1 00:00:00,600 --> 00:00:01,534 Thanks for that. 2 00:00:01,534 --> 00:00:03,903 Thank you very much. 3 00:00:03,903 --> 00:00:05,905 All right. 4 00:00:05,905 --> 00:00:07,374 Well, it's a pleasure to be here. 5 00:00:07,374 --> 00:00:08,475 Thank you for coming. 6 00:00:08,475 --> 00:00:12,712 And, we should already called your attention to the talking seminar 7 00:00:12,746 --> 00:00:13,646 schedule up there. 8 00:00:13,646 --> 00:00:17,217 And you noticed there's also a loose society schedule up there. 9 00:00:17,217 --> 00:00:19,085 The term card for Michaelmas term. 10 00:00:19,085 --> 00:00:22,555 I thought you might be interested to see those two talks on talking coming up. 11 00:00:22,589 --> 00:00:25,291 One by me and another one later in the term. 12 00:00:25,291 --> 00:00:28,661 And so I do encourage you to come Tuesday evening at Pusey House. 13 00:00:29,462 --> 00:00:32,632 815 Tolkien and Lewis for friends. 14 00:00:32,665 --> 00:00:34,467 It's nice that Tolkien is. 15 00:00:34,467 --> 00:00:36,836 And Lucien's can be friends, too. 16 00:00:36,836 --> 00:00:38,938 So here we have that. 17 00:00:38,938 --> 00:00:42,809 So my talk today is on Tolkien 18 00:00:42,809 --> 00:00:46,212 as interpreter and Transformer of Culture 19 00:00:46,613 --> 00:00:50,283 The Making of the Lord of the rings as a modern book. 20 00:00:52,285 --> 00:00:54,187 Tolkien as part of a generation 21 00:00:54,187 --> 00:00:57,924 that some more change than any other in human history. 22 00:00:58,658 --> 00:01:01,661 He was born in the reign of Queen Victoria. 23 00:01:01,728 --> 00:01:05,965 The British Empire was at its height, covering one quarter of the globe. 24 00:01:07,000 --> 00:01:10,003 And then he watched on television as Victoria's 25 00:01:10,003 --> 00:01:13,606 great great granddaughter Elizabeth was crowned queen. 26 00:01:13,973 --> 00:01:18,278 With the Empire now a thing of the past at his birth. 27 00:01:18,445 --> 00:01:22,015 Public transport went at the speed of a trotting horse, 28 00:01:22,782 --> 00:01:25,318 but by his death, supersonic 29 00:01:25,318 --> 00:01:28,321 flight was the modern reality. 30 00:01:28,488 --> 00:01:31,858 As a boy, he read Andrew Lang's read Fairy Book, 31 00:01:32,358 --> 00:01:35,895 and in his old age he read Frank Herbert's Dune. 32 00:01:36,429 --> 00:01:41,768 And it may be a bit of a cliche, but it's nonetheless pretty close to the truth 33 00:01:41,768 --> 00:01:46,473 to say that the one constant in his life was the fact of change. 34 00:01:47,774 --> 00:01:49,609 And through all of this, 35 00:01:49,609 --> 00:01:53,613 from his teenage years onward, Tolkien was writing. 36 00:01:54,080 --> 00:01:56,916 He was creating the imagined world that would in time 37 00:01:56,916 --> 00:01:59,919 become middle earth. 38 00:02:00,220 --> 00:02:03,923 How did he interpret this modern culture 39 00:02:04,124 --> 00:02:07,393 that was taking shape all around him in his writings? 40 00:02:08,294 --> 00:02:12,398 How did you respond to it, particularly in his writing of the Lord of the rings? 41 00:02:12,999 --> 00:02:16,803 Now, that's a very big question, and it's far too big to answer 42 00:02:16,803 --> 00:02:19,339 in one afternoon's lecture. So do not panic. 43 00:02:19,339 --> 00:02:21,975 And we will we will keep it concise. 44 00:02:21,975 --> 00:02:26,913 But what I want to do today is to look at just one angle of it, 45 00:02:27,380 --> 00:02:31,985 to explore a contrast, contrasting what Tolkien did 46 00:02:32,385 --> 00:02:35,388 with what he might have done. 47 00:02:36,756 --> 00:02:39,626 We know that Tolkien had a great love of the past. 48 00:02:39,626 --> 00:02:42,529 After all, he chose as his academic vocation 49 00:02:42,529 --> 00:02:45,532 the study of medieval languages and literature, 50 00:02:45,832 --> 00:02:48,835 and this professional and personal interest provided 51 00:02:48,835 --> 00:02:53,907 a considerable part of the literary DNA of the Lord of the rings. 52 00:02:55,041 --> 00:02:57,544 And readers noticed this from the beginning. 53 00:02:57,544 --> 00:03:00,547 We can see this and the early praise for the Lord of the rings. 54 00:03:01,447 --> 00:03:05,718 One reader remarked on the elements of Norse, Teutonic, and Celtic myth. 55 00:03:06,553 --> 00:03:09,289 Another compared it to Malory's great Arthurian 56 00:03:09,289 --> 00:03:12,292 saga of the 15th century. 57 00:03:12,759 --> 00:03:15,161 One declared that in the depths of middle earth 58 00:03:15,161 --> 00:03:18,164 we hear Snorri St realism and Beowulf. 59 00:03:18,364 --> 00:03:22,569 The sagas and the Nibelungen lead, and yet another described it 60 00:03:22,569 --> 00:03:26,472 as perhaps the last literary masterpiece of the Middle Ages. 61 00:03:28,374 --> 00:03:31,177 But if we stop here, 62 00:03:31,177 --> 00:03:35,949 and if we approach the Lord of the rings as if it were essentially medieval 63 00:03:35,949 --> 00:03:39,552 in its inspiration and worldview, we run into difficulty. 64 00:03:40,186 --> 00:03:44,791 How do we reckon with the fact that it's so widely and lastingly popular 65 00:03:45,792 --> 00:03:48,828 with translations into more than 50 languages, 66 00:03:48,828 --> 00:03:52,131 from Arabic and Chinese to Thai and Turkish? 67 00:03:52,599 --> 00:03:56,302 Its appeal obviously goes far beyond the Anglophone world, 68 00:03:56,903 --> 00:03:59,973 and the film adaptations I love by millions who've never read the book. 69 00:04:01,107 --> 00:04:04,410 The appendices alone were enough to launch The Rings of Power, 70 00:04:04,444 --> 00:04:07,447 the most expensive television series ever made. 71 00:04:08,248 --> 00:04:12,819 Would the Lord of the rings be this popular if it were a medieval story? 72 00:04:12,819 --> 00:04:14,621 Through and through? 73 00:04:14,621 --> 00:04:16,789 I suspect not drawn. 74 00:04:16,789 --> 00:04:21,861 How many people read the Poetic Edda for pleasure or take Beowulf to the beach? 75 00:04:22,095 --> 00:04:25,098 Apart from people in this present audience, of course. 76 00:04:26,699 --> 00:04:29,702 The answer is not that many. 77 00:04:29,769 --> 00:04:34,307 I would suspect that there is something special about Lord of the rings. 78 00:04:34,340 --> 00:04:38,478 I really believe there's something in Lord of the rings that resonates 79 00:04:38,478 --> 00:04:42,949 with a modern audience in a particular way, in some way. 80 00:04:43,016 --> 00:04:46,019 Tolkien is engaging with modern culture 81 00:04:46,219 --> 00:04:48,921 and with modern concerns. 82 00:04:48,921 --> 00:04:53,626 And one way that we can consider how he does so is to look at the way 83 00:04:53,626 --> 00:04:57,297 that the Lord of the rings could have been a very different book than it is. 84 00:04:59,132 --> 00:04:59,732 Great works of 85 00:04:59,732 --> 00:05:04,804 literature have such internal coherence that it can be difficult to imagine 86 00:05:04,804 --> 00:05:08,474 how they could be significantly different from what they are now. 87 00:05:08,474 --> 00:05:11,511 The Lord of the rings went so many through so many changes 88 00:05:11,511 --> 00:05:15,782 in its long gestation that we can envision some of these. 89 00:05:16,215 --> 00:05:19,018 For instance, we can imagine a version of the story 90 00:05:19,018 --> 00:05:22,922 in which Tolkien didn't heed his friends Lewis's advice 91 00:05:23,222 --> 00:05:26,159 that hobbits are only interesting in un hobbit like situations, 92 00:05:26,159 --> 00:05:29,162 and included loads more of just hobbits doing hobbit things. 93 00:05:29,562 --> 00:05:33,366 You can imagine that we can envision, a version 94 00:05:33,366 --> 00:05:37,870 which Frodo is still called Bingo Baggins and Strider is called Trotter. 