Okay, I make it 1:00. So let us make a start.
I'm sure we've all got things we need to be doing at two.
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.
And you will have seen, hopefully the website, etc.,
that there's a series of talks this term given by members of various faculties at Oxford and they are all fully booked.
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.
And they're all here in the Fitzhugh auditorium.
And I'm extremely grateful not only to the faculty of English but especially to Exeter College, Tolkien's First college,
of course, when he was a student here for hosting us.
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,
which is going to be down at the Faculty of English on Main Road, which was Tolkien's department, of course.
So it all ties together. And I took the opportunity of just casting my mind back 50 years.
I looked at the times and there was the the notice on the September 4th about Tolkien's burial.
Very small, as you can see. But just a little note in there.
And but they did run in an obituary the day before.
What interested me about this was on the left there is the obituary there, creator of hobbits and inventor of new mythology.
And it had a nice balance between his work as an academic and his work as a writer of of of the fantasy books.
We probably all know him. But without missing the opportunity to have a dig at his lecturing style.
And but the news was, oh, there could be another book here, The Silmarillion, which of course would appear four years later.
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.
Now, I sent myself the title of How to write The Lord of the Rings, which is utterly ridiculous.
I mentioned it to my wife and she said, But it's already been written. And I said, That's very true.
And so I would like to say this is a kind of warm up to the to the other series seminars in this series.
And I do feel a bit like Gandalf and Bilbo at the beginning of The Hobbit, and I'm paraphrasing here.
What do you mean? He said, Do you wish to tell me how to write The Lord of the Rings?
Or do you mean to tell me how Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings or what I
can learn from Tolkien if I want to write a book like The Lord of the Rings,
to which Bilbo, with some exasperation, replied All of them at once.
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.
And there is some background material here. So if you are very, very familiar with Tolkien, I think I would have to apologise.
But it interests me because I lecture on fantasy literature at and at the English faculty and
what I like to sort of pull out for me is that is the way people construct these novels.
So first of all, what is what is it if you're going to write a book in a particular genre,
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,
or notoriously Juvenile Trash and Balderdash by Wilson and Early Review, and Tom Shipp,
who is a scholar of token Tolkien's works and inspiration to many of us,
once argued that the problem The Lord of the Rings faces is that there is so many things that makes it so many modes.
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.
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.
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.
We then have to have to ask what is fantasy literature? And this, again, has been discussed over many decades and studies.
But at its simplest, to boil it all down, fantasy tends to deal with impossibility,
something which just could not happen naturally, but and most importantly, in a believable way.
And if you go into any bookshop, this I think is from Waterstones,
you will see that fantasy is quite big business and you will probably find the Lord of the Rings in shelves like this.
Not so much in literature or the classics. The next question then, before we get our really teeth into is why?
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?
Now, going on that picture there, if you if you're inspired and you want to go out and write the Great next down,
the next great fantasy saga, you might think, well, good reason is money, because there is money in this.
In them there are mountains. This is a boom genre.
And whilst Tolkien may have had that at the back of his mind to a degree, The Hobbit did grew financially successful.
And when you read through his letters and other works about and you will see that he was constantly
worried about his financial situation and I don't think that's obviously the main reason.
So the reasons which I would posit about why he why he embarked on The Lord of the Rings is,
first of all, The Hobbit was successful and the publishers wanted another Hobbit story.
He was himself quite pleased with how The Hobbit had gone and was having all kinds of ideas for new stories.
Although, as we will see, he struggled with that.
And whilst it had not been his original intention to set The Hobbit in Middle Earth, the fact that they came together,
I think revealed to him just how strong a narrative could be in terms of bringing his mythology and his languages to life.
And there is a couple of quotes here written, of course, in 1956, as you can see,
it was just after the 1914 Warburton to me that I made the discovery that legends depend on the language to which they belong,
and then in subsequent one, the invention of languages is the foundation.
The stories were made rather to provide a world for the languages, then the reverse.
To me a name comes first in the story follows. So this is particularly important.
The novel, as it transpires, was allowing him to bring his languages and his legendary to life.
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,
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.
But I'm going to do this very, very quickly. I hope you can read that in the back.
He was quite small, but he was obviously born in Bloomington, in in South Africa.
He came over to Britain at a young age and was actually orphaned at a young age,
went to King Edward School, and then here, Exeter College received his first class honours in 1915.
