Intros

Queer Lodgings: A Tolkien Podcast
Episode 1- Intros

[ Intro Music with birdsong plays ]

Grace: Hi everyone! Welcome to “Queer Lodgings”, the queer-led podcast about everything Tolkien. I’m Grace, and I’m here with my Co-Hosts Alicia and Leah, as well as our occasional co-host Tim, the ‘Tolkien White Man’, who will join us from time to time.

Alicia: Hey everyone.

Leah: Hi guys.

Tim: Hello.

Grace: This is our first official episode, so thank you for joining us, and know that you are all welcome here! Go ahead and pull up a drum-shaped section of log as Beorn invited the Hobbits, Dwarves, and a Wizard to do in 2941 of the Third Age– that’s 1341 by Shire-Reckoning–and get to know a little bit more about all of us, what the podcast is about, and why we started it in the first place.

If you enjoy what we’re doing here, we do also have a bonus episode out already– released a little bit early and talking about the racist and misogynistic backlash to “The Rings of Power” adaptation that started long before any episodes of that show even aired. We’ll be digging into a lot of topics on this podcast, but that was a timely issue that we felt we couldn’t just pass by.

But, first things first: We’re going to take a moment to Introduce ourselves:

My name is Grace. I’m a nerd in general, and a Tolkien nerd most specifically. I identify as Queer & Bisexual, and my pronouns are she/her/hers. I’m a member of the Council of Stewards of the Mythopoeic Society, which is a non-profit organization promoting the study, discussion, and enjoyment of fantastic and mythic literature–particularly the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and the other Inklings–which is the literary circle of which he was a part. I’m a member of some other Tolkien societies as well, and I’m also an LGBTQIA+ rights activist and serve on the board of an LGBTQ+ organization in my local area that’s dedicated to Bisexual and Pansexual Pride and Visibility.

Alicia, do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself?

Alicia: Yeah, sure! My name is Alicia, I am a…uh, wow–Grace is so on point and I’m so, just like…uh, uh, uh… whatever! [ Laughs ]

My name is Alicia. I’m Genderqueer and Bi. My pronouns are she/they. I’m kind of stealthing in a way because I’m in a hetero marriage with Tim, who you’re going to hear from in a minute.

By day I’m an art director, by night I’m an independent Tolkien scholar. I specialize in adaptation and reception, and I’ve just started branching into more mythopoeic video gaming works. I’ve been published in Critical Insights: The Hobbit, Something Has Gone Crack: New Perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War, and Mythopoeic Narrative in the Legend of Zelda, which sounds a little off-topic, but what I’m doing in that is comparing Zelda as a mythopoeic work with Tolkien’s concept of mythopoeia. I also regularly present at MythCon, Mythmoot, the National Popular Culture Association of America’s conference and at DragonCon. I have I am also involved with the Mythopoeic Society–I’ve been their social media Steward for 6 years, have been a member of the society for a little bit longer than that, and I am an off-and-on member of the Tolkien Society and the Popular Culture Association of America.

Leah: Well cool, I guess I’ll go next! I’m Leah! I’m just another general geek. I’ve been a Tolkien geek almost my entire life. I’m also Bi and Queer, and my pronouns are she/her. I’m a member of the mentioned Mythopoeic Society, though just one of the filthy plebs, and I’m also a member of The Tolkien Society, and a member of the Alliance of Arda, which is an inclusive Tolkien fan community. I co-lead a Smial, which is a local community group affiliated with the Tolkien Society, here in the Cascades corridor of the Pacific Northwest which is called The Grey Havens. And speaking of the Pacific Northwest, I live on the unceded homelands of the Duwamish, Snoqualmie, Muckleshoot, and other Coastal Salish peoples, otherwise known as Seattle, Washington. And when I’m not being a geek online, I work as a dogwalker and pet sitter.

Grace: All right. And Tim, would you like to introduce yourself?

Tim: My name is Tim. I am a boring old straight white dude and I use he/him pronouns which is exactly why I will only be occasionally co-hosting on the podcast, because our focus really will be on centering queer voices and perspectives from other marginalized groups. But I’ll be doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes, production-type stuff: editing and making sure the podcast gets posted everywhere and stuff like that. So, whenever the podcast is late you can scream at me because it means that I’ve been slacking, or busy or something.

I am the Online Events Administrator at the Mythopoeic Society. We just started doing online events in the past couple of years during COVID and we found that it’s been a really good way to sort of reach a wider audience, lower barrier of entry to our events, and stuff like that. I have been a member of the Mythopoeic Society for about four or five years and have helped to organize and execute a number of their events both online and in person.

I do want to make sure that we say here that this podcast is in no way affiliated with the Mythopoeic Society–sanctioned by, sponsored by, anything like that. It just so happens that that is how we all met, basically. Well, obviously I met Alicia well before that, but how Grace and Leah came into the picture.

I am an aspiring ally and my plan is to contribute to this podcast by sort of spending my privilege to fill what we sort of identified as a noticeable gap in the podcast dialogue surrounding Tolkien. I am an experienced podcaster despite the fact that my audio last week was absolute fucking dogshit, sorry about that!

