'Inside Tolkien's The Hobbit' Documentary

[Music] [Music] my [Music] the hobbit has become one of the most successful children's books of all time if not the most successful children's book millions and millions of copies have been printed and it's gone into dozens of languages all around the world and it's very satisfying and heartwarming to note that the genesis for this book actually lay in tolkien's relationship with his own children every christmas he used to write his children a letter which he managed to convince them came from father christmas at the north pole and it was this tradition of writing for his own children that led directly to the creation of the hobbit he began to write for his children really um when the first and the oldest of them john was was a small boy what he did was to make up a letter from father christmas each each christmas and and leave it in the fireplace and these letters are full of father christmas telling the children what's happened at the north pole the last christmas and so on they stretch from 1921 until the mid-1940s and they get better and better they're very entertaining and beautifully illustrated and he's actually in a sense trying out his wings for writing for children in the hobbit the father christmas letters began when i was about three they were very exciting because they always arrived sometimes only on christmas morning but sometimes they came with the ordinary post and uh when they came late they inevitably left awful mother snowy foot marks all over the floor when the father christmas had come down the chimney with the letter and left it they were a very important part of christmas for all of us it was a very gradual transformation from absolute total belief into a realization that it must be my father who did it all but such a pleasure in keeping the um process going that one believed and yet knew and what the truth was and certainly my brothers never in any way spotted for me they they entered into this absolutely although they knew so much longer than i did that my father was father christmas 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 clatter crash awful moanings and growlings he was a very very conscious of being a west midland writer um almost unnaturally so he was very proud of his mother's family the suffields who came from worcestershire he was actually born in south africa in bloom fontaine where quite by chance his father was working for a bank but the family came from birmingham and when the father died young the mother set up home just outside birmingham at sahel mill and this was glorious idyllic countryside with a water mill with blackberry dells copses and so on and tolkien and his brother roamed there for three or four years and had such a wonderful time that it's quite clearly reflected in the opening chapters of the lord of the rings where tolkien describes the idyllic happy rural life of the hobbits in the shire [Music] i think there was a kind of double coming home which made the effect of the odd english meadows can recite it breaks so immensely important to me [Music] in we're here in in the heart of rural warwickshire and this is the kind of landscape that tolkien would have grown up in in the early days when he was living in sierra mill nowadays it's part of the the outskirts of birmingham so you have to come slightly farther out to discover this kind of landscape but you can see all around me where the inspiration for a place like the shire might have come from and and the pattern for those comfortable warm hobbit holes that we hear so much about if you come to warwickshire you can begin to understand some of the influences that were at work on tolkien quite by accident the hobbit tumbled out of him because he had children and it originated as a story really for them the story of the hobbit bilbo baggins who goes off and challenges the dragon the little tiny hero against the giant the actual beginning though it's not really the beginning the actual flashpoint which i remember very clearly i mean i took um i could still see the corner in my house in 20 north moore road where it happened i got a normal pile of exam papers there and marking school examinations in the summertime is a is an enormous um very laborious and unfortunate also boring and i remember picking up a paper and actually if i nearly gave an extra mark for it extra five mark him one page on this particular paper's left blank glorious nothing to read so i scribbled on it i can't think one in a hole in the ground delivered a hobbit i think that was eventually published in 1937. as regards the the writing style of the hobbit it's very straightforward there are no great linguistic devices but for a first work tolkien did an excellent job of tailoring his language perfectly for the audience he doesn't talk down to them or or patronize them as he was concerned to do himself and probably the reason for that is that he had his own children so he was aware just how the language of the book needed to be pitched and he and he comes to that perfectly in the hobbit gollum lived on a slimy island of rock in the middle of the lake he was watching bilbo now from the distance with his pale eyes like telescopes dumbo could not see him but he was wondering a lot about bilbo but he could see that he was no goblin at all gollum got in his boat and shot off from the island while bilbo was sitting on the brink altogether flummoxed and at the end of his way in his wits suddenly up came gollum and whispered and hissed us and splashes my precious i guess it's a choice feast at least the tasty marshall didn't make us all and when he said calm he made a horrible swallowing noise in his throat that is how he got his name though he always called himself my precious robert jumped out of his skin when his came in his ears and he suddenly saw the pale eyes sticking out at him who you he said thrusting his dagger in front of him what do you see my