Okay, let's make a start.
Thank you very much, everyone, for coming.
This is the last in the seminar series which we put on, really
to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Lord of the rings.
So it's it's possibly appropriate.
I'm speaking about what
the title of this talk was, the key spring of the Lord of the rings.
With a question mark at the end and the question mark in the title
will carry a lot of weight, as we will see.
For those of you later, I'm afraid the projector isn't working, but,
that's nice, isn't it?
Because we're we're all sick of PowerPoint slides.
So let us begin
on the 30th of March, 1968, from 950 to 1035, the BBC2 aired
the latest episode of the documentary series release.
First half of that was about the sculptress, Barbara Hepworth.
The second of it, half was entitled
Tolkien in Oxford, which the Radio Times of the 28th of March
described as about the Lord of the rings.
Now, the program, I'm sure, is very familiar to many of you.
It's it's widely available on YouTube,
and I reconstructed all the interviews that happened.
The offcuts.
There's an article in Tolkien Studies and there's an archive, for radio
four show if you want to listen to that, which is quite fun.
For those of you who've seen the film, it's definitely a product of 1968.
There's over the top narration by the actor Joss Ackland.
There's some hilarious interviews with the Oxford students from the time,
radiophonic music, from the cutting edge Doctor Who team, and so on and so on.
And when I spoke to the director, Lesley McGahey, who's now, sadly,
no longer with us, and I said, it's a bit funny, and you said, that's fine.
It was meant to be funny.
So if you find yourself laughing, that's okay.
But it was meant to capture the essence of Tolkien.
And the crew were instructed when they filmed the interviews.
Imagine you're interviewing Lewis Carroll now.
One such moment that has been kept in, and it was kept on purely
for the comedic value.
I won't be able to show it, but I am going to play it so you can hear.
The audio is about 22 minutes into the show,
and if you look at your handout on item one, there is a transcript.
But let's see if we can get this to play.
If you want to come down to any lunch to interest people,
I can hold them that tension for considerable time or make them
stories.
Thank you.
Always a human stories make you always about one thing.
That that.
Inevitability of death.
I don't know who you'll be with me.
That is one.
Love them
I there was a quotation from this one
there in the paper the other day, which seems to me I.
I think I really do.
Love this. This.
Is that about the untimely death of,
Music composer who I am?
I shall always be interesting to ponder.
Carl Maria.
Viva,
who died 39 of them.
And the man who was Nazism
biography actually quotes these words of Simon.
There is no such thing as a natural death.
Nothing that happens to men is of a natural,
since his presence calls the whole world into question.
All men must die.
But for every man his death is an accident,
even if he knows it.
An insensitivity, an unjustifiable violation.
We may agree with the words or not,
but those are the,
The keys bring a little or.
So if you could imagine the scene.
Let's see. And you watch it.
Professor Tolkien sitting in an old room up at the Catholic Chaplaincy.
And just as he's about to read that quote,
he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a newspaper cutting.
And Lesley McGahey again, the director, said that
they kept that clip in because they just thought it was so hilarious
that it was this elderly Dom in an old suit, quoting
one of the great contemporary feminist writers of the 20th century.
If you heard it somewhere in the boudoir, they had no idea that he was going
to pull the cutting out of his pocket at the time and start reading it.
But what do you think is going on here?
And what we mean by what I think is critical phrase.
Those are the key spring of the Lord of the rings,
the vast, sprawling epic romances.
Enchanted is for many others.
For 70 years now in his moved and inspired generation general after generation.
But it has a multitude of themes.
But here he is, only five years before he actually passed away, saying,
well, it's primarily about this death, the unjustifiable violation of death.
And when I personally first encountered that program,
the 1968 show, I is puzzled.
And, I was reading his letters around the same time, though,
so maybe where he, I found he was saying some similar things.
For example, in the draft letter from April 1956, he wrote, the real
theme for me is about something much more permanent and difficult
death and immortality in a letter from 1957.
It is about death and the desire for death.
Lessness in October 1958 to own a beer, he states, power seeking
is only the motive power that sets events going and is relatively unimportant.
I think it's mainly concerned with death and immortality
and the escaped serial longevity and hoarding memory
and even Christopher Tolkien at the end of J.R.R.
Tolkien, A film portrait, which again you can find on YouTube, confirmed
the fundamental underpinning concern of all his work was death.
The intolerable fact,
this is about
as near as you can get in literary studies to what we call a slam dunk.
It basically tells you what a great work is about.
But why did this puzzled me?
Well, I first read Lord of the rings.
I was probably about 15.
And, if this really was
what it was all about, it had completely bypassed me at the time.
For me, it was this great sweeping adventure
full of action, a wondrous journey into an immersive world,
a heroic romance, as Tolkien would have termed it.
And if I'd been told, then it was really about an exploration
of the theme of death.
That would have been news to me.
Now, I may be alone here.
You may all recall the first time you read the Lord of the rings and you went,
oh, of course, it's all about death and immortality and everything.
If so, that's fine.
Let's look on this tour, because a bit of an exploration
and methodology is how we can explore this a bit, a bit deeper.
But if not, then and you're like me then, then follow me along now.
So return to the clip itself.
I'm sorry you can't see it, but it was, it was called shot 12 in the filming.
And the directorate
labeled the attitude of life and death, and it was about nine minutes long.
