1 00:00:04,140 --> 00:00:10,020 [Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] You've all met Stewart already. Um, but just as a reminder, Stuart's a leading scholar. 2 00:00:10,020 --> 00:00:14,309 Fantastic literature and and, um, an academic here at Oxford. 3 00:00:14,310 --> 00:00:18,180 And and [INAUDIBLE] be speaking to us next on, um. 4 00:00:19,020 --> 00:00:23,610 I'm sorry. I've already blanked on J.R.R. Tolkien. Uh, you've heard of him? 5 00:00:23,940 --> 00:00:32,159 Yes. Yeah. That's right. Uh, so thank you very much, everyone, and thank you all for coming in. 6 00:00:32,160 --> 00:00:37,050 Everyone is online again. Just to repeat, uh, thanks to you, this is proving a fantastic event. 7 00:00:37,650 --> 00:00:43,770 And, uh, so the title of my talk of the task I've been set is to talk about J.R.R. Tolkien. 8 00:00:44,580 --> 00:00:50,219 And you remember yesterday or some of you who were here, I proposed a framework of how to, 9 00:00:50,220 --> 00:00:55,080 uh, look at or discuss the fantasy writer or fantasy text and so on. 10 00:00:55,350 --> 00:01:02,070 So I'm gonna I'm going to, um, mark my own homework and try and work through the Discworld framework with J.R.R. Tolkien. 11 00:01:02,850 --> 00:01:08,370 And I guess it is appropriate that we're kind of halfway through this summer school. 12 00:01:08,880 --> 00:01:17,220 And here's Tolkien, because the conversations often go, everything that happened before Tolkien and everything that happens after Tolkien. 13 00:01:17,220 --> 00:01:23,670 So he's that pivotal point, um, and keeping with Terry Pratchett, just because so many people came up to me and said, 14 00:01:23,670 --> 00:01:28,230 I'm so glad to hear Terry Pratchett mentioned, um, I'll give you a quote from Terry Pratchett. 15 00:01:28,770 --> 00:01:37,080 J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain appearing, and all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mount Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. 16 00:01:37,590 --> 00:01:43,229 Sometimes it's pagan up close, sometimes it's a shape on the horizon, sometimes it's not there at all. 17 00:01:43,230 --> 00:01:47,700 Which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, 18 00:01:47,970 --> 00:01:52,470 which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mount Fuji. 19 00:01:53,620 --> 00:01:58,050 And whatever you think of token, good or bad, we cannot escape him. 20 00:01:58,060 --> 00:02:02,350 So therefore it is appropriate that we try to go through him as a writer. 21 00:02:03,130 --> 00:02:08,590 Um, I'm just going to start with the things that you probably need to know so that we're all on the right, the same level. 22 00:02:08,590 --> 00:02:14,470 So the key text that you need to sort of familiarise yourself with, and you probably already have are The Hobbit. 23 00:02:14,860 --> 00:02:18,550 1937 I'll come back to why 1951 is in brackets. 24 00:02:18,940 --> 00:02:27,100 The Lord of the rings 1954 to 55. The Silmarillion, published posthumously in 1977, edited by his son. 25 00:02:27,610 --> 00:02:35,319 The other two key texts I would say you should get into your library of Tolkien studies, um, in terms of his writing or his letters, 26 00:02:35,320 --> 00:02:44,860 which was revised and came out in 2023, and his poetry, which came out for the first time last year in 2024, in terms of the full collected edition. 27 00:02:47,100 --> 00:02:54,950 But we should also rejoice, perhaps, in the fact that there are many other texts appearing under his name. 28 00:02:55,590 --> 00:03:02,370 The History of Middle Earth Series a 12 volumes, um, plus The Nature of Middle Earth, which came out in 1996. 29 00:03:02,640 --> 00:03:04,920 Um, I should have put Unfinished Tales in here. Sorry. 30 00:03:05,350 --> 00:03:14,340 Uh, an extraordinary study by his son, Christopher, into the composition of the various texts that we've just referred to outside of The Hobbit. 31 00:03:15,000 --> 00:03:22,180 Uh, there were the great tales which have appeared, the four great tales which are referenced and came out in their own separate edition. 32 00:03:22,200 --> 00:03:25,979 There were the minor tales of over Random Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wootton Major, 33 00:03:25,980 --> 00:03:30,590 etc., etc. and then the the other text which I will come on to in a second. 34 00:03:30,600 --> 00:03:37,370 His um, his academic writing. Um, and there are a lot of secondary reading texts. 35 00:03:37,380 --> 00:03:41,790 There is we are not short of academic studies of Tolkien. 36 00:03:42,120 --> 00:03:44,400 Um, and there are a few there, and there were many more. 37 00:03:44,550 --> 00:03:49,860 I would just I would just really like to highlight the work done by Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull, 38 00:03:49,860 --> 00:03:53,520 which is the top one there, the J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide. 39 00:03:54,270 --> 00:04:04,050 I'm not familiar with a text like this for other writers, in that it not only gives you a detailed analysis of all the themes in Tolkien, 40 00:04:04,380 --> 00:04:08,220 but in the chronology, more or less a month by month account of what he was doing. 41 00:04:08,610 --> 00:04:13,470 Um, to absolute precise details. So extraordinary material out there if you wish to carry out. 42 00:04:15,620 --> 00:04:20,140 Okay, so the standard. He was born in. 43 00:04:20,500 --> 00:04:26,469 Uh. He's the life of J.R.R. Tolkien, um, born in 1892 and dies in 1973. 44 00:04:26,470 --> 00:04:29,520 So he lived to a ripe old age. And he's born in South Africa. 45 00:04:29,530 --> 00:04:33,460 But he's he's English through and through. He moves back when he's very young. 46 00:04:33,700 --> 00:04:39,519 King Edward School, Birmingham, and then without with a couple of minor sort of diversions. 47 00:04:39,520 --> 00:04:43,090 He's an Oxford person through and through studies at Exeter. 48 00:04:43,210 --> 00:04:51,100 We've already heard classics, then English, and then, um, comes back here to become professor of Pembroke and then Merton. 49 00:04:51,370 --> 00:04:54,700 Um, and we have in the dates there The Hobbit, the Lord of the rings. 50 00:04:55,300 --> 00:05:05,350 So there are two things I just want to point out about this. First of all, uh, as you'll see in 1915, um, not a good time to be a young person. 51 00:05:05,470 --> 00:05:12,820 Uh, he enlist in the Lancashire Fusiliers, 1916. He fights on the battle of the Somme, and many people have talked about the influences of that. 52 00:05:13,150 --> 00:05:17,380 But the second thing, and most notably, is his job is as an academic. 53 00:05:17,830 --> 00:05:20,860 He was not paid to be a writer of fantasy fiction. 54 00:05:21,070 --> 00:05:25,690 He was paid to lecture, teach and supervise researches here. 55 00:05:25,960 --> 00:05:33,090 And that point will come up again. Okay, so was Tolkien writing fantasy? 56 00:05:33,120 --> 00:05:40,379 I gave a talk on Friday to the prospective students at Oxford and I said, Was Tolkien writing fantasy? 57 00:05:40,380 --> 00:05:44,580 And I said, yes, he was. Now that's about it. Um, and none of them got the joke. 58 00:05:44,580 --> 00:05:48,630 So they all sat there looking bewildered. But I said, okay, well, let's explore it a bit more. 59 00:05:49,110 --> 00:05:55,080 But clearly he was. So let's if we take what I was saying yesterday about the definition, the impossibility test, 60 00:05:55,410 --> 00:05:59,640 The Hobbit, the Lord of the rings, The Silmarillion, all pass the impossibility test. 61 00:06:00,000 --> 00:06:06,000 Uh, it just doesn't happen and couldn't happen. And we could also say the same for some of his minor tales. 62 00:06:06,330 --> 00:06:15,000 Uh, some of them do sort of start, uh, blurring the boundaries between his work, uh, isolated work, but also his mythology. 63 00:06:15,300 --> 00:06:19,410 But there there are also definite, um, texts of a fantasy nature. 64 00:06:20,730 --> 00:06:28,910 Um, but I wanted to just pick up a couple of a couple of extracts here, uh, which we we've suddenly got, uh, sight of last year. 65 00:06:28,920 --> 00:06:36,270 So on the left is the start of a poem called Toll Eraser, which, uh, really is embedded in this mythology. 66 00:06:36,270 --> 00:06:41,729 Told, I would say is a mystical island where the elves live in, in his, in his mythology. 67 00:06:41,730 --> 00:06:42,809 And you can see he's right in that. 68 00:06:42,810 --> 00:06:53,940 In early 1916, he reworks that poem only a few months later, and this time he dedicates it for England, The Lonely Isle in June 1916. 69 00:06:54,360 --> 00:07:04,350 So it's a fantasy poem or a poem about his mythology, certainly, but then he repurposes it as he sent out to the Western Front and it becomes, 70 00:07:04,830 --> 00:07:10,920 uh, a memory, a eulogy to what he's leaving behind, notably England and, uh, Edith, his wife. 71 00:07:13,150 --> 00:07:16,540 So he was writing fantasy. Well. Was he? 72 00:07:17,650 --> 00:07:21,100 Well, he certainly wasn't paid to write fantasy, so I've already make the point. 73 00:07:21,100 --> 00:07:26,290 And this is something which you will occasionally hear in the English faculty or certainly did about Tolkien. 74 00:07:26,620 --> 00:07:29,740 Uh, this is a list of his academic publications. 75 00:07:29,750 --> 00:07:34,120 Um, seem to be missing one there, the Uncle Lewis, which is kind of major. 