Talking with J Wiremu Kane about Tolkien, History & Queerness

Scott Hamilton

RS: J. Wiremu Kane is a prolific writer whose work has appeared in many Aotearoan periodicals. In 2022 he was the Emerging Māori Writer in Residence at Pōneke's International Institute of Modern Letters. He is interested in writing fantasy fiction that does justice to the history of Aotearoa and the experience of tangata whenua, and in this exchange he draws on his deep knowledge and distinctive interpretation of the work of JRR Tolkien.

SH: Kia ora Jared, here are a few questions. But feel free to make up your own and talk about what you like. I can respond to your comments.

We got talking because of my very critical comments about Tolkien on Twitter. And you made the fair point that I was conflating the Tolkien industry, which has been extended to Aotearoa because of the success of the film adaptations of his novels, with Tolkien's actual texts. You urged me to read Tolkien, to return to the texts, and appreciate the artistry there. And I think the universe must have been on your side, because a couple of days after our exchange I found The Lord of the Rings in one of my hometown of Warkworth/Puhinui's half dozen op shops. Every book in the world seems eventually to wash up on the shelves of those op shops—but this one washed up very conveniently. And reading the text I had to concede one of your points: Tolkien can be a very fine narrative writer. There's an elegant simplicity in the way he writes of journeys and battles. His prose is superior to many of his imitators. I had missed his quality as a writer because I'd been preoccupied with the effects of the Tolkien industry on Aotearoa. I think these effects have been negative: there seems to me something neo-colonial in the way our country has become identified in the minds of so many tourists with the fantasy of an Englishman. Haven't we already suffered from fantasists like Wakefield and Grey? I don't like the way the traces of our history have been removed from the films shot here—the way pā sites have been erased from hilltops, the way awa with ancient names have gotten new labels invented by Tolkien. For me, this problem is symbolised by the way that the remains of the village of Peria, which as you know was established as a model community by the kingmaker Wiremu Tamihana, sit close to Hobbiton. Thousands of tourists visit Hobbiton; none ever learn about the real-life shire that Tamihana created. John Gorst, who toured the pre-war Waikato as an agent of the colonial regime in Auckland, wrote exultantly about the peace and order and prosperity of the little kāinga, with its church and school and rich fields of wheat. And this fragile utopia was destroyed, of course, by the invading orcs of Governor Grey.

But I'm aware that other people interpret Tolkien and the association of Middle Earth and Aotearoa differently. I have met hippies from Europe, for example, who love the landscapes and peoples of these islands, and see our smaller centres and rural regions as some sort of twenty-first century shire. They contrast thinly populated and relatively laidback Aotearoa with the teeming industrial societies of Europe. So that's one view that isn't contained by my analysis. I'm interested in hearing more about how you, as an indigenous writer, relate to Tolkien, and also how you view the association of Middle Earth and Aotearoa.

My view of Tolkien was very influenced by Michael Moorcock, whose books I devoured as a teenager. In his book on fantasy fiction, Wizardry and Wild Romance, he called The Lord of the Rings 'Winnie the Pooh posing as an epic', and saw it as a reactionary allegory for British society. Moorcock called the Shire a 'Surrey of the mind', and associated the Orcs with the industrial working class of northern England. Mordor is Yorkshire. How do you see Moorcock's reading? Is it too simplistic? Does it have any validity? And is he unfair to consider Tolkien's politics reactionary?

Moorcock doesn't address the fact that William Morris was a major influence on Tolkien. Morris like Tolkien was greatly interested in Norse societies and languages, and he produced romances that have some of the same qualities as Tolkien's books. And Morris of course was a Pre-Raphaelite who, in the words of his biographer EP Thompson, 'crossed the river of fire' and became a revolutionary socialist. Yet despite his left-wing views Morris was a critic of many features of industrial society, and someone more comfortable in the countryside than the city. Morris arguably shows that some of the core beliefs Tolkien held were not incompatible with left-wing stances. Do you think many Tolkien enthusiasts are drawn eventually to Morris' writings?

