1 00:00:03,050 --> 00:00:06,470 Okay, I make it 1:00. So let us make a start. 2 00:00:06,470 --> 00:00:08,750 I'm sure we've all got things we need to be doing at two. 3 00:00:08,810 --> 00:00:19,040 And so, first of all, many thanks for coming for this this first in this series to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of Professor Tolkien. 4 00:00:19,460 --> 00:00:23,120 And you will have seen, hopefully the website, etc., 5 00:00:23,120 --> 00:00:31,309 that there's a series of talks this term given by members of various faculties at Oxford and they are all fully booked. 6 00:00:31,310 --> 00:00:36,980 But I suspect there probably would be some spaces if you if you do need to or want to come to them, just let me know. 7 00:00:37,400 --> 00:00:40,790 And they're all here in the Fitzhugh auditorium. 8 00:00:40,790 --> 00:00:46,939 And I'm extremely grateful not only to the faculty of English but especially to Exeter College, Tolkien's First college, 9 00:00:46,940 --> 00:00:50,120 of course, when he was a student here for hosting us. 10 00:00:50,840 --> 00:00:58,190 And they are all as they're all going to be here with the exception of the first of November, which is a pay Giuseppe Pezzini's Tolkien and the Classics, 11 00:00:58,190 --> 00:01:03,950 which is going to be down at the Faculty of English on Main Road, which was Tolkien's department, of course. 12 00:01:03,950 --> 00:01:11,700 So it all ties together. And I took the opportunity of just casting my mind back 50 years. 13 00:01:12,600 --> 00:01:17,460 I looked at the times and there was the the notice on the September 4th about Tolkien's burial. 14 00:01:17,700 --> 00:01:21,090 Very small, as you can see. But just a little note in there. 15 00:01:21,580 --> 00:01:24,390 And but they did run in an obituary the day before. 16 00:01:25,950 --> 00:01:32,190 What interested me about this was on the left there is the obituary there, creator of hobbits and inventor of new mythology. 17 00:01:32,730 --> 00:01:39,090 And it had a nice balance between his work as an academic and his work as a writer of of of the fantasy books. 18 00:01:39,090 --> 00:01:43,740 We probably all know him. But without missing the opportunity to have a dig at his lecturing style. 19 00:01:44,200 --> 00:01:51,509 And but the news was, oh, there could be another book here, The Silmarillion, which of course would appear four years later. 20 00:01:51,510 --> 00:01:59,430 But people were already talking about some of Tolkien's writings which never got published, which to a degree is a theme for this talk. 21 00:02:00,600 --> 00:02:06,540 Now, I sent myself the title of How to write The Lord of the Rings, which is utterly ridiculous. 22 00:02:07,740 --> 00:02:12,660 I mentioned it to my wife and she said, But it's already been written. And I said, That's very true. 23 00:02:13,080 --> 00:02:19,400 And so I would like to say this is a kind of warm up to the to the other series seminars in this series. 24 00:02:19,920 --> 00:02:25,140 And I do feel a bit like Gandalf and Bilbo at the beginning of The Hobbit, and I'm paraphrasing here. 25 00:02:25,530 --> 00:02:29,069 What do you mean? He said, Do you wish to tell me how to write The Lord of the Rings? 26 00:02:29,070 --> 00:02:32,760 Or do you mean to tell me how Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings or what I 27 00:02:32,760 --> 00:02:36,540 can learn from Tolkien if I want to write a book like The Lord of the Rings, 28 00:02:37,050 --> 00:02:40,530 to which Bilbo, with some exasperation, replied All of them at once. 29 00:02:41,130 --> 00:02:48,810 So this is a talk that will go in several directions. And we're going to take some tentative steps from the shire out into the wild. 30 00:02:49,170 --> 00:02:55,559 And there is some background material here. So if you are very, very familiar with Tolkien, I think I would have to apologise. 31 00:02:55,560 --> 00:03:03,000 But it interests me because I lecture on fantasy literature at and at the English faculty and 32 00:03:03,000 --> 00:03:07,680 what I like to sort of pull out for me is that is the way people construct these novels. 33 00:03:08,400 --> 00:03:13,500 So first of all, what is what is it if you're going to write a book in a particular genre, 34 00:03:13,500 --> 00:03:21,360 what genre you you going for The Lord of the Rings has been described or the various times as an epic, a romance, Tolkien's own word, a saga, 35 00:03:21,690 --> 00:03:28,050 or notoriously Juvenile Trash and Balderdash by Wilson and Early Review, and Tom Shipp, 36 00:03:28,080 --> 00:03:32,820 who is a scholar of token Tolkien's works and inspiration to many of us, 37 00:03:33,120 --> 00:03:38,400 once argued that the problem The Lord of the Rings faces is that there is so many things that makes it so many modes. 38 00:03:38,820 --> 00:03:44,370 And the critics who, when they've actually read it, which most of them haven't, don't seem to know what to make of it. 39 00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:51,360 But if you are to write The Lord of the Rings or the next Lord of the Rings, you've got to have a feel for what genre your placing this in. 40 00:03:51,810 --> 00:04:00,660 And I think to cut through books and books and articles about these, what we would say is it is it is a piece of fantasy literature. 41 00:04:01,020 --> 00:04:07,320 We then have to have to ask what is fantasy literature? And this, again, has been discussed over many decades and studies. 42 00:04:08,160 --> 00:04:14,309 But at its simplest, to boil it all down, fantasy tends to deal with impossibility, 43 00:04:14,310 --> 00:04:20,550 something which just could not happen naturally, but and most importantly, in a believable way. 44 00:04:21,990 --> 00:04:24,930 And if you go into any bookshop, this I think is from Waterstones, 45 00:04:25,380 --> 00:04:32,940 you will see that fantasy is quite big business and you will probably find the Lord of the Rings in shelves like this. 46 00:04:33,270 --> 00:04:41,440 Not so much in literature or the classics. The next question then, before we get our really teeth into is why? 47 00:04:41,890 --> 00:04:47,440 Why might you want to write The Lord of the Rings? And here I'm going to go with why did Tolkien write The Lord of the Rings? 48 00:04:47,740 --> 00:04:52,450 Now, going on that picture there, if you if you're inspired and you want to go out and write the Great next down, 49 00:04:52,450 --> 00:04:58,210 the next great fantasy saga, you might think, well, good reason is money, because there is money in this. 50 00:04:58,510 --> 00:05:01,210 In them there are mountains. This is a boom genre. 51 00:05:01,900 --> 00:05:09,160 And whilst Tolkien may have had that at the back of his mind to a degree, The Hobbit did grew financially successful. 52 00:05:09,160 --> 00:05:15,040 And when you read through his letters and other works about and you will see that he was constantly 53 00:05:15,040 --> 00:05:20,110 worried about his financial situation and I don't think that's obviously the main reason. 54 00:05:20,650 --> 00:05:26,469 So the reasons which I would posit about why he why he embarked on The Lord of the Rings is, 55 00:05:26,470 --> 00:05:30,460 first of all, The Hobbit was successful and the publishers wanted another Hobbit story. 56 00:05:31,120 --> 00:05:36,459 He was himself quite pleased with how The Hobbit had gone and was having all kinds of ideas for new stories. 57 00:05:36,460 --> 00:05:38,500 Although, as we will see, he struggled with that. 58 00:05:39,250 --> 00:05:45,100 And whilst it had not been his original intention to set The Hobbit in Middle Earth, the fact that they came together, 59 00:05:45,100 --> 00:05:53,020 I think revealed to him just how strong a narrative could be in terms of bringing his mythology and his languages to life. 60 00:05:53,200 --> 00:05:57,820 And there is a couple of quotes here written, of course, in 1956, as you can see, 61 00:05:58,120 --> 00:06:04,270 it was just after the 1914 Warburton to me that I made the discovery that legends depend on the language to which they belong, 62 00:06:04,720 --> 00:06:07,990 and then in subsequent one, the invention of languages is the foundation. 63 00:06:08,410 --> 00:06:12,520 The stories were made rather to provide a world for the languages, then the reverse. 64 00:06:13,180 --> 00:06:18,490 To me a name comes first in the story follows. So this is particularly important. 65 00:06:19,000 --> 00:06:25,840 The novel, as it transpires, was allowing him to bring his languages and his legendary to life. 66 00:06:25,840 --> 00:06:33,130 And I will come back to all this a bit later in a bit about the why, but it does, of course, the first lecture in this series, 67 00:06:33,430 --> 00:06:39,790 which is to sort of take you through the life of J.R.R. Tolkien, because some of you may be familiar with it, but some of you may not. 68 00:06:39,790 --> 00:06:42,980 But I'm going to do this very, very quickly. I hope you can read that in the back. 69 00:06:43,000 --> 00:06:47,080 He was quite small, but he was obviously born in Bloomington, in in South Africa. 70 00:06:47,710 --> 00:06:51,700 He came over to Britain at a young age and was actually orphaned at a young age, 71 00:06:51,700 --> 00:06:58,540 went to King Edward School, and then here, Exeter College received his first class honours in 1915. 72 00:06:58,540 --> 00:07:04,089 But then, of course, the First World War by then was a year year underway and he joins the Lancashire Fusiliers. 