My great pleasure to.
Yes. Hello, I'm Catherine McIlwaine.
I'm the talking archivist at the Bodleian Libraries and also the curator of the exhibition, Tolkien, maker of Middle-Earth.
I am delighted to welcome you all here tonight to the very first public event associated with this summer's exhibition.
This is one of a series of events will be holding one a month throughout the duration of the exhibition, which ends at the end of October.
So if you check on the website, you can book there for forthcoming events.
There's a dedicated website for the token exhibition.
That's Tolkien. Bodleian. Dot, dot, dot, UK.
And you'll be able to book for future events there. I'll just say that.
The next one coming up is the 3rd of July.
That's the Tuesday when Professor Russell Ferré will be speaking about translating, talking into different languages.
As Alex has just said, there will be the opportunity to visit or perhaps revisit the exhibition after the lecture finishes about 7:00 tonight.
So you'll have an extra hour, an hour and a half to go to the exhibition room next door.
And the café will also be open late. And Blackwell Hall. Okay.
I'm going to hand over now to Professor Carolyn Harrington, who's the fellow and tutor,
medieval English at St John's College, Oxford, and also professor of medieval European literature.
And she will be convening the event tonight. Thank you, Karen.
Thank you. And now this this is a question of passing on the introduction baton as well.
So I'm about to do some introducing of our speakers.
It's my pleasure and privilege to introduce all of them to you that in some ways I'm sure they needs no introduction in this company.
But I also just want to explain a little bit about how things are going to operate.
Each of our speakers is going to speak for 5 to 10 minutes to a particular point, and also all three of them have said what they wanted to say.
Then we're going to throw the floor open to questions and they'll be a roving mike.
So even the people up at the back should be able to ask whatever questions they feel like asking.
I will try and stand somewhere where I can see the people at the back and point at the the the person who needs to get the mic in such a way.
Because I didn't have the light shining directly in my eyes as I did at the moment.
And it would be useful.
I think perhaps if you do want to ask a question and you get the mic in your hands to say whether you want to direct your question
to one particular member of the panel or whether you want to throw in something for a larger discussion for all the panel.
So it's my great pleasure then to welcome all speakers.
We have, first of all, Professor de Marina Warner, who is a professor of English and creative writing at Birkbeck College at the University of London.
And she also has a local connection as a fellow of All Souls, and she is the president of the Royal Society of Literature.
Her most recent book, Fairy Tale, a very short introduction, was published by Oxford University Press quite recently,
and she has a forthcoming book called Forms of Enchantment Writings on Art and Artists, which is coming out with Tamsin Hudson in autumn 2018.
And I think perhaps I'll let Marina speak now. Then I'll introduce Berlin just before she speaks.
So I'll do introduction then. Speaker Thank you. Thank you.
Well, thank you all for coming and thank you, Caroline,
for introducing me and above all thank the organisers that thanks to the organisation who included me in this discussion.
Because though I know it's annoying for people to apologise beforehand but I'm really not
talking scholar so I have been asked to give some kind of general a few general points on this,
suppose us making and fairytale, which is what I set out to do.
You know, you all know the term secondary world that Tolkien instituted or shared with C.S. Lewis and Auden
discussing this idea of speculative or hypothetical or mystical fiction adopted the term secondary world.
And he wrote, Every normal human being is interested in two kinds of worlds the primary everyday world, which he knows through his senses.
And Auden, of course, writing before it was wrong to just say his which he or she knew through their senses,
and a secondary world or worlds which he not only can create in his imagination.
Do you think that was sort of approving what I was saying?
So she not only can create, she can create in his imagination, but cannot stop himself creating stories about the primary world,
maybe called failed histories, stories about a secondary world, myths or fairy tales, and a sense that always quite important myths or fairy tales.
And Tolkien was interest rates of this poem in this place.
But he also wrote a very, very famous essay on fairy stories.
In a sense, he wasn't very concerned with distinguishing them,
but I found that people often ask about that when I'm talking about and this is across all fairy tales, myths, or what are the differences?
So I suggest a few differences. Myths tend to be about gods and cosmologies.
They tend to have had or continue to have a relationship with religion.
Now, this will be problematic when we come when I come back to talking into the modern era.
But nevertheless, the fairy tale on the whole does not imply a supernatural cosmology in which somebody at some point believed as a religion.
Again, that's contentious because there were people or there are people who still give the credence to fairies for whom the fairy world is real world.
And this idea of reality I'll come back to again later, because it's a reality created by language,
and these distinctions start dissolving when one looks at them.
On the whole, the Greeks might have believed in that there's Olympian gods.
And the second thing is this is almost more important, is that the protagonists of fairytale are mostly humans.
They may be varieties of humans, but they are humans rather than gods.
We don't actually. And some of the great stories that are mythical Greek stories are about demi heroes of Hercules.
But on the whole, the, the, the, the that's that's the kind of difference.
It's not, again, one that holds completely they are tend to be immortals in whereas the gods and the subjects of myths are often immortal.
That's not the case in fairytales. Cinderella is clearly not an immortal, so they both have in common the marvellous.
In fact, they have that in common. I mean, that is in a sense the the overriding characteristic of the secondary world.
It is a place where marvels can occur and those marvels range right across the genres that Tolkien does mention in fairy stories,
animal fables, legends, epics and so forth.
We have the piercing of the veil of the visible and indeed the veil of the audible,
so that we can hear animal speak, we can hear it, fairies speak and so forth.
So this word, we're no longer bound by our senses of patterns in the primary world.
There's a there's a pretty fundamental difference, which is to do with the ethics of hope.
And Tolkien does home in on that when he talks about you catastrophe as being, which is his word for this sort of happy outcome,
which comes after travails and after agonies again, it doesn't hold altogether.
Red Riding Hood is eaten by the wolf in many, in many versions.
But it holds that the fairy tale tends to providence, tends to the idea there will be some resolution, justice will be seen to be done.
There will be mercy. There will be, above all, recognition for the suffering, hero or heroine.
That is very different to the spirit of myths and myths such as even in Ovid's metamorphosis, the metamorphoses are not reversed.
In fairy tale, metamorphosis are usually reversed. If you're if you're a frog prince, you can hope that you will come back in a human form.
But if you're Iraqi, the spider, you will not be changed back. And that's that's a sort of certainty.
So the perspective this respective has a different destination, a different horizon.
Now, the other major, huge subject and difficult to cover in a minute, but is that the modes of delivery and here you get into the oral,
the scribal, and Tolkien represents a kind of marvellous manifestation of the scribal.
This is a written text missing in its way.
If we go right back is a form of speech in Greek, and it's a form of public speech,
a share of shared public speech in the form or in the street or in the family setting.
