Refutations of ‘Rings of Power’ Gripes

Queer Lodgings: A Tolkien Podcast
Episode 0.5- Refutations of Rings of Power Gripes

[ Intro Music with birdsong plays ]

Alicia: Hey everyone, welcome to Queer Lodgings, the queer-led podcast about everything Tolkien. I’m Alicia–I’m an independent Tolkien scholar and a member of some leadership of a Tolkien-related society, and I am here with Grace and Leah.

Grace: I’m Grace–I am a fan and occasional Tolkien scholar, definite Tolkien nerd, and also serve on some leadership councils for Tolkien scholarship organizations and some activism boards as well.

Leah: And I’m Leah–and I’m just another Tolkien nerd who hangs around here and I don’t know… makes everybody else here look really smart. So.

[ Laughter ]

Alicia: And let’s not forget our ‘Tolkien White Guy’, Tim.

Leah: Yes!

Tim: Hi everybody I’m Tim–I am the non-queer person on the podcast and I will just be kind of here periodically as sort of the on-air producer kind of guy. I did another podcast previously for about 5 years called Dance Robot Dance that recently sort of went defunct–But I am married to Alicia and we are a house of Tolkien nerds.

Alicia: Yeah, so we decided to start this podcast because we saw… let me put on my marketing hat briefly… a bit of a need in the market for a Tolkien podcast that is:

1.) Centered on queerness and

2.)  Just not centered on white dudes talking about White Dude Stuff.

[ Group laughter ]

Tim: Straight white dudes in particular.

Leah: Yeah, we definitely saw a niche for some queer women and queer non-men to come in here and approach Tolkien from a deliberately intersectional anti-racist stance and one that was not afraid to really question Tolkien and question fandom in response to Tolkien. But  I know all of us have had some pretty…interesting… experiences on social media lately. I know Grace has been doing kind of a deep dive on various groups lately.

Grace: Well, and that’s one of the things about why we’re releasing this episode now–this little sort of ‘proto-episode’, ‘half-episode’… ‘Harfoot’ episode if you will: that there’s been some timeliness in the discussion relating to I think the need to approach Tolkien and Tolkien scholarship and fandom with this particular lens. Folks on the internet have been really great at providing that case study of late, shall we say.

[ Group laughter ]

Tim: That’s a very generous way to put it!

Alicia: Indeed. That is a fantastic segway.

Leah: What a segue.

Alicia: Indeed. So in today’s not quite really a real episode/bonus episode/proto episode (however, you want to say it), we’re discussing the backlash surrounding Amazon’s “Rings of Power.”

Tim: (facetiously) Backlash? There hasn’t been any backlash. Nothing!

Alicia: Yeah, exactly. It’s been 100% fine.

Leah: Not that white supremacist backlash that doesn’t exist?

[ Group laughter and sounds of acknowledgement ]

Alicia: Yeah, um, as of right now none of us have watched the episodes. I know a few people who have watched the episodes–they went to the New York premiere. I did not get in on that, sadly. But we are attacking this from a–we have not seen any of this yet. This is just kind of what we’ve been dealing with for the past, what, year or so?

Leah: Two years, Two years.

Tim: Yeah, more than that.

Alicia: Just to give everyone a little bit of background about where I stand on this personally: I am…my hands are tied in terms of fighting with people on the internet about this because I actually administer— I moderate one of the big Tolkien Facebook groups— a Tolkien Facebook group that has a few hundred people who are a part of it. So I am not allowed to really speak my mind fully about their bullshit arguments.

Tim: At least not in that group.

Alicia: No, not in that group— and I don’t actually go on to any other groups because my husband is constantly in a lot of other Tolkien groups, and reports back to me about the horse shit that he is dealing with on a day-to-day basis.

Tim: Not just groups but also official Facebook pages. That’s what I don’t understand is the people that are still following the Facebook pages for like the “Rings of Power”, OneRing.net, when like anytime anything gets dropped about it, they’re just ready–like pants down, ready to take a shit all over it. Like a wet, fucking nasty, steaming pile all over it even though they haven’t fucking seen it.

Leah: How do these people live their lives? Like how… what are you doing with your lives that you’re ready to do this?

Tim: Why is this what you choose to fucking spend your time on? That’s what I don’t understand.

Alicia: Get a fucking hobby.

Tim: Go read the books if you’re pissed off that an adaptation is coming out.

Leah: Touch Grass. Read the books, man. But yeah, that’s…we’re kind of jumping the gun a little bit, but—

[ Group laughter ]

Alicia: Are we?

Leah: But we really wanted to have this proto episode to kind of…kind of vent our spleens a little bit before the show starts because, as Alicia said: none of us have seen the show. The vast majority of people on the planet have not seen the show and yet there are a lot of Opinions being shared about the show that are pretty shitty.

And specifically, a lot of these complaints are deeply racist and bigoted on several levels, and extremely antithetical to a lot of what our values are and what a lot of “Rings of Power” I think is setting out to do. So we really wanted to talk about it amongst ourselves and also bring some clap backs to these complaints.

Tim: I just want to head this off at the pass before the accusations come: None of us are paid by Amazon. There are no ‘quote unquote’ paid shills.

Alicia: I mean look, if Amazon wants to pay me I’ll fucking take their dirty money but I have not been given any.

Grace: I don’t like Amazon and I spend too much money there anyway. So if they wanted to pay me like that might balance it a bit but oof, not happening yet.

Tim: Yeah, none of us are big fucking fans of Skeletor Bezos or anything like that, like, we’re just a bunch of Tolkien fans/scholars that are optimistic about a new adaptation that is focused on a world that we are all passionate about.

Grace: In fact, one of my frustrations is that some of the opinions that people are presenting as fact on the internet are making me have to defend Amazon and that’s just rude.

Leah: Yeah, not a great position to put any of us in.

Tim: No, and it’s just, it’s such a cheap fallback, like “oh they’re just, you know, you’ve just been paid by Amazon–you’re just a shill for the show, blah blah blah–“ or like, you know, “oh you just love, you know, capitalist Bezos,” like, no I don’t! But that’s who’s making the fucking show!

Alicia: Who else is going to make it? It’s got to be someone with fucking money!

Leah: Yeah, we didn’t choose who bought the rights and we didn’t vote for them to buy the rights, and we don’t have any say in how that goes. But now that it has been made, we do have a lot of things to say about what we feel about how other people feel about it! [laughter] And yeah, none of us are being paid, and honestly, if they were going to pay me I would consider it kind of a form of reparations for all the grief that they’ve caused me here personally in Amazon headquarters Seattle.

Tim: Yeah.

Leah: I guess in terms of turning to some of these complaints, shall we kind of launch into that and kind of see, kind of tell folks what’s been going on?

Grace: Yeah! One of the things that people will say all the time–and a lot of these just ever-so-lovely social media comments, and Youtube videos, and what-have-you— is that their complaints have absolutely nothing to do with topics of race, or misogyny, or whatever and all that…and then proceed to go on to some statements that would seem to… contradict that. So. Maybe it may just make sense to take a minute here and just state the case of what we’ve been seeing.

Tim: Is this where ‘Angry Nerd’ comes in?

Leah: Yes. I would like to invite Tim the ‘Tolkien White Guy’ to read some of these complaints in a fantastic angry nerd comic book guy voice for us.

Tim: So I guess the first one is just like: [Editorial note: Tim puts on a voice to imitate an Angry Nerd Guy, akin to the Simpsons character. This will be referred to as Angry Nerd Voice from this point forward. ] They’re just casting colorful people for the point of, you know, to like, force diversity, like, what’s the point? There were no fucking like, Black Elves or fucking Dwarves in Tolkien’s Middle-earth

[ outright group giggling ]

Leah: Thank you so much.

Alicia: My first response to that is usually if someone is complaining about specifically “Well, Middle-earth is based in Medieval Europe, there weren’t Black people there–” There fucking were. There were Black people in Medieval Europe just get over it guys.

Leah: Yeah. They were there, and to say otherwise is to ignore vast swaths of history and to honestly… I think at the end of the day what it does, a lot of this like, you know, insisting that, you know… ‘Tolkien based his mythology on Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and Germanic myths and they were all white and…’ Ugh. And I’m like–no, he didn’t. And also it’s not really true that they were all white, and you’re doing the work of Nazis when you say that. So…

Alicia: And Tolkien would be angry at you, because who didn’t like Nazis? Fucking Tolkien.

Leah: Yeah.

Tim: Even if you were to say ‘Okay sure, everything is based on Norse and Celtic influence’ (which is definitely an over-generalization) influence doesn’t mean ‘has to 100 % obey the tenets of,’ right? You can have some of that influence and then in other places, you can entirely fucking subvert that influence. It’s not a fucking all-or-nothing proposition.

Leah: Yeah, I guess I should say, like, it’s not… I think it’s influenced by Germanic and Celtic mythologies and other mythologies of northwestern Europe, absolutely. But based on? No. That’s not…this is a work of fiction. This isn’t a work of a culture, of an ethnic culture, you know, telling each other stories and distilling it down over centuries, right? Like, this is one guy. This is one guy who said this and who made this fictional story which isn’t mythology. And a lot of people have been getting kind of confused about that. Also, relatedly, have been getting confused about calling Tolkien a Saint which I think that he would be really uncomfortable with.

Tim: We’ll have to do an episode on the Canonization Bullshit at some point.

Leah: Stop making this into a religion, right? Stop making him into a religion, especially.

Alicia: He would be really pissed off about that, given how upset he was when C.S. Lewis decided to start writing all of his apologetic books, because Tolkien didn’t think that laymen should act as if they are in any sort of, like, religious authority over other people.

Leah: Exactly.

Alicia: It’s gross, it’s weird, like… he’s just a man. He was a very brilliant man who created, like, an incredibly, like… a world that you just want to, like, curl up and lie in, right? Like, it’s an incredible feat what he achieved. He wrote this over the course of, what? Sixty years? Seventy years? Like, of course, it’s this really huge… It’s hard to wrap your head around how detailed and what just the scope of it is. But that doesn’t mean that he was superhuman or that he should be canonized or what…it’s just so strange to me.

Leah: Yeah, he’s a human, and with all of the good and the bad that comes with being a human, and all the foibles and flaws. He was actually— he was a very complicated person. And a lot of what these people have been doing in trying to appeal back to Tolkien in their complaints or their anger about this is, you know, saying ‘Tolkien would, Tolkien did, Tolkien this’ is…appealing back to him is to, again, flatten him into a caricature of who he actually was and the man that he actually was. And it turns him into a reflection of, you know, that person’s own personal beliefs which may or may not be grounded in anything… I don’t know what the word might be, to be generous to them but…

Tim: Reality.

[ Group laughter ]

Leah: Reality? Yeah, that’s a good word. Yeah, it’s not grounded in reality and it’s often grounded in, you know, a revisionist sort of bigoted position about, you know…who he was, what he thought,  and a lot of it is more reflective of the person’s own bigotry and their own sense of the world.

