Tolkien Gleanings #358
* The contents-list is now available for the academic book Queer Approaches to Tolkien (2025). This offers 12 essays plus a bibliography. Amazon UK is saying ‘U.S. import only’ and Amazon USA is saying 25th November 2025, but publisher McFarland now flags it as “in stock” and I assume it’s shipping.
– The Problematic Perimeters of Elrond Half-elven and Ronald English-Catholic.
– I Dream of Gandalf: or, How I Was Raised by Wizards.
– The End Is Queer: Cleanness and Tolkien’s Apocalyptic Landscape.
– Mother or Other: Tolkien’s Shelob and the “Monstrous-Feminine”.
– Eowyn and/or Dernhelm: Reading Eowyn’s (Trans)Masculine Disguise.
– “Something Mighty Queer”: Destabilizing Gender, Intimacy and Family in Tolkien’s Legendarium.
– “For he would take no wife”: Surface Reading, Earnur and the Queering of the Unmarried Male in The Lord of the Rings.
– “Bending over with naked blade”: The Erotics of Suffering and Male-Male Penetration in Tolkien’s Legendarium.
– Frodo, Sam and the Ring of Power: A Queer Erotic Triangle.
– “Saruman [?Pardoned]”: The Queerness of Sex in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
– “and stooping he raised Beleg and kissed his mouth”: Queering Canon with Tolkien Fanfiction.
– “What care I for the hands of a king?”: Tolkien Fanfiction and Narratives of the Transgender Self.
– Tolkien and Alterity: A Bibliography.
* A review in English of the new German-language academic book “In Texten wildern: Slash oder die Erotisierung fiktiver Stoffe durch Fangemeinden” (2025) (‘Poaching texts: slash or the eroticization of fictional material by fan communities’). The review is freely available online. One of the book’s chapters focuses on an apparently very popular three-year pornographic fan-fiction which… “portrays a sexual power struggle between Aragorn and Boromir. Despite apparent non-consensual elements, the narrative emphasizes that both characters are equally strong and willingly engage in the power play” which is depicted in “explicit sex scenes”.
* New from Germany, in English, the article “Reimagining The Lord of the Rings Slash Fiction, Queer Interventions, and Their Limits” (2025). Freely available online. Centers around discussion of the comic-book Lord of the Cock Rings which depicts Sam and Frodo as gay lovers…
“Rejecting any impulse toward subtlety or restraint, the visual narrative refuses to sanitize queer desire, instead embracing graphic portrayals of erotic encounters, including self-pleasure, rimming, penetrative intercourse, and foot-based masturbation.”
* I read that the recent academic book Cosplay and the Dressing of Identity (2024) opens with an extended consideration of Tolkien cosplay (i.e. ‘fans dressing up as fictional characters’). A review notes… “Ethnic and gender identities are also discussed at length, as are psychological problems” among cos-players.
* Vivid Seats has details of the stage-show “Tolkien It Off – A Burlesque & Drag Tribute to Lord of the Rings”.
* I just now noticed a U.S. ‘celebrity news’ item, from last month. George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones author), reportedly bemoaned the “lack of explicit sexual scenes” in The Lord of the Rings, while being interviewed at The Kimo Theatre in Albuquerque. I would have responded that — even if a hypothetical ‘alternative-timeline Tolkien’ had felt the need for such scenes — Martin overlooks the historical and national context. Britain has no U.S. First Amendment to guarantee its citizens free speech, and effective de-censorship of the printed word only happened here some two decades after the publication of The Lord of the Rings.
* And finally, an unusual new academic journal. Epic Threads aims to… “weave together fact and fiction to breathe new life into the ancient world”. The journal is open-access and the first issue is now available. An interesting idea, which might be characterised as a sort of ‘fan fiction for historians’. It makes me wonder if Northern ancient history could benefit from a similar imaginative-scholarly journal, assuming appropriate editorial rigour?