The shot that they only used, just under a minute from from the footage.
And he does pull out a newspaper article.
And you can trace that.
It's from the times dated Saturday, the 3rd of February, 1968.
It was a review by Michael Ratcliffe of,
a biography of the composer is he says, Carl Faber.
And you can I can find it or I would shown it to you,
but the quote highlighted, which is in the extract, number one,
comes from A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir, the 1964 essay
on the time she spends with her mother, who is dying in hospital.
Now, there is absolutely no indication that talking read Simone de Beauvoir.
In fact, Alonzo Chilly and Holly Ordway, both looking at Tolkien's library
and Tolkien's modern reading, devote quite a bit of time to this site,
and there's absolutely no evidence he owned any of the books or read this.
So what he's reading the quote is exactly the quote from the newspaper.
However, the central theme to de Beauvoir's book
is the desperate desire of any human being, regardless of their however strong
their religious beliefs might be, to cling on to life as long as possible.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
As Dylan Thomas once wrote.
So perhaps it doesn't really matter how Tolkien came
to de Beauvoir's text, or indeed, whether he read it or not.
The important point is that the quote chimed with him
and his own thinking about the Lord of the rings,
not just having a look again at number one.
And I just want to pull out a few things.
If you really come down to any large story that interest people,
they are always about one thing, aren't they?
Death, inevitability of death.
And then there is no such thing as a natural death.
Death is an unjustifiable violation.
But these are the key spring of the Lord of the rings key spring.
This is one of those odd phrases
that we probably all hear and think we know exactly what it means.
But it's a bit nonsensical.
Those are in fact, no such word is key.
Spring. Certainly not recorded in the Oxford
English Dictionary or elsewhere that I know.
If you search it, all you find is this quote from Tolkien.
But I suspect what he was
probably using or saying or thinking of saying was mainspring.
And that's the principle of spring in a watch or clock.
The spring which drives the hammer in a gun, or figuratively,
the chief motive, the main incentive.
But it could be key, as in the essential and spring as in source.
We just don't know.
We don't have any evidence, is what Tolkien was trying to say.
But clearly there's something about death that was either the inspiration
for the Lord of the rings, the motivation for some of the characters,
the driving force for the plot, the central theme, or all of these
and if we accept that and the toolkit is not simply resorting to hyperbole,
which was his wont, I'm afraid,
and he was winding the crew up quite a bit in the interview.
But the further references in the letters are quoted earlier.
Then what are we to make of it?
What, for
example, is so intolerable about death?
That might seem a bit of an odd question to come to ask people, but anyway,
why would we see it as a violation?
Is it the fact of its inevitability that you can't escape it?
As in the ancient Mesopotamian tale Appointment in Samarra?
Is it that it's just unfair and cruel?
Is it the fear of death and the unknown?
I'll attempt to show that Tolkien explores all of these in the Lord of the rings
and his wider mythology, and that he presented his own conclusions.
But they were deeply rooted in the experiences of his life
and also his faith.
So as I pondered this problem,
and I would say I'm not alone in focusing in on this quote,
in the reading list at the back you will find many articles and chapters
by people who've looked at it.
And Signum University, in fact, did an entire day on death in Tolkien last year.
But what I do find is that people sort of skirt over it.
They mention it a bit, and then they skirt quickly over it,
and none of them think of it
in the context of Tolkien's life, which is what I'd like to do.
However, as I begin to ponder it, the bit I came back to was any large story
that interests people, and this felt to me like a way you should always look
for a way in to try and understanding what an author's talking about.
So I started to think, what large stories might these be?
So let's start with these.
First of all, I think
there are other stories he read tool studied.
Second, there's the most probably important story
to his life the story of Christ.
And then thirdly, there is the story of his own life,
the context in which he lived and wrote.
So I'm just going to start
with the stories he read, taught, or studied.
And here just have your hand
up, to hand because I'll be reading some quotes.
So let's start with what is often cited as the first fantasy story,
the Epic of Gilgamesh.
We know that Tolkien owned E Wallace
fudges the Babylonian story of the deluge and the Epic of Gilgamesh.
And as some of you will know, the second part of that tale recounts
the failed quest to find the secret of eternal life,
with the protagonist being told by the gods that death was man's fate.
So we're on to a good start.
I'm going to skip classical literature
and direct you to the really excellent talk last year in this series by
See me on that very subject, and it's on our podcast series.
But I'm going to concentrate instead on the the text that Tolkien
studied and taught, particularly in medieval literature.
It's not hard to find the
theme of death being dealt with across the board.
For example, in the spiritual in Bede's
Ecclesiastical History of the English People book,
for there are a number of instances of the dead returning in a good way.
Or there's the horror in the Old Norse sagas of the droga and how we,
we through these bloodthirsty revenants that come back
and terrorize the protagonists of the text.
But let's talk about a few texts, which we know Tolkien
paid a lot of attention to.
First, Beowulf.
It's always Beowulf, isn't it?
The great epic of Old English literature which tells the tale of a hero
fight three monsters Grendel, Grendel, his mother, and then a dragon
warrior at the end is mortally wounded and die or dies.
Crucially, at the midpoint of that poem, we get a speech by Hrothgar,
the old Danish king.
The young Beowulf has come over to save, and having done that, Hrothgar subjects
him to what we often call cross sermon, which always seems to be important to me.
