Thanks for that.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Well, it's a pleasure to be here.
Thank you for coming.
And, we should already called your attention to the talking seminar
schedule up there.
And you noticed there's also a loose society schedule up there.
The term card for Michaelmas term.
I thought you might be interested to see those two talks on talking coming up.
One by me and another one later in the term.
And so I do encourage you to come Tuesday evening at Pusey House.
815 Tolkien and Lewis for friends.
It's nice that Tolkien is.
And Lucien's can be friends, too.
So here we have that.
So my talk today is on Tolkien
as interpreter and Transformer of Culture
The Making of the Lord of the rings as a modern book.
Tolkien as part of a generation
that some more change than any other in human history.
He was born in the reign of Queen Victoria.
The British Empire was at its height, covering one quarter of the globe.
And then he watched on television as Victoria's
great great granddaughter Elizabeth was crowned queen.
With the Empire now a thing of the past at his birth.
Public transport went at the speed of a trotting horse,
but by his death, supersonic
flight was the modern reality.
As a boy, he read Andrew Lang's read Fairy Book,
and in his old age he read Frank Herbert's Dune.
And it may be a bit of a cliche, but it's nonetheless pretty close to the truth
to say that the one constant in his life was the fact of change.
And through all of this,
from his teenage years onward, Tolkien was writing.
He was creating the imagined world that would in time
become middle earth.
How did he interpret this modern culture
that was taking shape all around him in his writings?
How did you respond to it, particularly in his writing of the Lord of the rings?
Now, that's a very big question, and it's far too big to answer
in one afternoon's lecture. So do not panic.
And we will we will keep it concise.
But what I want to do today is to look at just one angle of it,
to explore a contrast, contrasting what Tolkien did
with what he might have done.
We know that Tolkien had a great love of the past.
After all, he chose as his academic vocation
the study of medieval languages and literature,
and this professional and personal interest provided
a considerable part of the literary DNA of the Lord of the rings.
And readers noticed this from the beginning.
We can see this and the early praise for the Lord of the rings.
One reader remarked on the elements of Norse, Teutonic, and Celtic myth.
Another compared it to Malory's great Arthurian
saga of the 15th century.
One declared that in the depths of middle earth
we hear Snorri St realism and Beowulf.
The sagas and the Nibelungen lead, and yet another described it
as perhaps the last literary masterpiece of the Middle Ages.
But if we stop here,
and if we approach the Lord of the rings as if it were essentially medieval
in its inspiration and worldview, we run into difficulty.
How do we reckon with the fact that it's so widely and lastingly popular
with translations into more than 50 languages,
from Arabic and Chinese to Thai and Turkish?
Its appeal obviously goes far beyond the Anglophone world,
and the film adaptations I love by millions who've never read the book.
The appendices alone were enough to launch The Rings of Power,
the most expensive television series ever made.
Would the Lord of the rings be this popular if it were a medieval story?
Through and through?
I suspect not drawn.
How many people read the Poetic Edda for pleasure or take Beowulf to the beach?
Apart from people in this present audience, of course.
The answer is not that many.
I would suspect that there is something special about Lord of the rings.
I really believe there's something in Lord of the rings that resonates
with a modern audience in a particular way, in some way.
Tolkien is engaging with modern culture
and with modern concerns.
And one way that we can consider how he does so is to look at the way
that the Lord of the rings could have been a very different book than it is.
Great works of
literature have such internal coherence that it can be difficult to imagine
how they could be significantly different from what they are now.
The Lord of the rings went so many through so many changes
in its long gestation that we can envision some of these.
For instance, we can imagine a version of the story
in which Tolkien didn't heed his friends Lewis's advice
that hobbits are only interesting in un hobbit like situations,
and included loads more of just hobbits doing hobbit things.
You can imagine that we can envision, a version
which Frodo is still called Bingo Baggins and Strider is called Trotter.
A little grim, but we can imagine it then.