76 00:07:34,480 --> 00:07:41,800 Um. I think the key thing you'd say from these two things, one is his scholarship was very, very good. 77 00:07:41,830 --> 00:07:48,520 We still cite a lot and read a lot of his works. The second thing you'd say is there's not a lot there. 78 00:07:49,470 --> 00:07:56,760 He did not publish extensively, and one of the criticisms of Tolkien is that he did not publish as many things as he probably should have. 79 00:08:00,730 --> 00:08:08,740 However, he appears time and time again, and an anecdote which I've told many times, but I hope this audience will forgive me is one. 80 00:08:08,740 --> 00:08:14,970 One day I was going up, uh, I was being interviewed at Radio Oxford, and I was in the taxi driver, uh, taxi. 81 00:08:14,980 --> 00:08:19,540 I was in the taxi and taxi driver said to me, what you're going to be interviewed about? I said, oh, a new book by Tolkien. 82 00:08:19,810 --> 00:08:22,990 And he said, he's dead, isn't he? Um, and he's quite right. 83 00:08:22,990 --> 00:08:26,440 There's a lot of posthumous material coming out by J.R.R. Tolkien. 84 00:08:26,530 --> 00:08:32,560 So these are the types of things you may have seen the legend of Sigurd and Goodwin, Fall of Arthur, Beowulf and so on. 85 00:08:32,950 --> 00:08:36,249 And I got to thinking about these things, and I tried to sort of group them. 86 00:08:36,250 --> 00:08:42,790 So in the centre, if you want to, you can go wait and read The Monsters and the critics, which are a selection of his lectures and essays. 87 00:08:43,030 --> 00:08:43,990 They're not all of them. 88 00:08:44,200 --> 00:08:51,700 There were a lot of his lectures still sitting in Bodleian, which have been, um, and I'm not worked on as much as perhaps they should have. 89 00:08:52,170 --> 00:08:56,229 Uh, and on the left you could say, well, they're kind of scholarly text translations, 90 00:08:56,230 --> 00:09:03,250 which I would add the anchor note with, say, from 62 in, but on the right there's an element of him having a go. 91 00:09:03,760 --> 00:09:07,479 And I'll come back to this about gap filling, etcetera. You could argue this. 92 00:09:07,480 --> 00:09:13,740 You could argue which way they fall. But fall of Arthur Coloro the lay of are true and true. 93 00:09:13,810 --> 00:09:22,209 These are all areas where he's trying to have a go. And by gut filling, I mean he's, he's he's sort of imagining what else might have happened. 94 00:09:22,210 --> 00:09:30,220 So the text there about Finn and, uh, Genghis, um, an episode in Beowulf and then in the winsberg fragments, 95 00:09:30,220 --> 00:09:33,910 and he kind of steps away and he goes, what actually did happen here? 96 00:09:33,910 --> 00:09:38,770 And he has a go. He has a go at writing it. So we'll come back to that again and again. 97 00:09:38,770 --> 00:09:46,170 Uh, throughout the talk. Um. You may recall I came up the subgenres and high epic fantasy. 98 00:09:46,180 --> 00:09:52,470 Uh, yes. Without a doubt. Tolkien was writing what we loosely call high end epic fantasy. 99 00:09:52,710 --> 00:09:56,550 It is a tale, particularly the Lord of the Rings of Good v evil. 100 00:09:56,850 --> 00:10:02,790 It is on a scale that is extraordinary. It's the end of the Third Age, the culmination first and second age. 101 00:10:02,790 --> 00:10:13,130 You could probably say it starts in north west middle earth and goes down to kind of southeast, middle earth, um, to a degree there. 102 00:10:13,280 --> 00:10:17,190 There's a world threatening crisis. It's an existential threat to middle earth. 103 00:10:17,490 --> 00:10:21,660 Just ask yourself, what would have happened to everyone if Sauron had actually won. 104 00:10:22,200 --> 00:10:29,040 Uh, and it's also something which, uh, John Clue talks about in his encyclopaedia, uh, of fantasy. 105 00:10:29,400 --> 00:10:37,950 Uh, it is about thinning. There is this element of transience, of past glories fading, uh, and this, this comes up again and again. 106 00:10:37,950 --> 00:10:43,050 But the quote always reminds me is leaf is Larner from Old English life is on loan. 107 00:10:43,470 --> 00:10:51,720 Um, but that passed away. So maybe this from day or that idea that past glory and sometimes past threats can pass away. 108 00:10:53,290 --> 00:11:00,700 So that is my day. If you remember, my I was really about the setting intrusive liminal of secondary world. 109 00:11:01,540 --> 00:11:08,740 And I think fairly easily we could say this is a secondary world or immersion as far Mendelsohn has said. 110 00:11:09,250 --> 00:11:12,370 Um, middle earth simply didn't happen. 111 00:11:12,370 --> 00:11:18,280 It doesn't exist. You can't find any of those places on a map of unknown Earth. 112 00:11:18,410 --> 00:11:22,510 Certainly. So it is that secondary world that we go into and immerse ourselves. 113 00:11:26,790 --> 00:11:31,310 But is it? No. You can take this picture with a pinch of salt. 114 00:11:31,320 --> 00:11:34,980 It's an artist's impression, and it always looks to me like a set of lungs. 115 00:11:35,520 --> 00:11:44,190 Um, but basically what we are seeing here is an attempt to show our two tokens, uh, Earth or planet. 116 00:11:44,190 --> 00:11:51,720 And that's the kind of area there. That's the middle Earth, where most of the action takes place in The Hobbit and The Lord of the rings. 117 00:11:52,850 --> 00:11:55,969 Uh, and then on the left here we have the Undying Lands. 118 00:11:55,970 --> 00:11:58,790 And then in the middle. What, uh, Pepe was referring to yesterday. 119 00:11:58,790 --> 00:12:05,000 This island, Numenor Island, which links to the Atlantis myth because it disappears beneath the waves. 120 00:12:06,210 --> 00:12:11,970 And I think the interesting thing here is that talking repeatedly again and again says, middle earth is our earth. 121 00:12:12,300 --> 00:12:18,060 This is our earth. Um, but you look at that and you probably would be forgiven to say, well, 122 00:12:18,060 --> 00:12:22,800 it doesn't look anything like the map of the globe I've seen recently, and it clearly doesn't. 123 00:12:23,280 --> 00:12:28,620 But throughout his mythology, there were these seismic shifts in the continents which change everything. 124 00:12:29,160 --> 00:12:32,340 But most importantly, and this is a I think we'll come onto this later, 125 00:12:33,240 --> 00:12:40,310 is that these lands to the west at the end of one of his myth cycles disappears, 126 00:12:40,320 --> 00:12:44,930 not just disappears beneath the waves, but signs to go out onto another dimension. 127 00:12:44,940 --> 00:12:49,140 And what was originally a flat earth becomes a rounded earth. 128 00:12:49,500 --> 00:12:55,860 And the only way that you can find your way to these lands, as the elves do continuously in Lord of the rings, 129 00:12:55,860 --> 00:13:01,770 is by taking the straight or the lost road, which is only allowed to certain individuals, 130 00:13:01,920 --> 00:13:06,990 and this allows them to start playing in with all kinds of things about these mythical lands to the west, 131 00:13:07,440 --> 00:13:12,390 not the continent of America, but this out in this other sort of fairy dimension. 132 00:13:14,060 --> 00:13:18,010 And the time time structures he gives up there are really you hate. 133 00:13:18,020 --> 00:13:25,880 You will hear about first, second, third age and so on. He is talking about a grand scale here, but again he talks about when we enter the fourth age. 134 00:13:26,000 --> 00:13:34,220 It takes us to the present day, to the day, the age of men as in humans here, and that there will be this final battle at the end. 135 00:13:35,270 --> 00:13:40,219 So he plays fast and loose with this. He's not consistent, which you have to remember with Tolkien. 136 00:13:40,220 --> 00:13:43,610 He never is consistent. He constantly contradicts himself. 137 00:13:43,790 --> 00:13:49,189 But this idea that perhaps this was a pre-history of the world is is something which we should bear in mind. 138 00:13:49,190 --> 00:13:52,669 And the letter I reference there was his explanation. 139 00:13:52,670 --> 00:13:59,450 And again, we're gloriously fortunate to have it of his entire mythology, which he wrote to the publisher. 140 00:13:59,710 --> 00:14:09,080 Mothman, 1951. And a text which I think has been mentioned, it was mentioned yesterday is, uh, 141 00:14:09,080 --> 00:14:12,410 the Notion Club papers, which was originally the Los Road, which he writes. 142 00:14:12,860 --> 00:14:16,910 Uh, 1945 Los Road is a bit earlier. And it's that response to Lewis. 143 00:14:17,150 --> 00:14:22,100 I'll write something about space travel. You write something about time travel, uh, and you can get it. 144 00:14:22,100 --> 00:14:31,280 In the history of Middle-Earth, Sauron defeated. And basically the plot is there is this club, the Notion Club, notion inklings. 145 00:14:31,490 --> 00:14:39,170 Get it? Um, and someone ferreting around in the Bodleian in 2012 finds this manuscript of their notes, 146 00:14:39,170 --> 00:14:42,080 which is notes that they were having meetings in the 80s. 147 00:14:42,170 --> 00:14:49,190 Remember, he's writing this in 1945 of this club that meets and starts to sort of do the things that the inklings did, 148 00:14:49,490 --> 00:14:56,180 but particularly what we start to get is a couple of the protagonist start to dream and have visions and then take go on journeys where they 149 00:14:56,180 --> 00:15:03,920 start to realise that there's a continuity from their present time and their names going back from Anglo-Saxon times all the way to Numenor. 