73 00:07:04,090 --> 00:07:10,809 We talk a bit about that in a second. On returning from the war after convalescing and the cessation of the war. 74 00:07:10,810 --> 00:07:12,760 He works with the Oxford English Dictionary. 75 00:07:13,360 --> 00:07:20,679 He then gets his first proper academic job outside of the OED up at Leeds University when he's made a professor, 76 00:07:20,680 --> 00:07:31,810 but quickly returns to Oxford where he is the once and Bosworth professor at Pembroke and then moves to Merton and then retires in 1959. 77 00:07:33,830 --> 00:07:36,860 And as we know, dies 50 or 50 years ago. 78 00:07:37,460 --> 00:07:41,510 And this is a quote which I often use from the biography by Humphrey Carpenter. 79 00:07:41,990 --> 00:07:46,850 It was the ordinary, unremarkable life made by countless of other scholars, a life of academic brilliance, 80 00:07:47,210 --> 00:07:52,040 certainly, but only in a very narrow professional field that is really of little interest to laymen. 81 00:07:52,250 --> 00:07:56,719 As a person who started out doing medieval literature, that really gets me that sentence every time. 82 00:07:56,720 --> 00:08:01,940 But there we go. And that would be that. Apart from the strange fact that during those years when nothing happened, 83 00:08:01,940 --> 00:08:09,500 he wrote two books which became world bestsellers that captured the imagination and influenced the thinking of several million readers. 84 00:08:10,910 --> 00:08:18,170 But what can we learn from Tolkien's life that may help us to write our next Lord of the Rings? 85 00:08:18,200 --> 00:08:20,570 Well, the first thing is, well, come to Oxford. 86 00:08:20,960 --> 00:08:28,940 And it's worth considering that of his 81 years of life, he spent nearly half of them in this city and at this university as a student, 87 00:08:29,240 --> 00:08:35,059 academic or in his retirement, and is often been posited about the Oxford School of Fantasy. 88 00:08:35,060 --> 00:08:41,180 But the place does seem to engender writers who are interested in speculative fiction. 89 00:08:42,140 --> 00:08:47,600 William Morris, whose fantasy books, talk and read, was also an old ex-union, and he rubbed shoulders, of course, 90 00:08:47,600 --> 00:08:52,040 with this loose network of writers like Owen Barfield, Charles Williams and of course, 91 00:08:52,040 --> 00:08:56,690 C.S. Lewis, which fall under that sort of loose title of the Inklings. 92 00:08:57,140 --> 00:09:00,890 They are the Wyn Jones, and I believe Susan Cooper attended his lectures. 93 00:09:01,310 --> 00:09:05,330 Alan Garnett didn't, from what I know, but he was certainly here at a similar time. 94 00:09:05,330 --> 00:09:09,280 And then we have writers like Sir Philip Pullman, again, an old zone. 95 00:09:09,290 --> 00:09:16,820 And so it's must it must be to do with extra college and people even more modern, like Rebecca Kwang, who have been here at Oxford and absorbed it. 96 00:09:17,720 --> 00:09:23,690 And so there is something special about this place, which you might want to consider. 97 00:09:23,990 --> 00:09:32,540 And I appreciate that many of you read or at Oxford or maybe are past that stage of applying as an undergraduate, 98 00:09:32,540 --> 00:09:37,970 But I would you certainly point out that we have a wonderful continuing education department, which of course you can attend. 99 00:09:40,120 --> 00:09:44,799 So let's start with the big question before we move on to the slightly more woolly ones. 100 00:09:44,800 --> 00:09:48,760 How do Tolkien write The Lord of the Rings and what can we learn from that? 101 00:09:49,580 --> 00:09:57,190 And so let's start with some dates again. So The Hobbit published in September 1937. 102 00:09:58,060 --> 00:10:04,820 It was revised to a certain degree, but there were three three possible revisions you'd like to look at. 103 00:10:04,840 --> 00:10:13,600 I don't have time to talk about that. The Fellowship of the Ring comes out in 1954 July, the two towers in November 1954, 104 00:10:13,600 --> 00:10:20,560 and Return of the King, the last volume, October 1955, which of course the titles of Jackson's films. 105 00:10:20,980 --> 00:10:24,160 And this immediately throws up some all kinds of questions. 106 00:10:24,970 --> 00:10:29,530 Three books, three volumes, actually six books. What was going on here? 107 00:10:29,710 --> 00:10:37,480 The titles that we are very, very familiar with now were ones that Tolkien perhaps didn't like at times was playing around with the first journey, 108 00:10:37,720 --> 00:10:45,490 the journey of the Nine Companions. He even starts using titles like The Ring sets out, the ring goes south, the ring goes east, and so on. 109 00:10:45,700 --> 00:10:51,970 There's a couple in there which will come back again and again, or we'll come back to like the trees and the eyes and God and the war, the ring. 110 00:10:52,450 --> 00:10:57,370 But this is just to explain by background, if you if you see references to the Lord of the Rings, 111 00:10:57,610 --> 00:11:03,280 you will often see it's something like that Return of the King Book five, Chapter three, and then pages. 112 00:11:03,280 --> 00:11:10,630 So that's how it's often referenced. But it is something which Tolkien struggled with, as did his publishers. 113 00:11:13,060 --> 00:11:19,630 But this hides the story and the middle bit is the is the important thing because writing in December 1937, 114 00:11:19,990 --> 00:11:23,540 I have written the first chapter of a new story about hobbits. 115 00:11:24,010 --> 00:11:31,090 A long expected party. Well, if you know the first chapter in The Hobbit, this is a play on that with the title. 116 00:11:31,330 --> 00:11:35,590 But we're only a couple of months after the publication of The Hobbit. 117 00:11:35,860 --> 00:11:39,610 So he's getting into the swing of it. Well, easy. 118 00:11:40,780 --> 00:11:45,820 The chronology hides, of course, a lot because the first draft of The Lord of the Rings, 119 00:11:46,300 --> 00:11:52,600 a loose draft, let's say, was really appeared in August, September 1948, So 11 years later. 120 00:11:53,260 --> 00:12:00,910 And the final copy around October 1949, the next few years were spent wrangling with the publishers, Allen and Collins. 121 00:12:01,210 --> 00:12:05,500 So a quick bit of math shows that from the time Tolkien put pen to paper to the time the 122 00:12:05,500 --> 00:12:12,580 return of the King reached the bookshelves over 17 years at the last 214 months or 6200 days. 123 00:12:13,150 --> 00:12:19,750 And according to Nick Groome in his new book, 21st Century Tolkien, this averages out about 90 words a day. 124 00:12:20,890 --> 00:12:24,550 So the lesson could be for you, if you want to go in this, take your time. 125 00:12:25,000 --> 00:12:30,940 And I'm reminded here of tree beards, comment on the language and you should takes a very long time saying anything in it because 126 00:12:30,940 --> 00:12:36,040 we do not say anything in it unless it's worth taking a long time to say and to listen to. 127 00:12:37,030 --> 00:12:43,750 Now, this isn't what Tolkien set out to plan. I mean, he was it was even in late 1939, he was writing to Allen and Unwin saying, 128 00:12:44,170 --> 00:12:48,880 will it be any chance of publication if I can get it done before the spring, Spring, 1940? 129 00:12:49,360 --> 00:12:55,870 And obviously being rather optimistic and there are a lot of things we could say, why did it take so much time? 130 00:12:55,900 --> 00:13:03,090 There were various reasons here. Tolkien took on an excessive workload as an academic here at the university, particularly during the war. 131 00:13:03,100 --> 00:13:09,790 He's picking up other people's duties. He was also, I think, from 1942 onwards, involved in the civil defence of the city. 132 00:13:10,150 --> 00:13:14,310 He wasn't part of the armed forces. He had distractions. 133 00:13:14,320 --> 00:13:21,459 He was one to be distractions. But most importantly, I think what we will see is he was finding his way with the plot. 134 00:13:21,460 --> 00:13:25,060 As Nick Groome in the book states, there was no plan. 135 00:13:26,110 --> 00:13:32,770 Now. I'm pleased I put this slide in for reasons I to say in a second, 136 00:13:33,610 --> 00:13:37,659 if you want to understand about the composition in the creation behind the Lord of the Rings, 137 00:13:37,660 --> 00:13:41,110 you need to go to Christopher Tolkien's absolutely wonderful series of books, 138 00:13:41,110 --> 00:13:45,790 history of Middle-Earth, and particularly the four which devote themselves to the Lord of the Rings. 139 00:13:45,790 --> 00:13:47,530 And you probably already recognise the titles, 140 00:13:48,010 --> 00:13:52,120 the Return to the Shadow with the trees and the Eyes and God, The War with the Ring and Sauron defeated. 141 00:13:52,420 --> 00:13:59,920 There are also the letters edited by Humphrey Carpenter and New Edition coming out later this year, which we are all looking forward to. 142 00:14:00,190 --> 00:14:06,009 But the reason I'm so pleased about this slightly because I wrote and I will quote it, the masterful work of the Scholars Wing, 143 00:14:06,010 --> 00:14:09,820 Hammond and Christina Skull, who are very kindly in the audience today, 144 00:14:10,330 --> 00:14:14,860 who without whom we just would not know anything like what we know about Tolkien. 145 00:14:14,980 --> 00:14:19,750 Absolutely fantastic amount of work that they've done, the chronology, the reader's guides, 146 00:14:19,750 --> 00:14:24,340 etc. I, I could, I could probably spend an hour listing it, but I'm absolutely thrilled. 