After Tolkien (short talk) - Felix Taylor

[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Okay. Hi. Welcome back. Um, we're. Um. Right. Well, we have Felix back to speak to you again. You've met Felix already, but, uh, medievalist, scholar, librarian, scholar of modern fantasy. And he's going to be following Stuart Lee's talk on talking with a talk called After Talking. So. So please welcome Felix to the podium. I'm sorry that. Um, yeah, I've called that off Tolkien, but it's in the program.

It's following Tolkien, but it's basically the same thing. Um, uh, I should probably subtitle it, uh, standing on Mount Fuji based on, uh, Stewart's quotes. Um, so instead of, uh, trying to sum up the impact of Tolkien on the entire genre of fantasy, I've, uh, I'm going to touch on just three writers, uh, two of them British and one American. Uh, he began writing imaginative literature featuring wizards, uh, and quests for magical objects, uh, in the 1950s and 60s.

How did they respond to what Tolkien was doing? Did they try to emulate him? And my main question is what was Tolkiens immediate, immediate influence on younger writers at the time? Um, so the first of these I want to talk about, um. Uh, I think this was meant I wasn't here for Caroline's talk earlier, but I think he was mentioned, uh, as part of the Oxford school. Um, but he's hopefully a, well, well-known figure at this point.

Uh, a few years ago, he was the oldest, uh, writer to be, uh, shortlisted for the Booker Prize with his novel Treacle Walker. Um, he was born to a working class family, uh, in Cheshire, in a little village called Alderley Edge, which is important to his fiction. Um, he was one of a generation who attended, uh, Oxford in the 1950s and was taught by an author.

Met Tolkien, uh, and Cass Lewis, um, very important to his books and the way that critics, uh, usually interpret his, uh, his fiction is this working class background. Uh, and the fact that, uh, he came up through the, the grammar school system. Uh, and, and won a place that Maudling College, Oxford, and this kind of, um, to him at least separated him from his, uh, from his, uh, family, uh, culturally speaking. Um, there is a story that Garner tells.

Uh, I'm not sure if it's true or not. Uh, of him abseiling down the outside of maudlin, uh, at night and his feet, uh, touching the top of Clarissa's head as he's leaning out to smoke of height. Um, not sure if this is true, but it's a very useful visual metaphor for, uh, how Ghana thought of people like C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and the kind of fantasy that they were writing. Um, he didn't think much of it.

Uh, he left Oxford in his second year, after the realisation that he needed to become a writer, to kind of reconnect with his, um, his background. Uh, he returned to Alderley Edge and bought a very old house for not very much money and began to write the weird Stone number, which was published in 1960. Um, and quickly after that came a sequel. The moon has come right in the centre there. Uh, and these these two books, um, that set in, you know, they had on a hill called The Edge.

Um, and two children, um, Colin and Susan, become embroiled in this, uh, magical battle between, uh, wizards and elves and, um, dark elves and, uh, a dark Lord figure. Uh, and then he, uh, he wrote a letter, which is a kind of, uh, secondary world fantasy, almost. Um. Uh, but with parallels to, to, uh, to modern day Manchester and the hour service, which uses a story from the map and again, uh, the Welsh, uh, cycle of legends. Um, so repetition is a is a key is a key theme in Garner's writing.

There's always, uh, there's always a myth that's being, uh, cycled through, uh, experienced over and over again. Um, the impossible question is, were any of these direct responses to Tolkien's work, or was it just something in the air? Garner is on record as saying he did not read the Lord of the rings until many years after Whetstone was written. He has, in several interviews, renounced Tolkien. Um, there's, uh, one in the interview.

Whether the interior asks. I imagine then that when the way it's done everything and then appeared with its wizard and its army of dark elves, people who didn't know the legend devoutly claimed that you'd copied the Lord of the rings. Uh. And Alan says which side? That they didn't. They hadn't read any old English. Tolkien and I ripped off the same sources. He did it for his reasons. I did it because a simple level. I hated made up names.

If I'd used a name that was familiar, considerable baggage would have come with it. Um, and then he tells the story of, um, when he gave his archive to the Bodleian. Uh. At some point, he heard from someone connected with the Lord of the rings films that, uh, one of the Tolkien family had given him J.R.R. Tolkien's annotated copy of The Weird Stone in England, and apparently his notes are just vitriolic at what bothered him.

The interviewer asked. Trivial use of language. I would love to see that book. Um, so whether or not that story is true, uh, it points to a fundamental difference in Garland's approach to fantasy. He may have been using the same sources Old Norse, Celtic. Um, I was English, uh, but at this stage it was his way of expressing the importance of myth and local landscape.