[ Group laughter ]

My microphone was on the wrong setting. Hopefully it is on the correct setting this week, we’ll find out. Editing Tim will find out.

For over five years I was the co-host of a weekly NSFW nerdy podcast that was focused on comic book media, sci-fi, some film and music and stuff as well that was called “Dance Robot Dance”. It sort of fizzled out earlier this year, but we have almost 300 episodes up on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify if anybody feels like going back and checking those out.

And I do have a Ph.D. in biochemistry–not that it does any good in this context whatsoever–but I do have a little bit of training in media studies in my undergrad. I took some film analysis and literary analysis courses, and did an undergraduate thesis on Cold War science fiction. But I don’t have any formal education, training, or experience in Tolkien Studies besides what I have sort of gained through osmosis from my wife Alicia. And besides Tolkien, my other biggest fandom is comic books, especially DC Comics, I’ve been collecting them–collecting and reading them, I should say–for over 25 years. I’ve been also really big into sci-fi: Star Wars, Star Trek, “Blade Runner”, “Battlestar Galactica”, I could go on and on if I just listed all of the various medias that I am into. So, that’s me, I’m happy to be part of this.

Grace: All right! And now that you know who we are, it’s time to talk about why we’re here–Why we started the “Queer Lodgings” Podcast. For that, I want to turn us over to Alicia: Alicia, what’s the story of why we chose to start this podcast?

Alicia: The short story is … we realized that there was kind of a gap in the market and that a lot of podcasts are close readings of Tolkien’s work, or it’s like a husband and a wife duo where the husband is teaching the clueless wife, or they come at it from a decidedly religious bent and … there needs to be more than that.

The long story is that as the social media Steward of the Mythopoeic Society, one of the things I have to do is look out on social media and be prepared to moderate that space, and a lot of things are tying back to the backlash to “The Rings of Power”. This is one of the things that directly came out of that.

I, personally, am sick to death of whenever anyone posted anything that wasn’t just Tolkien-as-a-Catholic, that there was this huge homophobic backlash about it–racist backlash, misogynistic backlash. And because I am a voice of the Society in that particular space, I can’t really say much about it other than “Hey, stop this” and then ban people if it gets bad enough.

And what I really want to do is sit down and point-by-point tell this person why they’re a horrible person, and I just I can’t do that in my current capacity. So, we started kind of an incredibly secret enclave of Progressive Tolkien fans where we all kind of get together and grouse about this horrible thing that’s happening to our fandom. And through that little secret space, I met some like-minded people and we ended up starting this podcast. And I’m really excited about it because one of the best things about being a part of the Popular Culture Association and going to their national conference … They have a Tolkien studies area that Robin Reid is the chair of, and it is fantastic. And I know that I personally get so much out of that conference, because you get people who are coming and they’re presenting papers such as–a reading of Éowyn as being genderqueer. Like, all of this other stuff that you don’t really get on social media or in a lot of the stodgier Tolkien groups, and I’m hoping to do a podcast that brings that kind of enlightenment to other people.

Leah: Yeah, exactly!

Grace: Leah, anything to add?

Leah: Well, yeah! Well, I think that Alicia was touching on it at the end there. Being in the Alliance of Arda, which is a deliberately inclusive and heavily queer Tolkien fan community, it really brought home to me just how enriching and joyful it really is to be talking Tolkien with a bunch of queer folks. Like, being with people who are like me and are unafraid to tackle big questions, and ask big questions, and go weird places with our fandom, and also, you know, present really serious and well-thought-out scholarly-based papers.

And, I really just think that having fun together with all of our areas of expertise and interest is just so … It just has brought me so much joy, and has brought me so much value because I love being seen for myself and being fully myself in my fandom, and in a lot of other spaces online, especially on social media, I kind of feel like I also–I’m not a moderator, but I also kind of have to constantly hide my queerness or, you know, stay quiet out of, you know, a sense of safety as a woman especially. And I have to, kind of, fend off a bunch of creeps, and bigots, and people who think they are allies but have a lot of work that they are unwilling to do.

I guess part of my hope in participating in this podcast is just to really bring an unapologetic and bright light to the dark places in Tolkien fandom and really illuminate how much richness there is in Tolkien and share a bunch of—share joy with just, you know, folks who are like myself.

Grace: Tim, any two cents to add?

Tim: I guess the only thing I would add is that especially with Tolkien being so much at the forefront of the cultural consciousness right now, with the new “Rings of Power” series, that I think has brought a lot of people, you know, from kind of both sides of the conversation out of the darkness. And, you know, there’s a lot more conversation happening around it right now, and hopefully one of the things that we can do over the period of the series–not that that’s the onlything we’re going to be focusing on by any stretch—but is to set the record straight, and to provide some textual context, and some different points of view than kind of the, you know, traditionally male, Christian points of view that you get in terms of the analysis and discussion of that show, and the sort of wider conversation that it opens up for Tolkien. Especially at a time when–we saw this when the Peter Jackson movies came out–there are going to be a lotof new people coming into this fandom, and we want to make sure that those people understand that White Christian Male views are not the only way that you can view Tolkien and his works.

Leah: Yep, exactly.

Alicia: Well said.

