John Ronald Reuel Tolkien Oxford Professor, master of the languages and
literatures of the ancient north poet, storyteller Creator of the Ents the Orcs, the Hobbits,
the high Elves, the black riders, of Rivendell, Lothlórien and the Misty mountains, of Mirkwood and the
black land of Mordor. Of the fellowship of the Ring and the dark lord. J.R.R. Tolkien maker of Middle-earth. The legends of the Silmarillion root and ground of the world he created have been an inspiration to other artists. The Hobbit written for his children and published more than half a century ago, is
known now all over the world. And the Lord of the Rings has come to be
widely regarded as a formative book of our time. Nearly 40 years after its first publication a special edition, illustrated by the artist Alan Lee, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Tolkien's birth, sold out as soon as it reached the bookshops. Christopher Tolkien: I think that I would say that the appeal the attraction lies in my father's extraordinary power of compelling literally believe in an unreal world,
what he called a secondary world. That is a world that exists only in the mind. It cannot be seen, cannot be found. It exists only in the mind. And many people have discovered, perhaps many people
for the first time in their lives, have discovered that this is a very delightful thing. And this world that they enter, proves to be an extraordinary interesting place, with a long imagined past. In this world strange beings, beautiful, noble, terrifying, hideous, strange places, strange events are encountered. But in this world of his devising when you enter it, they are true. Their existence cannot be doubted, so long as you're in that world. Because they are cored with the laws that govern it. Tom Shippey: I think the ultimate secret
of Tolkien's continuing popular appeal, is something that was a mystery even to him. And uh, I would say it was a quality of imagination. He was able to imagine and to make real,
things which nobody had ever thought about before. The kind of thing I mean is uh for instance Ents. Nobody ever talked about Ents before,
they're not part of the the background literature. They're not part of the tradition. He just made them up. But once he made them up Everybody understood them. Everybody can recognize them. Another even more of its example is Hobbits. Hobbit even sounds like a proper English word,
but it isn't, he made it up. And he made the whole conception up behind it,
and yet once he invented that, everybody in a sense has understood it
and many people have actually imitated it. So he was able to to create these creatures and also I think these characters,
I think you only have to say Gollum Gollum now and everybody knows what you mean
and what kind of character you're imitating. This is a quality which very few writers have. They can invent a notion which becomes
known to the wider world, even among people who haven't read the book. J.R.R. Tolkien was born in South Africa
of English parents in 1892. When he was four his mother brought him and his
younger brother Hilary to England to visit relatives. During the visit the boy's
father died in South Africa, and Mabel Tolkien decided to settle
with her two sons in England. It was to the rural hamlet of Sarehole
on the southern edge of Birmingham that Mabel Tolkien brought John Ronald and Hilary. This was the countryside where she herself had been brought up. And it was here that Tolkien first
discovered his deep and abiding love of nature. And his roots in the west midlands. Tragically when John Ronald was 12 Mabel Tolkien died. She had converted to the catholic faith some years previously. And inspired by her memory J.R.R. Tolkien
remained a devout roman catholic all his life. As his eldest son father John Tolkien recalls. It's one of those things that if you have
something like that, you can't sort of say particularly where it comes out, I think. It pervade all his thinking and beliefs and everything else. So I think he was very much... always a christian. And um didn't like the changes in the church in post war, because he very strongly couldn't see any point
in abandoning Latin, because he spoke Latin. And he had his little... tiny little missal. Which he'd always had. I don't know how long it,
I've got it actually, in Latin. He used to try and struggle with using the Latin missal with the English mass. Robert Murray: Clearly as soon as his mother
became a catholic and he became a catholic, he just breathed that air and it all fitted in together, but... I wouldn't mean for a moment that it was his intention
to write a book that would teach catholic ideals through a book that... Not necessarily... that wouldn't necessarily have been crude allegory, but it wouldn't have been the kind of thing that he would have done. No, the values are there all the time, because he was that kind of person. But I don't think the primary intention at any time was to exhibit noble ideals to the world, and try to persuade the world to live by them.
I think he just held these ideals. The world of Tolkien's books was already forming in his mind during his school days at king Edwards in Birmingham, and later as an undergraduate at Oxford university. His third son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien
who lives in France with his wife Baillie, has edited and published many writings,
that were left in manuscript form at his father's death. He speaks of the nature of Tolkien's world
what he himself called a secondary world. In his secondary world, which he worked on all his life. He developed it to this extraordinary vastness solidity, and coherence which is I suppose unique. And this secondary world, which is usually referred to as mistakenly but entirely understandably as Middle-earth. This comprehensive secondary world, inevitably it's his world He uh... its content will be... His content it will contain his griefs, his hopes, his experience, his concept of
beauty and ugliness, his concept of good and evil. It will not be an ideal world, he wasn't interested in utopias, far from it, but it will to inevitably, I think be an archaic world in some aspects. Its archaism, shows itself at once in the relatively small space that the man-made takes in it. In relation to the world, we inhabit now and for him the man-made was the great problem. He once said to me: You know, it isn't the not man like the weather Nor man, even at a bad level, it's the man-made
that is so ultimately daunting and insupposable. So his secondary world
contains an extraordinarily small, relatively speaking to our
world, amount of the man-made. And it's very well known it's often said he disliked
the modern world, of course, this is absolutely true. But what I would like to say is that it was absolutely
inevitable that he should. It springs from exactly the same source as his desire for fantasy. In the modern world, the word modern is the word that has to be emphasized He loved the world. And he was in no conceivable sense a misanthrope. The modern world meant for him essentially ''the machine''. And once again, this was a word that he tended... he tried to enlarge. So that, when he speaks of ''the machine''
and he more than once expressly said, that it was one of the underlying themes for him
in the Lord of the Rings was ''the machine''. We should think of something rather more than what the word ''machine''
naturally suggests to us trains, motorcars, airplanes. He used it very compendiously to mean
almost you might say an alternative solution. To the development of the innate and inherent powers and talents of human beings. The machine means for him... meant for him The... the wrong solution the attempt to actualize our desires, like our desire to fly. It meant coercion, domination, for him the great enemy. Coercion of other minds and other wills, this is tyranny. But he also saw the characteristic activity
of the modern world as the coercion. The tyrannous reformation of the Earth, our place. That is really why he hated machines. Of course, it's perfectly true, he hated the internal combustion engine,
for perfectly good practical reasons. I mean... Noise, congestion, destruction of cities
and many people greatly agree with him now. And Tolkien's distaste, extended to modern labor-saving machinery. He used to sort of say, you only move the slavery out of sight, so it's much more effective, because nobody knows what's going on. So you put them in the factories, where you can't see them. He actually mentioned this, in a letter that I think is worth quoting,
that he wrote to me when I was in South Africa. And he spoke of the tragedy and despair,
of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art, which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire. And so to create power in this world and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labor-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labor In addition to this fundamental disability of a creature, is added before. Which makes our devices not only fail of their desire, but turn to new and horrible evil. And so we come inevitably, from Daedalus and Icarus, to the giant bomber. And of course in his secondary world ''the machine'' is, as he would say mythologized in the mythological mode. Because he is dealing entirely in the representation
of his perception of the primary world in the secondary world form the world, if you like a Middle-earth. And... I think it is, undoubtedly true, that in this very large sense of the word ''machine'', the supreme machine, in the mythological terms
is the ring is the One ring. This of course may seem extraordinary
because many people would feel like saying: surely the ring is the most magic thing of all. To which he would have said: magic is very close to the machine. Magic is coercion, is the coercion of the world,
the attempt by apparatus to transform the world. And indeed the Elves... As he again said, in saying all this I'm largely drawing on
what he himself said and putting it in my way. The Elves... represent... Uh, obviously they represent in a sense an aspect, they must do, of the the humane, they represent an aspect of mankind,
but raised in certain directions to a higher power with powers that men don't actually possess. And that the ultimate aim of the Elves is art and not power. Whereas Men have taken the solution of power. Represented by the machine. The Ring is the ultimate machine
because it was made for coercion. Made by Sauron to coerce and that is why, the only solution to the problem, of the ring, as the wise at Rivendell saw, was its destruction. And if the ring were not destroyed It wouldn't in the long run matter whether Sauron got it himself. As he said once: Gandalf if he had the ring, would be far worse than Sauron. Because he would be righteous and self-righteous. An order coerced the world to its own good.