Tim: (jokingly) Are you saying that they might be projecting a little bit? I don’t believe that…

Leah: Just a smidge. Just a tiny bit.

Grace: So much of what folks are saying in these just—just–you know…awful videos and comments on the internet and everything…is revisionist, it’s reductive, and it’s not reflective of Tolkien’s texts, or letters, or the documentation that we have. There are a lot of opinions being stated as facts that are directly contradicted in all of the written records that we have, so… And there’s certainly times where Tolkien contradicts himself, and we will certainly not shy away from the times that that happens. But we–

Alicia: It’s constantly. He constantly contradicts himself about literally everything. You can build a case on basically any side of any opinion based on Tolkien’s own words.

[ Sounds of agreement. ]

Leah: Yeah, he changed his mind constantly and up to the end of his life. I feel like when people ignore that, they do a really great disservice to him. And they try to tout themselves as, like, ‘they’re the great defender of Tolkien’ or sort of like ‘the true fan’. The true, you know, the pure Tolkien fan. And I’m like, this is the most disrespectful thing I feel like you can do to the man by insisting that you know what he thought at any given time when he’s dead, and you didn’t know him, and he constantly changed his mind about everything.

Grace: Although there were some things that he was pretty clear on as a throughline throughout his life. One of those would be as mentioned: he was not a fan of Nazis or ideologies of White Supremacy. And there are in fact quite a number of points in his letters, without even having to explicate his texts or anything like that–just in his letters–that he just absolutely eschewed those ideologies.

Which are of course the ideologies that a lot of these statements about Tolkien are grounded in today and that’s quite troubling to me. But the idea that everything is based in, you know, Nordic myths or whatever–there is, in Letter #375 he said “Not Nordic, please. A word I personally dislike. It is associated through the French origin with racialist theories.” He was very keen on pointing out when this was not ok with him!

Alicia: Yeah. We have had some joking discussions about whether it’s because it was racialist or because it was French?

[ Laughter ]

Tolkien famously hated words that come from French and like…when he was writing The Lord of the Ringsand he needed a synonym, he would go and make sure that it had Germanic origins and not French origins because he was, you know, in the 1900’s, still pissed off about the Norman invasion.

[ Laughter ]

Leah: Lord.

Grace: This is part of where folks I think get the idea that that makes sense because he was trying to create this Anglo-Saxon myth of Middle-earth in order to be a myth for England and all of that. But Alicia, do you want to tap in on how that’s not maybe perhaps quite true?

Alicia: Yeah, so, obviously Tolkien was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon, and therefore everything that he does is going to kind of be touched like that, because if you are, like, really enmeshed in a field in that way, it’s going to kind of bleed over into everything else. But I’m just going to go ahead and just say: if you haven’t read Dimitria Fimi’s Tolkien: Race and Cultural History, you should. She goes into this in a lot of detail.

It’s positioning Tolkien as a man in his time and how he is dealing with the leftovers of basically eugenics, and how that is, during his lifetime, being proven as being unscientific, and how he’s dealing with that from the time he’s 19 until he dies, essentially. And how the intersection of what’s happening scientifically and therefore what Tolkien believes scientifically and his individual study in Anglo-Saxon, how those two things intersect.

Because when he’s reading Medievalist works, those are actually based on Medievalist prejudices, and those sorts of things work their way into Tolkien’s work, even though Tolkien the man seems to have really eschewed racialist stuff.

 Like in Letter #37 he says “I should regret giving any color to the notion that I subscribe to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race doctrine.” Like he’s coming out really hard against that. But like, what he’s doing in his–at least what he’s doing in the first iteration of Middle-earth, which is The Book of Lost Tales(which is stuff that most people don’t even read because who actually reads the Histories of Middle-earth? Just like the real big dorks.)

Tim: Us.

Leah: A.K.A Us

Alicia: Yeah, exactly.

Grace: Yours truly.

Alicia: But when you hear people talk about the mythology for England, which we’re going to get into in a second, what they’re talking about is specifically The Book Of Lost Tales, his really early writings. And what he is trying to do there is actually…in his very early life, a lot of countries in Europe were re-finding their folk tales, and what he realized was that England doesn’t have its own folk mythology.

So he figured, much like Finland did with the Kalavalla, that he wanted to do something similar to that. But he’s coming at it from like a philological–which is the scientific study of language and literature and how they work together— he’s coming at it from that angle, and then he realized that there’s just not enough to really build actual folklore out of so he started creating his own.  I’ve really gone off on a tangent. [ Laughter ]

Leah: No! I was going to say that, you know, the idea that ‘England’ as a separate entity that ‘didn’t have a folklore ‘quote-unquote’ is kind of…is incorrect in the same way that the whole idea of reconstructing different ethnicities, and deconstructing and reconstructing the history of different cultures that sort of existed… that was all part of the same Medievalist project, right?

Like, the nation-building and rediscovering of folklore–it was all done with very specific aims in mind, grounded in nationalism and very often grounded in racism and in different supremacies–specifically white supremacy for a lot of the Northwestern European countries.

Because during the Enlightenment and during the Romantic periods, you know, these new studies of like…these new areas of science, in these new areas of investigation of history, and archaeology all of these things were used and able to be used to support very specific narratives. And often they were, you know, completely ungrounded in anything that, like, actually resembles the way that history unfolded, and it looks very, very different to the study of these different studies today. But they also kind of have that… that same ground of being really difficult to come away from and–I guess the point being that England as a ‘separate’ sort of nation… that’s not what it is. That’s never been what it is. It’s made up of a whole bunch of different peoples. It’s made up of a whole bunch of different invasions and immigrations and a whole lot of different peoples from the continent who came over in different waves.

And so the folklore that emerges, the mythology that emerges from it has all of those same influences. And so, I kind of feel like you know there really is no, like, ‘pure’, like… ‘England’ and there really is no ‘pure’ Anglo-Saxon, despite what a lot of people have tried to construct. Because the truth is…there was really no onepeople. It was all these different peoples coming together to live and occupy this… this little island.

Grace: The truth is that Tolkien is influenced by the history of the place where he lives and that this nation that he loves and all that. But the idea that he was writing a ‘Mythology for England’? That is not a phrase that Tolkien himself used. That’s a phrase that we’re all familiar with because it was introduced by his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter. And so the idea that that that’s ‘what Tolkien was doing’ is an assertion by another individual. It’s not something out of Tolkien’s own language.

Alicia: Yeah, it is a poor paraphrase of a letter that he sent to his publisher, but it is a very poor paraphrase.

I do want to get back to this ‘England as its own group of people’ thing because what it–it sounds really similar to what is currently happening in America, where people identify as white and don’t understand why that is problematic. It’s because white people aren’t…like really, that’s not your ethnicity. It’s not your nationality. And the reason why (I mean, like, in general) it’s ‘okay’, in quotation marks to claim to be Black, but it’s not okay to be white… It’s because white people enslaved Black people and took that ethnicity and nationality away from them. A lot of Black people in North America have no idea where they actually came from other than just generic ‘Africa’. Whereas, a lot of white people can pinpoint where their, you know, 5-times-Great-Grandparents came from and it’s, you know… England, it’s France, it’s Norway, whatever.

What is happening around the time that Tolkien’s actually trying to write his quote-unquote ‘Mythology for England’ is that the Celts were starting to rise up and push against England. Like, Ireland’s making a case for why they should be free, Scotland is making a case for why they should be free. Tolkien–who although his works were decorated with Celtic things–apparently dislikes? Celtic people. And he said in one of his letters that Celtic influence was an affront to his essential Anglo-Saxon-ness, which is a hell of a quote. He’s trying to make the group.

Leah: Yeah, yeah, hoof. Yeah.

Grace: It really highlights though, how his definition of race and culture is based in culture and language rather than physical characteristics like skin color.

Alicia: Yes.

Leah: Right. And in speaking to the point about claiming the ‘white culture’… It’s like, no: whiteness isn’t a culture. It’s an absence of culture. And–

Alicia: I’m sorry I thought white culture was having birthday parties for your dogs and doing gender reveals that catch California on fire.

Leah: Yeah, catch the country on fire… that is white culture. You’re absolutely right.

[ Group laughter ]

Tim: And for the record, since some of you can’t see us, everybody on this podcast is white as fuck.

Alicia: Yeah, yeah.

Leah: Is white as fuck. Yeah.

Grace: Look, and sometimes we’re complicit. We probably have all had birthday parties for our dogs or cats.

Alicia: Oh 100%. I make him a meat cake. It’s a whole thing.

Leah: Yeah…But like…in order to become ‘white’, our ancestors gave up their cultures, right? In order to gain these privileges and this power of Whiteness, we had to erase where we actually came from and cut ourselves off from that history, and our cultures of the various, you know, where our ancestors all came from.

Tim: The actual rich storied histories to make this like basically artificial culture that is…a fucking inch deep.

Leah: Exactly, yeah. And I feel like… I sometimes wonder if some of that, kind of, grief, in a way, is something that Tolkien was sort of reaching for when he talked about creating a mythology for England. In kind of trying to reconnect with something that didn’t mean the British Empire, that it didn’t mean colonization. It didn’t mean the eradication of so many other cultures. It kind of meant… what was it that the various peoples here on this island, in this space where I live…what were their stories and what were their beliefs?

And I guess… I don’t know if we want to keep going on with some of this, like, the mythology behind a ‘white’, you know, Medieval Europe–I don’t know–I get really frustrated with it when I see this complaint happening online, and I’ve seen it pop up a few times in Facebook.

Because, again, it’s the long argument in response to that particular complaint is grounded in needing to know the history of racisms, the history… the actual Medieval histories, the history of what we’ve been talking about with like, you know, nation building and the Romantic and Enlightenment movements, of science and eugenics and, you know, the grounding and racisms of that.

And… there’s a short argument against that complaint, which is: Nazis, my dude.

[Group laughter ]

Nazis are…you’re saying Nazi shit, and like, you’re doing…again, you’re doing the work of White Supremacists and Nazis when you say things like “the Middle Ages were white” and when you say things like “Medieval Europe was white.”

Tim: Erasure.

Leah: And I’m like: that’s like tl;dr without needing to know all that complex history and that nuance of what we mean when we say things like ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘white’ and all this other stuff. It’s like…

No! Nazis have been saying this shit for decades. It’s been a campaign of theirs for decades. Even before there were Nazis, white supremacists for saying this shit! And so I’m like: when you say it on Facebook or on Twitter, you’re doing their work for them.

Grace: Mmm-hmmm.

Alicia: I would also like to point out that Nazis got their ideas from Reconstruction America.

Leah: Bingo.

Alicia: Like, the KKK directly gave Nazis their ideas on how to do the horrible things that Nazis did. So like don’t even try to say that… “Well you know I’m an American and I believe in freedom and blah blah.” Whatever.

