{"id":30208,"date":"2016-10-03T01:00:40","date_gmt":"2016-10-03T05:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30208"},"modified":"2018-09-18T14:14:07","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T18:14:07","slug":"qotd-nitpicking-sexual-issues-in-middle-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/10\/03\/qotd-nitpicking-sexual-issues-in-middle-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Nitpicking sexual issues in Middle Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

Warm Beds Are Good<\/em> fails to grapple with the most interesting question of all, however, which is how Arwen and Aragorn could possibly have developed the hots for each other in the first place. It turns out to be rather hard to come up with any theory of Elvish reproductive biology under which Arwen\u2019s behavior makes any sense at all.<\/p>\n

Aragorn\u2019s end isn\u2019t that much of a mystery. He\u2019s an alpha male of a warrior culture, chock full o\u2019 testosterone and other dominance hormones guaranteed to make him into a serious horn-dog. She\u2019s a beautiful princess, broadcasting human-compatible health-and-fertility signals in all directions. If she doesn\u2019t actively smell bad, tab A fits slot B just fine from the point of view of his<\/em> mating instincts.<\/p>\n

No, the fundamental problem is Arwen\u2019s lifespan. She is supposedly something like two thousand, seven hundred years old when she meets Aragorn. That\u2019s an awful lot of Saturday nights at the Last Homely Disco West of the Mountains; if she has a sex drive anything like a normal human female\u2019s, she ought to have more mileage on her than a Liberian tramp steamer. On the other hand, if her sexual wiring is fundamentally different<\/em> from a human female\u2019s, what\u2019n\u2019the hell is she doing with Aragorn? He shouldn\u2019t look or smell or behave right to trigger her releasers, any more than a talking chimpanzee would to most human women.<\/p>\n

\u201cB-b-but\u2026\u201d I hear you splutter \u201cThis is fantasy!<\/em>\u201d, to which I say foo! Tolkien was very careful about logical consistency in areas where he was equipped by temperament and training to appreciate it; he invented a cosmology, thousand of years of history, multiple languages; he drew maps. He lectured on the importance of a having convincing and consistent secondary world in fantasy. Furthermore, Tolkien never completely repudiated the intention that his fiction was a mythic description of the lost past of our<\/em> Earth, and that therefore matter, energy and life should be consistent with the forms in which we know them.<\/p>\n

Therefore, it is entirely appropriate to analyze Middle-Earth as though it were a science-fictional creation, to assume Elves and Men both got DNA, and to ask if the freakin\u2019 biology makes any sense at all under this assumption.<\/p>\n

And one of the facts we have to deal with is that humans and elves are not just interfertile, they produce fertile offspring. That means they have to be genetically very, very<\/em> similar. If there are dramatic differences between elf and human reproductive behavior, the instinctive basis for them must be coded in a relatively small set of genes that somehow don\u2019t interfere with that interfertility. In fact, technically, Elves and Men have to be subspecies of the same stock.<\/p>\n

When this came up on my favorite mailing list just after the first movie came out, my hypothesis was that elves (a) have only rare periods of vulnerability to sexual impulses, and (b) imprint on each other for life when they mate, like swans. This pattern is actually within the envelope of human variation, though uncommon \u2014 which makes it a plausible candidate for being dominant in another hominid subspecies.<\/p>\n

This \u2018swan theory\u2019 would be consistent with Appendix A, which (a) has Arwen meeting Aragorn when he was garbed like an elven prince and (as near as we can tell through Tolkien\u2019s rather clotted chansons-de-geste<\/em> style) falling for him hard right then and there, and (b) has Arwen\u2019s family apparently operating under the assumption that once that had happened, the damage was done and she wouldn\u2019t be mating with anyone else, noway, nohow.<\/p>\n

One of the techies on the list shot the swan theory down by finding a canonical instance of an Elf remarrying (Finwe, father of Feanor; first wife Miriel, second Indis). In subsequent discussion, we concluded that it wasn\u2019t possible to frame a consistent theory that fit Tolkien\u2019s facts. The sticking-point turned out to be the half-elven; Tolkien tells us that they get to choose<\/em> whether they will have the nature of Men or Elves, and it is implied that they do so at puberty.<\/p>\n

Since that\u2019s true, the difference between Men and Elves can\u2019t properly be genetic at all. It must be in the cloudy realm of spirit, magic, and divine interventions. This is not an area in which Tolkien (a devout Catholic) gives us any rules or regularities at all. Elvish sexual behavior could be arbitrarily variant from human without any reasons other than that Eru keeps exerting his will to make it so, and He very well might be intervening to keep elf-maidens\u2019 hormones from getting them jiggy Until It\u2019s Time.<\/p>\n

Helluva way to run a universe, say I. Inelegant. A really craftsmanlike god would build his cosmos so it wouldn\u2019t require constant divine intervention to function. It\u2019s a serious weakness in Tolkien\u2019s fiction, one that runs far deeper than anachronisms like domestic cats (which didn\u2019t reach northern Europe until late Roman times) and tea (to Europe in 1610) in the Shire.<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “Sex and Tolkien”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2003-12-18.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Warm Beds Are Good fails to grapple with the most interesting question of all, however, which is how Arwen and Aragorn could possibly have developed the hots for each other in the first place. It turns out to be rather hard to come up with any theory of Elvish reproductive biology under which Arwen\u2019s behavior […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28,41],"tags":[183,1235,868,255],"class_list":["post-30208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","category-quotations","tag-dna","tag-esr","tag-jrrtolkien","tag-sexuality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Re","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30208"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35965,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30208\/revisions\/35965"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}