And that was one of my father's greatest fears was the coercion... for good ends. He wasn't an unreasonable man. He wasn't an eccentric.
He wasn't absurd. And of course he recognized that one must live in the world to to an extent as it is, so he had a telephone, he even had a tape recorder when they were quite newfangled. But as a vision of how the world could be, the uh machinery of telecommunications, just as much as the airliner. No, they were not what he wanted in the world. I remember sitting with him, and I must have been quite a small boy, on the white horse hill In Berkshire, looking down over the veil of the white horse. Through which the great western railway line
goes towards Bath and Bristol. And I think even then, I appreciated his intense awareness of that hill. The archaic carving in the chalk of the white horse,
the bones of the hill. One could see Weathertop in that. But I also love a soundless sight in the valley
of the train with the line of smoke from it, but he didn't. He didn't. He saw it as the intrusion of coercion into the veil. Carrying people of high speed to destinations,
that they would be very much better off going by other means. But what aspects of the primary world did Tolkien value enough,
to bring into his secondary one? I think that the answer to that lies in the intensity of his love for the primary fundamental simplicities of a... not necessarily of the natural world,
but of the materials of the natural world. As used by men using tools and not machines. So Uh in food bread, cheese, and wine. The materials of craftsmanship: stone, wood. And so on, but also there was his extraordinarily intense feeling and amazing ability
to visualize landscapes Although in fact, he traveled as people travel now, very very little, it seems that a little went a very long way. And he... had a great... a great range of taste. Many people would naturally, I think rightly,
associate him with uh, well, of course with trees which has perhaps been in a certain sense exaggerated. That he had some sort of thing about trees,
but trees are part of a much larger thing. Or one associates him with the Shire, because he so often said that he was Hobbit-like. But I remember a letter, one of the many letters
he wrote to me in South Africa, where I had been complaining volubly as usual about the um, the awfulness... um, I didn't like it. In memory, I love it. I would love to go back. Just as he once said that he would love, but he never did, to go back to the long streets of Artois, that he hated so deeply in the war.
He said "I would have to go back". But he said... all... speaking of South Africa, and the Highveld,
where I spent so much of the time: All you say about the dryness, dustiness and smell, of the Satan licked land, reminds me of my mother.
She hated it as a land. And was alarmed to see symptoms of my father going to like it. But oddly enough, all that you say even to its detriment, only increases the longing. I have always felt to see it again. Much though, I love and admire little lanes and hedges and rustling trees, and the soft rolling contours of a rich champagne. The thing that stirs me most and comes
nearest to heart satisfaction is space. I would be willing to barter barrenness for it.
Indeed I think I like barrenness itself whenever I've seen it. My heart still lingers among the high stony wastes,
among the moraines and the mountain wreckage. Silent in spite of the sound of thin chill water. Intellectually, and aesthetically, of course, man cannot live on stone and sand. But I at any rate cannot live on bread alone. And if there was not bare rock and pathless sand
and the unharvested sea, I should grow to hate all green things as a fungi growth. His more, uh, passionate and exaggerated stuff. But I quote that because hey this is true. He could even... uh Bailey and I have... used to think that his marvelous description of the land called Ithilien, through which Frodo and Sam and Gollum passed on their way into Mordor, this beautiful land of quick waterfalls and herbs that smelt when you walked on them. Extraordinarily like parts of Provence, which he never seen. His sense of land and landscape was more than merely visual. Together with the language spoken by the people of the land it was for him an essential element in
what he described as his primary passion. A passion of mine ''ab initio'' was for myth and for fairy-story. And above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world
accessible to me for my appetite. I am not 'learned' in the matters of myth and fairy-story, however, for in such things I have always been seeking material, things of a certain tone and air, and not simple knowledge. Also, and here I hope I shall not sound absurd, I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country; It had no stories of its own. Bound up with its tongue and soil. Not of the quality that I sought and found
as an ingredient in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian and Finnish which greatly affected me. But nothing English save impoverished chapbook stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world,
but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English
and does not replace what I felt to be missing. In the same letter, he went on to say: Once upon a time, my crest has long since fallen, I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, which I could dedicate to England, to my country. For Tolkien, this was a way of replacing that, which England had lost. House, England demythologized? I would say
the short answers are 1066 and the industrial revolution. In 1066 the uh, English literary class was uh, eliminated or dispossessed. We don't know what went down the plug with them, but we do know that native English literature was replaced,
very soon, by a French-based literature. And uh what we've got left from before 1066 are fragments. Um, we've got Beowulf with Grendel we've got Beowulf with the dragon. We've got the strange 'Sigurd Gudrún' creatures who come out of exodus. We don't have any old English reference to 'wudu-wāsan', woodwoses. We only get people remembering them some hundreds of years later. But the memory of them some hundred years later indicates that, perhaps there was a time when people really did know what they were. But we don't know about it anymore,
because all that's been eliminated. So a whole tradition I think of... non-human supernatural creatures has just been wiped away, with only a few smears and scratches remaining. And that is something which happened
to England because of 1066 which didn't happen to other European countries. And then the industrial revolution came along and of course, it came earlier in
England than in other countries. And when it came along, uh it took people's interests away from the fairy tales and the folktales, which they used to get from their nannies. Now in Germany they were still telling them in the 19th century when the Grimms made their collection. But when English collectors went around
trying to make similar collections inspired by the Grimms in the later 19th century there wasn't very much left at all. So by the accidents of defeat in battle, or of economic progress, I think a whole native English
world of stories was destroyed. And ever since then England has... not had,
as it were, a native mythology. It's had to borrow things from other people
like trolls from Scandinavians for instance. Queen Margrethe II: As a Dane as a Scand' somebody
brought up in this part of the world and with the brought up with A lot of the Norse sagas
and... and the Eddas and things like that, which quite naturally came into my school curriculum. I recognized such a lot of little snippets and bits and pieces I said I wonder who this man can be, he must know an awful lot about... about a Norse mythology. and I could also see that he was doing fascinating things with words and and names and I could recognize little snippets again, which was I mean quite plain, uh Norse or... I don't know ancient Norse myself. But I know Danish of course and I also know both Swedish and Norwegian. So I have a fairly broad knowledge of... of Nordic languages and I could see that this was a most unusual business and... and I remember I even thought
that there were bits that in his created languages which
sounded very much like Finnish And it was only much much later that I realized that they did indeed. Love of language was a fundamental element in Tolkien's creativity. At the same time his love of the natural world
inspired him throughout his life. He loved trees and flowers with deep urgent love
but I don't think he could really be called a botanist. He didn't have that kind...
he obviously had the analytical wits for it. But they were all entirely used on philology I don't think he would have
wished, he certainly wouldn't have despised, but he wouldn't have wished to spend his time analyzing plants into different species. They would... they would get taken up into the
secondary world very quickly and become The plants in the in...
of Middle-earth like Niphredil or Simbelmynë the white flower that grew
specifically on the mounds of the dead. He would see them clearly he had evidently
a very powerful visualizing mind. But I think that the name Simbelmynë or Niphredil were absolutely essential to their existence in his mind. One thing I think I've learned from Tolkien Which I think he'd be pleased about is that,
he's made me a better observer. I actually look at things which he looked at
because I've read him writing about them and uh started taking interest in them myself. So Tolkien I think is the the kind of person
who turns people into into bird watchers, or tree spotters or hedgerow grubbers people look at the plants and try to work out what they are what their...
what their old name was, you know, what they ought to be called now. The thing I never knew before, is the the tree which I call a 'Rowan' and which other people call a mountain-ash,
Rowan is Norse. Mountain-ash is modern learned. What's the English word for it? I never knew, but actually I read the Lord of the Rings
carefully and I realized that the old English word is 'cwic-beám' quickbeam and actually the modern English word is quicken or wicken. Now I know lots of people who have names like Wickenden.