But then, of course, the First World War by then was a year year underway and he joins the Lancashire Fusiliers.
We talk a bit about that in a second. On returning from the war after convalescing and the cessation of the war.
He works with the Oxford English Dictionary.
He then gets his first proper academic job outside of the OED up at Leeds University when he's made a professor,
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.
And as we know, dies 50 or 50 years ago.
And this is a quote which I often use from the biography by Humphrey Carpenter.
It was the ordinary, unremarkable life made by countless of other scholars, a life of academic brilliance,
certainly, but only in a very narrow professional field that is really of little interest to laymen.
As a person who started out doing medieval literature, that really gets me that sentence every time.
But there we go. And that would be that. Apart from the strange fact that during those years when nothing happened,
he wrote two books which became world bestsellers that captured the imagination and influenced the thinking of several million readers.
But what can we learn from Tolkien's life that may help us to write our next Lord of the Rings?
Well, the first thing is, well, come to Oxford.
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,
academic or in his retirement, and is often been posited about the Oxford School of Fantasy.
But the place does seem to engender writers who are interested in speculative fiction.
William Morris, whose fantasy books, talk and read, was also an old ex-union, and he rubbed shoulders, of course,
with this loose network of writers like Owen Barfield, Charles Williams and of course,
C.S. Lewis, which fall under that sort of loose title of the Inklings.
They are the Wyn Jones, and I believe Susan Cooper attended his lectures.
Alan Garnett didn't, from what I know, but he was certainly here at a similar time.
And then we have writers like Sir Philip Pullman, again, an old zone.
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.
And so there is something special about this place, which you might want to consider.
And I appreciate that many of you read or at Oxford or maybe are past that stage of applying as an undergraduate,
But I would you certainly point out that we have a wonderful continuing education department, which of course you can attend.
So let's start with the big question before we move on to the slightly more woolly ones.
How do Tolkien write The Lord of the Rings and what can we learn from that?
And so let's start with some dates again. So The Hobbit published in September 1937.
It was revised to a certain degree, but there were three three possible revisions you'd like to look at.
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,
and Return of the King, the last volume, October 1955, which of course the titles of Jackson's films.
And this immediately throws up some all kinds of questions.
Three books, three volumes, actually six books. What was going on here?
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,
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.
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.
But this is just to explain by background, if you if you see references to the Lord of the Rings,
you will often see it's something like that Return of the King Book five, Chapter three, and then pages.
So that's how it's often referenced. But it is something which Tolkien struggled with, as did his publishers.
But this hides the story and the middle bit is the is the important thing because writing in December 1937,
I have written the first chapter of a new story about hobbits.
A long expected party. Well, if you know the first chapter in The Hobbit, this is a play on that with the title.
But we're only a couple of months after the publication of The Hobbit.
So he's getting into the swing of it. Well, easy.
The chronology hides, of course, a lot because the first draft of The Lord of the Rings,
a loose draft, let's say, was really appeared in August, September 1948, So 11 years later.
And the final copy around October 1949, the next few years were spent wrangling with the publishers, Allen and Collins.
So a quick bit of math shows that from the time Tolkien put pen to paper to the time the
return of the King reached the bookshelves over 17 years at the last 214 months or 6200 days.
And according to Nick Groome in his new book, 21st Century Tolkien, this averages out about 90 words a day.
So the lesson could be for you, if you want to go in this, take your time.
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
we do not say anything in it unless it's worth taking a long time to say and to listen to.
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,
will it be any chance of publication if I can get it done before the spring, Spring, 1940?
And obviously being rather optimistic and there are a lot of things we could say, why did it take so much time?
There were various reasons here. Tolkien took on an excessive workload as an academic here at the university, particularly during the war.
He's picking up other people's duties. He was also, I think, from 1942 onwards, involved in the civil defence of the city.
He wasn't part of the armed forces. He had distractions.
He was one to be distractions. But most importantly, I think what we will see is he was finding his way with the plot.
As Nick Groome in the book states, there was no plan.
Now. I'm pleased I put this slide in for reasons I to say in a second,
if you want to understand about the composition in the creation behind the Lord of the Rings,
you need to go to Christopher Tolkien's absolutely wonderful series of books,
history of Middle-Earth, and particularly the four which devote themselves to the Lord of the Rings.
And you probably already recognise the titles,
the Return to the Shadow with the trees and the Eyes and God, The War with the Ring and Sauron defeated.
