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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2pSv5XE:
sex-ruiner:
I’ve been meaning to write a post on this topic
for ages and a conversation on twitter has brought it back into my
mind, so here goes: my theories about what the elves in Tolkien’s
mythology “really” looked like and how they came to be presented
as the very face of the European beauty standard.
There are a few of things we’re told about elves
that aren’t quite congruent with the image we’re given of them as
some kind of willowy uber-Scandinavian - they had superhuman sight
and hearing, they were probably minimally sexually dimorphic (while
the popular translation we have of the Red Book of Westmarch is
usaully taken to imply a level of sexual dimorphism similar to that
found in ideally slender humans, I don’t actually recall any
references to elves having tits!), and they have a few other
biologically bizarre traits such as walking on top of snow and
sleeping with their eyes open. I would argue that with a bit of
imagination and reading between the lines, the image we get of elves
is very strange indeed.
Let’s look at a passage from The Lord of the
Rings concerning the sensory
abilities of elves.
“‘Riders!’ cried Aragorn, springing to his
feet. ‘Many riders on swift steeds are coming towards us!’ ‘Yes,’
said Legolas, ‘there are one hundred and five. Yellow is their hair,
and bright are their spears. Their leader is very tall.’Aragorn
smiled. ‘Keen are the eyes of the Elves,’ he said.‘Nay! The
riders are little more than five leagues distant,’ said Legolas.”–
The Two Towers Chapter
2: The Riders of Rohan
At this point I’m
going to reference a tumblr post some of you may recall from a few
months ago (I can’t find it right now, but here
is something that gestures at it), where somebody did the maths and
realised that in order for Legolas to see the colour of someone’s
hair five leagues (15 miles, or 24 kilometers) away, he would have to
have absolutely massive pupils. Like, to the point of being
incredibly disturbing to the average human. It’s my theory that the
“grey-eyed elves” Tolkien describes were “grey-eyed” not in
the sense of “that particular shade of blue most common in northern
and eastern Europe”, but in the sense of the grey sheen you get on
a wide black surface. It wouldn’t be so much “scandinavian” as
“unnervingly similar to a perigrine falcon”.
Imagine seeing
them sleeping with those
open. As an aside – I’m not going to go too far into the stuff
about sleeping with their eyes open and walking on snow, but if any
creature sleeps and walks lightly, it’s a bird, and I think a certain
birdlikeness is going to be part of the image of elves we’re left
with when we consider all these factors. While birds are a common object of romantic comparisons, the way they move and speak is really not what you’d call conventionally attractive, and as beautiful as the voices of elves were held to be they were also described as all kinds of intimidating.
The superhuman sight
and hearing of elves simply would not have left them with
conventionally attractive human features. It’s generally accepted
that elves had pointed ears, but given the acuteness of their hearing
their ears may have been even more animalistic than that – perhaps
higher up on their head, subject to voluntary movement, certainly
larger than they’re generally depicted as. I’m not advocating for a
picture of elves as basically hentai cat-people, but I think we have
to accept that while you were being captivated by the “wells of
deep memory” they were using to count your pores, it would be
offset by some constantly twitching and prominent ears.
Now to address the
topic of sexual dimorphism in elves.
“Very
tall [Galadriel and Celeborn] were, and the Lady no less tall than
the Lord; and they were grave and beautiful. They were clad wholly in
white; and the hair of the Lady was of deep gold… but no sign of
age was upon them, unless it were in the depths of their eyes; for
these were keen as lances in the starlight, and yet profound, the
wells of deep memory.”–
The Two Towers Chapter
7: The Mirror of Galadriel.
This passage is
notable for not only mentioning no sexual dimorphism, but outright
stating that one of the forms of sexual dimorphism generally expected
in humans (the “male” being taller than the “female”) is not
present. It is noted elsewhere that elves do not grow beards. While
gender pronouns are always applied to elves, elves present themselves
very androgynously and my reading is that the impression of a human
gender binary is the product of the human translators rather than
anything native to elven culture. It is notable that where “female”
elves are recorded they are overwhelmingly either wives or mothers;
while one explanation for this is that the authors saw no reason to
note the contributions of female elves unless they related to those
of a male elf, this could also be explained by elves not being
assumed to be female at all until they gave birth or entered a
relationship where according to a worldview that naturalised
cis-hetero-sexuality, someone
had to be the woman.