But the extract on the handout from section two is Tolkien's own translation.
Now, for a little while they valor is in flower.
But soon shall it
be that sickness or the sword rob thee of they might as far as embrace
or waters wave or bite of blade or fight of spear, or dreadful
old age, or the flashing of thine eyes should fail and fade.
Very soon will come that the proud knight shall death lay low.
And Tolkien considered this may have been inserted
by another poet called Colonel Wolf,
but even so he thought it was a fitting end to the first part of Beowulf,
which depicted the rise of the hero, but foreshadowing the coming of old age.
And in these notes to the text, Tolkien showed the contrast of youth
and age, age and death, the inevitable sequel of Youth and Triumph.
At the end of the text.
Spoiler Beowulf dies, of course, perhaps a needless death due to his pride,
which seems to be what Tolkien also suggests with his comment
in his lecture on Beowulf and the monsters and the critics quote, but
we may remember that the poet of Beowulf saw clearly the wages of heroism is death,
and the whole poem quote was a solemn funeral ale with the taste of death
moving on in time.
So Gawain in the Green Knight, you know, he produced an edition of this book.
We also have his lecture and translation so clearly another text, which Tolkien
probably would have said.
This is a great story.
And with Sir Gawain, the whole quest is to seek out death,
the return blow by the Green Knight to be delivered at the Green Chapel.
In his essay on the poem, Tolkien makes several references to the point
that Gawain is off to meet death, but Gawain is given hope.
If you know the tale, he's handed this magic belt by the lady which he could use,
which he potentially might well have saved him.
But Tolkien, in his lecture on this, decidedly underplays that.
To quote again, number three.
But even at the moment
when the idea of helping escaping death first wakes in his mind
and is strongest before he has time to reflect
all that the poet strictly reports him is thinking is
it would be a marvelous thing to have in the desperate business allotted to me.
If I could somehow escape being slain, it would be a splendid trick.
He's really underplaying this idea,
and if you know the text going doesn't use the magic belt to save himself.
He saved from death by his own righteousness and humility.
Two more text.
Next one is Pearl.
This is a wonderful poem from medieval literature, one which is,
one of the great masterpieces.
And Tolkien, marveled at the intricate verse from the poet, at the time.
And there was an edition with Gordon that you probably know,
and he returns to the text and provides a translation.
It is a poem purely about death, the death of the poet's daughter,
the poet, the protagonist in the poem, falls asleep and then sees this vision
of his daughter, who has died as a child but is now grown up.
She's in Paradise,
and she remonstrated with him for grieving when she is in such an idyllic place.
And the end of the poem is when the poet wakes, when he attempts
to cross the stream to her and, in effect, an attempt to circumvent death.
And finally, briefly, there is Sir Orfeo.
Again, we know Tolkien worked on this, and has been argued
was very possibly a source for the inspiration for the elves.
Certainly The Hobbit, and the tale itself focuses on the ancient myth of Orpheus.
But in Middle English the Queen is taken to Faerie, not the underworld,
and the main elements of the plot, though, are still there from the Orpheus
tale, so Rovio has to rescue her, manage to do so through his music.
And as an aside, it's interesting, which I've put there.
That's the end of Tolkien's translation now.
Is King Orfeo crowned a new and here it is his lady two and long
they lived till they were dead, and King was the steward in their stead.
The halfling two lady were dead is not in the manuscript.
He just inserts it. Now.
He inserts it for reasons to keep up the rhyme, as you can see.
And maybe that's just coincidence, but I just thought it was a nice little
touch to bring in.
This brings us to the books Tolkien read, namely fairy stories,
which he famously encountered as a young boy.
Sir Orfeo employs the trope of fairy, the perilous realm being a substitute
for death, or at least a place of separation from normal human existence.
It's a place of wonder and enchantment, yes,
but also where time operates on a different plane.
The mainstay of many fairy tales,
the fairy or elf or wherever it is, leaves differently to us
and most importantly, is often depicted as ageless, timeless, deathless.
In this sense, then, the land of fairy is in fact
a way of cheating, death or cheating time.
Sorry. And to a degree death do age there.
You do not die.
Of course, we have lots of fairy tales which deal directly with the threat
of death Hansel and Gretel, the juniper tree or symbolism of death?
Fearlessness, like Sleeping Beauty,
or tales, where the hero, but usually the villain, tries to seek immortality.
But the symbolic importance of fairy tales is depicting another way of existence,
especially when it comes to mortality, was important to Tolkien, as can be seen
from his comment, which I think is item five on fairy stories.
At last
there is the oldest and deepest desire the Great Escape, the escape from death.
Fairy stories provide many examples and modes of this, which might be called
the genuine escapist, or should I say fugitive spirit.
The human stories of the elves are doubtless
full of the escape from death lessness few lessons are taught more
clearly in them that the burden of that kind of immortality,
or rather endless serial living to which the fugitive would fly for the fairy
story, is especially apt to teach such things of old and still today.
Death is the theme that most inspired George MacDonald.
As an aside, as an aside,
the reference to George MacDonald is probably,
his explorations of death in text light at the back of the North Wind, or Lilith,
a MacDonald's famous statement that death is simply more life or
death to MacDonald was not a problem.
It was a promise of fulfillment.
But note in that quote from, fairy stories.
