J.R.R.T.: A Film Portrait of J.R.R. Tolkien - 1996

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien Oxford professor master of the languages and literature's of the ancient North poet storyteller creator of the ents the orcs the hobbits the high elves the Black Riders of Rivendell lórien 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 hundredth anniversary of Tolkien's birth sold out as soon as it reached the book shops I think that I would say that the appeal the attraction lies in my father's extraordinary power of compelling literary belief 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 case with a long imagined past in this world strange beings beautiful noble terrifying hideous strange place 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 accord with the laws that govern it I think the ultimate secret of talking's continuing popular appeal and something that was a mystery even to him and 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 for instance ants nobody ever talked about ants 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 are 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 Hillary 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 ser who on the southern edge of Birmingham that Mabel Tolkien brought John Ronald and Hillary this was the countryside where she herself had been brought up and it was here the Tolkien first discovered his deep and abiding love of nature and his roots in the West Midlands tragically when John Ronald was 12 Mabel talking died she had converted to the Catholic faith some years previously and inspired by her memory Junior Tolkien remained a devout Roman Catholic all his life as his eldest son father John talking the cause it's one of those things that if you have something like that you cancel to 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 Paul was the Christian and didn't like the changes in the church post-war because he very strongly couldn't see any point in a Banting Latin because he spoke Letty and he had his little tiny little missile which he throw his head I don't know how long he'd I've got it at actually in Latin he used to trans trouble with using the letter missile with an english mass 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 that not necessarily that wouldn't necessarily have been crude at Erica allegory but it wouldn't have been the kind of thing that he would have done no the 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 tried 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 Edward's in Birmingham and later as an undergraduate at Oxford versity his third son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien who lives in France with his wife Bailey 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 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 as his world he 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 your 10 pills far from it but it will too inevitably I think be an archaic world in some aspects it's our chasm shows itself that 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 knot man like the weather nor man even at a bad level it's the man-made that is so ultimately daunting insupportable so his secondary world contains an extraordinary small relatively speaking to our world of of the man-made and it's very well made it's often said he disliked the modern world of course this is absolutely true to what I would like to say is that it was absolutely inevitable that he showed it Springs through 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 a conceivable Samson isn't trip the modern world meant for him essentially the machine and once again this was a word that he tended he tried to enlarge said the when he speaks of a 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 made cars airplanes he used it very compendious Lee 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 any 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 quickly with 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 rarely be done with any real satisfaction labor-saving machinery only creates endless and worst labor the 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 like a middle-earth and I think it is undoubtedly true that in this very large sense of the word machined 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 that was surely the ring is this magic thing of all to which he would said magic is very close to the machine magic is coercion as the coercion of the world the attempt by apparatus to transform the world and indeed the elves as he again said and in saying all this I'm largely drawing on what himself fairly from my way the elves represent obviously they represent in a sense of aspect they must do of 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 they're the V I the ultimate aim of the elves Israel is art and not power whereas men have taken the solution of 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 distraction 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 sorrow because he would be righteous and self-righteous an order coerced the world to return good net was one of my father's greatest fear 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 was to an extent as it is so he had a tell affair and he even had a a tape recorder when they were quite quite newfangled but as a vision of how the world could be the machinery of telecommunications just as much as the 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 where I can see whether taught in that but I also loved soundless sight in the valley of the Train with the line of smoke from it 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 of me but what aspects of the primary world dick Tolkien value enough to bring into a secondary one I think that the answer to that lies in the intensity of his love for the primary fundamental simplicities of her not as any of the natural world but of the materials of the natural world as used by men using tools and not machines so in food bread cheese and wine the materials of craftsmanship stone wood and so on but also there was his extraordinary intense feeling and amazing ability to visualize landscapes well there in fact he travelled as people traveled out 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 were naturally I think rightly associate him with what cost the trees which has perhaps been in a certain sense exaggerated was they had some sort of thing about trees the trees are part of of a much larger thing or one associate some of 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 have been complaining vulnerably as usual about the the awfulness and I didn't like it in memory I love it I would love to get back just as he once said that he would love that he never did to go back to the Longstreet said after that he hated so deeply in the war he said I would have to get back but he said oh you're speaking of South Africa and the high veldt we're spent so much at 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 make it but oddly enough all of you say even to its detriment only increases the longing I have always felt to see it again much there 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 whom comes nearest to heart satisfaction his space I would be willing to barter baroness for it indeed I think I like Baroness 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 had any rate cannot live on bread alone and if there was not bare rock and pathless sand than the unharvested sea I should go to hate all green things as a fungal growth is more passionately exaggerated to have but I quit that because hey this is true he could even Bailey and I used to think that his marvelous description of the land called aphelion through which Frodo and Sam and Gollum passed on their way into Mordor this beautiful land of quick waterfalls and curves it's not when you walked on them extraordinary like parts of the lands which had 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 in history of which there is far too little in the world accessible to me for