There are also the letters edited by Humphrey Carpenter and New Edition coming out later this year, which we are all looking forward to.
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,
Hammond and Christina Skull, who are very kindly in the audience today,
who without whom we just would not know anything like what we know about Tolkien.
Absolutely fantastic amount of work that they've done, the chronology, the reader's guides,
etc. I, I could, I could probably spend an hour listing it, but I'm absolutely thrilled.
I thank you very much for coming. So there's work is indispensable.
The other thing which we would probably need to look at some point,
but I wouldn't recommend it for the faint hearted is to start working with these manuscripts now.
Christopher transcribes those in the history of the Middle Earth and we hold some of the manuscripts here in Oxford,
but most of them are in Milwaukee. And the reason I would suggest you sort of give a bit of a wide berth,
unless you've got a strong glass to hand, is that they are often unintelligible.
They are really very, very difficult to read and pieced together.
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.
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.
I never have been able to work without a pen, scribble, scribble, scribble.
And although I have some calligraphic leanings rather than accomplishments,
my writing becomes more and more illegible until finally only my son Christopher can read it and then it becomes beyond him.
Well, when I'm in the process of writing, I've written very quickly, getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.
And then if I'm wise like I've written before, it becomes unintelligible.
Leaving out those things, those words which I can no longer interpret.
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.
Then I discovered the typewriter was a great boon to me, and I think rather quickly.
So I think rather quickly, in very elaborate long sentences, my digression sentences by me very largely consist of stuff in brackets.
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.
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.
And it just seems to be quite that he started with the simplest possible story a man prince, a woodcutter, going on a journey.
He then gave the journey a name, and we found that the simple, picaresque plot had developed into a quite story.
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,
which Chaucer made in his partner's tale. And I love the expression.
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.
So what did he say about the road to the Rings process?
And here we can piece together a lot of things from the letters and from the chronology, from Wayne and Christine.
So I'm just going to pull out a few extracts. But here we are, October 1937.
So. Very quickly after the publication of it.
I have only too much to say and much already written about the world into which The Hobbit intruded.
So that again picks up this point that The Hobbit, the book Bilbo was not meant to be.
They came together and he uses intruded of Bilbo a couple of times in his lectures.
They just kind of locked together by almost not by chance, but by fate.
Perhaps in February 1938, The Hobbit sequel is still where it was.
So were a few months later, and I have only the vaguest notions of how to proceed.
I fear I squandered all my favourite motifs and characters on the original series.
You think I used up all my good ideas in that children's book and now I'm rather stuck.
What am I going to write about? Well, obviously you managed to solve that one August.
It's now flowing along and getting quite out of hand. It has reached about Chapter seven and progresses towards quite unforeseen goals.
February 1939. He's beginning to realise this is a different type of book.
It's more grown up. But the audience for which The Hobbit was written has done that also.
So it's okay that it's moving more into sort of adult themes. Leaping forward here few years at.
April 1944. This story takes me in charge, and I've already taken three chapters over what was meant to be 1st November 1944.
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.
As if the truth comes out then and then post-publication.
I've long ceased to invent that Even patronising or sneering critics from the side praised my invention.
I wait till I seem to know what really happened or until it writes itself.
There's this feeling almost that, well, I don't know if you would say it. It's kind of like bewilderment, despair, panic.
But it's almost as if the book had a life of its own.
Things were falling. I wouldn't quite use the word channelling, but it almost feels like that.
Now, some people say this is a deliberate attempt and decision and methodology by Tolkien, which sets him up on one of those pedestals.
As a postmodernist writer who wants to break the norms, makes modes go free flow, etc., etc.
But I suspect it's actually a bit more that no one really told him how to do this.
So he just got on with what he felt was right.
And that's why it's perhaps so groundbreaking now when we think about the methodology behind the writing of this,
and I have had the pleasure of working with Tolkien's manuscripts on on a few occasions and particularly
worked on a couple of chapters from The Lord of the Rings and tried to piece them together and.
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.
So it would sometimes start with him diving straight into full prose.
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,
often containing elements which which may not have made it into the final version.
This is not uncommon for creative writers, I would say.
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?
And then you quickly make now notes and you try and get it towards the end.
But this is definitely working through thought process and sometimes very often littered with questions.
So the first quote there is from the Return of the Shadow,
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.
That shadowy character appeared in The Hobbit not very dangerous when used for good purpose, but exacts a penalty.
