J. R. R. Tolkien - Stuart Lee

[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] You've all met Stewart already. Um, but just as a reminder, Stuart's a leading scholar. Fantastic literature and and, um, an academic here at Oxford. And and [INAUDIBLE] be speaking to us next on, um. I'm sorry. I've already blanked on J.R.R. Tolkien. Uh, you've heard of him? Yes. Yeah. That's right. Uh, so thank you very much, everyone, and thank you all for coming in.

Everyone is online again. Just to repeat, uh, thanks to you, this is proving a fantastic event.

And, uh, so the title of my talk of the task I've been set is to talk about J.R.R. Tolkien. And you remember yesterday or some of you who were here, I proposed a framework of how to, uh, look at or discuss the fantasy writer or fantasy text and so on. So I'm gonna I'm going to, um, mark my own homework and try and work through the Discworld framework with J.R.R. Tolkien. And I guess it is appropriate that we're kind of halfway through this summer school.

And here's Tolkien, because the conversations often go, everything that happened before Tolkien and everything that happens after Tolkien. So he's that pivotal point, um, and keeping with Terry Pratchett, just because so many people came up to me and said, I'm so glad to hear Terry Pratchett mentioned, um, I'll give you a quote from Terry Pratchett. J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain appearing, and all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mount Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints.

Sometimes it's pagan up close, sometimes it's a shape on the horizon, sometimes it's not there at all. Which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mount Fuji. And whatever you think of token, good or bad, we cannot escape him. So therefore it is appropriate that we try to go through him as a writer.

Um, I'm just going to start with the things that you probably need to know so that we're all on the right, the same level. So the key text that you need to sort of familiarise yourself with, and you probably already have are The Hobbit. 1937 I'll come back to why 1951 is in brackets. The Lord of the rings 1954 to 55. The Silmarillion, published posthumously in 1977, edited by his son.

The other two key texts I would say you should get into your library of Tolkien studies, um, in terms of his writing or his letters, which was revised and came out in 2023, and his poetry, which came out for the first time last year in 2024, in terms of the full collected edition. But we should also rejoice, perhaps, in the fact that there are many other texts appearing under his name. The History of Middle Earth Series a 12 volumes, um, plus The Nature of Middle Earth, which came out in 1996.

Um, I should have put Unfinished Tales in here. Sorry. Uh, an extraordinary study by his son, Christopher, into the composition of the various texts that we've just referred to outside of The Hobbit. Uh, there were the great tales which have appeared, the four great tales which are referenced and came out in their own separate edition. There were the minor tales of over Random Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wootton Major, etc., etc. and then the the other text which I will come on to in a second.

His um, his academic writing. Um, and there are a lot of secondary reading texts. There is we are not short of academic studies of Tolkien. Um, and there are a few there, and there were many more. I would just I would just really like to highlight the work done by Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull, which is the top one there, the J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide.

I'm not familiar with a text like this for other writers, in that it not only gives you a detailed analysis of all the themes in Tolkien, but in the chronology, more or less a month by month account of what he was doing. Um, to absolute precise details. So extraordinary material out there if you wish to carry out. Okay, so the standard. He was born in. Uh. He's the life of J.R.R. Tolkien, um, born in 1892 and dies in 1973. So he lived to a ripe old age. And he's born in South Africa.

But he's he's English through and through. He moves back when he's very young. King Edward School, Birmingham, and then without with a couple of minor sort of diversions. He's an Oxford person through and through studies at Exeter. We've already heard classics, then English, and then, um, comes back here to become professor of Pembroke and then Merton. Um, and we have in the dates there The Hobbit, the Lord of the rings.

So there are two things I just want to point out about this. First of all, uh, as you'll see in 1915, um, not a good time to be a young person. Uh, he enlist in the Lancashire Fusiliers, 1916. He fights on the battle of the Somme, and many people have talked about the influences of that. But the second thing, and most notably, is his job is as an academic. He was not paid to be a writer of fantasy fiction. He was paid to lecture, teach and supervise researches here.

And that point will come up again. Okay, so was Tolkien writing fantasy? I gave a talk on Friday to the prospective students at Oxford and I said, Was Tolkien writing fantasy? And I said, yes, he was. Now that's about it. Um, and none of them got the joke. So they all sat there looking bewildered. But I said, okay, well, let's explore it a bit more.

But clearly he was. So let's if we take what I was saying yesterday about the definition, the impossibility test, The Hobbit, the Lord of the rings, The Silmarillion, all pass the impossibility test. Uh, it just doesn't happen and couldn't happen. And we could also say the same for some of his minor tales. Uh, some of them do sort of start, uh, blurring the boundaries between his work, uh, isolated work, but also his mythology. But there there are also definite, um, texts of a fantasy nature.

Um, but I wanted to just pick up a couple of a couple of extracts here, uh, which we we've suddenly got, uh, sight of last year. So on the left is the start of a poem called Toll Eraser, which, uh, really is embedded in this mythology. Told, I would say is a mystical island where the elves live in, in his, in his mythology. And you can see he's right in that. In early 1916, he reworks that poem only a few months later, and this time he dedicates it for England, The Lonely Isle in June 1916.

So it's a fantasy poem or a poem about his mythology, certainly, but then he repurposes it as he sent out to the Western Front and it becomes, uh, a memory, a eulogy to what he's leaving behind, notably England and, uh, Edith, his wife. So he was writing fantasy. Well. Was he? Well, he certainly wasn't paid to write fantasy, so I've already make the point. And this is something which you will occasionally hear in the English faculty or certainly did about Tolkien.