precious mr gollum who always spoke to himself from never having anyone else to speak to he used to tell stories every night and often i went to sleep with hearing him telling fairy stories i can't actually remember him telling the stories which were later incorporated into the lord of the rings i think my older brothers do remember this being being that much older how it began i would think in 1926 27 when we first went to oxford and was told us at christmas time uh in chapters which is why it has chapters of adventures we if we were lucky we got a couple of extra chapters each christmas and the other ones had to be repeated so it goes longer and longer and longer as we know tolkien taught philology oxford which is the the study of how languages evolve over time it's very difficult to explain to anybody who hasn't as i have suffered the oxford university english language and literature course exactly what philology is about it's a science that was invented by a group of germans during the 19th century largely it's been said by certain people in order to befuddle the world outside and it is a very very dense subject to those who don't know it's now out of fashion is in fact now a dead subject it's really being taken over entirely by by linguistics and by different forms of language science but basically all it is is the historical study of languages it's really quite simple it means that you look at a language not as it stands at the moment but you look at its history you see how the forms of words have developed and in doing so you're liable to come across quite a lot of interesting history tolkien learnt that in fact he did partly teach himself uh he began reading it while he was still at school and this is fairly remarkable he then went on to study it at oxford but with the hobbit being a book for children there isn't a great deal of of literary overtones nonetheless we can see quite a number of influences because tolkien loved the uh surviving fragments of literature from the dark ages he was also not just a teacher of but a passionate devotee of the icelandic headers and the norse sagas and it was from them that tolkien gained a lot of his inspiration in the hobbit we don't see a terribly large amount of this but there's enough there in the society of the dwarfs to see that clearly they have been modeled on on the norse society he didn't even finish it he got it to a point where anybody could have finished it any writer of any competence he got it to the point where the dragon has been killed and you know the dwarves are about to get back that treasure but it's going to be a big battle the story from then on merely requires a few tying up events and really as i say anybody could have completed it he didn't bother he put it in a draw and it stayed there i don't think he wasn't that he hadn't got confidence in it just he'd lost interest in it at that point um and he wasn't as i said writing for anybody else he'd already told the story to his children it was finished therefore as far as he was concerned and it was only quite by accident that the publisher discovered its existence and it and it got into print well my father who was the publisher believed i think rightly that children were the best judges of children's books and so when i was a 10 year old he used to bring home children's book manuscripts and uh i was paid one shilling for my report i had to make a written report and one of those manuscripts was the hobbit report on the hobbit booboo baggins was a hobbit who lived in his hobbit hole and never went for adventures at last gandalf the wizard and his dwarfs persuaded him to go luckily for me and for everybody else um i wrote uh an approving report should appeal to all children between the ages of five and nine got paid my shilling which was probably the best shilling this firm's ever spent and um the book was published not any of you had a marvelous adventure story in a marvelous fantasy but some of the magic has rubbed off on the ordinary very homely things of life like a good meal like food there's a great joy in food food never been adventure man i admired frenchmen therefore i but i like i must say since england produces the best basic food in europe i'm a whole uh does and drink the fact that there are there are pubs in middle earth yes has had ring things he's dead i like of course being feeling elevated but i'm very fond of the beer and stuff like tobacco i've always always smoked i sometimes smoke beyond the point when you enjoy it it was silly but i do smoke and enjoy it and a matter of fact he's now so tied to uh to writing that i can't write without it all these are sort of homely pleasant things and it's the sort of basis of things homely in the shire the hobbits i think are tolkien's image of people from the west midlands at the start of this century only shrunk and the reason they're shrunk i think is that they're living in the world of the heroes so they're like us if we were living in a world of heroes we wouldn't be able to uh to run around throwing our weight about we would have to manage as best we could so the hobbits have to manage as best they can by perseverance and determination and humor and their endemic inability to take things really seriously so there is it were a set of reader figures running through this heroic or epic landscape and just about surviving in it just about managing and that i think gives you something to identify with set against a background which is entirely different and which offers a kind of glamour which has vanished from the world it's not just the the physical world that tolkien modeled on warwickshire these are rural people and he looked around and he saw the kinds of rustic characters that there were at the turn of the century around these fields and he built his hobbit world very much based upon them the ordinary people of warwickshire shrunk down in size so that when we suddenly go out into this big