Braided Armitage, or: what is it with playing with the hair?

[SPOILERS FOR “Return to the Blue Mountains” and The Hobbit.]

Glimpse of Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield in vlog #4 from The Hobbit pre-production stage. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

I don’t write whole paeans to single fanfics unless they appear as books on their own, usually for reasons that have to do with my anxieties about loving fanfic. The last almost two years of blogging notwithstanding, I have as great a fear of looking silly as anyone else. But I’m making an exception here because this topic has come up a couple of times both in comments and in Armitageworld Chat. “So intimate,” people say. “So tender.” I would even go so far as to say, “so counter-intuitively erotic.”

[Richard Armitage in Project Magazine, July 2011. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com]

What are we talking about? Cat Winchester‘s “Return to the Blue Mountains,” in which Thorin somehow miraculously survives the events of The Hobbit, comes back to govern his kingdom, and — against the background of another adventure story — falls in LOVE. It’s a story in which the manipulation of facial hair plays a really big role in what Jane just called “dwarf love.” This story will not, as Cat herself concedes, appeal in the least to Tolkien purists, but is directed right at the audience of Richard Armitage fangirls. She may sell herself short; at least three features of the story offer explicit homage to Tolkien — the attempt to develop a sort of cultural anthropology of the race of dwarfs she writes about, the fairy-tale quality of much of her storytelling, and the authorial / audience insertion into the narrative that she achieves with her sparing use of the first person plural. It has cute, sweet, comic moments that lovingly set up the foibles of the dwarfs: as when, ordered to collect books for historical information, the dwarfs in question collect all the books they have — cookbooks included. Finally, I love her heroine, Rori — a calm, down-to-earth dwarf with few pretensions and a handful of endearing self-esteem problems. The whole piece has very much the often mythic, occasionally rambling feel of a bedtime story — except that it’s one for us and not for squirrelly little boys.

But in the end, it’s the hair that kept me linking to it and re-reading. I wanted to read more about the hair.

I won’t give you all the details, so that you can enjoy the story if you haven’t read it, but in this story, hair play is a major plot motor. Female dwarfs have beards, too, and a dwarf’s sense of honor is intimately connected with the maintenance of the beard. At the beginning of this story, the heroine loses hers — and how she and her love interest deal with that fact becomes a plot strand of major interest, as the practical need to deal with the hair situation leads them slowly into romance. Here are some moments I found particularly tender / erotic:

From chapter 2:

From chapter 3:

From chapter 4:

That’s probably enough excerpts — go over to wattpad and read the story for yourself, if you haven’t.

Gosh, this is sweet and hot. I admit that although I like long hair on men and love Armitage’s beard, I find my sudden captivity to this hair-play fascination personally odd. I have never been one to include a man brushing my hair in my own fantasies — and for many years I had hair that went down to the middle of my back. When I read it in happening in Armitage-related fanfic (most frequently in N&S pieces), the best it does is leave me cold; sometimes it leaves me with a little squick, as I tend to think of Mr. Thornton as anything other than a hair brusher. I also think about the decidedly mixed reactions among fans to Mr. Armitage’s own beard — and when the picture of Thorin at the top of the post appeared, only one voter ventured to admit that the beard was the first thing she noticed.

So what is it about Thorin grooming Rori? Or Rori playing with Thorin’s beard? I have a few theories, as always:

• some annoying male would probably see this fascinating as a variation on creative play with dolls. I never played with dolls other than Barbies, and I don’t want a Richard Armitage doll or a Thorin doll. So I don’t see it that way, but I put it out there.
• there’s an interesting hide / reveal dynamic at the heart of the heroine’s beard dilemma that relates both to her willingness and capacity to be seen, and to Thorin’s capacity to see her.
• there’s a fascinating gender-crossing tension to the female beard problematic that is then mirrored in the male beard-braiding ritual.
• it’s an unconventional way to show tenderness so that it surprises us as readers and thus catches our attention.
• the beard shame problem is a fantastic, counterintuitive way to portray hurt / comfort, a central trope of fanfic and one that is occasionally said to stand in for sex — which is referred to in this story but not ever narrated.
• the hair play, by allowing the author to create intense intimacy without sex and allowing the sex to be blended out, makes the dwarf bonding / mating ritual, which occurs here in the wake of passion, read as unbelievably romantic. I could read that passage again and again.

Of course, I’d also like to hear your theories — and if you read this story and love it as much as I did, please take the time to leave Cat some love in her comments. Respondents should feel free to discuss the significance of specific hair-related plot elements of “Return to the Blue Mountains” in my comments.

And I wonder — in conclusion — does this kind of story have the potential to reverse the positions of beard opponents in the varied constituencies that make up Armitageworld? Particularly given Armitage’s statement about the decision to grow his own beard this week?

If you’re an Armitage beard lover but not familiar with this site, you should be.

~ by Servetus on January 14, 2012.