Does Merry shag around?

[jastius]

but tolkien was one of a shaggy group of authors that met in pubs and he says how he met his wife at one of those garden party dinner party things and that they loved dancing.. if you look at the era's movies as an indication of the goings on at those things it wasn't exactly your country fete deal.. there was a great deal of promiscuity and generally bad behavior with a thin veneer of polite civility to cover it over. that kind of thing didn't start in the fitzgerald/ gatsby era, it was just brought to peoples attention more.
so tolkien wasn't a innocent, he was decent, an entirely different thing. he choose to define his hobbits general behaviors upon the generations of shaggy english schoolboys he taught. so the question is not really did hobbits sleep around, but instead; if your average english schoolboy coming into adulthood at a certain age would upon having an opportunity for extramarital relations, choose to pursue it.

shall i give you a moment to pause and consider, whether your average teenage boy would choose to have connubial relations given the opportunity, at this juncture??

 

[Corbier]

Tolkien didn't meet his wife at "one of those garden party dinner party things" I'm afraid...

 

[jastius]

all i remember reading is about how he saw her laughing and dancing and thats where he got the idea of galadriel from eventually. he thought her the human embodiment of fae beauty. i can't remember whether it said if they were introduced at the time or not. he thought she had the most feminine name. elvin even.


anyways wasn't merry a type of knight errant for rohan?

 

[Corbier]

Tolkien moved into the same boarding house as Edith after his mother died and they spend their time in tea-houses throwing sugar cubes from a balcony onto walkers-by. Tolkien's guardian, Father Morgan, forbade them to meet or correspond. Tolkien did so (only one exception) until he was 21. So, I'm sorry, but your promiscuous dance parties didn't seem to have happened.

 

[jastius]

then he was probably writing about watching her, the bit i read..
sorry corbier,

anyways, wasn't merry over in rohan at the court a lot?


(tolkien was the nineteen hundreds equivalent of those adolescent boys who pelt you with gummie bears at the movies? )

 

[Grimward]

(Started this several contributions to the thread earlier, but got interrupted; sorry if it doesn't flow exactly!)

I hear what you're saying, Jast. Nevertheless, if the Inklings predominantly met starting in the early 1930s, Tolkien himself was already AT LEAST pushing 40, and most of the other founding members were at least in their late 30s. While you might make some degree of a case about Charles Williams and his relationships with younger women, both Lewis and his older brother renewed/resumed/converted to Christianity about this time. If you further look at Lewis' writings on conjugal infidelity, you could find both acknowledgement and abhorrence. In Tolkien's letters to Lewis (and to his son, as noted previously) during the Inklings' run you find no such indulgence of multiple sexual partners. In other words, we're way beyond the thinking of the average teenage boy by the time the Inklings started holding their meetings, and certainly at the point where the end of The Return of the King (where the passage that prompted this thread lies) was written (I think!). There's plenty of argument linking the fascination and studies of some of them to the occult, but I'll leave it for deeper Tolkien/Lewis/Williams/Barfield, etc. scholars to address their personal doings. I myself don't really get the impression that the connubial relations of hobbits were based at all upon your average teenage boy.

 

[River Boy]

As Teresa already argued, you can find in the text why there were golden-haired children and Tolkien himself was such a devout man that it's quite unthinkable that one of his heroes was "shagging around". So, you do see what you want to see because there's all the evidence against your point and you happily discard it.

I've not discarded the Lorien theory I have just yet to fully accept it. It was not unlike Tolkien to be surreptitious in the points he made: he mentions that Merry becomes a type of celebrity in the Shire and is often seen travelling to all parts of it, yet he has no children. He's the rock n roll star of the post-Sharky Shire generation, that much is certain.

I'm not 'seeing what I want' - the theory is a questionable one I thought it would be fun to get Tolkien fans' opinion of. I'm not championing it as fact and if you think it's nonsense then I respect that.

 

[Pyan]

all i remember reading is about how he saw her laughing and dancing and thats where he got the idea of galadriel from eventually. he thought her the human embodiment of fae beauty.

It wasn't Galadriel: it was Luthien, and he saw himself as Beren.

[URL=http://s460.photobucket.com/user/pyanfaruk/media/tumblr_mefeum6blP1rl91nno1_500.jpg.html][/URL]

And I'm in the Galadriel's Box camp, myself: the passage clearly states

....most of them had a rich golden hair that had before been rare among hobbits.

and I can't really see Merry, dashing and lordly as he may have been, getting away with fathering most of the children born or begotten in 1420 SR...

 

[jastius]

wups.. yes pyan, totally right..
too many years since i seriously studied tolkien, the details smudge together sometimes..

the last time was before the movies came out.

sorry, my personal library is in storage right now and the internet is fritzy, so i didn't back check. i apologuise.

 

[Grimward]

sorry, my personal library is in storage right now and the internet is fritzy, so i didn't back check. i apologuise.

Would just like to say for my part that it was a good discussion, and I learned a bit more about Williams and Barfield en route; a humble thank you (and to River and Joan!) for the opportunity to do so, and certainly no apology necessary!

 

[Corbier]

Of course no apologies needed. It's just that Tolkien was such a devout man that "shagging around" seems impossible. Still the idea was fun (sorry if I sounded too harsh to you, River).

 

[River Boy]

Of course no apologies needed. It's just that Tolkien was such a devout man that "shagging around" seems impossible. Still the idea was fun (sorry if I sounded too harsh to you, River).

Ha! No worries, I admire a fierce defence of Tolkien.

Merry's my favourite hobbit also so I tend to think better of him than as a philanderer.

 

[Pyan]

sorry, my personal library is in storage right now and the internet is fritzy, so i didn't back check. i apologuise.

No need - I wasn't attacking you at all, just correcting a point...


Besides, there's no pedant like a Tolkien pedant - try going to a dedicated JRRT forum, and asking if it's right that Balrogs have wings. You'll be up to your ears in references and cross-references before you can say Elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo...

 

[Corbier]

Balrogs have wings. Elen síla lúmenn' oment--

 

[Pyan]

Do Balrogs have wings?

(9,630 results)

..ielvo...

 

[Corbier]

All joking aside... what about the quiz, Mr Pyan Sir