But nevertheless. It's public speech and in fact it's opposed very often to locals with the implication that logos is written.
But what you get in the modern rewriting of myths, reinventions of myth or pure inventions of myth is a kind of memory of the oral memory of epic,
the memory of this, this one detail that was shared as a mythos and that returning in prose form and the embedded in that is a kind of memory.
That fairy tale was not really written in verse.
I mean, maybe some examples, but on the whole it's a prose, but it's a prose mode.
Whereas mythos, the great myths are often written in metrical verse and because they have very deep roots
in incantation and charm in forms of communal assembly that are conjuring possibilities,
and on that word, possibilities. I came across a quotation from Auden in an excellent article that Seamus Perry, who's here at Oxford,
has just written on Autumn and Auden wrote What makes it difficult for the poet not to tell lies is that in poetry,
all facts and all beliefs cease to be true or false and become interesting possibilities.
And I think this is where the modern voice of writers, because some of the poets,
some of the prose writers and contemporary and modern has has latched onto myth.
Because here we're in a very difficult philosophical area, which I'm really not competent to to explore that.
And that is that there really is no ontology. When I said that a myth tends to be about gods and cosmologies, there is an ontology.
These are real beings. These are this is a system, but in it.
But now when we create when someone like Tolkien creates a secondary world, it doesn't have an I would claim doesn't have an ontology,
which is the thing itself in language inscribed in words created by words.
And he, I think recognised that himself. And that's and that's partly its power because we are actually drawn into a kind of
whole cosmos that doesn't actually ask for our beliefs or sacrifices or worship,
but involves us deep with deep imagination in the possibilities such as imagining.
So the one final thing that I throw out is that I'm very curious about the term to the north that took
place in the last century and perhaps started before with people like William Morris the turn to Iceland,
the turn to the old North Carolina territory, because there's such a strong religious undertone in some of the writers here in Oxford.
C.S. Lewis, Auden himself, of course, at the end of his life and Tolkien.
So this where is the strong religious faith? But it turns north, and that's to create the whole destiny of English studies,
English literature and the English imagination recently and or for the last hundred years.
And it's interesting to me, because I was brought up a Catholic,
and it seems to me that English literature was deeply turned to the South before this happened,
and that one of the reasons I want to put it to you talking scholars,
that it could one of the reasons be that this is a form of Protestant imagination.
This is Protestant magic. This is the need for the glaciers, the need for the snowy wastes,
because it's a different landscape from papal papers strewn from papers and superstition.
So this is magic disinfected of Catholic superstition.
I'll stop them. Wonderful.
Thank you very much for that, Maureen. And so everybody hold on to whatever thoughts and questions that provoke.
Our next speaker is Professor Berlin Pfleger, who's going to speak from her sitting position.
Verlyn is a professor emerita from the University of Maryland, of course, a great expert on Tolkien and comparative mythology.
I can't begin to list all the books that she's written on Tolkien's mythology, so I'm not going to attempt to do that.
I would just mention a few of them splendid lights, logos and language.
In Tolkien's world A Question of Time. J.R.R. Tolkien's Road to Fairy Interrupted Music,
The Making of Tolkien's mythology and the Tolkien Legends area essays on the history of Middle Earth, which he credited with Karl Hofstetter.
And most recently, of course, he's been re-editing or editing, re-editing some of Tolkien's early works,
like the story of Clairvaux and the Lay of Ultron in each room.
So without more ado, I would ask Verlyn to speak to us about Tolkien himself.
Thank you, Caroline. Can you hear me okay?
And thank you, Marina, for a wonderful send off.
I hope I'm picking up where Marina left off. I'm going to begin with a quote from a draft of Tolkien's essay on fairy stories.
It didn't make it into the published version. And I'm really very sorry, because I think it's the most important sentence in the whole essay.
And it goes like this. Mythology is language and language is mythology.
Hmm. That's it. He wasn't content to say it just once, however, and he said it several times, which didn't make it into the published essay.
One is to ask what is the origin of stories?
Is to ask what is the origin of language and of the mind?
And another the incarnate mind. The tongue and the tail are in our world.
Coeval. You could put it another way.
You could say in the beginning was the word, but you'd have to be aware of that.
You were using beginning as an active participle construct or happening in which word was embedded,
in which word was both the source of and the agency for the beginning, so that the two of them are umbilical tied and can't be can't be separated.
That was something that talking. Believed.
Wrote about and also discovered when he first read in this takes him to the north the Finnish mythology.
It's called an epic sometimes, but it ain't no epic Kavala.
Which he read in what he said was a very poor translation.
And so he wanted to read it in Finnish, which is an impossible task.
But he tried to teach himself because he came more and more to think that the myths,
the stories and the words in which they were communicated were interdependent and that he wasn't really getting it.
If he was reading it in English, that in order to understand it, he would have to.
Taste the words, listen to the metre and see how that sort of carried the whole idea.
At the same time, he was inventing languages, starting with simple things like animal,
like in which every noun is substituted for a noun in English every word, and refining them farther and farther and farther.
Until he realised that you can't have a language without somebody who speaks it,
and you can't have somebody who speaks the language unless they live in the world that the language describes.
And so he realised what he had probably known instinctively all along, that the two go together, that you cannot.
Have a mythology without a language, but just as truly, you cannot have a language without a mythology.
Mythology is language and language is mythology.
And that was the kick-off that led to why we are here today.
That led to in a hole in the ground, there lived a habit to the Silmarillion, to the Lord of the Rings,
when the Lord of the Rings was first published and Tolkien said it all started with invented languages,
very few people believed him unless they had read the appendices.
It wasn't until The Silmarillion and then only partially that we realised he really meant it and began to investigate these for ourselves.
But. But it's true.
And anybody who reads. In more than one language or even in one language, which is all I read.
Well, know that. But to take away language is to take away culture.
Which is what? The English did with the Irish.
Were the Welsh or the CORNISH, which Anglo-Americans did with Indians,
which single the King of the Cinder did with the north door when he forbade them to speak their own language in the middle earth.
You live. In the world that is created by your language, to put it rather flippantly.
You don't live in reality.
You live in a description of reality, and you know the words that convey to you the meanings of all the things in your daily life.
There's a saying tried to Tory it Tory to translate is to betray the translator as a traitor.
And when Tolkien read the Kirby translation of Kavala, he knew exactly what that was saying.
And he wanted to write the balance and read the stories that he came to love and to transcribe and to rewrite.
In the language that best conveyed them that led first to the story of Collierville
and then to our true and it true and which is in Breton or which comes from Breton.
And then to the made up languages from which the stories of Middle Earth all derive.