150 00:15:04,040 --> 00:15:10,340 And that's his time travel. So again, an attempt to knit his mythology together with everything that, uh. 151 00:15:11,890 --> 00:15:15,580 He had studied. Okay. Setting. 152 00:15:16,450 --> 00:15:22,240 This is my Discworld again. Yes, of course, it's pseudo medieval Germanic influences which we've discussed again and again. 153 00:15:22,840 --> 00:15:27,729 The trolls, the dwarves, the elves, the dragons. And I find it interesting what he said there. 154 00:15:27,730 --> 00:15:29,350 It's desirable if you can. 155 00:15:29,350 --> 00:15:35,350 Necessary, if you can, to use words that are already in existence, which have a certain sense and are laden with a certain sense. 156 00:15:35,680 --> 00:15:39,040 And therefore I use dwarves and Middle-Earth and elves and so on. 157 00:15:39,460 --> 00:15:43,330 You can't have everything absolutely strange at the outright. 158 00:15:43,750 --> 00:15:46,719 And I do think he kind of has something to say there. 159 00:15:46,720 --> 00:15:52,960 And I actually personally, when I read or I'm about to launch into a new series of fantasy writings, 160 00:15:53,410 --> 00:15:59,650 it's a bit of a struggle to get through that first chapter where you get all of those strange names and strange places, 161 00:15:59,950 --> 00:16:02,919 because he seizes on this and he's doing it for various reasons. 162 00:16:02,920 --> 00:16:08,950 But he got the idea that, well, look, these are already embedded in people's imagination, so I can reuse them. 163 00:16:10,150 --> 00:16:14,950 Um, and I will come back to this piece of text again and again. 164 00:16:15,460 --> 00:16:22,480 I've written on this chapter here. Um, so for those of you who've read my article, apologies, but, uh, 165 00:16:22,480 --> 00:16:28,090 this is from the Lord of the Rings The Siege of Gondor returning the King, book five, uh, chapter four. 166 00:16:28,420 --> 00:16:35,709 And you can see here this is at the end of the siege of many stories, the language, the range that's being used here, 167 00:16:35,710 --> 00:16:44,200 a huge ram, Knights shot and dark siege towers, gate, etc. all the types of things we would associate with a medieval setting. 168 00:16:47,100 --> 00:16:52,170 I find myself saying this again and again and I. But is it, you know, is it really? 169 00:16:52,200 --> 00:16:56,610 Well, someone's already made mention of this. I think in terms of the shire. 170 00:16:57,120 --> 00:16:58,020 The shire is, 171 00:16:58,090 --> 00:17:07,860 is we can pretty much date it to Victoria's Jubilee is that capturing of that Victorian ideal that Tolkien himself experienced as a child. 172 00:17:08,280 --> 00:17:15,240 And as many people pointed out, there are some archaic details in there which just do not make sense. 173 00:17:15,870 --> 00:17:19,100 They have clocks, so you know, well, good. 174 00:17:19,260 --> 00:17:26,280 Well done. The hobbits, you know, and umbrellas. They've already managed that with the rest of the, the, uh, Middle-Earth is struggling. 175 00:17:26,580 --> 00:17:31,380 Um, they have steam kettles and so on, and they have post offices, 176 00:17:31,500 --> 00:17:36,780 so they're kind of not in that pseudo medieval world is basically what you're trying to say. 177 00:17:37,680 --> 00:17:39,120 And then we move into something. 178 00:17:39,120 --> 00:17:47,040 The second red dot, for example, where we are moving back to a town with inns and cetera, you talking probably 14th century. 179 00:17:47,910 --> 00:17:53,310 Take Rowan, although we argue constantly it is Anglo-Saxon England. 180 00:17:53,640 --> 00:17:58,350 Um, so we're probably talking about, uh, 10th, 11th century at least. 181 00:17:58,560 --> 00:18:02,879 Then you get into Gondor. Well, he talks about Byzantine in Constantinople. 182 00:18:02,880 --> 00:18:10,560 ET cetera. But sometime after the. So maybe late Middle Ages or sometime around that, and then we have The Bookman and so on. 183 00:18:11,550 --> 00:18:15,300 It just shouldn't work when you think about it, because it isn't consistent. 184 00:18:15,390 --> 00:18:23,220 So it is right to say you come away from it thinking this is a medieval setting, but actually it's very easy to find areas where it isn't. 185 00:18:24,960 --> 00:18:29,640 However, it was described as the last great work of the Middle Ages, the Lord of the rings. 186 00:18:30,030 --> 00:18:37,500 Um, but I would just like to say there's a lot of pushback against this in that Tolkien, I believe, is a very modern writer. 187 00:18:38,010 --> 00:18:45,060 Um, there's this traditional view. You just didn't care if you rejected modern life, which is just simply not true. 188 00:18:45,360 --> 00:18:48,360 And he he reads extensively of modern writers, etc., 189 00:18:48,360 --> 00:18:54,599 and we've already touched on the fact that he is engaged very heavily early on in environmental issues, 190 00:18:54,600 --> 00:18:59,580 which we then pick up later in later industrialisation and commercialisation. 191 00:18:59,880 --> 00:19:04,020 And I just like to read, if I can, an extract from a poem. 192 00:19:06,350 --> 00:19:12,860 And this is Progress of Bimbo or Progress in Bimbo Town, which he writes it in 1928. 193 00:19:13,400 --> 00:19:18,260 And it's really a sort of his view of what's happening to the British seaside. 194 00:19:18,680 --> 00:19:22,610 And having spent a summer down in North Devon, I have a lot of sympathy for it. 195 00:19:23,210 --> 00:19:25,360 So he describes this place, Bimbo Town. 196 00:19:25,370 --> 00:19:32,780 It's sort of a seaside resort, or somewhere near the sea where people come and people come on holiday and on day trips. 197 00:19:33,800 --> 00:19:40,360 Sometimes through it, and this is rare. One can hear the shouts of boys, sometimes late. 198 00:19:40,370 --> 00:19:48,080 When motorbikes are not passing with a screech, one hears faintly if one likes the see still at it on the beach. 199 00:19:49,310 --> 00:19:49,910 At what? 200 00:19:51,390 --> 00:20:01,920 At churning orange rind, piling up banana skins, gnawing paper, trying to grind a broth of bottles, packets, tins before a new day comes with more. 201 00:20:02,220 --> 00:20:06,780 Before next morning. Shower. Banging, stopping at the old indoor with reek and rumble. 202 00:20:06,780 --> 00:20:10,499 Hoots and clangs. Bring more folk to God knows where to. 203 00:20:10,500 --> 00:20:17,850 They don't mind to bimbo town, where the steep street that once was fair with many houses staggers down. 204 00:20:18,360 --> 00:20:25,319 It's a real view of sort of like that on on a restricted sort of spread of people going out and 205 00:20:25,320 --> 00:20:30,330 just throwing their rubbish out at the sea and is being washed up on the destruction of things. 206 00:20:30,900 --> 00:20:36,180 And to me that Romans, if you if that was in a collection of works by John Betjeman, I wouldn't be surprised. 207 00:20:36,510 --> 00:20:41,100 So to say that he isn't concerned with modern modern ideas, I think is just wrong. 208 00:20:42,120 --> 00:20:45,479 And I think also we've mentioned, um, disenchantment. 209 00:20:45,480 --> 00:20:51,200 I think disillusionment is actually the term I use because it was, uh, a key, 210 00:20:51,370 --> 00:20:56,370 key concept that emerges after the First World War when people come back and this wasn't a land fit for heroes, 211 00:20:56,370 --> 00:20:59,880 and they found out all of the things that went wrong in the First World War. 212 00:21:00,390 --> 00:21:06,630 Um, and I think he tackles that head only tackles exactly what's happening in the period between the wars, 213 00:21:06,750 --> 00:21:14,639 but also after the Second World War, when we were told in the 50s, no, all you should be reading the kitchen sink dramas and the movement. 214 00:21:14,640 --> 00:21:24,870 He was saying no. I think people still harking back to some ideas that were not powerless, uh, against some of the horrors that beset us. 215 00:21:25,050 --> 00:21:31,020 And we do have a desire to go back to some of our roots. So I do think he's a modern writer in that sense. 216 00:21:32,160 --> 00:21:35,700 Okay. Characterisation. This is disk. 217 00:21:35,730 --> 00:21:44,309 We've got to disk. Um, and I mentioned the, the dwarves in The Hobbit as in they're not very good in terms of character profiles, 218 00:21:44,310 --> 00:21:48,930 but let's pass over because it's The Hobbit. And criticising The Hobbit is like kicking a puppy. 219 00:21:49,230 --> 00:21:59,010 So let's not do that. Um, but, uh, clear criticism of Tolkien is that, you know, where were the female characters in in The Hobbit? 220 00:21:59,010 --> 00:22:02,940 Will there aren't any or in the Lord of the rings? There are, of course, in the Lord of the rings. 221 00:22:03,300 --> 00:22:08,760 Um, and we can argue at length about that, about how well portrayed they are. 222 00:22:09,180 --> 00:22:12,839 Uh, but you can it's a sign of desperation when people say, well, there are look, 223 00:22:12,840 --> 00:22:20,909 there's she lob um, and you know, but you know, and maybe his understanding of, 224 00:22:20,910 --> 00:22:31,620 uh, Eowyn sudden conversion to liking Faramir just because she's looking over a wall is perhaps not an exact, uh, uh, study in attitudes. 