heroic world we associate very much with the small people then the mother decided that she must move the children into birmingham in reach of good schools and he hated this move in this big smoky city i mean it was when industrial pollution was at its height to know the factory chimneys belching out that he hated though in a way i feel he loved it because i think you can see this reflected in his descriptions of mordor the country which is the seat of evil incarnate in the lord of the rings where you have this wonderful description of the smoking fiery mountain mount doom which is the center of it and an impression of vast factory-like caves and so on where where uh orcs goblins you know work at that build their armaments and so on this is quite clearly reflects something of birmingham in the early 1900s [Music] so [Music] one of the things that tolkien detested above all else is modernity he hated the modern world he hated to see the end of the what he considered to be the older english way of life and how that connection with nature was quickly being swept aside by the forces that had begun at the time of the industrial revolution and obviously in the 20th century had begun to really build peace it was also in birmingham that he met his wife he was by this time orphaned and living in a lodging house in edgeboston run by a rather witch-like lady also he said and also living in this house was edith whom he eventually married he fought in in the first world war in the trenches as a signaling officer and in a way that made no impression on him it was a kind of experience so awful on the somme battlefield that he shut it out from the rest of his mind it comes in at moments in the story in the lord of the rings where the heroes are undergoing various awful experiences but really what he did was drive him more and more into himself and make him more determined to cultivate his own private landscape and so he withdrew really from the war and it was at that point he began to write his books after the war he became a university teacher first really at leeds and then back at oxford he wasn't in some sense he's a good teacher at all his actual performance in the lecture room was largely incomprehensible to many people my mother used to say that she was an undergraduate in the 30s at oxford said that if you sat in the front row you could hear him but only in the front row but then of course he spat all over because his teeth didn't fit very well anywhere further back it was quite inaudible tolkien was one of these small group of writers from oxford each of whom created a very special and immortal fantasy land first of course there was louis carroll who created wonderland where alice had her adventures this was followed by tolkien himself who created his his middle earth and finally very hot on his heels came cs lewis with his narnia adventures the main point about his oxford career was that it gave him a lovely um cozy nest really to inhabit his teaching duties weren't that heavy um he had a big house in north oxford which his four children grew up uh he had marvelous friends in c.s lewis and other dons of like mind all of them had strongly religious all of them liking fairy stories and myths and they would meet together in oxford pubs for pints of beer in lewis's rooms in college on thursday nights and drink their beer and smoke their pipes and talk good manly talk and read their stories to each other that was really wonderful that's what was the best part of his life and really gave him the encouragement to go on writing i was on the whole a rather puny uh other mothered timid little creature who who was not much of a success eventually became a fairly ordinary scholar turned out to be good at rugby football of all odd things i think there was no doubt about his ability his intelligence or the effect he'd had there was also a strong feeling that uh he had rather given up the trade that he didn't publish very much in the learned way after about 1940 1941 he was still working on things but not very fast so i think there was to begin with a kind of puzzlement as to what he was doing with his time and he had a reputation for laziness this was quite wrong i think he was you know an obsessive worker but nobody saw the work being done he was sitting at home writing his books and writing draft after draft after draft and try to make it absolutely perfect but he didn't tell everybody or indeed many people at all what he was doing having achieved such a major success with a hobbit tolkien now turned his attention to the next real challenge and that was to take the world of middle earth and extend the boundaries and write a comparable saga but for an adult audience i now wanted to try my hand at writing a really stupendously long narrative and to see whether i had sufficient art cunning or material to make a really long narrative which would um hold the average reader right through the best uh one of the best forms for a long narrative is the as was found in the hobbit there's a much more elaborate form of the pilgrimage on journey with an object so that was inevitable the form i adopted the first memories i had of him was when i was a very embarrassed undergraduate and he was a rather famous don and he used to because he knew i'd been the original reader invite me to t and hand me slices of manuscript which i now know were slices of the lord of the rings and the silmarillion um out of context and say uh read this read this dear boy um and bring it back next week when you come to tea and tell me what you think about it that was a terrible challenge i knew that i liked it i didn't know what was going on and who was doing what to whom but i came back next week and i said well that was very interesting then i think there was an enormous shock both when it came out and when it proved to be so successful a lot of tolkien's colleagues i think were uh irritated by it they felt that tolkien had