95 00:05:38,438 --> 00:05:41,441 A little grim, but we can imagine it then. 96 00:05:41,541 --> 00:05:44,544 But these are still minor variations. 97 00:05:44,644 --> 00:05:49,482 They're still focused on the basic assumption that the Lord of the rings 98 00:05:49,482 --> 00:05:54,354 is thematically, generically, stylistically what it is, 99 00:05:55,388 --> 00:05:58,391 but it could have been otherwise. 100 00:05:58,691 --> 00:06:02,161 And exploring some counterfactual scenarios will, 101 00:06:02,161 --> 00:06:06,332 I think, shed some light on Tolkien's magnum opus. 102 00:06:06,699 --> 00:06:09,702 So let's consider what might have been. 103 00:06:11,471 --> 00:06:14,540 Given the massive changes in the world he was born into. 104 00:06:14,707 --> 00:06:19,412 Tolkien could have chosen to embrace modernity 105 00:06:19,946 --> 00:06:22,882 and reject the past entirely. 106 00:06:22,882 --> 00:06:27,186 Now, this may seem unlikely, but I think we can sketch 107 00:06:27,186 --> 00:06:31,891 a plausible scenario in which he retained an academic interest in the past. 108 00:06:32,125 --> 00:06:35,128 But rejected a personal connection to it. 109 00:06:35,661 --> 00:06:39,932 A key aspect of this would probably have been abandoning his Christian faith, 110 00:06:40,266 --> 00:06:44,103 which represented, among other things, continuity with the past. 111 00:06:45,405 --> 00:06:48,307 Tolkien had a depressive streak to his personality, 112 00:06:48,307 --> 00:06:53,780 and some of his creative works show an emotional grasp of a bleak view of life 113 00:06:53,780 --> 00:06:57,383 that's more characteristic of some of his atheist literary colleagues. 114 00:06:58,351 --> 00:06:59,452 His mother's Catholic 115 00:06:59,452 --> 00:07:03,923 conversion had plunged a little family into poverty, as well as family conflict, 116 00:07:04,590 --> 00:07:07,560 and as a teenager he had the painful experience 117 00:07:07,560 --> 00:07:11,731 of his guardian Catholic priest separating him from his beloved Edith 118 00:07:12,832 --> 00:07:14,700 after the nightmare of the Great War. 119 00:07:14,700 --> 00:07:18,137 He might well have looked back at the traditions of Christianity 120 00:07:18,938 --> 00:07:22,542 and, like his contemporary and his fellow war veteran, the poet 121 00:07:22,542 --> 00:07:26,179 Robert Graves simply said goodbye to all that. 122 00:07:28,080 --> 00:07:30,716 Now, it's interesting to note in this regard 123 00:07:30,716 --> 00:07:33,820 Tolkien's great enjoyment of science fiction, 124 00:07:34,320 --> 00:07:37,256 a genre which in his day as today 125 00:07:37,256 --> 00:07:40,293 often overtly rejected traditional Christianity 126 00:07:40,726 --> 00:07:46,098 or more often depicts a world, a future world in which religious practice, 127 00:07:46,098 --> 00:07:50,870 which was so big with us in English life until the 20th century, is simply absent. 128 00:07:51,771 --> 00:07:55,041 Tolkien had no qualms about reading and enjoying works 129 00:07:55,041 --> 00:07:58,044 along these lines by authors such as David Lindsay, 130 00:07:58,578 --> 00:08:01,614 and instantly the book is even weirder than the cover would suggest. 131 00:08:03,449 --> 00:08:06,686 Olaf Stapleton and Isaac Asimov, 132 00:08:07,887 --> 00:08:09,856 Tolkien's contemporary H.G. 133 00:08:09,856 --> 00:08:12,859 Wells overtly rejected Christianity. 134 00:08:13,125 --> 00:08:16,562 Wells's Outline of History, published in 1920, presents 135 00:08:16,562 --> 00:08:20,266 a materialist view of history and denies the divinity of Christ. 136 00:08:20,933 --> 00:08:23,469 And Wells became increasingly anti-religious. 137 00:08:23,469 --> 00:08:28,674 In fact, in 1943 he published Crookes and Santa, an indictment of the Roman 138 00:08:28,674 --> 00:08:32,245 Catholic Church in which he advocates intolerance of Catholics. 139 00:08:32,678 --> 00:08:34,847 Indeed, he even asked 140 00:08:34,847 --> 00:08:37,850 rhetorically, why don't we bomb Rome? 141 00:08:38,751 --> 00:08:41,220 But Tolkien called Wells 142 00:08:41,220 --> 00:08:44,524 one of the great old masters of science fiction, 143 00:08:44,891 --> 00:08:47,894 and he had praise for the time machine 144 00:08:47,894 --> 00:08:50,897 and The First Men in the moon. 145 00:08:51,931 --> 00:08:54,867 Faith was not a fait accompli. 146 00:08:54,867 --> 00:08:59,005 He could have followed a similar path to Graves or Wells. 147 00:09:00,473 --> 00:09:03,676 In this scenario, it's doubtful that the Lord of the rings would have been 148 00:09:03,776 --> 00:09:06,979 would have existed in any form like what we have, 149 00:09:07,647 --> 00:09:11,083 because the story as we have it is so firmly grounded 150 00:09:11,450 --> 00:09:15,454 in Tolkien's religious convictions, including the objective reality of good 151 00:09:15,454 --> 00:09:19,992 and evil, the work of Providence, and the possibility of catastrophe. 152 00:09:21,060 --> 00:09:23,229 What might he had written instead? 153 00:09:23,229 --> 00:09:27,667 Well, possibly he could have written a long prose work that looked more like 154 00:09:27,667 --> 00:09:31,571 the children of human destruction, manipulation, 155 00:09:31,571 --> 00:09:34,574 incest, suicide, despair. 156 00:09:35,308 --> 00:09:36,842 Or, to put it another way. 157 00:09:36,842 --> 00:09:40,379 The Lord of the rings might have looked a lot more like a Game of Thrones. 158 00:09:43,349 --> 00:09:46,852 So that's our first major counterfactual scenario. 159 00:09:47,119 --> 00:09:51,624 If Tolkien, a chosen to embrace modernity and jettison tradition. 160 00:09:52,592 --> 00:09:57,296 Alternatively, Tolkien might have chosen to reject modernity completely 161 00:09:57,563 --> 00:10:00,566 and orient himself unreservedly toward the past. 162 00:10:01,500 --> 00:10:03,970 Well, you might think, is this really a 163 00:10:03,970 --> 00:10:06,973 what if? Yes. 164 00:10:07,039 --> 00:10:11,110 So in order to establish that a total rejection of modernity 165 00:10:11,310 --> 00:10:14,146 is, in fact a counterfactual scenario, 166 00:10:14,146 --> 00:10:17,283 we'll just take a brief excursion into biography. 167 00:10:19,352 --> 00:10:20,286 Tolkien certainly 168 00:10:20,286 --> 00:10:23,322 did make biting comments about modernity, particularly 169 00:10:23,322 --> 00:10:27,393 with regard to machines, industrialization and totalitarianism. 170 00:10:27,793 --> 00:10:31,163 But he did us look at the past through rose colored glasses, 171 00:10:31,163 --> 00:10:34,166 and he wasn't reflexively against change. 172 00:10:34,934 --> 00:10:37,036 For instance, Tolkien was a willing, 173 00:10:37,036 --> 00:10:40,539 even enthusiastic adopter of advanced technology. 174 00:10:41,307 --> 00:10:44,677 He was intrigued by the potential of audio recording and read 175 00:10:44,677 --> 00:10:48,547 various poems onto tape recorders, once even doing his own sound effects. 176 00:10:49,515 --> 00:10:49,815 You not 177 00:10:49,815 --> 00:10:54,387 only use a typewriter, a new fangled invention at the time, he was also 178 00:10:54,387 --> 00:10:59,191 an early adopter of the ballpoint pen, a new invention from America at that. 179 00:11:00,159 --> 00:11:03,162 And he used this for both his writing and his visual art. 180 00:11:03,729 --> 00:11:07,667 And in contrast to his willingness to use technological innovation 181 00:11:07,667 --> 00:11:09,735 that his day, his friend C.S. 182 00:11:09,735 --> 00:11:12,738 Lewis staunchly refused to use a typewriter 183 00:11:12,938 --> 00:11:15,941 and wrote with a dip pen all his life. 184 00:11:16,876 --> 00:11:18,511 Now, Tolkien's opposition 185 00:11:18,511 --> 00:11:21,514 to the machine age was surprisingly nuanced. 