But these are still minor variations.
They're still focused on the basic assumption that the Lord of the rings
is thematically, generically, stylistically what it is,
but it could have been otherwise.
And exploring some counterfactual scenarios will,
I think, shed some light on Tolkien's magnum opus.
So let's consider what might have been.
Given the massive changes in the world he was born into.
Tolkien could have chosen to embrace modernity
and reject the past entirely.
Now, this may seem unlikely, but I think we can sketch
a plausible scenario in which he retained an academic interest in the past.
But rejected a personal connection to it.
A key aspect of this would probably have been abandoning his Christian faith,
which represented, among other things, continuity with the past.
Tolkien had a depressive streak to his personality,
and some of his creative works show an emotional grasp of a bleak view of life
that's more characteristic of some of his atheist literary colleagues.
His mother's Catholic
conversion had plunged a little family into poverty, as well as family conflict,
and as a teenager he had the painful experience
of his guardian Catholic priest separating him from his beloved Edith
after the nightmare of the Great War.
He might well have looked back at the traditions of Christianity
and, like his contemporary and his fellow war veteran, the poet
Robert Graves simply said goodbye to all that.
Now, it's interesting to note in this regard
Tolkien's great enjoyment of science fiction,
a genre which in his day as today
often overtly rejected traditional Christianity
or more often depicts a world, a future world in which religious practice,
which was so big with us in English life until the 20th century, is simply absent.
Tolkien had no qualms about reading and enjoying works
along these lines by authors such as David Lindsay,
and instantly the book is even weirder than the cover would suggest.
Olaf Stapleton and Isaac Asimov,
Tolkien's contemporary H.G.
Wells overtly rejected Christianity.
Wells's Outline of History, published in 1920, presents
a materialist view of history and denies the divinity of Christ.
And Wells became increasingly anti-religious.
In fact, in 1943 he published Crookes and Santa, an indictment of the Roman
Catholic Church in which he advocates intolerance of Catholics.
Indeed, he even asked
rhetorically, why don't we bomb Rome?
But Tolkien called Wells
one of the great old masters of science fiction,
and he had praise for the time machine
and The First Men in the moon.
Faith was not a fait accompli.
He could have followed a similar path to Graves or Wells.
In this scenario, it's doubtful that the Lord of the rings would have been
would have existed in any form like what we have,
because the story as we have it is so firmly grounded
in Tolkien's religious convictions, including the objective reality of good
and evil, the work of Providence, and the possibility of catastrophe.
What might he had written instead?
Well, possibly he could have written a long prose work that looked more like
the children of human destruction, manipulation,
incest, suicide, despair.
Or, to put it another way.
The Lord of the rings might have looked a lot more like a Game of Thrones.
So that's our first major counterfactual scenario.
If Tolkien, a chosen to embrace modernity and jettison tradition.
Alternatively, Tolkien might have chosen to reject modernity completely
and orient himself unreservedly toward the past.
Well, you might think, is this really a
what if? Yes.
So in order to establish that a total rejection of modernity
is, in fact a counterfactual scenario,
we'll just take a brief excursion into biography.
Tolkien certainly
did make biting comments about modernity, particularly
with regard to machines, industrialization and totalitarianism.
But he did us look at the past through rose colored glasses,
and he wasn't reflexively against change.
For instance, Tolkien was a willing,
even enthusiastic adopter of advanced technology.
He was intrigued by the potential of audio recording and read
various poems onto tape recorders, once even doing his own sound effects.
You not
only use a typewriter, a new fangled invention at the time, he was also
an early adopter of the ballpoint pen, a new invention from America at that.
And he used this for both his writing and his visual art.
And in contrast to his willingness to use technological innovation
that his day, his friend C.S.
Lewis staunchly refused to use a typewriter
and wrote with a dip pen all his life.
Now, Tolkien's opposition
to the machine age was surprisingly nuanced.
