts on what we'd read with "the text states." rather than "Shakespeare states that." Such a reading doesn't completely ignore the author. Critics are free to view the statement's meaning on its own terms. The statement expresses psychological truths about the way people experience time in a pastoral setting. Shakespeare may not have had in mind modern theories of the meaning of time when he wrote "there is no clock in the forest" in "As You Like It," but it doesn't matter. Similarly, when an author writes a story, there are often images, symbols, and language in it that suggest things on their own that the author never imagined. But clearly, my intent is not the only thing that matters in such a statement. I might say she is wrong to take offense, that she didn't understand my intent. If I tell my wife she looks nice for an older woman, I may insist I didn't mean it as an insult. We all say things that others take to have meanings we don't intend. This might seem crazy, and nothing more than a rearguard justification for the inventive interpretations of literary professors, but there is a point to it. It may surprise those who assume the author's intent to be the only intent that matters to find that literature scholars actually speak of something called an "intentional fallacy." That is, to think of literature only in terms of what an author meant is a mistake. Tolkien cannot have meant these things, so Sam and Frodo cannot be gay, however it may seem to a modern reader. Tolkien lived at a time when homosexuality was seen as a mental illness, an abomination. Many, many discussion fora on the Internet have discussed the question of homosexuality in the relationship between Frodo and Sam in terms of Tolkien's intent ( one example). Most people who haven't studied literature seriously would most likely assume that the most important type of intent-maybe the only one that matters-is the intent of the author. So we cope by joking about them.īefore getting into various ways to interpret the physical and emotional closeness of Frodo and Sam, the two most important characters in the Rings trilogy, I need to make a quick digression into the question of intent. The men watching these things are at once uncomfortable with them and drawn to them. There are heroes who demonstrate tenderness, gentleness, and compassion, traits that do not fit the standard male hero archetype. When men watch a story like Lord of the Rings together, certain male characteristics are called into question. By doing this, they are able to hide physically homo-intimate behaviors that are a corollary of spiritual closeness in plain sight. So men play jokes like "tea-bagging" one another. Men need to be close in the Corps, but the closeness required is itself suspect-or at least uncomfortable for most men. But that closeness, when it starts to take on a deep and spiritual dimension, threatens hetero-normative standards. Possibly both." The Marine Corps requires that men within it become closer than most men become in normal life. In my short story about male identity in the Marine Corps, "Brokedick," the main character notes that "most of the jokes they'd played (in the Marine Corps) had been either homo-erotic or homophobic. The jokes today have lost their mean-spirited edge of fag-bashing, of guarding hetero-normative standards by threatening harm to those outside the standards. In my personal experience, this is as true today as it was three decades ago, even though now you would be hard-pressed to find a man even in a group of hetero-normative males who thinks there is anything essentially wrong with homosexual behavior. Jokes and comments about homo-eroticism are a constant when a group of largely heterosexual males gathers. If you watch the movie in the company of a lot of men, as I have many times, one topic of conversation that infallibly arises is the level of homo-eroticism in the films. And even the films' flaws can be a good point of discussion. It'd be awfully hard to read through all three books in a day with a group of people. I can only go so long without it.Įven though I've said before I'm not crazy about everything in Jackson's movie trilogy, it's still easily the best way to enjoy the story in a communal fashion. Much like Carlos Fuentes needed to read Don Quixote once a year, I occasionally have a mystical need to re-visit Frodo's quest to Mount Doom. I will be hosting a Lord of the Rings (LOTR) movie marathon in the near future, which explains this being my second LOTR-related post in two weeks.
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