I remember being a little. Well, I wasn't I wasn't disapproving,
but I did raise an eyebrow when I heard during Vatican the period of Vatican two that told Kim objected to the maths and English.
But of course he did because it's not the right language.
It's a translation. It may be conveyed conveying something to the people who hear it in their own language.
But from Tolkien's point of view, it's not the real thing.
And he wanted the real thing. So I forgave him for that.
He was interested in invented languages.
Well, Dimitri will probably tell us more about how his invented languages matched up with some of the others that were invented in the time.
But he was really interested in.
What at the time he was reading and thinking and writing was a very current linguistic theory called Sapir Wolf, which held.
And it's a theory, you know, nobody can prove it.
That language and thought and reality are interdependent and that if you move from language to language, you're moving from world to world.
They did a lot of work, particularly with Native American languages.
Well, I'm thinking particularly of Hopi, which has a number of different expressions for kinds of time that it seems to me
must have resonated very deeply with Tolkien in his own experiments with time.
But he was also interested in James Joyce. He read Gertrude Stein.
He felt that.
Stein in particular was doing some very important work with simply repetition and the
ways that the same word can bounce off each other if you repeat them often enough.
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
But if you. If you unpack that, it's got a lot of meaning in it.
The first thing to say is it's not a rose is a rose is rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
And it has a nice lilt to it. But he said in the essay on fairy stories.
That a real taste for fairy stories.
And I think he meant stories of myth and magic was wakened by philology.
On the threshold of manhood, not for children, and quickened to full life by war.
He began experimenting with languages while he was at school,
but he became much more intensely interested in them and in the stories that they generated when he was a soldier and has a
lovely story about sitting next to somebody in a mess hall who was obviously another story creator and language creator who said,
Yes, I shall express the blue perfect with a.
Edit2 with a with a suffix and he thought right and turned and the man had disappeared and he never saw him again.
But I want to get to quick and to full life by war.
Because he was going to war, he was in danger of losing his life.
And I'm reading into this statement that he also felt he was in danger of losing his world.
And that was particularly true with this particular war in which one indigenous although various Indo-European mythology.
Embodied in Western Europe was going to be engulfed by a particular version of a particular
myth that had been taken over and used to its advantage by the makers of that war,
World War One. And he was in danger of losing it.
I think at that moment, both language and myth must have become very precious to him.
And I use the word precious advisedly, but I think I've said enough and I'd like to turn it over to Demetrius.
Thank you very much for that. And now to introduce our final speaker with the metre,
a female who has a Ph.D. from Cardiff and is now senior lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University.
And she too is the author of numerous books, most recently the award winning Celtic Myth and Contemporary Children's Fantasy.
She's also editor with Andrew Higgins, a secret vice talking on invented languages,
which of course picks up very nicely from what Berlin was saying and Tolkien race and cultural history.
And she was also the judge of the Wales Book of the Year Award 2017.
Right. Bright her. Okay.
Thank you very much for having me. Thanks for the introduction, Caroline.
There are interesting convergences already between what we've been talking about and what I want to add today.
So talking to the Lord of the Rings is often cited as the literary work that inaugurated modern fantasy literature as a genre.
It is seen as a paradigmatic example at triggering a number of imitations of various degrees of success,
as well as causing a severe case of the anxiety of influence at leading stronger fancy
authors to write against its model and striving to construct a distinctive voice and style.
But Tolkien's influence has remained all pervasive, a fact perhaps best encapsulated by the late Sir Terry Pratchett and was so
lovely to see that letter by very young Terence Pratchett in the exhibition.
So this a Terry Pratchett st told him, appears in the fantasy universe in the same way that Mount Fuji appeared in all Japanese prints,
sometimes small in the distance and sometimes big and close to and sometimes not there at all.
And that's because the artist is standing on Mount Fuji.
So Brian Arthur Barry, therefore, is not at all exaggerating when he claims that The Lord of the Rings is a mental template for defining fantasy,
drawing upon fuzzy set theory, which comes from maths and logic.
And he claims that this is the way that most of us classify fantasy.
How do we know whether a text is fancy? Does it resemble the Lord of the Rings?
Now Professor Liggett has talked about Talking's personal motivations and his
construction of a secondary world and tied it all very nicely with language,
invention and with that on fairy stories and his theorising of fantasy, which I think is also a very important contribution.
You know, we have a host of other fantasy writers later theorising their own practice.
What I think is also important to highlight is that told he read fantasy too.
If we can call Tolkien the father of modern fantasy, someone grandfathers too.
And these are, you know, the works of the imagination of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and many others.
And this is this is where I'm picking up actually first from a professor who it now there
are two schools of thought in terms of the historical development of fantasy literature.
Some scholars take the view of the long history of fantasy,
so you will see arguments that actually fancy goes back to the beginning of time and the claim that
the first texts of fantasy are actually those ancient medieval tales and poems that retell myths,
legends and folk tales. So Odyssey as a fantasy or a both?
As a fantasy. And again, you know, I think probably Professor Warner has already sort of clarified this.
My own view sides with the opposite camp of fantasy as a modern genre, originally originating mostly in the 19th century,
largely as the underbelly of the dominance of the Victorian realist novel and having as a main in parties that really
of the wish for a re enchantment of a world that must have seemed at the time increasingly focussed on rationalism,
on technology and progress, and on science.
And the Victorians, of course, when strangest to retreat into imaginary worlds of medievalism and folklore,
the Middle Ages weren't perceived anymore as the dark, superstitious times that titillated readers of the early, early Gothic novel.
But there's a long lost golden age of chivalry and craftsmanship, which which encapsulated the sense of a glorious national or cultural past.
Equally, folklore had become a well-respected academic discipline, especially following the work of the Brothers Grimm,
a scholarly activity that could actually salvage ancient tales and beliefs captured in the oral tradition and transmitted across many generations.
And of course, fantasy did engage with these things. You know, it did engage with both of these routes of Escape for the Victorian Fantasy,
didn't mind the myths and legends of different traditions for its settings.
So we tend to get primordial at times in pre-modern societies and pre-industrial landscapes for its characters.
So we do get sort of details and heroes and wizards and dragons and elves and hobbits as well, and for its motif.
So we do get Cosmopolis stories and Tales of Fall from Grace in a way.
You know, we could think of The Silmarillion as the mythology of Middle-Earth and then maybe the great tales of and Luthien,
etc., or the legends of the, you know, heroic individuals.
And then, you know, Bilbo Baggins becoming a fairy tale in The Lord of the Rings is, you know,
the folktale element, but it also all but but fantasy, of course, also used mostly the conventions of the novel.