Tolkien has that bit of an undercurrent casting doubt
on where the death of his death lessness is really that ideal.
It's a burden.
And the fairy story was a great way of exploring this.
Hold on to that thought.
Now, we don't know if Tolkien read Arthur Machen or E.F.
Benson, but if he had, or at least I don't know, he no doubt
would have been intrigued by the use of the great classical fairy pen
and the promise the pen could bring immortality in such tales
as McEwan's The Great God Pan, or most notably in Benson's
horrific tale from 1912, The Man Who Went Too Far.
I would strongly recommend Go and read that
token, of course.
Also read for fun.
And whilst no doubt there are hundreds thousands of books
he read or tales I'm going to be very,
very selective and focus on one author which we know he really liked.
Because he went off and collected eight novels by him H.
Rider Haggard, and particularly his story she A History of Adventure,
which we think Tolkien was reading about 1908 to 1910.
This, as you may know, if you haven't read it, you've probably seen the film.
The hammer film
is the story of Aisha, who was discovered the secret of immortality.
But when the male protagonist, Leo, refuses to enter the sacred fire
and to join her in that immortality, Aisha does and reverts to a true age.
But there are sequels I issue the return of.
She, she and Allen Wisdom's daughter, and Tolkien owned all of those.
So you're still buying Haggard's books?
It looks like, into the 20s.
So where does this get us to?
And I do appreciate I've been incredibly selective here, but taking these few
great stories, they do seem to give some substance to Tolkien's observation.
The death is also a central theme of many tales,
or at least that's what he encountered.
Death needs to be faced.
Death will come to us all.
That can be unfair.
But for as long as we have told tales, we have wondered
whether it may be possible to escape death and what it might mean
to be immortal.
When I was younger, I was brought up a Catholic.
And it always struck me as I sat in the church, just how much iconography
there was around me of horrific ways that people got killed.
There were statues to martyrs that were very realistic.
Stations of the cross, the large crucifix with blood pouring from Christ,
media vat in mortal summers, in the midst of life, we were in death.
This all transfixed me.
Didn't do anything spiritually for me.
I just went off and watched a load of horror films and really enjoyed those.
But nevertheless, death plays an important role in the way
Catholics and Christians of suppose see the story of Christ.
So it's critically important to Tolkien,
and as he's well known, the fall of man occurs.
When are or is the leaf is the first parents, Adam and Eve,
the fruit of the tree of the knowledge, thus disobeying God, and having done
so due to the wiles of Satan, they fall from God's grace, expelled from Eden.
And it's for this reason that mankind is subject to sin,
temptation, hardship, and importantly, death.
And from those early chapters of Genesis, then death is in God's plan.
Christ's death, however, is the redemption from this.
Moreover, his resurrection the greatest you catastrophe of them all for talking
so as a glimpse of the truth, a ray of light reveals
not only that Christ was the Son of God,
but also that we can all escape the nothingness of death.
As Christ's sacrifice allowed us to enter heaven,
he's victorious over death,
as foreshadowed by his last miracle, the raising of Lazarus.
And he says, I am the resurrection and the life,
and he that believeth in me, that we were dead, yet shall he live.
In Romans 838 to 39, Christians are told they need not fear.
Death is nothing will separate them from God.
The resurrection gives meaning to the famous one Corinthians
O death, where is thy sting at the victory?
Oh death, what is thy sting?
And in revelations 21, for we're told death will be eradicated.
Moreover, the Bible tells us that to attempt to evade or escape
death is unacceptable, is made clear in the Old Testament
Deuteronomy, where there is a prohibition on witchcraft,
specifically necromancy,
and most famous in one Samuel with the Witch of indoor.
Now, it doesn't matter if you don't believe any of this,
this doesn't align with your own spiritual or religious beliefs.
But what is key here?
This was central to Tolkien's conception of death, that it was not the end.
That through Christ we have redemption.
There's an afterlife, and to evade or cheat death is not something
that is acceptable, and even worse is in direct conflict
with God's will and the purpose of Christ's passion.
Miracles are allowed, of course, as Christ did,
but also miracles can be performed if it kind of temporarily stays off death.
And we know Tolkien was
really got a great lot of solace from the story of Bernadette, of Lourdes.
And in one letter, 1944, he ecstatically recounts
the story of a young boy in the 20s who was seriously ill
but passed by the grotto on a train and was miraculously cured.
So we can imagine told we took a very active
Catholic part in the discussions by the inklings of death
and the afterlife, which we know they debated in Hollywood.
We spoke,
and death
was, of course, something told not to come too early in his life.
His father died in 1896, as you know.
But more crucially, was the death of his mother.
As Hollywood. Well noted.
Tolkien commented decades later that she died in the postman's cottage,
but right now he still had the image of that death in his head generations later.
And if that was not enough, only a few years later, like the rest of
his generation, he was to experience the cataclysm, First World War.
Now, much focus about the First World War is on people like Rob Gibson
and Jeffrey Smith in the TCP, which is understandable.
But we have to remember, Tolkien was also an officer and officer to his men,
the pain of which is so wonderfully captured by the poet.
A macintosh in his poem In Memoriam, which I will skip over.
But please do go and read it.
It's a it's a it's a description of what it is like
as an officer in the First World War to lose
private your men and to cradle them while they're dying is incredibly moving.