147 00:14:24,440 --> 00:14:28,450 I thank you very much for coming. So there's work is indispensable. 148 00:14:30,150 --> 00:14:32,580 The other thing which we would probably need to look at some point, 149 00:14:32,580 --> 00:14:36,930 but I wouldn't recommend it for the faint hearted is to start working with these manuscripts now. 150 00:14:36,960 --> 00:14:42,030 Christopher transcribes those in the history of the Middle Earth and we hold some of the manuscripts here in Oxford, 151 00:14:42,030 --> 00:14:47,370 but most of them are in Milwaukee. And the reason I would suggest you sort of give a bit of a wide berth, 152 00:14:47,370 --> 00:14:52,560 unless you've got a strong glass to hand, is that they are often unintelligible. 153 00:14:52,680 --> 00:14:57,150 They are really very, very difficult to read and pieced together. 154 00:14:57,180 --> 00:15:06,240 But it can be done. But it's not an easy task. As Tolkien himself wrote and this I wrote, sent in 1968 in a TV interview. 155 00:15:06,630 --> 00:15:12,870 I can't work over much in my head. I admire people who can who say they can go down and think out long chapters of either music or verse. 156 00:15:13,350 --> 00:15:16,530 I never have been able to work without a pen, scribble, scribble, scribble. 157 00:15:16,860 --> 00:15:20,130 And although I have some calligraphic leanings rather than accomplishments, 158 00:15:20,520 --> 00:15:28,020 my writing becomes more and more illegible until finally only my son Christopher can read it and then it becomes beyond him. 159 00:15:28,560 --> 00:15:33,720 Well, when I'm in the process of writing, I've written very quickly, getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. 160 00:15:34,110 --> 00:15:37,680 And then if I'm wise like I've written before, it becomes unintelligible. 161 00:15:37,980 --> 00:15:41,430 Leaving out those things, those words which I can no longer interpret. 162 00:15:41,670 --> 00:15:48,360 In fact, there's one piece of manuscript that I've got somewhere. Even now, after many years, I've never discovered what the word could possibly be. 163 00:15:48,930 --> 00:15:53,080 Then I discovered the typewriter was a great boon to me, and I think rather quickly. 164 00:15:53,100 --> 00:16:01,950 So I think rather quickly, in very elaborate long sentences, my digression sentences by me very largely consist of stuff in brackets. 165 00:16:03,270 --> 00:16:09,660 So that kind of gives you a bit of a background and a feeling which we will pick up as we explore a bit more about The Lord of the Rings. 166 00:16:10,200 --> 00:16:19,460 And I was I was struck by this this. Comment in an article by Diane Wyn Jones in 1983 who attended a lecture by Tolkien. 167 00:16:19,670 --> 00:16:27,260 And it just seems to be quite that he started with the simplest possible story a man prince, a woodcutter, going on a journey. 168 00:16:27,470 --> 00:16:32,600 He then gave the journey a name, and we found that the simple, picaresque plot had developed into a quite story. 169 00:16:33,230 --> 00:16:39,980 I'm not quite sure what happened then, but I know that by the end he was discussing the peculiar adaptation of the Quest story, 170 00:16:40,340 --> 00:16:44,460 which Chaucer made in his partner's tale. And I love the expression. 171 00:16:44,480 --> 00:16:51,350 I'm not quite sure what happened then, which seems in some way to capture Tolkien's own writing of The Lord of the Rings. 172 00:16:53,030 --> 00:16:55,969 So what did he say about the road to the Rings process? 173 00:16:55,970 --> 00:17:01,880 And here we can piece together a lot of things from the letters and from the chronology, from Wayne and Christine. 174 00:17:02,870 --> 00:17:07,700 So I'm just going to pull out a few extracts. But here we are, October 1937. 175 00:17:08,330 --> 00:17:11,680 So. Very quickly after the publication of it. 176 00:17:12,400 --> 00:17:17,799 I have only too much to say and much already written about the world into which The Hobbit intruded. 177 00:17:17,800 --> 00:17:22,570 So that again picks up this point that The Hobbit, the book Bilbo was not meant to be. 178 00:17:23,140 --> 00:17:28,210 They came together and he uses intruded of Bilbo a couple of times in his lectures. 179 00:17:28,480 --> 00:17:34,550 They just kind of locked together by almost not by chance, but by fate. 180 00:17:34,570 --> 00:17:38,920 Perhaps in February 1938, The Hobbit sequel is still where it was. 181 00:17:38,920 --> 00:17:43,510 So were a few months later, and I have only the vaguest notions of how to proceed. 182 00:17:43,840 --> 00:17:47,830 I fear I squandered all my favourite motifs and characters on the original series. 183 00:17:48,130 --> 00:17:52,390 You think I used up all my good ideas in that children's book and now I'm rather stuck. 184 00:17:52,390 --> 00:17:58,230 What am I going to write about? Well, obviously you managed to solve that one August. 185 00:17:58,240 --> 00:18:05,560 It's now flowing along and getting quite out of hand. It has reached about Chapter seven and progresses towards quite unforeseen goals. 186 00:18:06,220 --> 00:18:11,070 February 1939. He's beginning to realise this is a different type of book. 187 00:18:11,080 --> 00:18:16,330 It's more grown up. But the audience for which The Hobbit was written has done that also. 188 00:18:16,390 --> 00:18:22,300 So it's okay that it's moving more into sort of adult themes. Leaping forward here few years at. 189 00:18:22,540 --> 00:18:30,940 April 1944. This story takes me in charge, and I've already taken three chapters over what was meant to be 1st November 1944. 190 00:18:31,270 --> 00:18:38,050 It will probably work out very differently from this plan when it really gets written as the thing seems to write itself once I get going. 191 00:18:38,290 --> 00:18:42,250 As if the truth comes out then and then post-publication. 192 00:18:42,820 --> 00:18:47,860 I've long ceased to invent that Even patronising or sneering critics from the side praised my invention. 193 00:18:48,250 --> 00:18:53,470 I wait till I seem to know what really happened or until it writes itself. 194 00:18:54,340 --> 00:19:00,310 There's this feeling almost that, well, I don't know if you would say it. It's kind of like bewilderment, despair, panic. 195 00:19:00,700 --> 00:19:03,709 But it's almost as if the book had a life of its own. 196 00:19:03,710 --> 00:19:07,990 Things were falling. I wouldn't quite use the word channelling, but it almost feels like that. 197 00:19:08,350 --> 00:19:15,339 Now, some people say this is a deliberate attempt and decision and methodology by Tolkien, which sets him up on one of those pedestals. 198 00:19:15,340 --> 00:19:19,800 As a postmodernist writer who wants to break the norms, makes modes go free flow, etc., etc. 199 00:19:20,790 --> 00:19:25,710 But I suspect it's actually a bit more that no one really told him how to do this. 200 00:19:26,400 --> 00:19:28,920 So he just got on with what he felt was right. 201 00:19:29,490 --> 00:19:37,380 And that's why it's perhaps so groundbreaking now when we think about the methodology behind the writing of this, 202 00:19:38,040 --> 00:19:44,309 and I have had the pleasure of working with Tolkien's manuscripts on on a few occasions and particularly 203 00:19:44,310 --> 00:19:48,870 worked on a couple of chapters from The Lord of the Rings and tried to piece them together and. 204 00:19:49,950 --> 00:19:58,170 When you put those together with what you find in history, the middle Earth, you can start to sort of abstract out his his writing process. 205 00:19:58,680 --> 00:20:01,799 So it would sometimes start with him diving straight into full prose. 206 00:20:01,800 --> 00:20:08,640 He would start writing away. But every now and then he'd pause and he'd start to outline the plot at a very high level, 207 00:20:08,790 --> 00:20:12,690 often containing elements which which may not have made it into the final version. 208 00:20:12,930 --> 00:20:16,140 This is not uncommon for creative writers, I would say. 209 00:20:16,170 --> 00:20:22,139 I mean, I don't know if any of you write. I've done a bit of writing myself and you get and you go, But what's going to happen? 210 00:20:22,140 --> 00:20:25,530 And then you quickly make now notes and you try and get it towards the end. 211 00:20:26,130 --> 00:20:32,730 But this is definitely working through thought process and sometimes very often littered with questions. 212 00:20:32,730 --> 00:20:35,280 So the first quote there is from the Return of the Shadow, 213 00:20:35,610 --> 00:20:44,310 where Tolkien is beginning to write the beginning of what the ring might be and where it fits in the ring, whence its origin necromancer. 214 00:20:44,520 --> 00:20:50,579 That shadowy character appeared in The Hobbit not very dangerous when used for good purpose, but exacts a penalty. 215 00:20:50,580 --> 00:20:54,720 So he's beginning to think about things. If we move on to the trees and of eyes and God, 216 00:20:55,530 --> 00:21:02,370 we can see three points in there at which he stops or is recorded in that and tries to work out what is going to happen. 217 00:21:03,240 --> 00:21:05,280 In the story for Scene from Moria, 218 00:21:05,880 --> 00:21:13,140 they kind of get stuck in Ireland's tomb a bit and he starts to try and work out what what's going to happen, which Christopher notes. 219 00:21:13,140 --> 00:21:19,920 In addition, it's being hard to make out in places does not at all represent a clearly defined step by step sequence. 