225 00:22:31,620 --> 00:22:34,920 Let's put it that way. However, these criticism is excessive. 226 00:22:35,220 --> 00:22:43,090 Um, and if you look in The Silmarillion, particularly if you look in the original drafts of The Silmarillion, um, and you use, uh, 227 00:22:43,090 --> 00:22:50,790 are the reconstructed, a great book which shows you he builds some very strong female characters, and really, they're very prominent in that book. 228 00:22:50,790 --> 00:22:55,680 So I don't think it's it's fair, but it's you can understand why people did it just because of the published books. 229 00:22:56,070 --> 00:23:00,180 Um, he, he got criticised a lot and he still gets criticised. 230 00:23:00,180 --> 00:23:03,240 It's just good and evil. Everyone's good and everyone's bad. 231 00:23:03,660 --> 00:23:07,440 Um, and that's it. And the good people win and the bad people lose. 232 00:23:07,740 --> 00:23:10,770 It's. It's nowhere near as simple as that. 233 00:23:11,160 --> 00:23:15,809 Uh, and I think his he observed and I completely agree, people who say that clearly, um, 234 00:23:15,810 --> 00:23:21,450 read the book, um, particularly the Lord of the rings, if we take, for example, the orcs. 235 00:23:21,870 --> 00:23:25,270 Um. In Peter Jackson's films. 236 00:23:25,510 --> 00:23:30,370 They are what they are. They are just horrendous sort of cannon fodder. 237 00:23:30,760 --> 00:23:35,080 But as he said, we do get insights into the way the orcs think occasionally. 238 00:23:35,500 --> 00:23:44,860 Um, and if you think of those sort of chapters where Sam and Frodo, uh, Frodo is captured after this thing and Sam overhears the orcs talking, 239 00:23:44,860 --> 00:23:50,110 or when they are dressed as orcs and then being marched around Mordor, you hear the orcs? 240 00:23:50,530 --> 00:23:55,120 Um, and they're just like soldiers. Basically. They're grumbling all the time. 241 00:23:55,120 --> 00:23:58,360 They're grumbling about the conditions, their grumbling about their officers. 242 00:23:58,900 --> 00:24:06,520 They don't want to be there half the time. So you do kind of get that yet that there's some less than pleasant characteristics about orcs, 243 00:24:06,520 --> 00:24:10,990 like cannibalism and so on, and that they tend to sort of just march through and slaughter. 244 00:24:11,000 --> 00:24:15,040 But I do believe it. If you if you study them, it is good. 245 00:24:15,040 --> 00:24:19,390 And actually ran Rings of Power, which we let's put that to there. 246 00:24:20,050 --> 00:24:24,550 But I do think they're interesting. They're delving into the character of orcs, which is quite good. 247 00:24:24,990 --> 00:24:28,420 Uh, I mentioned doubling yesterday and it's, you know, that they're Faramir. 248 00:24:28,750 --> 00:24:36,489 How Faramir reacts compared to how Boromir reacts, how Aragorn is in terms of what he is trying to achieve as the Lost King, 249 00:24:36,490 --> 00:24:41,530 reclaiming Sauron compared with the Nazgul, and how they behaved as kings or leaders. 250 00:24:41,860 --> 00:24:45,010 Salmon, Frodo and without a shadow of doubt. 251 00:24:45,670 --> 00:24:50,320 Anyone who criticises Tolkien's characterisation, you just go back and go, well, what about Gollum? 252 00:24:50,830 --> 00:24:54,520 Um, where we get that psychological struggle in an individual? 253 00:24:54,880 --> 00:25:03,040 And actually, if you put Gollum alongside Sam and Frodo, you get that classic tripartite characterisation where all three make the whole. 254 00:25:03,380 --> 00:25:10,030 Uh, and for those of you, this is an example I often use, and you may be a bit churlish, but if you think of McCoy, 255 00:25:10,030 --> 00:25:16,240 Spock, and Kirk, the three just compliment each other in Star Trek, and that's how it kind of works. 256 00:25:16,480 --> 00:25:19,810 I'm not saying they're like that, but they're much better developed than those three. 257 00:25:20,140 --> 00:25:23,950 Um, but think of that. So. Okay. Worldbuilding. 258 00:25:25,530 --> 00:25:30,090 Uh, of course, Tolkien takes time to develop his mythology. 259 00:25:30,210 --> 00:25:33,960 Um, I'll come back to the voyage of our randomly evening star in a bit. 260 00:25:34,440 --> 00:25:40,740 Um, but here we have these starting to work in in 1915 1916 on the Book of Lost Tales, 261 00:25:41,160 --> 00:25:48,360 which is where a mariner finds their way to the, um, the elven homelands, the open isle, and they start to hear tales. 262 00:25:48,360 --> 00:25:51,389 So we have that framing structure which we'll come back to again. 263 00:25:51,390 --> 00:25:55,710 And then he's working on it again and again, all the way through the Lord of the rings. 264 00:25:56,100 --> 00:26:00,930 And as I said, it posthumously comes out as the book that we now have called The Silmarillion. 265 00:26:01,230 --> 00:26:11,070 But there's a lot more to it than that. And the key thing you have to take from this is that if the Lord of the rings doesn't reach print until 1954, 266 00:26:11,580 --> 00:26:14,940 he's been working on his mythology for 40 years. 267 00:26:16,260 --> 00:26:20,550 And we have to think about fantasy writers, and we're going to hear from some later. 268 00:26:20,850 --> 00:26:22,410 And there are some in the room I know. 269 00:26:23,010 --> 00:26:31,919 Do you spend 20 years building your mythology without any thought to ever getting it published, and then put a tail on the top? 270 00:26:31,920 --> 00:26:35,370 Because that's exactly what Tolkien did. And Simon was exactly right. 271 00:26:35,490 --> 00:26:39,899 He never intended The Hobbit to get published. In fact, he never intended The Hobbit to be set in Middle-Earth. 272 00:26:39,900 --> 00:26:42,900 It kind of got sucked into it, and before he knew it. 273 00:26:43,350 --> 00:26:47,030 Uh, and that's what's interesting about Tolkien. Why is he doing this? 274 00:26:47,040 --> 00:26:53,940 He's doing it kind of for fun, but he lays the foundations, um, for reasons will come onto. 275 00:26:54,180 --> 00:26:57,960 And then he adds over or overlays the stories. 276 00:26:59,110 --> 00:27:06,350 Um, and the foundation was the invention of languages. The stories were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. 277 00:27:06,370 --> 00:27:11,559 To me, a name comes first and the story follows. He was playing around with inventing languages as a child. 278 00:27:11,560 --> 00:27:16,450 He loved it. He's a philologist. He carries on, he carries on, and he develops them, as you all know. 279 00:27:16,990 --> 00:27:21,819 But he realises a language can't just exist without a living world to put them in. 280 00:27:21,820 --> 00:27:28,149 And that's what drives him to start writing his mythology and world building. 281 00:27:28,150 --> 00:27:33,250 And I'm going to show a couple of examples here. Is is extraordinary, I think in Tolkien. 282 00:27:33,250 --> 00:27:41,830 So on the right you have a standard Proto-Indo-European family tree of languages, and some of us will be familiar with these things. 283 00:27:41,980 --> 00:27:45,340 Uh, token certainly was. It tries to show how the roots of language developed. 284 00:27:45,340 --> 00:27:49,389 And on the left we have him playing around exactly that language. 285 00:27:49,390 --> 00:27:55,030 The tail tree of tongue, sorry, where he shows the relationship between the languages and so on. 286 00:27:55,330 --> 00:28:01,300 He's thinking at that level, which is absolutely extraordinary. 287 00:28:02,110 --> 00:28:05,140 If you don't think it is, let's carry on with that, shall we? Um. 288 00:28:07,010 --> 00:28:15,889 So attention to detail. The ghostly images behind are because it copyrighted, of course, but I'm taking some quotes where he's working out here. 289 00:28:15,890 --> 00:28:19,880 The distance to the Ford device in 15 miles of the gates of Ise and got 13 miles. 290 00:28:20,090 --> 00:28:25,790 How far can a Hobbit or orcs move on foot compared with someone on a horseback? 291 00:28:26,420 --> 00:28:30,590 Uh, right. Okay, so he gets to some struggles. Well, if it's a full moon. 292 00:28:30,980 --> 00:28:34,840 Which way will the shadows lie? That I have to think about. 293 00:28:34,850 --> 00:28:38,600 Do I have to change the text? Is that going up the steps of Curious Uncle? 294 00:28:38,840 --> 00:28:42,350 And he starts doing that? He gets a cop out, basically. So he takes. 295 00:28:42,710 --> 00:28:48,950 What's the what? What's the moon cycle in 1944? I'll plunk that on my book, but it works. 296 00:28:49,280 --> 00:28:56,060 And I love this quote. At this point, I required to know how much later the moon gets up each night when they're in full, and how to stew a rabbit. 297 00:28:58,250 --> 00:29:02,510 And then he starts to work on structures you know. 298 00:29:02,540 --> 00:29:05,959 Well, on January the 16th, the company ring is the battle of the bridge. 299 00:29:05,960 --> 00:29:10,370 Um, in Moria, Gandalf falls. Okay, Gollum stalking and company. 300 00:29:10,460 --> 00:29:13,760 And he has you can you can see them if you if you look at, for example, 301 00:29:13,760 --> 00:29:21,920 the the voyage or on tear the media the collection from the exhibition in Paris, uh, really detailed plans of his plots. 