1 00:00:03,520 --> 00:00:07,300 [Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Okay. Hi. Welcome back. Um, we're. 2 00:00:07,360 --> 00:00:12,700 Um. Right. Well, we have Felix back to speak to you again. 3 00:00:12,730 --> 00:00:17,740 You've met Felix already, but, uh, medievalist, scholar, librarian, scholar of modern fantasy. 4 00:00:17,740 --> 00:00:22,959 And he's going to be following Stuart Lee's talk on talking with a talk called After Talking. 5 00:00:22,960 --> 00:00:26,470 So. So please welcome Felix to the podium. I'm sorry that. 6 00:00:27,860 --> 00:00:31,790 Um, yeah, I've called that off Tolkien, but it's in the program. 7 00:00:31,790 --> 00:00:33,980 It's following Tolkien, but it's basically the same thing. 8 00:00:34,640 --> 00:00:42,650 Um, uh, I should probably subtitle it, uh, standing on Mount Fuji based on, uh, Stewart's quotes. 9 00:00:42,830 --> 00:00:48,080 Um, so instead of, uh, trying to sum up the impact of Tolkien on the entire genre of fantasy, 10 00:00:48,080 --> 00:00:52,970 I've, uh, I'm going to touch on just three writers, uh, two of them British and one American. 11 00:00:53,330 --> 00:01:01,700 Uh, he began writing imaginative literature featuring wizards, uh, and quests for magical objects, uh, in the 1950s and 60s. 12 00:01:02,570 --> 00:01:06,740 How did they respond to what Tolkien was doing? Did they try to emulate him? 13 00:01:08,020 --> 00:01:13,850 And my main question is what was Tolkiens immediate, immediate influence on younger writers at the time? 14 00:01:15,360 --> 00:01:17,970 Um, so the first of these I want to talk about, um. 15 00:01:18,720 --> 00:01:25,170 Uh, I think this was meant I wasn't here for Caroline's talk earlier, but I think he was mentioned, uh, as part of the Oxford school. 16 00:01:25,980 --> 00:01:29,010 Um, but he's hopefully a, well, well-known figure at this point. 17 00:01:29,040 --> 00:01:37,080 Uh, a few years ago, he was the oldest, uh, writer to be, uh, shortlisted for the Booker Prize with his novel Treacle Walker. 18 00:01:37,890 --> 00:01:45,240 Um, he was born to a working class family, uh, in Cheshire, in a little village called Alderley Edge, which is important to his fiction. 19 00:01:45,960 --> 00:01:51,120 Um, he was one of a generation who attended, uh, Oxford in the 1950s and was taught by an author. 20 00:01:51,130 --> 00:01:57,630 Met Tolkien, uh, and Cass Lewis, um, very important to his books and the way that critics, 21 00:01:58,110 --> 00:02:03,120 uh, usually interpret his, uh, his fiction is this working class background. 22 00:02:03,450 --> 00:02:07,650 Uh, and the fact that, uh, he came up through the, the grammar school system. 23 00:02:08,010 --> 00:02:12,540 Uh, and, and won a place that Maudling College, Oxford, and this kind of, um, 24 00:02:13,350 --> 00:02:20,070 to him at least separated him from his, uh, from his, uh, family, uh, culturally speaking. 25 00:02:21,320 --> 00:02:24,410 Um, there is a story that Garner tells. 26 00:02:24,830 --> 00:02:33,739 Uh, I'm not sure if it's true or not. Uh, of him abseiling down the outside of maudlin, uh, at night and his feet, uh, 27 00:02:33,740 --> 00:02:38,120 touching the top of Clarissa's head as he's leaning out to smoke of height. 28 00:02:38,540 --> 00:02:42,950 Um, not sure if this is true, but it's a very useful visual metaphor for, uh, 29 00:02:43,880 --> 00:02:49,670 how Ghana thought of people like C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and the kind of fantasy that they were writing. 30 00:02:50,180 --> 00:02:51,740 Um, he didn't think much of it. 31 00:02:52,550 --> 00:03:00,620 Uh, he left Oxford in his second year, after the realisation that he needed to become a writer, to kind of reconnect with his, um, his background. 32 00:03:01,760 --> 00:03:07,600 Uh, he returned to Alderley Edge and bought a very old house for not very much money and began to write the weird Stone number, 33 00:03:08,150 --> 00:03:13,680 which was published in 1960. Um, and quickly after that came a sequel. 34 00:03:13,700 --> 00:03:22,130 The moon has come right in the centre there. Uh, and these these two books, um, that set in, you know, they had on a hill called The Edge. 35 00:03:22,640 --> 00:03:29,160 Um, and two children, um, Colin and Susan, become embroiled in this, uh, 36 00:03:29,330 --> 00:03:36,440 magical battle between, uh, wizards and elves and, um, dark elves and, uh, a dark Lord figure. 37 00:03:37,250 --> 00:03:42,620 Uh, and then he, uh, he wrote a letter, which is a kind of, uh, secondary world fantasy, almost. 