China Mieville has a really interesting perspective on Tolkien, one that blends praise and criticism. He praises Tolkien as the first fiction writer to create an entire world. Middle Earth is in some ways like one of the societies documented by great 20th century British anthropologists like EE Evans-Pritchard. Like those anthropologists Tolkien gives us everything—setting, cultures, customs, language. And this was something new in fiction, and something countless subsequent writers have been inspired by. Mieville's complaint is that Tolkien's world, interesting as it is, reflects a conservative view of life. So what Mieville's tried to do, in his sprawling fantasy novels, is marry a Tolkienesque quasi-anthropological approach with a different, radical viewpoint (I think Mieville identifies as an anarchist). What do make of this take on Tolkien?

JWK: Kia ora! Just writing to let you know I haven’t forgotten about our interview...

Also if my extensive pages of notes are anything to go by, I could write an entire dissertation based on your questions and the hilariously pedantic and frankly off-putting Foreword to the second edition Tolkien wrote in 1965, where in his persona of stuffy academic, he not only spoils significant plot points, goes into detail on the differences between ‘allegory’ which he derides as limiting and dictatorial on the author’s part, and ‘applicability’ which are near universal and are shaped by the experiences of the reader them self.

It’s interesting you mention China Melville identifying as an anarchist. Tolkien too felt his politics most closely aligned with the academic, idealistic version of anarchy. He strongly believed any authority beyond the community level were inevitably prone to corruption and overreach, which history seems to support.

What Tolkien WASN’T however, was a conservative. It was due to the Elves’ own attempts to freeze time and preserve unstained the memories of a world long past that they were seduced by Sauron’s power in the first place, leading to the forging of the rings of power. It was a type of blasphemy, to set themselves up in Middle Earth as rivals to the Valar in Valinor. To keep their status as supreme beings in Middle Earth while still desiring the eternal bliss and beauty that could only exist in the Uttermost West.

Tolkien even called what the Elves were attempting with the Rings project, as a form of ‘cultural embalmment’. Tempting well intentioned and understandable, but ultimately a trap. A culture preserved in amber cannot grow or progress, and could only be achieved through a deal with the (almost literal) devil that was Sauron in the second age.

All three bearers of the Elven rings, Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel, are faced with the ultimate temptation. To keep and wield the one ring, and maintain the insular paradises they’ve maintain in middle earth for millennia, at the cost of their own humanity. Or let the ring be destroyed, and along with it, the power of their own rings. To let the Grey Havens, Rivendell, and Lothlorien fade and for the last vestiges of the elder days in Middle Earth crumble, for magic to leave the world, and for men to take their place as the supreme beings. To finally swallow the pride that has kept them as exiles in Middle Earth far beyond their natural life span, and return to servitude (of a sort) under the gods that rebelled against back in the First Age.

Tolkien knew that progress couldn’t and shouldn’t be held back. How could he when he lost his parents terribly young to rheumatic fever and diabetes, illnesses he saw change from fatal to preventable and treatable in his lifetime? He mourned the Surrey and Midlands of his youth, aimed to preserve their memory through his storytelling, but knew that clinging to them would come at the sacrifice of advances like insulin and antibiotics.

The lingering power of Galadriel could allow Sam to replant the wastefully destroyed trees of Bagshot Row, and a mallorn in place of the party tree. But it couldn’t bring the dead trees back to life. It couldn’t bring back the Hobbits lost in the fight to scour the Shire of the rot that had crept in while its protectors were away fighting Sauron more directly.

Tolkien wanted us to mourn the past, and preserve patches of the wild that remained, but not to go backward or freeze time. How did he (and by extension Sam, Frodo, and Bilbo) TRULY save the Shire? By writing about it. By bringing in back to green and perfect life in the imaginations of millions of readers, who each fill it with the trees, shrubs, streams, and wildlife they associate most with the time in their life they had the fewest cares.

