Best question about Legolas I've seen yet, from a friend's LJ:

Why is Legolas the Sigorney Weaver character in Galaxy Quest?

She owes me a new keyboard for that one.

(Raquel, I'll also have to cop to having read too much about Tolkien's set, so knowledge external to the text does, in fact, inform my reactions to it.)

I firmly maintain that it takes both attitudes (mercy/distrust) to get to the goalposts, and privileging either one over the other is a mistake.

Oh I agree. I do think that it is impossible to have a perfect balance of both, and I think that Tolkien is overtly reminding us to be merciful. Distrust, we ain't got no supply shortage of that.

Hee hee hee...

MERRY: Hello, Pippin. (cough) Would you believe I...got lucky with a hot Rohirrim chickie?
PIPPIN: Er...no. No, Merry, I wouldn't. I'm sorry; I want to humor you when you're this hurt; but no, that's really quite beyond the realm of credibility.
MERRY: Then how do you explain this...(cough)...lipstick on my armor?
PIPPIN: (cry of disbelief) No fair! And all I got was an oily unconscious steward!

SAM: It's a shame. Now I'll never get to marry Rosie Cotton.
FRODO: (startled) YOU want to marry a girl? Really?
SAM: Aye. Why is that so hard to believe?
FRODO: It's just - er - well - you know, I think I must have misinterpreted several things you've said over the past couple decades, Sam. Forgive me.
SAM: No matter. Could you hold me in your arms before we die, sir?
FRODO: See - like that statement, right there. Oh, who cares...

the whole set up of the situation is disturbingly sexualized *and* the one thing most likely to ping my "issues, much?" radar.

Chock full o' issues was he. Also, being bitten by a very large spider as as a very young child in South Africa didn't help his spider thing, either.

I would have said that Tolkien didn't really have gender issues so much as a general failure to think about gender critically. Which I can attribute laregly to his time, and largely to the source materials he loved -- if you want to, it's easy to pay attention only to the guy-materials in a lot of OE sources.

You know, Shelob was going to be a spider, and that caused her being female to be the default -- and all of the ick and grossness in her portrayal followed as a logical/culturally normal assumption, I should think. Certainly, as a portrayal of feminine evil, she's rather a failure: her big act is to stab people with a big sharp pointy object located in the general area of the gonads.

I imagine if you wanted to posit Shelob as a monstrous-feminine creature appropriating signifiers of masculinity for her own evil feminine uses, there's an argument to be made in that general direction, but it would need to take into account all the other creatures -- male, female, genderless -- that have stabbed Frodo with big sharp pointy objects.

Frodo gets stabbed rather a lot in the course of the trilogy. So if you wanted to argue in favor of the monstrous feminine, you'd probably also have to examine the use of St. Sebastian imagery in undermining traditional concepts of masculinity.

Which would make a really good paper, but I'm not sure it would all come out with the Red Arrows of Authorial Psychodrama all pointing in the same direction.

Paul being a Tolkien geek, we discussed Tolkien and gender issues at great length last night (actually, because Paul was picking his nits, it was more a discussion of race and class issues, with some mention of gender). They're the same sort of ones (the gender ones) I see in Wodehouse, when I think about it for longer than half a minute (warning, no coffee here).

Where Tolkien (no matter how the wives have affected the men, or no matter how heroic some of his women have been) disturbs me is not the lack of women, but the feeling of women, when present, as foreign or other, so that it is a war story about men doing things isn't my problem with it. Your mileage may, obviously, vary.

Apart from the entire cast being amazingly talented, they're also really freaking pretty.

Gah! Naked feet! Naked feet of Dom!!

I can't look at Billy Boyd's anymore face without getting melancholy.

Where Tolkien [...] disturbs me is not the lack of women, but the feeling of women, when present, as foreign or other

Oh, I guess I do buy that. He does set up every woman as having a completely different mind than one might find in a man's body. I would have said he found women sort of vaguely mystifying, and sometimes in nice ways (Galadriel, Luthien). But, I guess, that sort of attitude doesn't say very much to me about Tolkien as a person/writer, as much as it does about his particular slice of English donnish 1940s culture.

So, I guess I can't say that he was working out his capital-I Issues int he female characters he wrote; certainly, I don't see any particular axes he is grinding in a consistent way; but I'll give that his writing of women hasn't aged well.

Actually, his attitude towards women is the exact thing I had such a problem with in the writing of the Angel episode "Billy". I can forgive that kind of fuzzy thinking in a writer in 1952; less so in a work written in 2002.

And cereal, because I crossposted with Nutty...

A little way ahead and to his left he saw suddenly, issuing from a black hole of shadow under the cliff, the most loathly shape that he had ever beheld, horrible beyond the horror of an evil dream. Most like a spider she was, but huger than the the great hunting beasts, and more terrible than they because of the evil purpose in her remorseless eyes. Those same eyes that he had thought daunted and defeated, there they were lit with a fell light again, clustering in her out-thrust head. Great horns she had, and behind her short stalk-like neck was her huge swollen body, a vast bloated bag, swaying and sagging between her legs; its great bulk was black, blotched with livid marks, but the belly underneath was pale and luminous and gave forth a stench. Her legs were bent, with great knobbed joints high above her back, and hair that stuck out like steel spines, and at each leg's end there was a claw.

That's the particular passage I'm thinking of, Nutty.