So he's beginning to think about things. If we move on to the trees and of eyes and God,
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.
In the story for Scene from Moria,
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.
In addition, it's being hard to make out in places does not at all represent a clearly defined step by step sequence.
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.
Perhaps some Sam comes up. This is talking about when they get to the to Mount Doom Frodo Sam for the destruction
of the ring beats off a vulture and hurls himself and Gollum into the Gulf.
Question mark function for Sam. Question Mark Is he to die?
Question Mark, How are Sam and Frodo saved from the eruption and in the trees and advise and guide?
Again, we have a couple more of these. The story for scene from Laurie and the story for scene from Final One.
So he would work on these things and preliminary drafts, pretty many questions, often in pen or pencil or both.
He was quite happy to write over things and then he would subsequently rework these in further drafts.
And eventually, as he said, the typewriter was the boon and he suddenly emerged to TypeScript.
Now, this kind of makes it all sound a bit linear and a bit well thought through.
And, you know, I'm not taking anything away. But Christopher notes, for example,
instances where the plot outline starts in the present tense and then slides almost imperceptibly into full narrative.
So you get this mixed mode when you're reading it and it numerous points.
Tolkien would often just go back and rewrite whole sections,
often for much earlier parts of the book as he begins to realise things aren't quite working out.
This is not untypical of Tolkien with his academic writings, I should say,
and it's one of the reasons why perhaps he didn't publish as much as we would have liked.
As Christopher also notes, he abruptly, even in mid-sentence at certain points in the narrative,
and returned to revise what he had written once so often more than once.
So what can we learn from this? Well, as tribute would say, stop every now and then and plan out as things are heading.
Don't be hasty. And you can see that to a degree.
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.
Just be prepared to change. Think of things if things sort of don't feel right, well, make a change.
Even the smallest change can have significance.
And I think the change here, which I would just explain I think is incredibly significant.
Christopher didn't think it was so, but this is towards the end when Frodo reaches Mount Doom,
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.
I will not do it. The ring is mine. The final published version is.
But I do not choose now to do what I have come to do.
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.
And the troughs in history. Miller show constant reworkings and rethinking of the plot chapters,
structures being quite fluid, characters coming and going, changing names even changing race.
For example, Aragorn morphing from a hobbit called Trotter.
Second, I think be prepared to run with an idea. And I have a few examples here.
The most obvious example is the one ring which emerges, as you might say, the dominant character or certainly concept in the book.
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.
And there's a wonderful story of the ring verse, which which many of you may know.
But just to repeat it. Tolkien, in that 1968 interview, said, I invented that in a bath.
I remember. Yes, I remember inventing that one in the bath in when I was having a bath in 20 Northmoor Road.
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.
But keeping with our friend there trip at the end in 1956, he wrote,
I knew for years that Frodo would run into a tree adventure somewhere far down the Great River River.
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.
Just as it now is. And then I saw that of course it had not happened to Frodo at all.
It's almost like this surprise and 1968 to 12 years later.
I haven't the slightest recollection of anything in the position where the window was on myself.
The whole of the end chapter that came straight out of the leaf mould.
There was no difficulty, no sense of trouble, of composition.
There must have been something burgeoning there, and I'll come back to the small bit later on.
Now we can all think of where the ends came from.
Enter your way, ORC Old English. The work of giants.
When the Anglo-Saxons with news over these ruined buildings by the Romans.
I think these were the work of giants used metaphorically fused with his own thinking about Macbeth and of trees.
Da da da da da da. So you could say that is the leaf mould.
That is the thing. All those things bubbled to the surface and that's where the end came.
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.
He carried on. Now.
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.
And this is tied in with the theory of worldbuilding, which you will come across if you if you investigate fantasy writing,
how writers make the worlds into which they are taking you an experience you enjoy,
an immersive experience, a believable experience, and it permeates into things like computer games.
This is a vast topic and there are all kinds of books and articles written about tips and tricks on how to do this,
but I'm just going to pull out a few from Tolkien.
Which I wouldn't say he was the first to do these, but, you know, and of course,
I would refer you to going and reading the, um, fairy stories lecture at St Andrews is 1939.
That's right. Published in 47 Flagrante Andersen's great edition of that.