Uh, this is a list of his academic publications. Um, seem to be missing one there, the Uncle Lewis, which is kind of major. Um. I think the key thing you'd say from these two things, one is his scholarship was very, very good. We still cite a lot and read a lot of his works. The second thing you'd say is there's not a lot there. He did not publish extensively, and one of the criticisms of Tolkien is that he did not publish as many things as he probably should have.

However, he appears time and time again, and an anecdote which I've told many times, but I hope this audience will forgive me is one. One day I was going up, uh, I was being interviewed at Radio Oxford, and I was in the taxi driver, uh, taxi. I was in the taxi and taxi driver said to me, what you're going to be interviewed about? I said, oh, a new book by Tolkien. And he said, he's dead, isn't he? Um, and he's quite right. There's a lot of posthumous material coming out by J.R.R. Tolkien.

So these are the types of things you may have seen the legend of Sigurd and Goodwin, Fall of Arthur, Beowulf and so on. And I got to thinking about these things, and I tried to sort of group them. So in the centre, if you want to, you can go wait and read The Monsters and the critics, which are a selection of his lectures and essays. They're not all of them. There were a lot of his lectures still sitting in Bodleian, which have been, um, and I'm not worked on as much as perhaps they should have.

Uh, and on the left you could say, well, they're kind of scholarly text translations, which I would add the anchor note with, say, from 62 in, but on the right there's an element of him having a go. And I'll come back to this about gap filling, etcetera. You could argue this. You could argue which way they fall. But fall of Arthur Coloro the lay of are true and true.

These are all areas where he's trying to have a go. And by gut filling, I mean he's, he's he's sort of imagining what else might have happened. So the text there about Finn and, uh, Genghis, um, an episode in Beowulf and then in the winsberg fragments, and he kind of steps away and he goes, what actually did happen here? And he has a go. He has a go at writing it. So we'll come back to that again and again.

Uh, throughout the talk. Um. You may recall I came up the subgenres and high epic fantasy.

Uh, yes. Without a doubt. Tolkien was writing what we loosely call high end epic fantasy. It is a tale, particularly the Lord of the Rings of Good v evil. It is on a scale that is extraordinary. It's the end of the Third Age, the culmination first and second age. You could probably say it starts in north west middle earth and goes down to kind of southeast, middle earth, um, to a degree there. There's a world threatening crisis. It's an existential threat to middle earth.

Just ask yourself, what would have happened to everyone if Sauron had actually won. Uh, and it's also something which, uh, John Clue talks about in his encyclopaedia, uh, of fantasy. Uh, it is about thinning. There is this element of transience, of past glories fading, uh, and this, this comes up again and again. But the quote always reminds me is leaf is Larner from Old English life is on loan.

Um, but that passed away. So maybe this from day or that idea that past glory and sometimes past threats can pass away. So that is my day. If you remember, my I was really about the setting intrusive liminal of secondary world. And I think fairly easily we could say this is a secondary world or immersion as far Mendelsohn has said. Um, middle earth simply didn't happen. It doesn't exist. You can't find any of those places on a map of unknown Earth.

Certainly. So it is that secondary world that we go into and immerse ourselves. But is it? No. You can take this picture with a pinch of salt.

It's an artist's impression, and it always looks to me like a set of lungs. Um, but basically what we are seeing here is an attempt to show our two tokens, uh, Earth or planet. And that's the kind of area there. That's the middle Earth, where most of the action takes place in The Hobbit and The Lord of the rings. Uh, and then on the left here we have the Undying Lands. And then in the middle. What, uh, Pepe was referring to yesterday.

This island, Numenor Island, which links to the Atlantis myth because it disappears beneath the waves. And I think the interesting thing here is that talking repeatedly again and again says, middle earth is our earth. This is our earth. Um, but you look at that and you probably would be forgiven to say, well, it doesn't look anything like the map of the globe I've seen recently, and it clearly doesn't.

But throughout his mythology, there were these seismic shifts in the continents which change everything. But most importantly, and this is a I think we'll come onto this later, is that these lands to the west at the end of one of his myth cycles disappears, not just disappears beneath the waves, but signs to go out onto another dimension. And what was originally a flat earth becomes a rounded earth.

And the only way that you can find your way to these lands, as the elves do continuously in Lord of the rings, is by taking the straight or the lost road, which is only allowed to certain individuals, and this allows them to start playing in with all kinds of things about these mythical lands to the west, not the continent of America, but this out in this other sort of fairy dimension. And the time time structures he gives up there are really you hate.

You will hear about first, second, third age and so on. He is talking about a grand scale here, but again he talks about when we enter the fourth age. It takes us to the present day, to the day, the age of men as in humans here, and that there will be this final battle at the end.

So he plays fast and loose with this. He's not consistent, which you have to remember with Tolkien. He never is consistent. He constantly contradicts himself. But this idea that perhaps this was a pre-history of the world is is something which we should bear in mind. And the letter I reference there was his explanation. And again, we're gloriously fortunate to have it of his entire mythology, which he wrote to the publisher.

Mothman, 1951. And a text which I think has been mentioned, it was mentioned yesterday is, uh, the Notion Club papers, which was originally the Los Road, which he writes. Uh, 1945 Los Road is a bit earlier. And it's that response to Lewis. I'll write something about space travel. You write something about time travel, uh, and you can get it. In the history of Middle-Earth, Sauron defeated. And basically the plot is there is this club, the Notion Club, notion inklings.

Get it? Um, and someone ferreting around in the Bodleian in 2012 finds this manuscript of their notes, which is notes that they were having meetings in the 80s.