He was an automobile owner in the 1930s,
and retained a surprising affection for them throughout his life.
In a 1968 BBC interview painstakingly reconstructed by Stewart Lee,
so regretful for that, he declared love
writing them like driving them.
And he explained that the problem is not the automobile per se,
but the excessive number of them
and the heedless way in which roads are blasted to the countryside.
A driver, he said, is no longer able
to get to do the things for which motor cars were made.
Nowadays, where you can get to the brooks for picnic.
The state road makers of smash the brook and cut the trees down
so you can get there.
I should have thought.
Is the road makers more than the motor car, which I dislike.
They really are ruthless and foolish.
Nor did he romanticize the past.
Having lamented that we that having lamented being born
into a country which has developed and changed very quickly, talking adds,
I'm sensible enough to realize a lot of this is essential at any rate.
It's not peculiar to our time
that nobody in ancient England buy anything about oaks, trees.
I mean, they devastated the whole
the southeastern country for smelting, rebuilding ships and so on.
No, it's not a new thing.
And throughout his life, he was a regular reader of the newspaper,
declaring, I take a strong interest in what is going on, both in the University
and in the country and in the world.
Tolkien also read widely in contemporary fiction and poetry.
He praised the historical fiction of Mary Renault.
He enjoyed detective fiction and particularly appreciated Agatha Christie,
and he read and enjoyed a wide range of modern literary fiction, including,
as he put it, all of Sinclair Lewis, the American realist novelist.
Now, he didn't like everything that he read.
For instance,
he described William Golding as the Lord of the flies as dreary stuff.
Not wrong.
But he was also willing to venture out into reading things like modernist works,
such as an early portion of what became James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake.
Tolkien
had a nuanced reaction to the changes that he experienced.
He neither rejected modernity completely
nor embraced it completely.
But you might argue,
perhaps this was just a practical accommodation to the world
that he lived in day to day in his creative work.
He might have chosen to orient himself totally towards the past.
So let's imagine what the Lord of the rings might have been like if Tolkien,
totally rejecting modern culture in his imaginative and literary work,
had wanted to write the kind of book
that the Beowulf poet or Snorri Strawson, or so Thomas Malory would write
if they were transplanted to the 20th century.
He was, in fact entirely competent to do so.
He composed poetry in the languages of the medieval period.
He wrote poetry in Gothic and Old English,
and many of his English language poems, as Modern
English poems have titles that he gives them in Old English,
and he wrote extended poetic
narratives in the style of medieval authors.
For instance, he wrote a long portion of an American story,
The Fall of Arthur, in alliterative verse.
Here he's using medieval materials and form
the verse form used by Old and Middle English poets.
He also composed his own version of The story of the Muslims.
The New lay of the old Songs and the New Land of Good Ruin,
posthumously published as the Leo Cigaret and the Goodrum,
in which he uses a literature verse.
But this time in the short lines and stanzas of the Poetic Edda.
If he had wanted to, Tolkien could have composed
the saga of the War of the ring in alliterative poetry.
And even if he didn't choose a verse style that was so consciously
tied to medieval literature, writing it in poetry of any kind
would have firmly oriented his work toward the past.
And we can even see what it might have been like.
One of the most significant works set in middle earth is the long poem
The Lay of Lithium, telling the love story of Baron and Lucien.
We get an extract from it in the Lord of the rings, in which Aragorn
sings to the hobbits on whether top the leaves were long,
the grass was green, the hemlock was tall and fair,
and in the glade a light was seen of stars and shadows
shimmering to Nuvia was dancing there to music of a pipe unseen.
And the light of stars was in her hair and in her.
Raymond's glimmering.
We have eight more stanzas telling the first meeting of Beren and Luthien.
Now there is a lot to like in this poetry, but it does tend to feel a bit
long to many readers of the story, who often skip over the poetic bits.
And if these 72 lines that Tolkien extracted from his poetry
seem long, it's worth noting that these 72 lines come
from a narrative poem of over 4000 lines, which wasn't even finished.