So should a patch of the Waikato become a sort of secular shrine to a writer’s imagination and the craft and care of artisans he inspired? Maybe not. But is it worse than the vast swathes of the Waikato kept green by fertilisers unethically obtained from the war-torn Western Sahara? To house too many cows, polluting our waterways and the fragile ecosystem of the Hauraki Gulf, fed on palm kernel grown on what should be protected rainforest? To make milk, turned to powder by burning coal, and flavoured with the blood of orang utans and the tears of indigenous rainforest protectors?

Again, maybe not...

Kia ora again!

I am doing exactly what I didn’t intend to do, and have fallen into a close reading of Fellowship of the Ring, where on this read, the queer coding of Bilbo and Frodo feels much more overt than I remember. It must have been thrilling, and moving to queer readers to see the queerness of our lead characters treated with such dignity.

But a scene I had almost forgotten in chapter three brought to mind your question about how Tolkien’s writing relates to an Indigenous writer from the South Pacific.

In chapter three, Three is Company, Tolkien introduces us to a group of High Elves of the West who describe themselves as ‘exiles’ from the West, that is, Elves of the Noldor who defied the Valar and left Valinor after the darkening of the two trees and the theft of the silmarils for the dark (literal and metaphorical) of Middle-earth and for whatever reason, have remained there. The elves take Frodo, Sam, and Pippen to a clearing in the woods where the eastern sky is visible, where I will quote the scene directly:

“Away high in the East swung Remmirath, the Netted Stars, and slowly above the mists red Borgil rose, glowing like a jewel of fire. Then by some shift of airs all the mist was drawn away like a veil, and there leaned up, as he climbed over the rim of the world, the Swordsman of the Sky, Menelvagor with his shining belt. The Elves all burst into song. Suddenly under the trees a fire sprang up with a red light.

‘Come!’ the Elves called to the hobbits. ‘Come! now is the time for speech and merriment!’

On the surface, this might sound like typical fantasy gobbledegook, until you realise what is being described. The High Elves of the West are watching for the rising of Orion (Menelvagor) and the other stars mentioned are Antares or Puanga, and the Pleiades, or Matariki.

In a world where the shape of the continents has changed over thousands of years, two races of sentient beings are entranced by the same groupings of stars as my tūpuna did, and as we still do and have just publicly celebrated here in Aotearoa New Zealand.

J

SH: Fascinating Jared. It's interesting how many apparently heterosexual canonical writers have been reread and have been the subject of biographies that reveal the complexity of their sexual identity. Hemingway was supposed to be the ultimate red-blooded heterosexual man, but he has been looked at as a transgender writer in the 21st century. He had a sort of female alter ego that he kept secret from everyone but his lovers. And there's John Betjeman, who seemed to embody Englishness in all its mid-century orthodoxy, but who was actually bisexual.

There's a really good study of the poet John Ashbery by a critic called Shoptaw called On the Outside Looking Out. Shoptaw points out that Ashbery and his friends like Frank O'Hara had to disguise their identity as gay men, and that they used a variety of 'crypt words' to do this. Pen for penis, etc. So he rereads Ashbery and digs out the crypt words. 

JWK: Thanks for your email, I'm glad you find my word vomit interesting, sometimes I worry that I'm boring the hell out of people when I go down the rabbit hole of my obsessions. I was planning on writing up something a little more coherent but if you think you can make an interesting read out of my responses so far, then I'm very happy for you to do so.

Researching queerness in anything written earlier than about the 1960s is really tricky, especially when there were real and serious legal ramifications for writing about queerness and queer relationships without being extremely careful about the language used. An interesting parallel is between Sargeson, who wasn't able to write about himself openly, and James Courage, who just went ahead and did it anyway.

