Let's go, Meletheldi, Let's go!
Revisiting a footnote, analyzing Tolkien's description of same-sex love in Nature of Middle-earth
(art in the preview for this post is by busymagpie and can be found here)
Back in 2021, I wrote a Twitter thread. The Nature of Middle-earth was just about to come out, and the Tolkien Society Seminar on Diversity had just happened. I can truly attribute both the seminar and this tweet thread combined with making my future in Tolkien scholarship a reality. This thread, in which I gave my academic opinion on a very interesting footnote from NoMe, made the rounds and got the attention that put me within the scholarly circles that would then become my scholarly community. This blog post has been a long time coming.
What I’m doing here is putting everything I said on that thread into a citable blog post format. I’m going to puff it up a bit with deeper explanations, but mostly this work is something that is going to be done when I am finally working on PhD. This is really just a primer draft of something meatier.
So, with all that preamble being said, let’s take a look at the footnote, which can be found on page 20.
What I believe this footnote shows us is that Tolkien was trying to marry his sometimes quite rigid Catholicism with his more empathetic understanding of the world around him. This footnote tries to rationalize how Elves are capable of the “higher” ideal of romantic love without sex, whereas Men are not, which draws very heavily on what would have been understood by a mid-century Oxford Academic as the Platonic ideal.
Let’s break down first what the footnote is actually saying.
As per this footnote, for Elves there is a higher level of love that men can't comprehend and so interpret as "friendship", presuming that love in their case fundamentally involves procreative sex. Note that Tolkien does still call it love at the end of the passage. This makes sense in terms of Tolkien’s conception that humans are Fallen in a Christian sense even in Middle-earth, though the origin of that Fall is different (to be found in some detail in “The Tale of Adanel”, in “Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth” in Morgoth’s Ring HoMe 10). Even though the origin of the Fall in Middle-earth is not directly linked to concepts of sex and sexuality like it is in our primary world, as I explained in my paper for the Tolkien Society Seminar this year, the iconography of the sexuality of seduction and temptation is inherent to any post-Victorian representation of the Fall in the arts. In Tolkien’s own words, “the dislocation of the sex-instinct is one of the chief symptoms of the Fall” and “The devil is endlessly ingenious, and sex is his favourite subject” (Letters, Letter #43).
Then he goes on to rationalize that this level of love is a love of the soul not of the body. Soulmates basically. The reason that elves can experience same-sex soulmate love is that their souls are gendered as well but independently from their bodies. This is, of course, heavily constrained to some degree of gender binary, but it does open the door for transgender elves as he doesn’t specify that the gender of the hröa and fëa must inherently be identical.
What Tolkien is putting forth here is that if the Body and the Soul can function independently, then two souls, independent of sexual drive, can fall in love. With the same brush stroke, Tolkien is thus confirming same-sex romantic love and brushing same-sex sexual desire under the rug.
All things considered, not a huge surprise. Definitely a win for asexual queer interpretations that I don’t want to undersell, but a complicated win-loss for the rest of the community.
He then takes a sharp turn from rationalization to give them proper elvish linguistic signifiers, making them thus commonplace in Elvish culture and definitive. Melotorni (love-brothers) and meletheldi (love-sisters) are now actual words in our Quenya lexicon.
What Tolkien is doing here is really interesting in relation to two things: a. his relationship with the Classics and b. his relationship with actual people in his life. I’ll go into a lot more detail about this in the actual PhD work that will be done in the future, but let’s go with a summary for now.
a. What Tolkien's doing here is pretty much the same thing he does with Sam and Frodo (though of course this is complicated by Hobbits being human-like and therefore having their Body and Soul linked as opposed to the Elves, but I genuinely do not think he finished working the logistics of this train of thought out. It’s an incomplete notation of a thought process). What he's saying is that the most elevated love between two people is the Platonic Ideal. The Platonic Ideal in this case is a higher, intimate understanding and deep respect for one another that is definitely, absolutely LOVE, between equals. This distinction of being equals is important because as both the ancient Greeks and a mid-century Oxford academic might see it, it’s equal because it’s between men on a level that women would have been considered incapable of relating to.
This is specifically a version of the Platonic ideal that omits the “unspeakable vice of the Greeks” because sex between men in Ancient Greece was happening fairly regularly. While this was purposefully ignored by the academic ivory tower for a long time, it is worth noting two things. Firstly, the phrase “the unspeakable vice of the Greeks” comes from E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice, written and revised between 1913 and 1960 (so, during Tolkien’s lifetime), even though it was published posthumously in 1971. In this scene, Forster is drawing attention to the academic tendency to ignore Greek homosexual love even though they absolutely knew it was there because it was the unspeakable vice. And secondly, the founder of Neo-Classicism as we know it, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, was as gay as the day is long and absolutely drew from Classical art and sculpture with expressed homoerotic appreciation. The point is that even though the vices were considered unspeakable, and even though the ivory tower tried very hard to craft a nonsexual Platonic Ideal—any academic worth their salt would be fully aware of this cognitive dissonance. This isn’t a new discovery, it’s only newly acceptable to discuss.
So there’s that, but there’s also b. Tolkien, especially as he got older and was trying to work out the logistics of the world, was trying to write a secondary world that was wholly realistic within itself. We can definitely consider this notation as part of that process, as everything in NoMe is part of that process. Tolkien had queer people in his life who were friends and respected colleagues. Mary Renault and W.H. Auden are the two most cited examples, and I can only recommend the Queer Lodgings podcast episode on the subject as they do some really comprehensive research and excellent scholarship on Renault, Auden, and many others. It can also be assumed that Tolkien knew his fair share of queer people in his academic life, as academia (alongside the arts) has always been a port in the storm for queer people (again, no time to dwell on that here it’s a tangent all its own, it’s all about the systemic othering of intellectualism by standards of masculinity).
As such, this also can be interpreted as his way of negotiating his Catholicism and his relationships with people in his life. We can see in this footnote a way to understand and accept this higher, elevated love that included the homoromantic, but brushed the issue of sex under the rug. A classic 'I love my friends but not their way of life' move.
I do personally consider this a massive win for queer interpretations and understandings of Tolkien’s work. We could have expected not much better and a lot worse. What this brief notation, this footnote shows is that he seriously considered this issue. The fact that he even broached this subject at all speaks volumes. He didn't have to. There was zero obligation. But he considered it, which says a lot. This note feels, to me, extremely personal, as it isn’t a polished product and it wasn’t intended to ever be seen in this form. It opens a window into Tolkien’s complex internal process, and it’s an internal process that felt empathy in spite of religious doctrine and was trying to figure out where the two could possibly meet in the middle. It’s a good effort, all things considered.