Could he have written the whole of the Lord of the rings
in narrative verse, in the tradition of the medieval poets,
in the way that he was doing in the way of lithium?
Yes, he could have, but he didn't.
So now let's consider another what if scenario.
The novel is a modern form.
Could Tolkien have chosen to write in prose, but in a manner
that otherwise follows the conventions and styles of many of literature?
Well, as it happens, we had two examples
to emulate as this project was attempted by authors
whose work he admired greatly by William Morris
and, er, Edison.
William Morris died
in 1896, four years after Tolkien's birth.
In his heyday, Morris was a major cultural figure.
He was even in the running to succeed Tennyson as Poet laureate.
He was a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts movement.
Poet, A novelist and a well-informed
amateur scholar of mythology and medieval romance.
Tolkien greatly
enjoyed and admired Morris's imaginative writing.
One of Tolkien's early literary ambitions was in fact to adapt one of the tales
of the finished Call of Allah, as he put it into a short story, somewhat
on the lines of Morris, his romances with chunks of poetry in between.
And he was referring to the House of the Wolf things.
And here we can see it with the title page advertising
its mixture of verse and prose.
Tolkien bought this book when he was an undergraduate at Oxford,
at Exeter College,
along with Morris's life and death of Jason and the story of the Wolf Sons.
Now this, this edition I show in Morris's
own High and Kelmscott Press edition,
as that gives a good feel of the literary style as as well.
And over the
years Tolkien added other titles to his personal library,
so that eventually he owned nearly all of Morris's works.
Morris's fiction is written in a deliberately and consistently
archaic style.
Here's a passage from the House of the Wolf.
Things not looked the odd off, either the heavens above or the trees,
as he strode on from the husk
strewn floor of the beechwood, on to the scanty grass of the lawn.
But his eyes looked straight before him at that which was amid most of the lawn.
And the little wonder was that were there in a stone chair, said a woman,
exceeding fair clad and glittering raiment,
her hair lying as pale in the moonlight on the gray stone
as the barley acres, and the August night before the reaping goes in amongst them.
She sat there as though she were awaiting someone,
and he made no stop nor stay,
but went straight up to her, and took her in his arms,
and kissed her mouth and her eyes, and she him again.
And then he sat himself down beside her, but her eyes looked kindly on him
as she said, oh, Theodore Hardy, art thou
that thou hast no fear to take me in thine arms, and to kiss me,
as though thou hadst met in the meadow with a maiden of the king's?
And I am a daughter of the gods of thy kindred, and a chooser of the slain.
That's sort of typical of the prose style,
but most of the speech in the book is in the form of verse, as when Theodore,
the claims we are in the ring of the hazels
and the wine of war, we drank from the tide
when the sun's highest, the hour when she sank.
And the three kings came against me.
The mightiest of the Huns, evil eyed in the battle, was swift afoot.
Wily ones.
And I'll leave it at that.
It goes on for pages.
So we have here Morris's very,
very archaic style,
and again popular in his day
as a 20th century moved on.
Tolkien had another directly contemporary example of the archaic style
used for novels in the work of E r Edison.
Two even met when Edison was a guest at an inklings meeting,
and read some of his work in progress.
Er. Edison is known today, if
at all, for the warm or rigorous, which was published in 1922.
A heroic epic on the planet Mercury, where mighty lords participate
in the eternally repeating cycle of war against their enemies,
these other fantasies comprise a trilogy of mysteries mistresses,
A fish, Dinner and Medicine,
and the mentioned gates, all largely set in the alternate world of his.
In the NBA, the plots focus on her quick action, a court intrigues, romance,
and a generous helping of philosophical discussions.
Tolkien said that he had read all that er.
Edison wrote and praised him as the greatest and most convincing
writer of invented worlds that I have read.
What did he appreciate in these stories?