my appetite I'm not learned it 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 the walls and is all the Arthurian world awful as it is it is imperfectly naturalized associated with the sign of Britain but not with English 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 talking this was a way of replacing that which England had lost how was England D mythologized I would say the short answers are 1066 and the Industrial Revolution in 1066 the English literary class was eliminated or dispossessed we don't know what went down the plug with them but we do know that that native English literature was replaced very soon by a French based literature and what we've got left from before 1066 are fragments we've got Bale with Grendel we've got bay off with the dragon we've got this strange seagull heroine creatures who come out of Exodus we don't have any old English reference to wudu Wissam woodwose 'as 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 it took people's interests away from the fairy tales and the folk tales which they used to get from their nannies now in Germany they were still telling him in the nineteenth century when the groom's made their collection but when English collectors went round trying to make similar collections inspired by the Grimm's in the later 19th century there wasn't very much left at all so why 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 er not had as it were a native mythology it's had to borrow things from other people like trolls from the Scandinavians for instance as a bane as a skin that somebody brought up in this part of the world and with the poor brought up with a lot of the Norse Sagas and the errors and things like that which quite naturally came into my school curriculum eirick I recognised such a lot of little snippets and bits and pieces I did I wonder who this man can be he must know an awful lot about about the 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 no soul or day 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 and I remember I even thought that there were bits that in his created languages which started very much like Finnish and it was only much much later that I realize 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 loves trees and flowers and deep urgent love but I didn't think he could really be called a botanist he didn't have that kind cuz he had the analytical wits for it but they were all entirely used on philology I don't think he would have wished who suddenly wouldn't have despise 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 middle-earth likeness riddle or symbol mean the white flower that grew specifically on me man's of the dead he will see them Kelly he had evidently very powerful visualizing mind but I think that the name symbol meaner or nefra dill where absolutely essential to their existence in his mind one thing I think I've learned from talking which I think he'd be pleased about is that he's made me a better observer I actually look at things which he looks at because I've read him writing about them and started taking interested in them myself so talking I think is the the kind of person who turns people into into bird watchers or tree spotters or hedgerow grubbers people who 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 tree which I call a Rowan and which other people call a mountain ash Rowan is north mountain ash is modern learn ed what's the English word for it I never knew but actually I read the Lord rings carefully and I realized that the old image word is quick by arm quick beam and actually the modern English word is quicken or Wickham now I know lots of people who have names like Wickenden I just didn't know what it meant before an established Oxford Dom talking'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 Bratz 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 tokine 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 they used to come either by post with the postman because he bribed the person to put them through the door with a post or they if there were a bit late they were on the mat gently in front of the stove in the dining room and there would be snowy footpaths across the floor we never discovered for a long time never have suspected that they were him until one night we used to hang our big stockings on the bottoms were paid and one night might feel nice to had a room together and he was the door open we hadn't gone to sleep and he stubbed his door foot on the door and said blast in the only way that he could safe and I knew who it was if he hid under the blanket so as not to let him know that we knew and we never let on to anybody that we knew two years out he was extremely clever in making the whole father Christmas business totally credible to young children there was the thing of the postman bringing the letters to the door with the North Pole stamps on them and the the whole way in which one we put letters on the fire and in the earlier part of the essay 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 where as you can see from his letters that was beginning to be a new secondary world the sense in which nonetheless we were actually drawn in I think to the secondary welders actually existed so it was intensely exactly intensely exactly and tightening because when one heard once couldn't get sleep on Christmas Eve when one heard the tread of father Christmas's feet coming up the stairs and when all the clothes everyone's hair don't because something very strange had entered the heart 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 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 thee to the main one what do you think the poor dear Oh 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 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 brought 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 also I never Adam and he can't draw when 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 and escapades involving him but I think that the thing that stays with me is the 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 the father Christmas who is a sort of Gandalf figure it had it has 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 Bailey talking 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 the actual beginning I just not really the beginning but the actual flash point was I remember very clearly I can even I took I still see the corn in it my house in Trenton off for everybody haven't I got as most eyelids and papers there and mocking school examinations in the summertime is there is enormous very laborious and unfortunate wasn't boring and I know that picking up a paper and actually find nearly an extra mark for it takes two five marks if you lose one page of this particular papers left blank glorious nothing to read so I scribble our Ajay counting back in a hole in the ground lived a hobbit I think the 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 talking CS foresters horatio hornblower stories have been very successful over a long period and there you have a character set in the the brutal world of the Royal Navy in the 19th century with you know the lash on the rum ration continually being described you can't help thinking now 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 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 and Bilbo though he doesn't become a hero like the dwarves nevertheless show 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 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 rustic English people made small in size because it reflects the generous small reach of the imagination but it's not this more reach of their courage or latent power I think the hobbits are not only specifically English but talking was a said straightaway that there are specifically West Midland us that they remind him of the Society of his youth and they come actually from work sure Worcestershire possibly Oxfordshire Herefordshire but he really means a very closed 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 an