Grace: Alright! So, now that our listeners know a little bit more about who we are and why we’re here, I want us to delve a little bit deeper into the relationship that we each have with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. So, I have a few questions for each of us to answer, starting with: When and how did you first come to experience Tolkien’s works? Leah, I’m going to tap you for this one first.

Leah: Well, I first read The Hobbit when I was about nine or ten, and I enjoyed myself. It was a–a fun book. But one day when I was in my older brother’s bedroom looking for a new book to read, since I had read all of mine, I picked up his copy of Fellowship of the Ring, and I kind of started reading the first couple of pages. And, just then, my older brother came in and said “Hey, what are you doing?” and I was like–“Ah…nothing, I was just bored and looking for something. Uhhh … I’ll—I gotta go, bye.”

And he said “No, wait. You actually–you might actually like that book. It’s a sequel to The Hobbit, you know.”

And I was like, “Ugh, shut up, go away.” And so I left, and then the next day I came back and stole that copy of Fellowship of the Ring and I have been reading Tolkien pretty much ever since.

[ Group chuckling ]

My fandom experiences really started when, a few years later, the Peter Jackson movies came out. I was fourteen and I managed to rope a lot of my high school friends into learning Tengwar, and giving ourselves Hobbit names, and all sorts of really fun stuff. I got a fair number of friends to read the books as well. So, yeah, I kind of have been a Tolkien geek and have been kind of known as a Tolkien geek ever since.

Grace: Alicia?

Alicia: Yeah, so I am going to firmly date myself. I was in ninth grade–I’ve told the story a million times and it never gets–I never get tired of telling it. I was in ninth grade and I had a crush on a teacher. His name was Van White, he was our journalism teacher, and I used to spend almost every day after school in his office doing that pseudo-intellectual shit that teens do when they think they’re so smart, and so worldly, and know so much.

And I think what ended up happening was, either he was listening to me very closely and saw an emotional need I had, or he was just tired of me eating up all of his time, and he sat me down and was like, “Look, there’s this book. It’s called The Lord of the Rings, and I really think that you need to read it because I really think that it would be meaningful for you right now.  And I think you need to read it immediately because they’re about to make movies and it’s going to ruin them.”

[ Chuckling ]

So, I ended up getting a copy–I convinced my mom to buy me a copy of this book, and it was one of those book club copies of the book. And little did I know that the cover art was done by Donato Giancola, who is now my favorite Tolkien artist, and I never put two-and-two together that he was my visual introduction to Tolkien until much later when I had him as a Guest of Honor at the MythCon that I hosted.

Yeah, so I got that copy of the book. I read it in one weekend–I could not put it down–and then the movies came out, and I also fell in love with them, and, yeah … just kind of kept on, you know, reading the book once a year or so and then watching the movies once a year or so.

Grace: Alright, and—Tim, how did you come to first appreciate Tolkien?

Tim: I also came into Tolkien around the time of the Peter Jackson movies. My Dad was very much into sci-fi and fantasy growing up, and he had copies of Lord the Rings—those copies, I can’t remember the artist…Barbara something, but the really strange, sort of psychedelic covers. [ Editorial Note: Barbara Remington. ] That’s the first copy that I read, which were his copies, which were already kind of starting to fall apart, and then by the time I finished reading them they were, like, taped together.

So, I knew that the movies were coming out, they looked interesting to me, and so I picked up his copies and started reading them. And I managed to read them–finish reading them before the–I’m a terribly slow reader–I managed to finish reading them before the last movie came out. Like, I finished Fellowship before “Fellowship” came out, finished Two Towers before “Two Towers” came out, I finished Return of the King–the last chapter–in the parking lot before going in to see the movie. Like, just barely under the wire, kind of finished it before we went in.

And then, I love the movies, you know, but wasn’t, like, obsessive over them, and then I met Alicia, like, a year or so later because we met in 2004 and the movies came out in … or was it 2003?

Alicia: 2003. End of 2003.

Tim: Okay, so I guess we met right around when “Return of the King” came out then.

Alicia: It was right after–it was a couple of weeks after “Return of the King” got released. I distinctly remember that because I was still upset with my boyfriend at the time who shamed me for wanting to go to a midnight release.

Leah: Boooo!

Grace: Boooo!

Leah: There’s a reason he’s an ex.

Tim: [ Laughing ] Yes. And then, you know, over the course of our relationship her obsession with Tolkien sort of just bled over to me as well. And because, you know, it’s in our house a lot, and a lot of our conversations would bring it in and so, you know, I came to have a much deeper appreciation the more I learned about it.

I don’t interact a lot with the primary text, you know, I’m not one of the people that reads Lord of the Rings once a year or something like that. The only texts I’ve read cover to cover are Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion, which took me, like, six or seven years to get through, because I was doing it, like, a piece at a time kind of thing. But then I have dipped into some of the other texts, you know, just kind of as needed, like “Oh, I want to read more about this character or this story” or whatever.

Because I live with a Tolkien Scholar, we have all of those books in the house. So I can always go pick up whatever or, you know, if I want to refute some dickhead internet troll and go grab Letters or something like that to do that.