Poem.
In an interview with Tolkien by Martin Gilbert, the famous
historian Gilbert wrote Toscanini's signals were always vulnerable.
One of them, Private
Sydney Sumner, had disappeared during intense shellfire on July the 9th.
For two months no trace of him could be found.
Dear sir, his wife wrote to Tolkien in hope and despair.
I would not care if only I knew how he went.
And she added, I know they cannot all be saved to come home.
Sumner had left a one year old daughter at home, by the way,
you can imagine how the impact of that in many other letters
would have had on a young man like Tolkien.
Friends from college and school were killed.
But we should also note that when he was on the Somme,
he was surrounded by horrific conditions.
You just didn't.
He only had to not only had to live with the threat of death,
but also July, August.
There is a lot of unburied dead out there
and he is seeing that day in, day out.
And it wasn't just combatants who die in the war.
Father Basil Maturin, who told him that in 1914
and they shared a great love of ghost stories, dies on the Lusitania in 1915.
And if you want on the podcast, it will come out.
I've given it talk on Tolkien's war poetry a few weeks back,
but everyone stops at 1918.
It doesn't end there.
As the guns fell silent, the butcher's bill really starts to come up.
But even worse is what we get is the Spanish flu epidemic.
40 to 50 million people killed worldwide, 200,000 in England, Wales alone,
and most importantly, 45% of the casualties of the Spanish flu
were from people aged 15 to 35, the very generation
that had just been decimated in the First World War.
In October 1918, in Liverpool alone, the death rate
had risen to 41.9 in every 2000,
and it doubled by the next week, over 80 in every thousand.
And to put that in context, because that's how we can measure these things.
The height of Covid in England, it was 1.85 per thousand.
The times in 1921, Labor
Day, all the great death.
So in the space of a few years, token and millions of Britons had to come to
terms with losing friends and loved ones and often in the prime of their life.
And it was this sense of shock and mourning which just dominated everything.
Lucy Noakes put in the reading observed
the physical and cultural spaces of towns, cities and villages were shaped
by the erection of war memorials, and the national and imperial calendar
encompassed Armistice Day as a means of honoring the dead.
And token cannot of missed the fact that there are numerous war memorials.
I think there's over 150 in England alone, where the depiction
is not just of the standard soldier, it's of the Pieta,
that station of the cross of Mary cradling the dead Christ.
But then underneath are all the men who were killed in the town
and villages, and it wasn't just in towns and villages.
Memorialization of the first war is brought into the home.
Everyone had a photograph of a lost son or relative.
They would often put these in frames, enshrine them.
They would be a memorialization, a sort of,
a memorialization sort of event where perhaps at their birthday
or the day of their death,
they would bring these down and the family would talk about it.
Pilgrimages to back site became incredibly popular.
And this cannot of escape token.
50% of the Leeds
Leeds pals who went over the top and the first day the battle of the
Somme were dead or are a casualty within a space of a few minutes.
And of course he works in Leeds.
He's surrounded by those families.
Even worse, for many families there was no grave.
And, to quote Noakes, the absence of a body to be cared
for instead, the accompanying
lack of funeral rites could be disruptive of the very process of grieving.
There was always the hope they may have escaped death.
Now, Tolkien noted that in the teens
and 20s his and his faith suffers a bit.
But he wasn't alone there and into that vacuum.
Spiritualism
the very thing the Bible condemns the ability to commune with the dead.
It come into the vogue in the 19th century.
But it really takes off during the war and after the war, there was no
spiritualist church in Oxford to the 50s, but there were plenty in Leeds,
and this was led by luminaries like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
You may know in the things like spirit
photographs, photos and spirit writing and sciences abounded.
There was even a book dictated by a dead soldier from beyond the grave
to his father and spiritualism said notes
provided a framework for the ongoing presence of the dead.
Death was not the end, it suggested.
And then there was the fear of the next war.
The 1930s has been described as the age of anxiety.
In 31, Japan invades Manchuria.
People start going, told what?
What was happening there, the atrocities.
32 Baldwin says the bomber will get through.
36 we get the films like Things to Come, which shows
the effect of mass bombings on cities.
And then we get the German Condor
bombing of Guernica and 37, and it's easy
to look back on the Second World War and go, oh, we know exactly what happened.
London wasn't bombed and flattened completely.
They didn't drop poison gas on us at the time or anything like that.
But the people living through it didn't know that.
So in a letter 1941 to Michael Token wrote,
I fancy things will blow up early this year than last,
and that we will have a pretty hectic time in every corner of the island.
Plain reasoning seems to show that Hitler must attack this country direct
and very heavily soon.
And in other letters he really wonders if he, Edith
and Priscilla, not to mention his sons, will survive the war.
So when you put all that together,
it's really hard to imagine that the Lord of rings could be about
anything else, isn't it? Apart from death.
So let's quickly now turn to the Lord of the rings.
What exactly does it say about death?
And how do we go about answering this?
And the first step, which I can't show you now, is a quantitative analysis
where you take, for example, terms associated with death
and see how are they distributed throughout the book.
Now, death comes in many guises, of course, in the Lord of the rings,
even if it's not specifically mentioned.
We have the deathly tone in Moria, the slaughter of the orcs by the row here
in the funeral pyre of Faramir,
the underpinning of the whole book is a sense of loss and transience.