I just didn't know what it meant before. An established Oxford don Tolkien's genius was further employed in the 1920s and 30s creating stories for his four children. John, Michael, Christopher and Priscilla. He had married Edith Bratt in 1916. And was now settled with his family in north Oxford. J.R.R Tolkien was also a talented artist. And every December
he combined this with his gift for storytelling. In 1920 when John was three years old
Tolkien had written a note to his son in shaky handwriting signed Father Christmas. From then on he produced letters every Christmas
to his children's great delight. John Tolkien: They used to come either by post, with a postman because he bribed the person
to put them through the door with a post. Or they if they were a bit late they were on the match
in the in front of the stove in the dining room and there would be snowy footpaths across the floor. Um... we never discovered... for a long time,
nobody suspected that they were him. Until one night... We used to hang our big stockings
on the bottoms of bed and one night Michael, and I still had a room together and uh He... the door open we hadn't gone to sleep and he stubbed to his door. Foot on the door, and said blast, the only way that he could say it. and I knew who it was but we hid under the blanket
to not to let him know that we knew. And we never let on to anybody that we knew till years after it. He was extremely um clever in making the whole
Father Christmas... uh business, totally credible to young children This was the thing of the postman Bringing the letters to the door with the north pole stamps on them And the uh... the whole way in which one... we put letters on the fire. And in the earlier part of the year, say in October, they wouldn't go for weeks and then suddenly they would go. And we were at that stage of our lives
deeply convinced in the reality of this. Deeply convinced. Of course one was more interested in the presence, in a way. Whereas you can see from his letters that
there was beginning to be a new secondary world. There's a sense in which nonetheless we were actually drawn in I think to the secondary world. It was actually existing. So it was intensely exciting. Intensely exciting and frightening. Because when one heard once
couldn't go to sleep on Christmas Eve, but when one heard the
tread of Father Christmases feet coming up the stairs and one pulled the clothes over one's head and... Because something very strange had entered the house. Baillie Tolkien: After my father-in-law died and we received this vast mass of papers, that he had kept all those years.
Some of which hadn't been looked at by anyone other than him possibly not by him. Uh, the the Father Christmas letters turned up.
Nobody knew that they still existed. Nobody knew that he'd kept them but he had. And they were there absolutely intact
with the envelopes and stamps and everything. And it was decided that... we could try to... it could be tried to make them into a book. They do produce a fairly coherent story even though they consisted of these isolated letters written once a year. And they of course do relate to his primary imagination as Christopher said the creation of a new secondary world began, but it was one which was very closely related to the... to the main one. Judi Dench: What do you think?
The poor dear old bear has been and done this time? Nothing as bad as letting off all the lights. Only fell from top to bottom of the main stairs on Thursday. We were beginning to get the first lot of
parcels down out of the storerooms into the hall Polar bear would insist on taking an enormous
pile on his head as well as lots in his arms. Bang, rumble, clutter, crash, awful moanings and growlings! I ran out onto the landing and saw he'd fallen
from top to bottom onto his nose. Leaving a trail of balls bundles
parcels and things all the way down. And he'd fallen on top of some and smashed them. I hope you got none of these by accident. I've drawn you a picture of it all. Polar bear was rather grumpy at my drawing it. He says my Christmas pictures always make fun of him. And that one year he will send one
drawn by himself of me being idiotic. But of course, I never am and he can't draw well enough. When he'd picked himself up he ran out of doors and wouldn't help clear up
because I sat on the stairs and laughed, as soon as I found out there was not much damage done. The character of the polar bear of course who emerges as more and more of a personality as as time went on and escapades um involving him, but I think that the thing that stays with me is the... the goblin wars in the caves because I think that's the point at which it touches most closely the the real imaginative creation. It has everything, it has a Father Christmas
who is a sort of Gandalf figure it had... It had the goblins it has a runic alphabet it has caves, battles, Elves so they're quite different but everything is there. The Father Christmas letters were produced
in book form after Tolkien's death, edited by Baillie Tolkien. But the first of his creative works to be published took shape as a long story read to John, Michael
and Christopher on winter evenings. Now a classic children's book
the Hobbit began in an unusual way. Tolkien: The actual beginning, though
it's not really the beginning, but the actual flashpoint was I remember very clearly, I could even... um, I could still see the corner in my house
in 20 Northmoor Road where it happened. I got an enormous pile of exam papers there. And... marking school examinations in the summertime is a is an enormous um... very laborious and unfortunately also boring. And I remember picking up a paper and actually find, nearly gave an extra mark for it extra five marks actually, there was one page of this particular paper
was left blank. Glorious! Nothing to read. So I scribbled on it,
I can't think why, In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. I think the Hobbits function as replacements for us. Or as creatures with it with whom we can identify. And I think this is something that happens
quite a lot in historical fiction. To give an example outside Tolkien, C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower stories
have been very successful over a long period, and there you have uh a character set in the the
brutal world of the royal navy in the 19th century With you know the lash and the rum ration
continually being described, you can't help thinking you know, how would someone like me manage in a world like that? And the answer is perhaps not too well. Well Hornblower is a 20th century person in a 19th century setting and he actually expresses
the attitudes that we would feel and he shows somebody who is
like a 20th century person coping Coping very well in these extremely difficult circumstances. Well, the hobbits are rather like that.
I wouldn't say they're exactly 20th century people. But they're obviously English people. And they're English people who are coping, in a world which uh in a sense is far too big for them.
And yet they grow into it. You get Bilbo Baggins at the start of the Hobbit being Quite sneered at by the Dwarves who think he's absolutely
no good for anything and nothing but useless baggage. But as the story goes on Bilbo though he
doesn't become a hero like the Dwarves, nevertheless shows that he can survive in that world that he can manage and that he has qualities which are at least comparable with the heroic qualities of the characters, uh by whom he's surrounded. The hobbit published in 1937 was a success. And the publisher Stanley Unwin wrote to Tolkien: "A large public will be clamoring next
year to hear more from you about Hobbits." They were to hear a great deal more about Hobbits. Hobbits are just, well rustic English people
made small in size because it reflects the general small reach of their imagination, but it's not
the small reach of their courage or latent power. I think the Hobbits are not only specifically
English but Tolkien would have said straight away that there are specifically West Midlanders,
that they remind him of the society of his youth. And they come actually from Warwickshire,
Worcestershire, possibly Oxfordshire, Herefordshire, but he really means a very close area.
And in many ways they represent as it were, you know, traditional English feelings. One of the things for instance
which Sam Gamgee says at one point, which is quite anachronistic in the Lord of the Rings. He says to Gollum who is complaining about the food as usual, he says look if we ever get home, Gollum,
I'll cook you some nice fish and chips. Well, potatoes actually
shouldn't existed in Middle-earth cause they are, you know, a late introduction to this world, nevertheless fish and chips is the traditional English
diet and that naturally then is what the Hobbits offer. That's their their main idea of a delicacy. They're also I think in a sense a voice from the past, not the remote past the rather recent past, but the Hobbits have the attitudes
perhaps of my grandfather's time. They are firmly attached to comfort to
six square meals a day if they can get them. Um, they haven't heard about
dieting or slimming or anything like that. You would never get a Hobbit jogging
I think under any circumstances, nevertheless they have a virtues of their own. And they are, as Tolkien says,
surprisingly able to endure rough handling. There is a kind of toughness in the fiber which they have. Yet, Tolkien himself was equivocal
about both them and the book. On the 14th of December 1937 two months
after the Hobbit had been published and I think about two days before he began the Lord of the Rings, he said to a friend of his... he wrote to a friend of his: I don't much approve of the Hobbit myself. Preferring my own mythology, which is just touched on. With its consistent nomenclature Elrond, Gondolin have escaped out of it and organized history, I prefer that to this rabble of Eddaic named Dwarves out of the Völuspá newfangled Hobbits and Gollums invented
in an idol hour and Anglo-Saxon rooms. Tolkien's own mythology had begun many years earlier
in his first and perhaps most important creative work. Which would not be published until after his death. The Silmarillion was my... Was the primary central work of my father's secondary world. One of the chief things that people know
about it I think is that it was unfinished. But I think this is in a way misleading. The real point is is that there were several Silmarillions. When he was very young man during the first world war and in the years immediately following he wrote a work called the Book of Lost Tales. Which the little notebooks... that he used still exist, little penny notebooks, and some parts of it he recorded... were written in the trenches under shell fire. And this was the first Silmarillion I know he didn't then call it that. It's quite unlike his later manner of
writing when he adopted a much more remote, exalted even manner for his mythology. It's more immediate it's even funny. It's written in an extraordinarily flowery consciously archaic manner.