Well, it certainly wasn't the moral philosophy of the tales.
Tolkien was critical of this, believing that Edison was coming to admire
arrogance and cruelty under the influence of what he called an evil
and indeed silly philosophy.
No, he was very specific.
He declared that he read his works with great enjoyment
for their sheer literary merit.
And indeed, I don't think it's possible to get through one of Edison's novels
if one doesn't actively enjoy his literary style,
which is a consistent Elizabethan prose.
So here, let's look at a passage from the middle of the Worm or Averroes,
in which the Lord to grow as on a long horseback ride,
grow, lean forward to pat his horse's neck.
Common gossip.
We must go on, he said, and marvel not if thou find the rest going with me,
which could never find any steadfast day under the moon's globe.
So they for that river, and fair to through low rough grasslands beyond.
At length the slopes slackened, and they passing us through a gateway
between two high mountains, which impending sheer and stark on either
hand, came forth upon a more of linen bog myrtle, strewn with liquids
and abounding in streams and moss, hags and outcrops of living rock,
and the mountain peaks afar stood round that moorland, waist like warrior kings.
Rose said in himself, how shall not common opinion account me mad,
so rash and presumptuous, dangerously to put my life and hazard
nay against all sound judgments.
And this folly I enact in that very season, when my patience and courage
and my politic wisdom I had won that in despite the fortune's teeth,
which obstinately hitherto she had denied me, when, after the brunt
of diverse tragical fortunes, I had marvelously gained the fortune
and grace of the King, the very honorably placed me in his court
and tender with me, I well think so dearly as he doff the balls of his two eyes.
So here we have Edison again.
This is written in 1922,
writing in a full orbed Elizabethan style.
Now compare this scene with Tolkien's rendering
of a similar one with Gandalf and Shadowfax.
Gandalf spoke now to Shadowfax, and the horse
set off at a good pace, yet not beyond the measure of the others.
After a little while, he turned suddenly and choosing a place
where the banks were lower, he waited the river and then led them away
due south into a flat land, treeless and wide.
The wind went like gray waves, the endless miles of grass.
There was no sign of road or track Shadowfax did not stay or falter.
He is steering a straight course now for the horns of Saturn
under the slopes of the White Mountains, said Gandalf.
It will be quicker so the ground is firmer in the east,
and that's where the chief northward track aligns across the river.
But Shadowfax knows the way through every fence, and a hollow,
so we can see that
Tolkien is using a much more naturalistic style.
He might well have appreciated things like the descriptions of the landscape
in Edison, little notes like the bald myrtle, but he writes in his own work
in a much more naturalistic style, which we shouldn't take for granted
given his enthusiasm for the writings of Maurice and Edison,
and given that this enthusiasm was shared by many of his friends Amani inklings,
Tolkien would have been fully aware that this kind of archaic, stylized,
consciously medieval or Elizabethan literary style was publishable
during the very years in which he was writing the Lord of the rings.
Now, if we want to see what the Lord of the rings might have looked
like in the style of Morris or Edison, we can consider his early tale
The Fall of Gondolin, which in 1920 he read to the extra college Essay Club.
The minutes of the meeting described it as a treatment.
In this manner, such typical romantics as William Morris.
So here's a taste of it.
At length they had fallen in with a band somewhat too numerous,
and Voronoi had dragged for them by the luck of the gods,
for all else with them perished, and therefore burned towards
house, yet found not the secret way therewith said were on the way.
Dilated came distraught of weariness and grief,
and fared into the city wildly to my great fear.
Nor might I get her to Sally from the burning
about the saying of these words, were they come to the southern walls
and nigh to two hours house.
And lo, it was cast down,
and the wreckage was a smoke, and thereat was two more bitterly wrath.
But there was a noise that boded the approach of orcs,
and to dispatch that company as swiftly as might be down that secret way.
Now is their great sorrow
upon that staircase, as those exiles bid farewell to Gondolin.
