alia-andreth:

Some of y’all might remember the Great Shitposting Event of December 2017, spearheaded by @cerulean-shark and @verymaedhros, aided and abetted by @tyelperinquar, @fuindar-valen, @saltysquidtea, @cataclysmofstars, @vampiraptor, and probably some other people who I’m forgetting (sorry!).  As for me, I have never shitposted in my life. (She blatantly lied.)

And if not, this thread, originally posted by Vmae, tells you all you need to know.  The thread deals with his passage from the Lay of Leithian:

‘Thou fool: a phantom thou didst see
that I, I Sauron, made to snare
thy lovesick wits. Naught else was there.
Cold ‘tis with Sauron’s wraiths to wed!
Thy Eilinel! She is long since dead… ’

and the discussion was of whether or not this meant that Gorlim and also Sauron had canonically slept with a wraith.

There’s a widespread understanding within the Tolkien fandom that Tolkien never wrote about sex.  Ever.  Even in the stuff he wrote privately for himself and didn’t intend to publish.  And so wherever something turns up in canon that hinted at possibly some non-platonic entanglements, a giggle goes around at daft Grampa T who was so prudish he didn’t recognize the sexual subtext within his own work, the shippers write their fic, and everyone goes about their lives. (Of course, this interpretation ignores that Tolkien canonically wrote an incestuous relationship in The Children of Hurin.)

Which is what I did too until recently.  A little over a month ago, I got into one of Tolkien’s lesser known, non-Middle Earth works.  The Lay of Aotru and Itroun, (good luck with the pronunciation, I don’t know either) is set in the Real World, “In Britain’s land beyond the seas,” aka Brittany, and the plot follows a nobleman and his wife who are trying to conceive.  Of course she doesn’t, so Aotru seeks out a witch, who promises to give him a potion for his wife in return for an unknown price to be paid sometime later.  Itroun get pregnant, and in the spring Aotru is hunting in the woods, and who does he meet but that witch again!  Except now she’s young and hot, and it’s questionable whether she’s wearing any clothing, and this is what she says to Aotru:

For this at least I claim my fee,

if ever thou wouldst wander free.

With love thou shalt me here requite,

for here is long and sweet the night;

in druery dear thou here shalt deal

in bliss more deep than mortals feel.’

Italicized as in the original.  In case it isn’t clear that the witch/fairy is requesting Aotru repay her by having sex with her, the footnotes helpfully inform us that “druery” means “love-making.” Count on Tolkien to use an archaic term that has gone out of use instead of the prosaic “fucking.”

Let Tolkien say “fuck” 2k18.

This leads me to believe that I’ve been approaching parts of Tolkien’s work all wrong.  Instead of turning cognitive cartwheels to figure out what Tolkien meant if he wasn’t talking about sex, it seems that I should roll with the more intuitive interpretation, and assume that in at least some of the cases that he was actually talking about sex.  Which doesn’t mean that at other times he couldn’t have been speaking metaphorically in other cases. (Such as Melkor’s lust for the Silmarils. Or, maybe Melkor was just really into geology.)

Upshot: Gorlim/Wraith is probably a canon ship.  Also, some of us (such as me) have been missing out on this whole other side of Tolkien’s work, because we’ve been dismissing the sexual subtext as the creations of people scrabbling to support their ship.

And I don’t believe in Tolkien’s personal life having any bearing on how I interpret his works, but it does stretch my credibility to suggest that a veteran for crying out loud, and someone who studied mythology, would be writing merrily along like “Sexual innuendo?  I have never heard of it.”