Which I think is very attractive. But there already in often in very early undeveloped forms, are the great stories, the great legends, which
were an inspiration to him throughout his life. Above all the 'Lay of Beren and Lúthien' and the tragedy of Túrin Turambar. Another Silmarillion was already in existence by about 1930. And that is very different it's as I said
in a more remote style and it's a... it's more chronicle-like. The important thing is that was
finished the Book of Lost Tales you could say was finished the
1930s Silmarillion was finished. It's complete, a completely enclosed myth. Not presupposing any later ages. And at that stage
the Hobbit had no connection with it. In fact, he said in a letter
that he wrote in 1964, he said: By the time the Hobbit appeared in 1937 this... The Silmarillion was in coherent form. The Hobbit was not intended to have anything to do with it. I had the habit while my children were
still young of inventing and telling orally, sometimes writing down “children's stories” in
inverted commas, for their private amusement. The Hobbit was intended to be one of them. It had no necessary connection with the
mythology, by which he means the Silmarillion. But naturally became attracted towards
this dominant construction in my mind. Causing the tale to become larger and more heroic as it proceeded. Even so it could really stand quite apart. And so you see the the famous names of Middle-earth such as the Misty mountains, Mirkwood, the great river of Wilderland. They began with the Hobbit and
had no necessary association at all with the mythology as it existed at that time. The Lord of the Rings was... began as the sequel to the Hobbit. But this dominant construction 'in my mind' as he said attracted everything into it. Attracted the Hobbit and still more of
course attracted the Lord of the Rings. So the Lord of the Rings becomes in the most complex fashion both the sequel to the Hobbit
and heavily involved with the Silmarillion. The Lord of the Rings
Tolkien's 'heroic romance' as he called it. With its vast imagined world was begun in 1937. But it took him twelve years to write. At the same time he continued with his academic work as professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, which
was so closely related to his creative writing. I think that they were intertwined with each other. Which I call the content as opposed
to the practice of his academic work is one of the primary ingredients in the secondary world. Of many kinds, Anglo-Saxon above all,
and of course the philology. The philology of the primary world relates very very closely to the languages of the secondary world. Sindarin and Quenya, the languages...
the Elvish languages of Middle-earth. Uh, they're totally different in the sense in which he meant used the word fantasy,
they are the languages of the fantasy. But they're very hard.
They're hard bitten. They have their own severe phonetics
their severe grammatical history. which shows, I think is important,
because it shows what the word fantasy means. There's nothing crazy or absurd in the idea. His fantasy philology
is just as just as strict as the philology of the Germanic languages
that he practiced as a... that he expanded as a professor.
So I think that his academic the content of his academic
life to say intertwined and was productive, very productive in his sub-creative world. it seems to me that he poured everything he knew about early literature into the fiction. And that one of the great strengths
of the fiction has been this sense of an enormous weight of knowledge and
accumulated experience and accumulated thought which has been put into it and which
cannot be counterfeited, which cannot be faked. In terms of actual content, of course
an important element in the Lord of the Rings which plays no other part no part in the Hobbit,
I think or not in the Silmarillion but plays a very important part in Lord of the Rings
is the kingdom of Rohan. Which is modeled on, in a sense, transformed it's not supposed to be historical because it's in the secondary world,
but the inspiration for Rohan derives very evidently from Anglo-Saxon England
and the philology does not derive from any direct imitation of real
languages in the world not at all. But of course it does derive from his mastery of the history of actual languages. That is to say his knowledge of the history of English, German, so forth, other Germanic languages He used this He used this kind of knowledge his knowledge of phonetics
of phonetic history to devise his own languages. That is what gives them their extraordinary credibility because he composed them historically. He started from ancient forms and just as with a real language within the history of Middle-earth,
he devised the changes of pronunciation that overtook them, just as they do in real languages. And therefore if he wanted a new word within one of these languages he didn't uh, simply select a
few syllables that attracted him. He worked out what that
word would actually be And he works out as well the sound changes that will it fictionally, will have passed over them in the course of time. As they do in all languages this is what
gives to these languages they're extraordinary, one of the most powerful
things in his works even for those who have no understanding of the
nature of the philology this extraordinary sense that they they cohere they are real, they have the trademark of being
a totally individual speech. Just as even if you don't know French
who can say that's French or that's Swedish Because they have the characteristic note
and quality and his languages do that. And were the languages Tolkien created comprehensive? They're not entirely comprehensive because
they don't have a big enough vocabulary. On the other hand I think what you do when
you're creating languages to work out the grammar first and then in Tolkien's case you work out the main verbal roots. and then you play around with the verbal roots.
And at the end of it you have the grammar and the beginnings of a dictionary, but you also have the potential
for creating the rest of the dictionary. But you don't have to create the whole of the dictionary you only use the word you happen to need
at that particular moment. I first began seriously invent languages about time when I was 13 or 14,
I've never stopped, really. Languages have a flavor to me which are... I never understand people saying for instance
it was awfully dry and dull. Because the new language to me is just like taking
a new wine or some new sweet bit of something. As the creator or sub-creator of these languages He could take great delight in them
because he could make the sounds that were developed by the phonetic
changes attractive to his own ear. So that he could say that
Quenya was the language that he really deeply desired there's none of
the languages of the world really came quite there. He loved Anglo-Saxon, but he didn't like it as much. He loved Finnish, which was an important influence on Quenya. But Quenya was the language of his heart
it was the language that he wanted. What I'm doing now is to try and write in Elvish with obviously my writing
is very inferior to the Elves. Their standard greeting when meeting:
"A star shines upon our meeting". Oh god, I made a mistake didn't I... And that's stands for: "Elen síla lumenn' omentielvo". It's piece of rather beautiful language, I think. "A Elbereth Gilthoniel silivren Penna míriel o menel aglar elenath! Na-chaered palan-díriel o galadhremmin ennorath, Fanuilos, le linnathon nef aear, sí nef aearon!" During the long years in which he
worked on the languages and the legends the stories themselves seem to evolve. As if under other influence and that of their creator. In the case for instance particularly of the Silmarillion, what is so fascinating is because it lasted so long
and because he wrote so many versions, you can follow the changes in great detail, when you got the papers in the right order. And the movements in the legends moving from one text to another very gradually mean that after the passage of years in my
father's life you have a movement in the legends similar to the actual movements
in the legends of actual peoples. So you see in one particular case I can think of... a great king in the earlier stages of mythology Orodreth of Nargothrond. He slowly as the years pass becomes diminished and is ultimately rejected completely from the dynasty... the kingly dynasty he uh he belong to. And the reason for this was that another of my father's legends slowly made contact with the first one.