been sitting apparently to their eye doing nothing all these years and then turned out hadn't been doing nothing he'd written a great big book it was enormously successful everybody was reading it you'd think they'd be pleased but actually they weren't um i think there was a feeling of jealousy even a feeling of anger uh one comment which uh somebody passed on to me that was that when a colleague and indeed a friend of tolkien's was told what he'd been doing and the book was out he looked at it and he said he should have been teaching there have been 26 translations into other languages of the hobbit and 20 of the lord of the rings but uh i i would say that he is both popular and unpopular across the board uh because there are those who deeply dislike uh the lord of the rings and all it stands for uh there are those who are passionately addicted to it and i think it is because it always rises strong opinions uh that uh you get this uh extreme of expression and of like and of dislike no i don't at all like tolkien or what he stands for it seems to me that his work implies an escape from political and social reality now uh this seems it seems to me reprehensible uh it's an implication of triviality it's an implication of regression a refusal to uh face up to our political and social problems our religious problems of today and the cult of the hobbit uh the cult of tolkien in america particularly seems to be responding to this uh sort of failure in engagement with our political and social situation here was the uh oxford professor who was supposed to be writing monumental works on anglo-saxon poetry he was in fact sitting up all night writing fairy stories this was how most of them fell to tammany and still feel about him there was also jealousy quite obviously the fact he made a lot of money out of it and he did i think regret the fact that his colleagues weren't able to be a little bit more liberal and open-minded about this and to actually praise him there was a feeling that he'd uh he'd outflanked everybody after all for many years for many decades i think people had got used especially on the literary side to a patronizing philologist and saying well it's uh interesting so i suppose but it's all very passe it's fuddy-duddy it's not relevant nobody takes you notice of it suddenly bang you write a smash hit best seller you sell you know empty million copies you become enormously rich um well it means that your predictions about them have been quite wrong and there's a sense in which uh some of his colleagues thought they'd they'd been made a fool off video couldn't be in the springtime when that tree wouldn't look sad but covered with leaves if she looked old but not sad and these uh that uh looks like kind of plain doesn't it something whatever that tree is and these are lives but all the lime substitutes are lovely green in spring i have always for some reason i don't know why i am enormously attracted by tree all my works is full of trees i suppose i have actually had some simple minded form of long-action who would like to i should have liked to be able to make contact with the tree and find out what he feels about things because and the old lint says a few things isn't he about feeling the sap run up in the open to the side i haven't the slightest recollection whatsoever i i normally preserve a very bright visual recollection where i was where i am and things are associated what i'm looking at i have the slightest recollection of anything either the position where the window was myself or the thoughts anyway i'm out of the whole of the chapter that came straight out of the leaf mode there was no no difficulty no sense of trouble of composition it must have been sort of bursting the trees quivered and bent as if a ghost had struck them there was another pause and a marching beauty began like solemn drums and above the roaring beats and bones of the swelled voices singing high and strong and even louder rules their song picked up the hobbits and strolled from his house to eisenguard the ends cried in many voices to eisengaard to eyes and guard the wise and god be ringed and barred with doors of stone the wise and garb is strong and hard and cold the stone and bearers bone we go we go we go to water hew the stone and break the door for bowlenbauer burning now the furnace roars we go to war the land of gloom with cramp of doom with roll of rum we come we come to eyes and guard with whom we come with doom we come with doom we come there is of course the cynic's view which is that tolkien essentially wrote the same book twice if we look at the similarities between the plot there is the strong possibility that he may be guilty of that charge both books start with the arrival of gandalf after a long absence into the shire he brings news that precipitates a journey in the hobbit they encounter the trolls and of course by the time the lord ring the adventures are much much more sinister but essentially it's the same idea both parties then arrive at rivendell where council is taken and they both then move on to discover a new city in the hobbit they discover eskarath by the lake and in the lord of the rings they eventually find themselves in minis tirith the eagles are used in both books to rescue gandalf from difficult situations and you can have a great deal of fun spotting the similarities between the two plots of the two books he was deeply moved and grateful for the fact that so many people responded with great appreciation to the book and although it was a heroic task i think he greatly appreciated being able to reply to or to be in contact with so many people who wrote to him the um letters were enormous but instead of the postman the van used to arrive each morning with the moaning's post which he couldn't get through the door and in the beginning my father tried to answer them all it used to come in at a phenomenal rate towards the end of his life it ranged from the