Middlesex Earth: Are the hobbits homos?

By STEPHEN HOLT

In "The Two Towers," the thrilling follow-up to "Lord of the Rings,", the central characters of the Hobbits seem gayer than ever. The film is powered by not one, but two very feelingly drawn male/male relationships.

There's Frodo and Sam, of course. In "Two Towers," the other more comical couple, Merry and Pippin, come into their own when they are separated from the rest of the Fellowship and have to rely on each other to survive.

One of the few ladies to have more than an eye-blink of screen time is Australian actress Miranda Otto, who plays the new character of Eowyn. "I have to say about the woman thing," Otto told me recently at the Regency Hotel, "it is a terrible thing to admit, but when I started reading the scripts, and I saw the names of the hobbits, I actually thought Merry and Pippin might have been girls."

Queer audiences have responded to the sexually ambiguous duo of Frodo and Sam, seeing in them a deeply devoted, admirable, and even iconic relationship that is, as Elijah Woods (Frodo) admits, "Up for interpretation."

So are the hobbits gay?

"Sure, why not?" quips the hunky hobbit Dominic Monaghan, 26. "We did everything together. We even showered together," indicating his co-hobbit, the impish Scottish comedian Billy Boyd, 34.

"Oh! Why did you have to go and tell them that?" moans Boyd, (Pippin) putting his head in his heads. "We did once, but I like to keep to try to keep it in the back of my mind."

The muscular Monaghan continues, "I think there's a nice kind of loving, close friendship that goes on, a kind of unconditional love between the hobbits. But I think it's their hobbity nature. I think they are all like that. They are very caring and free and open with their emotions. As a sweeping generalization, it is something that you can associate with gay people."

"But I don't think they are gay, " says Boyd, "Not totally gay, because they get married at the end. It's in the appendices of the book, and not the actual stories." Looking right at his friend, Dom, he adds "Tolkien did say Merry was the gayest of all hobbits."

Dom shrugs, "Some people think I'm called Mary."

"But do you have a little lamb?" ribs Billy.

"As to the homosexuality of Frodo and Sam, I think it's important to understand the historical context that these characters are written in," adds Sean Astin, 31 (Sam). "Tolkien based the relationship, to my knowledge, on the batmen in the First World War. Officers, probably a colonel, I would think, would have an attendant assigned to him, an enlisted attendant, and the particular British batmen were characterized by their unusual devotion and loyalty. They would jump on a hand grenade or take care of every small detail and it was a kind of noblesse oblige, a reciprocal sense of responsibility that the officers felt towards the batmen and the batmen felt towards the officers."

When told that Frodo has been embraced by the gay community, Elijah Woods, 21, exclaims, " Have we all? Yay! I think that's up for interpretation. I think the gay community has certainly embraced it as a beautiful, special thing, and I think it CAN be interpreted that way."

He admits the connotation is in Tolkien but not the film. "We saw it as just this incredibly great friendship and people who cared about each other and would do anything for each other," he says. "One would give to the other, when the other couldn't, and vice versa. That's just the beauty of their friendship."

If the audience wants to read that as "gay," that's fine with Woods. "It's good to know that people appreciate the relationship, because it is powerful, and it is integral to both individual journeys," he says. "Frodo wouldn't make it without Sam and Sam wouldn't make it without Frodo. That's really important. You get that in this film, and it becomes even more relevant in the third movie."

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.nyblade.com/arts/021227dish.php3
http://www.dominicmonaghan.info/dom/nyblade.php

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