And the internal dynamics of the legends, forced this king into a inferior and therefore he becomes cowardly weak and in a sense disappears through the sheer internal energy or
dynamics of the movements of the legends. Throughout his life J.R.R. Tolkien enjoyed discussing literary subjects with his friends and colleagues. He belonged to many literary clubs both official
and unofficial where lively debates took place. In Oxford for many years he was a
central figure in a group called the Inklings. They met every week in a pub called The Eagle and Child. Rayner Unwin: It's only uh strangers who call it
the Eagle and Child, it's really the Bird and Baby. And in the Bird and Baby the Inklings
who were a group of like-minded dons and near dons, used to meet
from 1939 right through the war. They came every Tuesday lunchtime they sat in this room and they were in fact a club... a male club. And they met also in evenings
In C.S. Lewis's rooms in Magdalen. Very few outside his generation came to them I was lodging during some of this period just up the road, never knew they were happening these meetings
of the inklings, but it was a very important thing. And it's nice to be still in this pub
and where you can imagine them sitting around not in great comfort and
during the war not with even very much beer. but talking, "literary talk" and uh working in complete isolation from the rest of the literary establishment. During the evening meetings in Lewis's rooms,
the inklings read parts of their books to each other. The Lord of the Rings was read chapter by chapter. At that sound the bent shape of
the king sprang suddenly erect. Tall and proud he seemed again;
and rising in his stirrups he cried in a loud voice, more clear than any there had ever
heard a mortal man achieve before: Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter! spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor! The Inklings had a small nucleus of regular members
with others attending on an occasional basis. But at the center of the group was Tolkien's great friend C.S. Lewis. The profound attachment and imaginative intimacy between him and Lewis was I think
in some ways the the real core of it. Certainly it was of profound importance
to my father, that relationship. Did to both of them. The fact that they drifted apart in their... um later on, I think myself is... it was sad. But I think I would say that it was no more than a drifting apart. I don't think myself that it really
requires to be studied in in depth, I think what I should concentrate on was the extraordinary support of mind,
of taste that they offered each other. Priscilla Tolkien: I think he felt that he owed a very great deal to Lewis in his encouragement of him as a writer. And I think he did say and certainly conveyed this,
but for Lewis's encouragement when things were difficult, he might never have got the Lord of the Rings complete. So I think he felt an enormous debt to him there, and they mutually gave each other a
great encouragement over their writings. I think that it was the most tremendous
grief and blow when when Lewis died. Even though in the years preceding Lewis's death, following Lewis's marriage and also after his move to Cambridge, they'd not met regularly and they'd seen very little of each other. And there was a lessening of the bond a loosening of the bonds and a loss of what my father would call the communion between them. But nonetheless, I think the memory was
always there and the affection remained. In the letter he wrote to me which is in response to a
letter I wrote to him of sympathy after Lewis's death, he said that he had the normal feelings of... of a man of his age who feels he is losing his leaves, one by one. But the Lewis's death felt like an axe being taken to the roots. Which I think is... expresses far more
than anything else what he must have felt. With Lewis's encouragement Tolkien persevered with
the enormous task of completing the Lord of the Rings. It is often said that the writings of any major
author must to some extent be autobiographical. How true was is in Tolkien's case? Both specifically in the Lord of the Rings
and generally in his other works? I have a passage taken from my father's story Leaf by Niggle, which is probably the most obviously autobiographical of anything he wrote I think. And Mr. Niggle is is a painter who can never get his big work finished
which is a painting of a tree. And finally he comes to die which is what he's called in the story going on a journey. And he finds himself eventually in another country. Niggle pushed open the gate, jumped on the bicycle and went
bowling downhill in the spring sunshine. before long he found the path on
which he had started had disappeared, and the bicycle was rolling along over a marvelous turf. It was green and close; and yet he could see every blade distinctly. He seemed to remember having seen or
dreamed of that sweep of grass somewhere or other. The curves of the land were familiar somehow. Yes:
The ground was becoming level as it should and now, of course, it was beginning to rise again. A great green shadow came between him and the sun. Niggle looked up, and fell off his bicycle. Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the Tree, and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide. "It's a gift!" he said. He was referring to his art, and also to the result; but he was using the word quite literally. And that passage I think illustrates very profoundly my father's belief in the source of his own inspiration. One of the things where I feel rather sympathetic
to Tolkien is that he was a very private person. He didn't expect as it were to have
biographical criticism perpetrated on him. And I don't think you'd have liked it if it had happened. Having said that, nobody can avoid putting
their personal life into their fiction. I mean what else have you got to put
into it other than in his case... the learning. So I’m sure that in many respects,
like for instance, his war service, his experience with the war and also the terrible
experience of having been in the war to end all wars. And then seeing his sons go off to fight the
next war to end all wars all that I think is very much part of his fiction, and one way of looking at the Lord of the Rings I think is to see it as a post-war book except because it was written during the second world war. But all that I think affects it powerfully. He was a very jovial
man and loved good company, good wine,
good conversation. But it frequently came through that he had an
underlying melancholy. I think he believed very deeply in the mythical historical framework that
the world is running down from a golden age. And has gone fairly far. And that of course is is also the framework of... his whole creative work now that we have
so much more than just the Lord of the Rings. And his sorrow, at the destruction
of the English countryside. this came out again and again and
again and that is really encapsulated in What the heroes of the Lord of the Rings
found when they went back to the Shire. And the sense of evil
actually comes across to me more powerful... more powerfully In
that scene when they come back to the Shire and see that the meanness of the destruction. This is more powerful to me than all the evocation
of the the grand and cosmic evils of Mordor itself. Because I think it the other was
storytelling but this was what he had felt. It was one of the saddest hours in their lives. The great chimney rose up before them; and as they drew near the old village across the Water, through rows of new mean houses along each side of the road, they saw the new mill in all
its frowning and dirty ugliness: a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a steaming and stinking outflow. All along the Bywater Road every tree had been felled. As they crossed the bridge and
looked up the Hill they gasped. Even Sam's vision in the Mirror had
not prepared him for what they saw. The Old Grange on the west side had been knocked
down, and its place taken by rows of tarred sheds. All the chestnuts were gone. The banks and hedgerows were broken. Great waggons were standing in disorder in a field beaten bare of grass. Bagshot Row was a yawning sand and gravel quarry. Bag End up beyond could not be seen for a clutter of large huts. "They've cut it down!" cried Sam.
"They've cut down the Party Tree!" He pointed to where the tree had stood under
which Bilbo had made his Farewell Speech. It was lying lopped and dead in the field. As if this was the last straw Sam burst into tears. Tolkien I think had a uh a melancholic
streak perhaps that's putting it too far. I would put it this way that uh when he was 22 he had many friends,
when he was 26 they were nearly all dead. Obviously an experience
like this does affect anybody and from a very early period Tolkien
obviously, continues to think about death. And part of his uh mythology Is to construct
a race of creatures who are deathless. And who wish to escape from deathlessness in the
way that human beings wish to escape from death. But the center of all that is the thought of death. The strange thing perhaps is that everybody
thinks like this sooner or later at some time, but Tolkien was thinking about that very early
on and it was a thought which never left him. But I think the reason there is
actually quite clearly biographical. It's caused by the experience of the
first world war and by seeing his whole generation of age mates at school
just wiped out apart from himself. If you really come down to it
any large story interest people... can hold their attention for a
considerable time or make the... stories frankly always... a human stories in fact,
always about one thing, aren't they? Death, inevitably of death. The passage in the Lord of the Rings
which most clearly recalls The first world war is when Frodo and Sam with Gollum are
actually crossing what they call the Dead Marshes. Now the dead marshes look very like a first world war battlefield. They're flat, they're covered in craters, there's ash heaps, and slag heaps,
and the really striking thing is that there are the unburied dead all over the place. You look down in the pools and you
see the dead bodies looking back at you Actually in the dead marshes this is a phantasm or an illusion because the dead bodies aren't really there they've been buried, you know many ages ago.