I recently read The Sun Also Rises and was immediately stuck by how homoerotic and homosocial most of it was, with the Hemmingway stand-in character blaming his lack of interest in women on his impotence, an apparently common tactic among closeted men at the time. Other examples that come to mind are the books of Lou(isa) May Alcott, who would almost certainly identify as a transgender man in modern parlance, and who it now feels wrong to refer to using she/her pronouns or by anything other than his preferred masculine moniker 'Lou' that was used among family and friends, and is a pretty direct parallel to the character of Jo in the books.

The other example that has been a huge influence on the epic of historical fiction I'm attempting is Moby-Dick, which much like Lord of the Rings, is an extraordinary piece of art that is often mischaracterised as simply a swashbuckling action adventure revenge story, when the reality is so much weirder and more interesting than that superficial appraisal. As with the beginning of Fellowship, the queerness of the text is there from the absolute beginning, with the narrator using an obviously fake name, his dissatisfaction with 'normal' life on land and his periodic yearning for 'the sea', and the type of men drawn to that profession, where they are apart from women for up to three to four years at a time, and be a more readily tolerated, if not truly accepted, authentic version of themselves. And I genuinely can't see how readers could interpret the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg as anything other than romantic. They go through the beats of a quirky interracial rom-com, complete with meet-cute, cultural misunderstandings, and an eventual 'marriage', are physically intimate in ways both literal and metaphorical (sharing a bed with limbs intertwined, and passing Queequeg's tomohawk-pipe between them) as well as a form of marriage ceremony together with the pooling and dividing of their assets. And like Bilbo and Thorin in The Hobbit, and Frodo and Sam in Lord of the Rings, Queequeg (and Thorin and Frodo) do no survive the quest (Frodo's ending is a little more complicated, since he DOES make it home from the quest, but is so broken in body and spirit and consumed by his perceived failure at the end, though his leaving Middle-earth is undeniably a 'death' both literally and metaphorically) leaving their partner to go on living for both of them, and more importantly, to share their story with the world and in doing so, keep their memories alive.

To expand a little more on what I mentioned in passing on Twitter, one of the few genuine criticisms I have about The Lord of the Rings, is that the one-two punch of the Foreword to the second edition and the Prologue, feel almost designed to put new readers off, and aggravate bad-faith readers, who come to the text with an already hostile attitude.

The Foreword is Tolkien at his most crotchety and pedantic, seemingly falling into the classic author trap of needing to explain himself and his thought processes, instead of letting the work speak for itself. It is fascinating to go back to AFTER having read the book, especially to people like me who are interested in the writing process, but to first time readers, it feels like they are being preemptively scolded for not reading the book correctly.

It does however contain a few key points to unlocking the text. First, that the book Tolkien WANTED to write after The Hobbit, was the text that would eventually be compiled and published as The Silmarillion, and to a lesser extent, the Unfinished Tales of Middle Earth and Numenor. He had 'little hope' anyone would be interested in those texts, which was corrected to 'no hope' by his publisher and fans, who all wanted 'a sequel to The Hobbit'. As a compromise of sorts, Tolkien then concisely lays out what he set out to achieve with The Lord of the Rings.

"The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of the readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them."

Later, he becomes pedantic in a way only an Oxford Professor of Linguistics can be, with the following.

"But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author."

An almost perfect sentiment, giving the reader permission to find as many 'applicabilities' in the text as suits them. If only he'd been able to leave it at that. Instead, he goes on to explain how a hypothetically version of the story would differ from the actual story if it WERE a direct allegory to the global conflict that raged around him during the writing process, and there he loses the first-time reader again, by giving away major plot points in an inherently confusing way.

The Prologue that follows, is in many ways, even worse.

Here begins the central conceit that Tolkien doggedly commits to, that JRR Tolkien is NOT the creator of this story, but the discoverer, compiler, and translator of several real historical texts, made up of the personal memoir and diary of the real Bilbo Baggins (The Hobbit), the continuation of that story by a post-quest Frodo Baggins (most of The Lord of the Rings), the conclusion and afterword by Samwise Gamgee (the very ending) with supplementary material by Meriadoc Brandybuck, Peregrin Took, and the historical translations Bilbo was working on at Rivendell (The Appendices).

