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Originally Posted by Lalwendė
Seriously, from what I now know about 'slash' (and I didn't even know what it was that long ago) most of it is created by and for adult women. I can't say whether some of them viewed the male relationships in LotR as actually homoerotic, but they may have imagined them to be. As odd as this may seem, a lot of women find gay couples either exciting or beautiful. This possibly says a lot about women and if they perceive such relationships as 'non-threatening'; this is a probable reason, as psychologists say the success of boybands is down to girls finding non-threatening, quite 'feminised' young men who they can have as imaginary boyfriends until its time for them to get a real one.
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I thought of writing about this one but thought that might be offending to someone...
So, naturally I think you have a point here.
Elijah Wood and Orlando Bloom might form a boyband! Just think of the success - and going by that road, I don't see that anyone can honestly think that PJ (or his production team) chose those actors just because of their acting skills!
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But going back to Tolkien and the LotR. I think there might be something in Tolkien's writing that does make people of west in our time to look things from homoerotical point of view. That does not mean Tolkien wrote it as such, but that our culture has kind of toned down those parts of our inheritance that would have explained it otherwise.
Just remember Tolkien's early friends and their club of associates and then the war and what it did to that circle of young men. Add to this Tolkien's other experiences of war; not just fear and anxiety but also those of brotherhood and closeness to others in "harms way". I think it's not too far-fetched to read these experiences in the LotR between Frodo and Sam (and possibly between Aragorn and Legolas, maybe even Legolas and Gimli - and Gandalf could be a good general loving his lads whom he sends to the peril... and so on).
But that experience is here no more. The people who lived by the cultural standards of the beginning of the last century are already under the ground and the last veterans of WW2 who have any experience of utmost challenge are getting very old indeed. So we are left out of this experience as a shared one. And that is a good thing - in a sense that we haven't had a war of that scale (or any comparable lenghty tragedy) in the west after the WW2.
But we may mourn the loss of the notion of deeper friendship. We are the people always ready to mourn over things. Like any great artist, T.S. Elliot was ahead of his time when he wrote
The Hollow Men (in "The Waste Land") just after the WW1. It fits us now even better than it fitted people then!
Now why is there no comradeship anymore in the old sense as we all seem to be so individual, why is all physical denied in the west unless it's sexual? That's a path I'm not wishing to engage right now, but I know there are a lots of philosophers and sociologists who have spent a good amount of time with this question... enough to fill the Downs, anyway.
PS. Well Vietnam... and now Iraq, might prove exceptions to my point of "no major catastrophy" after WW2. Well, I'm an European... The Vietnam-war produced the hippies - both at the homefront and in the battlefield. It might be too early to tell, what the Iraq-war will generate?