So we have detail, characterisations, detailed settings, you know, a different sort of.
Language. And again, that fits in with what Professor Warner was saying earlier about verse versus prose, etc.
Now, talk is publication guy that a timeline can be rather misleading.
The Hobbit was published in 1937, The Lord of the Rings in 5455.
But in many ways, these were late works, especially the Lord of the Rings off,
and also had been writing and obsessively developing this entire legend daring since the 19 tens.
And I have argued elsewhere, and I stand by this argument that Tolkien should probably be considered as a late Victorian or Edwardian writer.
That literary context explains a lot about the kind of fiction he wrote and the kind of imaginary world that he constructed.
And as I said earlier, you knew and read Victorian Fantasy.
So when one thinks about the Victorian roots of thought and fantasy,
the texts that come to mind, obviously children's children's books, children's fantasy.
But there was also fantasy for adults at that time.
But many of the relevant texts became part of the canon of what we today recognise as fantasy later.
And a major role in that process was played by the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, which was published between May 1969 and April 1917.
In response actually specifically to the growing popularity of The Lord of the Rings and the series,
editors were keen to find new authors of fantasy or rediscover old ones.
There were a total of 70 titles in that series, many of which were reprints of all the fantasy works.
I often out of print for many, many years and forgotten this and has done a lot of work on this.
The series included a great number of Victorian fantasy works that have been largely neglected, neglected by critics and were sinking into oblivion.
And here we can see, I think, exactly what I was saying before, what Brian Atterbury calls the fuzzy set and the centre note.
In a way, The Lord of the Rings became the model by which the text was selected retrospectively and classified as works of fantasy.
And the two authors that I've got in mind is pretty fundamental fear for Tolkien and his and the development of these fantasy.
And one of them has already been mentioned are George MacDonald and William Morris
McDonald wrote both fairy tales for children and fantasy romances for adults,
but he was also one of the very first to try to attempt to theorise fantasy literature as well.
You know, he's actually this fantastic imagination anticipates some of Tolkien's ideas in on fairy stories.
MacDonald's most important work in terms of the emergence of the fantasy genre to fairy tales for children and to fantasy
what's for adults who fantasies travel to fairy romance for men and women follows this young protagonist out of this,
into a more into into fairyland, into a quest to pursue that young lady, that it starts as a love interest,
but it ends up being a spiritual journey during which the hero moves through an enchanted landscape, which is really powerfully described.
Lilith concentrates more on the dark side of fairyland.
The main here, Mr. Vane, moves to a terrifying, nightmarish landscape.
And both noble novels these portals to the secondary world as they present us with this dual nature of fairyland.
And again, we see both of those things in Tolkien.
We both we see both of the florid landscape and and the sort of more terrifying, nightmarish mode of our journey.
MacDonald opened the way for renegotiating the tradition, the traditional fairyland of folklore into a world of its own with its own internal rules.
Not to the extent that Tolkien did it later, but it is sort of the beginning of a process.
And his children's books The Princess and the Goblin and the Princess and Kid, they are equally important for the place and fantasy genre,
not least because they introduce the goblins, you know, the intrinsically sort of monstrous others that are often found in fantasy.
Tolkien's orcs were called Goblins in The Hobbit, and Tolkien have been acknowledged.
He's a he's dead to MacDonald, so he's.
MacDonald exemplifies the roots of fantasy in the Victorian interest in folklore and the literary fairy tale.
Then Morris represents the kindred interest in medievalism and the rediscovery of northern European mythologies.
Maurice was fascinated with the Middle Ages as a better place than Victorian modernity.
He was interested in Old Norse and demonic myths and legends, and he that his contribution to fantasy were sort of romances taking place,
taking place in sort of imaginary medieval settings where you medievalist worlds
and I'm talking about works such as the would be on the world or the well,
the world's end and also in,
in a separate sort of creative streak, the northern world works that took place in imagined Germanic societies, for example,
a tale of the House of the Wolf Things and the Roots of the Mountains and Morris's Idealisation
of the Germanic world following the pattern of the Old Norse sagas into Spenser's.
Well, prose and verse and including elements of enchantment and supernatural appearances, was clearly an influence on Tolkien as well.
So by tending to revitalise the medieval romance genre, Morris gave fantasy some of its most enduring elements of pre-industrial medieval settings,
complex narratives, multiple plots and subplots, and a focus a focus on Northern European mythologies.
And they're coming back exactly to what we were talking about at the beginning,
as opposed to classical motifs, which, yes, indeed, English literature had relied upon for a long time.
And Tolkien himself declared that he studied northern European languages and literatures in reaction against the classics.
And this is really my my last point here, that really this is a really important line to draw,
and I'll sort of approach it from a slightly different perspective.
But I think that the Nielsen genre of fantasy was definitely influenced by the 19th century interest in folklore and myth,
and so to invent a new mythmaking process both crystallised later in Tolkien's work.
But these had to be specifically Northern European myth and legend.
This was literature inspired by mythical and legendary material, but not by the classics.
English literature had relied in classical mythology for centuries,
but the Victorian fantasy slipped up through the dark forests of northern Europe, then the sunlit marble civilisation of Greece and Rome.
And I think there was certainly a surge of identity in this 19th century interest in the nation's own stories and folklore,
and interest that starts with new German romanticism. And then we have the rediscovery of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon texts and their story and legend.
And of course, the value placed on traditional fairy tales as well with with folklore.
Is that respectable now academic discipline. And this is, I think, the legacy that Tolkien engaged with.
And this season, again, this is probably a pretty big thing to say. One of the most significant aspects, I would say,
I think of British fantasy literature more generally a desire to connect with a mythical and legendary past,
as exemplified in Tolkien's own work, and also by some of the most important fantasists who followed in Tolkien's footsteps,
such as Susan Cooper, Diane Wyn Jones and Alan Gardiner.
Do you have Barry on? Thank you very much. Right.
So we've heard three wonderfully different and yet interlocking discussions of where Tolkien took his inspiration from,
why we keep returning to myths and fairy tales to discuss these extraordinary aspects of human existence.
And we can also, I think, open up from there.
Some of the questions that the symmetry raised is not about where we go from Tolkien, where people went at that point.
And so now it's your turn to ask any questions that you might have.
And I'll just repeat again, please tell us who you want to answer or let us know if it's the the whole panel.
And I will try to spot some hands. Therefore, my question is maybe for Professor FLATOW.
I was very interested in what you were saying about Tolkien opposing my being in English rather than Latin,
and just his general interest in academics towards translation and how interesting you seem to be in the field.
And the sound of language itself with that has to do with like particular emotional qualities
that he felt could be pregnant in the original language that would have been in the translation.