Grace: In fact, there are aspects of the American caste system that actual meeting groups of Nazis determined that they could not simply implement in Germany, because it would be too noticeably awful.

Alicia: Jesus fuck. Yeah, just for the record I’m from Georgia. I grew up really enmeshed in this horrible racist horseshit and it’s, um, mildly triggering for me.

Leah: Um, yeah, man, it’s just like… learning that shit, you’re just like, Jesus Fucking Christ. We… we have been sold something in American schools about ourselves for sure.

Alicia: Lies. Those things are lies.

Grace: And anyone by the way who wants to investigate a little bit more of what I was saying about Nazis actually holding back on some of the American traditions I would recommend [the book] Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson.

Tim: And if anybody wants to read more about the whole mythology for England and why it’s kind of largely a misconception: Luke Shelton, who is a co-host on “the Tolkien Experience Podcast” and also a PhD Tolkien scholar himself, did a whole great article on it that is called “Why Calling Tolkien’s Work ‘A Mythology for England’ is Wrong and Misleading”. And it goes over sort of the academic arguments for where it came from and why it is not really something that can be truly attributed to Tolkien, especially in his later life.

Alicia: It also goes into detail about Dimitra Fimi’s book, and why you should read it, because it is one of the cornerstones of modern Tolkien scholarship.

Tim: And it’s probably going to end up being like the unofficial bible of this podcast.

Alicia: Yeah, basically.

Grace: Pretty much.

Alicia: Read that book and then you’ll know all of our arguments.

Leah: Yeah.

Alicia: We started talking about inclusive casting and then like…hard-right straight into “Tolkien wasn’t a racist”.

Grace: Hard-left, hard-left, Alicia.

Alicia: Oh yeah, shit, oh God.

Leah: Oh Lord…

Alicia: Yeah, “Tolkien hated the French but he was okay with people with different colored skin.” Um, it doesn’t really even fucking matter what Tolkien thought—although, like, I’m always going to think it matters because I like Tolkien and I like his works, and I don’t want to be disappointed by him being a closeted racist (which he wasn’t).

This is 2022 and if they want to adapt a Tolkien work and put in Black people, there’s nothing stopping them. One, I don’t think that it would make Tolkien particularly angry because Tolkien doesn’t really seem to see race in the same way that, like, a North American person living today would see race.

Two, there is no textual evidence to say that there weren’t Black Elves.

Tim: That’s been one of my favorite things to throw back in the faces of the trolls on Facebook and Twitter: I ask them to specifically cite to me where Tolkien said that all Elves and or all Dwarves in Middle-earth were light-skinned. Nobody’s been able to yet. Because it doesn’t fucking exist.

Alicia: Right!? And three, is 2022 and like…the racial makeup of the group of people who are going to be watching this show is significantly different than it would have been even twenty to thirty years ago, so just fucking get over it.

Grace: I love too the argument that I see a lot crop up on Facebook and other such lovely places that “Well, but Tolkien was writing this in the 1930s, and 1930s Britain; it should reflect what 1930s Britain looked like.” Well, guess what? There were a lot of different cultures represented in 1930s Britain too, and so there’s really no excuse for a reductive reading of who can and can’t be in this fictional land of Middle-earth based on skin tone.

Tim: Yeah…I love that too. I Love that that’s what’s breaking the illusion for them, is the fact that some of the Elves and Dwarves have dark skin. Not the fact that, you know, they’re having trouble being immersed in this world where fucking like…wizards and goblins and fucking dragons exist.

Grace: There are wizards and dragons and light comes from trees…

Tim: Yeah, because somebody’s fucking skin pigmentation is too dark. That’s what breaks the illusion. Yeah.

Leah: Yeah, it’s like fucking Balrogs and dragons and a gigantic flaming spiritual eye… but Black people is where you draw the line?

Tim: Some of them will start going off into these stupid fucking like…genetics arguments and like…My dude. Elves were created by fucking magic. By Demi-Gods.

Alicia: They woke up next to a fucking Lake. They were sang into goddamn existence.

Tim: By a fucking race of shapeshifters, basically. By the Valar who could assume any goddamn shape that they wanted to.

Leah: By Eru, who is, you know, supposed to be God I guess but is…we could talk about that later. That’s a whole other episode. Yeah.

Grace: Previews of future episodes!

Tim: And then the Dwarves, made by Aulë, right? And Aulë, Also Valar. Also–fucking shapeshifter. There’s no reason why he couldn’t have magically made them in all the fucking colors of the rainbow kind of thing.

Alicia: Yeah I would like to, while we’re talking about Tolkien’s actual depictions of things, just give you a couple of short descriptions of Men that Tolkien gave.

Tim: Please do.

Grace: Please.

Alicia: So in the Quenta Silmarillion, which was written in the mid-to-late 1930s,  which is mostly what became the published Silmarillion, there’s additional work that got worked into that, but… there’s the three houses of the Edain which are the Men who align themselves with Elves–some of them became Númenorean later. There’s the House of Hador, which were described as yellow-haired, blue-eyed, for the most part…greater in strength and stature than the Elves and…what Treebeard would call hasty.

There’s the House of Haleth which were like the House of Hador, but not as tall–they were broader and slower, and had slow but deep thought.

And they actually change to be physically closer to Beor’s people in the 1950s iteration of the Silmarillion. And the house of Beor, which are darker brown hair, grey eyes, faces that are quote “fair to look upon, shapely of form but hardy, equal in height to Elves, and smart.” And I want to go forward to the Lord of the Rings where they talk about the Dúnedain which are the um–

Tim: Wait wait–the House of Beor at one point are also described as having skin color ranging from “fair to swarthy” explicitly.

Alicia: There you go. Yeah, in “Of Dwarves and Men”, which is in the middle of HoMe (History of Middle-earth) [Editorial Note: Volume 12 of HoMe, The Peoples of Middle-earth]. This is written in the late ’60s:  They are, the folks of Beor and Hador, are shown as being related by their speech. And the House of Beor is described as–this is a direct quote from that: “contrast in speech was probably connected with the observable physical differences between the two Peoples. Many were less fair in skin, some indeed being swarthy.”

Tim: Swarthy…I want to take a second and define that term because there are a lot of people that will say okay, he just meant…Mediterranean. You know, olive skin, whatever you want to call it kind of thing. But like swarthy. Yes, that is one historical application of that term. Swarthy is descended from the Anglo-Saxon word “Sweart” which means explicitly black. Tolkien being a fucking scholar of Anglo-Saxon would have been very familiar with that usage of the term.

Tolkien being also such an exacting linguist and being so careful with his word choice…if he wanted to prescribe a certain image in your head he would do so–and he did many times! How many fucking times does he talk about ladies having light, beautiful arms and shit like that…which we’ll get–I’m sure at some point we’ll end up talking about Tolkien’s weird fucking arm and hand thing. Not kink-shaming, but it’s–it’s there.

[ Laughter ]

And so any time that he leaves it open, that he uses a term like ‘fair’ or ‘swarthy’, he is leaving it up to interpretation. In your interpretation, maybe that’s that ‘swarthy’ means Mediterranean or olive-skinned or something like that. Your interpretation may be that fair is light-skinned. But that is your interpretation. That’s where that ends. It is not something that you can prescribe to anybody else.

Alicia: I almost skipped over something important going straight to Lord of the Rings. The Númenoreans are made up of those three houses of Men.

Tim: Yeah, they are. They’re absolutely House of Beor. So every motherfucker that wants to say Tar-Míriel can’t be Black: Fuck You.

Alicia: I would also like to point out that in Letters #154, Tolkien specifically says that Númenoreans are, quote: “hardly distinguishable from the Elves” and therefore I am putting out there that Elves can fucking be Black.

Leah: Fuck yeah.

Alicia: If Númenorean Men can be Black. Elves can also fucking be Black.

Leah: Hell yeah.

Grace: Hell yes.

Tim: And there’s also that letter– I’m looking for it right now–where Tolkien basically says that Númenoreans, he envisions as being closest in, like cultural descendance as–

Grace: Egyptians, yeah.

Alicia: Egyptians. It was one of the later letters—Fimi talks about it in-depth in her book.

Tim: It is from letter #211. So he says: “the Númenoreans of Gondor are proud, peculiar, and archaic, and I think are best pictured in (say) Egyptian terms. In many ways they resembled Egyptians–the love and power to construct the gigantic and massive…” etc, etc,  etc.

Leah: Yeah, and the Egyptians were majority brown and black skinned. But there were also, when the Greek invasion came in, tons of different peoples were in Egypt. 

I feel like a lot of this, like…some of this talk about you know, like, where certain people should be coded as being from based on their skin color is, you know… it’s yet another example of this whole ‘Medieval Europe was white’. And it’s like: No! Shit.  You guys, you don’t remember the fucking, you know, Roman Empire? Like, they were all over the damn place and so it’s sort of like… it’s a whole…I want to see all sorts of skin colors in Númenor and I feel like “Rings of Power” is trying to bring that same reflection to their casting.

Alicia: One last thing before I completely go away from these Men. The Dúnedain are specifically described as being taller and darker than the men of Bree, so also give me Black Aragorn.

Leah: Oh yeah!

Grace: Snaps for that!

Leah: Who would be a good Black Aragorn?

Grace: Yes!

Leah: Another show, sorry.

[ Group laughter ]

Grace: Yes, yes, the answer is yes, I would like to see all of those adaptations–that would be beautiful!

But no, this matters in our present day, right? Like, as there is a TV show that is being produced, that has been cast… it matters to have representation. So just for a little bit of a picture of where at least U.S. markets currently stand:

 U.S.-based data about streaming tv shows— all of this comes from a research project from Common Sense Media called the Inclusion Imperative:  Asian people are about 6% of the U.S. population and make up about 2% of leading roles on streaming television. Black people— 12% of the population, 5% of the main roles. Hispanic and Latino people are 19% of the population and only 6% of main roles…while white people are only 62% of the population but occupy 76 % of leading roles.

So where we are statistically is about 50% off of what actual representation would be and that matters for our ideas of who gets a voice at the table, who should be included, and if they’re being overrepresented…or underrepresented. And that matters because it has real-world impacts on how young people, how people who have grown up in this culture are impacted.

This dissonance? Statistically, according to numerous studies, aggravates racial tensions. Erasure and negative and stereotypical portrayals of people adversely affects how people see themselves, how people of color and people of other marginalized identities see themselves based on what is what is depicted on our TV screens. So it does matter that Amazon and any other group that is casting a television show today does actually make an effort to be true to representation as the world exists today.

Leah: Yeah.

Tim: Mic drop.

Leah: It’s just…totally. The thing is, if Middle-earth is ostensibly meant to be our Earth in way, way, back–there’s absolutely no reason that it should look, you know, in a particular way–in specifically a particular white nationalist way of looking at things.

