‘But the Forest is queer’, or so said Merry Brandybuck in Chapter 6 of Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. He was telling Frodo and his friends about the strange and rather forbidding woodland that faced them as they passed out of The Shire on their journey east to Rivendell.
One of the many, many things I love about The Lord of the Rings is Tolkien’s use of the word queer. Firstly, he uses it SO often; 9 times in the first chapter alone! He finds endlessly different ways to apply the word, to people, places, feelings, situations – pretty much anything and everything can be queer in the LOTR universe. It is such a rich and varied use of a single word.
As a gay man, ‘queer’ is a word that I’ve had a particular connection to for most of my adult life, but it is Tolkien’s liberal sprinkling of it all over his great work that is probably my favourite use of it in literature. Again and again ‘queer’ is used to describe something out of the ordinary or not easily explained. The meaning of the word itself cannot be precisely pinned down and hence it remains beautifully nuanced throughout the book, no matter how many times it appears. For example, when Merry is describing the Old Forest to his friends he tells them how the paths through the wood seem to ‘shift and change from time to time in a queer fashion’. In another example, when Frodo first meets Strider at The Prancing Pony, he doesn’t take kindly to the Ranger at first. Strider doesn’t blame him; Well, I have a rather rascally look, have I not? said Strider with curl of lip and a queer gleam in his eye.’
Some uses of the word may make us smile today, if not snigger, as Farmer Maggot says goodbye to Frodo and friends and declares ‘it’s been a queer day and no mistake’. There is also writing to delight anybody who has ever felt a bit ‘other’, such as in Chapter 1, when the Gaffer is standing up for the Baggins’s during a discussion in the local pub; ‘If that’s being queer, then we could do with a bit more queerness in these parts’ – here here Mr. Gamgee! And one my favourite lines, when Merry tells the gang ‘We don’t want to go that way! The Withywindle valley is said to be the queerest part of the whole wood – the centre from which all the queerness comes, as it were’. It sounds like my kind of place.
LOTR was written between about 1937 and 1949 and ‘queer’ certainly had various meanings by then. It was already in use as a term to describe an aspect of gay subculture, namely gay men who self-identified as more conventionally ‘masculine’. But it became a much more pejorative word later in the 20th century until it was reclaimed in the 1980s by activists who sought to challenge homophobia and prejudice against people with HIV and AIDS. It was also used by the more radical end of the LGBT community spectrum to set themselves apart from the ‘gay’ movement which they felt was too cosied up to the liberal conservative mainstream.
Today, queer is everywhere, it’s meaning having broadened to include an ever-wider group of minority identities. Perhaps the meaning has evolved into something a little closer to the way Tolkien used it in his writing; unusual and hard to pin down.
I don’t describe myself as ‘queer’ mainly because I’ve never felt entirely comfortable being part of a group or a particular category. I’ve always hated those diversity questionnaires you fill in when you apply for a job where you have to tick a box to describe yourself. I prefer to be a bit more free-floating, on the margins with one foot in and one foot out as it were (it’s typically me that I choose to live life across two countries, Germany and the UK), but maybe that just makes me even more queer!
Hedgecrows 