Or is it to be that he felt that something particular would be lost in the act of transmuting the white requirement language?
So your question is, what do I think he would have felt was missing?
And that's an easy answer. Everything. The whole.
The whole context. The whole occasion.
The whole history of the words. Isn't there in English.
I don't think I could get any farther into his head than that.
But thank you. It's a good question. Maybe somebody else can answer.
Anybody else on the panel whose views? To ask a question about it, actually, as you may know,
which is that the exhibition reveals to us that he was taken in as an orphan into a Catholic family or nuns.
No, he was adopted. His mother converted to Catholicism.
And then he was given to nuns and then to the mortuary.
So he's he's one of the priests. So that the mortuary became his legal guardian after both of his parents and after his mother died.
But he didn't remain a Catholic himself. He told kids.
Oh, yes, yes. Not that he didn't have doubts.
I'm sure he did. No, I just I didn't. But, yes, he was a Catholic all his life.
It's a couple of questions that have. Right think that perhaps you could pass it on to energy.
So this I guess this is a general question, but it's the use of the word me in the in talking world.
I would say these are not really myths, the history, because I think it's reasonably clear that all these things if our real rings are a real problem.
So in terms of creating your myth, you could say it focuses on things that we have in our world.
But in Tompkins Well, they're not they're not myths. They're actually real stories, even photos.
I don't think he would have. Feel comfortable with your distinction?
Yeah. And I'm not sure that the people know this is, again, making a huge leap whose myths these stories were.
Would have made a distinction between the belief in the story.
Either there is a very or there was in the thirties a very popular school connecting with with ritual and re-enactment.
But I and I once wrote a very interesting book called Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths?
But as far as we know, they did.
I think I would say exactly. I would flip it exactly the same way.
So within the culture that tells these stories, these are all true,
that there is no apart from maybe the folk tale which could be tells us and was an entertaining story around round the fire,
etc. But myths and legends are definitely true within the culture that tells them totally us from
outside talking about them that call them this one way difference between myth and the history.
Just from the outside, we know the history of just the world.
We know it's the mode of consciousness that we're using.
So in this is the this goes back to this idea of mythos and logos.
Yes. I mean, obviously, religions use logos as if it's true.
I mean, the in the beginning was the word. So there are difficulties around it.
But in general, the is the assumption that a myth is false or a lie is something that has been imposed by enlightenment views about falsehood.
And we see it again in operation now with the inability to distinguish between what all calls feigned histories,
which is a reporting of the truth of events that have happened.
And what we have now is fake news. Fake news is used some things with and that's deleting for all of us who like imaginative speculation,
deleting a kind of whole world of possibilities. Because the mode of consciousness that myth calls on is imaginative construction, some creation,
he calls it in talking and and that and that is a truth telling mechanism of the human consciousness, a very strong one.
It's absolutely impossible for us actually to model any form of possible possibility without using it, and that's certainly not a falsehood.
So I think that I mean and I think most readers actually folks in fantasy literature accept
that accept this this idea that the imaginative modelling of a dragon is a real truth.
But when I read this, I say I do accept the fact that he's a real animal.
Well, that's in that world, within the rules of that world.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. Do you agree? I do think that in my study of Tolkien, in both the myth and the intertwined language,
the thing that I've always been most impressed and in awe of is the death that he created.
And I don't know anything before Tolkien that I read.
Certainly I've never gotten that sense of depth that he created in both the myth making and in the language invention.
And, you know, I was reading the book of the last hours through reading a comment on the environment.
I mean, there is depth there. And what I would like to hear from each of you is.
How deliberate is not the right word, but how conscious do you think he was as he was developing this whole group most of his lifetime,
that he was creating this idea of death? And there was this sense that there were tales not being told, which is being mentioned and things like that.
And how much of that was just a product of him working on this mythology, changing little bits and pieces each time and creating these ladies?
I guess what I'm trying to get to is how deliberate and how, just as a product of his work, of his myth of work,
so that what we have now is this incredible history that we can live in and to be, you know, histories of battles and all that.
And and has become the blueprint now for world building, you know, onwards.
You know, thinking about people like George R.R. Martin, you know,
whereas he did it throughout his lifetime without the sense of, I'm going to write this history.
He did it over the course of a lifetime. And I think he did that both with his thinking and his language invention as well.
So just like I think you just answered your own. Just.
What do we want to hear? A bit more from the panel alone.
I think it was mainly because I was just trying to find.
Yeah, I think it's very difficult because I mean,
we are extremely lucky to have the history of Middle-Earth series of 12 volumes because we can see, you know,
these tiny changes of, you know,
how the how the the tales changed and how the concepts changed and how sometimes even very fundamental ideas about it changed.
So there's one there's one sense in which it happened, because you have somebody who is a Nicola and a,
you know, somebody keeps them tinkling with stories and wants,
you know, there's something to be said about writing and rewriting rewrite and write some students I it's a creative writing.
Seems like you've been telling them just before rewriting. Right. It's a good thing in the end.
But on the other hand, I think there was definitely, at least at the beginning, this vision of an anthology that we call it conventionally.
I know it's not the right phrase we call convention the mythology for England.
And it had a much more nationalistic not in not in a negative way, but,
you know, a sense of cultural heritage that and it didn't quite end up that way.
You know, we end up with, you know, the mythology. We end up with much more.
I don't know, it's World Heritage now, isn't it? It's something that belongs to to a whole world of not just even to northern Europe.
And I think that vision was there at the beginning and creates, you know, this even in the Book of Lost Tales,
the very earliest versions, we still have depth, maybe not to the extent we've got it later, but I think it's there already in German.
Can I jump in? Oh, go ahead. Good. Well, I was going to say this gets a little complicated, because at the end of his life,
he really sort of turned from poetry to science and and started analysing these myths.
If you read the volumes of Christopher, the history of Middle-Earth after The Lord of the Rings,
the War of the Jewels, the people of peoples of Middle Earth.
More of us ring. The they have a different approach from the pre Lord of the Rings early Book of Lost Tales, Lives of Malaria and all of those.
And it was. The fallout from the Lord of the Rings that moved him in this direction because it got so many questions.
Ken, how do elves and humans procreate? You know, should they?
And he tried to where he had had a poetic vision of a world with.
Of a species that lived. Immortality and one that died.
He then had to start figuring out the genetics.
And so it's different. All right.
Well, actually, I wanted to ask Dmitri something.
You said it does relate to this building of worlds and that and that is you mentioned the Celtic and Irish and possibly Welsh, you know, sources.
And you said that that became part of this national mythological.