186 00:11:21,714 --> 00:11:24,750 He was an automobile owner in the 1930s, 187 00:11:25,151 --> 00:11:28,487 and retained a surprising affection for them throughout his life. 188 00:11:29,121 --> 00:11:34,026 In a 1968 BBC interview painstakingly reconstructed by Stewart Lee, 189 00:11:34,126 --> 00:11:37,830 so regretful for that, he declared love 190 00:11:37,997 --> 00:11:41,000 writing them like driving them. 191 00:11:41,734 --> 00:11:46,405 And he explained that the problem is not the automobile per se, 192 00:11:46,572 --> 00:11:48,808 but the excessive number of them 193 00:11:48,808 --> 00:11:51,911 and the heedless way in which roads are blasted to the countryside. 194 00:11:52,445 --> 00:11:55,347 A driver, he said, is no longer able 195 00:11:55,347 --> 00:11:59,018 to get to do the things for which motor cars were made. 196 00:11:59,418 --> 00:12:02,655 Nowadays, where you can get to the brooks for picnic. 197 00:12:03,255 --> 00:12:06,492 The state road makers of smash the brook and cut the trees down 198 00:12:06,492 --> 00:12:07,727 so you can get there. 199 00:12:07,727 --> 00:12:08,427 I should have thought. 200 00:12:08,427 --> 00:12:11,430 Is the road makers more than the motor car, which I dislike. 201 00:12:11,564 --> 00:12:13,632 They really are ruthless and foolish. 202 00:12:15,601 --> 00:12:18,471 Nor did he romanticize the past. 203 00:12:18,471 --> 00:12:22,708 Having lamented that we that having lamented being born 204 00:12:22,708 --> 00:12:27,480 into a country which has developed and changed very quickly, talking adds, 205 00:12:28,013 --> 00:12:31,951 I'm sensible enough to realize a lot of this is essential at any rate. 206 00:12:32,051 --> 00:12:34,553 It's not peculiar to our time 207 00:12:34,553 --> 00:12:38,390 that nobody in ancient England buy anything about oaks, trees. 208 00:12:38,390 --> 00:12:39,592 I mean, they devastated the whole 209 00:12:39,592 --> 00:12:42,962 the southeastern country for smelting, rebuilding ships and so on. 210 00:12:43,395 --> 00:12:46,398 No, it's not a new thing. 211 00:12:47,466 --> 00:12:51,036 And throughout his life, he was a regular reader of the newspaper, 212 00:12:51,036 --> 00:12:55,741 declaring, I take a strong interest in what is going on, both in the University 213 00:12:56,041 --> 00:12:59,011 and in the country and in the world. 214 00:13:00,346 --> 00:13:04,049 Tolkien also read widely in contemporary fiction and poetry. 215 00:13:04,450 --> 00:13:07,419 He praised the historical fiction of Mary Renault. 216 00:13:07,419 --> 00:13:11,056 He enjoyed detective fiction and particularly appreciated Agatha Christie, 217 00:13:11,557 --> 00:13:16,562 and he read and enjoyed a wide range of modern literary fiction, including, 218 00:13:16,562 --> 00:13:20,900 as he put it, all of Sinclair Lewis, the American realist novelist. 219 00:13:21,967 --> 00:13:23,936 Now, he didn't like everything that he read. 220 00:13:23,936 --> 00:13:24,570 For instance, 221 00:13:24,570 --> 00:13:28,707 he described William Golding as the Lord of the flies as dreary stuff. 222 00:13:29,341 --> 00:13:31,243 Not wrong. 223 00:13:31,243 --> 00:13:36,115 But he was also willing to venture out into reading things like modernist works, 224 00:13:36,115 --> 00:13:39,418 such as an early portion of what became James Joyce's 225 00:13:39,418 --> 00:13:42,421 Finnegans Wake. 226 00:13:43,255 --> 00:13:43,656 Tolkien 227 00:13:43,656 --> 00:13:46,992 had a nuanced reaction to the changes that he experienced. 228 00:13:47,293 --> 00:13:50,162 He neither rejected modernity completely 229 00:13:50,162 --> 00:13:52,698 nor embraced it completely. 230 00:13:52,698 --> 00:13:54,667 But you might argue, 231 00:13:54,667 --> 00:13:58,904 perhaps this was just a practical accommodation to the world 232 00:13:58,904 --> 00:14:03,242 that he lived in day to day in his creative work. 233 00:14:03,475 --> 00:14:06,946 He might have chosen to orient himself totally towards the past. 234 00:14:07,746 --> 00:14:12,852 So let's imagine what the Lord of the rings might have been like if Tolkien, 235 00:14:13,219 --> 00:14:17,690 totally rejecting modern culture in his imaginative and literary work, 236 00:14:18,290 --> 00:14:20,793 had wanted to write the kind of book 237 00:14:20,793 --> 00:14:26,799 that the Beowulf poet or Snorri Strawson, or so Thomas Malory would write 238 00:14:27,066 --> 00:14:30,135 if they were transplanted to the 20th century. 239 00:14:32,304 --> 00:14:35,307 He was, in fact entirely competent to do so. 240 00:14:36,041 --> 00:14:38,911 He composed poetry in the languages of the medieval period. 241 00:14:38,911 --> 00:14:42,281 He wrote poetry in Gothic and Old English, 242 00:14:43,282 --> 00:14:46,185 and many of his English language poems, as Modern 243 00:14:46,185 --> 00:14:49,188 English poems have titles that he gives them in Old English, 244 00:14:49,455 --> 00:14:51,891 and he wrote extended poetic 245 00:14:51,891 --> 00:14:54,894 narratives in the style of medieval authors. 246 00:14:55,661 --> 00:14:59,131 For instance, he wrote a long portion of an American story, 247 00:14:59,164 --> 00:15:02,568 The Fall of Arthur, in alliterative verse. 248 00:15:03,302 --> 00:15:06,672 Here he's using medieval materials and form 249 00:15:06,939 --> 00:15:10,009 the verse form used by Old and Middle English poets. 250 00:15:10,843 --> 00:15:14,246 He also composed his own version of The story of the Muslims. 251 00:15:14,580 --> 00:15:17,616 The New lay of the old Songs and the New Land of Good Ruin, 252 00:15:17,950 --> 00:15:20,953 posthumously published as the Leo Cigaret and the Goodrum, 253 00:15:21,687 --> 00:15:23,822 in which he uses a literature verse. 254 00:15:23,822 --> 00:15:27,559 But this time in the short lines and stanzas of the Poetic Edda. 255 00:15:29,261 --> 00:15:32,731 If he had wanted to, Tolkien could have composed 256 00:15:32,731 --> 00:15:36,101 the saga of the War of the ring in alliterative poetry. 257 00:15:37,036 --> 00:15:40,239 And even if he didn't choose a verse style that was so consciously 258 00:15:40,239 --> 00:15:44,576 tied to medieval literature, writing it in poetry of any kind 259 00:15:44,576 --> 00:15:47,613 would have firmly oriented his work toward the past. 260 00:15:48,347 --> 00:15:51,450 And we can even see what it might have been like. 261 00:15:53,218 --> 00:15:57,056 One of the most significant works set in middle earth is the long poem 262 00:15:57,056 --> 00:16:01,427 The Lay of Lithium, telling the love story of Baron and Lucien. 263 00:16:01,961 --> 00:16:05,931 We get an extract from it in the Lord of the rings, in which Aragorn 264 00:16:05,931 --> 00:16:10,102 sings to the hobbits on whether top the leaves were long, 265 00:16:10,135 --> 00:16:13,605 the grass was green, the hemlock was tall and fair, 266 00:16:13,973 --> 00:16:17,643 and in the glade a light was seen of stars and shadows 267 00:16:17,643 --> 00:16:22,614 shimmering to Nuvia was dancing there to music of a pipe unseen. 268 00:16:22,614 --> 00:16:25,751 And the light of stars was in her hair and in her. 269 00:16:25,751 --> 00:16:27,953 Raymond's glimmering. 270 00:16:27,953 --> 00:16:32,691 We have eight more stanzas telling the first meeting of Beren and Luthien. 271 00:16:33,225 --> 00:16:39,698 Now there is a lot to like in this poetry, but it does tend to feel a bit 272 00:16:39,698 --> 00:16:43,902 long to many readers of the story, who often skip over the poetic bits. 273 00:16:44,570 --> 00:16:49,575 And if these 72 lines that Tolkien extracted from his poetry 274 00:16:49,575 --> 00:16:53,645 seem long, it's worth noting that these 72 lines come 275 00:16:53,645 --> 00:16:58,951 from a narrative poem of over 4000 lines, which wasn't even finished. 