Yeah, so from there I became involved with the Mythopoeic Society, again through Alicia. The year that she hosted MythCon in Atlanta she tapped me, knowing that I am also a cocktail nerd, to run the hospitality suite at MythCon 2018 in Atlanta which will go down in history as, like, I think the most lit hospitality suite that MythCon has ever had, because it had, like, hard liquor and stuff like that. And everyone was like, “We never had hard liquor!”

I was just, like “I was just told to get booze!”

[ Laughter ]

Alicia: A handle of whiskey in one evening.

Tim: Yeah, the Friday night of MythCon a handle of whiskey was consumed.

Leah: Woof.

Tim: And then from there, yeah, I just got more and more involved, and I’ve really enjoyed the people that I’ve met through it, and some of the really interesting mix of scholarly work and fannish content that Mythopoeic Society, in particular, kind of espouses and … yeah, that’s what brings me to today.

Grace: I like that Tim helps put the lit in literature.

[ Group laughter ]

Tim: Always.

Leah: I was like … how can we … putting crunk in … hmmm, how can we connect to “I like getting real crunk over at the MythSoc” [ Laughs ]

Grace: So, for me, Grace, I can’t remember how old I was when I read The Hobbit for the first time. It was somewhere around middle school though. I remember that my best friend was talking about it very excitedly while my family was visiting her on vacation. She had read it when she was five, you know, and then as we were leaving her city, I asked my mom where our copy was. I knew we had one, only to find out that she had actually packed it already in the RV with us as we were travelling. So, I was reading The Hobbit before we were even back on the interstate. So, I’ve always had a lot of support in my Tolkien fannishness.

For Lord of the Rings, I definitely read it when I was thirteen. I was already hooked, I knew the movies were coming out, and we had a rule in my house that you always read the book before you saw the adaptation. So, I devoured all three volumes before December of that year. The amazing thing for me that came out of that rule, and where I grew up though, was that I ended up with a really deep appreciation for adaptation. See, I grew up in this little town of about six hundred people near Woodstock, New York. It’s a small town with a lot of artists and a lot of farmers, and most people barely scraping by, but also a lot of movie stars and folks who worked in theater and film production who had second homes there.

My parents owned a little country deli and general store, and that was always struggling to stay afloat, but it was totally normal to be a little kid coloring at the table and have Pat Carroll come up behind me to surprise me by saying something in the voice of Ursula the Sea Witch, or stop in the parking lot of the grocery store to chat with a friend who was an Oscar winner. Um, you could just borrow somebody’s Academy Award if you needed to you. You’d walk into somebody’s bathroom and find their collection of, like, framed gold records. It was a strange place.

Tim: Just totally normal stuff, right? Yeah.

Leah: Totally cool. Totally normal.

[ Chuckling ]

Grace: Strange place. But one of those amazing people was Romeo Muller. He was this barrel-chested, white-whiskered screenwriter who drove a red convertible and played Santa Claus in our town. He wrote the screenplays for all of those Rankin/Bass Christmas specials, like “Frosty” and “Rudolph”, and also for other things like “Puff the Magic Dragon”. And I grew up as this audacious young thing who would stop Romeo in my parents’ deli and demand to know things about the films he wrote. Like, why at the end of “Frosty” Karen gets dropped off on the roof with no way down?

And Romeo would explain to me that there were things in the universe of the film that might only be hinted at on screen, that had been thought of in adaptation and that exists if we delve deep enough, even if what we see on the screen only hints at it. For anyone wondering. Karen’s dad was putting up Christmas lights earlier in the day, and she used the ladder that he still had up to get back to the ground. Romeo never missed a beat with that one.

[ Chuckling ]

The reason that I bring him up is that he also wrote the screenplays for the Rankin/Bass productions of “The Hobbit”and “Return of the King”. Now, those had already come out before I was born, and I wasn’t allowed to watch them until after I read the books and had my own mental pictures. But I grew up with the keen understanding that adaptations and the works they came from were each beautiful in their own right.  And that each time something is adapted there will be the delights, and differences, and doubts, but that the process is undertaken with care and with real people behind it.

So, I read Tolkien knowing people who had already adapted it, and with an awareness of new adaptations on the horizon. So my lens has always been that adaptation is additive rather than definitive and that there are a lot of ways to view a set of works that are so rich. There are a lot of paths into Middle-earth.

So, next I want to ask everybody just beyond those initial experiences. What has your relationship with all things Tolkien been since those early encounters? Alicia.

Alicia: Well, you’re gonna start with a downer. Uh … and, I’m gonna just go ahead if I get emotional. It’s a weird day for me? [ Tight voiced, at risk of crying ] Um, Tolkien’s really helped me through a lot of grief. [ Sniffle ] Um, when my grandfather died, I went to Tolkien a lot because … specifically Ian McKellen’s portrayal of Gandalf reminds me an awful lot of him.

So, right after my grandfather died, I would just obsessively watch the movies over, and over, and over again because it made me feel closer to my grandfather. And that’s the reason I’m now kind of emotional. Um … Today’s the anniversary of when I got run over by a car.  And after that happened, I really threw myself headlong into Tolkien because those themes of hope in The Lord of the Rings specifically really helped me through difficult times, and I actually started becoming a Tolkien scholar because I got run over by that car. And because I really delved into Tolkien in that way to help me process that trauma, and that grief.