Imagination. But I just would like to know a bit more about how that shows in Tolkien's writing,
because one of the things that I feel you'll probably over his head me is that there's not enough female presence where it feels so,
so and as some of noggin and Irish materials are absolutely filled with the.
I know that the sagas are two fantastically strong heroines of Wicked.
One of them the wicked. I mean, those are very, very powerful.
I mean, there's a sort of equality of parity of interest in those great poems.
So does it. I mean, did he does he borrowed from it?
Does he does he adapt? Which he does. He does. Yeah.
But that's I mean, that's of course, that's a very big question.
And we do see quite a bit of the Irish material adapted in the in The Silmarillion Tales or what became The Silmarillion Tales.
So they're the tales at the top of the dominion of the sort of deities that leave and then,
you know, burn the sheets and all of this, you know, you see all of that sort of parallel.
And I think the other the other big one, again, you know, this is scratching the surface here,
but the Arthurian legend and and his own retelling of the fall of Arthur actually does have a pretty strong female presence in there,
not necessarily in a very positive, you know, present light.
So there are definitely elements of of this.
I think with with that Celtic material, the the the Welsh linguistic influence is stronger than anything else.
Again, we go back to myth is language. Yeah. So if we have an all pervasive so are we going to get out of the Celtic in sort of quotation marks.
That's, that's another big discussion can of worms that I'm not going to open.
But the, the, the way that the Welsh language it sounds actually fed into the names and the place names.
And you know, even if you're not going to stop and try and read that, that that's a sort of poetic compositions in that language.
The names are throughout The Lord of the Rings, for sure.
And I've always wondered whether this sort of the these repeated motif of the mortal man and fairy woman that we see in total,
we're actually the woman is actually of the highest status. That in the mind comes from the Irish and the Welsh tales that that's very sorry.
This is just trying to condense too much. 2 seconds, right.
We have a question. I then perhaps we can release the microphone back on to this some little we've.
How would you describe the influence of his Catholic faith on the myths and stories he created in the and.
Oh, gosh. He stuck it out. I wouldn't even try.
This is very hard. This is a big, big subject.
And you can draw parallels just all over the place.
Is it influence or is it simply a parallel?
Was he trying to do it? Was it just was it did it just happen?
Was he so imbued with a Catholic myth in most respectful use of that term?
It's very hard to pin it down. Yeah.
Sorry. This. I suppose. I suppose there are some fundamentals there.
So we do have we do have an anthology in which you have sort of a semblance of ancient or ancient mythologies in which you have a pantheon.
Right. So we do have the valar and we do have sort of they have discrete areas, etc.
But above all of them there is the one Godhead, the one God.
So I think there is a, you know, at the heart of this a an attempt to sort of reconcile a Christian worldview with,
you know, the sort of texts that he enjoyed reading the mythological text akin to reading.
But if we, you know, yeah, it's just where do you start in The Lord of the Rings, you know?
It's I think you're correct. But we should also remember that the whole point of it was to be a pre Christian mythology.
Yes. On which he said he wanted it intended it to be consonant with Christianity.
It was still work again. But. But not Christianity because it hadn't come yet.
I think that I think that the mythology is very strongly tinged as a lot of modern fantasy is more modern and possibly Victorian,
but certainly modern fantasy and getting into contemporary.
You see it in Philip Pullman with the notion of. The dualism, the deep struggle between a very, very powerful force of evil,
forces of evil, and the forces of goods that are weak against against them.
And and, of course, in his case, I think it was because of the Armageddon of the First World War that you saw this.
And it's very in the films, it's very strong. The sort of vision of the fields plunders the dead.
And that photograph you have in the exhibition is very,
very distressing photographs where the people who all died in this year, Dexter, are blacked out.
That's right. As it is. Yes. Yes. I mean, that's, you know, really.
And he was lucky. We're lucky and he was lucky that he survived.
But but but I think that I mean, this is a little bit speculative, but on the whole,
English Catholicism was very influenced and shaped by Protestantism.
And so that actually the the sort of incarnation and merciful aspects of Catholicism, the fact that it's, you know, most disliked by the Reformation,
that it's slack and lax and sort of forgives people things and that you go you have your sex with
your girlfriend and then you go to confession that you have sex the next day with your girlfriend.
Good confession. That that that was how the English saw the Catholics.
So so so that was in there.
And I think that there's a Puritan streak in this vision of Armageddon, of this vision of the of a struggle to the death with the evil in chances.
All the evil forces. I don't know if you would agree with that, but I think that the good versus evil is, gosh, there's enough huge.
What is interesting in terms of the context and and of the war context.
Sure. But but at the same time, it's also what you were saying earlier on about the fairy tale and the ethics of hope and and the sort of I think,
you know, in most cases, we talk about fantasy as a structure and we talk about fences,
a structure that has a comedic and not comedic in terms of comedy humour, but comedic in terms of not tragedy.
So expect or resolution, you expect, you know, you expect actually a set piece battle.
Yeah, expect a big battle. And that's the frustration that I'm finished work that I will not not mention here.
But you expect a big confrontation and you expect the good side to win.
And, you know, that is built in. I think, you know, it was slight, you know, it was kind of already there with that.
Maurice McDonald But it does come much stronger in talking because probably of that context.
All right. Coming in the microphone over here. We had to have.
Thank you. Thank you all for the wonderful presentations.
I'm doing some work around midnight, specifically in the sense of narratives through which we interpret the world.
And so I wanted to think about the middle earth work so good off of what you were talking about the beginning,
Professor Warner, about the distinction between fairy tale and myth and the ontology suggested by one or the other.
And I've I've been noting the way that fantasy works, like Lord of the Rings, like Harry Potter,
even have that kind of interpretive quality where, you know, we talk about what house are you and Harry Potter?
And the wake of the 2016 election in America. We had more of our national park set up as a Twitter account that was sort
of interpreting American politics through the lens of the Lord of the Rings.
It's brilliant. I recommend looking it up.
So I just wondered if if anyone wanted to comment on that interpretive quality, both of classical myth and of Tolkien's midpoint because.
Oh, gosh. Well, of course. Do you think, Alfred?
Well, Dmitri said what I was thinking.
Oh, God. In response to your question, which was, of course,
misinterprets reality and makes it accessible to all of us, or it reconfigures it and calls it fake news.
Well, I'm very interested in your work. I hope you progress with that.
And I hope you publish it. I think that's that's part that's part of the reason why fantasy is has gained in popularity,
especially in the 20th and 21st century, because it has become a way to engage with the world in a different way.
You know, if we think about if we think about myth synthesis, I'm stealing.
Now, this is Mary Beard's idea, that myth to myth as a verb to myth and the idea of mythologising.