Given that
Galadriel’s accomplishments independet of Celeborn are noted
throughout the Silmarillion and the fact that the only thing visually
distinguishing her from her partner is the colour of her hair, it is
arguable that her gendering as female is only to do with her role in
producing Celebrían.
The fact that traditional human gender roles seem present in some
interactions between elves (such as the trapping of Aredhel by Eöl
in chapter 16 of The
Silmarillion)
is likewise explicable as the projection of human gender roles onto
simply unequal or predatory interactions. Of course, Galadriel is
such an exceptional case that using her as an example is tenuous, but
the fact remains that I see no evidence for an elven gender binary
that cannot be explained away by a mix of attempts to defend human
heterosexual norms and a treatment of male as default. I believe the
projection of male-and-femaleness onto elves was more to do with
human men deciding that the elves they found attractive must be women
than anything else.
So
far, we have an image of elves as minimally dimorphic (to the point
that elves capable of child-bearing etc may have had this ability
unacknowledged in text purely due to human presumtuousness) and an
explanation for the sexual dimorphism that is heavily implied (but
never outright supported) by the text as we receive it today. The
erasure of some of the elves’ alien features also has traits we might
expect from translations where the expectations of the translator
combine with the fact that some things were assumed knowledge by the
original writers thousands of years ago. Of course “grey-eyed” meant the sheen on strange and
piercing black wells to writers well acquainted with either real
elves or reliable depictions of them, and of course “grey-eyed”
could only mean eyes that fit an existing beauty standard when the
stories told of human men being captivated by the beauty of elves. That the
lightness and agility of elves was left in the text unquestioned
points to the later translators not even being conscious of their
agenda. We can only speculate as to what elves really looked like,
but even if we take for granted that their paleness and long limbs
were very humanoid (and the fact that elven weapons suit human hands
and movements very well does point to the latter, at least),
inferring that they look like stereotypical Swedish models with a
human gender binary seems at best unsupported.
I think there’s more I could go into, but I’ve rambled on for about 1300 words now and there’s only so much people want to read in a tumblr post! I haven’t read LoTR or the Sil properly in ages though, so this could have a few glaring inaccuracies. I will fight anyone who claims elves had a gender binary though.
sex-ruiner:
I’ve been meaning to write a post on this topic
for ages and a conversation on twitter has brought it back into my
mind, so here goes: my theories about what the elves in Tolkien’s
mythology “really” looked like and how they came to be presented
as the very face of the European beauty standard.
There are a few of things we’re told about elves
that aren’t quite congruent with the image we’re given of them as
some kind of willowy uber-Scandinavian - they had superhuman sight
and hearing, they were probably minimally sexually dimorphic (while
the popular translation we have of the Red Book of Westmarch is
usaully taken to imply a level of sexual dimorphism similar to that
found in ideally slender humans, I don’t actually recall any
references to elves having tits!), and they have a few other
biologically bizarre traits such as walking on top of snow and
sleeping with their eyes open. I would argue that with a bit of
imagination and reading between the lines, the image we get of elves
is very strange indeed.
Let’s look at a passage from The Lord of the
Rings concerning the sensory
abilities of elves.
“‘Riders!’ cried Aragorn, springing to his
feet. ‘Many riders on swift steeds are coming towards us!’ ‘Yes,’
said Legolas, ‘there are one hundred and five. Yellow is their hair,
and bright are their spears. Their leader is very tall.’Aragorn
smiled. ‘Keen are the eyes of the Elves,’ he said.‘Nay! The
riders are little more than five leagues distant,’ said Legolas.”–
The Two Towers Chapter
2: The Riders of Rohan
At this point I’m
going to reference a tumblr post some of you may recall from a few
months ago (I can’t find it right now, but here
is something that gestures at it), where somebody did the maths and
realised that in order for Legolas to see the colour of someone’s
hair five leagues (15 miles, or 24 kilometers) away, he would have to
have absolutely massive pupils. Like, to the point of being
incredibly disturbing to the average human. It’s my theory that the
“grey-eyed elves” Tolkien describes were “grey-eyed” not in
the sense of “that particular shade of blue most common in northern
and eastern Europe”, but in the sense of the grey sheen you get on
a wide black surface. It wouldn’t be so much “scandinavian” as
“unnervingly similar to a perigrine falcon”.