Remember, he's writing this in 1945 of this club that meets and starts to sort of do the things that the inklings did, but particularly what we start to get is a couple of the protagonist start to dream and have visions and then take go on journeys where they start to realise that there's a continuity from their present time and their names going back from Anglo-Saxon times all the way to Numenor.

And that's his time travel. So again, an attempt to knit his mythology together with everything that, uh. He had studied. Okay. Setting.

This is my Discworld again. Yes, of course, it's pseudo medieval Germanic influences which we've discussed again and again. The trolls, the dwarves, the elves, the dragons. And I find it interesting what he said there. It's desirable if you can. Necessary, if you can, to use words that are already in existence, which have a certain sense and are laden with a certain sense. And therefore I use dwarves and Middle-Earth and elves and so on.

You can't have everything absolutely strange at the outright. And I do think he kind of has something to say there. And I actually personally, when I read or I'm about to launch into a new series of fantasy writings, it's a bit of a struggle to get through that first chapter where you get all of those strange names and strange places, because he seizes on this and he's doing it for various reasons.

But he got the idea that, well, look, these are already embedded in people's imagination, so I can reuse them. Um, and I will come back to this piece of text again and again. I've written on this chapter here. Um, so for those of you who've read my article, apologies, but, uh, this is from the Lord of the Rings The Siege of Gondor returning the King, book five, uh, chapter four.

And you can see here this is at the end of the siege of many stories, the language, the range that's being used here, a huge ram, Knights shot and dark siege towers, gate, etc. all the types of things we would associate with a medieval setting. I find myself saying this again and again and I. But is it, you know, is it really? Well, someone's already made mention of this. I think in terms of the shire.

The shire is, is we can pretty much date it to Victoria's Jubilee is that capturing of that Victorian ideal that Tolkien himself experienced as a child. And as many people pointed out, there are some archaic details in there which just do not make sense. They have clocks, so you know, well, good. Well done. The hobbits, you know, and umbrellas. They've already managed that with the rest of the, the, uh, Middle-Earth is struggling.

Um, they have steam kettles and so on, and they have post offices, so they're kind of not in that pseudo medieval world is basically what you're trying to say. And then we move into something. The second red dot, for example, where we are moving back to a town with inns and cetera, you talking probably 14th century. Take Rowan, although we argue constantly it is Anglo-Saxon England. Um, so we're probably talking about, uh, 10th, 11th century at least.

Then you get into Gondor. Well, he talks about Byzantine in Constantinople. ET cetera. But sometime after the. So maybe late Middle Ages or sometime around that, and then we have The Bookman and so on. It just shouldn't work when you think about it, because it isn't consistent. So it is right to say you come away from it thinking this is a medieval setting, but actually it's very easy to find areas where it isn't.

However, it was described as the last great work of the Middle Ages, the Lord of the rings. Um, but I would just like to say there's a lot of pushback against this in that Tolkien, I believe, is a very modern writer. Um, there's this traditional view. You just didn't care if you rejected modern life, which is just simply not true.

And he he reads extensively of modern writers, etc., and we've already touched on the fact that he is engaged very heavily early on in environmental issues, which we then pick up later in later industrialisation and commercialisation. And I just like to read, if I can, an extract from a poem. And this is Progress of Bimbo or Progress in Bimbo Town, which he writes it in 1928. And it's really a sort of his view of what's happening to the British seaside.

And having spent a summer down in North Devon, I have a lot of sympathy for it. So he describes this place, Bimbo Town. It's sort of a seaside resort, or somewhere near the sea where people come and people come on holiday and on day trips. Sometimes through it, and this is rare. One can hear the shouts of boys, sometimes late. When motorbikes are not passing with a screech, one hears faintly if one likes the see still at it on the beach. At what?

At churning orange rind, piling up banana skins, gnawing paper, trying to grind a broth of bottles, packets, tins before a new day comes with more. Before next morning. Shower. Banging, stopping at the old indoor with reek and rumble. Hoots and clangs. Bring more folk to God knows where to. They don't mind to bimbo town, where the steep street that once was fair with many houses staggers down.

It's a real view of sort of like that on on a restricted sort of spread of people going out and just throwing their rubbish out at the sea and is being washed up on the destruction of things. And to me that Romans, if you if that was in a collection of works by John Betjeman, I wouldn't be surprised. So to say that he isn't concerned with modern modern ideas, I think is just wrong. And I think also we've mentioned, um, disenchantment.

I think disillusionment is actually the term I use because it was, uh, a key, key concept that emerges after the First World War when people come back and this wasn't a land fit for heroes, and they found out all of the things that went wrong in the First World War.

Um, and I think he tackles that head only tackles exactly what's happening in the period between the wars, but also after the Second World War, when we were told in the 50s, no, all you should be reading the kitchen sink dramas and the movement. He was saying no. I think people still harking back to some ideas that were not powerless, uh, against some of the horrors that beset us. And we do have a desire to go back to some of our roots. So I do think he's a modern writer in that sense.

Okay. Characterisation. This is disk. We've got to disk. Um, and I mentioned the, the dwarves in The Hobbit as in they're not very good in terms of character profiles, but let's pass over because it's The Hobbit. And criticising The Hobbit is like kicking a puppy. So let's not do that. Um, but, uh, clear criticism of Tolkien is that, you know, where were the female characters in in The Hobbit? Will there aren't any or in the Lord of the rings? There are, of course, in the Lord of the rings.