But actually the fact that it is an illusion makes you think that this is a reflection
of a reality which Tolkien had himself seen. There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and even if he knows it and
consents to it, an unjustifiable violation. We may agree with the words or not. But those
are the are the key spring of the laws of the Ring. If death was the great underlying theme of the Lord of the Rings, what were the sources of Tolkien's special creativity? I always in the writing always start with a name. Give me a name and it produces
story not the other way back, normally. I think a lot of his creativity came out of a kind of,
careful brooding about the history of places. The Lord of the Rings in some ways is a work governed by a map. And that map is a map of fantasy, but behind
the map of fantasy, there is a real map of England. But you have to know that real map very well. You have
to know it's down on the level of names of streets. Not just names of towns, for instance if I could give
one example just outside here hundred yards outside here we have Woodhouse Lane, which goes over Woodhouse
Moor to Woodhouse Ridge. What does Woodhouse mean? Well, if you look it up in the book, it says
house in the wood, which is pretty boring. But Tolkien knew that actually nobody around
here says Woodhouse they all say woodouse. And actually some of them say woodose. Now a woodose is a different thing from a wood house and Tolkien thought it might have meant
once upon a time not house in the wood, but 'wudu-wāsa' which means wild man of the woods, woodwose, satyr. And that in a sense is the start for his picture
in the Lord of the Rings of Ghân-buri-Ghân, the head men of the of the woses in the wood. Well Tolkien obviously thought to himself:
What is a woodwose? Did they really live here? It's a very good place for woodwoses because
it is that it were a heavily forested and steep site Where wild men could lurk for a long period,
well he obviously thought about that. You wouldn't think about that
if you didn't walk along the road and then again, I think he set
his story Farmer Giles of Ham in Brill which is oh 10 miles outside
Oxford and the reason uh, I think he was interested in that was that he knew that
Brill had a Celtic element in it it means brie hill. And when he looked at the map he
discovered there was a little cluster of these Celtic stroke Anglo-Saxon compounds. And of course he uh wanted to know why
and he ended up telling himself a story about it. So very often, I think that the story of the fiction comes out of a name, and a wonder, and a question, which you ask yourself. And often the I must say I found that the the answers
which he worked out to be, extremely surprising. I don't think anybody else would have worked them out.
To give one example of that, one of the I think the first word that
we ever get in the Lord of the Rings which is from the language of the Riders of Rohan, which is a kind of Old English is Emnet. And when I first read this, I thought
'emnet'' never come across it, don't know that word, wonder what it means. Um, so I looked it up in the
uh Oxford book of place names. And of course there is a place called
Emnet actually It's Emneth and it's in Norfolk. And then I worked out what it meant in Old English
and it means Emnmaeth - the even meadow. And I realized actually that what Tolkien had asked himself was if the old English had not lived in a wooded
hilly island but lived on a flat grass plain what would they call the flat grass plain?
What would their word be for step? or for prairie, what would the
native English word for that be. And he answered that
actually would be an emnet. And we haven't got any emnets in England
except actually, of course in Norfolk. That's the one place we do find flat grass planes.
So he told himself that this is the answer to it and again the thought and the word and the place name give you a major element in the culture in the whole build-up of the riders of Rohan of the Riddermark. So all the time I think uh, his mind turned on names and places and landscape and
history and it's from that that the fiction develops. The love of word lore came first. And then the imagination of a world for the
languages to live in and then the story grew with this extraordinary experience to which he bore witness that the story told itself that he as
it were heard it and put it down. And two other things that give it its incredible coherence and convincingness inducing what Coleridge called the Suspension of disbelief, it is that, the language is so coherent. Whereas in many other fantasies you
feel the names are like pantomime names. They're just reached out from here and there, but his names are all coherent. And he explains they've all got meanings in the different languages. And The other thing is... that he had this strong experience that it was given to him. That he was recording something that was happening.
And therefore the story was all important. Priscilla Tolkien recalls that parts of the story of
the Lord of the Rings had a powerful effect on her. Particularly the description of the Black Riders. I remember that I had nightmares about Black Riders, it was so powerful. The other thing I remember too, is that when I came
to read the book and re-read it a long time afterwards, I still felt just as frightened,
even though I knew what was going to happen, that they would eventually get
away as it were, from the Black Riders. And that I think remained in my mind
as a very important fact about literature. That the important thing is the... is the threat and is the feeling that you have, the fear, and not actually knowing what happens. That's perhaps one reason why I always have
found Who done it's rather unsatisfactory form of reading because if it's just the thrill of finding out what happened,
you don't really want to read it again. But if it's the emotion then that's forever if it's great literature. Verlyn Flieger: It's a very good book it's well written. It's extraordinarily rich and complex. It has some very sharply drawn
characters and it is an absorbing story, it's one of the oldest stories,
the journey. And and one of the newest in its new-old treatment. But the book itself is good, it's not just a freak,
he was a very good writer and he knew what he was doing. I suppose that my favorite character, out of all
of those wonderful characters, would be Frodo. Who to me, and there's a great debate
about this, is really the hero of the story. They're all marvelous and I love Pippin and Merry who gets kind of overlooked. But Frodo seems to me at once the most deeply timeless and the most modern Of all the people in the story. And to me it is both a very mythic and a very medievally colored story, but I think it is very deeply rooted in the 20th century in Tolkien's own time and place and... and sensibility and I think Frodo reflects that,
more than any of the others. He is somebody who takes on a job, because he has to, that nobody else wants,
and that is doomed to failure. He's too little for it literally and metaphorically and yet he rises to it better than anyone else could and he fails heroically. And that to me is very much
a manifestation of our own time and place. And what uh, everybody feels about this century that we're in. Frodo is the most ordinary and the most extraordinary of the Hobbits. Very quiet, he doesn't have the
personality quirks that some of the others do that makes them more fun to play.
He doesn't have the speech patterns that Gollum has or the kind of childishness
that makes Gollum terribly attractive. But Frodo, um could be any of us. And I don't think any of us would want to be gone.
Although we can recognize it Frodo tries very hard to do something impossible, he gives up everything In the course of it he loses everything.
