Verity Ritchie

New Video! The Queer History of The Lord of the Rings

Added 2024-02-23 19:36:19 +0000 UTC

I started working on this video in 2022 as everyone was getting hyped about The Rings of Power. Without giving away any spoilers, lets just say I had a few ideas which I was working on but didn’t think I could make interesting in a video. And then after the last video essay, Ada wasn’t able to work on this next one with me because of the Slovenian sexual health project we’ve been working on (which I’ll probably share more about here later), so I had to think of something I could do on my own. I decided I could probably manage a very short video on this topic and got to work.

But as time went on I realised this could be bigger and that there was a lot of fun to be had with it! You will be the judges of whether I managed that! I hope you have fun watching it!

And this is for after you’ve finished watching:

I thought some of you might want to check out the fairy stories mentioned in the video, so I have collected some links. It’s very easy to come across copies of The Fairy Books because they're in the public domain. Here is “The Girl Who Pretended to be a Boy” on archive.org.

One of the oldest versions of the gender changing Prince Charming comes from the Narts Saga. I came across a cute webcomic adaptation of it here.

Here is the online PDF of the modern Romanian queer feminist version, Ana, Făt-Frumos.

And the podcast episode we made about the Lord of the Rings musical is here.