302 00:29:22,220 --> 00:29:23,750 Always reminds me a bit of an. 303 00:29:25,090 --> 00:29:33,130 I gather when they were doing Fawlty Towers, uh, John Cleese and Connie Booth had a massive wall full of plot structures, 304 00:29:33,340 --> 00:29:38,200 and they mapped out exactly to the line of the script how it would all come together. 305 00:29:38,410 --> 00:29:44,020 So it's a bit like that. Again, attention to detail is extraordinary flora, fauna, geography, distances. 306 00:29:45,160 --> 00:29:50,440 And sometimes his mythology overtakes him so that the tale about why The Hobbit in 307 00:29:50,440 --> 00:29:55,870 1951 is important is because if you read the first version of The Hobbit in 1937, 308 00:29:56,740 --> 00:30:02,620 when when the ring appears with Gollum and the riddles, etc. basically the story goes Gollum. 309 00:30:02,860 --> 00:30:04,750 Yeah, look, if you win, I'll give you this ring. 310 00:30:05,170 --> 00:30:11,870 Um, and of course, then he writes the Lord of the rings, and that's the last thing Gollum would do is just hand over the ring. 311 00:30:11,950 --> 00:30:18,309 He finds it. So then he has to rewrite The Hobbit in the light of how the mythology is changing. 312 00:30:18,310 --> 00:30:21,730 And he does that. And a revised version comes out in 1951. 313 00:30:22,330 --> 00:30:25,899 And that then puts him in a quandary, because you could go into a bookshop, 314 00:30:25,900 --> 00:30:31,270 and if you get the 1937 edition down, you're going to get a very different tale from the 1951 edition. 315 00:30:31,270 --> 00:30:34,540 Dan. And Tolkien doesn't just leave it at that, of course, he says. 316 00:30:34,540 --> 00:30:39,280 Well, basically the 1937 version is the one Bilbo tells the dwarves, 317 00:30:40,000 --> 00:30:46,150 but the 1951 version is the one we all know to be the truth that he he reveals later and fragrance and pick up. 318 00:30:48,290 --> 00:30:52,099 Attention to detail. It is extraordinary. Okay. So objective. 319 00:30:52,100 --> 00:31:00,560 Why? Why is he doing this? We've talked again and again about on fairy stories and a, you know, a bit like that letter from 1951. 320 00:31:01,280 --> 00:31:07,880 We are so fortunate that just at the point he's really engaging with the Lord of the rings and his mind is shifting. 321 00:31:08,060 --> 00:31:15,710 He delivers this lecture which then is published, which really is his treatises, his theories about fantasy literature. 322 00:31:16,010 --> 00:31:19,549 I would say, don't just read that. Go off and read myth appear. 323 00:31:19,550 --> 00:31:25,910 His poem, which is a result of a walk with Lewis and Dyson in Morton College. 324 00:31:26,270 --> 00:31:30,110 Um, and also the essay that came out in the 2005 edition of Smith. 325 00:31:30,110 --> 00:31:32,419 And what made you think you've kind of read them in the round, but, um, 326 00:31:32,420 --> 00:31:39,410 Fairy Stories is so important is delivered in 1939 as lecture and then published in 47. 327 00:31:40,190 --> 00:31:46,379 And I think these points have already made he's he's really setting out that fantasy or fairy story are not just for children. 328 00:31:46,380 --> 00:31:49,310 Let's, let's rescue them from the nursery. 329 00:31:50,480 --> 00:32:01,040 Because they really take on or sorry portrayal convey the human ki human faculty and that is about sub creation making secondary worlds. 330 00:32:01,040 --> 00:32:09,379 This is something which we aspire to do, and if you do this successfully, you will engender secondary belief in the reader. 331 00:32:09,380 --> 00:32:15,050 They will immerse themselves fully in the text, they will believe what they are reading and they'll come out of it. 332 00:32:15,050 --> 00:32:22,580 And he talks a lot. He has some really interesting points here, which again, have come up, I think, yesterday about recovery. 333 00:32:22,820 --> 00:32:28,100 Because you're in this fantasy world, you then get a clear view of things we take for granted. 334 00:32:28,100 --> 00:32:33,540 You can see reality freshly. But it also allows you to escape. 335 00:32:33,540 --> 00:32:37,080 And escapism is a term that is thrown at fantasy. 336 00:32:37,440 --> 00:32:39,300 Incorrectly, I think. I don't think it is. 337 00:32:39,510 --> 00:32:46,890 But what he's saying here, it's escape because we can escape the confines of reality, of mimetic literature if you want. 338 00:32:47,310 --> 00:32:52,500 Um, like a prisoner escaping jail. And then there is consolation, which we'll come onto in a second. 339 00:32:54,600 --> 00:33:04,030 Okay. I'm just going to put this here because it's a theory, which, uh, well, I first came across it by the great scholar of Tolkien studies, 340 00:33:04,030 --> 00:33:08,680 Tom Shippey, and that is the asterisk reality, which is another thing that Tolkien's done. 341 00:33:08,720 --> 00:33:11,010 I've hinted at it already on the right. 342 00:33:11,020 --> 00:33:19,990 If you don't know what you're looking, here is, uh, again, a philologists playground where we're looking at the words 11 and elf by 2011. 343 00:33:20,050 --> 00:33:24,270 Course. Um, and they go back and they go back, and then they get back to a point and they go, yeah, 344 00:33:24,550 --> 00:33:30,670 we don't quite know what the word would have been in proto Germanic, but we'll come up with an idea and that's probably what it looks like. 345 00:33:30,670 --> 00:33:35,290 And you'll see there's an asterisk there. So it's filling in the gap where we don't have it. 346 00:33:35,740 --> 00:33:41,880 And this is what starts Tolkien off. Um. I said I'd mentioned this poem from 1914. 347 00:33:42,060 --> 00:33:48,270 The top you'll see the manuscript, the Old English of the Old English poem uh, Christ won by Kinney Wolfe. 348 00:33:48,270 --> 00:33:52,380 The imaginatively titled Christ won Christ who's better? 349 00:33:53,400 --> 00:34:01,210 And the risen Christ to Christ, three fates. Um, but, uh, on there, you know, as we've we've read this and everyone's done it. 350 00:34:01,230 --> 00:34:04,370 Hayley Randall, brightest of angels, sent two men over middle earth. 351 00:34:04,380 --> 00:34:07,530 A true radiance of the sun. And something sparks in his mind. 352 00:34:07,530 --> 00:34:10,770 And he reads that, and he goes, who is this, a friend, or what is it? 353 00:34:10,800 --> 00:34:15,150 We don't quite know. We think it's possibly Venus or something like that. 354 00:34:15,510 --> 00:34:19,799 So being Tolkien, even in 1914, he talks often. 355 00:34:19,800 --> 00:34:24,420 He writes the Voyage of Grendel, the Evening Star. And when he was asked by one of his friends, what's it about? 356 00:34:24,420 --> 00:34:27,480 He says, I don't know. I'll try to find out. 357 00:34:27,900 --> 00:34:31,860 And that's actually, if you look at his composition of the Lord of the rings, often things for a reason. 358 00:34:31,860 --> 00:34:34,830 He goes, where did that come from? And then he tries to work it out. 359 00:34:35,100 --> 00:34:40,680 So it's a kind of example of Asterix where you you've got this, we've got what survives. 360 00:34:40,890 --> 00:34:44,770 But where did it come from? In his case, there are. 361 00:34:44,770 --> 00:34:49,499 Yeah. Randall becomes the mariner in his tales. And you'll see this again and again in his Beowulf edition. 362 00:34:49,500 --> 00:34:56,730 We get the silly spell. Beowulf is probably a a bringing together of multiple tales, probably by a single author. 363 00:34:57,000 --> 00:35:00,270 But things were happening centuries before that they picked up. 364 00:35:00,750 --> 00:35:02,280 So he doesn't just take that for granted. 365 00:35:02,280 --> 00:35:08,969 He goes out and tries to write one of the tales that maybe the the poet behind Beowulf picked up at The Homecoming, 366 00:35:08,970 --> 00:35:13,110 a bitterness built and some battles mould in a famous poem in Old English. 367 00:35:13,110 --> 00:35:17,180 But battle in 991. Well, what happened after the battle? 368 00:35:17,190 --> 00:35:21,630 I know I'll go and write a verse drama about it and just try and work out what it happens there. 369 00:35:22,230 --> 00:35:26,160 But in terms of his mythology, we have all of the things the dwarves, elves, trolls. 370 00:35:26,880 --> 00:35:33,480 So what he's doing there is, look, if you read Old English, you read Middle English, as we've heard again and again, you come across these creatures. 371 00:35:34,110 --> 00:35:37,350 But why? Where did they come from? Where did the ideas come from? 372 00:35:37,530 --> 00:35:45,750 I know I'll write a pre-history where there are tools, elves and trolls, etc. and there's a middle earth and I'll write one about ents into your orc, 373 00:35:45,990 --> 00:35:53,730 as we've already heard from the ruin, but also possibly linked to Macbeth, who's a bit fed up that the trees really didn't go up Dunsinane hill. 374 00:35:54,180 --> 00:35:58,860 Um, and then there's the Lost Road, the Notion Club papers, this idea that there's a mythical land to the west. 375 00:35:58,860 --> 00:36:08,520 Well, in King Chief in Beowulf, there's this character at the beginning who is sent off, comes from somewhere and goes off somewhere. 376 00:36:08,850 --> 00:36:10,559 Well, that's what he's playing with in that. 377 00:36:10,560 --> 00:36:18,330 Or the voyages of Saint Brendan, those Peregrine, his poem, or any day who sailed off madly into the Atlantic Ocean from Ireland. 