276 00:16:59,985 --> 00:17:03,088 Could he have written the whole of the Lord of the rings 277 00:17:03,088 --> 00:17:06,091 in narrative verse, in the tradition of the medieval poets, 278 00:17:06,191 --> 00:17:09,194 in the way that he was doing in the way of lithium? 279 00:17:09,461 --> 00:17:12,464 Yes, he could have, but he didn't. 280 00:17:13,932 --> 00:17:17,202 So now let's consider another what if scenario. 281 00:17:18,003 --> 00:17:20,839 The novel is a modern form. 282 00:17:20,839 --> 00:17:25,077 Could Tolkien have chosen to write in prose, but in a manner 283 00:17:25,077 --> 00:17:28,747 that otherwise follows the conventions and styles of many of literature? 284 00:17:29,448 --> 00:17:32,251 Well, as it happens, we had two examples 285 00:17:32,251 --> 00:17:36,422 to emulate as this project was attempted by authors 286 00:17:36,422 --> 00:17:39,458 whose work he admired greatly by William Morris 287 00:17:39,458 --> 00:17:42,461 and, er, Edison. 288 00:17:42,761 --> 00:17:44,029 William Morris died 289 00:17:44,029 --> 00:17:47,499 in 1896, four years after Tolkien's birth. 290 00:17:48,367 --> 00:17:51,470 In his heyday, Morris was a major cultural figure. 291 00:17:51,870 --> 00:17:55,040 He was even in the running to succeed Tennyson as Poet laureate. 292 00:17:55,974 --> 00:17:58,510 He was a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts movement. 293 00:17:58,510 --> 00:18:01,580 Poet, A novelist and a well-informed 294 00:18:01,580 --> 00:18:05,284 amateur scholar of mythology and medieval romance. 295 00:18:06,752 --> 00:18:08,087 Tolkien greatly 296 00:18:08,087 --> 00:18:11,323 enjoyed and admired Morris's imaginative writing. 297 00:18:11,857 --> 00:18:16,228 One of Tolkien's early literary ambitions was in fact to adapt one of the tales 298 00:18:16,228 --> 00:18:20,132 of the finished Call of Allah, as he put it into a short story, somewhat 299 00:18:20,132 --> 00:18:24,670 on the lines of Morris, his romances with chunks of poetry in between. 300 00:18:25,471 --> 00:18:28,807 And he was referring to the House of the Wolf things. 301 00:18:29,141 --> 00:18:32,511 And here we can see it with the title page advertising 302 00:18:32,511 --> 00:18:35,514 its mixture of verse and prose. 303 00:18:36,381 --> 00:18:39,551 Tolkien bought this book when he was an undergraduate at Oxford, 304 00:18:39,651 --> 00:18:40,953 at Exeter College, 305 00:18:40,953 --> 00:18:45,691 along with Morris's life and death of Jason and the story of the Wolf Sons. 306 00:18:45,991 --> 00:18:48,961 Now this, this edition I show in Morris's 307 00:18:48,961 --> 00:18:51,964 own High and Kelmscott Press edition, 308 00:18:52,431 --> 00:18:56,568 as that gives a good feel of the literary style as as well. 309 00:18:57,669 --> 00:18:58,203 And over the 310 00:18:58,203 --> 00:19:01,206 years Tolkien added other titles to his personal library, 311 00:19:01,306 --> 00:19:05,144 so that eventually he owned nearly all of Morris's works. 312 00:19:07,446 --> 00:19:11,517 Morris's fiction is written in a deliberately and consistently 313 00:19:11,517 --> 00:19:13,185 archaic style. 314 00:19:13,185 --> 00:19:15,554 Here's a passage from the House of the Wolf. 315 00:19:15,554 --> 00:19:20,359 Things not looked the odd off, either the heavens above or the trees, 316 00:19:20,359 --> 00:19:22,060 as he strode on from the husk 317 00:19:22,060 --> 00:19:25,631 strewn floor of the beechwood, on to the scanty grass of the lawn. 318 00:19:26,031 --> 00:19:29,701 But his eyes looked straight before him at that which was amid most of the lawn. 319 00:19:30,002 --> 00:19:33,505 And the little wonder was that were there in a stone chair, said a woman, 320 00:19:33,505 --> 00:19:36,508 exceeding fair clad and glittering raiment, 321 00:19:36,575 --> 00:19:40,078 her hair lying as pale in the moonlight on the gray stone 322 00:19:40,078 --> 00:19:44,049 as the barley acres, and the August night before the reaping goes in amongst them. 323 00:19:44,583 --> 00:19:46,985 She sat there as though she were awaiting someone, 324 00:19:46,985 --> 00:19:49,121 and he made no stop nor stay, 325 00:19:49,121 --> 00:19:51,190 but went straight up to her, and took her in his arms, 326 00:19:51,190 --> 00:19:54,092 and kissed her mouth and her eyes, and she him again. 327 00:19:54,092 --> 00:19:57,796 And then he sat himself down beside her, but her eyes looked kindly on him 328 00:19:57,796 --> 00:20:01,233 as she said, oh, Theodore Hardy, art thou 329 00:20:01,433 --> 00:20:04,436 that thou hast no fear to take me in thine arms, and to kiss me, 330 00:20:04,770 --> 00:20:07,940 as though thou hadst met in the meadow with a maiden of the king's? 331 00:20:08,106 --> 00:20:12,110 And I am a daughter of the gods of thy kindred, and a chooser of the slain. 332 00:20:13,512 --> 00:20:16,448 That's sort of typical of the prose style, 333 00:20:16,448 --> 00:20:20,919 but most of the speech in the book is in the form of verse, as when Theodore, 334 00:20:21,053 --> 00:20:24,256 the claims we are in the ring of the hazels 335 00:20:24,256 --> 00:20:26,959 and the wine of war, we drank from the tide 336 00:20:26,959 --> 00:20:30,062 when the sun's highest, the hour when she sank. 337 00:20:30,329 --> 00:20:32,030 And the three kings came against me. 338 00:20:32,030 --> 00:20:35,834 The mightiest of the Huns, evil eyed in the battle, was swift afoot. 339 00:20:35,834 --> 00:20:37,469 Wily ones. 340 00:20:37,469 --> 00:20:38,437 And I'll leave it at that. 341 00:20:38,437 --> 00:20:41,440 It goes on for pages. 342 00:20:42,507 --> 00:20:45,043 So we have here Morris's very, 343 00:20:45,043 --> 00:20:48,046 very archaic style, 344 00:20:48,080 --> 00:20:51,083 and again popular in his day 345 00:20:51,483 --> 00:20:53,385 as a 20th century moved on. 346 00:20:53,385 --> 00:20:57,456 Tolkien had another directly contemporary example of the archaic style 347 00:20:57,456 --> 00:21:00,692 used for novels in the work of E r Edison. 348 00:21:01,326 --> 00:21:04,496 Two even met when Edison was a guest at an inklings meeting, 349 00:21:04,496 --> 00:21:06,632 and read some of his work in progress. 350 00:21:08,367 --> 00:21:10,702 Er. Edison is known today, if 351 00:21:10,702 --> 00:21:15,540 at all, for the warm or rigorous, which was published in 1922. 352 00:21:15,907 --> 00:21:20,212 A heroic epic on the planet Mercury, where mighty lords participate 353 00:21:20,212 --> 00:21:23,615 in the eternally repeating cycle of war against their enemies, 354 00:21:24,216 --> 00:21:27,619 these other fantasies comprise a trilogy of mysteries mistresses, 355 00:21:27,753 --> 00:21:29,121 A fish, Dinner and Medicine, 356 00:21:29,121 --> 00:21:33,025 and the mentioned gates, all largely set in the alternate world of his. 357 00:21:33,025 --> 00:21:38,096 In the NBA, the plots focus on her quick action, a court intrigues, romance, 358 00:21:38,096 --> 00:21:41,099 and a generous helping of philosophical discussions. 359 00:21:42,034 --> 00:21:44,936 Tolkien said that he had read all that er. 360 00:21:44,936 --> 00:21:49,708 Edison wrote and praised him as the greatest and most convincing 361 00:21:49,708 --> 00:21:52,711 writer of invented worlds that I have read. 362 00:21:54,046 --> 00:21:56,548 What did he appreciate in these stories? 363 00:21:56,548 --> 00:21:59,551 Well, it certainly wasn't the moral philosophy of the tales. 