🏳️🌈🏺 Bi Hobbit Day
🏳️🌈🏺2-gay in History🏺🏳️🌈
9/22 is Hobbit Day, the birthday “Bachelors very exceptional” Frodo shares with Bilbo. And it’s Bi Visibility Week. So let's talk about bi-king hero of the Lord of the Rings Sam.
Chapter 1: The miller calls Bag End a queer place with queerer folk. Sam's father fires back: "If that's being queer, then we could do with a bit more queerness in these parts." He meant odd, but then mentions they’re bachelors.
Tolkien based Sam on "the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war." A batman cared for their officer, slept beside him & are documented to often crossed the line into a deep physical & emotional relationship.
In the book, Sam watches Frodo sleep in Ithilien, notes his beauty, & thinks "I love him." Frodo calls him "Sam my dearest hobbit, friend of friends." They always hold hands in the Dead Marshes, in Shelob's lair, in Mordor, by Frodo’s sick bed. Sam even blushes when he looks at him.
When Sam believes Frodo dead, all his life has fallen in ruin. They kiss at least 4 times. Tolkien said the scene that moved him most was Frodo asleep on Sam's breast.
Not sexual explicitly, romantic. It’s Tolkien's ideal of chivalric love: beyond physical, enjoining fidelity, self-denial, service & honor.
Fellowship came out in 1954, weeks after Alan Turing’s death. Love between men was subtle back then. But Tolkien called the openly gay W.H. Auden "one of my great friends," & cherished a fan letter from Mary Renault, his former student & the most explicit novelist of gay love.
Back in Hobbiton, Sam marries Rosie, but Sam is sad until Frodo invites them both into Bag End. Sam loves them both, and isn’t happy without either.
When Frodo sails West Sam says he is "torn in two." In an epilogue Tolkien cut as too sentimental, Sam's daughter Elanor calls Frodo "your treasure," & likens her father's love for him to Celeborn's love for Galadriel.
When Rosie died years later, Sam set out that same year, on September 22, Frodo's birthday, out of Bag End & crossed the Sea, last of the Ring-bearers, to see Frodo again.
What happened there Tolkien never wrote, but of Beren & Luthien: "It is sung that they met again beyond the Sundering Sea."
Credit Lee Ostertag
To be clear: I don't think Tolkien was gay, & I don't think he wrote Frodo & Sam as a coded romance for readers who knew the signals, or Legolas and Gimli or Aragorn etc.
What makes people see this reading is that Tolkien had a deep homoromantic vein running through every close relationship of his life (the TCBS at school, Lewis, the Inklings) while staying devoted to Edith for fifty years.
His most intimate & supportive, most intellectually alive, most emotionally exposed connections were all with men, & he never seems to have ever examined that or found it worth remarking on.
Part of the reason is how he saw women. Tolkien's great female characters aren't weak: Lúthien out-sings Sauron & walks into Angband. Éowyn kills the Witch-king. Galadriel refuses the Ring. They're elevated — revered, quested after, & potentially won. That's his Edwardian chivalric inheritance that’s often beautiful on the page, but reverence is a form of distance. His Catholic rejection of sex as “dislocated…symptoms of the fall” makes the distance even greater. Nobody crawls through the mud or breaks down beside someone they've placed on a pedestal.
So the love went to men. The exhaustion, the terror, the carrying each other, the care & tenderness, the speaking love out loud — Tolkien made it all between men, because men were where he had lived it.
He didn't write a gay allegory. He wrote the emotional truth of his own life, with the honesty of a man who didn't think it needed hiding, & that truth happens to be one queer readers resonate with on sight. It’s not a twisting of the text, it’s there, just not in a way Tolkien could name.
Call it emotionally bi. He'd have been baffled to name it, but he also would have approved.