378 00:36:18,660 --> 00:36:21,300 But in the tale of some Brendan, he finds a mystical isle. 379 00:36:21,450 --> 00:36:28,080 And even when you get to the Hobbit rhymes, you know he starts writing these man in the moon tales poems early on. 380 00:36:29,100 --> 00:36:35,280 But you know, they then become those fairy, those nursery rhymes that we tell you a little, the captain of it. 381 00:36:35,370 --> 00:36:39,240 Well, he writes the earlier poem that then led to The One we tell. 382 00:36:39,330 --> 00:36:44,520 And of course, then he says, oh, that's a whole bit rhyme. And it becomes in the tales of Tom Bombadil and so on. 383 00:36:44,520 --> 00:36:48,690 So it's all about gap filling. Um, objective. 384 00:36:48,690 --> 00:36:52,650 I'll just go on about a few things which have already come up. He does say. 385 00:36:53,990 --> 00:36:57,020 This is all about fall mortality and the machine. 386 00:36:57,530 --> 00:37:03,200 Um, fall is a lot of people who fall in Tolkien's mythology Morgoth, Sauron, fan or foreign. 387 00:37:03,590 --> 00:37:10,490 They all fall from grace in some way or other. And the book, as you know, is the downfall of the Lord of the rings. 388 00:37:11,840 --> 00:37:19,219 Mortality is another key area which he plays a lot with, uh, the problem of death, the escaping of death. 389 00:37:19,220 --> 00:37:27,140 And, um, he even said that it's this idea of the escape from death or death is the key spring of now. 390 00:37:27,140 --> 00:37:30,410 Everyone thinks he says the Lord of the rings. I dispute that. 391 00:37:30,410 --> 00:37:36,110 I think he says the law of the ring. But anyway, he says that's what the books are all about. 392 00:37:36,380 --> 00:37:42,140 Death and trying to evade it. And this is all obviously a very Catholic view has already been mentioned. 393 00:37:42,140 --> 00:37:47,719 He was a devout Catholic, um, and very active in the Catholic Church and particularly in Oxford. 394 00:37:47,720 --> 00:37:55,910 What was happening here. And then the third area is the machine that technology can corrupt nature or destroy nature or corrupt people. 395 00:37:56,450 --> 00:38:00,500 And I think all of these, again, are very modern views. 396 00:38:00,860 --> 00:38:04,160 There are things which we probably come up again and again with. 397 00:38:06,300 --> 00:38:09,750 My are was routes. Where does he fit in the long history? 398 00:38:09,930 --> 00:38:18,470 Um. And this is this is actually a slide which is worked well because what it does is pick up everything you've heard so far. 399 00:38:19,400 --> 00:38:25,280 So do you remember yesterday we talked about that hoovering up of myths and legends, 400 00:38:25,580 --> 00:38:30,530 possibly for nationalist purposes, by people to collect them together and then put them out. 401 00:38:30,770 --> 00:38:36,020 Well, one of the things he was slightly upset about was he didn't think England had its own mythology. 402 00:38:36,020 --> 00:38:39,679 So he plays again inconsistently with this. 403 00:38:39,680 --> 00:38:46,880 But he he is perhaps toying with this idea that he could create a cycle of myths for England to my country. 404 00:38:48,650 --> 00:38:54,469 Um. We also heard about fairy tales and folklore tales, but fairy tales and one. 405 00:38:54,470 --> 00:39:01,640 I don't think he's been mentioned yet, but what a strong influence of of on Tolkien as a child was the underlying coloured fairy tale books, 406 00:39:01,910 --> 00:39:06,560 which aren't just about fairy stories and fairy tales. There's a lot of some old Norse legends and repurposing in there. 407 00:39:07,160 --> 00:39:12,170 Um, what we heard last night, and we've heard a bit this morning, you know, 408 00:39:12,230 --> 00:39:17,990 we read Morris Dunn saying the Haggard, particularly the she novels as well, they all influence him. 409 00:39:18,260 --> 00:39:23,660 David Lindsay, I think, has been mentioned to strong influence. Grace has just talked about er Edison. 410 00:39:24,290 --> 00:39:32,690 Um, so all of these things are in this cauldron, and everything you've heard about in a way leads to this, to this talk. 411 00:39:33,170 --> 00:39:35,700 Uh, one thing which he said, I fear you may be right. 412 00:39:35,720 --> 00:39:40,879 The search for the source of loitering is going to occupy academics for a generation or two, and I hope my hands up. 413 00:39:40,880 --> 00:39:44,870 I'm one of them. Um, and a book that myself and a colleague did. 414 00:39:44,990 --> 00:39:49,040 Uh, this is a solid over where we take The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and Lord of the rings. 415 00:39:49,040 --> 00:39:53,120 Go on. And what we're trying to do there is going, look, there's an episode in these books. 416 00:39:53,720 --> 00:40:02,690 It really links or has a lot of similarities, what you'll find in these older Middle English and Old Norse and Finnish texts. 417 00:40:03,890 --> 00:40:10,010 Okay, my l I'm nearly there in terms of my Discworld, um, magic in Middle-Earth. 418 00:40:10,130 --> 00:40:13,820 Um, just because it had it is part of Adam's definition. 419 00:40:14,210 --> 00:40:20,390 He says he was a bit casual with the word magic, and he didn't really, uh, use it correctly. 420 00:40:20,390 --> 00:40:24,770 Actually, when you look at it, he's he's quite sparing in his use of term magic. 421 00:40:25,070 --> 00:40:29,000 Um, in The Hobbit, the Lord of the rings and so on, and sorcery and so forth. 422 00:40:29,450 --> 00:40:32,960 And again, as Tolkien, he he thinks very deeply about it. 423 00:40:33,410 --> 00:40:36,740 Magic has to be believable to keep up the secondary belief. 424 00:40:37,130 --> 00:40:41,240 Um, but he understates it, I think. I think you get natural magic in there. 425 00:40:41,240 --> 00:40:44,570 You get the monsters, the creatures which are which are magical. 426 00:40:44,990 --> 00:40:51,320 But it is not. The full on J.K. Rowling school of magic is very underplayed. 427 00:40:52,640 --> 00:40:55,400 Um, and of course, Tolkien being the academic, 428 00:40:55,610 --> 00:41:03,110 then starts to think about magic and starts to think about its roots and some of the terminology in the philology that goes with it. 429 00:41:03,350 --> 00:41:12,920 And he starts to define going back on some medieval and classical theories about Maja and go into the physical magic or the spells and the conjuring, 430 00:41:13,280 --> 00:41:17,120 and he keeps the elaborates on this so you can go away and read this letter. 431 00:41:17,360 --> 00:41:20,809 But magic could be as well as held good and go out to you bad. 432 00:41:20,810 --> 00:41:25,340 Neither is in this tale good or bad, but only by motive or purpose or youth. 433 00:41:25,670 --> 00:41:28,940 Use both sides. Use both, but with different motives. 434 00:41:29,480 --> 00:41:35,870 What I think it's important here to say is that it isn't the magic that's important, it's what you do with it. 435 00:41:36,050 --> 00:41:39,230 And that's what Tolkien is trying to convey in this tale of power, struggle. 436 00:41:39,770 --> 00:41:44,870 Um, depth. I think depth, I've realised, is really worldbuilding, but let's let's just go with it. 437 00:41:45,230 --> 00:41:54,290 Um, depth allows him to achieve his goal of getting the inner consistency in a consistency of reality to so that you as a reader, 438 00:41:54,290 --> 00:41:59,179 believe in what you're doing. Um, and there's various things he does here. 439 00:41:59,180 --> 00:42:07,040 So scholarly apparatus. So you have maps at the book, there's introductory essays, there's appendices at the animals and so on and so forth. 440 00:42:07,670 --> 00:42:15,469 Uh, a lovely example, I think. Oops, sorry about the text that just appeared on there is a left is the Book of Oil, um, 441 00:42:15,470 --> 00:42:21,860 which he he actually sits there and makes that, um, thinking it will go in the illustrated version of Lord of the rings. 442 00:42:21,900 --> 00:42:28,820 It didn't, uh, and he uses his knowledge of what happens in, um, medieval manuscripts like Beowulf on the right. 443 00:42:30,950 --> 00:42:37,220 Uh, so there a map. So the map at The Hobbit at the beginning bases ourself in it, and then we get the Lord of the rings. 444 00:42:38,540 --> 00:42:41,840 References to the past. Another classic, I think. 445 00:42:41,870 --> 00:42:47,990 I don't know if he was the first, but he does it probably the best subsequent writers trying to do this, such as General Martin. 446 00:42:48,400 --> 00:42:51,530 Not as well. Um, but examples here from The Hobbit. 447 00:42:51,530 --> 00:42:54,649 Before you could get round to the south, you would get into the lands of the necromancer, 448 00:42:54,650 --> 00:42:58,190 and even you, Bilbo, won't need me to tell you the tales of that black sorcerer. 449 00:42:58,430 --> 00:43:03,560 And of course, he never does. And we never find out in The Hobbit. But we know that there's something going on. 450 00:43:03,890 --> 00:43:12,890 Um, and then fellowship of the ring. I do not think that tale should be told now with the servants, I mean, and and this is all an example of depth, 451 00:43:12,890 --> 00:43:18,890 because what happens is you get a glimpse that there is something much bigger going on behind this story. 452 00:43:19,100 --> 00:43:25,399 And of course there is, because he's worked on it for 20 and 30 years. And then he uses the framing devices, which has been mentioned. 