220 00:21:20,370 --> 00:21:29,040 Ideas are emerging and evolving. As a as my father wrote, you can see here he's playing around with the very end of the novel here. 221 00:21:29,040 --> 00:21:35,579 Perhaps some Sam comes up. This is talking about when they get to the to Mount Doom Frodo Sam for the destruction 222 00:21:35,580 --> 00:21:40,780 of the ring beats off a vulture and hurls himself and Gollum into the Gulf. 223 00:21:40,800 --> 00:21:44,490 Question mark function for Sam. Question Mark Is he to die? 224 00:21:44,520 --> 00:21:51,030 Question Mark, How are Sam and Frodo saved from the eruption and in the trees and advise and guide? 225 00:21:51,030 --> 00:21:56,830 Again, we have a couple more of these. The story for scene from Laurie and the story for scene from Final One. 226 00:21:57,960 --> 00:22:05,100 So he would work on these things and preliminary drafts, pretty many questions, often in pen or pencil or both. 227 00:22:05,400 --> 00:22:10,200 He was quite happy to write over things and then he would subsequently rework these in further drafts. 228 00:22:10,200 --> 00:22:15,810 And eventually, as he said, the typewriter was the boon and he suddenly emerged to TypeScript. 229 00:22:17,040 --> 00:22:21,449 Now, this kind of makes it all sound a bit linear and a bit well thought through. 230 00:22:21,450 --> 00:22:26,339 And, you know, I'm not taking anything away. But Christopher notes, for example, 231 00:22:26,340 --> 00:22:33,659 instances where the plot outline starts in the present tense and then slides almost imperceptibly into full narrative. 232 00:22:33,660 --> 00:22:37,730 So you get this mixed mode when you're reading it and it numerous points. 233 00:22:37,740 --> 00:22:40,560 Tolkien would often just go back and rewrite whole sections, 234 00:22:40,770 --> 00:22:45,630 often for much earlier parts of the book as he begins to realise things aren't quite working out. 235 00:22:45,870 --> 00:22:49,349 This is not untypical of Tolkien with his academic writings, I should say, 236 00:22:49,350 --> 00:22:53,160 and it's one of the reasons why perhaps he didn't publish as much as we would have liked. 237 00:22:54,240 --> 00:22:59,310 As Christopher also notes, he abruptly, even in mid-sentence at certain points in the narrative, 238 00:22:59,460 --> 00:23:04,140 and returned to revise what he had written once so often more than once. 239 00:23:05,930 --> 00:23:14,640 So what can we learn from this? Well, as tribute would say, stop every now and then and plan out as things are heading. 240 00:23:14,670 --> 00:23:18,000 Don't be hasty. And you can see that to a degree. 241 00:23:19,100 --> 00:23:24,980 I think more interesting, though, is be prepared to change. So if you are writing, you're a creative writer, you're writing in the genre. 242 00:23:25,220 --> 00:23:30,830 Just be prepared to change. Think of things if things sort of don't feel right, well, make a change. 243 00:23:31,040 --> 00:23:34,040 Even the smallest change can have significance. 244 00:23:34,040 --> 00:23:38,869 And I think the change here, which I would just explain I think is incredibly significant. 245 00:23:38,870 --> 00:23:44,779 Christopher didn't think it was so, but this is towards the end when Frodo reaches Mount Doom, 246 00:23:44,780 --> 00:23:50,870 he has the ring and he said in the original draft, I have come, you say, but I cannot do what I have come to do. 247 00:23:50,870 --> 00:23:54,470 I will not do it. The ring is mine. The final published version is. 248 00:23:54,860 --> 00:23:57,950 But I do not choose now to do what I have come to do. 249 00:23:57,950 --> 00:24:07,400 And I think that deliberately lays another layer in there of Frodo deliberately not choosing to do this because of the power of the ring. 250 00:24:09,710 --> 00:24:14,870 And the troughs in history. Miller show constant reworkings and rethinking of the plot chapters, 251 00:24:14,870 --> 00:24:20,260 structures being quite fluid, characters coming and going, changing names even changing race. 252 00:24:20,270 --> 00:24:23,840 For example, Aragorn morphing from a hobbit called Trotter. 253 00:24:24,950 --> 00:24:30,710 Second, I think be prepared to run with an idea. And I have a few examples here. 254 00:24:30,740 --> 00:24:37,880 The most obvious example is the one ring which emerges, as you might say, the dominant character or certainly concept in the book. 255 00:24:38,490 --> 00:24:44,950 And but the notion of the ruling ring of this one ring really emerges only about I think it's about 12 months into his drafting. 256 00:24:45,590 --> 00:24:49,399 And there's a wonderful story of the ring verse, which which many of you may know. 257 00:24:49,400 --> 00:24:55,580 But just to repeat it. Tolkien, in that 1968 interview, said, I invented that in a bath. 258 00:24:55,580 --> 00:25:01,700 I remember. Yes, I remember inventing that one in the bath in when I was having a bath in 20 Northmoor Road. 259 00:25:02,210 --> 00:25:08,660 I still remember kicking the sponge out of the bath when I got the last line and thinking, That will do alright and jumped out. 260 00:25:10,820 --> 00:25:16,070 But keeping with our friend there trip at the end in 1956, he wrote, 261 00:25:16,700 --> 00:25:22,580 I knew for years that Frodo would run into a tree adventure somewhere far down the Great River River. 262 00:25:22,910 --> 00:25:30,020 I've no recollection of inventing names. I came at last to the point and wrote the tribute chapter without any recollection of any previous thought. 263 00:25:30,380 --> 00:25:35,209 Just as it now is. And then I saw that of course it had not happened to Frodo at all. 264 00:25:35,210 --> 00:25:39,290 It's almost like this surprise and 1968 to 12 years later. 265 00:25:39,500 --> 00:25:45,559 I haven't the slightest recollection of anything in the position where the window was on myself. 266 00:25:45,560 --> 00:25:49,730 The whole of the end chapter that came straight out of the leaf mould. 267 00:25:50,210 --> 00:25:52,850 There was no difficulty, no sense of trouble, of composition. 268 00:25:53,090 --> 00:25:57,290 There must have been something burgeoning there, and I'll come back to the small bit later on. 269 00:25:57,830 --> 00:26:00,889 Now we can all think of where the ends came from. 270 00:26:00,890 --> 00:26:04,220 Enter your way, ORC Old English. The work of giants. 271 00:26:05,090 --> 00:26:09,890 When the Anglo-Saxons with news over these ruined buildings by the Romans. 272 00:26:10,130 --> 00:26:17,840 I think these were the work of giants used metaphorically fused with his own thinking about Macbeth and of trees. 273 00:26:17,840 --> 00:26:22,819 Da da da da da da. So you could say that is the leaf mould. 274 00:26:22,820 --> 00:26:26,630 That is the thing. All those things bubbled to the surface and that's where the end came. 275 00:26:27,410 --> 00:26:36,010 But importantly for you lessons and how to write The Lord of the Rings, you had the courage to go with it, however far fetched it might seem. 276 00:26:36,410 --> 00:26:39,770 He carried on. Now. 277 00:26:42,300 --> 00:26:51,480 I'm going to just say a few words about this because one of the triumphs of the Lord of the Rings is how it achieves what we might say depth. 278 00:26:51,630 --> 00:26:59,010 And this is tied in with the theory of worldbuilding, which you will come across if you if you investigate fantasy writing, 279 00:26:59,280 --> 00:27:06,780 how writers make the worlds into which they are taking you an experience you enjoy, 280 00:27:06,780 --> 00:27:12,630 an immersive experience, a believable experience, and it permeates into things like computer games. 281 00:27:13,080 --> 00:27:19,860 This is a vast topic and there are all kinds of books and articles written about tips and tricks on how to do this, 282 00:27:19,860 --> 00:27:22,920 but I'm just going to pull out a few from Tolkien. 283 00:27:24,140 --> 00:27:28,640 Which I wouldn't say he was the first to do these, but, you know, and of course, 284 00:27:28,940 --> 00:27:35,209 I would refer you to going and reading the, um, fairy stories lecture at St Andrews is 1939. 285 00:27:35,210 --> 00:27:40,460 That's right. Published in 47 Flagrante Andersen's great edition of that. 286 00:27:40,970 --> 00:27:46,270 The reason why this is this is so important and, you know, 287 00:27:46,280 --> 00:27:51,049 I've taught literature in many periods and about many writers is that we have at 288 00:27:51,050 --> 00:27:56,360 this this crux point between The Hobbit and the real work on The Lord of the Rings, 289 00:27:56,840 --> 00:28:01,880 an author standing up and pretty much saying, This is my craft, this is what I write about, 290 00:28:02,090 --> 00:28:05,300 this is what I'm trying to do, even in a wonderfully approachable way. 291 00:28:05,540 --> 00:28:13,210 And you rarely get that from writers. So it is really sort of his thesis and he talks about things about being a sub creator. 292 00:28:13,730 --> 00:28:21,469 The creator, of course, in his eyes being God, but then working on these secondary worlds and engendering in the reader secondary belief. 293 00:28:21,470 --> 00:28:25,700 This is probably familiar to many of you, but I just think just to recap it. 294 00:28:26,000 --> 00:28:28,370 Secondary belief is different to Tolkien. 