364 00:21:59,818 --> 00:22:03,889 Tolkien was critical of this, believing that Edison was coming to admire 365 00:22:03,922 --> 00:22:07,893 arrogance and cruelty under the influence of what he called an evil 366 00:22:07,893 --> 00:22:09,594 and indeed silly philosophy. 367 00:22:10,595 --> 00:22:12,698 No, he was very specific. 368 00:22:12,698 --> 00:22:16,201 He declared that he read his works with great enjoyment 369 00:22:16,201 --> 00:22:19,171 for their sheer literary merit. 370 00:22:20,472 --> 00:22:24,376 And indeed, I don't think it's possible to get through one of Edison's novels 371 00:22:24,376 --> 00:22:27,579 if one doesn't actively enjoy his literary style, 372 00:22:27,913 --> 00:22:31,416 which is a consistent Elizabethan prose. 373 00:22:32,117 --> 00:22:35,821 So here, let's look at a passage from the middle of the Worm or Averroes, 374 00:22:36,321 --> 00:22:39,958 in which the Lord to grow as on a long horseback ride, 375 00:22:40,759 --> 00:22:43,295 grow, lean forward to pat his horse's neck. 376 00:22:43,295 --> 00:22:44,029 Common gossip. 377 00:22:44,029 --> 00:22:48,367 We must go on, he said, and marvel not if thou find the rest going with me, 378 00:22:48,533 --> 00:22:51,636 which could never find any steadfast day under the moon's globe. 379 00:22:52,137 --> 00:22:56,141 So they for that river, and fair to through low rough grasslands beyond. 380 00:22:56,708 --> 00:23:00,345 At length the slopes slackened, and they passing us through a gateway 381 00:23:00,345 --> 00:23:04,049 between two high mountains, which impending sheer and stark on either 382 00:23:04,049 --> 00:23:08,920 hand, came forth upon a more of linen bog myrtle, strewn with liquids 383 00:23:08,920 --> 00:23:12,724 and abounding in streams and moss, hags and outcrops of living rock, 384 00:23:13,125 --> 00:23:17,462 and the mountain peaks afar stood round that moorland, waist like warrior kings. 385 00:23:18,296 --> 00:23:22,200 Rose said in himself, how shall not common opinion account me mad, 386 00:23:22,501 --> 00:23:25,604 so rash and presumptuous, dangerously to put my life and hazard 387 00:23:26,037 --> 00:23:28,273 nay against all sound judgments. 388 00:23:28,273 --> 00:23:32,344 And this folly I enact in that very season, when my patience and courage 389 00:23:32,344 --> 00:23:36,348 and my politic wisdom I had won that in despite the fortune's teeth, 390 00:23:36,815 --> 00:23:40,252 which obstinately hitherto she had denied me, when, after the brunt 391 00:23:40,385 --> 00:23:43,889 of diverse tragical fortunes, I had marvelously gained the fortune 392 00:23:43,889 --> 00:23:47,192 and grace of the King, the very honorably placed me in his court 393 00:23:47,392 --> 00:23:52,431 and tender with me, I well think so dearly as he doff the balls of his two eyes. 394 00:23:55,200 --> 00:23:57,335 So here we have Edison again. 395 00:23:57,335 --> 00:24:00,272 This is written in 1922, 396 00:24:00,272 --> 00:24:03,375 writing in a full orbed Elizabethan style. 397 00:24:03,608 --> 00:24:06,645 Now compare this scene with Tolkien's rendering 398 00:24:06,645 --> 00:24:09,681 of a similar one with Gandalf and Shadowfax. 399 00:24:10,248 --> 00:24:12,751 Gandalf spoke now to Shadowfax, and the horse 400 00:24:12,751 --> 00:24:16,154 set off at a good pace, yet not beyond the measure of the others. 401 00:24:16,521 --> 00:24:19,524 After a little while, he turned suddenly and choosing a place 402 00:24:19,524 --> 00:24:22,661 where the banks were lower, he waited the river and then led them away 403 00:24:22,661 --> 00:24:25,664 due south into a flat land, treeless and wide. 404 00:24:25,997 --> 00:24:29,568 The wind went like gray waves, the endless miles of grass. 405 00:24:30,068 --> 00:24:34,272 There was no sign of road or track Shadowfax did not stay or falter. 406 00:24:35,106 --> 00:24:38,109 He is steering a straight course now for the horns of Saturn 407 00:24:38,109 --> 00:24:40,712 under the slopes of the White Mountains, said Gandalf. 408 00:24:40,712 --> 00:24:43,582 It will be quicker so the ground is firmer in the east, 409 00:24:43,582 --> 00:24:46,585 and that's where the chief northward track aligns across the river. 410 00:24:46,585 --> 00:24:49,855 But Shadowfax knows the way through every fence, and a hollow, 411 00:24:51,623 --> 00:24:53,625 so we can see that 412 00:24:53,625 --> 00:24:57,095 Tolkien is using a much more naturalistic style. 413 00:24:57,162 --> 00:25:01,399 He might well have appreciated things like the descriptions of the landscape 414 00:25:01,399 --> 00:25:05,770 in Edison, little notes like the bald myrtle, but he writes in his own work 415 00:25:05,770 --> 00:25:09,474 in a much more naturalistic style, which we shouldn't take for granted 416 00:25:10,442 --> 00:25:13,712 given his enthusiasm for the writings of Maurice and Edison, 417 00:25:13,879 --> 00:25:18,650 and given that this enthusiasm was shared by many of his friends Amani inklings, 418 00:25:19,217 --> 00:25:24,623 Tolkien would have been fully aware that this kind of archaic, stylized, 419 00:25:24,656 --> 00:25:29,761 consciously medieval or Elizabethan literary style was publishable 420 00:25:30,362 --> 00:25:33,532 during the very years in which he was writing the Lord of the rings. 421 00:25:35,100 --> 00:25:38,169 Now, if we want to see what the Lord of the rings might have looked 422 00:25:38,169 --> 00:25:42,707 like in the style of Morris or Edison, we can consider his early tale 423 00:25:43,208 --> 00:25:48,580 The Fall of Gondolin, which in 1920 he read to the extra college Essay Club. 424 00:25:48,980 --> 00:25:51,283 The minutes of the meeting described it as a treatment. 425 00:25:51,283 --> 00:25:55,086 In this manner, such typical romantics as William Morris. 426 00:25:55,921 --> 00:25:57,923 So here's a taste of it. 427 00:25:57,923 --> 00:26:00,859 At length they had fallen in with a band somewhat too numerous, 428 00:26:00,859 --> 00:26:04,195 and Voronoi had dragged for them by the luck of the gods, 429 00:26:04,396 --> 00:26:07,933 for all else with them perished, and therefore burned towards 430 00:26:07,933 --> 00:26:11,770 house, yet found not the secret way therewith said were on the way. 431 00:26:11,770 --> 00:26:14,706 Dilated came distraught of weariness and grief, 432 00:26:14,706 --> 00:26:17,576 and fared into the city wildly to my great fear. 433 00:26:17,576 --> 00:26:20,579 Nor might I get her to Sally from the burning 434 00:26:20,879 --> 00:26:23,982 about the saying of these words, were they come to the southern walls 435 00:26:23,982 --> 00:26:25,550 and nigh to two hours house. 436 00:26:25,550 --> 00:26:27,352 And lo, it was cast down, 437 00:26:27,352 --> 00:26:31,022 and the wreckage was a smoke, and thereat was two more bitterly wrath. 438 00:26:31,423 --> 00:26:34,326 But there was a noise that boded the approach of orcs, 439 00:26:34,326 --> 00:26:38,296 and to dispatch that company as swiftly as might be down that secret way. 440 00:26:38,763 --> 00:26:40,231 Now is their great sorrow 441 00:26:40,231 --> 00:26:43,835 upon that staircase, as those exiles bid farewell to Gondolin. 442 00:26:44,336 --> 00:26:47,672 Yet are they without much hope of further life beyond the hills? 443 00:26:47,672 --> 00:26:50,308 For how shall any slip from the hand of Melco? 444 00:26:52,477 --> 00:26:55,814 Tolkien was 28 at this point. 445 00:26:55,814 --> 00:26:58,817 When he writes this version of The Fall of Gondolin. 446 00:26:59,084 --> 00:27:01,886 He is not at the height of his stylistic powers, but 447 00:27:01,886 --> 00:27:04,889 he is also hardly a callow youth. 