Warm Beds Are Good
From esr: Warm Beds Are Good: Sex and Libido in Tolkien's Writing
This is an extended and thorough consideration of sex and sexuality in Tolkien's works. Towards the end, the author makes the telling point that eroticizing various elements in Tolkien's mythos is one of the ways in which modern readers adapt it to their own fantasy needs. This makes sense; giving a luscious version of Arwen screen time and playing up her thing with Aragorn is not just a crude sell-it-with-sex maneuver, it's a way to make the mythos fundamentally more intelligible to a viewer in 2003 than the rather dessicated and repressed account of The romance of Aragorn and Arwen in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings would have been.
posted Wed 21 Jan 2004 in /books/lotr | link
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