Tolkien is very tough on Frodo. And I find that very moving. This is the end of the
Lord of the Rings the end of the last chapter. And I begin with Gandalf speaking At the Grey Havens as he and Frodo prepare to leave in the last ship. Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the
Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil. Then Frodo kissed Merry and Pippin and last of all Sam
and went aboard; The sails were drawn up, and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long Grey firth; and the light of the glass of Galadriel
that Frodo bore glimmered and was lost. And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo
smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the Grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond
them a far green country under a swift sunrise. But to Sam the evening deepened
to darkness as he stood at the Haven; as he looked at the Grey sea he saw only a
shadow on the waters that was soon lost in the West. There he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh
and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart. Beside him stood Merry and Pippin, and they were silent. At last the three companions turned away and
never again looking back they rode slowly homewards. And they spoke no word to one
another until they came back to the Shire. But each had great comfort in his friends on the long Grey road. At last they rode over the downs and took the east road and then Merry and Pippin rode on to Buckland. And already they were singing again as they went. But Sam turned to Bywater. And so came back up the Hill as day was ending once more. And he went on and there was yellow light and fire within and the evening meal was ready and he was expected. And Rose drew him in and set him in his chair and put little Elanor upon his lap. He drew a deep breath: Well I’m back, he said. Twelve years after he had begun it Tolkien
finally completed the Lord of the Rings in 1949 But he had great difficulty in finishing it. He would rewrite passages time and again. Constantly seeking a better expression. And he put the greatest emphasis
on the accuracy of the smallest details. I do remember him saying things like, that he had to rewrite whole part
of the Lord of Rings because he... or at least the whole chapter, which
was might have been quite a lot, because he had um described something as being by full moon. And realized on looking back at the time scheme that the he was a day in advance, that the moon
couldn't have been full for the next day. And I mean one person in the thousands of
readers would probably have noticed that, but it was... he wouldn't dream of leaving something like that in. The moons, I think, finally the moons
and the suns have worked out according to what they were in this part of the world in 1942 actually. I couldn't... I'm not a good enough
mathematician or astronomer, to work out where they might have been seven thousand eight thousand years ago. But as long as they correspond to some
real configuration I thought it was good enough. Despite Tolkien's perfectionism, The Lord of the Rings
was at last published in three volumes during 1954 and 1955. It was a book in an entirely new genre and
the publishers were worried about its reception These worries were shared by the book's author,
as he confided to his close friend father Robert Murray. He just had no idea how they would take it, and Rayner Unwin himself had slightly suggested such fears to him. That people would think of it as an allegory or a book
with a message or something and he appalled that idea. So he really didn't know what would happen, he thought it
might be taken in a in a vulgar spirit just as a thriller. He thought it was the most important thing he had done. He cared deeply about all the values
which are enshrined in it, which are very old-fashioned values the values of epic poetry and chivalry and all kinds of things which
people now connect with the middle ages. He cared very much about all these things and I
think that those ancient values are very far from dead. But have been stifled in modern culture. But he tapped the sources of continuing enthusiasm for them. The whole position of Aragorn as the king who is to return is like a kind of secular messianism. An expected king a descendant
of the glorious king of the past who is going to come back. We're familiar with its Jewish biblical form. But there's an analogous form in the idea that king Arthur is not dead but sleeping and will come back. Which is there in some strands of mythical thinking in our literature. And I think he... he tapped all that. And in a letter to father Murray, Tolkien said:
I'm afraid it is only too likely to be true what you say about the critics and the public. I am dreading the publication for it will be impossible not to mind what is said. I have exposed my heart to be shot at. I think the publishers are very anxious, too. And they are very keen that as many people
as possible should read advanced copies and form a sort of opinion before the hack critics get busy. When it first came out the... most of the first reviews of it couldn't have got it more wrong. I think my favorite comment is by the reviewer in the Times
that re-supplement 25th. November 1955 who nailed his colors to the mast. He said: This is not a work that many adults
will read right through more than once. Well, that must have seemed a safe bet at the time because uh it's twelve hundred pages long and you wouldn't
expect many people to read it right through more than once, but actually, of course they have. It is a book which has been read through by an
enormous number of adults many more times than once. Another classic I think really again, uh, you know a
book when people might possibly have have learned better. This book says talking in a very advanced critical
language that the Lord the Rings is over coded. Because the mega text has to be
constantly explained, well leave that aside. But it goes on to say nor of the histories and
genealogies in the least necessary to the narrative. But they have given much infantile
happiness to the Tolkien clubs and societies. Well, that's just that's just name-calling, infantile happiness. But when somebody says the histories and
genealogies are not in the least necessary as the narrative, now that's dead wrong, that's not only wrong, that's stupidly wrong. Actually what they give to the narrative is
something which Tolkien was very aware of and which he often talked and wrote about. And which he valued very much and that is depth. So you don't just have as it were a flat garish shiny surface. You have something which has depth
behind it and a feeling this is a world where you can ask a question about it and you'll get an answer. And if you ask a question about the
question or a question about the answer then you'll get more answers because it's all
there already and that gives you an illusion of reality. But the illusion has been deliberately created. The critics were varied in their reaction to the Lord of the Rings. Among the condemnations there were some significant good reviews. Bernard Levin wrote that: It would be impossible to do justice to this magnificent book. To begin with the learning is prodigious. But why did some of the critics get it so wrong? I think that they they read it, right and they realized what it was trying to do
and then they realized they didn't like that so they denied their own response. And that I think is the worst thing a critic
can do uh when you, you know it in your heart but then you think I’m going to suppress
this because it is giving an answer which I I didn't expect and I don't like. So I think there was a kind of a self-censorship there. I think that one thing is that there's a kind of ideological opposition. The Tolkien in a way was sticking up for the past and not just the far remote past
but also actually the near past. Perhaps we're going back to the first world war again after the first world war the dominant
literary response to everything was irony. Now Tolkien was capable of irony, but
he did not actually write in an ironic mode. Actually, I think he was writing in a romantic mode and that mode they thought had... that mode, should we say the critics thought the academic
world thought had actually been completely drained, it had finished, you couldn't do it again. And here's somebody coming along insisting on
doing something again, which they thought they'd buried. But he resurrected it.
Well, that couldn't be allowed. And so the feeling was uh, we're this is a success but we're not going to admit that we're going to say it's a failure because on our little plan of literary genres it ought to be a failure. You can't do things
like that anymore. People are various
and tastes differ And not everybody's
going to like the same thing. I don't recommend the
Lord of the Rings to people. Because I’d rather have them discover it and because I’m not sure, until I know somebody very well
whether they're going to like it or not. You know Tolkien wrote an essay on Beowulf. In which he took on all the people who were embarrassed
at the fact that Beowulf was about a man who fought dragons, and dismissed it as a fairy story. Because they were slightly uneasy with the idea that a grown-up person would write or sing or be involved in such a story. And I think there's still a lot of people who would have that response. And for those people that's not their book and for people who like that sort of
thing that's the sort of thing they like. Among the people who definitely did not like Tolkien's book were many of his fellow academics
and this attitude prevails today. The academic reaction has been I think comically bad. Uh, I can understand people saying I don't like this book. And I don't think anybody should write it like this book that that makes sense. But uh ever from the the moment the Lord of the Rings was published you got people saying:
I don't like this book and nobody else does either. And that's just not true. You can say I don't like it.
Anybody does like is an idiot. That's that's understandable, but then you've got
to explain, why there are so many people like that. And actually it would be a better idea
to try to explain why it was successful. But actually there's been very strong aversion,
as I say, to doing that. There are people who are reading the book and then averting their eyes and talking about some other book they thought they might have read but they disliked it so much they couldn't watch it, they couldn't see it clearly. Now that I think was quite an interesting reaction. If you create that reaction in people you have...
you have so to speak hit them on the funny bone. And you then wonder quite you know, how he managed to do that. But I think there's another reason which is this that um, Tolkien like me was the professor of English language and he spent his time teaching old English and middle English
and old Icelandic and unfashionable subjects like that. Well, as long as that stayed in a kind of ghetto,
uh, people were quite prepared to to accept it. It was a minority subject, uh taught to small numbers of
students which could uh, perhaps safely be patronized. And what I think was particularly irritating was to find that uh, the literary success of the century coming out of Oxford university was not one of the runners they'd backed. But one of the runners they hadn't backed, in fact one of the runners they were dead sure wasn't going to start. And the the sudden appearance as it were of this
minority subject appealing to a very large community over the heads of the accredited scholars and the accredited
literary critics and the academic world in general. That actually must have been uh, well a shock and a an embarrassment and I think those reactions are still very prominent. The Lord of the Rings popularity and appeal
may have offended the academic establishment, but the book became a huge success. With a particular following in the United States,
where part of its appeal was its very Englishness. I think he's profoundly English and very deeply rooted in a particular time in his countries and in western European history, sort of between the wars period. Which I think his work very much reflects.