Um, and we can argue at length about that, about how well portrayed they are. Uh, but you can it's a sign of desperation when people say, well, there are look, there's she lob um, and you know, but you know, and maybe his understanding of, uh, Eowyn sudden conversion to liking Faramir just because she's looking over a wall is perhaps not an exact, uh, uh, study in attitudes. Let's put it that way. However, these criticism is excessive.

Um, and if you look in The Silmarillion, particularly if you look in the original drafts of The Silmarillion, um, and you use, uh, are the reconstructed, a great book which shows you he builds some very strong female characters, and really, they're very prominent in that book. So I don't think it's it's fair, but it's you can understand why people did it just because of the published books. Um, he, he got criticised a lot and he still gets criticised.

It's just good and evil. Everyone's good and everyone's bad. Um, and that's it. And the good people win and the bad people lose. It's. It's nowhere near as simple as that. Uh, and I think his he observed and I completely agree, people who say that clearly, um, read the book, um, particularly the Lord of the rings, if we take, for example, the orcs. Um. In Peter Jackson's films. They are what they are. They are just horrendous sort of cannon fodder.

But as he said, we do get insights into the way the orcs think occasionally. Um, and if you think of those sort of chapters where Sam and Frodo, uh, Frodo is captured after this thing and Sam overhears the orcs talking, or when they are dressed as orcs and then being marched around Mordor, you hear the orcs? Um, and they're just like soldiers. Basically. They're grumbling all the time. They're grumbling about the conditions, their grumbling about their officers.

They don't want to be there half the time. So you do kind of get that yet that there's some less than pleasant characteristics about orcs, like cannibalism and so on, and that they tend to sort of just march through and slaughter. But I do believe it. If you if you study them, it is good. And actually ran Rings of Power, which we let's put that to there. But I do think they're interesting. They're delving into the character of orcs, which is quite good.

Uh, I mentioned doubling yesterday and it's, you know, that they're Faramir. How Faramir reacts compared to how Boromir reacts, how Aragorn is in terms of what he is trying to achieve as the Lost King, reclaiming Sauron compared with the Nazgul, and how they behaved as kings or leaders. Salmon, Frodo and without a shadow of doubt. Anyone who criticises Tolkien's characterisation, you just go back and go, well, what about Gollum? Um, where we get that psychological struggle in an individual?

And actually, if you put Gollum alongside Sam and Frodo, you get that classic tripartite characterisation where all three make the whole. Uh, and for those of you, this is an example I often use, and you may be a bit churlish, but if you think of McCoy, Spock, and Kirk, the three just compliment each other in Star Trek, and that's how it kind of works. I'm not saying they're like that, but they're much better developed than those three. Um, but think of that. So. Okay. Worldbuilding.

Uh, of course, Tolkien takes time to develop his mythology. Um, I'll come back to the voyage of our randomly evening star in a bit. Um, but here we have these starting to work in in 1915 1916 on the Book of Lost Tales, which is where a mariner finds their way to the, um, the elven homelands, the open isle, and they start to hear tales. So we have that framing structure which we'll come back to again. And then he's working on it again and again, all the way through the Lord of the rings.

And as I said, it posthumously comes out as the book that we now have called The Silmarillion. But there's a lot more to it than that. And the key thing you have to take from this is that if the Lord of the rings doesn't reach print until 1954, he's been working on his mythology for 40 years. And we have to think about fantasy writers, and we're going to hear from some later. And there are some in the room I know.

Do you spend 20 years building your mythology without any thought to ever getting it published, and then put a tail on the top? Because that's exactly what Tolkien did. And Simon was exactly right. He never intended The Hobbit to get published. In fact, he never intended The Hobbit to be set in Middle-Earth. It kind of got sucked into it, and before he knew it. Uh, and that's what's interesting about Tolkien. Why is he doing this?

He's doing it kind of for fun, but he lays the foundations, um, for reasons will come onto. And then he adds over or overlays the stories. Um, and the foundation was the invention of languages. The stories were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me, a name comes first and the story follows. He was playing around with inventing languages as a child. He loved it. He's a philologist. He carries on, he carries on, and he develops them, as you all know.

But he realises a language can't just exist without a living world to put them in. And that's what drives him to start writing his mythology and world building. And I'm going to show a couple of examples here. Is is extraordinary, I think in Tolkien. So on the right you have a standard Proto-Indo-European family tree of languages, and some of us will be familiar with these things. Uh, token certainly was. It tries to show how the roots of language developed.

And on the left we have him playing around exactly that language. The tail tree of tongue, sorry, where he shows the relationship between the languages and so on. He's thinking at that level, which is absolutely extraordinary. If you don't think it is, let's carry on with that, shall we? Um. So attention to detail. The ghostly images behind are because it copyrighted, of course, but I'm taking some quotes where he's working out here.

The distance to the Ford device in 15 miles of the gates of Ise and got 13 miles. How far can a Hobbit or orcs move on foot compared with someone on a horseback? Uh, right. Okay, so he gets to some struggles. Well, if it's a full moon. Which way will the shadows lie? That I have to think about. Do I have to change the text? Is that going up the steps of Curious Uncle? And he starts doing that? He gets a cop out, basically. So he takes.

What's the what? What's the moon cycle in 1944? I'll plunk that on my book, but it works. And I love this quote. At this point, I required to know how much later the moon gets up each night when they're in full, and how to stew a rabbit. And then he starts to work on structures you know. Well, on January the 16th, the company ring is the battle of the bridge. Um, in Moria, Gandalf falls. Okay, Gollum stalking and company.