295 00:28:28,370 --> 00:28:34,729 It's not the suspension of disbelief, it is the fact that when you are in that world, you completely buy into it. 296 00:28:34,730 --> 00:28:38,719 You believe everything about it, and when you come out of it, put the book down. 297 00:28:38,720 --> 00:28:46,340 Okay, But it's still there and you can go back in. It's it's and how do you actually engender that in the reader? 298 00:28:46,790 --> 00:28:49,850 So it ties into all kinds of things about readers theory and so on. 299 00:28:50,030 --> 00:28:53,420 And I'm just going to give you a few so and a few ways that he does. 300 00:28:53,630 --> 00:28:56,840 First of all. Three framing device so. 301 00:28:58,220 --> 00:29:03,620 He tends not to be used so much now. And what I'm trying to write is they just give you the book and best of luck. 302 00:29:03,980 --> 00:29:07,400 And but Tolkien and other writers were very, 303 00:29:07,400 --> 00:29:13,160 very conscious of how to frame a book so that when you pick it up, it gives you that sense of authenticity. 304 00:29:13,400 --> 00:29:20,030 The framing device for him is, of course, these are the memoirs of Bill though, and for over and amended by Sam and hobbits. 305 00:29:20,030 --> 00:29:27,500 Keep them in their lives that are that are owned by the way it comes to me and I've translated it so he's using the lost manuscript kind of idea, 306 00:29:27,680 --> 00:29:31,370 which he certainly uses in other stories. The notion club papers. 307 00:29:31,580 --> 00:29:37,010 So a framing device is something which is quite useful because you get to feel, Oh, this must be real. 308 00:29:37,430 --> 00:29:41,750 And he then uses scholarly apparatus, the most obvious being maps. 309 00:29:42,530 --> 00:29:49,009 And we also forwards and appendices. So when you pick up Return of the King, all those appendices at the back, 310 00:29:49,010 --> 00:29:52,790 when you when you look at them and you may not have read them or you may glance through them, 311 00:29:53,840 --> 00:29:55,940 I mean to a certain degree the bunkers really, 312 00:29:55,940 --> 00:30:02,629 but they are there because they give you all the details you need but are impressing on, you know, these are real. 313 00:30:02,630 --> 00:30:06,020 This is a real genealogy. These were real people. Leslie descendants. 314 00:30:06,020 --> 00:30:09,440 I can give you an exact phonology of how these people lived. 315 00:30:09,830 --> 00:30:15,740 And of course, all of this adds up. He doesn't, of course, doesn't use notes, footnotes. 316 00:30:16,760 --> 00:30:20,060 Some fancy writers have now started using footnotes in their books. 317 00:30:20,450 --> 00:30:26,089 And personally, I don't think that's a good idea because it immediately shatters the secondary 318 00:30:26,090 --> 00:30:29,270 belief because you're reading the text and suddenly you go down to the footnote, 319 00:30:29,450 --> 00:30:33,739 which is usually telling you off or telling you some minor piece of information. 320 00:30:33,740 --> 00:30:39,470 And then you go back and finally glimpses at a deeper world and. 321 00:30:40,830 --> 00:30:47,850 He said. I think it was 1963. Part of the attraction of the Lord of the Rings is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background, 322 00:30:48,180 --> 00:30:56,100 an attraction like that, a viewing far off an unvisited island or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. 323 00:30:56,400 --> 00:31:00,120 And it's littered with this. Of course, this is just one example. 324 00:31:00,120 --> 00:31:04,049 I do not think that tale should be told now. As a reader, you might be going, Oh, come on. 325 00:31:04,050 --> 00:31:07,050 I want to know the tone with the servants of the enemy at hand. 326 00:31:07,050 --> 00:31:11,400 If we wind through to the house of Elrond, you may hear it. They're told in full. 327 00:31:11,970 --> 00:31:17,010 There are all kinds of examples of that where it gives you these glimpses many people have observed. 328 00:31:17,010 --> 00:31:21,450 And it's absolutely true. This comes straight out of the medieval way of thinking. 329 00:31:21,840 --> 00:31:25,740 If you read a text and law is going to be giving a lecture on Beowulf later on, 330 00:31:26,460 --> 00:31:33,390 you will often get these asides to previous events, which the audience probably at the time knew, but it was fine. 331 00:31:33,390 --> 00:31:41,910 You could just hint at them and so on. And as you read Lord of the Rings, of course you get these constant references back to other times. 332 00:31:43,350 --> 00:31:48,870 I think he does it very well. Of course, I would say that there are some fancy shoe writers who do it really badly. 333 00:31:48,900 --> 00:31:50,820 They just make the oddest side. 334 00:31:51,330 --> 00:31:57,990 And I often used to think of Star Trek as I grew up with Star Trek in the Sixties and with my favourite classic Star Trek. 335 00:31:58,500 --> 00:32:03,329 But Gene Roddenberry would also say, Oh yes, that happened in the 1920s, in the 1940s, 336 00:32:03,330 --> 00:32:10,409 and then he'd make up some terminology and that happened in 2050 and he's trying to give death to the world and you know, 337 00:32:10,410 --> 00:32:15,360 and then sort of like Saturday evening TV, it kind of works, but it's that idea. 338 00:32:15,360 --> 00:32:18,480 But when you read some of the other writers they make, they use this trick, 339 00:32:18,930 --> 00:32:22,880 but they don't have the depth because they don't really know what they're referring to. 340 00:32:24,210 --> 00:32:28,500 So he did these dates was subject to all kinds of discussion. 341 00:32:28,500 --> 00:32:34,260 But I think the most important thing here to say is that he laid the foundations early on for all of this. 342 00:32:34,890 --> 00:32:36,719 So we know that he as a as a child, 343 00:32:36,720 --> 00:32:45,350 he was inventing languages in the age and in some of these through various routes reached fruition in the development language of Middle Earth. 344 00:32:46,680 --> 00:32:49,829 And he wants stories to try and make those come alive. 345 00:32:49,830 --> 00:33:00,120 But even as far back we're talking now is obviously, as a young adult, 1914, he's working on what was to become the start of his mythology. 346 00:33:00,360 --> 00:33:07,680 And gradually, through various drafts of the book, Lost Tales and The Silmarillion, etc., up to the 1977 publication. 347 00:33:07,950 --> 00:33:14,040 So by the time of The Hobbit, 20 years he's been working 20 years on his legendary. 348 00:33:16,650 --> 00:33:19,830 And it's worth kind of considering and taking a step back. Why did he do this? 349 00:33:20,790 --> 00:33:26,460 Well, obviously, it's fun. It was a natural progression from inventing languages. 350 00:33:26,820 --> 00:33:33,360 And I've said it aloud to explore his use of stories and to explore all of these. 351 00:33:34,060 --> 00:33:40,380 And he did also once famously remark on, I don't have time to go into this, but it's worth just parking there. 352 00:33:40,800 --> 00:33:44,490 I was from early days, grief by the poverty of my own beloved country. 353 00:33:44,790 --> 00:33:48,150 It had no stories of its own, bound up with its tongue and soil. 354 00:33:48,540 --> 00:33:51,870 Do not laugh, but once upon a time my crest has long since fallen. 355 00:33:52,200 --> 00:33:57,210 I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, which I could dedicate simply to. 356 00:33:57,570 --> 00:33:59,310 To England. To my country. 357 00:34:00,340 --> 00:34:07,900 And this kind of goes back and forth in this construction of the mythology to playing around with the real world and with England, etc. 358 00:34:08,140 --> 00:34:10,660 But perhaps that is another reason. 359 00:34:11,990 --> 00:34:19,290 Now, the lesson to learn from this is rather depressing because unless you're young and some of you are in the audience, but I'm certainly not, 360 00:34:19,530 --> 00:34:27,299 you may rather miss the boat to start early and start writing your mythology in your teenage years and through your fantasy novel. 361 00:34:27,300 --> 00:34:30,150 But take heart, even if time is against you. 362 00:34:30,660 --> 00:34:36,660 The lesson is we can learn from this is that thinking through your world, your mythology, or drawing on something already in existence, 363 00:34:36,660 --> 00:34:44,400 perhaps someone else's mythology or historical period will give you that anchor and you can learn from the mistakes from others. 364 00:34:44,820 --> 00:34:48,930 Where it seems clear to me that they're making up the mythology as they go along. 365 00:34:49,650 --> 00:34:53,790 What sets Tolkien apart is the depth of his background of the legend. 366 00:34:54,930 --> 00:35:00,480 This is just a bit of fun and you can you can think which one is A, B and C referring to. 367 00:35:01,110 --> 00:35:09,749 You can see Romney and Martin that they were 90% people from real life history and other authors. 368 00:35:09,750 --> 00:35:13,590 To fill out your world map only start creating the lore after you've already 369 00:35:13,590 --> 00:35:17,520 finished half of the series and keep adding stuff a decade after finishing it. 370 00:35:18,180 --> 00:35:23,610 And well, I think you can catch this one. Create an entire universe with a bloody theological history, 371 00:35:23,610 --> 00:35:28,080 with hundreds of characters and dozens of devastating wars, and then write a children's book in it. 372 00:35:32,940 --> 00:35:42,270 The other thing to say, just to sort of conclude on this sort of secondary belief idea is, first of all, have attention to detail. 373 00:35:42,540 --> 00:35:47,550 Tokens. Attention to detail is meticulous. It is quite extraordinary. 