453 00:43:25,400 --> 00:43:29,750 So the book of Lost Tales I already talked about, but The Hobbit is, of course, 454 00:43:29,750 --> 00:43:33,739 The Hobbit or There and Back Again being the record of reused journey made by Bilbo Baggins, 455 00:43:33,740 --> 00:43:37,940 compiled from his memoirs by J.R.R. Tolkien and published by George Allen and 456 00:43:38,090 --> 00:43:42,049 Win and Lord of the rings survives to us by through the Red Book of West March. 457 00:43:42,050 --> 00:43:48,380 And there's a potted history of that manuscript and how it survives from the Shire all the way to us. 458 00:43:48,890 --> 00:43:53,280 Um, I, I mean, it's ended on the ruins of The Hobbit. 459 00:43:53,280 --> 00:43:59,599 It's it's all nonsense, of course, but it's brilliant in a way, because it does give you that. 460 00:43:59,600 --> 00:44:03,319 You read it and you go, really? Really. I was that how it happened? 461 00:44:03,320 --> 00:44:06,710 Oh, yeah. The Book of West, Mark. It must be sitting in Bodleian or something like that. 462 00:44:07,190 --> 00:44:12,680 And Tolkien found it and he translated it not very well. That explains some of the inaccuracies in Lord of the rings. 463 00:44:13,070 --> 00:44:17,209 But then, you know, of course, none of this happens, but it's a framing device. 464 00:44:17,210 --> 00:44:21,020 It's a way of doing that. Okay. So that was my proposed framework. 465 00:44:22,540 --> 00:44:26,920 One minute to go. Okay. Style. The thing which I felt it's missing. 466 00:44:27,280 --> 00:44:32,770 Um. And I won't do this very quickly is his style, so perhaps we should call it disc worlds. 467 00:44:33,250 --> 00:44:37,560 Um. And that piece of text from the end of Minas Tirith. 468 00:44:37,570 --> 00:44:42,610 Uh, the secret ministry, I think, is important. And as I said, I've written on this quite extensively. 469 00:44:43,420 --> 00:44:48,069 But you can see so much going on in here. Uh, even if you just take it. 470 00:44:48,070 --> 00:44:52,170 Forget the rest of Lord of rings. Just read this extract. We get magic. 471 00:44:52,180 --> 00:44:55,479 We get that in there. Words of power and terror to end. 472 00:44:55,480 --> 00:44:58,480 Heart and stone. As if stricken by some blasting spell. 473 00:44:58,480 --> 00:45:03,040 And we get magical creatures. So it is fantasy. We get characterisation in there. 474 00:45:03,040 --> 00:45:09,970 We get Gandalf, Gandalf and Shadowfax I think is we forget Shadowfax bless him, but he's in there. 475 00:45:10,330 --> 00:45:14,620 And the words that Tolkien uses with Gandalf in chatter about unmoving, that commanding. 476 00:45:14,620 --> 00:45:18,900 They're stoic. They still. We get the witch King. 477 00:45:18,930 --> 00:45:27,690 This is where the Witch King rides into ministry. And he uses an example of what we call variation in medieval literature. 478 00:45:27,840 --> 00:45:33,629 Look at the multiple descriptions of the witch king, a horseman, the black captain, uh, the huge shadow, 479 00:45:33,630 --> 00:45:40,620 the Black Rider, etc. he really does that to layer on the effects of of who this thing is. 480 00:45:40,920 --> 00:45:45,870 Um, and also that this is a person who moves, who commands power. 481 00:45:45,960 --> 00:45:51,480 Whereas Gandalf and Shadowfax, you stand still. The witch king keeps moving forward and nearer and nearer. 482 00:45:52,590 --> 00:45:57,659 We get characterisation. Um, if you forget Shadowfax, don't forget Grom. 483 00:45:57,660 --> 00:46:01,420 The battering ram run! The battering ram actually takes on a life of its own. 484 00:46:01,440 --> 00:46:05,309 It isn't just a shove. They shove a ram at the door. We get the name of ground. 485 00:46:05,310 --> 00:46:09,510 We get his background and ground. Crawls on these and pushed on. 486 00:46:09,690 --> 00:46:17,510 Bronze starts to become a living creature. And then we get in what Tolkien often gets criticises about his style. 487 00:46:17,540 --> 00:46:20,569 It is full of this piece, archaic style. 488 00:46:20,570 --> 00:46:26,570 The syntax is wrong. We get the verb at the end of clauses in sort of the way you would in, in German. 489 00:46:26,910 --> 00:46:31,590 Um, and it reads reads old fashioned and the semantics. 490 00:46:31,590 --> 00:46:36,590 So we're not showing up there. It's full of a register associated with the epic. 491 00:46:37,250 --> 00:46:41,230 Um. But he's he's he's a genius. 492 00:46:41,500 --> 00:46:45,970 It's just repetition. Look at the repetition. The drums rolled around and the drums are old and rattled. 493 00:46:46,150 --> 00:46:50,410 Thrice he cried. Thrice. There's so much going on in this text. 494 00:46:50,410 --> 00:46:55,830 There's even a little oration if you want to look for it. And he controls the pace. 495 00:46:55,850 --> 00:46:58,890 If that wasn't enough. One minute. 496 00:47:00,960 --> 00:47:04,770 He controls the pace fantastically. This. 497 00:47:04,770 --> 00:47:12,659 This is a masterpiece of prose narrative, because you get to that point where that green blob is, 498 00:47:12,660 --> 00:47:20,400 and you pause and you think it's all over, but he's taking you through it by managing these short sentences and so on. 499 00:47:21,060 --> 00:47:24,870 Um, there are even influences from the First World War, I would argue in that. 500 00:47:26,440 --> 00:47:34,360 There were even influences from Christianity. Thrice he cried, a cock crowing at the end, probably about dawn breaking. 501 00:47:34,360 --> 00:47:38,730 But we all know the the link there to, uh, Saint Matthew dogma. 502 00:47:38,860 --> 00:47:43,499 And then finally you catastrophe. Every time I read this. 503 00:47:43,500 --> 00:47:47,890 Every time. You may have read this. It wasn't one of his favourite scenes. 504 00:47:48,160 --> 00:47:54,070 That bit at the end, when the row hear him and the cavalry actually come, brings a lump to your throat. 505 00:47:54,790 --> 00:47:59,590 And it was why it made me look back on this scene and just work out why he's doing so well. 506 00:48:00,100 --> 00:48:05,350 So my time is up. I'm just going to say that not everyone likes Tolkien. 507 00:48:05,650 --> 00:48:10,570 Um, you've got a bit of a kicking. Uh, when it came out, uh, and afterwards, 508 00:48:10,840 --> 00:48:18,490 and particularly around the time the polls came out in 2000 and the Lord of the rings kept getting voted the best book of the 20th century, 509 00:48:18,760 --> 00:48:25,420 which really annoyed a lot of people. So that's another reason to applaud Tolkien, particularly the people he annoyed. 510 00:48:26,200 --> 00:48:31,030 Um, and there's an extract, and I would just finish his own reflection on it. 511 00:48:31,330 --> 00:48:35,120 The Lord of the rings is one of those things. If you like it, you do. 512 00:48:35,140 --> 00:48:47,000 If you don't, you boo. Thank you. Thank you very much for this. 513 00:48:47,000 --> 00:48:51,320 Is it really fascinating? Um, just a question about, um. 514 00:48:53,420 --> 00:48:58,580 You talked about self-creation a very briefly, and we've had mentioned several times in the past couple days, 515 00:48:59,000 --> 00:49:04,340 and it's just especially touching on catastrophe there at the end of the relationship between these things. 516 00:49:04,700 --> 00:49:11,450 Yeah. Um, detachment, which just kind of two forms of creation that we have right in Washington and in our conversation, 517 00:49:11,450 --> 00:49:17,419 one sort of creation is something underneath and one that's sort of I think this is what 518 00:49:17,420 --> 00:49:21,350 some of what you're saying is getting up in Tolkien and from his Catholic perspective, 519 00:49:21,350 --> 00:49:28,549 there's a sense of of storytelling is participation, not just not just something that's sort of like this is the that has been created, 520 00:49:28,550 --> 00:49:35,150 and therefore we can create lesser things, but rather that what we create is building on and continuing a work which is already begun. 521 00:49:35,990 --> 00:49:39,530 Yeah. Talk. Yes, exactly. So I think you're absolutely right. 522 00:49:39,530 --> 00:49:41,719 And the key thing is why it's called sub creation. 523 00:49:41,720 --> 00:49:51,530 Because creation creator is God, but it's one of the gifts of God, if you like to see humans, is that we have this ability to sub create. 524 00:49:51,830 --> 00:50:01,940 So we're participating by doing that and that desire to do that, we're participating in God's work and we can also through it, 525 00:50:02,420 --> 00:50:06,559 um, engender and this is Tolkien's theory, you know, what God was trying to tell us. 526 00:50:06,560 --> 00:50:14,090 And that's that you catastrophe that, you know, uh, there will be a joyous turn, that goodwill will will win out in the end. 527 00:50:14,420 --> 00:50:15,680 Um, now, I don't mean that. 528 00:50:15,800 --> 00:50:23,270 That doesn't mean that you all have to go away and start writing mythical worlds, because you can be a sub creator in your own mind. 529 00:50:23,270 --> 00:50:27,950 In my view, just by immersing yourself in someone else's world and imagining it. 530 00:50:28,310 --> 00:50:30,200 And that's where it moves into imagination. 531 00:50:30,200 --> 00:50:36,770 The fact that we can, we can all think, we can all envisage, um, so we're sub creators in that sense as well. 532 00:50:37,100 --> 00:50:38,600 And I think that's where he was pushing it. 533 00:50:39,380 --> 00:50:46,850 Um, this might be a bit of a silly question, but a lot of the, um, Tolkien having a go, I suppose you could consider Tolkien writing fan fiction. 