And he has you can you can see them if you if you look at, for example, the the voyage or on tear the media the collection from the exhibition in Paris, uh, really detailed plans of his plots. Always reminds me a bit of an. I gather when they were doing Fawlty Towers, uh, John Cleese and Connie Booth had a massive wall full of plot structures, and they mapped out exactly to the line of the script how it would all come together.

So it's a bit like that. Again, attention to detail is extraordinary flora, fauna, geography, distances. And sometimes his mythology overtakes him so that the tale about why The Hobbit in 1951 is important is because if you read the first version of The Hobbit in 1937, when when the ring appears with Gollum and the riddles, etc. basically the story goes Gollum. Yeah, look, if you win, I'll give you this ring.

Um, and of course, then he writes the Lord of the rings, and that's the last thing Gollum would do is just hand over the ring. He finds it. So then he has to rewrite The Hobbit in the light of how the mythology is changing. And he does that. And a revised version comes out in 1951. And that then puts him in a quandary, because you could go into a bookshop, and if you get the 1937 edition down, you're going to get a very different tale from the 1951 edition.

Dan. And Tolkien doesn't just leave it at that, of course, he says. Well, basically the 1937 version is the one Bilbo tells the dwarves, but the 1951 version is the one we all know to be the truth that he he reveals later and fragrance and pick up. Attention to detail. It is extraordinary. Okay. So objective.

Why? Why is he doing this? We've talked again and again about on fairy stories and a, you know, a bit like that letter from 1951. We are so fortunate that just at the point he's really engaging with the Lord of the rings and his mind is shifting. He delivers this lecture which then is published, which really is his treatises, his theories about fantasy literature. I would say, don't just read that. Go off and read myth appear.

His poem, which is a result of a walk with Lewis and Dyson in Morton College. Um, and also the essay that came out in the 2005 edition of Smith. And what made you think you've kind of read them in the round, but, um, Fairy Stories is so important is delivered in 1939 as lecture and then published in 47. And I think these points have already made he's he's really setting out that fantasy or fairy story are not just for children. Let's, let's rescue them from the nursery.

Because they really take on or sorry portrayal convey the human ki human faculty and that is about sub creation making secondary worlds. This is something which we aspire to do, and if you do this successfully, you will engender secondary belief in the reader. They will immerse themselves fully in the text, they will believe what they are reading and they'll come out of it.

And he talks a lot. He has some really interesting points here, which again, have come up, I think, yesterday about recovery.

Because you're in this fantasy world, you then get a clear view of things we take for granted. You can see reality freshly. But it also allows you to escape. And escapism is a term that is thrown at fantasy. Incorrectly, I think. I don't think it is. But what he's saying here, it's escape because we can escape the confines of reality, of mimetic literature if you want. Um, like a prisoner escaping jail. And then there is consolation, which we'll come onto in a second.

Okay. I'm just going to put this here because it's a theory, which, uh, well, I first came across it by the great scholar of Tolkien studies, Tom Shippey, and that is the asterisk reality, which is another thing that Tolkien's done. I've hinted at it already on the right. If you don't know what you're looking, here is, uh, again, a philologists playground where we're looking at the words 11 and elf by 2011.

Course. Um, and they go back and they go back, and then they get back to a point and they go, yeah, we don't quite know what the word would have been in proto Germanic, but we'll come up with an idea and that's probably what it looks like. And you'll see there's an asterisk there. So it's filling in the gap where we don't have it. And this is what starts Tolkien off. Um. I said I'd mentioned this poem from 1914.

The top you'll see the manuscript, the Old English of the Old English poem uh, Christ won by Kinney Wolfe. The imaginatively titled Christ won Christ who's better? And the risen Christ to Christ, three fates. Um, but, uh, on there, you know, as we've we've read this and everyone's done it. Hayley Randall, brightest of angels, sent two men over middle earth. A true radiance of the sun. And something sparks in his mind. And he reads that, and he goes, who is this, a friend, or what is it?

We don't quite know. We think it's possibly Venus or something like that. So being Tolkien, even in 1914, he talks often. He writes the Voyage of Grendel, the Evening Star. And when he was asked by one of his friends, what's it about? He says, I don't know. I'll try to find out. And that's actually, if you look at his composition of the Lord of the rings, often things for a reason. He goes, where did that come from? And then he tries to work it out.

So it's a kind of example of Asterix where you you've got this, we've got what survives. But where did it come from? In his case, there are. Yeah. Randall becomes the mariner in his tales. And you'll see this again and again in his Beowulf edition. We get the silly spell. Beowulf is probably a a bringing together of multiple tales, probably by a single author. But things were happening centuries before that they picked up. So he doesn't just take that for granted.

He goes out and tries to write one of the tales that maybe the the poet behind Beowulf picked up at The Homecoming, a bitterness built and some battles mould in a famous poem in Old English. But battle in 991. Well, what happened after the battle? I know I'll go and write a verse drama about it and just try and work out what it happens there. But in terms of his mythology, we have all of the things the dwarves, elves, trolls.

So what he's doing there is, look, if you read Old English, you read Middle English, as we've heard again and again, you come across these creatures. But why? Where did they come from? Where did the ideas come from?

I know I'll write a pre-history where there are tools, elves and trolls, etc. and there's a middle earth and I'll write one about ents into your orc, as we've already heard from the ruin, but also possibly linked to Macbeth, who's a bit fed up that the trees really didn't go up Dunsinane hill. Um, and then there's the Lost Road, the Notion Club papers, this idea that there's a mythical land to the west.

