The Body in Tolkien's Legendarium

302 Pages·2.021 MB·English

by  Christopher Vaccaro

The Body in Tolkien’s
Legendarium
Essays on Middle-earth Corporeality
Edited by Christopher Vaccaro
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
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BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-0388-9
© 2013 Christopher Vaccaro. All rights reserved
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Cover illustration © 2013 iStockphoto
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Table of Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction
Christopher Vaccaro
Part I. The Transformation of the Body
The Body in Question: The Unhealed Wounds of Frodo Baggins
Verlyn Flieger
Incorporeality and Transformation in The Lord of the Rings
Yvette Kisor
Frodo's Body: Liminality and the Experience of War
Anna Smol
Part II: The Body and the Spirit
The Hröa and Fëa of Middle-earth: Health, Ecology and the War
Matthew Dickerson
The Ugly Elf: Orc Bodies, Perversion, and Redemption in The
Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings
Jolanta N. Komornicka
Part III: The Discursive Body
Light (noun, 1) or Light (adjective, 14b)? Female Bodies and
Femininities in The Lord of the Rings
Robin Anne Reid
A Body of Myth: Representing Sauron in The Lord of the Rings
Gergely Nagy
Part IV. The Body and the Source Material
Emblematic Bodies: Tolkien and the Depiction of Female
Physical Presence
James T. Williamson
Extending the Reach of the Invisible Hand: A Gift Looks for Gain
in the Gifting Economy of Middle-earth
Jennifer Culver
Tolkien's Whimsical Mode: Physicalities in The Hobbit
Christopher Vaccaro
About the Contributors
List of Names and Terms
Abbreviations
All citations from The Lord of the Rings will be by book and chapter
and page number as they are located in the editions listed below.
FR: The Fellowship of the Ring. London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1954; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. 2d ed., Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Hobbit: The Hobbit. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1937.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938. The Annotated Hobbit, 2d ed.,
rev., ed. Douglas A. Anderson. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
  2002.
Letters: Carpenter, Humphrey, ed. The Letters of J.R.R.
Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
RK: The Return of the King. London: George Allen & Unwin,
1955; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956. 2d ed., Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Sil: The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
TT: The Two Towers. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954;
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955. 2d ed., Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1987.
Introduction
Christopher Vaccaro
It is a fallen world, and there is no consonance between our
bodies, minds, and souls.1
How many white wizards fit on the head of a pin? Does the same
divine music present at the moment of Arda’s creation also resonate
within the limbs of Pippin and Sam Gamgee, the Sung Word
ensconced in flesh? Did the sculptors of the Argonath strive for
physical realism or (as is more likely) did they attempt to convey
Isildur’s and Anarion’s virtues through a culturally recognized and
highly symbolic palette of facial and bodily features? Is Frodo’s
tortured shirtless back a site upon which the orcs of Cirith Ungol
inscribe Sauron’s temporary power and marred morality? All of these
enquiries are meant to steer thoughts toward this one question: Do
bodies matter in Middle-earth? To the contributors of The Body in
Tolkien’s Legendarium, the answer is an unqualified “Yes.”
Tolkien’s emphasis on the spirit (fëa) seemed to demand from him a
continuous downplaying or sublimation of the physical (hröa). As
much as he wrote of the beauty of Arda, he often upstaged this
creation through his continuous emphasis on the spirit. This is made
more apparent by his linking of the material world of Arda to
Morgoth.2 Yet the more closely one examines the text, the more
apparent it is that Tolkien found something very wholesome about a
simple Shire life full of physical enjoyments (decent hearty food,
thirst-quenching drink, leisure, laughter, and play) and no structured
religion to speak of. And while Arda may be referred to as Morgoth’s
Ring, Middle-earth is never completely abandoned by the author or
the deities he created, and incarnated spirits evince an appreciation
for the physicality in which they are housed. Conceptually the body is
an entryway into Tolkien’s complex and sometimes contradictory
opinions on the state of the postlapsarian world.3
The critical collections on Tolkien’s texts published recently have
made considerable gains in reaching beyond formal, source-specific
interpretations, and many of the essays within Tolkien the
Medievalist, J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, Tolkien’s
Modern Middle Ages, and Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on “The
History of Middle-earth,” and the Tolkien Studies journal provide
significant contextual frameworks for an analysis of corporeality
though none provide scholarship dedicated to the subject.4 In fact,
until now no collection has made a direct case for the body’s
prominent place in Tolkien scholarship. From this focused
interpretive trajectory, scholars may find their interpretations of the
Legendarium centered upon a bevy of relevant issues (birth, decay,
resurrection, physical discipline, pain, suffering, torture, sickness,
hunger, shape-shifting, and more broadly metamorphoses), central