The tone becomes anthropological, with references to characters and events the first-time reader has no context for, including spoilers relating to the fates of many characters both major and minor. And for what? To throw the reader into the deep end and say, sink or swim? To cover a continuity error between the Lord of the Rings and earlier editions of The Hobbit, one that would go unnoticed by nearly all readers, and is also adequately explained not once but TWICE in the text? To explain that pipe-weed is supposed to be a nicotine-containing relative of tobacco NOT a THC containing relative of hemp or cannabis?

Whatever his reasons, it feels like a genuine misstep to me, and an excuse for the aforementioned hostile reader to dismiss Tolkien's writing. Beyond being confusing and unnecessary, it gives a disastrously inaccurate indication of the clear, beautiful, grounded prose that is to follow. It is stiff, stilted, and jargon-filled, everything that makes a reader's heart sink when beginning a story. All the same, being written by an absolute master of the inner workings of how language and story-telling work, it does contain some beautiful sentences and revealing statements, especially in relation to The Hobbits and The Shire.

After describing the 'Wandering Days' of proto-Hobbits as a nomadic people who like all sentient beings in Middle Earth, came from somewhere far South and East of the map, eventually crossing the world-ending barrier that were the Misty Mountains, and arriving in the waning days of the great Kingdom of Men that was Arnor, founded by the exiles of the once great realm of Numenor/Westernesse, the island closer to Valinor (home of the Valar and the so-called High-Elves) than to Middle Earth, after that island was destroyed in Tolkien's version of an Atlantis myth. It's great forests had been cleared by Numenorean colonists to build their ships ages ago, and as the Northern Kingdom of Arnor collapsed, was broken apart, and eventually all but died out, this new group of colonists arrived to find an empty land of cultivated fields and meadows for them to occupy.

The greatest 'applicability' here, are the Anglo-Saxons settling on the remains of Roman Britain long after the once huge empire had abandoned it's north-western colonies, and withdrawn to their new seat of power at Byzantium.

"...and there in that pleasant corner of the world they plied their well-ordered business of living, and they heeded less and less the world outside where dark things moved, until they came to think that peace and plenty were the rule in Middle-earth and the right of all sensible folk. They forgot or ignored what little they had ever known of the Guardians, and of the labours of those that made possible the long peace of the Shire. They were, in fact, sheltered, but they had ceased to remember it."

And here is our more modern applicability, to the people of the British Isles before the onset of World War I. Followed by:

"Nonetheless, ease and peace had left this people still curiously tough. They were, if it came to it, difficult to daunt and to kill; and they were, perhaps, so unwearyingly fond of good things not least because they could, when put to it, do without them, and could survive rough handling by grief or weather in a way that astonished those who did not know them well and looked no further than their bellies and their well-fed faces."

Here the Hobbit's obsessions with good food and drink are put into context of centuries of scraping by on very little in a harsh and unforgiving world, with the real life applicability being the persistence and fortitude of the British after a devastating war, a global pandemic, an economic depression, and an every further reaching war, after which food rationing went on for many years. Suddenly, Bilbo's generosity and extravagance take on an inter-bellum feel, with an abundance of food, drink, and gifts, shared with the entire community, wealthy and poor alike, as a last hurrah, amidst clanging omens of war and famine to come.

The final note of importance is again to do with queer coding:

(Bilbo and Frodo Baggins were as bachelors very exceptional, as they were also in many other ways, such as their friendship with the Elves)

Tolkien isn't quite calling them 'confirmed bachelors' in a euphemistic way, but it's pretty close, as is the moniker of 'Elf-friend' which almost feels like something a well-intentioned older relative might call their queer grandchild.

But all of this is portrayed much more skilfully and deftly once we FINALLY get to the story itself.