There's the commemoration of death death practices, notably
in Rohan, where the dead are celebrated and remembered, but in Gondor,
where they have these great moments and are largely forgotten.
But if we were to keep it simple and look for the terms death, dead,
including undead, dying, mortal, immortal throughout the books,
I've done a distribution, so I'm going to have to verbally describe this, but,
basically what it shows is
there are some clear peaks of those terms, particularly in book four, as Frodo,
Sam and Gollum make their way into Mordor and the book becomes steadily darker.
But also book five as The War of the ring really hots up.
And there's also a centering of terms around those around the key
things that Amy and Rand
referred to as the three haunted places, the Barrow Downs and the whites,
the Dead Marshes in the path of the dead, which are all form of Cat Abbass.
She notes these scenes play on a number of primal fears,
including the fear of being buried alive, the fear of trespassing
on the places, the dead, and most of all, the lingering apprehension
that some part of our consciousness will remain in the tomb.
Of course, the book
opens or nearly opens with a very critical piece.
When Frodo says, it's a pity
Bilbo did not kill Gollum when he had the chance.
And Gandalf replies, many that live deserve death,
and some die who deserve life.
Can you give it to them then?
Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment.
And these words are repeated later when Frodo recalls a conversation
at a critical point. The narrative.
So importantly, this cements early on the death is neutral, unfair,
uncontrollable, and that there are also, perhaps good and bad deaths.
Good deaths might be, as we think about the book fired
and Gandalf in Moria, Boromir and Aragorn again.
Spoiler.
And bad deaths, Gollum, then author Saruman, worm tongue, etc.
but returning to
Tolkien's comment, the death was the key spring of the book.
This brief analysis or this description that does show that they're
almost continually mentions of or repeated mentions of words around the, semantic
field of death throughout the book, culminating or peaking in five.
Perhaps more interesting is to go back to that quote from,
fairy stories about the Great Escape and the attempt to evade death.
So in the Lord of the rings, I'd suggest this happens in three ways.
First of all, there's those you catastrophic episodes where characters
are snatched from the jaws of death,
like Frodo and Sam at the end with He Who's Coming.
Then there's the escape to Valinor at the end of the book,
where life and death merge.
Now, this is a bit of a gray area, if you'll excuse the pun,
as like so many things, Tolkien was hard pressed to pin this down.
Was it a place where immortality was granted to
mortals as the Numenoreans think?
Incorrectly, or as Tolkien asked himself, was it an allegory of death,
or a mode of healing and restoration leading to a return?
And then thirdly, there's the ability to escape death.
Through sorry, through immortality.
In his famous letter to Milton Warden Waldman of 1951,
Tolkien stated there were three great themes running throughout is mythology
the fall, Mortal ity, and finally the machine.
And by the fall he means this repeated,
kind of episodes where individuals, or indeed
entire races lead to their own disaster because they make bad decisions.
Morgoth, Melkor Féin or the Numenoreans Balram er.
And of course the fall of the Lord of the rings himself.
Mortality.
Well, that's central, of course, to this discussion, as
is the machine as we as we will see.
It's curious to note that when you look at the word distribution of mortal,
immortal mortality and mortality, he hardly uses them at all.
In Lord of the rings,
only a handful of titans and a dozen, I think, if that across all of the books.
So this is where you need to go a bit deeper than just counting words
and seeing where they appear.
And to understand this,
just need to give a bit of background on Tolkien's mythology,
spiritual and natural, which apologies to all of those who know who this.
So in terms of natural in his mythology, the various races,
as you probably know, are said to have different lifespans
on the whole longer than us, but also to a varying degree, finite.
He discusses this in several places, but most notably, if you get a copy
of The Nature of Middle Earth, which came out that it was last year,
and he has essay An Essay on Death in their
but for the purpose of talk.
I can't go through them all, but let's just think of the key ones men,
humans and elves, which Tolkien described
in 1956, is two experiments in mortality.
And to put it simply, men are mortal.
They grow old and die unless their life is prolonged by some supernatural means.
The machine.
But elves are what is often called immortal.
Elves grow to adulthood but then do not get older
and they will live on, but only until the end of the earth.
So strictly speaking, they are immortal to a degree, but they're not eternal.
And on the spiritual level, Tolkien.
He gets quite deep into these details.
In these races, there's a separation
between what he called the fair soul and the lower body.
For elves, the froa the body resists decay
and cereal longevity, but for men, that is not the case.
They grow old and the body dies even with the numenoreans
where they have grown a much longer lifespan, they still die.
So in chapter 17 of The Nature of Middle-Earth, this essay on death,
there's a section, Death of Incarnate Bodies, and he notes
that with elves, the failure departs when the body is injured.
Beyond recovery.
But then it kind of lurks around.
This sort of thing floats about.
Now. Eru saw this and allowed a failure to then be re-allocated to another rower.
In other words, reincarnation.
And he discusses the more sinister scenario, which I quite liked.
And I would like to read a bit
more about whereby Morgoth and Sauron could drive the fire out
with the thrower out the body, and keep the body as a beast.
Or they could trap the spirit in the body and nourish it fully
so that it became a beast due to the horror and torment of the soul.
But on the whole, this seems to be what you might call a top trump
for being an elf, doesn't it?
You might say, as well as serial longevity,
even if someone kills you, you get to be reincarnated.
