[Bêthberry]

I"ve found a review of "Tolkien and Alterity" which provides some explanation of the paper on Tolkien's minor characters, Giles, Niggle, and Smith. I'll provide a quotation here for those interested in examining these characters from an outsider or "Other" perspective.

The third essay in this Part, Stephen Yandell’s “Cruising Faery: Queer Desire in Giles, Niggle, and Smith”(149-79) argues that Giles, Niggle and Smith, heroes of Tolkien’s shorterworks, “embody a range of non-straight positions while negotiating theiroutsider status within society”(152). The themes of marginalized individuals, mainstream conformity, and hidden lives recur in theseworks; the autobiographical aspect of Farmer Giles and Smith also becomes relevant in that professionally Tolkien explored “the margins of his already marginalized fields of medieval literature and language”(153), while the Middle-earth works were “a queer project, consistently challenging ‘segregation of the Other’”(154). Yandell points to the queering device of the manuscript in Farmer Gilesand Giles’s “negotiat[ing of]a range of shifting boundaries”(157); how Niggle’s “queerness is brandished as a strength”(163) and the male companionship (reminiscent of the Inklings) that he needs for his creative work; Smith’s “closeted class of faeries”(166) and how “narrativizing the desires of Faery [is] ‘faerying’ the text” (a wonderful term; 164). All this,he argues, show these characters’ trips to their respective Otherworlds as a form of “cruising”: “pursu[ing] forms of pleasure tied to non-straight character traits, follow[ing] desires that grow from internal conflicts, and respond[ing] actively to the ways in which their desires place them at odds with mainstream society”(169). Yandell’s paper is another type of exploration in how the symbolically sexualized aspects of characters and narratives can be used to detect the queerness, the alterity of the fantastic, and is a very welcome addition to the corpus of works dealing with Tolkien’s shorter fiction.

Some very interesting things to say about the protagonists of the minor works!

I might also point out that for many of these papers, "queer" is not necessarily a sexual status.

Kisor’s survey on “Queer Tolkien”emphasizes that queer need not be understood in terms of sexuality (although it can), but can also cover any kind of emphatic “difference.”The articles she includes provide various examples of these usages, but perhaps the most important point is the mention of Tison Pugh’s Queering Medieval Genres(26-7): Pugh’s contention that the queer has a “propensity . . . to subvert genre expectations” and “to destabilize narrative”(26) seem particularly applicable to Tolkien’s fictitious genres, which mix and interact with each other, thus not only “queering” the text by their “medievalness,”but even within that, by their use of difference to include in the fiction the interactions of those genres as themselves frustrating expectations.

The collection of essays is a celebration of Jane Chance's contributions to Tolkien Studies.

If anyone is interested in the review, it can be found here: https://scholar.valpo.edu/cgi/viewco...olkienresearch