At Oxford, he created an all-male literary group with another Oxford professor of English, C. After the war he became a professor of English Language at the University of Leeds, and then at the University of Oxford, where he taught at Pembroke College. He joined the British Army's Lancashire Fusiliers and saw the horror of trench warfare, with life as an officer made more bearable by the support of a male batman or servant. He was brought up by his guardian, a Catholic priest, Father Francis Morgan, and educated at male-only grammar schools and then Exeter College, Oxford, which at that time had only male students. Tolkien, was orphaned as a boy, his father dying in South Africa and his mother in England a few years later. The author of the bestselling fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings, J. Scholars and commentators have interpreted the relationship in different ways, from close but not necessarily homosexual to plainly homoerotic, or as an idealised heroic friendship.

Homosexuality in some form has often been suspected in the officer- batman-inspired relationship of Frodo and his gardener Sam as they travel together on the dangerous quest to destroy the Ring. However, love and marriage appear in the form of the warm relationship between the hobbits Sam Gamgee and Rosie Cotton the unreturned feelings of Éowyn for Aragorn, followed by her falling in love with Faramir, and marrying him and Aragorn's love for Arwen, described in an appendix rather than in the main text, as ' The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen'.įemale sexuality appears, too, in the form of the monstrous female spider Shelob, who seems to function as a horrifying vagina dentata in Sam's rite of passage through her territory. Tolkien, has been debated, as it is somewhat unobtrusive. The presence of sexuality in The Lord of the Rings, a bestselling fantasy novel by J.

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