Yet are they without much hope of further life beyond the hills?
For how shall any slip from the hand of Melco?
Tolkien was 28 at this point.
When he writes this version of The Fall of Gondolin.
He is not at the height of his stylistic powers, but
he is also hardly a callow youth.
He might have continued on in this full blooded,
archaic style, in the mode of Morris or Edison.
However, he chose instead to use our chasm
in a limited and purposeful manner,
and the resulting blend of old and new in his writings can be quite subtle,
as in the scene of Frodo and Company arriving
at the Pension Pony in The Fellowship of the ring.
Even from the outside of the inn looked a pleasant place.
Frodo went forward
and nearly bumped into a short, fat man with a bald head and a red face.
He had a white apron on and was bustling on a one door
and in through another, carrying a tray laden with full mugs.
Can we, began Frodo?
Half a minute, if you please.
Shouted the man over his shoulder, and vanished into a babble of voices and a
cloud of smoke.
So here we can observe that
Tolkien is avoiding overly archaic diction,
but he's still choosing words
that convey a traditional rather than a modern day setting.
We have in and mugs, not pub and glasses.
The scene doesn't feel contemporary, but is not obvious
using old fashioned terminology either.
Tolkien also freely shifts
between stylistic registers, in contrast to Morris and Edison,
who stay in that high archaic register throughout their stories
so we can see the shifting registers.
For instance, in the Council of Elrond chapter,
as the Council discussed the matter of the ring, the register gets
gradually loftier and loftier until we reach Elrond, declaiming, yet
such is off the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world.
Now that line wouldn't be out of place.
And Edison or Morris, but only in Tolkien
do we get the effect of Bilbo breaking in very well, very well.
Master Elrond say no more.
This chatty matter of fact tone reflects Bilbo's character, of course,
but it also brings the exalted tone down,
and it provides for a preparation for another tonal shift.
As the Council's
reflecting on the question of who will become the appointed ring bearer,
we get a middle register expressed
in the simplicity of Frodo saying, I will take the ring.
Now there are a number of other ways in which the Lord of the rings
makes use of very modern literary techniques.
Consider the conversation between Sam and Frodo, and Curious Uncle
Sam wonders if they will ever be in a tale.
We're in one, of course.
But I mean put into words, you know, told by the fireside
or read out of a great big book
with red and black letters years and years afterwards.
So for a moment, the reader is simultaneously aware of the story
from both the inside sharing Frodo and Sam's experiences and the outside.
As we realize that we are reading the book that Sam is referring to,
and the characters experience same doubling because Sam
is reflecting on himself and Frodo and Gollum as literary characters.
It's a move straight out of the modern or even postmodern literary playbook.
The Lord of the rings also
has psychologically realistic and well rounded characters.
They may not have 21st century levels of angst,
but they certainly have 20th century levels of internal conflict.
Consider Aragorn frustrated at failing to make the right decisions.
The family dysfunction of den author Boromir
and Faramir for a complex emotional life.
And while there are scenes in the high heroic register, there's also quite
a lot of naturalistic dialog and thematic
resonances to the modern era.
Consider Frodo suffering from the wound he received, and whether Tom
as they ride home toward the Shire, Gandalf asks if Frodo is in pain.
Well, yes, I am, said Frodo.
It is my shoulder.
The wound aches.
The memory of darkness is heavy on me.
Was a year ago today.
Alas, there are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured, said Gandalf.
I fear it may be so with mindset. Frodo.
There is no real going back, though I may come to the Shire,
it will not seen the same, for I shall not be the same.
I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden.
Where shall I find rest?
Frodo could easily be a shellshocked
veteran of the First World War,
underscored by the fact there is no conventional happy ending for him.
So if Tolkien had
wanted to orient himself to the past,
he could have composed a book length narrative poem in order to verse.
Or, more modestly, he could have written
an epic in a backward looking, archaic prose style
along the lines of Morris or Edison, successful writers of their day.