Leah: [ Sympathetic Hum ]

Alicia:  I actually didn’t finish reading The Silmarillion until about nine years ago because I could never get through it. It was such a boring slog of a read.

[ Laughter ]

But I finally forced myself to finish reading it after that happened because I was just hungry for more and more Tolkien to, like, fill that void that I had.

Yeah, so, starting with a downer.

Leah: We are delving deep.

Grace: Yeah, thank you for sharing that.

Leah: Yeah.

Grace: That’s such a, like–I think it’s just such a powerful statement about–about how so many of us have found so much solace and so much compassion for ourselves through Tolkien as well.

Leah: Yeah, like, Tolkien—I make the joke that Tolkien actually, you know, turned me into an animist and a polytheist, and he would be horrified as a Catholic to learn that? [ Laughs ] But, um, but I mean, honestly, like, my experiences with anxiety and depression from a really young age really made Tolkien a safe harbor and a safe place for me to kind of lose myself, and also sort of find a place for my brain to go other than, you know, hating myself? And especially the character of Frodo. I really saw a lot of myself in Frodo.

And going back to the animist thing, Tolkien—especially his writing about nature and his writing about–his writing about fairy stories and about escape, and about how fantasy sort of reintroduces us into the world. I’m a living example of that. I really feel that Tolkien made me understand just how beautiful and rich, and wild and strange and wondrous this planet that I’m living on is, and really helped me find my place in it and find a desire to live in it, and to really, fully, you know, be a part of it and understand it. So, I really, you know, I can’t give him kind of enough credit for how much of the world he really opened up to me.

Grace: Tim, what is your relationship with all things Tolkien been like since your early encounters?

Tim: I guess I jumped the gun a little bit on this with my last question. But, you know, I mentioned getting involved with Mythopoeic Society and stuff like that. But the other–I’ve just met a lot of great people through Tolkien fandom and Tolkien groups and stuff like that. Some of our best friends in Atlanta are—Where we—Alicia and I lived in Atlanta for ten years before moving to Toronto where we are now, and we met some great people in the fandom community there. There’s a great Atlanta Tolkien fans group that’s very welcoming if anybody’s in the Atlanta area and looking for Tolkien nerds to hang out with. Some of those people work for TheOneRing.Net,  some of those people are, like, big in the Tolkien Cosplay community and stuff like that.

And through that, we also got into attending DragonCon more heavily, which is where Alicia and I were just last week, which is a huge–for anybody that doesn’t know, it’s very different from San Diego Comic-Con, New York Comic-Con, in that it is a fan run Con that does not shut down at, like, 7 o’clock at night or anything. There’s, like, events all night long, kind of thing.  It’s not just interviewing celebrities about, you know, movies that they’ve been in and stuff like that. There’s a lot of, you know, scholarly-ish (and in some cases actually scholarly) discussions about stuff like Tolkien, like Star Wars, like comics, like anime, like anything you could possibly–any fandom you could possibly want. There’s something there for you, kind of thing.

And we–Alicia and I started doing cosplay, Tolkien cosplay as well through that. We got encouraged by friends and did a group cosplay a few years ago where we did Ringwraiths and, like, went through this big arduous process of making these, like, gauntlets out of EVA foam that ended up turning out really great. I was very happy with them for, like, our first, sort of, big cosplay piece. And we got to march in the parade that year, again because of some of the friends that we’d met through Tolkien fandom, and I got to get up in kids’ faces and scare them with Ringwraith noises and stuff, which is a blast.

Leah: Hell yeah.

Alicia: It was good.

Tim: And the other really big thing that Alicia and I are kind of regionally-locally famous for that is directly related to Tolkien is our annual Middle-earth movie marathon. So, around Christmas, like, December–Late-late November, early December every year we have people over. Or the last couple of years due to COVID, it’s been virtual, or a mix of virtual and in-person, where we have–we watch all of the Peter Jackson movies. Originally it was just the three “Lord of the Rings” movies, and then when “The Hobbit” movies came out, we started tacking those on too. So, with the extended versions of all six movies, It’s 21 hours straight of Middle-earth, sort of, immersion. And sometimes we do it over two days, sometimes we do it all in one big 21-hour shot, there’s a whole–

Alicia: The two-day one doesn’t count. It’s not real. [ Laughs]

Tim: Alicia’s a little—this is one area where Alicia’s a bit of a Tolkien purist.

[ Laughter ]

Alicia: It has to be all six movies back-to-back or the trophy is too easily won.

Tim: Yeah–and yeah, so that’s been a blast too. We’ve had a lot of, like, sort of RiffTraxy, Mystery Science Theatermoments there. We have come up with a whole host of terrible, dirty Middle-earth sex acts that come out of those events as well, that we end up, like, live-tweeting or putting, you know, putting up on Facebook as we go. I’m sure there are people that mute us when we’re having this because they just don’t want to hear it.

Leah: Yeah, y’all have a good drinking game, don’t you?

Tim: Yes, there is a drinking game involved.

Alicia: It’s a fantastic drinking game.