534 00:50:47,450 --> 00:50:55,399 Um, and so how much would you say that working up that level of fan fiction sort of, uh, improved his craft in writing? 535 00:50:55,400 --> 00:50:59,900 Do you think it had a big influence in what actually he created that after? 536 00:51:00,740 --> 00:51:08,180 That's I think that's that's not a silly question at all. That's a brilliant point to to think of Tolkien as the precursor of fan fiction. 537 00:51:08,180 --> 00:51:11,810 But he was a fan of medieval literature, so he's having a go. 538 00:51:12,170 --> 00:51:14,360 Yeah, I think it does develop his style. 539 00:51:14,360 --> 00:51:20,239 And so, you know, a lot of the verse you get in Lord of the rings, he's imitating styles that he picks up from, 540 00:51:20,240 --> 00:51:27,110 uh, medieval literature and, uh, he there's a, there's one of the appendices in the collected poetry volumes. 541 00:51:27,800 --> 00:51:30,890 He lists all of the poetic styles, the metres, etc. 542 00:51:30,890 --> 00:51:34,700 He he wants to have a go at, um, and all of the poets he really likes, 543 00:51:34,700 --> 00:51:39,260 and he's and words that he really liked and he tries to weave them in which we do find in his poetry. 544 00:51:39,560 --> 00:51:43,640 So I think yes, it did it, no doubt it did. 545 00:51:44,000 --> 00:51:49,399 Um, of course he's no he's playing around with all kinds of things, prose and poetry. 546 00:51:49,400 --> 00:51:54,799 So yeah, that's that's a great point. Well done. Um, our first question is from Olly Murs. 547 00:51:54,800 --> 00:52:01,460 Ebadi. Thank you, Doctor Li, regarding Tolkien's naming, especially since he even composed old English versions of his texts, 548 00:52:01,790 --> 00:52:07,640 do you think his use of Old English and Old Norse was mainly to make his world feel less strange, 549 00:52:08,000 --> 00:52:11,840 or was it a part of a more ambitious attempt to build a tower with old stones, 550 00:52:12,080 --> 00:52:16,250 and fit his literary oeuvre into the tradition of the old northern legends? 551 00:52:17,300 --> 00:52:24,110 Um, so I think the analogy in the second, the point that me made in the second is, is a reference to his his essay on Beowulf, 552 00:52:24,440 --> 00:52:30,379 The monsters and the critiques, where, um, whether he uses the image of the tower and, you know, 553 00:52:30,380 --> 00:52:35,420 the tower is the kind of the work, but all we've done is pull it all down and look at the stones, 554 00:52:35,420 --> 00:52:41,180 and we've forgotten the scale that you could of of the tower itself, from what you could see, if you stand at the top of it. 555 00:52:41,480 --> 00:52:49,490 Um, so I think there's a few things which probably or to way to answer this, first of all, he's drawing on what he knows about. 556 00:52:50,000 --> 00:53:00,610 He's drawing on what he enjoys. Um, so he is he is very adept at doing the the names, the mixture from Old English, Old Norse, etcetera. 557 00:53:00,620 --> 00:53:04,970 That's possibly what inspires him in the Germanic tales. But of course, who would you mention finish? 558 00:53:05,270 --> 00:53:09,530 We have Welsh influences on it, etcetera. So he's drawing on he draws on a lot of things. 559 00:53:09,950 --> 00:53:19,549 Um, and I think but he also has that point made there, you know, by using some of these terms and words, they're not too distant from the audience. 560 00:53:19,550 --> 00:53:23,959 He was originally intending this for, which was a UK audience. 561 00:53:23,960 --> 00:53:29,690 Let's, let's start with that. I mean, it obviously has a global impact now, but when you come across those names, 562 00:53:29,690 --> 00:53:34,670 particularly if you start with the Shire names, well, they're all around this in Berkshire, in Oxfordshire. 563 00:53:35,000 --> 00:53:42,380 Um, but then you start to come across, say some of those names in ro hear him, you know, the names of the characters there, 564 00:53:42,710 --> 00:53:52,760 and they kind of ring true to sort of British people, because when we were at school, we all did 1066 and all that, that comic book and so on. 565 00:53:52,940 --> 00:53:56,660 And we have those names at the back of our head, the EG Kings and so on. 566 00:53:56,870 --> 00:54:01,099 So it begins to pick up and it begins to feel a bit more familiar. 567 00:54:01,100 --> 00:54:04,819 So I think he's, it's, it's, it's multiple angles that uh, yeah. 568 00:54:04,820 --> 00:54:13,130 Just wondering whether you think that, uh, the Lord of the rings is literature in the same way that Ulysses or In Search lost time is literature, 569 00:54:13,550 --> 00:54:19,220 or whether we have to kind of almost create a new sort of category, um, for what Todd Clayton is trying to do. 570 00:54:20,330 --> 00:54:23,530 Um, that's a good it's a good point. 571 00:54:23,540 --> 00:54:31,760 Um, it landed at the wrong time. As I've already mentioned, the mid 50s is not the time when you think what people were expecting. 572 00:54:32,060 --> 00:54:38,330 Um, and I've, I've written on the radio dramatisation, which came out a year later, and the listeners, what the hell's there? 573 00:54:38,340 --> 00:54:42,770 So where's the allegory? Um, so. 574 00:54:43,430 --> 00:54:46,940 And Tom Shippey, I think says it succinctly catches it. 575 00:54:46,940 --> 00:54:51,580 He says the reason people don't like Lord of the rings is because they don't understand it. 576 00:54:51,590 --> 00:54:56,150 They don't know what to make of it. Um, so yeah, it bucks the trend. 577 00:54:56,180 --> 00:55:03,889 I mean, I think it's literature in the sense that, um, a text that emotionally moves me or would have done in the 50s. 578 00:55:03,890 --> 00:55:07,160 I think it will still do that in 100, 200 years. 579 00:55:07,490 --> 00:55:13,700 I think people will still be reading it. Uh, and it's important because it says a lot about the 20th century. 580 00:55:14,120 --> 00:55:17,150 Um, so I think in that sense, yes, it definitely is. 581 00:55:17,420 --> 00:55:22,280 But you're right. I mean, it wasn't, as we've seen through all the talk yesterday, unique. 582 00:55:22,790 --> 00:55:28,300 But it was. Brian Atterbury calls it the end of apology. 583 00:55:28,720 --> 00:55:32,920 And I think that's absolutely right. It was the it was that well, by it, its appearing. 584 00:55:33,100 --> 00:55:39,040 We no longer had to apologise as adults for enjoying fantasy literature, and it sort of led to that. 585 00:55:39,040 --> 00:55:46,090 So I don't know that quite answers your question. Do you think in terms of yes, it is literature and yes, it wasn't what people were expecting. 586 00:55:46,480 --> 00:55:54,820 Oh, yeah. Thank you for the talk. Um, I'd be interested in your perspective, having talked about kind of the asterisk theory, um, 587 00:55:54,820 --> 00:56:01,000 and touching on earlier the comment on fanfiction as to how much you think Tolkien in his contemporaries, 588 00:56:01,000 --> 00:56:09,280 uh, the reason the fantasy sci fi, um, is now seen as kind of answering the the what if questions. 589 00:56:09,280 --> 00:56:15,549 And is that from how they kind of filled in the blanks and the, the what if around the talking animals of Narnia, 590 00:56:15,550 --> 00:56:20,950 for example, how much of that came before and how much of it is because of Tolkien and Lewis? 591 00:56:21,040 --> 00:56:25,540 Um, that's a good question, because they I mean, you're right in tickling Tolkien. 592 00:56:26,020 --> 00:56:33,820 Um, he is playing around with the what if what if there had been a world like this, like we're all familiar with in the Lord of the rings? 593 00:56:34,240 --> 00:56:37,299 Um, that would explain all the things that, you know, 594 00:56:37,300 --> 00:56:44,260 that then subsequently happened and that we pick up and Tom Bombadil and the Green Man and so on, you know, and, you know, answers it. 595 00:56:44,470 --> 00:56:47,770 So in that sense, it is. It is what if, um. 596 00:56:48,810 --> 00:56:58,230 And I. I mean, I suppose it's a bit like the answer there, because it allowed then people to move into that space and start to do that. 597 00:56:58,230 --> 00:57:03,360 Now, of course, in science fiction, they've been speculating all kinds of in all kinds of ways, 598 00:57:03,360 --> 00:57:10,259 and particularly in between the war periods, um, about dystopian utopian worlds that you could go and find. 599 00:57:10,260 --> 00:57:18,570 And that was a way of exploring what we hadn't here. But, uh, they certainly unleashed it, I would think, in terms of a popular genre. 600 00:57:19,050 --> 00:57:22,620 Um, but people have always been imagining what if. 601 00:57:22,620 --> 00:57:26,550 So, I, you know, I don't want to put Tolkien is the key one. 602 00:57:26,580 --> 00:57:29,879 You know, you go back and even to sort of like Thomas Moore used. 603 00:57:29,880 --> 00:57:33,150 Okay, you know, what if imagining things like that. 604 00:57:33,150 --> 00:57:39,540 So it's been going on for some time, and I suppose even the Epic of Gilgamesh is a what if, isn't it? 605 00:57:39,540 --> 00:57:42,720 What if we can try and find out how to have eternal life? 606 00:57:43,320 --> 00:57:46,560 Uh, which is the first one ever? Thank you.