purely lunatic to the uh highly informed critical analyses he was also sent curious presents uh mushrooms which went bad in the post and tobacco and uh clay models of this all that which bamboozled him completely he didn't know really what to make of it all so in the end we took up more and more of this onto ourselves on his behalf and i think he was quite relieved there were all kinds of of horrors sprang on him in the years when the book was being successful the lord of the rings my favorite was the american film company which turned up um in oxford wanting to film lord of the rings and they'd written this wonderful storyline or scenario for it um in which all the kind of delicate things of the original story had been hollywoodified interestingly a character who in the in tolkien's story is called boromir was called by the american film writers borimore you know shades of ethel barrymore the elves sustain themselves and fellow travellers on long journeys by something called lembas or whey bread which is really rather kind of holy thing it's a bit like communion wafers actually in the christian church it's got that kind of overtone the americans describe this as a food concentrate there were worse things to come after his death the lord of the rings has been filmed i think fairly execrably by an american and there was a horrible film of the hobbit on american television and various other nasties like that fortunately he didn't live to see those they've of course twisted his own conception quite out of recognition the thing has been disney fied or worse there also of course been all kinds of toys and and such like most of that happened since since his lifetime there was nothing quite so often in his lifetime i think one looks on them with modified rapture tolkien himself disliked them on the whole he came to fame very late and i think he was worried by what was a dilution or an adaptation of a vision that he had seen very clearly all through his life and he didn't like people tampering with his vision no we west you go back west deep the first editions of the the hobbit uh carried some wonderful color plates uh which depicted uh the world of middle earth as tolkien himself envisaged it and it's often overlooked just how good an artist tolkien actually was because he was able not only to describe this world but to visualize it as well in some very very satisfactory watercolours now if we look at that what we actually see is tolkien's view of middle earth contrasts sharply with many of the other artists it's much more a medieval kind of environment his his plates have a lot of the naivety and the feel of medieval manuscripts and that to an extent was the world that tolkien loved in literature and it was also these clues provide us with the kind of world that he envisaged his hobbits occupying [Music] he was essentially a victorian and victorians uh had skills in the arts of uh either you in doing amateur music or in doing amateur art i had a grandmother who was uh a watercolorist she wasn't a great watercolorist but she did it as a lady's occupation and in a sense starkeen had picked up this victorian habit of practicing an art and he practiced watercolor and pastels very effectively there are lots of paintings by him of of his landscapes which have been published since his death they're really again they're not done as works of art they're done simply to help him visualize the landscape he's writing about that kind of aid to him as a writer when i was about 16 i think that's the first time i was introduced to the book it had a great effect on me i think that was um when i first started to sort of uh get really interested in painting the the series i mean obviously it's my interpretation i wouldn't force it until anybody else say well this is it and this is how it's supposed to be this is purely my interpretation if somebody likes it as much then that's fine try not to go in too much dude i try to get the same enjoyment out of painting them as i did when i actually read it and the problem is when you sort of get further into the book itself and and you start reading into details and you can become too critical i think so i try and keep it as free as possible [Music] i happen to be painting on a little scene of this little dwarf skipping over a bridge towards this uh maple tree all gnarly and everything a lot of detail and a girl that worked in the office came in and looked at it and said that reminds me of the hobbit i said what's a hobbit so the next day she brought in the book gave it to me loaned it to me went right through it in about a day was hooked instantly read all three of the next the lord of the rings books and i was hooked instantly i wanted to illustrate that in some way but how it was going to come out i have no idea i never thought of doing a calendar until my wife rita got me a uh a token calendar from 1965 token jr token calendar of his illustrations the watercolors that he used to do and uh on the back of the calendar was this little box that was an invitation an invite to artists to submit their work to valentine books who was the publisher and got the job to do and that was it next year and it was an instant worldwide hit [Music] he's the most unusual man i've ever come across who read books i mean authors are a notoriously unusual breed but really he's not like any other figure in english literature very very isolated in every sense he was isolated socially he moved in a small circle of oxford dons but not outside at all he uh i think read very very little in modern english writing not that much in english literature in fact i've since since since chaucer i used to say you know english literature just stopped at chaucer but there was something genuinely sad about him one can't study his life without coming away feeling um that there was a kind of deep unhappiness which motivated the books which which gives them that wonderful sort of longing for past