The reason why this is this is so important and, you know,
I've taught literature in many periods and about many writers is that we have at
this this crux point between The Hobbit and the real work on The Lord of the Rings,
an author standing up and pretty much saying, This is my craft, this is what I write about,
this is what I'm trying to do, even in a wonderfully approachable way.
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.
The creator, of course, in his eyes being God, but then working on these secondary worlds and engendering in the reader secondary belief.
This is probably familiar to many of you, but I just think just to recap it.
Secondary belief is different to Tolkien.
It's not the suspension of disbelief, it is the fact that when you are in that world, you completely buy into it.
You believe everything about it, and when you come out of it, put the book down.
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?
So it ties into all kinds of things about readers theory and so on.
And I'm just going to give you a few so and a few ways that he does.
First of all. Three framing device so.
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.
And but Tolkien and other writers were very,
very conscious of how to frame a book so that when you pick it up, it gives you that sense of authenticity.
The framing device for him is, of course, these are the memoirs of Bill though, and for over and amended by Sam and hobbits.
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,
which he certainly uses in other stories. The notion club papers.
So a framing device is something which is quite useful because you get to feel, Oh, this must be real.
And he then uses scholarly apparatus, the most obvious being maps.
And we also forwards and appendices. So when you pick up Return of the King, all those appendices at the back,
when you when you look at them and you may not have read them or you may glance through them,
I mean to a certain degree the bunkers really,
but they are there because they give you all the details you need but are impressing on, you know, these are real.
This is a real genealogy. These were real people. Leslie descendants.
I can give you an exact phonology of how these people lived.
And of course, all of this adds up. He doesn't, of course, doesn't use notes, footnotes.
Some fancy writers have now started using footnotes in their books.
And personally, I don't think that's a good idea because it immediately shatters the secondary
belief because you're reading the text and suddenly you go down to the footnote,
which is usually telling you off or telling you some minor piece of information.
And then you go back and finally glimpses at a deeper world and.
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,
an attraction like that, a viewing far off an unvisited island or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist.
And it's littered with this. Of course, this is just one example.
I do not think that tale should be told now. As a reader, you might be going, Oh, come on.
I want to know the tone with the servants of the enemy at hand.
If we wind through to the house of Elrond, you may hear it. They're told in full.
There are all kinds of examples of that where it gives you these glimpses many people have observed.
And it's absolutely true. This comes straight out of the medieval way of thinking.
If you read a text and law is going to be giving a lecture on Beowulf later on,
you will often get these asides to previous events, which the audience probably at the time knew, but it was fine.
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.
I think he does it very well. Of course, I would say that there are some fancy shoe writers who do it really badly.
They just make the oddest side.
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.
But Gene Roddenberry would also say, Oh yes, that happened in the 1920s, in the 1940s,
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,
and then sort of like Saturday evening TV, it kind of works, but it's that idea.
But when you read some of the other writers they make, they use this trick,
but they don't have the depth because they don't really know what they're referring to.
So he did these dates was subject to all kinds of discussion.
But I think the most important thing here to say is that he laid the foundations early on for all of this.
So we know that he as a as a child,
he was inventing languages in the age and in some of these through various routes reached fruition in the development language of Middle Earth.
And he wants stories to try and make those come alive.
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.
And gradually, through various drafts of the book, Lost Tales and The Silmarillion, etc., up to the 1977 publication.
So by the time of The Hobbit, 20 years he's been working 20 years on his legendary.
And it's worth kind of considering and taking a step back. Why did he do this?
Well, obviously, it's fun. It was a natural progression from inventing languages.
And I've said it aloud to explore his use of stories and to explore all of these.
And he did also once famously remark on, I don't have time to go into this, but it's worth just parking there.
I was from early days, grief by the poverty of my own beloved country.
It had no stories of its own, bound up with its tongue and soil.
Do not laugh, but once upon a time my crest has long since fallen.
I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, which I could dedicate simply to.
To England. To my country.
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.
But perhaps that is another reason.
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,
you may rather miss the boat to start early and start writing your mythology in your teenage years and through your fantasy novel.
But take heart, even if time is against you.
The lesson is we can learn from this is that thinking through your world, your mythology, or drawing on something already in existence,
perhaps someone else's mythology or historical period will give you that anchor and you can learn from the mistakes from others.
Where it seems clear to me that they're making up the mythology as they go along.
What sets Tolkien apart is the depth of his background of the legend.
This is just a bit of fun and you can you can think which one is A, B and C referring to.