448 00:27:05,557 --> 00:27:09,761 He might have continued on in this full blooded, 449 00:27:09,761 --> 00:27:13,865 archaic style, in the mode of Morris or Edison. 450 00:27:14,599 --> 00:27:17,702 However, he chose instead to use our chasm 451 00:27:17,702 --> 00:27:20,672 in a limited and purposeful manner, 452 00:27:20,972 --> 00:27:25,477 and the resulting blend of old and new in his writings can be quite subtle, 453 00:27:25,977 --> 00:27:28,780 as in the scene of Frodo and Company arriving 454 00:27:28,780 --> 00:27:32,217 at the Pension Pony in The Fellowship of the ring. 455 00:27:32,951 --> 00:27:35,520 Even from the outside of the inn looked a pleasant place. 456 00:27:35,520 --> 00:27:36,488 Frodo went forward 457 00:27:36,488 --> 00:27:40,125 and nearly bumped into a short, fat man with a bald head and a red face. 458 00:27:40,492 --> 00:27:43,862 He had a white apron on and was bustling on a one door 459 00:27:43,862 --> 00:27:47,065 and in through another, carrying a tray laden with full mugs. 460 00:27:47,098 --> 00:27:48,900 Can we, began Frodo? 461 00:27:48,900 --> 00:27:50,268 Half a minute, if you please. 462 00:27:50,268 --> 00:27:54,039 Shouted the man over his shoulder, and vanished into a babble of voices and a 463 00:27:54,039 --> 00:27:55,173 cloud of smoke. 464 00:27:56,508 --> 00:27:57,842 So here we can observe that 465 00:27:57,842 --> 00:28:01,746 Tolkien is avoiding overly archaic diction, 466 00:28:02,180 --> 00:28:03,782 but he's still choosing words 467 00:28:03,782 --> 00:28:07,419 that convey a traditional rather than a modern day setting. 468 00:28:07,652 --> 00:28:11,656 We have in and mugs, not pub and glasses. 469 00:28:12,357 --> 00:28:15,860 The scene doesn't feel contemporary, but is not obvious 470 00:28:16,027 --> 00:28:19,030 using old fashioned terminology either. 471 00:28:19,764 --> 00:28:21,466 Tolkien also freely shifts 472 00:28:21,466 --> 00:28:25,236 between stylistic registers, in contrast to Morris and Edison, 473 00:28:25,236 --> 00:28:29,708 who stay in that high archaic register throughout their stories 474 00:28:30,542 --> 00:28:32,711 so we can see the shifting registers. 475 00:28:32,711 --> 00:28:35,714 For instance, in the Council of Elrond chapter, 476 00:28:36,481 --> 00:28:40,218 as the Council discussed the matter of the ring, the register gets 477 00:28:40,218 --> 00:28:44,856 gradually loftier and loftier until we reach Elrond, declaiming, yet 478 00:28:44,856 --> 00:28:49,627 such is off the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world. 479 00:28:50,929 --> 00:28:52,530 Now that line wouldn't be out of place. 480 00:28:52,530 --> 00:28:56,501 And Edison or Morris, but only in Tolkien 481 00:28:56,501 --> 00:29:00,905 do we get the effect of Bilbo breaking in very well, very well. 482 00:29:00,905 --> 00:29:03,408 Master Elrond say no more. 483 00:29:03,408 --> 00:29:07,712 This chatty matter of fact tone reflects Bilbo's character, of course, 484 00:29:07,979 --> 00:29:11,015 but it also brings the exalted tone down, 485 00:29:11,249 --> 00:29:16,054 and it provides for a preparation for another tonal shift. 486 00:29:16,521 --> 00:29:17,288 As the Council's 487 00:29:17,288 --> 00:29:21,359 reflecting on the question of who will become the appointed ring bearer, 488 00:29:21,693 --> 00:29:24,529 we get a middle register expressed 489 00:29:24,529 --> 00:29:28,299 in the simplicity of Frodo saying, I will take the ring. 490 00:29:29,834 --> 00:29:32,904 Now there are a number of other ways in which the Lord of the rings 491 00:29:32,904 --> 00:29:36,341 makes use of very modern literary techniques. 492 00:29:37,208 --> 00:29:41,179 Consider the conversation between Sam and Frodo, and Curious Uncle 493 00:29:41,813 --> 00:29:44,816 Sam wonders if they will ever be in a tale. 494 00:29:45,116 --> 00:29:46,651 We're in one, of course. 495 00:29:46,651 --> 00:29:49,754 But I mean put into words, you know, told by the fireside 496 00:29:49,954 --> 00:29:51,589 or read out of a great big book 497 00:29:51,589 --> 00:29:54,592 with red and black letters years and years afterwards. 498 00:29:54,959 --> 00:29:58,963 So for a moment, the reader is simultaneously aware of the story 499 00:29:58,963 --> 00:30:04,068 from both the inside sharing Frodo and Sam's experiences and the outside. 500 00:30:04,068 --> 00:30:07,839 As we realize that we are reading the book that Sam is referring to, 501 00:30:08,373 --> 00:30:11,910 and the characters experience same doubling because Sam 502 00:30:11,910 --> 00:30:16,648 is reflecting on himself and Frodo and Gollum as literary characters. 503 00:30:17,081 --> 00:30:21,619 It's a move straight out of the modern or even postmodern literary playbook. 504 00:30:23,087 --> 00:30:24,255 The Lord of the rings also 505 00:30:24,255 --> 00:30:27,759 has psychologically realistic and well rounded characters. 506 00:30:28,092 --> 00:30:31,095 They may not have 21st century levels of angst, 507 00:30:31,329 --> 00:30:34,899 but they certainly have 20th century levels of internal conflict. 508 00:30:35,333 --> 00:30:39,103 Consider Aragorn frustrated at failing to make the right decisions. 509 00:30:39,737 --> 00:30:42,874 The family dysfunction of den author Boromir 510 00:30:42,874 --> 00:30:46,311 and Faramir for a complex emotional life. 511 00:30:47,111 --> 00:30:51,583 And while there are scenes in the high heroic register, there's also quite 512 00:30:51,583 --> 00:30:54,819 a lot of naturalistic dialog and thematic 513 00:30:54,819 --> 00:30:57,822 resonances to the modern era. 514 00:30:57,856 --> 00:31:01,492 Consider Frodo suffering from the wound he received, and whether Tom 515 00:31:02,293 --> 00:31:06,497 as they ride home toward the Shire, Gandalf asks if Frodo is in pain. 516 00:31:07,098 --> 00:31:09,067 Well, yes, I am, said Frodo. 517 00:31:09,067 --> 00:31:10,268 It is my shoulder. 518 00:31:10,268 --> 00:31:11,302 The wound aches. 519 00:31:11,302 --> 00:31:13,304 The memory of darkness is heavy on me. 520 00:31:13,304 --> 00:31:15,340 Was a year ago today. 521 00:31:15,340 --> 00:31:18,910 Alas, there are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured, said Gandalf. 522 00:31:19,711 --> 00:31:22,113 I fear it may be so with mindset. Frodo. 523 00:31:22,113 --> 00:31:25,083 There is no real going back, though I may come to the Shire, 524 00:31:25,083 --> 00:31:28,052 it will not seen the same, for I shall not be the same. 525 00:31:28,386 --> 00:31:32,090 I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. 526 00:31:32,357 --> 00:31:34,292 Where shall I find rest? 527 00:31:35,660 --> 00:31:38,663 Frodo could easily be a shellshocked 528 00:31:39,297 --> 00:31:42,300 veteran of the First World War, 529 00:31:42,400 --> 00:31:45,837 underscored by the fact there is no conventional happy ending for him. 530 00:31:47,171 --> 00:31:49,474 So if Tolkien had 531 00:31:49,474 --> 00:31:52,844 wanted to orient himself to the past, 532 00:31:53,177 --> 00:31:57,382 he could have composed a book length narrative poem in order to verse. 533 00:31:58,182 --> 00:32:00,451 Or, more modestly, he could have written 534 00:32:00,451 --> 00:32:04,489 an epic in a backward looking, archaic prose style 535 00:32:04,489 --> 00:32:08,493 along the lines of Morris or Edison, successful writers of their day. 536 00:32:09,160 --> 00:32:10,495 I'm talking today. 537 00:32:10,495 --> 00:32:11,829 But he didn't. 538 00:32:11,829 --> 00:32:14,999 In many ways, Lord of the rings is very modern. 539 00:32:15,300 --> 00:32:18,569 While also having deep connections with and influences 540 00:32:18,569 --> 00:32:21,572 from the medieval world that Tolkien loved. 