binaries (fertility/celibacy, purity/pollution, transparency/translucence,
spirituality/materiality, absence/presence, and mortality/immortality),
and hitherto untreated subjects (iconography, bodies within the
source material, dance, nutrition, and even exercise).
Essays touching upon subjects of race, gender, and sexuality
naturally direct the critical conversation towards the body; in fact,
these subjects served as a catalyst for its most recent theoretical
attention. The Body in Tolkien’s Legendarium thrusts Tolkien and
Middle Earth Studies into a theoretical terrain most recently
navigated by contemporary feminist and queer scholarship but
initially mapped out in the seminal texts of the patristic and medieval
church fathers well known by Tolkien who was, of course, a medieval
scholar and a devout Catholic: this terrain being a reflection on
human corporeality. The ascetic discourses of the early church
prioritized physical discipline and renunciation. One finds in the early
English dialogues between the body and soul, the hagiographic and
medical texts, and in the Latin and vernacular penitentials a view of
the body as both obstacle and aid to salvation. This is a very familiar
concept for most: indulgence leads to suffering, renunciation
provides salvific effects. During the days of the early Christian
church, the human body was seen as a smaller version of the vast
cosmic one.5 Cast in such a light, human bodies were thought to
possess the same heat and spirit found in celestial objects.6
Many patristic and medieval church fathers subscribed to the widely
held belief that there existed beings of two distinct creations: beings
of the first were angelic creatures of the pre-fallen state and stood
completely outside of the sexual economy. Beings of the second
creation were more grounded in the body and manifested the
postlapsarian characteristic of sexually differentiation. Augustine was
largely responsible for redirecting this line of thought arguing that
through the eschatological and messianic event of Christ’s birth the
Word became incarnate thereby reestablishing the union between
humankind and God. It was Augustine also who believed that ascetic
control over the body rendered the body transparent to the soul—an
interesting notion considering Tolkien’s use of transparency and
translucency.7 In a complicated relationship to this discourse of
renunciation is the belief in the transubstantiation of the Eucharist
and the concept of the body of Christ. The corpus Christi was
understood not only as pertaining to Christ’s actual body, but as the
Church and its members as well as the converted and blessed
communion host.8 Tolkien appears to have placed these aspects
within his mythological framework in his attention to the resurrection
of the body politic in the Reunited Kingdom of Arnor and the
revivifying powers of Galadriel’s lembas.9 Biblical, apochryphal,
poetic and homiletic texts likewise kindled Tolkien’s imagination
when it came to the subject. Genesis and the gospels supplied
literally and symbolically fertile material regarding the distinctions
between pre- and fallen as well as mortal and divine bodies. Early
English religious poetry and prose was rife with images of martyrs
and miles Christi and of Christ’s body itself shining like a glass filled
with light.10
Discussions on the issue of physicality continued through to the
twentieth century and the nascence of contemporary literary theory.
Dramatically changing the theoretical landscape regarding the
subject was the work of Michel Foucault.11 In his three-volume The
History of Sexuality, he argues that sexuality is not conceptualized
today as it was during the Greek and Roman Empires, Medieval
Europe, or Victorian England; sex has a history. Categories such as
heterosexuality and homosexuality are historically determined, and
cultural articulations of ideology, power, and knowledge keep
meaning in constant flux. The body, too, has a hermeneutic history
and is constituted through and has a direct effect upon the cultural
discourses around which it exists. More recently, Judith Butler and
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have drawn from feminist and queer
theoretical perspectives in order to argue in very different ways that
the body has no meaning outside of cultural discourse. Butler’s
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” dismantles the
a priori notion that the body comes to us naturally sexed, gendered,
and heterosexualized.12
Building from these theoretical foundations, Tolkien scholars have
begun to examine the body in Middle-earth in relation to sex, gender,
desire, and power. Jane Chance explores the inarticulation of the
body in her The Mythology of Power.13 Where Shelob incarnates an
appetite for food and an instinct for survival, Saruman reveals an
inarticulate rage, and Gollum sings his “primitive, body-directed
song” and reveals his own preoccupation with food.14 Anna Smol’s
attention to the continuum of tactile intimacy between men makes
permeable the culturally determined boundaries coding some
friendships as heterosexual and others as homosexual.15 Gergely
Nagy investigates how meaning is made possible and subjectivities
are constituted in the novel through discourses of power, and he
pays quite a bit of attention to bodily concerns. Similar to Chance,
Nagy finds that Gollum’s “bodily-determined sounds dominate his
speech” but concludes that this language is formed out of physical
desire:
Discourses of power define the ways the subject imagines and
understands its bodily desires and the generation of its
language, meanings, and its own production of meaning.16