You can see Romney and Martin that they were 90% people from real life history and other authors.
To fill out your world map only start creating the lore after you've already
finished half of the series and keep adding stuff a decade after finishing it.
And well, I think you can catch this one. Create an entire universe with a bloody theological history,
with hundreds of characters and dozens of devastating wars, and then write a children's book in it.
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.
Tokens. Attention to detail is meticulous. It is quite extraordinary.
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.
Here he's working on distances.
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.
Here. He's working on Moons. Moon Times for full moons.
February six, 843, February the seventh,
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.
But he's working all this through because he wants to get it exactly right.
And I feel this is one of those things is in the back of my mind.
There is some point where he rewrites something because he's aware that the full moon where the full it would have
been a full moon and the shadow of the character would have been slightly different or the shadow of the landscape.
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.
He often maps out very meticulously where each of the characters or plots are happening.
So in this one, January the 16th company, the Ridge Company, the ring battle of the bridge kind of falls into place.
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.
And finally, I just say make it familiar.
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.
And she said the expected norm for fantasy writing is Northern Europe.
Sometime between the fall of Rome and the invention of the internal combustion engine and populated exclusively with wizards,
which is just as beautiful as young sons. Now, of course, Tolkien doesn't have all of those know some of them,
but you could certainly say that the setting of Middle Earth has that feel of northern Europe, of Germanic mythology, particularly coming through.
And it's sometime between the fall of Rome and the invention of the internal combustion engine,
with the exception of the hobbits, of course, who have umbrellas, things like that.
The second thing, if you're a writer, avoid info dumps.
Sometimes you might pick up a fantasy novel in the first chapter.
Is this just awful info dump where one character is telling another character who clearly already knew
this already and it's solely there for the purpose of trying to get you as a reader into the world.
And it never works. He cleverly does it through The Hobbit, those everyman characters who sort of explore the world as they progress.
But also I think he does it quite well in a chapter like The Shadow of the Past,
where it's understandable that Gandalf is explaining that the mythology or the history of the ring and to Frodo,
and then wonderfully with the Council of Elrond, which Tom Shippy is written on and how it shouldn't work.
But it does, but it works to me because it's exactly like any committee meeting I've ever attended in the university.
You get people shouting in overwrite and then you get a chair. Like everyone's like, No, no, you're next.
And so on. It just works really well and, you know, it's exactly like that.
So he's using those models and then, of course, bring your readers with you.
He knew his audience with The Hobbit and he had to bring them into The Lord of the Rings.
Now, I must move on a bit quickly. Sorry, just to say he does that in my view, wonderfully,
because what he does is he transitions you from that hobbit world and those original Hobbit chapters of the shire.
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.
We wake from the dreams,
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.
When people started to look at this, they did, of course, reflect on it and that there was a much more cohesive whole here.
Diana Wyn Jones Again, to shape a narrative, you have to face the various incidents and control the nature that you set up.
Significances, Correspondences, Foretaste Expectations.
The Lord of the Rings is organised in movements just like a symphony.
And what she was saying is that there are,
there are sort of these sections in the Lord of the Rings which work really well because they look forwards and they look backwards.
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.
So if we take China to Bri, it looks back at the beginning of your book to what happened in The Hobbit.
But then with the explanation of the rings history, it looks back to the forging.
So it's going back. There's the past. The barrel Whites and the elves are all about what happened in the past.
So you get that sort of preliminary bringing you back to the past.
Then when we get to Bree, we're beginning to think of the next movement,
the dash to Rivendell and ultimately to the quest and the ring raids and Tom Bombadil start to give us.
Not only that, this is important that we're moving to that, but this is really about the whole.
This is an existential threat to middle earth and wind.
Jones says The Barrow Downs is the absolute key moment, a wonderful moment.
And because she argues, I'm not sure this is quite true.
That's the last time the Hobbits are rescued. From then on in, they rescue themselves.
Now, you could argue that about, you know, the other cases where they kind of get rescued a bit.
But I take your point. So a cohesive whole to it.
And as she concluded, there really was nothing about narrative that Tolkien didn't know.
Finally know when to stop, but it's probably an expression of me.
And so he did he did try and write an epilogue.
And he says an epilogue giving a further glimpse, though, of a rather exceptional family that his family.
Been so universally condemned that I shall not insert it. One must stop somewhere.
And if you want to read it, it's there. But it lets to say I think he made the right decision.
