On Mon, 20 Oct 1997, Michael Marc Levy wrote:
> >
> Tolkien wasn't gay. By all accounts he was a happily married man and,
> by the lights of his culture, a good husband and father. He wrote The
> Hobbit for his kids.
>
> What he was, however, was an Oxford don, which is to say that he was a
> man who spent most of his life among men, with relatively little contact
> with or intellectual interest in women.
>
> At Oxford Tolkien was occasionally referred to as the Lord of the
> Strings, due to his talent for university politics. He was an arch
> conservative who fought long and hard to keep modern literature (and
> incidentally most literature by women) out of the curriculum.
>
That reminds me of the academic in Ursula LeGuin's THE DISPOSSESSED.
Because of his and his culture's male chauvinism, especially in
academia ("where are the women?") Shevek expected
him to be a total pig and it turns out his family life, while not
anything the poor exile was used to, was really quite sweet in a
Victorian sort of way.
Patricia (Pat) Mathews
mathews@unm.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:51 PDT