who doesn’t love a good “will they, won’t they” love story? it’s the centerpiece of every successful show since the beginning of time. sam and diane from cheers. jim and pam from the office. sheldon and his mother from young sheldon. the list goes on and on, but the formula is not exclusive to TV.
books and movies have been abusing the formula for ages. the great gatsby is one of my favorite examples in classic literature, but modern romance novels illustrate the point far better. take ten minutes to swipe through the grool-covered “BookTok” community and you’ll find no shortage of variations on a single theme. sure, there are different methods of making these two characters blow their fictional loads in, on, and around each other, such as “friends to lovers,” or “forced proximity,” but the singular premise remains the same: will they? or will they not?
most of these stories resolve within a single book. the more ambitious (see also: “hopelessly horny”) authors will turn their fuck novels into a series with recurring characters, raising the stakes and load counts with each sequel. i think you might see where i’m going with this (especially if you read the title of this article).
enter JRR tolkien (cue the wistful pan flutes, please). after inventing a new language, this mf decided that his language deserved a book to go with it. after casually inventing one of the most expansive and detailed fantasy worlds in history as a means to justify this new language, he created one of the most legendary creatures to ever grace fiction (at least until rian johnson created porgs for the last jedi): a hobbit.
hobbits are simple, folksy farmers who represent all that is good and pure in this world. they live not just in tolerance of nature, but celebrate it and cultivate the earth with reverence. they work to live, enjoy good food, tobacco, and friends. say what you will about peter jackson’s adaptation of the LOTR series, but he nailed this culture of middle earth. in my opinion, jackson also had a strong grasp on tolkien’s themes of strength through courage, friendship, and love in the face of insurmountable odds.
but did jackson fully understand the love? we may never know—jackson lives in new zealand and i can’t afford a plane ticket to ask. but we can be sure that tolkien understood the love. his writing was way too sexy for him to be unaware. take for example, these real af, not edited in anyway whatsoever quotes from the LOTR books:
“Tom put his mouth to the crack and began singing into it in a low voice. They could not catch the words, but evidently Merry was aroused. His legs began to kick.” — The Fellowship of the Ring
“‘All right,’ said Frodo, as if returning out of a dream. ‘I’m coming. Go on!’ Hurrying forward again, Sam tripped, catching his foot in some old root or tussock. He fell and came heavily on his hands, which sank deep into sticky ooze…” — The Two Towers
“It went in at last, and Butterbur’s face was a study in wonder. The eyes in his broad face grew round, and his mouth opened wide, and he gasped. ‘Strider!’ he exclaimed when he got back his breath.” — The Return of the King
and these don’t even include the long, lustful stares that legolas and gimli share throughout the adventure, the bubbling sexual frustration between aragorn and eomer, or the entire chapter of the two towers in which merry and pippin penetrate themselves repeatedly on treebeard’s limbs in fangorn forest. you’re telling me there was no intent behind tolkien’s writing?
the sad truth, however, is that tolkien wrote this epic homoerotic adventure in an era in which to be anything but cisgendered, white, and aggressively straight was met with passionate, coordinated hostility. and while not much has changed in the last century, we can at least look at his intent with fresh eyes now that historians have finally admitted that all those historical women who were “best friends” could possibly have been more than just a knitting club that wasn’t accepting more than two members.
so tolkien wrapped up frodo’s beautiful cumming of age journey in the guise of “friendship” and left readers to decide for themselves how frodo and sam kept themselves warm all those nights spent in the mountains. half a century later, jackson secured the funding and rights needed to take the biggest swing of his career and give the LOTR books the big budget, silver screen adaptation it deserved. and we may never again see such an ambitious, faithful, and well-intentioned adaptation of a beloved book series again. but it is the official opinion of me that peter jackson missed the subtleties of tolkien’s erotic intent and accidentally created a trilogy so faithful to the source material that the eroticism slipped in as easily as a hobbit eating a bucket of fried chicken can put on the one ring.
if you don’t believe me, i’ve saved the most damning evidence for last. compare these two quotes from interviews with jackson and tolkien, respectively, and come to your own conclusion:
“Frodo and Sam are best friends. They’re closer than most friends will ever be. I suppose I can see how people might view them as lovers retrospectively, but they’ve been through so much by the end of [Return of the King] that we simply can’t fathom how deep their bonds of friendship go.”
— Interview with Peter Jackson, Entertainment Weekly, 2004
for full effect, please click on this selection from howard shore’s masterful LOTR soundtrack prior to reading tolkien’s quote below: soundtrack here!
“Yeah, hobbits eat ass. Hobbits eat ass for foreplay. They build little chairs into the corners of their hobbit holes so they can watch their neighbors eat out their wives. Frodo and Sam were filling each other up every night, sometimes two, three times a day when they couldn’t travel for fear of being caught by the servants of the Dark Lord. Hobbits are mad freaks fr.”
— Interview with J.R.R. Tolkien, 1956
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