A post I came across recently claimed that men crying in The Lord of the Rings was unrealistic because “real medieval men didn’t show emotion.” The claim couldn’t be more backwards. If anything, Aragorn and Sam are closer to medieval masculinity than most TV Vikings or fantasy heroes. Modern fantasies of medieval masculinity – silent, stoic, brutal – tell us far more about contemporary anxieties than about the Middle Ages themselves. In medieval literature, the ideal man was emotionally expressive, morally permeable, and relational. He was a knight who cried, confessed, and loved deeply, not one who suppressed tenderness for fear of seeming weak.
Our screens, however, are full of hard men from a soft past.
The Fantasy of Stoicism
The modern “medieval” hero is an invention – forged not in the forge of chivalry but in the industrial furnace of modern masculinity. Contemporary portrayals of the Middle Ages, from Vikings to The Witcher to Game of Thrones, have turned the knight into an avatar of weaponised stoicism. These men smoulder, endure, and kill efficiently. Their silence is their strength, their emotion confined to rage or vengeance.
This aesthetic – of grit, restraint, and self-containment – owes its origins to the 19th and 20th centuries. It reflects a world where masculinity was redefined through militarisation, industrial discipline, and capitalist productivity. The strong, silent man of the factory floor and the battlefield became the cultural ideal. When transferred to medieval settings, that stoicism feels “authentic” only because it mirrors the emotional austerity we’ve been taught to admire.
What we read as medieval realism is often modern repression dressed in chainmail.
The Emotional Knight
In truth, medieval literature is saturated with emotion. Its heroes do not hide their feelings – they perform them. Knights weep, faint, kiss, confess, and blush. Their honour depends not on stoic distance but on visible sincerity. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain flinches before the Green Knight’s axe, blushes at his own cowardice, and weeps when confronted with his moral failure. His tears do not discredit him; they confirm his humanity.
In The Song of Roland, Roland collapses in grief for his fallen comrade Oliver, dying not in triumphant fury but in an agony of loyalty and faith. Yvain, the Knight of the Lion features a hero who, abandoned by his beloved, goes mad with heartbreak – tearing off his clothes and wandering the forest in despair before being redeemed by love and repentance. Even in Beowulf, often treated as a hymn to stoic heroism, the poem closes not in triumph but in mourning. The Geats weep for their dead lord; the narrator himself laments, his voice trembling with loss.
To the medieval mind, emotion was not weakness but proof of virtue. A knight who did not weep properly could be suspected of spiritual coldness, disloyalty, or pride. Tears, gestures, and embraces were outward signs of inward truth. They proved one’s capacity for love, loyalty, and faith.
The medieval man’s heart was meant to be visible.
Why Medieval Men Wept
The emotional life of medieval men was not merely personal; it was theological and social. Christian doctrine encouraged tears as a sign of grace. Saints wept during prayer; penitents wept during confession. Christ himself was praised for his tears at Lazarus’s tomb. To feel deeply was to be closer to God.
In chivalric and courtly traditions, emotion was also political. Love was supposed to hurt, because suffering purified the soul. The weeping lover or mourning knight performed a sacred kind of vulnerability – a bodily enactment of devotion. Honour, too, was emotional labour. Loyalty had to be made visible through touch, grief, and affection. Warrior brotherhoods were built on tactile intimacy: men embraced, kissed, and expressed affection without irony or fear.
To modern eyes, this emotional expressiveness might seem startlingly open, even “unmanly.” But to medieval audiences, feeling was a form of truth. The man who could not weep was not strong; he was incomplete.
How We Erased Softness
The disappearance of this emotional language tells the story of how modern masculinity hardened. By the 19th century, the Victorian ideal man had become restrained, industrious, and rational. The factory and the army prized endurance, not empathy. Tears became suspect – signs of weakness, hysteria, or femininity.
When cinema and television later imagined the medieval, they imported this stoic template wholesale. Vikings and Game of Thrones may look historically “real,” but their psychology is modern. These men are not knights; they’re CEOs in chainmail — models of self-control whose power depends on emotional scarcity. Vulnerability does not sell as epic.
Modern medievalism, in turn, eroticises brutality as authenticity. It markets emotional numbness as the truest form of strength. Our fantasies of “gritty realism” are fantasies of emotional safety – a longing for control in a culture that fears softness.
The modern medieval hero is a mirror of our own repression: brutal, beautiful, and profoundly lonely.
Tolkien and the Return of Tenderness
Tolkien, however, understood something that modern screenwriters forget. A philologist steeped in medieval literature, he built his world not on stoic brutality but on loyalty, affection, and grief. The Lord of the Rings is full of men who feel – and feel openly.
Sam and Frodo’s devotion to one another recalls the warrior-companion bond of Old English poetry, where comrades hold and mourn one another with physical intimacy. Aragorn’s tears at Boromir’s death echo the lament traditions of early medieval kingship, where to weep was to honour the dead. Theoden’s grief for Theodred is Shakespearean in scope, yet thoroughly medieval in sentiment – a vision of power made human through mourning.
Tolkien’s men weep because medieval men wept. Their tenderness is not modern softness but medieval sincerity — the conviction that love, loyalty, and loss belong to the same emotional universe.
In a culture where masculinity is often defined by silence, their tears feel radical.
Masculinity Before Stoicism
The knight who cries is not a subversion of medieval masculinity; he is medieval masculinity. Emotion was not a threat to honour but its expression. To love, grieve, and confess was not to weaken – it was to be recognisably human.
If modern audiences find that idea surprising, it is because stoicism has reshaped our sense of manhood, not because the Middle Ages lacked tenderness. The weeping knight reminds us that strength and vulnerability were once inseparable virtues. His tears do not undo his courage; they sanctify it.
Perhaps the most radical thing medievalism can do today is simply to let men feel again – to remember that once, before capitalism, war, and repression rewired masculinity into silence, strength meant sincerity.
To weep was to mean it.
Want to Read More?
- Karras, Ruth Mazo. From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.
- Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Duke University Press, 1999.
- Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. Columbia University Press, 2003.
- Bennett, Judith M. History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
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