There’s no reason that Middle-earth shouldn’t look like our Earth today because, I mean,  it’s ostensibly supposed to be our Earth. And the other thing is, Middle-earth exists in context, right? To, you know, where we are right now. And so I feel like…I feel like some of these different arguments that people have been–or at least different complaints that people have been having about how certain peoples in Middle-earth should or shouldn’t look is also kind of relevant here and, you know, it’s sort of like, who are you to say what that actually looks like when the Earth itself is so diverse?

So, in looking at some of these…do we want to kind of transition a little bit from like the Men into, like, the Elves and the Dwarves as well? And the Hobbits? And how they should ‘look?’

Alicia: I mean like…Tolkien is pretty fucking explicit about the Hobbits. He’s not very explicit about Elves and Dwarves though. I couldn’t actually find anything about specifics.

Tim: There’s nothing universal. There’s quotes about certain…even certain groups all having, you know, certain characteristics–but nothing saying that universally…there’s nothing all-encompassing for Elves or for Dwarves. There’s very little in terms of physical descriptions of Dwarves, period–and for Elves it ends up limited mostly to, like, hair color and eye color.

Alicia: I’m 100% taking that…Númenorean Men being basically indistinguishable from Elves as that’s the kind of diversity you should be able to find in Elves as well.

Tim: Yeah.

Leah: Yeah, I think it’s a good measurement—a good standard of measurement.

Tim: Yeah, and again, if it’s left ambiguous, then your interpretation is as valid as my interpretation, right?

Alicia: Yeah.

Grace: And I think it matters that people are able to see themselves in Middle-earth. It’s a fictional universe based off of our own Earth. So there should be representation and we should all be able to access that today.

And the reality is that no matter how much so many of us love Tolkien’s stories and Middle-earth and what-have-you… those of us who hold any marginalized identity are well aware of how painful it can be in reading–especially the most reductive ideas of who has access to this story.

There’s something you’ll see online all the time with these folks having comments of like, “well, if it’s fiction, you should just be able to see yourself in the fictional universe and why does it matter if Elves are Black” or what-have-you?

Well, it matters because anyone who is excluded from those descriptions has to work harder to see themselves in this place that we love. And that shouldn’t be.

Tim: And one problem is, you know, dark-skinned people are not unrepresented in Middle-earth. We have danced around the actual depictions of dark-skinned people in Middle-earth which are the Easterlings, which are the Dunlendings, which are the Haradrim, which are, you know, a fucking disaster area of racial stereotypes. You know, people with like, broad noses that are savage or whatever you want to fucking imagine the Púkel-men or like kind of thing, like, it’s a mess of like, Orientalism and shit like that and it’s just not great.

Leah: “Unlovely Mongol types and squint slant eyes” [Editorial Note: Letter #210]

Alicia: Indeed.

Tim: [ Sighs ] So yeah, so to have an example, even in an adaptation, where you’ve got, you know, people of darker skin that are represented as the more ‘heroic races’…Is honestly just overdue and kind of an equalizing factor at this stage.

Leah: Exactly, yeah.

Alicia: Yeah, that unlovely…”least lovely Mongol types” I…oh god, it makes my skin crawl to even repeat that–that is a direct quote from Tolkien about how the orcs should look.

Leah: Yeah.

Grace: It is interesting to note though that he often couches some of those things that make you go “Oh boy…”, he often couches those in how someone who is not familiar with their group of peoples would perceive them, and so he does often throw that back onto the reader as opposed to perhaps the narrator. So there’s some…some question there, some nuance, but uh…yeah, the phrasing isn’t great.

Alicia: No.

Leah: Yeah, it’s definitely like–I think that there’s some nuance there, but I also, you know, I also definitely think that it’s fair to say that that’s pretty shitty of you to say, Tolkien. Like, come on.

Grace: Yeah.

Alicia: I would like to point out he said that in June of 1958. He should have known better by then.

Tim: Yeah.

Grace: Mmm-hmmm.

Leah: For a lot of this stuff that we’re talking–I mean again: a whole other episode about Tolkien’s personal racism. And like, he’s a racist in the same way that all people are racist, in that we benefit from the systems of racism and are specifically benefit because of the color of our skin and in opposition to people who have different colors of skin. And, yeah…Basically, I guess I don’t want us to let Tolkien too off the hook too too much.

But I do think that, as we’ve been talking about, there was a lot of contradiction in what he was saying and there was a lot…he had a lot of different ideas about how he saw the various peoples of his creation. And I definitely think that there’s a lot of room—There’s more than enough room for Black people to be in Middle-earth, there’s way more room for Black Elves and Black Dwarves in Middle-earth than a lot of what these shitheads online are saying, and I guess that’s kind of like my ultimate point.

Grace: One of the points where it matters a lot to me is the statements that some of the actors who are portraying these characters have made. So like…Ismael Cruz Cordova [who plays the Elf Arondir] in an interview talked about reading Lord of the Rings as a kid and saying:

“I felt very represented spiritually and intellectually but not in image…There was no one that looked like me. I was a child and that was very present. So I traversed through life and had this dream of becoming an Elf, and so when I saw myself in the mirror with full armor in my ears on and I was an Elf I just, you know, there was a tear or two. That little boy felt very proud. And I know that that magic that I felt looking at myself in that mirror is something that I knew a new generation–but also adults–are going to feel. ‘That’s my guy! That’s me!'”

Leah: I’m so excited to see him as…I’m so excited to see this show.

Tim: And that’s something that all of us as white people and generally a lot of these, you know, critics are largely white dudes…sometimes white women…very rarely I’ve found people of color. They just don’t comprehend because they have grown up seeing themselves represented in every form of media, right? And so it’s just…it’s not something…they just lack the empathy to understand ‘Hey this does matter’ even though it doesn’t feel like it for you, because you’ve been taking this representation for granted your entire life.

Leah: You’ve never had it happen to you.

Tim: Yeah.

Grace: Well, and Sophia Nomvete, whose name I am probably mispronouncing, I apologize Sophia–um, who plays–

Tim: Who will definitely hear this, so…

[ Laughter ]

Grace: Look, got to have high hopes! (Yeah, no)

[ Laughter ]

Leah: She’s getting in on the ground floor of this podcast for sure.

Grace: Hey, Tim has had some tweets liked by writers for the show. So, you know, nothing’s impossible!

No, but Sophia Nomvete talks about this in some of the interviews too. She is playing a Dwarf queen named Disa who is largely a new construct for the show, and um…I’m sure it will surprise none of our listeners to recognize that she has drawn so much controversy and criticism just in the fact of her mere existence as a Black woman being cast in this show and speaking openly about what that means.

Alicia: Also in an interracial marriage.

Grace: Yes. But she’s made the point several times along the lines of, like, “Now, in this instance, we’re seen and we’re heard and we’re acknowledged as having a right to be here as much as anybody else.”

And that–that is what is so key for me is that the interpretations that we have of Tolkien’s works and Middle-earth and all of that, in adaptation, are accessible to everyone because there is textual support for it, but also because we live in the world today. We live in the world of 2022 and so yes, the world of 2022 ought be minimally reflected in the works that we create now.

Leah: Absolutely.

Tim: [ Angry Nerd Voice ] But this is cultural appropriation. You weren’t cast on white people in a Black Panther movie. You wouldn’t put white people in a Kung Fu movie.

Leah: Lord.

Alicia: Well fuck my life, Quentin Tarantino would put white people in a Kung Fu movie.

Tim: Would and has.

Leah: Shit, would he.

Tim: I love me some Tarantino but I openly acknowledge that he is problematic as shit. Also, might have some things in common with Tolkien in terms of the appendage fetish.

Leah: Appendage fetishes. Yeah, that’s exactly where I was going.

Alicia: Indeed…Indeed. I would like to point out in terms of cultural appropriation: You can’t appropriate the dominant culture, that’s assimilation, it’s a completely different thing.

Tim: [ Angry Nerd Voice ] It’s white replacement theory.

Leah: That’s another show!

[ Laughter ]

Leah: But in the exact same way that there’s no such thing as ‘reverse racism’, there’s no such thing as Black people appropriating from white people because again, whiteness isn’t a culture. I also, like, in response to a lot of this stuff is, like:

Number 1: You can’t appropriate from a dominant culture and,

Number 2: When you say things like “Ugh, why don’t you guys just make up your own stories? Why don’t you go, like, you know, make up your own fictional characters and tell stories about them?” Like…that’s what we’ve been doing. That’s what Black Panther is, for one thing, and it’s like…it implies that–it implies that…

Tim: Separate but equal maybe? Is that is that what people want? Yeah.

Leah: It implies that there’s no room for…it goes back to, like, there’s no room for you here. It’s like…that it implies that you’re not actually a part of this story. You’re not actually a part of this culture.

Tim: It’s cultural segregation.

Grace: The folks saying this are tattling on themselves.

Alicia: Oh yeah.

Leah: They really are, and it’s just, like, the idea that, you know…telling people to go make up their own thing. It’s like, that’s what all marginalized people have been doing for ages, where have you been?

The existence of fan-fiction is a testament to what we’ve been doing, and it’s like… it just kind of supports that division between people and saying…and kind of putting down that line saying that like “you’re not actually a part of this story at all, and you never were” and that’s absolutely not true.

Grace: It’s ahistorical. It’s atextual. It’s not a valid argument based on the texts that exist.

Tim: Plus, it’s not as simple as “Okay I’ll go make my own thing.” There are still very real systemic barriers to minorities and underprivileged and marginalized groups making their own media because look at the fucking executives at any major studio and it’ll be 80 to 90% white people kind of thing.

Like, when those are the people that are making decisions on what gets greenlit and what doesn’t, then you’re never going to have any sort of equality whatsoever, or equity, in terms of who’s represented in the stories, who has those lead, you know, those lead protagonist roles.

Leah: Um, yeah.

Alicia: One of my Facebook friends, his name’s Milton Davis, he is a Black author who writes steampunk and fantasy and science fiction. He’s a lovely man. He posted something about this exact thing–about how Black writers get shit upon for playing in other people’s sandboxes, for wanting to write for, you know, mainstream comic books, stuff like that.

And people tell them “Oh, well, just make your own thing, like, make your own thing and make it like, you know, Black-led.” Even his Black fans who tell him to do that…then don’t buy his stuff when he actually does that because they’re characters they don’t know. He’s, you know, doing something new, but they want another Spider-man.

Tim: Yeah, they’ve got so much invested in those existing characters that that’s what they are ultimately looking for. And not only that, but those minority characters or characters that represent marginalized groups–they never get the same promotion that your big-name characters do as well, right? So you’re fucking, like… 3 steps behind at the starting line.