541 00:32:21,739 --> 00:32:26,611 But so now the question is, how is it that the Lord of the rings 542 00:32:26,611 --> 00:32:29,580 can be both medieval and modern, 543 00:32:29,881 --> 00:32:32,850 and yet form such a coherent literary whole? 544 00:32:33,384 --> 00:32:34,719 And I would venture to say 545 00:32:34,719 --> 00:32:38,556 that this has something to do with Tolkien's understanding of tradition. 546 00:32:40,024 --> 00:32:41,659 According to Eugene Vinegar, 547 00:32:41,659 --> 00:32:44,562 Tolkien once said that his typical response upon 548 00:32:44,562 --> 00:32:49,334 reading a medieval work was the desire, not so much to make a philological article 549 00:32:49,400 --> 00:32:52,437 or critical study of it as to write a modern work. 550 00:32:52,437 --> 00:32:54,772 In the same tradition. 551 00:32:54,772 --> 00:32:58,109 Although the Lord of the rings isn't a direct response 552 00:32:58,109 --> 00:33:01,479 to a medieval work, in fact it's literally a response to The Hobbit. 553 00:33:02,213 --> 00:33:04,849 It is certainly rooted in Tolkien's 554 00:33:04,849 --> 00:33:07,852 lifelong interest in medieval language and literature. 555 00:33:08,319 --> 00:33:11,422 What might it mean to suggest that the Lord of the rings 556 00:33:11,422 --> 00:33:15,927 is a modern work, in the same tradition as the medieval writers, 557 00:33:17,228 --> 00:33:21,366 so it's helpful to shift gears for a moment from the literary 558 00:33:21,566 --> 00:33:24,369 to the theological, and consider what 559 00:33:24,369 --> 00:33:27,372 tradition meant for Tolkien. 560 00:33:27,905 --> 00:33:30,208 He was certainly very traditionally minded 561 00:33:30,208 --> 00:33:34,412 in the sense of having great love and appreciation for the forms of worship 562 00:33:34,412 --> 00:33:37,682 and prayer that have been handed on in the Catholic Church for generations. 563 00:33:38,349 --> 00:33:41,352 And he didn't approve of change for its own sake, 564 00:33:41,853 --> 00:33:45,957 but his views on tradition were surprisingly nuanced. 565 00:33:46,557 --> 00:33:50,928 Tolkien remarked that the Catholic Church was not intended by our Lord 566 00:33:50,928 --> 00:33:53,931 to be static, to remain in perpetual childhood, 567 00:33:54,032 --> 00:33:58,503 but to be a living organism, likened to a plant which develops and changes 568 00:33:58,503 --> 00:34:02,073 in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history. 569 00:34:02,407 --> 00:34:05,977 The particular circumstances of the world into which to set. 570 00:34:06,411 --> 00:34:09,981 There is no resemblance between the mustard seed and the full grown tree. 571 00:34:11,182 --> 00:34:12,316 Here, Tolkien follows the 572 00:34:12,316 --> 00:34:17,121 same line of thought as John Henry Newman in his development of doctrine. 573 00:34:17,455 --> 00:34:20,458 Human rights. It may indeed sometimes. 574 00:34:20,758 --> 00:34:24,395 It is indeed sometimes, said the stream is clearest nearest the spring. 575 00:34:24,962 --> 00:34:27,498 Whatever use may be fairly made of this image, 576 00:34:27,498 --> 00:34:30,501 it does not apply to the history of philosophy or belief. 577 00:34:31,202 --> 00:34:34,472 Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. 578 00:34:34,972 --> 00:34:37,975 At first, no one knows what it is or what it is worth. 579 00:34:38,142 --> 00:34:40,878 In time it enters upon strange territory. 580 00:34:40,878 --> 00:34:43,214 Points of controversy, alter of their bearing. 581 00:34:43,214 --> 00:34:47,618 Parties rise and fall around its dangers and hopes appear in new relations, 582 00:34:48,019 --> 00:34:50,788 and old principles reappear under new forms. 583 00:34:50,788 --> 00:34:54,792 It changes with them in order to remain the same in a higher world. 584 00:34:54,792 --> 00:34:55,860 It is otherwise. 585 00:34:55,860 --> 00:35:00,965 But here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often. 586 00:35:01,699 --> 00:35:04,869 Now I want to note by graphically that Newman was 587 00:35:04,869 --> 00:35:08,606 the founder of the Birmingham Oratory, in which talking grew up, 588 00:35:08,906 --> 00:35:12,343 and in which he was intellectually and spiritually formed. 589 00:35:12,844 --> 00:35:16,147 And so it's not that surprising to find that Tolkien 590 00:35:16,347 --> 00:35:19,650 makes the exact argument that Newman is making. 591 00:35:19,917 --> 00:35:24,222 As he continues his own arboreal analogy, he explains that 592 00:35:24,555 --> 00:35:27,725 for those living in the days of its branching growth, 593 00:35:28,092 --> 00:35:32,163 the tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is part of its life, 594 00:35:32,663 --> 00:35:35,333 and the history of a divine thing is sacred. 595 00:35:35,333 --> 00:35:37,835 The wise may know that it began with a seed, 596 00:35:37,835 --> 00:35:41,339 but it is vain to try and dig it up, for it no longer exists, 597 00:35:41,572 --> 00:35:44,775 and the virtue and powers of the hand now reside in the tree. 598 00:35:46,244 --> 00:35:48,513 So for Tolkien, tradition 599 00:35:48,513 --> 00:35:51,516 does not mean stasis. 600 00:35:52,416 --> 00:35:56,487 Now, in literary terms, we can see him presenting this idea. 601 00:35:56,487 --> 00:36:00,358 In his essay on Translating Beowulf, he explains 602 00:36:00,358 --> 00:36:04,762 the diction of Bell was poetical, archaic, artificial, if you will. 603 00:36:04,762 --> 00:36:07,231 In the day that the poem was made. 604 00:36:07,231 --> 00:36:10,501 Whether you regret it or not, you will misrepresent the first 605 00:36:10,501 --> 00:36:13,804 and most salient characteristic of the style and flavor of the author. 606 00:36:14,272 --> 00:36:15,706 If, in translating a Beowulf, 607 00:36:15,706 --> 00:36:17,642 you deliberately pursue the traditional literary 608 00:36:17,642 --> 00:36:21,612 and poetic diction which we now possess in favor of the current and trivial. 609 00:36:22,246 --> 00:36:25,249 Okay, so far so traditional. 610 00:36:25,616 --> 00:36:28,052 But then he goes on to say, 611 00:36:28,052 --> 00:36:32,390 but the opposite fault, once more common, should be equally avoided. 612 00:36:32,690 --> 00:36:36,427 Words should not be used merely because they are old or obsolete. 613 00:36:36,961 --> 00:36:40,731 The words chosen, however remote they may be from colloquial speech 614 00:36:40,731 --> 00:36:45,603 or ephemeral suggestions, must be words that remain in literary use, 615 00:36:45,903 --> 00:36:48,906 especially in the use of verse among educated people. 616 00:36:49,507 --> 00:36:51,976 The fact that a word was still used by Chaucer 617 00:36:51,976 --> 00:36:55,112 or by Shakespeare, or even later gives it no claim 618 00:36:55,379 --> 00:36:58,382 if it has in our time perished from literary use. 619 00:36:58,983 --> 00:37:02,119 Still less is translation of Beowulf a fitting occasion 620 00:37:02,119 --> 00:37:05,523 for the exhumation of dead words from a Saxon or Norse graves, 621 00:37:05,957 --> 00:37:11,529 antiquarian sentiments and philological knowingness are wholly out of place. 622 00:37:13,598 --> 00:37:16,267 He even incorporated into his legendarium 623 00:37:16,267 --> 00:37:20,438 the idea that attachment to the past can become unhealthy. 624 00:37:21,205 --> 00:37:24,242 Tolkien notes that when some of the elves lingered in middle earth, 625 00:37:24,442 --> 00:37:29,080 rather than heeding the call to the West, it was, he said, a sort of second fall, 626 00:37:29,080 --> 00:37:32,583 or at least error of the elves, he explains. 