38 00:03:43,310 --> 00:03:51,139 Um. Uh, but with parallels to, to, uh, to modern day Manchester and the hour service, 39 00:03:51,140 --> 00:03:55,760 which uses a story from the map and again, uh, the Welsh, uh, cycle of legends. 40 00:03:56,360 --> 00:04:03,040 Um, so repetition is a is a key is a key theme in Garner's writing. 41 00:04:03,050 --> 00:04:09,560 There's always, uh, there's always a myth that's being, uh, cycled through, uh, experienced over and over again. 42 00:04:10,340 --> 00:04:17,840 Um, the impossible question is, were any of these direct responses to Tolkien's work, or was it just something in the air? 43 00:04:18,500 --> 00:04:23,750 Garner is on record as saying he did not read the Lord of the rings until many years after Whetstone was written. 44 00:04:24,530 --> 00:04:29,839 He has, in several interviews, renounced Tolkien. Um, there's, uh, one in the interview. 45 00:04:29,840 --> 00:04:37,219 Whether the interior asks. I imagine then that when the way it's done everything and then appeared with its wizard and its army of dark elves, 46 00:04:37,220 --> 00:04:41,300 people who didn't know the legend devoutly claimed that you'd copied the Lord of the rings. 47 00:04:42,720 --> 00:04:46,799 Uh. And Alan says which side? That they didn't. They hadn't read any old English. 48 00:04:46,800 --> 00:04:50,750 Tolkien and I ripped off the same sources. He did it for his reasons. 49 00:04:50,760 --> 00:04:54,240 I did it because a simple level. I hated made up names. 50 00:04:54,870 --> 00:04:58,590 If I'd used a name that was familiar, considerable baggage would have come with it. 51 00:05:00,090 --> 00:05:06,030 Um, and then he tells the story of, um, when he gave his archive to the Bodleian. 52 00:05:06,090 --> 00:05:12,320 Uh. At some point, he heard from someone connected with the Lord of the rings films that, uh, 53 00:05:13,490 --> 00:05:18,570 one of the Tolkien family had given him J.R.R. Tolkien's annotated copy of The Weird Stone in England, 54 00:05:18,800 --> 00:05:23,190 and apparently his notes are just vitriolic at what bothered him. 55 00:05:23,210 --> 00:05:27,110 The interviewer asked. Trivial use of language. I would love to see that book. 56 00:05:28,340 --> 00:05:34,610 Um, so whether or not that story is true, uh, it points to a fundamental difference in Garland's approach to fantasy. 57 00:05:35,120 --> 00:05:38,180 He may have been using the same sources Old Norse, Celtic. 58 00:05:38,270 --> 00:05:44,750 Um, I was English, uh, but at this stage it was his way of expressing the importance of myth and local landscape. 59 00:05:47,910 --> 00:05:53,250 Uh, the second of it I want to talk about is Susan Cooper again, probably mentioned this morning. 60 00:05:53,790 --> 00:05:57,120 Um. Uh, she was born just a year after Garner. 61 00:05:57,180 --> 00:06:04,560 Uh, and like him, she was at Oxford during the 50s. She studied English at Somerville, uh, where she became interested in journalism as a career. 62 00:06:05,790 --> 00:06:12,360 I never met Tolkien, she says, but I went to his lectures on Anglo-Saxon literature along with hundreds of other students. 63 00:06:12,690 --> 00:06:16,800 He was a wonderful lecturer, like C.S. Lewis, whose lectures I also attended. 64 00:06:16,830 --> 00:06:22,860 He was a tweedy, pipe smoking, middle aged man. We were all waiting for the third volume of the Lord of the rings to come out. 65 00:06:25,020 --> 00:06:32,400 Her most famous work is the Darkness Rising sequence, which began in 1965 with see on the Stone in the middle of that, 66 00:06:32,970 --> 00:06:39,120 um, which is a kind of modern day, uh, hunt for the Grail set in, uh, set in rural Cornwall. 67 00:06:40,350 --> 00:06:43,410 And the next book in the series, The Dark Is Rising, um, 68 00:06:43,980 --> 00:06:50,700 it is set in Cooper's home county of Buckinghamshire and expands the scope of the book to a mythic battle between light and dark. 69 00:06:52,170 --> 00:06:56,479 Um. All five of the books. 70 00:06:56,480 --> 00:07:00,050 There are three of them that, uh, draw heavily on English and Welsh folklore. 71 00:07:00,530 --> 00:07:04,729 Uh, Arthurian legend and feature a recognisable Merlin character named Merriman. 72 00:07:04,730 --> 00:07:09,640 Lion keeper remembers reading. Uh, the Lord of the rings with astonishment. 73 00:07:09,650 --> 00:07:17,660 She found that Tolkien's work was full of the same Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature she was studying at the time, but she has written about how, 74 00:07:18,170 --> 00:07:23,420 while she was bowled over by Tolkiens middle earth, as with the canon sorry, as with Garnet, 75 00:07:23,690 --> 00:07:28,490 the idea of creating a completely separate secondary world was never her intention. 