So what's not to like with that?
If an elf partners
with the human, they can of course forgo this long life and embrace mortality.
And there are three areas where this happens in Tolkien's mythology
Luthien and Beren, Arwen and Aragorn, and Errol and Tulle and Lord of the rings.
It's the Beren Luthien tale, which is which is recounted,
summarized by Aragorn when he says she, Luthien
chose mortality and to die from the world so that she might follow him.
And this, of course, foreshadows Aragorn's relationship with Arwen.
Arwen herself says mine is the choice of Luthien,
and as she so have I, chosen both the sweet and the bitter.
Now, this whole concept of
fairies, elves, whatever you want to call them, immortal
beings giving up that and claiming mortality
is not new to Tolkien, but he explores it probably more than anything.
But if you go to the scythe, Thompson's motive index of folk literature,
and you see an entire section
just devoted to immortality and mortality, and there's even one specific one
which you would then go and follow the tales and read them.
Fairy gives up her fairy nature her, and becomes
mortal to be able to return to her mortal husband.
But to paraphrase Cole Porter's
song from High Society, who wouldn't want to be an elf?
Well, I do, because
he explores this probably the most fully in Arthur Beth Road.
Underneath this is a key text which takes the form of a discourse
between Finn Robb the Elf and Andrea the Wise woman
in this human of in King.
In this, King Finn Road argues that serious longevity for
the elves is a curse because they know they're ultimately doomed.
When are the ends?
But men may meet doom earlier, but have the promise of eternal life with every.
The tale also brings in an idea that perhaps humans were originally immortal.
But through some machination by Morgoth,
they fell like Adam and Eve's Adam and Eve.
Sorry.
And Ruth states, we knew that we had been born never to die.
And by that, my lord, we,
when we meant born to life everlasting, without any shadow in any notes.
Is she talking about a fall or about everlasting life?
But Finn Rod hones in
and disputes this, and Tolkien again blows hot and cold about this.
But I think he
settles on the fact that that men did not actually fall.
They were always mortal.
But even so, in, the key message of the text again
is that men are to be envied over elves.
The gift of L'Ouverture, Tolkien wrote, which is time where as even the powers
shall envy, so even men or humans might be in a better position than the gods.
Now, of course, this all finds
sounds fine and dandy.
But as Endrick argues, living this reality is something else.
Then humans could not but be envious of elves
immortality as they saw it, whilst they were doomed to die.
As de Beauvoir's mother showed,
it is built in to all humans to try to cling to death.
Even if we believe in an afterlife,
and all can observe that it's
the uncertainty around the latter that could lead or lead to the issue.
To quote men knowing little about what comes after death.
So many different things, some of which are fantasies of their own devising
and are darkened by the shadow.
So while most whilst mortality for many middle
earth is referred to as the gift of l'ouverture,
you can imagine while a lot of them just didn't always see it that way,
especially when they were surrounded by those damned deathless elves.
And Tolkien chose to explore this, of course, with the great tale
of the Numenoreans in his mythology, they're rewarded with longer lifespans
than other men, a topic he explores really well, I think in the married his wife.
But Numenoreans still die, and, as we know,
jealous of the elves immortality indeed.
Almost haunted by the fact that from their island they could see
the Undying Lands.
They first take on Satanist.
And he uses that word practices worshiping Melkor.
And they particularly uses the term necromancy, which is, of course,
interesting because it's the term that is then
applied to Sauron in The Hobbit.
They try all that, but they don't get very far.
So they go for the nuclear option, as you know, in creating a mordor
and sail West and contravene the ban of the Valar.
Detecting their plans, man wakens Elvish ambassadors to plead with them
not to break the ban.
The elder, you say, are, punish.
This is this is the elves speaking to them.
And even those who rebelled do not die, yet that is to them
neither reward nor punishment, but the fulfillment of their being.
They cannot escape and are bound to this world,
never to leave it so long as it lasts, for its life is theirs.
And you are punished for the rebellion of men.
You say, which you had small power, and so it is that you die.
But that was not at first appointed for a punishment.
You escape and leave the world, and are not bound to it in hope or weariness.
Which of us therefore should empty the others?
Well, the Numenoreans have no
truck with this elvish nonsense, and off they sail.
And credit where credit is due.
Sauron has played them like a piano.
So they head off to the island, dying lands to seek all mortality.
And what's even more tragic, of course, is that they wouldn't get it.
Even when they land young, dying lands don't bestow immortality.
It's just the name of the place where undying people live.
But even Arwen herself seem to have sympathy with
what might have been driven, and even more insidious
when facing up to Aragorn's impending death.
She says, but I say to you, King of the Numenoreans.
Not till now have
I understood the tale of your people when they fall as wicked fools.
I scorn them, but I pity them at last.
For if this is indeed is the elder, say, the gift of the one to men,
it is better to resolve
so the title of the Numenoreans forms that background
to the Lord of the rings.
I say Tolkien talked of three things.
I'm just going to very briefly talk about the machine,
and I hopefully I can play you something as well.
So you will see on your handout, if you go back to that, the quote,
if you really come down to any large story that interests people,
it's tension for the considerable time I make them started, practically always.
They are human stories.
They're always about one thing.
And then he talks about death.
So I'm just getting to the right slide on this.