Well, in King Chief in Beowulf, there's this character at the beginning who is sent off, comes from somewhere and goes off somewhere. Well, that's what he's playing with in that. Or the voyages of Saint Brendan, those Peregrine, his poem, or any day who sailed off madly into the Atlantic Ocean from Ireland. But in the tale of some Brendan, he finds a mystical isle. And even when you get to the Hobbit rhymes, you know he starts writing these man in the moon tales poems early on.

But you know, they then become those fairy, those nursery rhymes that we tell you a little, the captain of it. Well, he writes the earlier poem that then led to The One we tell. And of course, then he says, oh, that's a whole bit rhyme. And it becomes in the tales of Tom Bombadil and so on. So it's all about gap filling. Um, objective.

I'll just go on about a few things which have already come up. He does say. This is all about fall mortality and the machine. Um, fall is a lot of people who fall in Tolkien's mythology Morgoth, Sauron, fan or foreign. They all fall from grace in some way or other. And the book, as you know, is the downfall of the Lord of the rings. Mortality is another key area which he plays a lot with, uh, the problem of death, the escaping of death.

And, um, he even said that it's this idea of the escape from death or death is the key spring of now. Everyone thinks he says the Lord of the rings. I dispute that. I think he says the law of the ring. But anyway, he says that's what the books are all about. Death and trying to evade it. And this is all obviously a very Catholic view has already been mentioned. He was a devout Catholic, um, and very active in the Catholic Church and particularly in Oxford.

What was happening here. And then the third area is the machine that technology can corrupt nature or destroy nature or corrupt people. And I think all of these, again, are very modern views. There are things which we probably come up again and again with. My are was routes. Where does he fit in the long history? Um. And this is this is actually a slide which is worked well because what it does is pick up everything you've heard so far.

So do you remember yesterday we talked about that hoovering up of myths and legends, possibly for nationalist purposes, by people to collect them together and then put them out. Well, one of the things he was slightly upset about was he didn't think England had its own mythology. So he plays again inconsistently with this. But he he is perhaps toying with this idea that he could create a cycle of myths for England to my country.

Um. We also heard about fairy tales and folklore tales, but fairy tales and one. I don't think he's been mentioned yet, but what a strong influence of of on Tolkien as a child was the underlying coloured fairy tale books, which aren't just about fairy stories and fairy tales. There's a lot of some old Norse legends and repurposing in there.

Um, what we heard last night, and we've heard a bit this morning, you know, we read Morris Dunn saying the Haggard, particularly the she novels as well, they all influence him. David Lindsay, I think, has been mentioned to strong influence. Grace has just talked about er Edison. Um, so all of these things are in this cauldron, and everything you've heard about in a way leads to this, to this talk. Uh, one thing which he said, I fear you may be right.

The search for the source of loitering is going to occupy academics for a generation or two, and I hope my hands up. I'm one of them. Um, and a book that myself and a colleague did. Uh, this is a solid over where we take The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and Lord of the rings. Go on. And what we're trying to do there is going, look, there's an episode in these books. It really links or has a lot of similarities, what you'll find in these older Middle English and Old Norse and Finnish texts.

Okay, my l I'm nearly there in terms of my Discworld, um, magic in Middle-Earth. Um, just because it had it is part of Adam's definition. He says he was a bit casual with the word magic, and he didn't really, uh, use it correctly. Actually, when you look at it, he's he's quite sparing in his use of term magic. Um, in The Hobbit, the Lord of the rings and so on, and sorcery and so forth. And again, as Tolkien, he he thinks very deeply about it.

Magic has to be believable to keep up the secondary belief. Um, but he understates it, I think. I think you get natural magic in there. You get the monsters, the creatures which are which are magical. But it is not. The full on J.K. Rowling school of magic is very underplayed. Um, and of course, Tolkien being the academic, then starts to think about magic and starts to think about its roots and some of the terminology in the philology that goes with it.

And he starts to define going back on some medieval and classical theories about Maja and go into the physical magic or the spells and the conjuring, and he keeps the elaborates on this so you can go away and read this letter. But magic could be as well as held good and go out to you bad. Neither is in this tale good or bad, but only by motive or purpose or youth. Use both sides. Use both, but with different motives.

What I think it's important here to say is that it isn't the magic that's important, it's what you do with it. And that's what Tolkien is trying to convey in this tale of power, struggle. Um, depth. I think depth, I've realised, is really worldbuilding, but let's let's just go with it. Um, depth allows him to achieve his goal of getting the inner consistency in a consistency of reality to so that you as a reader, believe in what you're doing. Um, and there's various things he does here.

So scholarly apparatus. So you have maps at the book, there's introductory essays, there's appendices at the animals and so on and so forth. Uh, a lovely example, I think. Oops, sorry about the text that just appeared on there is a left is the Book of Oil, um, which he he actually sits there and makes that, um, thinking it will go in the illustrated version of Lord of the rings. It didn't, uh, and he uses his knowledge of what happens in, um, medieval manuscripts like Beowulf on the right.

Uh, so there a map. So the map at The Hobbit at the beginning bases ourself in it, and then we get the Lord of the rings. References to the past. Another classic, I think. I don't know if he was the first, but he does it probably the best subsequent writers trying to do this, such as General Martin. Not as well. Um, but examples here from The Hobbit.

Before you could get round to the south, you would get into the lands of the necromancer, and even you, Bilbo, won't need me to tell you the tales of that black sorcerer. And of course, he never does. And we never find out in The Hobbit. But we know that there's something going on.

Um, and then fellowship of the ring. I do not think that tale should be told now with the servants, I mean, and and this is all an example of depth, because what happens is you get a glimpse that there is something much bigger going on behind this story. And of course there is, because he's worked on it for 20 and 30 years. And then he uses the framing devices, which has been mentioned.