374 00:35:47,790 --> 00:35:58,860 I've just got a few examples here where he starts to work and these are taken from the catalogue from the Paris exhibition a couple of years back. 375 00:35:59,250 --> 00:36:00,630 Here he's working on distances. 376 00:36:00,840 --> 00:36:09,600 He would work out a map, the physical distances and how quickly characters could get from A to B so that he could exactly where account is mythology. 377 00:36:10,670 --> 00:36:14,500 Here. He's working on Moons. Moon Times for full moons. 378 00:36:14,510 --> 00:36:16,669 February six, 843, February the seventh, 379 00:36:16,670 --> 00:36:26,750 1906 and 1944 at this point are required to know how much late to the moon gets up each night when nearing full and how to stew a rabbit. 380 00:36:27,890 --> 00:36:31,250 But he's working all this through because he wants to get it exactly right. 381 00:36:31,250 --> 00:36:34,280 And I feel this is one of those things is in the back of my mind. 382 00:36:34,280 --> 00:36:39,829 There is some point where he rewrites something because he's aware that the full moon where the full it would have 383 00:36:39,830 --> 00:36:45,260 been a full moon and the shadow of the character would have been slightly different or the shadow of the landscape. 384 00:36:45,830 --> 00:36:54,890 That is a level of thinking you rarely get with many other fantasy writers, and also you will see in the manuscripts and in these exhibitions. 385 00:36:55,070 --> 00:36:59,900 He often maps out very meticulously where each of the characters or plots are happening. 386 00:37:00,110 --> 00:37:05,560 So in this one, January the 16th company, the Ridge Company, the ring battle of the bridge kind of falls into place. 387 00:37:05,570 --> 00:37:13,280 Gollum dogs the company siren his allies Moria orcs pursue company over the Silver Logan, etc. And there's quite a bit of working out like that. 388 00:37:15,320 --> 00:37:18,260 And finally, I just say make it familiar. 389 00:37:20,480 --> 00:37:28,680 This first quote is from Jane Langton, a writer who some of you may have come across her study of fantasy for children in 1973. 390 00:37:29,030 --> 00:37:32,839 And she said the expected norm for fantasy writing is Northern Europe. 391 00:37:32,840 --> 00:37:39,350 Sometime between the fall of Rome and the invention of the internal combustion engine and populated exclusively with wizards, 392 00:37:39,350 --> 00:37:44,840 which is just as beautiful as young sons. Now, of course, Tolkien doesn't have all of those know some of them, 393 00:37:45,110 --> 00:37:53,450 but you could certainly say that the setting of Middle Earth has that feel of northern Europe, of Germanic mythology, particularly coming through. 394 00:37:53,750 --> 00:37:58,370 And it's sometime between the fall of Rome and the invention of the internal combustion engine, 395 00:37:58,640 --> 00:38:02,660 with the exception of the hobbits, of course, who have umbrellas, things like that. 396 00:38:03,930 --> 00:38:07,080 The second thing, if you're a writer, avoid info dumps. 397 00:38:07,680 --> 00:38:10,620 Sometimes you might pick up a fantasy novel in the first chapter. 398 00:38:10,620 --> 00:38:15,509 Is this just awful info dump where one character is telling another character who clearly already knew 399 00:38:15,510 --> 00:38:20,610 this already and it's solely there for the purpose of trying to get you as a reader into the world. 400 00:38:20,610 --> 00:38:27,450 And it never works. He cleverly does it through The Hobbit, those everyman characters who sort of explore the world as they progress. 401 00:38:27,780 --> 00:38:32,490 But also I think he does it quite well in a chapter like The Shadow of the Past, 402 00:38:33,390 --> 00:38:41,130 where it's understandable that Gandalf is explaining that the mythology or the history of the ring and to Frodo, 403 00:38:41,460 --> 00:38:46,410 and then wonderfully with the Council of Elrond, which Tom Shippy is written on and how it shouldn't work. 404 00:38:46,410 --> 00:38:52,080 But it does, but it works to me because it's exactly like any committee meeting I've ever attended in the university. 405 00:38:52,500 --> 00:38:56,610 You get people shouting in overwrite and then you get a chair. Like everyone's like, No, no, you're next. 406 00:38:56,610 --> 00:39:00,479 And so on. It just works really well and, you know, it's exactly like that. 407 00:39:00,480 --> 00:39:03,900 So he's using those models and then, of course, bring your readers with you. 408 00:39:04,020 --> 00:39:08,610 He knew his audience with The Hobbit and he had to bring them into The Lord of the Rings. 409 00:39:08,610 --> 00:39:15,600 Now, I must move on a bit quickly. Sorry, just to say he does that in my view, wonderfully, 410 00:39:15,930 --> 00:39:21,960 because what he does is he transitions you from that hobbit world and those original Hobbit chapters of the shire. 411 00:39:22,470 --> 00:39:31,080 And the turning point, which is often overlooked, is the dream sequence of Tom Bombadil, because after that we are into the world of fear In adults. 412 00:39:31,080 --> 00:39:32,280 We wake from the dreams, 413 00:39:32,280 --> 00:39:40,050 we get the barrel lights and then we're in the adult world and the stuff before is definitely taking you from the world of The Hobbit into that now. 414 00:39:42,110 --> 00:39:48,260 When people started to look at this, they did, of course, reflect on it and that there was a much more cohesive whole here. 415 00:39:48,740 --> 00:39:54,469 Diana Wyn Jones Again, to shape a narrative, you have to face the various incidents and control the nature that you set up. 416 00:39:54,470 --> 00:39:58,190 Significances, Correspondences, Foretaste Expectations. 417 00:39:58,610 --> 00:40:02,780 The Lord of the Rings is organised in movements just like a symphony. 418 00:40:03,080 --> 00:40:05,000 And what she was saying is that there are, 419 00:40:05,000 --> 00:40:11,899 there are sort of these sections in the Lord of the Rings which work really well because they look forwards and they look backwards. 420 00:40:11,900 --> 00:40:17,330 And I'll just show you one example here. It's going to look like some bizarre invasion map, but it's not meant to. 421 00:40:17,330 --> 00:40:24,030 So if we take China to Bri, it looks back at the beginning of your book to what happened in The Hobbit. 422 00:40:24,710 --> 00:40:28,160 But then with the explanation of the rings history, it looks back to the forging. 423 00:40:28,340 --> 00:40:35,120 So it's going back. There's the past. The barrel Whites and the elves are all about what happened in the past. 424 00:40:35,130 --> 00:40:38,730 So you get that sort of preliminary bringing you back to the past. 425 00:40:39,060 --> 00:40:42,900 Then when we get to Bree, we're beginning to think of the next movement, 426 00:40:43,470 --> 00:40:51,030 the dash to Rivendell and ultimately to the quest and the ring raids and Tom Bombadil start to give us. 427 00:40:51,030 --> 00:40:56,070 Not only that, this is important that we're moving to that, but this is really about the whole. 428 00:40:56,370 --> 00:41:01,679 This is an existential threat to middle earth and wind. 429 00:41:01,680 --> 00:41:06,000 Jones says The Barrow Downs is the absolute key moment, a wonderful moment. 430 00:41:06,300 --> 00:41:09,600 And because she argues, I'm not sure this is quite true. 431 00:41:09,790 --> 00:41:15,600 That's the last time the Hobbits are rescued. From then on in, they rescue themselves. 432 00:41:15,630 --> 00:41:20,430 Now, you could argue that about, you know, the other cases where they kind of get rescued a bit. 433 00:41:20,430 --> 00:41:24,030 But I take your point. So a cohesive whole to it. 434 00:41:24,360 --> 00:41:28,830 And as she concluded, there really was nothing about narrative that Tolkien didn't know. 435 00:41:29,490 --> 00:41:33,240 Finally know when to stop, but it's probably an expression of me. 436 00:41:33,390 --> 00:41:36,209 And so he did he did try and write an epilogue. 437 00:41:36,210 --> 00:41:41,940 And he says an epilogue giving a further glimpse, though, of a rather exceptional family that his family. 438 00:41:42,540 --> 00:41:46,829 Been so universally condemned that I shall not insert it. One must stop somewhere. 439 00:41:46,830 --> 00:41:51,240 And if you want to read it, it's there. But it lets to say I think he made the right decision. 440 00:41:52,560 --> 00:41:58,020 I'm right. Last last period of this talk. 441 00:41:59,220 --> 00:42:07,220 So how do you write The Lord of the Rings? You will undoubtedly, if you were writing something like this, draw from your own experiences. 442 00:42:07,230 --> 00:42:13,620 And there are books and books written about Culkin's life and how that might have influenced particular scenes, 443 00:42:14,280 --> 00:42:19,800 particular characters, particular ideas in The Lord of the Rings and these other books. 444 00:42:19,850 --> 00:42:25,079 So the hiking trip you went to in Switzerland clearly had an enormous effect on him. 445 00:42:25,080 --> 00:42:32,250 And you can see those images being replayed in some of the descriptions of like the Misty mountains in paradise and so on. 446 00:42:33,000 --> 00:42:40,080 The First World War and John Gough is John's in the audience, but John has written the seminal book on this Tolkien in the First World War. 447 00:42:40,090 --> 00:42:44,360 He's also written the book on Tolkien at Exeter, which is available from reception for £8. 