I'm right. Last last period of this talk.
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.
And there are books and books written about Culkin's life and how that might have influenced particular scenes,
particular characters, particular ideas in The Lord of the Rings and these other books.
So the hiking trip you went to in Switzerland clearly had an enormous effect on him.
And you can see those images being replayed in some of the descriptions of like the Misty mountains in paradise and so on.
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.
He's also written the book on Tolkien at Exeter, which is available from reception for £8.
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.
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.
Understandably, the First World War had an extraordinary effect on him, as it did on Imagine everyone of that generation that lived through it.
The top left of the is the interview,
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.
And I do think it's just wonderful because it's the think it's his intake here at Exeter.
And you can see Hopkins at the fact of all the characters that played it out made it through.
They may have been disabled, but they made it through the war. Every gentleman that received food died in the war.
You could just imagine the decimation of his friends, his colleagues, and this university in particular.
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.
And then this expression at last they came. So this description that came to the end of the black man, they crossed it perilously,
crawling or hopping from one treacherous island tussock to another.
Often they floundered, stepping or falling hands first into waters as noisome as a cesspool.
Very much a description of the Somme towards after July, but towards the latter part of that battle and things like Passchendaele as well.
But even, of course, Second World War, Tolkien lived through two big world wars.
And when we know it's when he's writing The Lord of the Rings, even in October 1938, the war hasn't started.
It's fairly obvious to most people it's coming. The darkness of the present days has had some effect on it.
It's a couple of pictures there to show you a nice similarity. Tolkien was, of course, a medievalist.
He's published lots of books on medieval literature after he died, but there are numerous publications of his notes, of his lectures, etc.
This is just about a sample. So medieval literature greatly influenced what he did.
And this was from a book I did with my colleague Elizabeth Sleepover.
And the reason I'm doing this is because you can see if you take the Lord of the Rings,
you could see parallels between what he is doing and portrayals of things like Elves and of Legolas,
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.
So that obviously was something he drew on and he drew on his knowledge of languages.
On the left we have the tree of tongues.
On the right, we have a standard proto-indo-european language tree showing you how languages relate to each other and genealogy.
And you can immediately see the parallels here.
This is. A pretty example on the left Beowulf manuscript.
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.
And then just the plot, the plot of both books of The Hobbit.
Hobbit, but of the Lord of the Rings. The Quest plot lifted, of course, from classical literature.
But in his world, in what he was studying very much from medieval literature, and particularly the quest in medieval literature,
in that you start from a place which is often childlike and you yourself are perhaps childish.
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.
And the classic example of that, Sir Gawain in The Green Knight.
Now, there's a lot can be said about all this, and too much is said about all this, probably by people like me.
But, you know, I think come back to this idea.
He didn't work with literary theory. He didn't have that bit.
I'll have that be I'll have that bit.
I do think this idea of things surfacing consciously or unconsciously, whatever, into his book is something we should retain.
And here he is talking again about the leaf mould of the mind and all the things you've forgotten.
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.
Many of you will have seen this before, Randall And that's how Randall,
brightest of Angel's, a poem that he encountered quite early on when he was a student.
And he looked at that where they are ended and went, What on earth is this?
We still don't know. We think it's probably a very bright star. We can gloss it or something like that.
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?
And this touches into a theory which you need to go away and read Tom Ship.
His books on this are asterisk reality. In very simple terms when when and historical linguists philologists were looking at languages,
those language trees and the relationship between words,
they would often say this is very much like this word here is like that word over there in two different languages.
There must have been some form of ancestor, some up against the word.
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.
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.
So what he's doing is he's filling in the gaps in our knowledge about what we might call more Western mythology.
He's showing us where why dwarves appear in middle English and all English whales appear.
Where all those things come from. He's filling in the asterisk world of a mythology millennia ago.
Okay. Right. I am going to finish. So the final thing.
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.
Certainly. I'm sure someone else better than me. Okay. Is that you really going to be a rather good writer?
Now, a lot of people lay into Tolkien for various things about his style in his books,
and which is incredibly unfair because all books of that size will have weaknesses and all of them have strengths.
But what I would say is that Tolkien, in various stages and sorry, various places in The Lord of the Rings shows.
Have a level of sophistication, of control of narrative, which is really quite extraordinary.
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,
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.