So the book of Lost Tales I already talked about, but The Hobbit is, of course, The Hobbit or There and Back Again being the record of reused journey made by Bilbo Baggins, compiled from his memoirs by J.R.R. Tolkien and published by George Allen and Win and Lord of the rings survives to us by through the Red Book of West March. And there's a potted history of that manuscript and how it survives from the Shire all the way to us. Um, I, I mean, it's ended on the ruins of The Hobbit.

It's it's all nonsense, of course, but it's brilliant in a way, because it does give you that. You read it and you go, really? Really. I was that how it happened? Oh, yeah. The Book of West, Mark. It must be sitting in Bodleian or something like that. And Tolkien found it and he translated it not very well. That explains some of the inaccuracies in Lord of the rings. But then, you know, of course, none of this happens, but it's a framing device.

It's a way of doing that. Okay. So that was my proposed framework. One minute to go. Okay. Style. The thing which I felt it's missing. Um. And I won't do this very quickly is his style, so perhaps we should call it disc worlds. Um. And that piece of text from the end of Minas Tirith. Uh, the secret ministry, I think, is important. And as I said, I've written on this quite extensively. But you can see so much going on in here. Uh, even if you just take it.

Forget the rest of Lord of rings. Just read this extract. We get magic. We get that in there. Words of power and terror to end. Heart and stone. As if stricken by some blasting spell. And we get magical creatures. So it is fantasy. We get characterisation in there. We get Gandalf, Gandalf and Shadowfax I think is we forget Shadowfax bless him, but he's in there. And the words that Tolkien uses with Gandalf in chatter about unmoving, that commanding.

They're stoic. They still. We get the witch King. This is where the Witch King rides into ministry. And he uses an example of what we call variation in medieval literature. Look at the multiple descriptions of the witch king, a horseman, the black captain, uh, the huge shadow, the Black Rider, etc. he really does that to layer on the effects of of who this thing is. Um, and also that this is a person who moves, who commands power.

Whereas Gandalf and Shadowfax, you stand still. The witch king keeps moving forward and nearer and nearer. We get characterisation. Um, if you forget Shadowfax, don't forget Grom. The battering ram run! The battering ram actually takes on a life of its own. It isn't just a shove. They shove a ram at the door. We get the name of ground. We get his background and ground. Crawls on these and pushed on.

Bronze starts to become a living creature. And then we get in what Tolkien often gets criticises about his style. It is full of this piece, archaic style. The syntax is wrong. We get the verb at the end of clauses in sort of the way you would in, in German. Um, and it reads reads old fashioned and the semantics. So we're not showing up there. It's full of a register associated with the epic. Um. But he's he's he's a genius.

It's just repetition. Look at the repetition. The drums rolled around and the drums are old and rattled. Thrice he cried. Thrice. There's so much going on in this text. There's even a little oration if you want to look for it. And he controls the pace. If that wasn't enough. One minute.

He controls the pace fantastically. This. This is a masterpiece of prose narrative, because you get to that point where that green blob is, and you pause and you think it's all over, but he's taking you through it by managing these short sentences and so on. Um, there are even influences from the First World War, I would argue in that. There were even influences from Christianity. Thrice he cried, a cock crowing at the end, probably about dawn breaking.

But we all know the the link there to, uh, Saint Matthew dogma. And then finally you catastrophe. Every time I read this. Every time. You may have read this. It wasn't one of his favourite scenes. That bit at the end, when the row hear him and the cavalry actually come, brings a lump to your throat. And it was why it made me look back on this scene and just work out why he's doing so well.

So my time is up. I'm just going to say that not everyone likes Tolkien. Um, you've got a bit of a kicking. Uh, when it came out, uh, and afterwards, and particularly around the time the polls came out in 2000 and the Lord of the rings kept getting voted the best book of the 20th century, which really annoyed a lot of people. So that's another reason to applaud Tolkien, particularly the people he annoyed. Um, and there's an extract, and I would just finish his own reflection on it.

The Lord of the rings is one of those things. If you like it, you do. If you don't, you boo. Thank you. Thank you very much for this. Is it really fascinating? Um, just a question about, um. You talked about self-creation a very briefly, and we've had mentioned several times in the past couple days, and it's just especially touching on catastrophe there at the end of the relationship between these things.

Yeah. Um, detachment, which just kind of two forms of creation that we have right in Washington and in our conversation, one sort of creation is something underneath and one that's sort of I think this is what some of what you're saying is getting up in Tolkien and from his Catholic perspective, there's a sense of of storytelling is participation, not just not just something that's sort of like this is the that has been created,

and therefore we can create lesser things, but rather that what we create is building on and continuing a work which is already begun. Yeah. Talk. Yes, exactly. So I think you're absolutely right. And the key thing is why it's called sub creation. Because creation creator is God, but it's one of the gifts of God, if you like to see humans, is that we have this ability to sub create.

So we're participating by doing that and that desire to do that, we're participating in God's work and we can also through it, um, engender and this is Tolkien's theory, you know, what God was trying to tell us. And that's that you catastrophe that, you know, uh, there will be a joyous turn, that goodwill will will win out in the end. Um, now, I don't mean that. That doesn't mean that you all have to go away and start writing mythical worlds, because you can be a sub creator in your own mind.

In my view, just by immersing yourself in someone else's world and imagining it. And that's where it moves into imagination. The fact that we can, we can all think, we can all envisage, um, so we're sub creators in that sense as well. And I think that's where he was pushing it. Um, this might be a bit of a silly question, but a lot of the, um, Tolkien having a go, I suppose you could consider Tolkien writing fan fiction.