Alicia: Yeah, at this point he’s just self-publishing because he couldn’t find a publishing house that would give him equal status to other people, so he just decided to start doing it himself. And he’s actually doing pretty good, so, like, kudos to you! But, it’s a huge fucking problem! Like, unless there’s equal representation all the way up in companies, you’re just never going to get true equity.

Leah: Yeah.

Tim: And it’s starting to happen in comics. Like, the actual comic books are not necessarily–you’re in my fucking wheelhouse now, so bear with me for a second–not necessarily in the movies and secondary medias. But, you know, like right now there is a Black Batman that operates in New York City that is one of the sons of Lucius Fox–anybody that knows Morgan Freeman’s role from the Dark Knight movies.

There is…Superman’s son is currently the Superman of Earth and he is bisexual. One of the Robins has come out as bisexual. There is a fantastic Black female I think at least bisexual, if not pan, Green Lantern right now written by N.K. Jemison–if you have not read her miniseries Far Sector I highly, highly recommend it. It’s really, really good and plays on a lot of other really great social issues and stuff like that as well. So that is starting to happen as well in the comics. But again, comics aren’t what’s making the money.

The only reason that’s happening is because that’s not the bread and butter of Warner Brothers and Disney these days, right? They’re making their money off of the MCU and the DC movies and TV shows and stuff like that. So, they’re like “Okay, well, this is kind of secondary so we’ll let you play around in the sandbox over here a little bit,” but still a long way to go.

Leah: Well, what else did we want to touch on briefly? Do we want to…?

Grace: So that was our first topic!

[ Group laughter ]

Alicia: Ah, fuck it, Grace!

[ laughter ]

Leah: That was the first one in our in our five-part series…

Grace: I have several other soapboxes to climb on, you guys!

Alicia: As do I.

Tim: [ In Angry Nerd Voice ] Dwarf Women should have beards.

Alicia: Dwarf women should have beards, and you can–I will die on this fucking hill!

Grace: Dwarf women should have beards! Dwarf women in the Amazon Prime Show do! [Editorial Note: this was said before the show actually aired. There are no Dwarf women with beards in “Rings of Power”] That is excellent! However! Tolkien did write–there are three pieces of Tolkien’s writing that mentions Dwarf women and beards.

In Histories of Middle-earth: War of the Jewels we have an Elf who’s accounting for like, his narrative here, that Dwarf women have beards. It’s Pengalod, and he’s an Elf and an outsider… So. That’s a point from his perspective because the most common thing that we hear about is that Gimli, in Return of the King talked about that “There are few Dwarf women, probably no more than a third of the whole people, they seldom walk abroad except at great need. They’re in voice and appearance and in garb, if they must go out in journey, so like the Dwarf men that the eyes and ears of other people cannot tell them apart. This has given rise to the foolish notion that there are no Dwarf women and the Dwarves grow out of stone” and all that.

So yes, striking similarities and all that. But there is a note that Tolkien wrote in a letter and that’s published in Nature of Middle-earth that talks about all male Dwarves have beards, but doesn’t go into stating that female Dwarves do, and it’s not stressed in the way that male Dwarves is in this marginal note that’s published in Nature of Middle-earth.

So, there is definitely an argument that there wouldn’t need to be this in the depiction or there might be some flexibility. But for all the people shouting about it on the internet… It’s kind of a moot point because the characters as depicted in the Amazon Prime show that they’re yelling about do, in fact, have beards.

Tim: Disa has little baby fluff kind of stuff going on–like a chin strap but it’s not like a full beard.

Alicia: Which I think flies in the face of “you can’t tell them apart” because if she doesn’t have like the same amount of beard as the other, like, male Dwarves. You can tell them apart.

Leah: Alicia and I just want bearded women, I’m sorry!

Alicia: Fuck Yes!

Grace: I mean, yes.

Tim: And I think that’s totally valid, I just don’t understand the people that are making that one of the crucial points. If that is, like…what you’re going to let break the entire series for you then, like, you weren’t really invested to begin with. You were just looking for like something to fucking shit on.

Alicia: Like if any hair is going to break this for you, it should be the Elf hair.

[ Group laughter ]

Grace: I mean, that’s a whole thing. My Gosh.

Leah: Oh Lord, oh my goodness.

Grace: No, the thing that I do note in that in that Return of the King reference is that the depiction of Dwarf women being so alike in voice appearance and garb that if they must go on a journey they look so like the Dwarf men…this suggests to me that perhaps when they’re at home…their grooming habits might be different than when they are travelling on the road, or what-have-you. There’s an argument for differences in adaptation. That even if it’s not the thing that we most want to see? Whatever they put in the show, as long as there’s a note back to…a path back to what’s in the text, I’ll be happy.

Tim: What if it’s an issue of safety? What if it’s the dwarven women who travel abroad want to be perceived as dwarven men so that they’re safer?

Grace: I am 100% down for Dwarf women not wanting to deal with Middle-earth dudes’ fuckery, okay?

Tim: [ Laughing ] No Middle-earth Fuckboys.

Leah: They don’t want to deal…yeah, they don’t want to deal with fuckboys. That’s what it is, and it’s like you know? Yeah.

Grace: They put on their beards, they grow out their beards, they put on their beards–whatever it is–in the same way that we all put on our headphones and read our books because we don’t want to be talked to on public transit, ok?

Tim: It’s like, you know, ladies going out without makeup or, like, without having shaved their legs or whatever because they don’t want fucking unwanted male attention. This could be the exact same situation for dwarven women.

Grace: I am so down for that reading.

Leah: Yeah–I am super, super-duper into it. Well, we were talking about Elves hair–I know a lot of people have gotten really upset about short hair on Elves.

Tim: So there’s two classes of this one, right? There’s Arondir the dark-skinned Elf who has, you know, basically his hair is very close shaven.

Leah: Fresh buzz.

Tim: And then there’s the fucking used-car-salesman hair on Celebrimbor and Elrond.

Alicia: It’s so fucking bad! It’s so–I’m sorry–it’s so fucking bad. You did Celebrimbor and Elrond dirty. I’m already mad about Celebrimbor because I feel like the actor’s too old to play the Elf they cast him to play, and you know, I understand it’s at least mildly problematic…I don’t really care. Celebrimbor is my boy. Him and Annatar are my favorite slash pairing. I’m mad. But the fucking wigs that they put on these guys are atrocious. They’re so bad. It’s like seventies porn star/insurance salesman. It’s so bad.

Grace: Oh listen– I call them the Pantene Pro-V Elves.

Leah: Oh, I Love that.

Grace: Because yes–it is not…is it my vision? It is not. But I do have to acknowledge that Tolkien doesn’t say anywhere in the text that Elves all have long hair and that this is the stylistic choice of all Elves through all three ages of Middle-earth. Like, it’s a choice, but it’s not one that’s prohibited by the text. So…my ire has to be entirely personal.

Tim: Maybe we just need to look at the Second Age as the ‘70s of Middle-earth.

Alicia: I don’t want to!

Tim: –Where a lot of poor style and hair choices were made.

Leah: Yeah, yeah, why not? I’m into it.

Alicia: So is there a fucking bowl for your car keys when you walk into Rivendell?

[ Group laughter ]

Grace: I mean, I’m not going to be mad if there is.

Tim: Rule 34: That fic probably does exist, right?

Leah: I was going to say: that fic definitely exists.

Grace: Listen, someone was real, real mad on the internet and was like “what are we going to do next, have polyamorous Elves!?” And I was, like… well that’s an idea!

Leah: That’s…also a thing you can do.

Tim: When you’ve fucking been alive for thousands and thousands of years, you’re going to get sick of fucking the same dude. Like, let’s be honest, like Third-Age Galadriel is definitely not fucking Celeborn anymore. Yeah.

Alicia: No, she’s fucking Gandalf.

[ Group laughter ]

Alicia: And then she sailed off to Valinor with Gandallf and not with her fucking husband, left her husband to chill in Mirkwood with Thranduil.

Tim: Yeah.

Leah: I mean…

Alicia: Just saying.

Leah: I also think that like, you know, living for thousands and thousands of years, you’re going to want to change your hairstyle. Maybe once in a while? Like, I would get really fucking sick of long hair if I was 3000 years old, so…

Tim: And they’re not all gonna be winners.

Leah: They’re not all going to be winners, and also it’s like, you know, just trying something new! You know, just going through a fun phase! And, you know, couple hundred years will get it fixed.

Grace: The Elves do have a sort of ennui at times–

Alicia: Yeah.

Grace: This might just be their bangs phase. The Second Age might just be their bangs phase.

Leah: It might be the mullet phase.

Grace: So what you’re saying is it could be worse. It could get worse.

Alicia: Oh my God–You guys know that meme about how like Legolas talks with a really country accent because he’s from Mirkwood? Legolas with a mullet.

Grace: It hurts us, Precious.

Leah: Mwah. Mwah. Perfection. I would watch the hell out of that show. Duck dynasty, but… Mirkwood, basically.

Grace: Ok, but Gimli gets to style his hair in a mohawk–like a gelled, peaked mohawk. Like the two of them are just attending a punk concert.

 

Tim: Since we’re talking about Galadriel and Celeborn now, let’s move on to: [ In Angry Nerd voice ] Galadriel wasn’t a warrior. She never wore armor. She never picked up a sword.

Leah: Yes.

Alicia: [ Sigh ]

Grace: Ok, let me ascend to my soapbox here.

Leah: That voice is almost too good, I’m like…oh my god.

Grace: So the idea that Galadriel could not have been a warrior is banana-pants to me. There are so many points in the text where Tolkien talks about her leadership in an aspect or a realm which is conceivably militarily oriented. So, he says she’s “one of the leaders of the Noldorian rebellion against the Valar”, that’s in the Silmarillion. In fact, the first whole slew of references that I’m going to talk about are in the Silmarillion and that’s, you know–the most closely published to Tolkien’s own lifetime with the most editing of his own in there. So I want to prioritize those.

In “Flight of the Noldor”, he says “Galadriel, the only woman of the Noldor to stand that day, valiant against the contending princes.” I mean…that term valiant is a pretty key one in terms of military valour and all of that. Tolkien does know words and does know what he’s talking about and what the connotations of being valiant in this military setting means, and he is suggesting this to us. And these are even in the earliest writings about Galadriel.

We also have “led by Fingolfin and his sons, and by Finrod and Galadriel” as another reference within that same chapter of the Silmarillion. In “Of the Voyages of Earendil”, we have “Celeborn of Doriath and Galadriel his wife, who alone remained of those who led the Noldor to exile in Beleriand.”

In “Rings of Power and the Third Age”, he says she was the mightiest and fairest of all the Elves that remained in Middle-earth. So, this is just from the Silmarillion alone, there are a half-dozen references that at least make a case for Galadriel as being a leader militarily among the Elves as they fight.

Tim: Those are not the only references by far. As part of what I’m sure we’re gonna end up mentioning, Our “Rings of Power” book club that Grace and Alicia and myself were part of in the five months leading up to the premiere of “Rings of Power”, where we read through every last fucking word–contradictory or not–of what Tolkien wrote about the Second Age.