And if you think about ancient, may something about sort of aetiological myths.
Right, that explain why we have the seasons or, you know, what particular rituals are happening, etc.
In a way, I think that we're sort of doing the same thing, the fantasy and fantasies,
filling the gap of trying to understand the world by telling these sorts of stories.
Why at this particular time? Why, you know, towards the end, late 19th century, I mean, my hypothesis,
which is sort of presented earlier, was that there is a sort of religion is losing its focus at that point.
There's much more emphasis on science and technology, etc. But these, you know, fantasies born as the underbelly for that.
We still need the stories we still need. We still need the myths.
And I think this is part of what fantasy still doing today from many different perspectives and not necessarily,
you know, as a as a religious act, but as a folkloric act, as as a as it is written.
It's not oral anymore and it is much more tied into specific words.
But the function that's it. That's the word was the function of it I think is quite similar.
But actually I think the best sort of overview of the freeze is called Reason of Myth.
It's an essay by John if you know the great scholar, a Greek scholar.
And that that actually gives you a very, very full exploration of your question because he's the very title shows you what he's trying to do.
He begins with a kind of standoff between myths and history.
Then he moves closer to many different theories of mythology from the anthropologists,
the structuralist as he moves through to actually quoting Plato at the end.
Which is interesting because the Republic ends with the words, perhaps the myth will save us.
So Plato, having turned away from, you know,
from having affirmed the importance of rational discourse and actually in the end realises that this form of imaginative invention,
which he has discarded to some extent for his idea republic, nevertheless.
And of course, the idea of patriotism is, you know, with us.
That nevertheless, you know, this will be the mode of inquiry.
But, I mean, I have to. And then on the point of songs,
I think Pullman is very interesting in that because he's really taken the great mysteries of
quantum and so forth and so forth and tried to mythologise to this world in a very gripping way.
Is in the trilogy and his dark materials. And that's kind of an interesting step.
And I think Terry Pratchett does it a bit, too, doesn't he? Yes. So so that there's no there's no real distinction between, you know,
this is still a mode of inquiry into which with current scientific knowledge, it's it's available for.
It was one of those things where you said, oh, yes, I did want to put aside a word of caution, which is that, of course,
this instituting reality through through language and through imaginative acts can is not intrinsically a moral activity.
It's you know, it has been in the course of history, a very dangerous activity.
I mean, the Nazis were completely mythologised. You bet. So, so and end of anti-Semitism was mythologised outside the Third Reich.
So this is you know, this is a this is a powerful tool.
It is the ring. It's a powerful tool. Eric, isn't it?
Yeah. And and we need to I mean, Margaret Atwood said that the other day because of the closing of libraries and things,
she was protesting against the closing of this. We should we must remember that books are not intrinsically good.
There are a lot of very bad books. I mean, not that because they're written about because they have wrong you know, they have messages that are.
Thank you very much. One of the presentations in there.
You. I was just wondering. This is. I think.
Anybody there who can turn? This is probably one.
Professor Warner, I'm very interested in what you do. And I think that the role of.
Image. In the creation of his fantasy.
Yes. But actually, I think you we know much more about that than I do.
Could you hear the question at the back? It's only quiet here. Could you hear, though, about the role of image making in Tolkien specifically?
Is it just. Because I have. Because it's not like I have to ask you, what images are you thinking?
What do you mean? His paintings or his verbal descriptions?
Paintings, his maps in his illustrative material?
Do you think it's really illustrative or do you think it at times is a starting point for his work?
Well, he said he couldn't have written without the map.
As far as the Lord of the Rings was concerned, he had to have it and he had to have it in order to know where he was going.
Now, if this is a book about a journey, that means the map is going to be essential almost from the get go.
And if you look at the exhibit, you see how tattered those maps are and how many times they have been drawn and drawn over.
It was absolutely essential. To have it for the Lord of the Rings, but also in smaller compass, I think, for the stories of the Silmarillion.
Dimitri, would you. Yeah, I think the maps are interesting and I would say the maps are slightly different to the the drawings or the paintings.
And I think you're absolutely right in terms of the sort of realistic journey that he's portraying in the role of the rings, you need the map.
And again, he's not unique. There are lots of I mean, what's his name?
Robert Louis Stevenson saying, I couldn't have written Treasure Island without the map.
It's you know, the map is something that a lot of authors have talked about. But, for example, that there is the mythological map.
You know, you can see in the exhibition there that even a Cameron, the portrayal of the world is a Viking ship,
which shows you a different sort of map and a different sort of conception of the world.
So, yes, I think they are absolutely crucial, actually.
And at times, especially if you've seen The Art of the Lord of the Rings or The Art of The Hobbit,
sometimes he would he would visualise particular settings first and write about them next or actually write a bit about them,
then try before drawing, see, well, does that work and continue in that vein.
So it was it was, it was integral.
And you see how what a prolific doodler he was that everything you know towards the end of his
life everything that he was drawing a painting became somehow entangled with Middle-Earth.
So Doodles became a luminary in carpet design, right?
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's so it's sort of, I think crossing over one way and the other.
Interestingly, there's a there's among the papers. I don't know if it's of the exhibit, and I don't think so,
but maybe there's a drawing of curious angle with the steps that's in the margins of the text, the the manuscript.
So it's clear that he was trying to visualise not climbing or steps.
Oh, here you go the hobbits and writing to the image which which is I think your question and a very cute one which came up.
I think it's an interesting aspect of how he thought of the book.
I think in a way he was transforming the book. Of course, remembering Maurice.
I mean, Maurice Blake. I mean, these great imaginary imaginations and visionaries worked with images because in the end,
their creativity was not separated into text or sound or, you know, it was it was a full.
I mean, it sort of matched the world they were making was a full sensory experience.
And so. The video becomes more of a form of play.
The whole thing, just like a child will play with. And it will do every aspect in a game.
But what? Just stick to saying the words will you know, make the costumes or draw something, will make noises in the songs.
Because when you actually trying to track your own creations, you don't as you're not describe what someone playing.
Right? Well, yes, I. You feel that this piece of the puzzle would have to fit into the whole panel.
So it is used almost as a synonym to magic.
But if. None of if we live in a world created by language and the language of love and love.
Create a world where dragons and somany heavenly light fighters are how they fly one form and what is magic.
Tolkien spent a lot of time trying to answer that, and he was very concerned with,
with the nature of magic, with the connection with or different from miracle and that kind of thing.
If you go to etymology, fantasy comes from fancy, which comes from phantasm, which means to make appear,
which comes from feigning, which means to appear, which comes from bull in a European bow, which means to see.
So they. It's a progression of.