448 00:42:44,360 --> 00:42:53,370 So do buy it, and it seems now very often forgotten that to be caught in the youth by 1914 was no less hideous experience than the revolt in the 1939. 449 00:42:53,370 --> 00:43:00,840 The following years, and a taste of fairy stories as waken by philology on the threshold of manhood and quick into full life by war. 450 00:43:01,290 --> 00:43:08,160 Understandably, the First World War had an extraordinary effect on him, as it did on Imagine everyone of that generation that lived through it. 451 00:43:09,210 --> 00:43:11,040 The top left of the is the interview, 452 00:43:11,060 --> 00:43:21,360 his friends of which two died in the war and two made it through the riots that left him on his knees from the exhibition that was here in Bodley. 453 00:43:21,660 --> 00:43:26,340 And I do think it's just wonderful because it's the think it's his intake here at Exeter. 454 00:43:27,150 --> 00:43:32,790 And you can see Hopkins at the fact of all the characters that played it out made it through. 455 00:43:33,240 --> 00:43:41,270 They may have been disabled, but they made it through the war. Every gentleman that received food died in the war. 456 00:43:41,280 --> 00:43:47,220 You could just imagine the decimation of his friends, his colleagues, and this university in particular. 457 00:43:48,900 --> 00:43:55,710 So we see things like this in The Lord of the Rings, the dead marshes in Miranda, No, something to the northern France and the Battle of the Somme. 458 00:43:56,460 --> 00:44:02,100 And then this expression at last they came. So this description that came to the end of the black man, they crossed it perilously, 459 00:44:02,100 --> 00:44:05,910 crawling or hopping from one treacherous island tussock to another. 460 00:44:06,210 --> 00:44:10,830 Often they floundered, stepping or falling hands first into waters as noisome as a cesspool. 461 00:44:11,310 --> 00:44:19,170 Very much a description of the Somme towards after July, but towards the latter part of that battle and things like Passchendaele as well. 462 00:44:19,680 --> 00:44:24,870 But even, of course, Second World War, Tolkien lived through two big world wars. 463 00:44:25,800 --> 00:44:32,880 And when we know it's when he's writing The Lord of the Rings, even in October 1938, the war hasn't started. 464 00:44:33,180 --> 00:44:38,400 It's fairly obvious to most people it's coming. The darkness of the present days has had some effect on it. 465 00:44:39,060 --> 00:44:44,550 It's a couple of pictures there to show you a nice similarity. Tolkien was, of course, a medievalist. 466 00:44:45,490 --> 00:44:55,720 He's published lots of books on medieval literature after he died, but there are numerous publications of his notes, of his lectures, etc. 467 00:44:55,930 --> 00:44:59,919 This is just about a sample. So medieval literature greatly influenced what he did. 468 00:44:59,920 --> 00:45:03,730 And this was from a book I did with my colleague Elizabeth Sleepover. 469 00:45:04,620 --> 00:45:08,520 And the reason I'm doing this is because you can see if you take the Lord of the Rings, 470 00:45:09,060 --> 00:45:16,700 you could see parallels between what he is doing and portrayals of things like Elves and of Legolas, 471 00:45:16,800 --> 00:45:24,210 the poetry, their imprisonment, the Stones, the Fight, the aliens team, etc. In medieval texts are orfeo, the ruin, the fight against broke and so on. 472 00:45:26,370 --> 00:45:31,710 So that obviously was something he drew on and he drew on his knowledge of languages. 473 00:45:31,980 --> 00:45:33,870 On the left we have the tree of tongues. 474 00:45:34,140 --> 00:45:42,270 On the right, we have a standard proto-indo-european language tree showing you how languages relate to each other and genealogy. 475 00:45:42,670 --> 00:45:46,110 And you can immediately see the parallels here. 476 00:45:48,220 --> 00:45:53,150 This is. A pretty example on the left Beowulf manuscript. 477 00:45:53,480 --> 00:46:00,560 On the right, the Book of Magic Bull, which has been damaged and burned, of course, by the orcs as they attack the dwarves in Moria. 478 00:46:01,490 --> 00:46:05,210 And then just the plot, the plot of both books of The Hobbit. 479 00:46:05,570 --> 00:46:11,270 Hobbit, but of the Lord of the Rings. The Quest plot lifted, of course, from classical literature. 480 00:46:11,280 --> 00:46:18,680 But in his world, in what he was studying very much from medieval literature, and particularly the quest in medieval literature, 481 00:46:19,040 --> 00:46:26,960 in that you start from a place which is often childlike and you yourself are perhaps childish. 482 00:46:27,290 --> 00:46:35,390 You then go on your adventure to do whatever the quest is. You return grown up and generally the place you return to has changed. 483 00:46:35,690 --> 00:46:38,900 And the classic example of that, Sir Gawain in The Green Knight. 484 00:46:41,350 --> 00:46:46,480 Now, there's a lot can be said about all this, and too much is said about all this, probably by people like me. 485 00:46:48,160 --> 00:46:51,370 But, you know, I think come back to this idea. 486 00:46:52,240 --> 00:46:56,210 He didn't work with literary theory. He didn't have that bit. 487 00:46:56,230 --> 00:46:57,760 I'll have that be I'll have that bit. 488 00:46:58,060 --> 00:47:05,680 I do think this idea of things surfacing consciously or unconsciously, whatever, into his book is something we should retain. 489 00:47:05,920 --> 00:47:11,530 And here he is talking again about the leaf mould of the mind and all the things you've forgotten. 490 00:47:13,110 --> 00:47:18,690 I said I'd return to Y. I'm just going to say very briefly on this, and this is a piece of old English. 491 00:47:20,190 --> 00:47:26,190 Many of you will have seen this before, Randall And that's how Randall, 492 00:47:26,490 --> 00:47:31,470 brightest of Angel's, a poem that he encountered quite early on when he was a student. 493 00:47:32,010 --> 00:47:35,069 And he looked at that where they are ended and went, What on earth is this? 494 00:47:35,070 --> 00:47:39,690 We still don't know. We think it's probably a very bright star. We can gloss it or something like that. 495 00:47:39,690 --> 00:47:46,920 So this is from Anglo-Saxon. And the reason I'm showing this is because he then goes on to try and answer what might this mean? 496 00:47:47,130 --> 00:47:51,360 And this touches into a theory which you need to go away and read Tom Ship. 497 00:47:51,360 --> 00:48:02,469 His books on this are asterisk reality. In very simple terms when when and historical linguists philologists were looking at languages, 498 00:48:02,470 --> 00:48:05,170 those language trees and the relationship between words, 499 00:48:05,620 --> 00:48:10,360 they would often say this is very much like this word here is like that word over there in two different languages. 500 00:48:10,630 --> 00:48:14,680 There must have been some form of ancestor, some up against the word. 501 00:48:14,800 --> 00:48:20,920 Sometimes it's recorded that you go back to a point where it may not be recorded, at which point you would say, that's what I think is the word. 502 00:48:21,220 --> 00:48:29,770 And you'd put a little asterisk. And one of the driving things that I did not get it when I first read Tolkien, but he read it more and more. 503 00:48:30,310 --> 00:48:37,360 So what he's doing is he's filling in the gaps in our knowledge about what we might call more Western mythology. 504 00:48:37,600 --> 00:48:44,590 He's showing us where why dwarves appear in middle English and all English whales appear. 505 00:48:44,830 --> 00:48:52,660 Where all those things come from. He's filling in the asterisk world of a mythology millennia ago. 506 00:48:54,950 --> 00:48:58,520 Okay. Right. I am going to finish. So the final thing. 507 00:48:59,300 --> 00:49:06,110 Final thing to say on how to write The Lord of the Rings. And this is something I cannot teach and I can't teach it. 508 00:49:06,110 --> 00:49:10,880 Certainly. I'm sure someone else better than me. Okay. Is that you really going to be a rather good writer? 509 00:49:11,060 --> 00:49:17,540 Now, a lot of people lay into Tolkien for various things about his style in his books, 510 00:49:17,870 --> 00:49:25,370 and which is incredibly unfair because all books of that size will have weaknesses and all of them have strengths. 511 00:49:25,730 --> 00:49:32,900 But what I would say is that Tolkien, in various stages and sorry, various places in The Lord of the Rings shows. 512 00:49:34,440 --> 00:49:41,120 Have a level of sophistication, of control of narrative, which is really quite extraordinary. 513 00:49:41,750 --> 00:49:48,950 Now, I have written on this piece, so if you've heard me talk about this before, apologies, or you've read my chapter and apologies, 514 00:49:48,950 --> 00:49:56,270 but it's a good example because it's great and everyone knows the scene and it was one of Tolkien's favourite parts of the book. 515 00:49:56,660 --> 00:50:02,000 So this refers to that section in the Return of the King When the Witch King, 516 00:50:02,000 --> 00:50:09,050 they find the besieging ministries and they finally break through the gates and the witch comes in on his horse, 517 00:50:09,200 --> 00:50:15,709 not on a flying beast, as Peter Jackson wanted to do. But anywhere you go, he comes in and then he's facing Gandalf. 518 00:50:15,710 --> 00:50:19,430 So hopefully you are familiar with that scene is pretty famous. 