So this refers to that section in the Return of the King When the Witch King,
they find the besieging ministries and they finally break through the gates and the witch comes in on his horse,
not on a flying beast, as Peter Jackson wanted to do. But anywhere you go, he comes in and then he's facing Gandalf.
So hopefully you are familiar with that scene is pretty famous.
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.
There are multiple pauses. So the mind breaks is in the in the text.
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.
So what do we do? Well, we do a close reading of it. We work out why.
What is he doing here that is so powerful that we perhaps could pick from it?
Now, there's lots of things here, so I'm going to have to go very quickly. And he does control the setting.
We would often do that setting plot characterisation. And so we see where it seemed like runs.
You drank siege powers night shot in dark. Clearly we're in the medieval world.
That's fine. We knew that. That's fine. And he does very well with characterisation.
So I don't know if you can see the colours at the back here, but on towards the right there,
the Lord of the Natural comes before his face and then in green all say one, they're waiting for him.
And still it's that kind of function of Christ shouting back to alone.
Among the pretty horses we go into the terror, we kind of go back.
The Gandalf and shadow facts are surrounded by words which show that they are stoic.
They will not move, even though the words associated with the Witch King are all about movement.
And you get this symbiotic relationship between Gandalf and the horse.
They are the two things that can withstand him. So far, so good.
Well, a third character in this, which escapes most people is the battering ram grown from is this big ram.
If they get the gates open and we get one of those glimpses of the past,
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?
Don't worry. You just know that there is a bigger story out there.
But the interesting thing about is piece it.
They drew it, surrounded it. We all did it. But then grown starts to take on.
A personification starts to become a living creature is wrong. It finds its path wrong of code on which it swung thrice.
The great bamboo is becoming a living creature now, so it moves from passive to active.
There's more the which can. Wonderful use a variation of not just the Lord of Natural disease.
The Lord of Natural did that little man hideous shape, but description.
He he We then get the black cat and we're getting this semantic arrangement to do with military negotiating the crime.
They erode the borders. And that's a great motive and that's what the game is.
And then the black right, a lot of variation,
but motion is constantly associated with the which can hear apart from the point when he pauses deliberately,
powerfully and managed to spare a terror. His own words. You get with it.
We get the black, we get the menacing, we'll get the king, then we get the supernatural.
And there are supernatural elements around the. There's still more.
He uses and this is about the song called Me.
So you might think it's archaic, but it's deliberately words. The expression takes a verb in a sentence.
So when you look at the way he's doing this time, where we going?
In Rome. The law to the National Assembly is one thing.
It just has a weight feel to it.
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.
And yet upon the head, no visible words except people with awful English.
And it's not perfectly good in and the semantic range of the price.
Raki is ancient, it's powerful and so on slang.
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.
You get repetition from crude on from crude on the drums wildly becomes a racket.
We get alliteration in here at deliberate points to ram home the effect of this.
And then I'll stop here. Wonderful control of sound and pace.
The reason this bit works is because he manipulates you right the way through it.
All the way through it. He is controlling how fast you read this section, what your feeling is at each point throughout.
It sounds we've already had these short sentences that not to mention, cause that naturally gives you a sense of import in this.
And but note the amount of times he talks about sound.
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.
And that is because he then moves to silent. The key points inject silence in there.
So the and that school has the power to calm tens of thousands of orcs and more.
He is just holding his hand up and everyone from silent. But the reason it works particularly well is they involve secondary to manuscripts.
They operate in the context. You're not going to have to pause when you get to that.
And with that, my thoughts and feelings are down the blade. There's a break.
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.
We want you back. What does it look like unless you finish with two paragraphs down?
The next time is the call for. Which is a single reform, which is a symbol of rebirth and so on.
And some might say it's all to do with and when.
Those are the national three times and thank you for that Sectra showing the pieces.
Thank you. Catastrophic moment where we realise there is salvation because the next down a hole and put on hold
even if we don't know who these homes are because the ro here in the previous chapter a miles away.
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.
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.
But it's masterful because all the way until that last part there, you think, Minister,
if is fallen, Gandalf is doomed and everyone and the whole thing is for the birds.
Okay. My last night I was going to say, how can I capture this?
And I thought of Leaf by Nicole, that great short story where he talks about someone who never quite finishes anything.
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.
It just seems to capture how Tolkien worked his way through The Lord of the Rings.
It's almost like it is a very dangerous thing.
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,
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,
how far ahead the road has gone.
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.
And whither then I cannot say. Thank you very much.