Uh, the second of it I want to talk about is Susan Cooper again, probably mentioned this morning. Um. Uh, she was born just a year after Garner. Uh, and like him, she was at Oxford during the 50s. She studied English at Somerville, uh, where she became interested in journalism as a career. I never met Tolkien, she says, but I went to his lectures on Anglo-Saxon literature along with hundreds of other students. He was a wonderful lecturer, like C.S. Lewis, whose lectures I also attended.

He was a tweedy, pipe smoking, middle aged man. We were all waiting for the third volume of the Lord of the rings to come out. Her most famous work is the Darkness Rising sequence, which began in 1965 with see on the Stone in the middle of that, um, which is a kind of modern day, uh, hunt for the Grail set in, uh, set in rural Cornwall.

And the next book in the series, The Dark Is Rising, um, it is set in Cooper's home county of Buckinghamshire and expands the scope of the book to a mythic battle between light and dark. Um. All five of the books. There are three of them that, uh, draw heavily on English and Welsh folklore. Uh, Arthurian legend and feature a recognisable Merlin character named Merriman. Lion keeper remembers reading. Uh, the Lord of the rings with astonishment.

She found that Tolkien's work was full of the same Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature she was studying at the time, but she has written about how, while she was bowled over by Tolkiens middle earth, as with the canon sorry, as with Garnet, the idea of creating a completely separate secondary world was never her intention. The modern material world is the effective setting for fantasy, she writes. An arbitrary time and never Neverland softens the punch.

For example, if we're in Eldorado and we find a mandrake, then okay, so it's a mandrake and Eldorado, anything goes, but by a force of imagination, compel the reader to believe that there is a mandrake in a garden in Mayfair of Great Ulverston, Lancashire. Then when you pull up that mandrake, it is really going to scream, and possibly the reader will tell you. So there is some real influence of Tolkien in these books, I think.

And but again, like on that there is a, there's a fundamental, um, she's drawn more to setting fantasy in the, in the present day, uh, low fantasy as opposed to high fantasy.

Uh, and then lastly, uh, actually the Gwynn, um, California born, uh, writer in 1929. Uh, she started writing fantasy fiction when she was nine years old and did not come across the Lord of the rings until she was 25, obviously, because it hadn't been published until she was 25. Um, when the Lord of the rings appeared in the library, she reveals in, uh, in an essay. Um, I shied away from it. I was afraid of it. It looks dull. I thought, it's like the Saturday Review. It's probably affected.

It's probably allegorical. Allegorical. Once I went so far as to pick up volume two when it alone was on the rack. And look at the first page. The two towers. People were rushing around on a hill looking for one another. The language looked a bit stilted. I put it back, the eyes that threw me. The early fantasy that she was writing. Um. Now, the early fantasy she was reading, uh, people like Little Tanzania, uh, or the pulp stories and Astounding Stories.

Uh, but she was more interested in people like Charles Dickens and Tolstoy than the Fantasists. When she eventually read Tolkien, she found herself relieved that she hadn't read him earlier. Um, by the time I read Tolkien, however, though I had not yet written anything of merit. I was old enough and had worked long and hard at my craft to be set in my ways, to know my own way.

Um. Just get to the end quickly. Um, so her most famous work is the Wizard of Earthsea series, set in Earthsea, which is a secondary world. Um, she, uh, how Tolkien in her mind when she first created it. Uh, she was asking herself questions about, uh, wizards with grey beards who are ageless. Gandalf. What? How did they become, um, these old grey bearded, uh, mages? Uh, and so she invented a school for magic sets on the island of.

Right. Uh, my dad, who's the main character, um, attends the school, and. But the books lean less heavily on Western medieval traditions and Tolkien and instead look to a range of non European stories and mythologies. Whereas in middle earth, antagonists are usually dark skinned and come from the east. And Earthsea Get Skin is described as copper brown. Um, Daoism is also very important, uh, to the kind of really, uh, philosophical, uh, magic system, uh, of the books as this young psychology.

Uh, so in conclusion, we tend to think of Tolkien as a monolith. Uh, and yes, he is directly inspired. Later theories such as The Wheel of Time, uh, uh, by, uh, Robert Jordan and Terry Brooks Shannara series. Um, but even at the beginning of this post Tolkien era, there were writers who were reacting critically to his work or were more intent on pursuing their own ideas of what fantasy could be. Thank you.