519 00:50:20,820 --> 00:50:29,980 And if not, just imagine that picture there. So this is the section from Return of the King and this is how it is laid out. 520 00:50:30,650 --> 00:50:35,480 There are multiple pauses. So the mind breaks is in the in the text. 521 00:50:37,280 --> 00:50:45,650 And I don't know about you. Every time I read this and reread this, there is something about this section which just brings a lump to the throat. 522 00:50:47,120 --> 00:50:50,479 So what do we do? Well, we do a close reading of it. We work out why. 523 00:50:50,480 --> 00:50:55,560 What is he doing here that is so powerful that we perhaps could pick from it? 524 00:50:55,580 --> 00:51:01,670 Now, there's lots of things here, so I'm going to have to go very quickly. And he does control the setting. 525 00:51:01,760 --> 00:51:06,720 We would often do that setting plot characterisation. And so we see where it seemed like runs. 526 00:51:06,740 --> 00:51:10,790 You drank siege powers night shot in dark. Clearly we're in the medieval world. 527 00:51:10,790 --> 00:51:16,700 That's fine. We knew that. That's fine. And he does very well with characterisation. 528 00:51:17,870 --> 00:51:21,650 So I don't know if you can see the colours at the back here, but on towards the right there, 529 00:51:22,310 --> 00:51:29,389 the Lord of the Natural comes before his face and then in green all say one, they're waiting for him. 530 00:51:29,390 --> 00:51:34,310 And still it's that kind of function of Christ shouting back to alone. 531 00:51:34,310 --> 00:51:38,510 Among the pretty horses we go into the terror, we kind of go back. 532 00:51:38,960 --> 00:51:43,790 The Gandalf and shadow facts are surrounded by words which show that they are stoic. 533 00:51:43,790 --> 00:51:49,970 They will not move, even though the words associated with the Witch King are all about movement. 534 00:51:50,600 --> 00:51:54,200 And you get this symbiotic relationship between Gandalf and the horse. 535 00:51:54,200 --> 00:51:58,560 They are the two things that can withstand him. So far, so good. 536 00:51:58,950 --> 00:52:07,229 Well, a third character in this, which escapes most people is the battering ram grown from is this big ram. 537 00:52:07,230 --> 00:52:13,500 If they get the gates open and we get one of those glimpses of the past, 538 00:52:14,130 --> 00:52:21,750 it's important to take you back to the brothel they need in memory of the hammer and the underworld of What is this hammer? 539 00:52:22,080 --> 00:52:25,200 Don't worry. You just know that there is a bigger story out there. 540 00:52:25,680 --> 00:52:29,820 But the interesting thing about is piece it. 541 00:52:30,840 --> 00:52:36,270 They drew it, surrounded it. We all did it. But then grown starts to take on. 542 00:52:37,670 --> 00:52:48,680 A personification starts to become a living creature is wrong. It finds its path wrong of code on which it swung thrice. 543 00:52:48,680 --> 00:52:53,240 The great bamboo is becoming a living creature now, so it moves from passive to active. 544 00:52:54,200 --> 00:53:01,889 There's more the which can. Wonderful use a variation of not just the Lord of Natural disease. 545 00:53:01,890 --> 00:53:07,400 The Lord of Natural did that little man hideous shape, but description. 546 00:53:07,410 --> 00:53:14,130 He he We then get the black cat and we're getting this semantic arrangement to do with military negotiating the crime. 547 00:53:14,610 --> 00:53:20,340 They erode the borders. And that's a great motive and that's what the game is. 548 00:53:20,460 --> 00:53:23,130 And then the black right, a lot of variation, 549 00:53:23,490 --> 00:53:29,730 but motion is constantly associated with the which can hear apart from the point when he pauses deliberately, 550 00:53:30,210 --> 00:53:33,330 powerfully and managed to spare a terror. His own words. You get with it. 551 00:53:33,810 --> 00:53:37,470 We get the black, we get the menacing, we'll get the king, then we get the supernatural. 552 00:53:37,770 --> 00:53:42,940 And there are supernatural elements around the. There's still more. 553 00:53:44,350 --> 00:53:47,950 He uses and this is about the song called Me. 554 00:53:48,070 --> 00:53:54,670 So you might think it's archaic, but it's deliberately words. The expression takes a verb in a sentence. 555 00:53:55,090 --> 00:53:58,180 So when you look at the way he's doing this time, where we going? 556 00:54:01,280 --> 00:54:04,310 In Rome. The law to the National Assembly is one thing. 557 00:54:04,430 --> 00:54:06,860 It just has a weight feel to it. 558 00:54:07,610 --> 00:54:14,750 A poor writer would go the Lord of National Road in trouble in claiming whatever, but he's doing in Rome, the Lord and the what suspended him. 559 00:54:15,290 --> 00:54:20,540 And yet upon the head, no visible words except people with awful English. 560 00:54:20,540 --> 00:54:26,000 And it's not perfectly good in and the semantic range of the price. 561 00:54:26,240 --> 00:54:30,620 Raki is ancient, it's powerful and so on slang. 562 00:54:34,790 --> 00:54:42,560 If that's not enough, you get all kinds of things going on with the language, the style, the pattern, the rhythm, the drum roll. 563 00:54:42,810 --> 00:54:47,720 You get repetition from crude on from crude on the drums wildly becomes a racket. 564 00:54:48,080 --> 00:54:53,030 We get alliteration in here at deliberate points to ram home the effect of this. 565 00:54:54,360 --> 00:55:00,249 And then I'll stop here. Wonderful control of sound and pace. 566 00:55:00,250 --> 00:55:06,550 The reason this bit works is because he manipulates you right the way through it. 567 00:55:07,060 --> 00:55:14,410 All the way through it. He is controlling how fast you read this section, what your feeling is at each point throughout. 568 00:55:14,430 --> 00:55:23,860 It sounds we've already had these short sentences that not to mention, cause that naturally gives you a sense of import in this. 569 00:55:24,250 --> 00:55:28,810 And but note the amount of times he talks about sound. 570 00:55:29,200 --> 00:55:40,270 No Bo sang, even if it's an absence of sound. Roll the rattle, boom, rumble, thunder, cry, boom, burst for something like the mountain sound. 571 00:55:41,210 --> 00:55:46,130 And that is because he then moves to silent. The key points inject silence in there. 572 00:55:46,130 --> 00:55:51,170 So the and that school has the power to calm tens of thousands of orcs and more. 573 00:55:51,170 --> 00:56:01,520 He is just holding his hand up and everyone from silent. But the reason it works particularly well is they involve secondary to manuscripts. 574 00:56:02,090 --> 00:56:08,479 They operate in the context. You're not going to have to pause when you get to that. 575 00:56:08,480 --> 00:56:12,810 And with that, my thoughts and feelings are down the blade. There's a break. 576 00:56:14,550 --> 00:56:21,780 It increases the tension. This is the bit it's the cliff-hanger that we're saying next week we're going to find out what happens again. 577 00:56:21,970 --> 00:56:28,010 We want you back. What does it look like unless you finish with two paragraphs down? 578 00:56:29,070 --> 00:56:35,680 The next time is the call for. Which is a single reform, which is a symbol of rebirth and so on. 579 00:56:36,460 --> 00:56:40,730 And some might say it's all to do with and when. 580 00:56:41,700 --> 00:56:47,280 Those are the national three times and thank you for that Sectra showing the pieces. 581 00:56:47,580 --> 00:56:54,420 Thank you. Catastrophic moment where we realise there is salvation because the next down a hole and put on hold 582 00:56:54,760 --> 00:57:01,440 even if we don't know who these homes are because the ro here in the previous chapter a miles away. 583 00:57:01,700 --> 00:57:10,050 We don't know the coming bones, horns, horns in the dark. So it's five, six in the right corner to the north from flooding. 584 00:57:10,560 --> 00:57:17,790 It's only in that last sentence you get Rowan had come at last and we know the cavalry of literally come over the hill. 585 00:57:18,090 --> 00:57:23,340 But it's masterful because all the way until that last part there, you think, Minister, 586 00:57:23,340 --> 00:57:29,520 if is fallen, Gandalf is doomed and everyone and the whole thing is for the birds. 587 00:57:31,770 --> 00:57:36,179 Okay. My last night I was going to say, how can I capture this? 588 00:57:36,180 --> 00:57:41,550 And I thought of Leaf by Nicole, that great short story where he talks about someone who never quite finishes anything. 589 00:57:42,270 --> 00:57:49,830 And everyone would point to that. But actually I thought the poem, the verse that goes through various forms in Lord of the Rings was perhaps right. 590 00:57:50,280 --> 00:57:56,400 It just seems to capture how Tolkien worked his way through The Lord of the Rings. 591 00:57:56,970 --> 00:57:58,980 It's almost like it is a very dangerous thing. 592 00:57:58,980 --> 00:58:08,490 To paraphrase Bilbo going outside your front door, it's a very dangerous thing to start writing an epic of six books, three volumes of however, 593 00:58:08,700 --> 00:58:14,880 and how many million or how many words of his whatever the road goes ever on and on down from the door where it began, 594 00:58:15,120 --> 00:58:16,620 how far ahead the road has gone. 595 00:58:16,620 --> 00:58:24,510 And if and I must follow, if I can, pursuing it with weary feet until it joins some larger way where many paths and errands meet. 596 00:58:24,780 --> 00:58:30,750 And whither then I cannot say. Thank you very much.