I'm talking today.
But he didn't.
In many ways, Lord of the rings is very modern.
While also having deep connections with and influences
from the medieval world that Tolkien loved.
But so now the question is, how is it that the Lord of the rings
can be both medieval and modern,
and yet form such a coherent literary whole?
And I would venture to say
that this has something to do with Tolkien's understanding of tradition.
According to Eugene Vinegar,
Tolkien once said that his typical response upon
reading a medieval work was the desire, not so much to make a philological article
or critical study of it as to write a modern work.
In the same tradition.
Although the Lord of the rings isn't a direct response
to a medieval work, in fact it's literally a response to The Hobbit.
It is certainly rooted in Tolkien's
lifelong interest in medieval language and literature.
What might it mean to suggest that the Lord of the rings
is a modern work, in the same tradition as the medieval writers,
so it's helpful to shift gears for a moment from the literary
to the theological, and consider what
tradition meant for Tolkien.
He was certainly very traditionally minded
in the sense of having great love and appreciation for the forms of worship
and prayer that have been handed on in the Catholic Church for generations.
And he didn't approve of change for its own sake,
but his views on tradition were surprisingly nuanced.
Tolkien remarked that the Catholic Church was not intended by our Lord
to be static, to remain in perpetual childhood,
but to be a living organism, likened to a plant which develops and changes
in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history.
The particular circumstances of the world into which to set.
There is no resemblance between the mustard seed and the full grown tree.
Here, Tolkien follows the
same line of thought as John Henry Newman in his development of doctrine.
Human rights. It may indeed sometimes.
It is indeed sometimes, said the stream is clearest nearest the spring.
Whatever use may be fairly made of this image,
it does not apply to the history of philosophy or belief.
Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope.
At first, no one knows what it is or what it is worth.
In time it enters upon strange territory.
Points of controversy, alter of their bearing.
Parties rise and fall around its dangers and hopes appear in new relations,
and old principles reappear under new forms.
It changes with them in order to remain the same in a higher world.
It is otherwise.
But here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.
Now I want to note by graphically that Newman was
the founder of the Birmingham Oratory, in which talking grew up,
and in which he was intellectually and spiritually formed.
And so it's not that surprising to find that Tolkien
makes the exact argument that Newman is making.
As he continues his own arboreal analogy, he explains that
for those living in the days of its branching growth,
the tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is part of its life,
and the history of a divine thing is sacred.
The wise may know that it began with a seed,
but it is vain to try and dig it up, for it no longer exists,
and the virtue and powers of the hand now reside in the tree.
So for Tolkien, tradition
does not mean stasis.
Now, in literary terms, we can see him presenting this idea.
In his essay on Translating Beowulf, he explains
the diction of Bell was poetical, archaic, artificial, if you will.
In the day that the poem was made.
Whether you regret it or not, you will misrepresent the first
and most salient characteristic of the style and flavor of the author.
If, in translating a Beowulf,
you deliberately pursue the traditional literary
and poetic diction which we now possess in favor of the current and trivial.
Okay, so far so traditional.
But then he goes on to say,
but the opposite fault, once more common, should be equally avoided.
Words should not be used merely because they are old or obsolete.
The words chosen, however remote they may be from colloquial speech
or ephemeral suggestions, must be words that remain in literary use,
especially in the use of verse among educated people.
The fact that a word was still used by Chaucer
or by Shakespeare, or even later gives it no claim
if it has in our time perished from literary use.
Still less is translation of Beowulf a fitting occasion
for the exhumation of dead words from a Saxon or Norse graves,
antiquarian sentiments and philological knowingness are wholly out of place.
He even incorporated into his legendarium
the idea that attachment to the past can become unhealthy.
Tolkien notes that when some of the elves lingered in middle earth,
rather than heeding the call to the West, it was, he said, a sort of second fall,
or at least error of the elves, he explains.