Tim: Yeah, it is. You can find that online. It’s by this DeviantArt artist or Tumblr artist named Wuggly-ump. Yeah, there’s one for the “Lord of the Rings” movies, and then she didn’t quite finish the one for the “Hobbit” movies because, I think, she’s kind of disappointed in the “Hobbit” movies? So, we kind of ultimately filled in the blanks on that one. So, yes, you do have to participate in at least the spirit of the drinking game in order to win the Golden Dragon trophy that Alicia made for this contest. And we’ve, you know, done it up in different ways. There’s some years where I’ve made, like, Middle-earth inspired cocktails, like, Ent-draughts and stuff like that. Or, you know, had a Hobbit meal schedule, where we’d have, like, a meal in between every movie and stuff like that which—eating like a Hobbit is not easy I can say now from experience. You can–especially when you’re drinking a lot in between–

Alicia: Yeah.

Tim: –the meals too. You get very full very quickly. But yeah, it’s just such a fun, sort of, yes irreverent, but in a loving way to celebrate those movies, and we always end up talking about the books and stuff like that. That’s one of the drinking game rules: if somebody bitches about the books, you have to drink.

[ Laughter ]

Alicia: For “The Hobbit.”

Tim: Yeah, for the “Hobbit” movies in particular, because there’s a lot of–way more deviations there.

[ Laughter ]

Alicia: You left out the most important part of it, though. It’s “Jeopardy” famous!

Tim:  Our Middle-earth movie marathon is Jeopardy famous. Our friend Stephen, who is a five-time “Jeopardy”champion—

Leah: Wow!

Tim: –mentioned during, like, when he was talking to Alex–this is back before Alex Trebek passed away, I think 2018? 2019? Yeah, he was on the show, won five nights in a row–Well no, he was on five nights, he lost his fifth night–and he’d mentioned our marathon because he had won it that year. And the Golden Dragon trophy he had used as the topper on his groom’s cake at their wedding.

Leah: That’s so cute. Oh my gosh. That’s so cool.

Tim: Now we can officially say that our Middle-earth movie marathon is “Jeopardy” famous. That’s probably, you know, the way that I most closely interact with Tolkien’s texts on, like, a regular basis at this point.

Alicia: I can’t remember the last time I’ve watched the movies that I haven’t been drunk.

[ Laughter ]

Leah: Yeah.

Grace: Well, I will delve into what my relationship with all things Tolkien has been since those initial years of reading. But I have a feeling that by the time I finish, I will have also started to segue into the answer of my next question, which is: Why is our particular lens that we’re applying here important in this space? So then I will tag everyone in to answer that as well.

But, for relationship with Tolkien … For me? I was obsessed from the moment that I encountered Middle-earth, especially Lord of the Rings. I kept coming back to those books, I snuck them around and read them under my desk at school. My best friend and I spent our teenage years on Tolkien message boards and made costumes that we would wear together during the movies. We would make our families drive five hours at a stretch during the school breaks so that we could see the films together while they were in theaters, and we would do so in costume, and then pick them apart for hours afterward. I had a hand-colored map of Middle-earth posted on my bedroom wall and around it I very carefully taped up, like, very exactingly taped up page-a-day Lord of the Rings calendar pages until my entire room was wallpapered with them.

I made costumes and props for myself, I collected books about Tolkien, and Middle-earth, and everything that I could find. I found ways to write papers about Tolkien for English class, and actually in the ninth grade I got accused of plagiarism because the paper was more thoroughly researched and sourced than the papers that the seniors in the AP English class were turning in? And my teacher didn’t believe that a ninth-grade girl could be that precise and prolific in writing or in formatting a bibliography.

[ Laughter ]

But I also learned very quickly that not everyone thought a girl should be a fan of Tolkien or deserved to see herself represented there. Like, I learned in those online spaces not to talk about the female characters because they weren’t important. I watched people say that women shouldn’t be cast in film adaptations, that a gay man shouldn’t play Gandalf, and as a young woman just beginning to realize that I was queer, I heard those messages loud and clear. Like, I learned that I had to be more accurate on the lore than anyone else in the space because people would demand that I prove that I deserve to be there at all on the basis of my identity. I learned not to talk about some types of fannish behavior that I enjoyed too, like reading fan fiction, because that was a thing that was seen as something that silly girls did and silly girls couldn’t be real Tolkien fans.

And I learned that sometimes it wasn’t particularly safe to be a girl in Tolkien fandom. On a physical level. One year, while I was in Boston visiting my best friend, we got ready to go to the movies and watch one of the “Lord of the Rings” films. We were excited to see it together. We had our costumes. We’d spent the day making silver slippers out of duct tape from directions that we’d found online, because there were more like Elven shoes than anything that we had in our closets. And I remember that detail in particular because it was December, and it had snowed in Boston. The sidewalks were caked with ice in some places.

So when some men followed us out of the theater that night, calling out to us for a few blocks, making lewd comments about our costumes, quizzing us about our interest in Tolkien, challenging us to prove what we knew and then blocking our way and propositioning us on the street? I remember worrying about how fast we could get away from them in our Middle-earth-inspired costumes and our duct tape shoes. We tried to get away and they kept following until we pretended to spot our boyfriends down a side street and ran like we were trying to catch up with them, ducking out of sight and hiding, feet going numb in our duct tape shoes until the men finally gave up and moved on. Then we walked the final two blocks home, checking over our shoulders and around the corners the entire time to make sure that, if we’d been followed, or if they were waiting for us. These were grown men, self-professed Tolkien fans. We were fourteen.