From Silmarillion to Unfinished Tales, History of Middle-earth and everything, and there were a couple of in there that were in… “Of Galadriel and Celeborn” is the chapter. It’s one of the last chapters in Unfinished Tales. It is one of the last things that Tolkien wrote before he passed away.

Grace: He was working on it in the final month of his life.

Tim: Yeah. And in that chapter, Tolkien explicitly says in reference to Galadriel “she fought fiercely against Fëanor in defence of her mother’s kin,” and also, “She with Celeborn fought heroically in defence of Alqualondë against the assault of the Noldor.”

Both of these are referencing the same event–they’re referencing the First Kin-Slaying–but both of those very explicitly say “fought.” Not, you know, “resisted” or something sort of ambiguous like that, it is “fought”. It is, you know, the violent, hands-on battle kind of sense of the word, not, like, you know, that it was just like a political resistance or something like that kind of thing.

Alicia: It’s so much harder for me to see Celeborn doing anything of value than it is to see Galadriel as a warrior.

[ Laughter ]

Leah: Yeah, that’s the real unbelievable thing there.

Tim: And we just had this discussion too. We were having it sort of facetiously, with regards to Elves changing their hairstyles and stuff but, like, legit–these are beings that are immortal that live for thousands and thousands of years. They are not going to be static over that whole period. They are going to change, they are going to, you know, respond to events that are happening around them in different ways. There are plenty of people that you could look at right now and say, like, “I bet that person’s never been in a fight in their life.” But maybe they were in the military, you know, twenty years ago.  You cannot look at somebody now and say that you know what they were twenty years ago let alone an Age ago in the case of Galadriel.

Grace: And there are plenty of people that you look at now and think: Gosh, I don’t know that this is the person that I would want, you know, making policy and everything down the road because of, you know…how they behaved in, I don’t know, college? That turn out to have actually really great ideas as they get more life experience, and Galadriel does get a little bit of life experience over Three Ages of Middle-earth.

Like, we’re familiar–most familiar–with this version of her from Lord of the Rings which is a single year in the Third Age. There’s a lot of her history that comes before that, and the different versions that Tolkien wrote are contradictory. Christopher Tolkien talks about “there’s honestly probably nothing more contradictory than the different versions of Galadriel and Celeborn’s history”, and there are all kinds of contradictions and tensions between these things–where they travelled at various times, and what part of Arda they were from, and where they were, and at what point they joined a battle and all that. He went back and forth on all of this.

But, the thing that comes through in all of the different versions is this commonality of Galadriel’s involvement in what is arguably a military context. So, in Unfinished Tales, as well as Peoples of Middle-earth we have the Shibboleth of Fëanor, where it talks about Galadriel and says “her mother-name was Nerwen, ‘Man-maiden’, and she grew to be tall beyond the measure even of the women of the Noldor. She was strong of body, mind, and will—a match for both the loremasters and the athletes of the Eldar’. Like, we’re talking about Galadriel’s physical prowess in athletic feats here!

Tim: I want to go quickly on to what a mother-name is as well. Because elves have multiple names. They have like a name their mother gives them, a name their father gives them–That’s I think just, like, what they sort of go by in public, which in Galadriel’s case is “Galadriel”–but the mother-name in particular, is, in some cases, Tolkien writes– in most cases basically, supposed to be the name that most represents the essence of that Elf, because the mother is supposed to have some insight into what their child will become kind of thing. So you could make a case that Nerwen, which translates literally into “man-maiden”, is, like, Galadriel’s truest name.

Grace: Yeah.

Leah: Yeah, and Tolkien in a letter–Letter #348–says of Galadriel: “Galadriel was then”–then, back in her history–“of Amazon disposition and bound up her hair as a crown when taking part in athletic feats.”

Grace: And it is worth noting that every other time that he applies the term Amazon to a woman in the Legendarium it is in the context of women who fought in battle, who had a warrior aspect to their experience. It wasn’t just a descriptor or whatever. It was a very intentional, and this maps onto a pattern of usage.

Tim: And Tolkien’s no stranger to genderfuckery either, right? Like, look at Éowyn as a character, look at “I am no man” right? This is an idea he’s played with in the past, is female characters carrying traditionally male traits. It’s not out of the realm of possibility to imagine. Especially as he was getting further, you know, later in his life and had lived through the women’s rights movement that he started to think like, maybe I should have written this character a little bit more dimensionally, and that is one of the last characters he was, you know, trying to sort of retcon if you will. Up to the month of his death.

Leah: Yeah.

Grace: Absolutely. And then there’s also some mentions in Unfinished Tales that “she looked upon the Dwarves with the eye of a commander.” And what stands out to me in this is that at the point that this phrase appears in the history of Galadriel and Celeborn, it’s talking about the Second Age, between the years 400 and 750 in this version. She is present with Celeborn and Celebrimbor in Eregion, and she’s also noted that she studies under Aulë, who’s the member of the Valar who is about craftsmanship and forging and whatever.

So, there’s a whole lot of people on the internet who want to come out with like “well she’s a strong woman in her own right, so she doesn’t need a sword. We don’t need to have a sword-wielding version of her!” Like… Galadriel could know how to forge her own sword! Galadriel does not need your reductive, revisionist ideas of who her character is over 8000 years, my dude. She’s fine, and she’s cool.

Leah: Yeah, and why not have a sword-wielding Galadriel? I mean why–why the fuck not?

Grace: Yeah, well, it’s also something that I noted because I started going through a lot of the Silmarillion at one point, kind of inspired by this like [ Putting on Angry White Nerd voice ] “well, you know, Galadriel doesn’t need a sword, sort of thing. Other people, but Galadriel never has a sword” kind of, you know, fuckery arguments.

And I did notice something, and the thing that I noticed is that people like to compare Galadriel in the Second Age to, like, Gil-galad and Elendil and people who are, in the sparse writings of the Second Age, specifically noted as being military commanders and being part of the Last Alliance of Men and Elves, and fighting against Sauron, and all of that. And, um…the first time that Gil-galad’s spear Aeglos is mentioned…is in his death scene. The—spoilers you guys, I’m so sorry, spoilers.

[ Group laughter ]

Tim: Um, yeah, spoilers for the series, for this book that’s gonna be–

Leah: [ Mock gasps ] What!?

Tim: Damn it, he was my favorite.

Grace: The first time that Elendil’s sword is mentioned is–that Narsil is mentioned–is in that same death scene.

Tim: [ Facetiously ] What!?

[ Group laughter ]

Alicia: What??

Leah: What, Isildur dies!? Spoilers!!

[ Laughter ]

Alicia: Narsil is broken!? What!?

Leah: Narisil was broken!? Oh my god.

[ Laughter ]

Grace: You guys, I’m sorry, spoilers. Spoilers for “the Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring” prologue from the Peter Jackson films. I know that, like, 22 years or whatever is too soon on but…

[ Laughter ]

Leah: The first ten minutes of the film, spoilers.

Grace: But no, this is actually something that we see actually fairly regularly throughout the Silmarillion–the way that Tolkien records this history is that he mentions a weapon when it is of particular importance, usually in a grand battle scene that might, in fact, be a death scene for a character and it’s a major turning point in the battles.

So I mean, Morgoth and his hammer Grond are actually only really noted in that scene where– again, spoilers–where he’s defeated and Fingolfin’s mail and sword Ringle are noted in that same scene.

Tolkien’s style of writing in this age and for the Silmarillion and these other historical notes is not the narrative style of a novel. It’s a historical account and so these details are added in at the point when they would be recorded in history in this way.

And similarly, he doesn’t use the word fought very often. It’s really iconic when he does, it’s really important and impactful when he does. Usually he’s giving others synonyms or allusions. So: “Galadriel took up rule and defense against Sauron” is something that’s mentioned in Unfinished Tales. Celeborn “withstood the assaults”.

But at the same time, you have “Gil-galad defends Lindon and the Gray Havens”–that’s in Peoples of Middle-earth. You have “Galadriel escaped from Nargothrond on the day of its destruction” or in a different version “fled Nargothrond before its fall.” Well, you also have “Isildur escapes from the orcs who attacked him”, Elrond “was able to extricate himself from an attack.”

All of the time throughout the Silmarillion, male characters escape, they aid, they defend, they command, they guard, they’re overwhelmed. And these are some of the same pieces of language that are used to describe Galadriel’s actions. So, there is at least as strong an argument for Galadriel being a military figure and a fighter and a warrior throughout at least part of her time in Arda as there is for all of these male characters who it’s generally accepted for, and gosh, what could the difference be in our perceptions?

Tim: Hmmm….

Leah: [ Sarcastically ] It’s hard to put my finger on it…

Grace: It’s just on the tip of my tongue, I’m sure I’ll get to it someday.

Tim: Es…Vagine?

[ Everyone starts laughing ]

Alicia: God Dammit.

Tim: And I’ve broken everyone.

Alicia: Oh no….

Leah: I was going to say, it was kind of great that it was the dude who said that too.

[ Group laughter ]

Grace: He fits in well.

 

Leah: Do we want to move on from–do we have anything else, anything more to say about Galadriel?

Grace: Oh, I do. I do. Thank you so much for asking!

Leah: There’s always so much more to say about Galadriel, I mean…

[ Group laughter ]

Grace: Just one more point–and this is my, like, salty point and it’s actually something that I started looking at…I had picked up a copy of Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Atlas of Middle-earth. I was looking through some of the maps and nerding out about them, and noticed a particular note in there that I…checked the index, went back to the Silmarillion and started looking at.

 And…it’s this particular note: on the return of the Noldor, Tolkien notes that Finrod is a Nargothrond, Galadriel is living with Celeborn and Melian learning great lore and wisdom from Melian, and Turgon is in Nevrast. And following the paragraph of each of these three examples of where these three particular Elves are, he says “Now Morgoth, believing the report of his spies that the Lords of the Noldor were abroad with little thought of war, made trial of the strength and watchfulness of his enemies.”

And of course that didn’t work out well for him in the long run. It’s Tolkien talking about… by making these assumptions, Morgoth underestimates these particular characters–including Galadriel–who are, in fact, preparing for war and combat and defence.

And I just want to point out that this is basically what the people ranting in the Youtube videos and in the comments section are doing–they are making the exact same mistakes as Morgoth.

Leah: Yep, so exact same assumptions.

Tim: Mmmhmmm.

Grace: Grounded in kind of the same issues. Yeah, yeah.

Leah: Same mysterious issue that we can’t name.

Grace: Again, Tip of my tongue.

Tim: Are we basically just calling Morgoth a misogynist at this point?

Leah: I mean why not? If the boot fits…

Grace: I mean, I believe that he contains multitudes of other problematic behaviors. But, I mean, let’s not excuse him.