After a few necessary introductions and some murmuring from a Greek Chorus of generalised Hobbits, where the already queer-coded, solitary, wealthy, bachelor adopts his 'kindred spirit' heir, his young cousin Frodo, much to the disgust of his closer and more closed-minded relatives, the first proper SCENE, is not with these wealthy aristocrats, but with the thoroughly working-class hobbit, Hamfast 'the Gaffer' Gamgee, drinking after a hard day's labour in one of the many little pubs, defending his gay employees. "'A very nice well-spoken gentlehobbit is Mr Bilbo, as I've always said.' the Gaffer declared."

And to go along with the implied homophobia the Gaffer is deriding, we then get a healthy dose of xenophobia. "'But what about this Frodo that lives with him?' asked Old Noakes of Bywater. 'Baggins is his name, but he's more than half a Brandybuck, they say. It beats me why any Baggins of Hobbiton should go looking for a wife away there in Buckland where folks are so queer.'" Remember, he is talking about other hobbits, all of whom live within a few days walk of each other, merely because they live at the eastern end of the Shire, as if they were of a completely different race and culture. The insular nature of Hobbits is apparent, immediately.

To skip ahead, after the near literal torch passing of the Bilbo's extremely grand dwelling, the ring, and the story from Bilbo to Frodo, the first proper scene of the second chapter, is a repeat of the first scene with the new generation. This time, it's the Gaffer's son enjoying ale and gossip, Samwise Gamgee, stealth protagonist and hero of the story, the only working-class member of the Fellowship, and also queer-coded, in that he is an outsider who yearns to know more of the Elves, and whose devotion to Frodo goes above and beyond an employer-employee relationship. Tolkien based their relationship at least in part, on the relationships he saw between batmen, or servant-soldiers, and their upper class gentlemen officers he witnessed in World War I. I don't believe a man as worldly as Tolkien would've been unaware of the illicit relationships between men that undeniably occur during wars. While language has shifted the meaning of the term 'queer' since the 1930s when he first started properly working on the text, I am pretty confident that Tolkien knew that a particular slice of his audience would interpret the relationship as romantic, much as they did with Bilbo and Thorin in The Hobbit.

It's the sort of parallelism that so efficiently and effortlessly moves the reader on from the story of Bilbo to the story of Frodo. The switching and contrast from scenery to scene, the gradual revealing of information, and the multiple setups that don't pay off until the very final chapter of Return of the King all feels so effortless, and smooth, that any writer who has attempted long form fiction will recognise how harrowing and difficult to write it is. Which makes the contrast with the wooden, over-explaining of the prologue so frustrating. It continues into Chapter Three, with the following passage, the one that immediately leapt to my mind when you criticised the Shire as trite and lacking nuance.

After just escaping their first two encounters with the Black Riders of Mordor, Frodo bemoans how close to home the threat of Mordor has come to the High Elf of the West, Gildor.

"'I knew that danger lay ahead, of course; but I did not expect to meet it in our own Shire. Can't a hobbit walk from the Water to the River in peace?'

'But it is not your own Shire,' said Gildor. 'Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.'"

And that feels like more than enough words from me for this email. I'll address some of your other questions soon.

A final note. If you're looking for examples of me directly referencing Tolkien in my writing, there is a short story in the collection I sent you titled Tha' Ara Ripeka (Crossroads) that is packed with as many metaphors for puberty as I could conceivably fit into one short story, where moving on from reading The Hobbit to reading The Lord of the Rings is one such metaphor. I do the same thing in the current version of the novel manuscript Toward the Flood, where thirteen year old Tama brings up being awed by the massiveness of the landscape depicted in the map of Rhovanion/Wilderland at the front of The Hobbit, and then in opening The Lord of the Rings, realises that map was only a tiny portion of the complete map of the North West of Middle-earth depicted in most editions of The Lord of the Rings, as a metaphor for growing up and realising how much bigger, stranger, and more confusing the world is than he could've imagined as a pre-teen.

Thanks again! Will write more soon!

J

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