So, much as I grew up loving Middle-earth, I was keenly aware that my access to it as a queer person and a woman is not something that comes without an amount of effort and consideration that many other fans simply never have to even contemplate. And by the way, I still own that dress, and I put it on again this year for the first time in about twenty years for an event at MythCon. Because fuck the gatekeepers and the bigots, they don’t get to decide who belongs in Middle-earth.

Leah: Fuck Yeah.

Alicia: Indeed.

Leah: I’m so sorry that happened to you. That’s such an awful thing.

Grace: But it’s why this matters to me, you know? It’s not a singular experience.

Leah: Yeah, like, that’s–I think that’s one of the things that gets me, is that—this happens to a lot of us. It’s not an uncommon experience and it’s still going on, you know?

Grace: Yeah. Anyone else want to add a little bit about why this particular lens is important in this space in regards to Tolkien and Tolkien fandom and scholarship?

Leah: Well, I guess, you know, kind of branching from that is that—as people who hold marginalized identities, I really think that having a space where we can share–we can share how that marginalization and that oppression affects us as fans, and as scholars, and as readers … We’re always going to need spaces like Alliance of Arda, that I’ve mentioned before, and spaces, you know, like this podcast. I think I remember when we first shared our proto-episode basically. We actually had somebody ask the question of, you know, why does it have to be queer? Why do you have to read Tolkien in a queer way? Why do you specifically have to have a podcast where you show your queerness upfront?

And the answer is … because people like you keep asking that question. Until queer, trans, nonbinary identities, until women, until Black and brown and Indigenous identities, until disabled, neurodivergent, mentally ill, until non-Christian and non-religious identities have full equity in all levels of society–Not just Tolkien fandom–and our oppressions are gone? We need to highlight how that marginalization and that oppression affects us.  And, more than that, we need to highlight just, like, how much of a fucking gift our identities as marginalized people are, and how much, like–I really feel like we need to highlight just how much we have to give to fandom, and to academia, and how much we, like–how much we love Tolkien. And how much we have to offer as queer people.

I really think we make the world better when we embrace and exist fully and unapologetically as our true selves. And I think that making Tolkien more queer and more intersectional makes the world better because we make the world better.

Alicia: Yeah, I want to talk about the academic side of, like, Tolkien studies a little bit. Because although the outward fan impression of Tolkien studies is heavily white, heavily male, Tolkien Scholarship has a lot of women in it. In comparison to other fields outside of possibly Jane Austen–I’m just assuming Jane Austen studies is pretty heavily female as well, given who I know studies Jane Austen. Tolkien’s very heavily femme and even knowing that, even knowing so many of the really big Tolkien scholars are women–at least the Tolkien scholars that other Tolkien scholars know about. You ask a casual fan who’s a big Tolkien scholar, you’re going to get Tom Shippey, maybe Mike Drout?

Tim: John Garth.

Alicia: You’re not going to get people who are doing things like Janet Brennan Croft, who’s incredibly big and very prolific. Like Leslie Donovan, Jane Chance–as much as I have feelings about that one in particular.

Tim: Dimitra Fimi.

Alicia: Yeah, Dimitra Fimi. There are so many women in this space doing such good work, and yet sometimes I will go to a conference–I have literally had someone tell me that my study is bullshit and that I’m wasting everyone’s time because what I was presenting on was something that this man didn’t agree with because he doesn’t think audience–

Leah: What the fuck?

Alicia: –he doesn’t think audience reception is valid. Which … I would like to point him towards Luke Shelton, honestly. Luke and I met over us doing audience reception research at the same time. It is insane to me that I was standing in front of a group of people and this man thought that it was appropriate to tell me, in a group full of, like–it was probably twenty-something people–that my research was bullshit. It’s not the only time that’s happened to me, I’ve had that happen a number of times–that a white man has told me that I am wasting my time, and it’s ridiculous.

Leah: The fucking caucacity.

Alicia: Exactly. And I know that I brought it up before, about going to PCA and hearing other people’s readings of the work. Having contact with people outside of your own groups, it enriches what you’re doing, what you’re reading. Like, when I went to that talk about Éowyn as being genderqueer, the next time I read through I read through with that in mind, and it illuminated things that I hadn’t seen before. I think it’s very beneficial for everyone to step outside of who they are as a person and practice some empathy, and take other people’s readings into account, and seeing what else you can get from the work by thinking about how other people would take it.

One of the great things about Tolkien is that ongoing applicability. And by trying to narrow Tolkien down to just, “oh, well he was a catholic white man”, you’re missing so much nuance that you could be getting from it and making yourself a better person.

Grace: Yeah. I think that’s one of the really key points for me too, in terms of scholarship–is that until I started seeking out more Tolkien scholars and scholarship, what was readily available to me was through a very singular, fairly limited lens. Sometimes with very interesting takeaways and all that but very, very narrow with very little … I guess publicity or public awareness of everything else that is out there. And that’s something that I hope that we can bring on the podcast: That if people are curious about these other interpretations and other lenses that Tolkien can be read through, that there are resources for folks.