76 00:07:29,530 --> 00:07:33,100 The modern material world is the effective setting for fantasy, she writes. 77 00:07:33,670 --> 00:07:36,820 An arbitrary time and never Neverland softens the punch. 78 00:07:37,330 --> 00:07:44,280 For example, if we're in Eldorado and we find a mandrake, then okay, so it's a mandrake and Eldorado, anything goes, 79 00:07:44,290 --> 00:07:51,820 but by a force of imagination, compel the reader to believe that there is a mandrake in a garden in Mayfair of Great Ulverston, Lancashire. 80 00:07:52,510 --> 00:07:56,620 Then when you pull up that mandrake, it is really going to scream, and possibly the reader will tell you. 81 00:07:57,760 --> 00:08:01,900 So there is some real influence of Tolkien in these books, I think. 82 00:08:02,350 --> 00:08:06,130 And but again, like on that there is a, there's a fundamental, um, 83 00:08:07,480 --> 00:08:14,260 she's drawn more to setting fantasy in the, in the present day, uh, low fantasy as opposed to high fantasy. 84 00:08:15,940 --> 00:08:24,010 Uh, and then lastly, uh, actually the Gwynn, um, California born, uh, writer in 1929. 85 00:08:24,070 --> 00:08:30,970 Uh, she started writing fantasy fiction when she was nine years old and did not come across the Lord of the rings until she was 25, 86 00:08:31,330 --> 00:08:34,810 obviously, because it hadn't been published until she was 25. 87 00:08:35,740 --> 00:08:40,990 Um, when the Lord of the rings appeared in the library, she reveals in, uh, in an essay. 88 00:08:41,680 --> 00:08:45,500 Um, I shied away from it. I was afraid of it. It looks dull. 89 00:08:45,520 --> 00:08:48,790 I thought, it's like the Saturday Review. It's probably affected. 90 00:08:49,180 --> 00:08:55,839 It's probably allegorical. Allegorical. Once I went so far as to pick up volume two when it alone was on the rack. 91 00:08:55,840 --> 00:09:01,150 And look at the first page. The two towers. People were rushing around on a hill looking for one another. 92 00:09:01,390 --> 00:09:05,260 The language looked a bit stilted. I put it back, the eyes that threw me. 93 00:09:07,040 --> 00:09:09,870 The early fantasy that she was writing. Um. 94 00:09:10,760 --> 00:09:16,940 Now, the early fantasy she was reading, uh, people like Little Tanzania, uh, or the pulp stories and Astounding Stories. 95 00:09:17,480 --> 00:09:21,920 Uh, but she was more interested in people like Charles Dickens and Tolstoy than the Fantasists. 96 00:09:22,580 --> 00:09:26,630 When she eventually read Tolkien, she found herself relieved that she hadn't read him earlier. 97 00:09:28,280 --> 00:09:33,320 Um, by the time I read Tolkien, however, though I had not yet written anything of merit. 98 00:09:33,440 --> 00:09:38,630 I was old enough and had worked long and hard at my craft to be set in my ways, to know my own way. 99 00:09:40,100 --> 00:09:47,810 Um. Just get to the end quickly. Um, so her most famous work is the Wizard of Earthsea series, set in Earthsea, which is a secondary world. 100 00:09:48,500 --> 00:09:53,500 Um, she, uh, how Tolkien in her mind when she first created it. 101 00:09:53,550 --> 00:09:58,400 Uh, she was asking herself questions about, uh, wizards with grey beards who are ageless. 102 00:09:58,400 --> 00:10:05,540 Gandalf. What? How did they become, um, these old grey bearded, uh, mages? 103 00:10:05,840 --> 00:10:09,049 Uh, and so she invented a school for magic sets on the island of. 104 00:10:09,050 --> 00:10:14,990 Right. Uh, my dad, who's the main character, um, attends the school, and. 105 00:10:14,990 --> 00:10:22,550 But the books lean less heavily on Western medieval traditions and Tolkien and instead look to a range of non European stories and mythologies. 106 00:10:23,090 --> 00:10:27,140 Whereas in middle earth, antagonists are usually dark skinned and come from the east. 107 00:10:27,440 --> 00:10:30,170 And Earthsea Get Skin is described as copper brown. 108 00:10:32,090 --> 00:10:42,200 Um, Daoism is also very important, uh, to the kind of really, uh, philosophical, uh, magic system, uh, of the books as this young psychology. 109 00:10:43,770 --> 00:10:48,000 Uh, so in conclusion, we tend to think of Tolkien as a monolith. 110 00:10:48,070 --> 00:10:57,000 Uh, and yes, he is directly inspired. Later theories such as The Wheel of Time, uh, uh, by, uh, Robert Jordan and Terry Brooks Shannara series. 111 00:10:57,570 --> 00:11:00,690 Um, but even at the beginning of this post Tolkien era, 112 00:11:00,690 --> 00:11:07,530 there were writers who were reacting critically to his work or were more intent on pursuing their own ideas of what fantasy could be. 113 00:11:09,000 --> 00:11:09,270 Thank you.