age and the whole point of his stories is that they're about nostalgia about looking back to a golden age that's gone and by being stranded as it were in the 20th century in modern industrial society and feeling completely out of place in it he was able to create this writing yes well he was a really absent-minded professor and at the post office in high street the old lady there was rather a dragon but he won her over by posting his false teeth through the screen and putting his envelope in his mouth similar the bank uh used to keep all the things he left there i once went with him to the bank and they opened the door and gave him back his last two or three pipes and gloves and things he was very very conservative uh daily telegraph reader you know had supported franco in the spanish civil war very very right-wing very unattractive therefore to many modern readers of his books actually this wasn't really fascism he wasn't really deeply right-wing he was really somebody who had been born into a world where those were the accepted values and he never uh really rejected them he was a very deep profound catholic roman catholic and this comes out in his books now the lord of the rings is not a religious book in that it's not about god and the angels and so on but in fact it's a very religious book in tone and he knew this while writing it it's really um it's it's a book which tries to convey the feeling of religion to a world which is not actually a believing world a non-religious world this i think is largely why it's been so popular in america in what is on the whole a a a kind of godless modern world um it particularly appeals because it's it's it's bringing uh it's bringing religion back into fiction i don't live in america surely they should tell me i should like to ask them some questions of how things arise i observe in general that uh that america has north america has always been much more easily kindled uh england or indeed any country in europe and princess the dickens cult and the extraordinary excitement about uh dickens so the only people think came down at the key to watch the mail ship coming the only thing you want to know is what happened to the next chapter they've been worried about goods i think that tonkin was the greatest english philologist this century and that his trade as a philologist had a very great deal to do if not everything to do with the creative work which she finally produced i first began citizens to invent languages about time i was 13 or 14 i've never stopped really he said and i believe him that he wrote the law of the rings because he wanted to construct a world in which ellen silas lumen amenti elmo would be a normal greeting so he worked out the language he worked out the way they would say hello and then of course you had to work out a story to uh to explain how this phrase may a star shine on the hour of our meeting would actually be normal languages have a flavor to me which are i never understand people think the saying for instance it was awfully dry and double because the new language to me is just like taking a new wine or some new sweet beetle or something what i'm doing now is to try and write in elvish i'm thinking my writing is very inferior to the elves the standard meeting when meeting a star shines upon our meeting oh god i've made a mistake and that's stands for ellen sila lumen or manti he was creating a history a myth a mythology for england he called it and that involved not just a story it involved geography cartography geology ethnography any other ography you like um he had to do it all and he did in fact by inventing languages of his own tolkien was merely saying yes all this kind of history of languages thing it's a great game it's fun um it may have limitations but but you know i can play it too and was simply creating his own linguistic world which he could play about with i wouldn't mind people knowing it and enjoying it but i didn't really want to i would like some people who have been equally inventive in language have done who want to make cults and have people all speaking together now i don't desire to go and have afternoons talking elvish to chaps one thing because this is too complicated i've never finished making it tolkien had a great passion for maps he loved to draw maps of his middle earth and unlike many other fantasy worlds tolkien's world was almost completely realized in all of its dimensions he even created a whole geological history for his middle earth that involved continents colliding together over ages and splitting apart so it was a very very complete world it had its own languages its own culture its own belief systems its own mythology and it was a place really where he liked to escape to and since then millions more have gone on to do the same he used to draw enormous charts and maps of not just the landscape but also things like the phases of the moon of the weather perhaps even the tides things that he was certain he had got to get right because he was writing a real story about a real world so it seemed to him and everything must work on its own terms must fit or um the thing wasn't going to be real to him fame came too late it worried him rather than pleased him well i think that he found certain aspects of the success particularly the cult aspects and extreme amount of publicity very difficult particulars he was getting older by this time um he was frightened of the intrusions on his privacy he didn't like fame and he didn't like all the pallava at all he never actually really ever appreciated that he'd become famous always wealthy he um always worried about his finances and that he hadn't got much money and he was overspending it was kind of penny pinching that in the days when film rights been sold for a vast salmon money was pouring in and so on you find him keeping an account in his diary two spaces three and six but it's matches tuttins hating it old habits didn't didn't