Leah: Yeah, there are places. We’ve been making places and making spaces. Especially, like, in fanfic and fanfic-writing communities on Tumblr. We didn’t feel welcome in a lot of different places and so we just kind of ended up making our own. So, we’re out there.

Grace: There’s fascinating study and scholarship about that phenomenon as well. And so there’s this sort of circular feedback of being able to observe the phenomenons of fan interpretation and all that, like—well, that brings me honestly to some of my next questions.

A little bit more about this podcast that we’re creating. So, Alicia. Can you tell us a little bit more about the structure of the podcast and how often we’ll be releasing episodes, things like that?

Alicia: Sure. We’re obviously in the very beginning days. Right now what we’re shooting for is to release an episode twice a month, at very least once a month. We’ve been talking about day-of-the-week for release, and right now it sounds like probably Monday. If we don’t hit Monday, it’s all Tim’s fault.

[ Laughter ]

Tim: [ Sighs ]

Leah: Blame the white guy.

Alicia: [ Laughs ] Because some of our episodes, like the “Rings of Power” episode, are very in-depth, they take a fair amount of research. So right now, what we’ve been discussing is kind of alternating a more in-depth episode with a, for lack of a better word, fluffier episode where we don’t have to do quite as much research, which is kind of by default what we’re doing this time.

Leah: Yeah, just something more fun and kind of, you know, kind of getting more into, like, the fandom side and just kind of letting us … I guess not let our hair down but, you know, just letting us just, like, have some fun with things and not always doing super research-heavy things that, you know, take a lot of time.

Grace: Yeah, a good blend. And as we get going it’s our hope that we may be able to bring in some folks to co-host episodes with us or be guest hosts that have a different lens than we do and bring a different piece of intersectional thinking to Tolkien Studies and Tolkien fandom. So, look forward to that as well. Leah, can you tease a couple of the topics that we’ve been batting around that listeners might see from us in the future?

Leah: Yeah! Well kind of branching off from doing a mix of really deep dives, researchy things and more fun, you know, fluffy things. Some of the more in-depth things we kind of want to get into include things like Tolkien as a Norse myth and Kalevala fanfic writer (controversial). Getting into some of Tolkien’s non-Christian inspirations such as the obvious Germanic Norse myth and Celtic and Arthurian myth and legends, but also some Greek and Roman myth.

We’d also like to kind of branch into sort of the fan-academic spheres where there’s a lot of discussion about Elven colonization and Noldorin propaganda as told in The Silmarillion. We’d also like to get into some really more serious topics like the alt-right and fundamentalist Christians’ obsession with Tolkien. And for the fluffier stuff, which will–I think will be a nice antidote to some of that heavier stuff, we want to really explore a lot of queer relationships and identities in Tolkien such as reading the Baggins Boys as ace and aro or, you know, a polyamorous Frodo, Sam and Rosie, or my favorite iconic gay couple: Legolas and Gimli.

Alicia: Ah, Gigolas.

Tim: Oh Gigolas….

Leah: Ah, Long Live Gigolas. In that same vein, we’d love to explore some dramatic fanfic readings including some slash fic, not safe for work. And we also kind of want to get into some– just some fun fan speculation and digging into what we love and what we hate about Amazon’s “Rings of Power”. Full circle.

Grace: So, Tim, we love when you’re here co-hosting with us but the most important thing that you do is actively hold space for us.  One of the ways that you do that is to make it easier to share our perspectives by recording, editing, and posting the podcast audio. To that end, where and how can folks find the “Queer Lodgings” podcast?

Tim: Yeah so, so far we are available on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts and Spotify. Just search “Queer Lodgings:a Tolkien Podcast”, you can find us. There are a couple episodes out there that are on the “Queer Lodgings” chapter in The Hobbit that might also pop in those results, but ours is the only podcast that’s called “Queer Lodgings”. You can stream our individual episodes directly from where we produce them and post them which is Zencastr, and it’s just zencastr.com/Queer-Lodgings-A-Tolkien-Podcast with dashes between all the [words]. And if you do so, please do leave us a rating. It helps with our visibility, it helps with algorithms and stuff like that so that more people can find our podcast and we can, you know, have larger conversations.

Grace: Yeah, so if you like the idea of what we’re doing here or you believe that it matters please keep listening. But not only that: Please engage with us, like us on social media, share the episode, subscribe to us, send us ideas of episode topics that you would like to see. Just really come be part of the community with us! Alicia how can folks find us on social media?

Alicia: Sure, we are currently on Facebook at facebook.com/queerlodgings, all one word, Twitter at @queer_lodgings, and you can email us at [email protected].

Grace: All right! Well thank you everyone for listening and we will be back in a few weeks with another episode where we dig into one of our Tolkien topics.

Alicia: Bye everyone!

Leah: Thanks guys!

Grace: Bye!

Tim: Baruk Khazâd!

[Group Laughter ]

Alicia: Khazâd ai-mênu!

Transcription by: Mercury Natis