Words attempting to capture. The experience of and visual envisioning something and making it happen.
It's related to phenomena which are appearances.
So that's what we see. And the fantasist is the one who makes us see things through the words.
I don't know if that answers your question or not.
So it's sort of okay.
The thing is, is there really, you know, in the common sort of understanding of the term and that that's where we have a problem, right?
It's how do you define magic, magic to begin with and how do you use it?
But there are a number of cases where in The Lord of the Rings,
we're told that that's the sort of thing that some people might call magic, but it isn't quite that simple.
So. Yes, yes, that's right. So in middle earth, the thing is, it's it's a natural thing.
It's the outsider probably that sees it as magic again.
But yeah, that's an easy way out for me.
Mean this contest isn't that sort of part of the fantasy novel that of about good magic and bad magic I mean on the whole the.
The kind of bad magic is instrumentalized, but it's somebody using it for their own purposes, for their own ambition, for their own power.
The clear, the rings. But it's also in Harry Potter and in Harry Potter, Hogwarts.
They're learning to be magicians to counteract this this power.
So there. But there are other forms of magic.
One of them definitely is language. Magic.
I mean, the fact that, you know, you learn as speech acts and it also means that you can actually create legal bonds, you create a marriage,
you can change the Eucharist into the body of Christ by saying hocus pocus corpus, which then, you know, derogatorily becomes hocus pocus.
So this is. But I think that it's.
It would be. I mean, it's another of these enormous terms magic that you sort of need to be just to pick up on the point of Fantasia.
Almost all models of mind until just now. The distinguished Fantasia from the Morea and indeed from reason from right here.
They put them in different chambers in the mind. Aristotle had that model and it went on.
The only person who actually diverged from it was Leonardo, who,
because he thought about the way he thought and he realised that he should put them together because when he summed up an image which he then drew,
he knew that sometimes he'd seen it and sometimes he hadn't.
But he was doing it with saying he felt a sense that he was doing it with the same faculty.
And that is now shown by cognitive studies that when you are visualising the scenes, when you read Tolkien,
the parts of your brain lighting up are exactly the same parts of your brain as when
you're remembering that it's your mother's birthday and you must send her a present.
I mean, that's just the same thing. I mean, it may not be the identical part, but there's no difference between remembering a dream, dreaming.
And it's the same is the same model and the same things, the same synapses firing.
And that's truly important in terms of how fantasy can be effective in the world,
because if you know and that's the feeling that we actually get, but especially from film, I hope you've seen it.
Did I really see it always is filled with all this sort of confusion that is happening because we have such good representation of the medium.
All right. We have a question that came down on that in here, I think, and that may be about as many as we can.
And if you have unless we can have a quick question.
I'd like to wish. You seem she's more contentious.
One is Peter Jackson and the other is it's a classical tradition.
You mentioned that Red Riding Hood might be. And in classical tradition, they're all myths.
It varies in the way that, for example, Soviet.
How important is it for a women? It can be retold in a different.
It's absolutely of paramount importance, I would say.
So what makes those myths important is that they're versatile and they mean different things at different times,
and that's why we keep on telling them they are elastic.
Plastic. You know, we can we can shape them and recycle them in different ways.
Talking. Caught in the cauldron. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So story told in this story, you know, different ingredients are sort of swirling around it.
It is a broth, but a broth can be, you know, taste of different things.
And people make the broth and, you know, in their own way.
And I think the broth the cauldron is too static, actually.
And of course, you also had this model of the tree and she also accepting his their walk.
So that's okay. But but the I think the model more for me more is is migratory birds who of who you know who often there's no border
for them a migratory bird will will carry its beautiful plumage and song and ways making nests across borders.
Land here, land the go back.
And that's what stories do they can't say on the wing.
Can I borrow your word caldron for a minute, which is talking's word and a very good one.
But if you think of it as on the fire, it's not steady, it's boiling, it's bubbling, and the ingredients in it are bumping up against each other.
And then he also said, we can't forget the cook and the person who dips up the soup and puts it in the bowl.
There's or there's selectivity. And selectivity can be both individual and very conscious and cultural and and shaped by assumptions.
Five can be customised for now for one last question.
Yes. I did think I was simply going to observe the question about image that it's lovely with all of you here and Tolkien's image of Bilbo.
Going down the river to the. The wood.
Wood outside the raffles. Yeah. Thank you.
And how much? The images were in his mind as he created.
The stories and. In just the there's a three dimensionality.
There's a four dimensionality there for him because he was thinking about these things and he's drawing them as he's writing them.
And it's just wonderful and rich.
And so I don't have a question so much about that as just an observation in appreciating the image and the design of the whole display and exhibit.
It's been wonderful. Thank you. Okay.
Which doesn't really require a come back to the things. Perhaps you could take this one last question down here.
Yep. Yeah. Their kids?
Most of them. Yeah, very final question. But I look back to the beginning and the distinction between their stories, the myth.
Which is something Tolkin mentions.
This matches this tag. Many times without going into the distinctions.
But taking them. Granted the 62 ends of the spectrum.
And. He adds. He explains over and over again that what he wants to do is to have or have bought the spectrum to produce something that has all this.
He wants to make it a theatre where you have in the foreground very story characters.
You see them against the backdrop of the ecology. So that is his original vision for sort of a vision of mythology, but the vision of this theatrical.
Comments on that. I like a distinction that he made, actually, which is very much his personal old fashioned way and fairy tales.
I mean, and he just assumes that distinction.
So the fair fairy is the atmosphere, the mood, the kind of place where one where his wonders and and mythological happenings happen.
And it's not the same as a fairy tale, which is, you know, Sleeping Beauty or Bluebeard is often short so that it's not often observed.
People don't actually see that there's a distinction between the fairy tale world because you can say,
you know, of a long novel that it's fairytale like it is fearless fairy, what you call fairy.
I mean, I'm sure castles novels are like that. They're not fairy tales.
You couldn't call it nice matter. But the landscape wonder is that.
Same as in a fairy tale. Mary and Pippin are in a romance.
Aragorn is in an epic. Frodo is in a tragedy.
A Greek mythological tragedy.
To me. I like this idea of the theatre.
I think it does speak to your sense of death that we'd be talking about the foreground background.
It does speak to that sense of time as well.
How far back can you go? How far forward can you go?
And all of these are being encapsulated there right from the beginning.
They become more complex as the as they as the legendary develops.
But the fact that we do get, you know, these sort of all of these types of folk narratives, you know,
or even literary genres as well, inscribed within the same three volume novel is just extraordinary.
You know, this is my life's work. And with that, I think it's time to let our panel have a well-deserved rest.
Thank you all for your questions. I'm sorry.