Now, what happened in the shooting was they then sent some off
cuts off to a typist who typed up some notes, transcribed them,
and then all that footage was chopped in the bin.
So the quote that is sitting on item
six is what then immediately follows what he said there about,
death, the inevitability of death.
Now, what made the ring work?
Its corrupting power very largely by its attempt to escape that by a back door,
and really the whole constant interweaving opposition of men and elves.
You see, is really a very long story, a very long story based most particularly
on the differences in eternal life and unlimited serial death.
And you then get the I don't know if you'd agree with that,
but so the editing really has play tricks with us.
So if we now listen to what he says at the end,
I hope we can hear this again.
Let's just see what he actually does
say. Oh.
We may agree with the words or not,
but those are the,
the keys spring of the of the rings.
Now, just do we agree with the leads or not?
But those are the,
the keys bring in the Lord of the rings.
Everyone thinks he says those are the keys.
Spring of the Lord of the rings.
I don't think he does.
I think he says those are the key spring of the laws of the ring.
When you put that quote now before it, it makes sense.
Go away and listen to yourself.
You can make your mind up.
But I think that's what it's about.
So the rings not only offer power in the one ring of his ultimate power
and dominion,
their example of the machine, what he's talking about there that escapes death.
And I think that actually strengthens
the book by not just saying the books used about death.
If we just talk about the machine, the ring being about death,
and it opens up the book to so many more interpretations.
So the ring, of course, offers immortality through technology.
And that letter to Lord.
And he says the chief power of all the rings was the prevention
or slowing of decay, the preservation of what is desired or love.
Now, I don't have time to say this, but obviously the classic example of these
are the Nazgul, the Nazgul having immortality to a degree,
as long as that one ring exists and Sauron exists,
but it's an awful immortality, it's bad immortality.
And though we don't have much backstory to them, what happens to them?
We have a couple of bits about the witch King and Kamal.
It does feel to me they I can imagine
at some point in their existence, Bram Stoker's
Dracula quote, off to die, to be really dead, that must be glorious.
Would have haunted them because of course, they just can't escape it.
Cheating death as we're talking about it.
The other great classic
Cheat of Death, as he was accused of at the time by the critics,
was Gandalf's escape from death
in Moria, and he struggles about this,
and he even admitted he didn't quite get it right.
And particularly then, why does Saruman disappear in a puff of smoke?
But Gandalf gets to come back, I think the way he argues it and I,
I can go with this, I suppose, is that the key thing for Gandalf is
his choice of choosing death against the Balrog,
because not only is he putting himself in the face of death,
knowing that he will probably die, and it is a reference that the Istari can die.
And but more importantly,
he also knows that when he dies, the quest is pretty much doomed.
It will not succeed without him.
It's probably wrong, but we can.
You'd have to think through the consequences.
Tolkien says he was handing over to the authority,
that obtained the rules and giving up personal hope of success.
As we know, the powers decide to send him back naked,
as he says, not quite as the Rings of Power thought.
So where are we to conclude Tolkien statement that death.
It's inevitability.
It's unfairness, the natural desire to evade it
is, I would say, probably the source driving force, character, motivation,
major theme, whatever you want to of the Lord of the rings in his mythology.
But there is so much more to the book.
And I return back to when I was 15 and I read it and I just didn't get it.
And I don't like that.
So I wanted to try and work out why didn't I get it?
Well, first of all, Tolkien said it's only in reading the work myself
that I became aware of the dominance of the theme of death.
So that's quite nice.
He didn't intend to put it in, but when he reads it afterwards, he goes, oh,
so that's what it was all about.
Second, the 1968 interview, when he says that I have to think what has
what is around at that point, The Hobbit and The Lord of the rings.
It's still nine years before The Silmarillion makes an appearance.
13 years before his letters make an appearance.
So he's talking with all three ages of middle earth in his head.
Understandably, he talks about it.
But when we hear that quote, I heard that quote at some point
in the 70s or whatever it is, it perhaps didn't make sense.
And we know he desperately tried to get The Silmarillion published
with the Lord of the rings, and running through his letters, he says,
I just don't think you'll get the Lord of the rings.
If you haven't read The Silmarillion, he's wrong, because we all did.
But that was always about it, because he foreshadows
what the Lord of the rings is about.
Lord of the rings is is the culmination of that.
And my final point, because I
realize I am short of time.
Just a personal comment.
If the famous quote literature is for all time, what does that mean?
It means it never dates.
So. And I think that's probably true with Lord of the rings.
It will be read for decades, probably centuries to come.
But there's another aspect to that famous adage about literature is all time.
And I say that's about our time on earth.
And by that I mean, if you reread the text at different points in your life,
you get different things from it.
So, as I say, when I was a teenager and I first read it, I got the adventure story.
That's what I wanted.
But I'm at a time in my life, and some of you may well be where
I've lost close relatives.
I've lost friends.
I'm getting older.
Mortality is knocking at the back of my head.
So when I read the Lord of the rings, I start to get some of those ideas
now from it.
And maybe that's the power of this book, that it not only will last a long,
long time, but it's a book you can pick up at various points in your life
and maybe take a lot more from it.
So I ask myself, what if I could escape death?
What if I found a way to offer that to my friends and family?
Would I take that opportunity?
Would I take it now?
Would you?
Well, maybe me to read the Lord of the rings again.
Thank you.