They thus became obsessed with fading the mode in which the changes of time,
the law of the water of the sun was perceived by them.
They became sad.
And their art, shall we say, antiquarian,
and their efforts are really a kind of embalming.
Morris and Eddison are antiquarian.
Tolkien, for all his love of the past, was not.
And so when he writes in the modern idiom,
availing himself of modern literary techniques, literary styles, literature,
vocabulary, and above all, engaging with profoundly modern issues,
it is, for Tolkien, an authentic development of literary tradition.
The Tree of Tales is no longer a seedling.
It's a mature oak.
So if we ask, what would the Lord of the rings be like
if it had been written in the tradition
of the Beowulf poets, we have the answer right in front of us.
Tolkien has written it.
In discussing Tolkien's writings on Beowulf,
Peter Millward observed that Tolkien was gifted
with the ability to enter into the spirit of the old poem
and interpret it for his 20th century readers.
Tolkien could interpret the image of a world through his modern
readers precisely because he knew both cultures, the old and the new.
Someone who dwelt wholly in the past might well be able to understand
medieval literature better than anyone else,
but he wouldn't be able to communicate that with others.
Tolkien could and did share his insights.
This suggests that he could interpret the modern world even as he critiqued it.
But he was also a transformer of culture,
which I think we can see most fully in the theme.
At the heart of the Lord of the rings foreshadowed in The Hobbit,
that of renunciation, of relinquishing the will to power.
The plot of The Hobbit centers upon a quest
for something to recover the dwarf's treasure,
but the turning point of the story occurs when Bilbo gives up the ark and stone,
and by extension, his whole share in the in the treasure
and his place in the dwarves company.
In order to forestall the terrible conflict between the dwarves
and the men of Dale and their Elvish allies,
this theme, deepened and enriched,
becomes the centerpiece of the Lord of the rings.
The traditional storyline of a quest
is to find the magical item and use it,
but the Fellowship's mission is to destroy the ring,
and Tolkien underscores how radical this is by having dissent
among the fellowship for a brave and honorable man thinks it's madness
to give up the ring, and instead wants, understandably, to use it for good.
And the defense of Gondor.
The challenge that Tolkien
presents is ultimately to renounce
the will to power, that the ring signifies something that the character
has have to reckon with individually as well as corporately.
Gandalf, Boromir and Galadriel, even Sam are each faced with a temptation
to seize power instead of relinquishing it, and Frodo ultimately fails the test.
His will is broken, and he embraces the libido.
Dom Andy is saved
only through the providential consequences of his exercise of mercy and pity.
Earlier in the story.
Now the quest is about as ancient a story structure as one can imagine,
but Tolkien has shifted it at a fundamental level in a manner
that would not have made much sense to a medieval writer,
or indeed any writer before the calamities of the 20th century.
You know what a fairy story is?
Tolkien remarked that fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition
that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun,
on a recognition of fact, but not slavery to it.
Part of what Tolkien brought to the workings of his creative
imagination was a clear eyed acknowledgment of the modern world,
but not a weak willed acquiescence to it.
In writing the Lord of the rings, Tolkien was not turning his back
on the 20th century.
In fact, he was engaging with it all the more profound way,
as he recalled a letter to Christopher.
He had attempted diary keeping but found it unsatisfactory.
He wrote, so I took to escapism or really
transforming experience into another form and symbol,
and it has stood me in good stead in many hard years.
Since.
So how is it
that an epic fantasy about a quest to dispose of a magic ring
set in a prehistoric past,
featuring elves and dwarves, wizards and warriors,
should speak to readers in the 21st century.
The Lord of the rings is a great book,
and so there are many reasons why this should be so,
but I would suggest that part of the answer
is that Tolkien chose not to turn away from the modern day,
but rather to engage with it, difficult as that was at times,
and in that way he became both an interpreter
and a transformer of culture, and made the Lord of the rings
a book that speaks so profoundly to us today.
Thank you.