Um, and so how much would you say that working up that level of fan fiction sort of, uh, improved his craft in writing? Do you think it had a big influence in what actually he created that after? That's I think that's that's not a silly question at all. That's a brilliant point to to think of Tolkien as the precursor of fan fiction. But he was a fan of medieval literature, so he's having a go. Yeah, I think it does develop his style.

And so, you know, a lot of the verse you get in Lord of the rings, he's imitating styles that he picks up from, uh, medieval literature and, uh, he there's a, there's one of the appendices in the collected poetry volumes. He lists all of the poetic styles, the metres, etc. He he wants to have a go at, um, and all of the poets he really likes, and he's and words that he really liked and he tries to weave them in which we do find in his poetry. So I think yes, it did it, no doubt it did.

Um, of course he's no he's playing around with all kinds of things, prose and poetry. So yeah, that's that's a great point. Well done. Um, our first question is from Olly Murs.

Ebadi. Thank you, Doctor Li, regarding Tolkien's naming, especially since he even composed old English versions of his texts, do you think his use of Old English and Old Norse was mainly to make his world feel less strange, or was it a part of a more ambitious attempt to build a tower with old stones, and fit his literary oeuvre into the tradition of the old northern legends?

Um, so I think the analogy in the second, the point that me made in the second is, is a reference to his his essay on Beowulf, The monsters and the critiques, where, um, whether he uses the image of the tower and, you know, the tower is the kind of the work, but all we've done is pull it all down and look at the stones, and we've forgotten the scale that you could of of the tower itself, from what you could see, if you stand at the top of it.

Um, so I think there's a few things which probably or to way to answer this, first of all, he's drawing on what he knows about. He's drawing on what he enjoys. Um, so he is he is very adept at doing the the names, the mixture from Old English, Old Norse, etcetera. That's possibly what inspires him in the Germanic tales. But of course, who would you mention finish? We have Welsh influences on it, etcetera. So he's drawing on he draws on a lot of things.

Um, and I think but he also has that point made there, you know, by using some of these terms and words, they're not too distant from the audience. He was originally intending this for, which was a UK audience. Let's, let's start with that. I mean, it obviously has a global impact now, but when you come across those names, particularly if you start with the Shire names, well, they're all around this in Berkshire, in Oxfordshire.

Um, but then you start to come across, say some of those names in ro hear him, you know, the names of the characters there, and they kind of ring true to sort of British people, because when we were at school, we all did 1066 and all that, that comic book and so on. And we have those names at the back of our head, the EG Kings and so on. So it begins to pick up and it begins to feel a bit more familiar. So I think he's, it's, it's, it's multiple angles that uh, yeah.

Just wondering whether you think that, uh, the Lord of the rings is literature in the same way that Ulysses or In Search lost time is literature, or whether we have to kind of almost create a new sort of category, um, for what Todd Clayton is trying to do. Um, that's a good it's a good point. Um, it landed at the wrong time. As I've already mentioned, the mid 50s is not the time when you think what people were expecting.

Um, and I've, I've written on the radio dramatisation, which came out a year later, and the listeners, what the hell's there? So where's the allegory? Um, so. And Tom Shippey, I think says it succinctly catches it. He says the reason people don't like Lord of the rings is because they don't understand it. They don't know what to make of it. Um, so yeah, it bucks the trend. I mean, I think it's literature in the sense that, um, a text that emotionally moves me or would have done in the 50s.

I think it will still do that in 100, 200 years. I think people will still be reading it. Uh, and it's important because it says a lot about the 20th century. Um, so I think in that sense, yes, it definitely is. But you're right. I mean, it wasn't, as we've seen through all the talk yesterday, unique. But it was. Brian Atterbury calls it the end of apology. And I think that's absolutely right. It was the it was that well, by it, its appearing.

We no longer had to apologise as adults for enjoying fantasy literature, and it sort of led to that. So I don't know that quite answers your question. Do you think in terms of yes, it is literature and yes, it wasn't what people were expecting.

Oh, yeah. Thank you for the talk. Um, I'd be interested in your perspective, having talked about kind of the asterisk theory, um, and touching on earlier the comment on fanfiction as to how much you think Tolkien in his contemporaries, uh, the reason the fantasy sci fi, um, is now seen as kind of answering the the what if questions.

And is that from how they kind of filled in the blanks and the, the what if around the talking animals of Narnia, for example, how much of that came before and how much of it is because of Tolkien and Lewis? Um, that's a good question, because they I mean, you're right in tickling Tolkien. Um, he is playing around with the what if what if there had been a world like this, like we're all familiar with in the Lord of the rings?

Um, that would explain all the things that, you know, that then subsequently happened and that we pick up and Tom Bombadil and the Green Man and so on, you know, and, you know, answers it. So in that sense, it is. It is what if, um. And I. I mean, I suppose it's a bit like the answer there, because it allowed then people to move into that space and start to do that.

Now, of course, in science fiction, they've been speculating all kinds of in all kinds of ways, and particularly in between the war periods, um, about dystopian utopian worlds that you could go and find. And that was a way of exploring what we hadn't here. But, uh, they certainly unleashed it, I would think, in terms of a popular genre. Um, but people have always been imagining what if. So, I, you know, I don't want to put Tolkien is the key one.

You know, you go back and even to sort of like Thomas Moore used. Okay, you know, what if imagining things like that. So it's been going on for some time, and I suppose even the Epic of Gilgamesh is a what if, isn't it? What if we can try and find out how to have eternal life? Uh, which is the first one ever? Thank you.