Tim: Morgoth the Fuckboy.

Leah: If the boot fits your lame foot…deep-cut, deep-cut.

Tim: Morgoth de-feeted.

Grace: So again, as we talked about with, you know,  the depiction of casting of people of different ethnicities in Middle-earth, there are certainly all kinds of arguments and interpretations that are available based on how Galadriel is depicted in the texts.

But there are so many threads that run through that it’s really, really difficult to make any sort of compelling case that Galadriel can’t have this physical prowess, can’t be a warrior, can’t wield a sword. That may not be your personal preference, it may not be your personal vision… But it’s really hard to make a case that all of the instances in the text should be ignored in favor of your personal vision that is the one and only way.

Tim: Totally a valid reading.

Leah: Totally. Why don’t we move on to some of the kind of more general complaints that I think are grounded less in some of this misogyny and racism, and kind of more talking about some of the issues that are inherent in adaptation?

And this is kind of, like, the whiny crybaby section that I’m kind of, like, guys, grow up. You know how adaptations work, you know how movies are made, or don’t you? This is kind of the complaints that are things about like… the timeline being compressed and original characters.

Tim: That’s my job!

Leah: Excuse me! Have at it, have at it.

[ Laugher ]

Tim: You’re stepping on my lines, Leah. [ In Angry Nerd Voice] The timeline’s being compressed, Guys. It’s an entire Age. Why are they making it only into one lifetime?

Leah: Because there’s only 5 fucking seasons, my dude. That’s why.

[ Laughter ]

Tim: And because it’s not going to be a super exciting, super engaging series if like, every season you’re meeting, like, multiple generations of Númenorean leaders kind of thing.

Leah: Yeah, it took fifty-seven years for Sauron to, you know, basically get in the good graces of Ar-Pharazôn in Númenor. It’s like, we’re not going to wait, we’re not going to watch fifty-seven years of this, of this show, like Good Lord.

Grace: If we’re gonna–We’re gonna do this series in real-time, we’re going to be here a long time.

Leah: Yeah.

Alicia: As someone who just read everything Tolkien has ever written about Númenor, do I wish that they would start this earlier and not start with Míriel and Ar-Pharazôn? 100%. There’s so many good stories that happen in Númenor.

Grace: Yes.

Alicia: But I also understand that it’s a fucking TV show and they’re not wanting to bring on a new cast member, build, like, trust and love for that cast member, and then just have them die over and over and over again.

Leah: Yeah, because they’re mortal men, and that’s what they do.

Grace: With the way that Tolkien writes the immortal characters and long-lived characters and then characters who have lifespans closer to our current age of humanity…you would have people dying every quarter episode. And it’s just really hard to make a compelling narrative argument in about 8 to 10 minutes of why we should care about that person.

Alicia: Right.

Tim: Yeah.

Leah: Yeah.

Leah: Yeah, or even less. I mean, I think you kind of make a lot of decisions about what you’re watching and what you’re reading in just a few minutes, so I’m kind of like…For the same reasons that in “The Fellowship of the Ring”, we did not watch seventeen years pass between Bilbo’s birthday party and Gandalf telling Frodo about the One Ring, I think the timeline being compressed from about, you know, several thousand years to, you know, maybe a few years is a good and wise choice to it for adaptation.

Tim: I think it can still reasonably be like half of a lifetime kind of thing right? Like there are some of these characters we can grow up with, there could still be big time jumps between seasons and stuff like that. It’s just, you know, big time jumps meaning like, a decade or two, not a century or two kind of thing.

Leah: Yeah, because everybody we’ve met and grown to love has gone into the ground.

Tim: Except the Elves.

Leah: Yeah.

Grace: And in our human perceptions, a timeline jump of ten years when in the actual timeline it would have been a hundred and forty or what-have-you? Means the same thing to us. Our lives are not a hundred and forty years long and so we do understand time passes on a different level than what it means for a Númenorean or an Elf and that’s okay, it’s going to be humans watching.

Leah: Yeah. Tim, would you like to read the next complaints here?

Tim: [ Angry Nerd Voice ] Why can’t they just stick to what Tolkien wrote? Why did they have to make up new characters? This is basically just fan fiction at this point.

Leah: Oh, this is just fan fiction. Just like, man, I wish it were fan fiction–I’m sure that there’s plenty of fodder there that would blow some of these people’s minds. The thing is that ultimately Tolkien didn’t write that many major characters for the Second Age and so there’s going to have to be some creative license, there’s going to have to be some invention.

Even around those characters that he did write about such as Tar-Míriel and Ar-Pharazôn… the reason being that most of what his writings were for the Second Age read as histories rather than as narrative arcs, and so in order to bring an audience into the world, you’re going to have to have things happen in a way that brings us along with the characters rather than kind of…in retrospect and in telling us.

The other major point here is that there are fewer than 1000 characters in Middle-earth and in Aman across three Ages that spanned over 10,000 years. At some point, somebody whose name we don’t know is going to need to be there, and is going to show up right? There’s all sorts of stories about all of the people who are not named in these histories, and I think that that gives us a lot of opportunity to, you know, to make new stories and to kind of imagine what life is like for these folks. These kind of normal folks really, who aren’t necessarily these big named characters, and how they’re responding to the actions of these big named characters.

Like, I’m–now I’m kind of, like, spiralling into fanfic territory where I’m kind of, like, what kind of feelings would a Teleri have at the Kinslaying, you know? What kind of feelings would some other folks and you know…What was going through the minds of all of these normal people when the War of Wrath happened and Beleriand sank? It was like, you know, the end of the fucking world, man! How? While all these angels and Gods and stuff are like flying around in the air, you know…what’s happening on the ground? What’s happening to thesepeople?

And so, I get more excited about the idea that there are more original characters coming into this because I’d like to see a Middle-earth that reflects the Elves to Men, from Hobbits and Harfoots to Ents. I want to see a range of peoples because that’s what Middle-earth is all about. It’s about a whole bunch of different people.

Grace: I’m excited about this too–and I’m also excited because–I keep joking about spoilers but genuinely there’s the least written about the Second Age. A lot of these stories are going to be new for a vast portion of the viewing audience. But for some folks…who, let’s face it are nerds like us, and have read every single page about the Second Age that we can get our hands on…we know how a lot of the character stories turn out.

So I’m excited for the mystery of some of the original characters and for not knowing what their fates are, if there is happiness waiting for them, or tragedy.  Like, I want to experience those stakes as a viewer also. I don’t just want to know what’s going to happen everywhere. I want to be surprised. And I’d rather be surprised on some storylines that I’m not familiar with than have something be changed dramatically that’s truly in contrast to Tolkien’s writings (not just the things that he’s already contradicted himself on.)

Alicia: We’ve mentioned it a couple of times now–there are only about 200 pages written about the Second Age across all of Tolkien’s works, not including “the Notion Club Papers” and things like that that are really kind of tertiary. (“The Notion Club Papers” were Tolkien’s foray into like, time-travel science-fiction that’s based around Númenor, which doesn’t have a lot of bearing on what actually plays out in Middle-earth.)

But yeah, so there’s about 200 pages and half to two-thirds of that or about named characters we already know. They’re about Galadriel and Celeborn and like Númenorean Kings and all of that. There is a lot of room to have additional characters and I’m 100% with Grace–I don’t want them to be taking, like, horrific liberties with people whose stories we know how they’re going to end up—like, if for whatever reason they decide that Gil-galad survives the Last Alliance…

[ Group laughter ]

Leah: Yeah, no killing off Elrond or, you know, things like that. That’s, I mean…Number one, that’s not going to happen. But it’s like… I want different things that I don’t know about to happen because I’m like …like you guys say, we know what happens to these to these folks. And I think that some of the mystery and some of the surprises can have can be found in how these things will kind of unfold in this new story.

Grace: I want space for the storytelling— because Tolkien gives us all of this amazing history. But I want to see the story adapted to screen too and that’s going to take a lot of liberties beyond what’s on the page in a way that’s really…I think respectful to Tolkien’s work–I think that’s really possible. But if we were just adapting a history book, it wouldn’t be a particularly compelling adaptation.

Tim: And the Tolkien Estate shared that sentiment right? They signed off on this knowing how little was written in stone about the Second Age and knowing that the blanks were going to need to be filled in and trusting that, you know, the showrunners and the writers were going to do that in a respectful way.

I trust the judgment of the Tolkien Estate, you know–Tolkien’s actual family–That in some cases still knew the man.  Like, there’s still some of his grandkids that are involved with the estate. Simon Tolkien, Christopher’s oldest, was consulting on the show we found out not too long ago.

And, you know, I trust the judgment of those people more than I do random fucking internet commenter number three. I also don’t understand how random internet commenter number three, if he has actually read all 200 pages of Tolkien’s writings on the Second Age, wants to see a series that is based exclusively on those materials because it would be fucking unwatchable!

Alicia: Look, we all know that you hate Aldarion, just get over it!

[ Group laughter ]

Tim: Honestly, I would watch that just for the fucking rage bait. But no, it’s just….there’s so much in there that is disconnected, that has nothing to do with the primary thrust of the Rings of Power and the downfall of Númenor and stuff like that, that are just tangential. And there’s so much in there that are unfinished notes, that are contradictory within themselves, and I don’t understand how anybody can say “Hey, I want something that is totally true to the lore” when the quote-unquote “lore” of the Second Age contradicts itself every other page.

Leah: And it’s fragmentary and incomplete and…I would like to see…I just wanted to see that–I want to see the potential of what was unwritten be explored.

Grace: It is fascinating to me too, how so many of the folks who have such strong opinions in this regard are really willing to exclude the pieces of this fairly small amount of writing that they don’t necessarily agree with. Which doesn’t leave all that much left. Unless of course, by chance, they haven’t read the material and aren’t aware of it. [ Facetiously ] But I’m sure since they speak so definitively they must, in fact, have done the reading.

Tim: And not just looked it up on Wikipedia, or Tolkien Gateway, or something like that.

Leah: Yeah, Right. [ Sarcastic ] How dare you make such accusations? You know every single one of these dudebros has read every single word of Tolkien. How dare you?

Grace: Right.

Tim: Exactly. I love it when the gatekeepers are the people that haven’t even read.

Leah: Yeah, they haven’t read shit.

Tim: My favorite is the gatekeepers that, like, constantly misspell like…character’s names, or the worst is: cannot even handle the proper spelling of Middle-earth. With the hyphen and the lowercase e and everything. If you can’t get that right and yet you’re gonna play Tolkien Purist, like, just fuck off at that point.

Leah: Yeah, now this is it’s something that Tim gets very petty over.

Alicia: Right.

Tim: It is! But when they start the pettiness I don’t feel at all bad about throwing it back in their faces. You want to be petty about this except you can’t fucking even spell the name properly. The name of Tolkien’s beautiful original world.