die he didn't mind the fact that for the first time in his life probably in his seventies or thereabouts uh he was adequately rewarded for his pains but what he did with his rewards was very modest he didn't drive so he sometimes took a taxi that was just about all he did by way of luxury he's very pleased to have his books widely read that goes without saying what author isn't at the same time he was quick to um be sensitive uh at all kind of negative aspects he hated the invasion of privacy which which which sometimes happened i mean he and his wife would be having breakfast in their little house in in oxford and cameras would poke through the hedge american tourists would ring the bell and want to photograph professor talking he had a way with them there was the one who ranked from london and arrived with his secretaries and three colored umbrellas and my father had an alarm clock which he kept in a drawer and if there were people he really didn't want to see that stage the alarm clock was set for a quarter an hour after they arrived and when the alarm clock went off oh i'm so sorry i've got another engagement that invariably got rid of them they went quickly people found his telephone number and used to ring up in the middle of night when i remember especially because i was at home was the one who rang up from ohio i wanted him to find her son who was hiking in europe with a copy of the hobbit in a pocket tolkien's inspiration simply was language and he wanted to create a world where people spoke the languages that he'd invented he set himself a certain imaginative pattern in his adolescence which consisted of his absorption in anglo-saxon and middle english and other early germanic languages and that led him eventually to writing the lord of the rings he wasn't you see they were setting out to write a great book himself this is a very important point what he was setting out to do was to create a kind of something private in the back garden or in the loft it's a hobby much more like model railways than writing he was constantly writing then putting aside or rewriting and storing it away in fact more has been published by tolkien since his death than was published in his lifetime because so much was in fact unfinished business put away in box files the last years was spent in trying to finish the silmarillion the big work of mythology of which the lord of the rings is just a sequel he went on and on it in fact he never got anywhere near finishing what he would do would not be simply to continue writing the story he in a sense done all that years before but he was always trying new versions of old bits or was trying to rewrite older versions of newer bits or something by which i mean that it got terribly complicated textually actually he never wanted to finish this is quite clear he never wanted to finish i think he never wanted to publish it it had been the necessary background to the lord of the rings and the hobbit he didn't feel that scene close up to by readers it would have the same excitement as it certainly doesn't despite very skillful editing by christopher darkin also of course he still wanted to have the thing to live with he didn't want to finish he never wanted to finish he wanted to die still inhabiting and working on this extraordinary world of his and that's what happened he died in the end quite peacefully of an elsa it seems uh while on holiday for a weekend in bournemouth the good storytellers always last uh his place in literature is i'm perfectly sure secure i don't think we understand what that place exactly is because he doesn't conform to the the norms or the criteria of fiction as we understand it today but he is writing heroic romance and uh as such he is uh i think secure in his place in fame i suppose the easy thing to say is that uh the lord of the rings and the hobbit could become uh uh eccentric classics like um like lewis carroll alice in wonderland through the looking glass one-offs and it might be like that but i think there is a possibility also depending on which way the future goes which one can't tell the tolkien will be felt to be typical a representative of something which like middle earth was dying with him that he was you know the last of the old western men who were brought up before the first world war and before things changed but who lived on well into the 20th century and who wrote a book about what it was like to live through these disastrous years in some ways of war and defeat and what looked like failure but who never really himself gave up hope that uh that there would be a light beyond the darkness and that things would get better and before the sun had fallen far from the moon out of the east there came a great eagle flying and he bore tidings beyond hook and the laws of the west crying sing now ye people of the tower of anar for the realm of sauron is ended forever and the dark tower is thrown down sing and rejoice the people of the tower of god for your watch has not been in vain and the black gate is broken and your kingdom passed through and he is victorious sing and be glad all ye children of the west for your king shall come again and he shall dwell among you all the days of your life and the tree that was withered shall be renewed and ye shall plant it in the high places and the city shall be blessed seeing all ye people the people sang in all the ways of the city there are always mistakes all along the line if you read his letters to his publishers everything goes wrong i mean blocks are misplaced for illustrations and that this isn't right and that isn't writing it's a nice irony that at the very end his third name rule should be misspelt revel on tuesday [Music] so [Music] hey [Music] you

Channel: Talking Tolkien

Views: 12,562

Rating: 4.9501557 out of 5

Keywords: lord of the rings, tolkien, hobbit

Id: C4EzrxOFQ3Q

Length: 51min 16sec (3076 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2020