Hmm. The heat of the day must be getting to me, as I've decided to bite.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by littlemanpoet
Another aspect of the idealization of women occurred to me, linked to the fact that the women who married by the end of the appendices were not idealized by their new husbands.
An idealized woman is beyond reach.
This is one way in which Ellen Kushner failed in Thomas Rhymer: the Queen of Fairy was pretty much at Thomas' "personal disposal", to euphemize, for the entirety of his seven years in fairy. This misses the point.
Galadriel was beyond Gimli's reach; Goldberry was beyond Frodo's; Arwen was beyond Eomer's reach (recall the discussion between Eomer and Gimli regarding Galadriel and Arwen).
Frankly, lust is not the point. Adoration is. In the medieval courtly love 'vogue', the knight's goal was to 'win' the heart of the lady of his desire. This often resulted in his 'having' her as well. But in the 'getting', the ideal is lost and the besmirched couple is thrown into the ravages of infidelity in a culture that deplores it. Tolkien cleans all that up.
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I'm not sure what you mean when you say that Ellen Kushner failed. I haven't read her
Thomas, so quite possibly I'm missing part of your point. Yet she is far from being the only one having her protagonists romp in the hay or the bower or wherever the trysts take place. Fairy and fantasy and medieval courtly traditions are, first of all, related but not the same thing and I'm not sure we can lump them all together here under some rubric of adoration or idealisation. I am here thinking of cultural legends and mythologies, not just modern fantasy. Second, each 'genre' is replete with blood, lust, gore, passion, fright and doom. The original tales are not sanitised. However, I am gathering the suspicion here that you are talking Tolkien's version of Fantasy or Fairy or Courtly Love as the definitive one. Are you suggesting that Tolkien bowlderised Fairy, the same way that other fairy stories were watered down to make them acceptable for children? I'm also a bit thrown by the tone of your words--besmirched, ravages of infidelity, deplores. These sound more like latter day "Scarlet Letter" attitudes rather than the more complex attitude that I recall from my reading of medieval romance. And then too this idealisation almost always involved the opposite with a woman of lower rank.
To bring this back to the current phase of the discussion, is this view of adoration/idealisation what is going on in the current Mead Hall?
Now, it is exceptionally hot and humid out here and I've spent most of the day outside, so if my points sound way off base--not first or second, or third, but completely out in left field, from what you meant, you might want to put them down to some form of sunstroke.