Grace: My gosh, Tim’s pettiness does mean that I have not misspelled this at any point since meeting Tim.

Tim: [ Laughs ] See, I would give you a pass because I know that you’re not petty about shit like that. It’s just the people that are, like, overly petty about that shit and it’s honestly something–

Grace: It’s the hypocrisy and the pettiness that—that’s like, okay…

Tim: Alright, do I dare go into this last point that’s gonna start a fight among us?

Grace: Wait. Let us all lace up our boxing gloves…

Tim: [ In Angry Nerd Voice ] Hobbits didn’t even show up until the Third Age you guys, they’re not even in the Second Age!

Alicia: Okay. So.

Tim: This is going to start a fight in our house.

Leah: Yeah, let’s go. Let’s do this.

Alicia: This is correct. Hobbits, as far as we know, do not exist before the Third Age. And here are my fucking notes about this.

Okay–from Lord of the Rings,  page two, Fellowship of the Ring: “The beginning of Hobbits lies far back in the elder days that are now lost and forgotten…” ok, that’s kind of ambiguous.

Also, if you were to go back to “Of Dwarves and Men” from the History of Middle-earth,  [Editorial Note: HoMe Volume 12, The Peoples of Middle-earth ] Hobbits are specifically described as a type of Men. You could make the assertion that Hobbits have been around as long as Men have based on those two things. Cool.  Except.

Leah: I make that assertion.

Alicia: Also in Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf is talking to Frodo about the origins of Gollum, and he’s talking about something that happens after the events of Gladden Fields–so firmly Third Age–and says “long after, but still very long ago.” (So that’s what’s connecting it to when he’s talking about Gladden Fields) and then he goes on to describe Gollum’s people as “a clever handed and quiet footed little people. I guess they were of Hobbit kind, akin to the fathers of the fathers of the Stoors.”

And later, Gollum in The Two Towers, when they’re in the Dead Marshes, is talking about the origins of the Dead Marshes and says that “there was a great battle long ago. Yes. So they told him when Sméagol was young.”

That says to me that if Gollum is from a people who are akin to the fathers of the fathers of the Stoors, which are one of the kind of…three houses of Hobbits, and those people did not exist until after the Third Age from what we can tell, Hobbits are Third Age and I understand that it’s an adaptation and they have to have Hobbits because it’s Middle-earth and people fucking expect that–fine. But it’s not fucking canonical in my opinion, and as much as I don’t want to align myself with these fuckheads who say shit like this, I agree.

[ Group laughter ]

Grace: But see, here’s the great thing because Alicia and I can disagree on this and still want to like…have a cup of coffee together!

Alicia: Same, same.

Grace: Because when I look at like “the Elder Days” statement here…Now, admittedly, this does seem weirdly out of place to me. But “the Elder Days” typically in Tolkien’s writing refers to the First Age.

Leah: Yeah, First and Second Age.

Grace: So there’s an argument…there’s an argument that they’ve been there all along and nobody’s paying any attention to them, and that would seem like a little bit of a silly argument to me. But. Elrond and I think Gandalf…pretty much all of the Elves just tattle on themselves in this regard at multiple points in time throughout the story and are just like “Yep…yep, we…um, we didn’t actually make note of them in our records so…hard to say…hard to say.”

Tim: And that’s one of their inherent characteristics of Hobbits too, right? Is that they are good at going unseen, is that they’re light of foot, they can hide…I’m with you guys on this one at the risk of alienating my wife.

Alicia: Gollum is a fucking Hobbit! Gollum should know about like…what happened when he was alive because he was a Hobbit, and he was alive!

[ Everyone chuckling ]

Also when we’re talking about Elder Days…that’s in the prologue to the Lord of the Rings, and that is–to put that completely into context–that’s about finding the translation, right? So when they’re talking about the Elder Days, they’re talking about the entirety of the Red Book.

Tim: But there’s nothing in what you’ve put forth that specifically says to me that Gollum and, like, a couple generations before him were the first of the Hobbits or proto-Hobbits…that they couldn’t have existed long before him, but he was just at some point, you know…it was still a pre-Hobbit kind of thing….we don’t know how long proto-Hobbits, be they Harfoots, or Stoors, or whatever were around for.

Leah: Yeah.

Grace: Yeah.

Alicia: It’s the “fathers of the fathers of the Stoors” part that really says to me….It’s kind of towards the beginning.

Tim: So you think you think specifically that two generations before Sméagol, the Stoors just fucking hopped…like hopped up out of the ground?

Leah: Yeah, because I read ‘fathers of the fathers’ as like a rhetorical. Like along ‘once upon a time’ and ‘long ago and far away’. I read that as generations in very multiples of–

Grace: Well, because I think you can take it as a fairly literal generational argument, especially, like, given how long Gollum ends up living and all of that…and I think you can also take it as a very figurative argument of almost, like “the peoples that came before the peoples that came…” and so like an age argument.

Leah: Yeah, I read this as like ancestors. Like, you know, deep ancestors, you know, rather than like ‘Great-Grandma’ or ‘Great-Great-Grandma’, you know?

Grace: And of course…Tolkien doesn’t give us enough to go on here. He gives us just enough knowledge to be dangerous.

[ Laughter ]

 

Grace: So I think I think honestly…I also would have only expected to see hobbits in the Third Age because so few peoples of Middle-earth are aware of them. But there is a textual explanation for that.

There’s also some evidence that makes me go, okay I have to expand my assumptions past what I had previously thought. So I think that this one is indeed a stretch. It is definitely a stretch that the producers of the show are making here. But I don’t think it’s a stretch that absolutely has to result in injury.

Leah: Yeah, I agree. I’m actually–I probably fall on the other side of like, you know, I’m like “ooh, yeah, Hobbits, of course!” because I kind of fall into, like–in my head canon I’m like: yeah, they’ve been around for ages in the same way that like…all of these peoples in Middle-earth have been around for ages and ages. And so I definitely fall on the, you know, when it comes to Hobbits, I’m like: they’ve been around here for time immemorial. So I’m excited to see them here in the Second Age for sure.

Tim: And the one thing I’m really happy about with how the Hobbits are being depicted is–or the proto-Hobbits or Harfoots–is that they are being depicted as nomadic and that is canonical. That is–Tolkien wrote that specifically that they are a nomadic people, walking around place to place.

Leah: Yeah, they haven’t found the Shire.

Tim: Yeah, exactly. They have not settled down in the Shire yet. Which, realistically like, how easy is it for another race to pin down the existence of Hobbits or proto-Hobbits/Harfoots when they’re nomadic, right? When they’re a race that is notable for their ability to walk around unseen and they never stay in one place for very long.

Grace: Catch me a lot angrier if they’re shown crossing the Anduin and, like, settling in the Shire in episode two—

Tim: Yeah.

Grace: –then I am about their existence in this Age.

Tim: That might be something nice that we didn’t talk about during the book club.  But I think, you know, if we saw that in like the last season kind of thing, I would be totally happy with seeing the Hobbits find the Shire and start to settle.

Alicia: ABSOLUTE-THE-FUCK NOT!

[ Group laughter ]

That doesn’t happen until the fall of the god-damn North Kingdom! We’re not going all the way to Forochel and fucking killing Arvedui, that’s not something that’s happening! That happens halfway through the goddamn Third Age!

[ Group laughter ]

Tim: I think I touched a nerve, guys.

Leah: Oh yeah. Oh.

Alicia: Are you now going to fucking defend Movie Faramir?

[ Group laughter ]

Grace: Look, some things are a bridge too far.

Tim: Some things are the Brandywine Bridge too far.

[ Laughter ]

Alicia: Oh…that’s just…there are very few hills that I’m willing to die on about this show and it’s fucking…the horrible wigs on the Elves, and the Hobbits just existing.

Leah: I feel you. Stand in your truth, stand in your truth. It’s not my truth, but that’s cool!

Grace: Well and there are plenty of things that I…I have strong opinions on too, about the way that some things might be depicted, that…there are going to be plenty of things that I will be able to trace the through-thread back to Tolkien’s writings and see the genesis of that idea, and think “I understand how the Council came to that decision, but being as I think it’s a stupid-ass decision, I’m not going to listen to it.”

[ Group laughter ]

I have to, it’ll be the canon of the show, if not the canon of Tolkien–that’s fine. Knowing where the idea comes from is really, really helpful to me actually. But I certainly have strong preferences about how certain things may or may not be depicted.

Um, buy me a coffee and we can talk for about three hours about how I’d like to see Tar-Míriel’s storyline go, and that’s before we’ve even started the show. So, yeah, we all have pretty strong opinions. But I think it’s really helpful to know what the grounding in the text is. And as Alicia points out…if you’re ever trying to make the case that Tolkien definitively meant something that is your own worldview…it’s a really hard case to make.

Leah: Yeah, and I think that, in a lot of this stuff, it’s like–coming back full circle back to the beginning: We haven’t seen this show yet. We don’t know what choices have been made. We don’t know what things are going to happen, how things are going to happen. And when they deviate from the text, like, that’s definitely a conversation we can have and I think that’s a conversation we’re definitely going to have on future episodes of this podcast.

Tim: [ Angry Nerd Voice ] But I could tell just from the trailers it’s just a fucking Amazon cash grab.

Alicia: Oh my God.

Leah: [ Mocking ] It’s gonna be super disrespectful of Tolkien. It’s gonna be terrible, I could just tell.

Tim: –and Tolkien’s going to be rolling around in his grave, you guys.

Leah: Oh my God…

Alicia: You can really just hear, like, one: how like, excited Tim gets about fighting with people on the internet, and also, like, how soul-draining it is to me. Just, like, goddammit, shut up. No one fucking cares. You’re one more angry white Catholic man. Like, I’ve heard your fucking opinion already.

Leah: No one cares! We’ve heard it like ten thousand times. I should get paid every time you say an opinion, so that I can, like, you know, afford health insurance.

Alicia: America.

Leah: You’re draining me of my health, you owe me. [Laughing ]

Alicia: Alright, well we are at over two hours now, so I’m really excited to listen to this after Tim edits it and figure out how much of this we actually end up keeping!

[ Laughter ]

Tim: Please don’t make reference to how long the episode has been going because it will be…

[ Laughter ]

Leah: What a journey. What a journey Future Tim’s going to go on.

Alicia: Indeed. Yeah, so this was our not-quite-a-real episode, our .5 episode of “Queer Lodgings”.

You can find us on the interwebs. We’re on Facebook as “Queer Lodgings” and on Twitter as “queer_ lodgings” and if you have an episode idea or whatever, you can email us at [email protected] 

See you guys next time. Where we’re going to be angrily talking about something different!

Leah: Angrily…or maybe not! Tune in to find out!

Grace: Because we want to leave folks with an air of mystery.

Alicia: Indeed.

[ Laughter ]

Leah: Yeah. Yeah, they want to be surprised.

Transcription by: Mercury Natis