627 00:37:33,150 --> 00:37:37,855 They thus became obsessed with fading the mode in which the changes of time, 628 00:37:37,855 --> 00:37:40,858 the law of the water of the sun was perceived by them. 629 00:37:41,058 --> 00:37:42,526 They became sad. 630 00:37:42,526 --> 00:37:45,429 And their art, shall we say, antiquarian, 631 00:37:45,429 --> 00:37:48,432 and their efforts are really a kind of embalming. 632 00:37:49,734 --> 00:37:52,737 Morris and Eddison are antiquarian. 633 00:37:53,137 --> 00:37:56,607 Tolkien, for all his love of the past, was not. 634 00:37:57,908 --> 00:38:01,412 And so when he writes in the modern idiom, 635 00:38:01,746 --> 00:38:06,450 availing himself of modern literary techniques, literary styles, literature, 636 00:38:06,717 --> 00:38:11,555 vocabulary, and above all, engaging with profoundly modern issues, 637 00:38:12,023 --> 00:38:16,761 it is, for Tolkien, an authentic development of literary tradition. 638 00:38:17,428 --> 00:38:19,897 The Tree of Tales is no longer a seedling. 639 00:38:19,897 --> 00:38:21,699 It's a mature oak. 640 00:38:21,699 --> 00:38:25,503 So if we ask, what would the Lord of the rings be like 641 00:38:25,836 --> 00:38:27,538 if it had been written in the tradition 642 00:38:27,538 --> 00:38:31,042 of the Beowulf poets, we have the answer right in front of us. 643 00:38:31,375 --> 00:38:32,743 Tolkien has written it. 644 00:38:36,213 --> 00:38:39,216 In discussing Tolkien's writings on Beowulf, 645 00:38:39,617 --> 00:38:42,453 Peter Millward observed that Tolkien was gifted 646 00:38:42,453 --> 00:38:45,956 with the ability to enter into the spirit of the old poem 647 00:38:46,223 --> 00:38:49,493 and interpret it for his 20th century readers. 648 00:38:50,127 --> 00:38:53,631 Tolkien could interpret the image of a world through his modern 649 00:38:53,631 --> 00:38:58,402 readers precisely because he knew both cultures, the old and the new. 650 00:38:59,370 --> 00:39:04,008 Someone who dwelt wholly in the past might well be able to understand 651 00:39:04,141 --> 00:39:06,377 medieval literature better than anyone else, 652 00:39:06,377 --> 00:39:09,347 but he wouldn't be able to communicate that with others. 653 00:39:09,347 --> 00:39:12,850 Tolkien could and did share his insights. 654 00:39:13,284 --> 00:39:18,322 This suggests that he could interpret the modern world even as he critiqued it. 655 00:39:19,423 --> 00:39:22,393 But he was also a transformer of culture, 656 00:39:22,393 --> 00:39:25,963 which I think we can see most fully in the theme. 657 00:39:25,963 --> 00:39:29,400 At the heart of the Lord of the rings foreshadowed in The Hobbit, 658 00:39:29,967 --> 00:39:34,238 that of renunciation, of relinquishing the will to power. 659 00:39:35,506 --> 00:39:38,509 The plot of The Hobbit centers upon a quest 660 00:39:38,609 --> 00:39:41,612 for something to recover the dwarf's treasure, 661 00:39:41,946 --> 00:39:46,584 but the turning point of the story occurs when Bilbo gives up the ark and stone, 662 00:39:46,751 --> 00:39:50,287 and by extension, his whole share in the in the treasure 663 00:39:51,021 --> 00:39:52,923 and his place in the dwarves company. 664 00:39:52,923 --> 00:39:57,161 In order to forestall the terrible conflict between the dwarves 665 00:39:57,161 --> 00:40:00,164 and the men of Dale and their Elvish allies, 666 00:40:00,931 --> 00:40:03,901 this theme, deepened and enriched, 667 00:40:03,934 --> 00:40:06,937 becomes the centerpiece of the Lord of the rings. 668 00:40:08,005 --> 00:40:11,008 The traditional storyline of a quest 669 00:40:11,008 --> 00:40:14,779 is to find the magical item and use it, 670 00:40:15,613 --> 00:40:18,649 but the Fellowship's mission is to destroy the ring, 671 00:40:19,417 --> 00:40:23,387 and Tolkien underscores how radical this is by having dissent 672 00:40:23,387 --> 00:40:28,359 among the fellowship for a brave and honorable man thinks it's madness 673 00:40:28,359 --> 00:40:32,563 to give up the ring, and instead wants, understandably, to use it for good. 674 00:40:32,563 --> 00:40:34,064 And the defense of Gondor. 675 00:40:35,866 --> 00:40:37,034 The challenge that Tolkien 676 00:40:37,034 --> 00:40:40,237 presents is ultimately to renounce 677 00:40:40,237 --> 00:40:44,542 the will to power, that the ring signifies something that the character 678 00:40:44,542 --> 00:40:48,078 has have to reckon with individually as well as corporately. 679 00:40:48,612 --> 00:40:53,651 Gandalf, Boromir and Galadriel, even Sam are each faced with a temptation 680 00:40:53,651 --> 00:40:58,689 to seize power instead of relinquishing it, and Frodo ultimately fails the test. 681 00:40:59,089 --> 00:41:02,159 His will is broken, and he embraces the libido. 682 00:41:02,159 --> 00:41:03,761 Dom Andy is saved 683 00:41:03,761 --> 00:41:08,132 only through the providential consequences of his exercise of mercy and pity. 684 00:41:08,332 --> 00:41:10,901 Earlier in the story. 685 00:41:10,901 --> 00:41:14,972 Now the quest is about as ancient a story structure as one can imagine, 686 00:41:15,339 --> 00:41:19,810 but Tolkien has shifted it at a fundamental level in a manner 687 00:41:20,110 --> 00:41:23,113 that would not have made much sense to a medieval writer, 688 00:41:23,314 --> 00:41:26,951 or indeed any writer before the calamities of the 20th century. 689 00:41:28,352 --> 00:41:29,453 You know what a fairy story is? 690 00:41:29,453 --> 00:41:33,691 Tolkien remarked that fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition 691 00:41:33,691 --> 00:41:37,094 that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun, 692 00:41:37,528 --> 00:41:40,931 on a recognition of fact, but not slavery to it. 693 00:41:42,199 --> 00:41:45,202 Part of what Tolkien brought to the workings of his creative 694 00:41:45,202 --> 00:41:49,740 imagination was a clear eyed acknowledgment of the modern world, 695 00:41:50,107 --> 00:41:53,110 but not a weak willed acquiescence to it. 696 00:41:54,044 --> 00:41:57,314 In writing the Lord of the rings, Tolkien was not turning his back 697 00:41:57,314 --> 00:41:58,549 on the 20th century. 698 00:41:58,549 --> 00:42:01,819 In fact, he was engaging with it all the more profound way, 699 00:42:02,820 --> 00:42:04,922 as he recalled a letter to Christopher. 700 00:42:04,922 --> 00:42:09,093 He had attempted diary keeping but found it unsatisfactory. 701 00:42:09,493 --> 00:42:13,097 He wrote, so I took to escapism or really 702 00:42:13,097 --> 00:42:16,901 transforming experience into another form and symbol, 703 00:42:17,434 --> 00:42:20,271 and it has stood me in good stead in many hard years. 704 00:42:20,271 --> 00:42:20,938 Since. 705 00:42:22,473 --> 00:42:23,774 So how is it 706 00:42:23,774 --> 00:42:27,511 that an epic fantasy about a quest to dispose of a magic ring 707 00:42:28,045 --> 00:42:30,848 set in a prehistoric past, 708 00:42:30,848 --> 00:42:33,951 featuring elves and dwarves, wizards and warriors, 709 00:42:34,351 --> 00:42:37,922 should speak to readers in the 21st century. 710 00:42:38,822 --> 00:42:41,825 The Lord of the rings is a great book, 711 00:42:41,825 --> 00:42:44,828 and so there are many reasons why this should be so, 712 00:42:45,062 --> 00:42:47,631 but I would suggest that part of the answer 713 00:42:47,631 --> 00:42:51,068 is that Tolkien chose not to turn away from the modern day, 714 00:42:51,502 --> 00:42:55,306 but rather to engage with it, difficult as that was at times, 715 00:42:55,973 --> 00:42:59,109 and in that way he became both an interpreter 716 00:42:59,109 --> 00:43:02,613 and a transformer of culture, and made the Lord of the rings 717 00:43:02,613 --> 00:43:05,583 a book that speaks so profoundly to us today. 718 00:43:06,116 --> 00:43:06,483 Thank you.