Although it is not an allegory of it. But any great work is going to exceed its national boundaries without betraying its own cultural heritage. And I think the Lord of the Rings does become international, partly by virtue of the fact that it is so very English. I was aware that the book had gotten a sort of second wind because I would see people reading it in
grocery store lines and bus cues and things like that. I wasn't so aware of what has since become described as the Tolkien phenomenon or the Tolkien cult. And I’m not sure that it was that it coincided with the time of great upheaval in our
political and social and psychological life. And the book did speak very strongly to a lot of young people at that time,
but it's kept on speaking since. Letters from readers poured in from all over the world. One of these came from the then princess Margrethe of Denmark. She had read and been greatly moved by the Lord of the Rings. Ever since I grew up, I have loved fairy stories
legends and sagas and to find that anyone of today obviously shares the same love and moreover takes it
seriously enough to write a complete new cycle of legends as natural as the traditional ones has been a wonderful experience. But I do not think I have ever believed in fairies or
Elves so much before I got to know the Lord the Rings. I don't think your tale would have been possible if the Elves hadn't had a hand in it. There seems to be something more to it than can be
explained by scholarly imagination and inspired writing. With her letter, the princess enclosed some
semi-abstract illustrations, which Tolkien liked. In particular her drawing of the devastated Shire showed a scene which he described as dismally and meanly hideous. Dreadfully like what happened to the village in
which I lived as a child almost as soon as I had left it. Well, of course, I mean you can't... one can't help
remembering the the hymn line of the "dark satanic mills" Of course I've been schooling for a year, so I know Otherwise, I suppose I just... Uh, his description of the of of these
houses with ugly narrow windows corresponded so very much to among with other things that the um, the sort of ugly buildings that the Germans put up during
the war in in certain places where they did where they fortified the coasts on the west coast looking onto the North sea. And and they you can spot those buildings even today immediately because they the the window the
proportions of the windows are so ugly, strangely narrow and high shouldered unpleasant. And and it was so strange that he should describe exactly the same kind of ugliness
that to me is the essence of ugliness a bad architecture so to speak, so I
suppose that's what I what I tried to put in. Queen Margrethe has continued to be inspired by Tolkien's writing. This is a watercolor that I did sometime I think in the
late 70s probably anyway after I’d read the Silmarillion. It's really after the story of Túrin Turambar is
when his old father is released and comes back and finds
I think it's his wife, yes, his wife sitting at the stone which was put
up where Túrin and his sister were buried. J.R.R Tolkien's books have sold millions of copies. And have been translated into over 25 languages. The Lord of the Rings in particular has clearly touched
people from all walks of life and different cultures. But Tolkien was concerned that the work
was often misinterpreted as allegorical. Or condemned as escapist. Many people applied to a nuclear... the ring particularly, to the nuclear bomb, don’t they? And think that was in my mind is
that the whole thing is an allegory of it? But it isn't. People can of course find allegories if
they wish to but it as you can see it was wholly outside his conception of what he was doing
in what he called fantasy. The world he created exists for itself, and for what it tells you and for what delight it gives you. It may of course contain, as indeed it does, elements of his own comprehension his view of the world at large, but not anything out of the primary world. Just as it contains, no specific
reference to the christian religion. It actually contains no specific reference
to communism or fascism, absolutely not. His view of such things if... if available at all will be in solution. In the secondary mythical or
mythological world that he has created but not actually itself, therefore it is in no sense an allegory.
The double meaning is not present. Escape, is a different question he was there perhaps more deeply. Hostile. Because Escape is used
has often been used as a means of attack on the very
conception of fantasy of the secondary world. And he, in a sense, he he said, of
course, it is an escape if you like. Because it's a movement out of the primary
world, which isn't such a pleasant place into a secondary world that may not be very
much more pleasant but it's generally very different. There are terrors as well as beauties in the secondary world. But it is not... He said that his critics had chosen the wrong word.
He said they were perhaps maliciously confounding the escape of the prisoner
with the flight of the deserter. And why should what he offered, if it is escape, not be the escape of the prisoner which in other contexts
is regarded as a noble thing to try to do to get away. But they are twisting it. And suggesting that he shouldn't get away. He should stay very firmly in the primary world. With all the attention he was receiving, instead of a quiet retirement Tolkien found to his amazement that his books had brought him enormous success and fame. He was overwhelmed, in a sense by fame because it distracted him and he was too easily distracted perhaps. He Did have a few luxuries which fame
gave him when the money began to flow he took taxes for instance, but outwardly, he was the same man living in the same modest way absolutely unspoiled. And this was very very attractive to
those who came as I did to see him. He was not the grand man, too famous
to give you more than quarter an hour. He was the same professor Tolkien interested in whatever happened to me at the moment on the top of the agenda, making these jokes, striking matches, lighting his
pipe and roaring with laughter. He was a good friend. He was very much what one
imagines an Oxford don to look like. When I knew him he was
Grey-haired, swift of speech but a little bit, incomprehensible at times. He spoke, uh, he tripped almost over his own words, He would laugh immoderately at his own jokes, often when you hadn't heard them properly. He was the solo courtesy he was a Victorian,
by nature of birth really, and he had many Victorian qualities, which I think we miss today. That innate courtesy in dealing with people. And especially with people out of generation as I was. He never made me...
he tried never to make me feel embarrassed by his company. I was often embarrassed by his company
because he was a ferocious intellect. He didn't throw this at me in any
sense, but one was aware of it all the time. And he was um a man who was loyal almost in an unbelievable sense, once he got to trust you. In 1968 the Tolkien's moved from Oxford to Bournemouth. A place much loved by Edith and where
they lived for three years before she died. Tolkien returned to Oxford when Merton College
offered him rooms in a neighboring street. Close both to the college and its gardens
whose beauty and serenity he had always enjoyed. But on his mind was the Silmarillion the book all Tolkien readers were waiting for. But which he was finding impossible to finish. I think one must say, it was the last version
of the Silmarillion that he couldn't finish. He couldn't finish a Silmarillion That would stand in relation to the Lord of the Rings. It was inevitable that the Lord of the Rings
must alter the Silmarillion. Because having once been as I've said an enclosed myth with
the beginning and an end, it now has the vast extension. And in the Lord of the Rings there are major figures Who come out of the elder days out of the the primeval world of the Silmarillion chief among them, Galadriel. So a great deal of writing back
would have to be done. But my father being who he was this writing back
would never be a simple thing because he... when Galadriel enters out of the Lord of the Rings
into the world of the Elves in Valinor. New stories begin right after the end of his life Galadriel's
position in the elder days was still being developed. So this was a a major problem,
but I think there were deeper problems than this. I think that
in his later years he became... he had become detached in the way from the old legends Túrin, Beren and so on and they were immensely important to him, but they were
things that... they were like the legends of the real world. Which he could which he could observe and study. And he became more and more interested I think more and more... more and more interested in the what
you might call the metaphysical aspects of the... of his secondary invention. Above all with the nature of the Elves. Because it is absolutely fundamental to the whole conception is that Men are mortal and Elves are immortal. And as he declared I'm sure rightly declared the... the fundamental underpinning concern of all his work was death. The intolerable fact and the nature of the Elves going
right back to the Book of Lost Tales was above all that they were immortal they were not
naturally destined to die. They could be killed because they had bodies. But they were not in their nature destined to die, whereas Men are of their nature destined
to spend only a short while in the world whereas the life of the Elves was coterminous. With the life of Arda, Arda being the Elvish word for the world,
our world and which Middle-earth was a part. And so in his later years he became involved in profound... attempts to determine the nature of an immortal
being who is nonetheless incarnate and possesses a body. This would in turn was beginning to develop
new stories within the Silmarillion. And I think the whole thing simply became too large. Too complex. To have so precise. To attempt to impose so precise a metaphysical explanation on it. It was perhaps a task for a younger man, the flame began to die down. And he hadn't the energy left that would
be needed for such a huge transformation. Some people who knew him well, thought that he didn't really... have said that
he didn't really want to finish the Silmarillion. Suggesting even that it's at some level he felt that to finish The Silmarillion
would be finishing his life. I personally don't think that at all I
don't think there's any real evidence for it. I think he deeply wanted to finish it. But got too large. Too large a task, too tired. In the last photograph taken of him he is standing by one of his favorite trees the
great black pine in Oxford's botanic gardens. Less than a month later on September the second 1973 J.R.R. Tolkien died aged 81.
And was buried with Edith in Wolvercote Cemetery. Christopher Tolkien brought the Silmarillion
into publishable form after his father's death. And like the previous books it became a bestseller. Interest in Tolkien's writing is as flourishing today as ever. With each new generation discovering
the delights of his created world. There's a great hunger for some kind of literary tradition I feel among my students. So that I get students who read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings
ten times and students who've never read it. But are pulled into it by the
idea that there's a connection between the medieval and the
modern, that they want to explore. The book taps into, I think some very old patterns of desire that everybody has of wanting a world that's richer and deeper and more alive than the one that Descartes has given us. Wanting to find not magic but enchantment in the world around us. Which Tolkien's world will give you, on an abiding basis so that when you have closed the book you can look around you and
and your eyes still keep that imprint. You still see that world,
in the world that you live in.