Imagine seeing
them sleeping with those
open. As an aside – I’m not going to go too far into the stuff
about sleeping with their eyes open and walking on snow, but if any
creature sleeps and walks lightly, it’s a bird, and I think a certain
birdlikeness is going to be part of the image of elves we’re left
with when we consider all these factors. While birds are a common object of romantic comparisons, the way they move and speak is really not what you’d call conventionally attractive, and as beautiful as the voices of elves were held to be they were also described as all kinds of intimidating.
The superhuman sight
and hearing of elves simply would not have left them with
conventionally attractive human features. It’s generally accepted
that elves had pointed ears, but given the acuteness of their hearing
their ears may have been even more animalistic than that – perhaps
higher up on their head, subject to voluntary movement, certainly
larger than they’re generally depicted as. I’m not advocating for a
picture of elves as basically hentai cat-people, but I think we have
to accept that while you were being captivated by the “wells of
deep memory” they were using to count your pores, it would be
offset by some constantly twitching and prominent ears.
Now to address the
topic of sexual dimorphism in elves.
“Very
tall [Galadriel and Celeborn] were, and the Lady no less tall than
the Lord; and they were grave and beautiful. They were clad wholly in
white; and the hair of the Lady was of deep gold… but no sign of
age was upon them, unless it were in the depths of their eyes; for
these were keen as lances in the starlight, and yet profound, the
wells of deep memory.”–
The Two Towers Chapter
7: The Mirror of Galadriel.
This passage is
notable for not only mentioning no sexual dimorphism, but outright
stating that one of the forms of sexual dimorphism generally expected
in humans (the “male” being taller than the “female”) is not
present. It is noted elsewhere that elves do not grow beards. While
gender pronouns are always applied to elves, elves present themselves
very androgynously and my reading is that the impression of a human
gender binary is the product of the human translators rather than
anything native to elven culture. It is notable that where “female”
elves are recorded they are overwhelmingly either wives or mothers;
while one explanation for this is that the authors saw no reason to
note the contributions of female elves unless they related to those
of a male elf, this could also be explained by elves not being
assumed to be female at all until they gave birth or entered a
relationship where according to a worldview that naturalised
cis-hetero-sexuality, someone
had to be the woman.
Given that
Galadriel’s accomplishments independet of Celeborn are noted
throughout the Silmarillion and the fact that the only thing visually
distinguishing her from her partner is the colour of her hair, it is
arguable that her gendering as female is only to do with her role in
producing Celebrían.
The fact that traditional human gender roles seem present in some
interactions between elves (such as the trapping of Aredhel by Eöl
in chapter 16 of The
Silmarillion)
is likewise explicable as the projection of human gender roles onto
simply unequal or predatory interactions. Of course, Galadriel is
such an exceptional case that using her as an example is tenuous, but
the fact remains that I see no evidence for an elven gender binary
that cannot be explained away by a mix of attempts to defend human
heterosexual norms and a treatment of male as default. I believe the
projection of male-and-femaleness onto elves was more to do with
human men deciding that the elves they found attractive must be women
than anything else.
So
far, we have an image of elves as minimally dimorphic (to the point
that elves capable of child-bearing etc may have had this ability
unacknowledged in text purely due to human presumtuousness) and an
explanation for the sexual dimorphism that is heavily implied (but
never outright supported) by the text as we receive it today. The
erasure of some of the elves’ alien features also has traits we might
expect from translations where the expectations of the translator
combine with the fact that some things were assumed knowledge by the
original writers thousands of years ago. Of course “grey-eyed” meant the sheen on strange and
piercing black wells to writers well acquainted with either real
elves or reliable depictions of them, and of course “grey-eyed”
could only mean eyes that fit an existing beauty standard when the
stories told of human men being captivated by the beauty of elves. That the
lightness and agility of elves was left in the text unquestioned
points to the later translators not even being conscious of their
agenda. We can only speculate as to what elves really looked like,
but even if we take for granted that their paleness and long limbs
were very humanoid (and the fact that elven weapons suit human hands
and movements very well does point to the latter, at least),
inferring that they look like stereotypical Swedish models with a
human gender binary seems at best unsupported.
I think there’s more I could go into, but I’ve rambled on for about 1300 words now and there’s only so much people want to read in a tumblr post! I haven’t read LoTR or the Sil properly in ages though, so this could have a few glaring inaccuracies. I will fight anyone who claims elves had a gender binary though.
