I’m using as a subject heading a chapter title in the Paul Fussell book that squire refers to in his earlier message in this thread.  Question #2 asks whether other images seem to us to have been drawn from Tolkien’s war experiences, and I would say that in addition to the reflections of the war that Garth talks about, the way that Tolkien describes the friendship between Frodo and Sam strikes me as being very similar to how British soldiers in WWI described their male friends and the bonds that developed between them.  Historians like Fussell and Joanna Bourke have discussed how British soldiers often developed a strong emotional bond with other soldiers and how that was often expressed in physical ways (not usually intended to be sexual, but then again not without some homoerotic possibilities in all cases).  Looking at photographs, diaries, letters, and memoirs, these historians have discussed how men in the trenches often had to take on what were for them unconventional roles: they cooked for each other, nursed each other when ill or wounded, tucked each other in at night, slept curled up against each other for warmth and comfort, read to each other, and when they had the chance for entertainment, even danced with each other.  We have pictures and accounts of men kissing each other (especially in moments of danger or near death).  As Fussell points out, some men developed romantic  “crushes” on each other, often between officers and batmen.

I think that the physical gestures of tenderness between Frodo and Sam (lots of hand-holding, for example) are an expression of this style of male bonding that is difficult for us to recapture today, at least on film. Think of the reception the Jackson films might have gotten if they had actually shown book scenes in which Frodo and Sam hold hands while creeping through Shelob’s lair, or Frodo sleeps on Sam’s lap on the stairs to Cirith Ungol, or Sam embraces and comforts a naked Frodo in the Tower of Cirith Ungol.  This is the book stuff that fires the imaginations of slash writers today, while movie audiences only need a tender look between Sam and Frodo or Sam taking Frodo in his arms when he thinks he’s dead, or near dead, to set them off with giggles and snide remarks about gay hobbits. The fact that Jackson couldn’t film such scenes without raising the question of homosexuality even more insistently than his movies do now just shows us how many people today probably look on this tender mode of male friendship as being only possible between gay men.  But in WWI, the possibilities weren’t as restricted as all that. 

I think that there are other ways in which thinking about Frodo and Sam as soldiers who have developed a strong bond helps to explain the problems that Frodo has in returning to Shire life and what happens at the end of the story, but it’s the middle of the night here and this post is already way too long.

The Reading Room

Ooo...another great book on philology!