acoustic 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 gone I'll cook you some nice fish and chips well protector has actually shouldn't existed in middle-earth because 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 there also I think in a sense of voice from the past not the remote past the rather recent past but the hobbits have the attitude perhaps of my grandfather's time they are firmly attached to comfort to six square meals a day if they can get them 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 virtues of their own and they are as talking 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 be published and I think about two days before he began The Lord of the Rings he said to her friend of his he read to a friend of his I don't much approve of The Hobbit myself preferring my own mythology which is just touched on with it's consistent nomenclature Elrond Gondolin have escaped out of it and organised history I prefer that to this rabble of a day named dwarves are to the völuspá newfangled hobbits and golems invented in an idle era 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 I think this is in a way misleading the real point is is that there were several Silmarillion 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 as still exists little penny netbooks and some parts of it he recorded were written in the trenches under shellfire and this was the first Silmarillion oh no 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 Malan therefore his mythology it's more immediate it's even funny it's very written in an extraordinary flowery consciously archaic manner which i think is very attractive but they're already in awfully late 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 it's more chronicle like the important thing is that that was finished the book of lost tales you could say was finished the in 1930 silver in Leon 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 read in 1964 he said by the time the Hobbit appeared in 1937 this the silver illion was in coherent form the Hobbit was not intended to have anything to do with it I had the habit where my children was too young of inventing and telling orally sometimes of 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 Muslim Aurelio 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 rarely stand quite apart and so you see the the famous names of middle-earth such as the Misty Mountains Mirkwood the Great River of Wilden hand 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 says attracted everything into it attracted the Hobbit and still more while subtracted the Lord of horrendous said the Lord of the Rings becomes in the most complex fashion best the sequel to The Hobbit and heavily involved the cerulean 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 12 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 and if I called the content as opposed to the practice of his academic work is one of the primary ingredients in the secondary world there are many kinds anglo-saxon above all and of course the phonology the phonology of the primary world relates very very closely to the languages of the secondary world cinder in and Quenya the languages the elvish languages of middle-earth they're totally different in the sense in which he meant used the word fantasy there there 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 it shows I think is important as it shows what the word fantasy means there's nothing crazy or absurd in the idea his fantasy phonology is justice 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 as I say intertwined and was productive very productive in his sub creative well it seems to me that he 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 an 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' plays no other part of a part in the hobbit they think or not oh Anderson Verrilli on the plays a very important part in Lord of the Rings is the kingdom of Rohan which is modeled on in the 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 because 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 for 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 simply select a few syllables that attracted him he worked out what that word would actually be and he works out as where the sun changes that will if fictionally will have passed over them in the course of time as they do in all languages and this is what gives to these languages they're extraordinary I know there's powerful things in his in his works even for those who have no understanding of the nature of their philology this extraordinary sense that they they cohere they are real they have the trademark of being a totally individual speech doctors even if you don't know French you can say that's French or that's Swedish because they have the characteristic note and quality and his languages do that and where the language is tolki and 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 is to work out the grammar first and then in tokens case you work out the main verbal routes and then you play around with the 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 words you happen to need at that particular moment the first citizen thinpla yeah about John I was 13 or 14 I've never stopped with him languages have a flavor to me the job I never understand people thinking the same phrases there's awfully dry and die because the new language to me is just like taking your wine or some new sweet Pete or 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 era feel that he could say that Quenya was the language as he really deeply desired whereas none of the dangers of the world really came quite there he loved Angus excellent he didn't like it as much he loved finish which was an important influence on Kenya but Quenya was the language of his heart because the language that he wanted oh I'm doing now is to try and write in elvish we obviously my writing is very inferior to the elf their standard reason when meeting a star shines upon our meeting good I might have mistaken my I would and that's stands for LN sila lumen or Monte elbow visual imagery are really the rescue funny l see different an imperial know many like Blair Elena now higher ed Palantir elo galas Romina North Van Looy loss limit on navaja signify our own during the long years in which he worked on the languages in the legends the stories themselves seem to evolve as if under other influence and that of their creator if the case bitter for instance particularly of The Silmarillion what is her fascinating it's because it lasted so long and because he read so many versions you can follow the changes in great detail where you've got the pickles 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 people's so you see in my particular case I can think of a great king in the earlier stages of mythology or our dress of Naga throne he slowly as as the years pass becomes diminished and is ultimately rejected completely from the dynasty where the kingly dynasty he he belonged 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 shell 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 it's only strangers who call it the eagle and child it's ready the Burton baby and in the Burton baby the Inklings who were a group of like-minded dons and new dons used to meet from 939 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 CS Lewis's rooms in maudlin 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 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 that's on the bench over the Kings been suddenly erect tall who proudly seemed again and rising his stirrups he cried in a loud voice more clear than any there and ever heard a mortal man achieve before arise arise riders of Theoden they'll only need to make iron slaughter spiritually conceal the Splinter of the sword a a red day or the Sun rises right now right now right Condor 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 CS Lewis the profound attachment and imaginative intimacy between him and Lewis was I think in some ways the real core of it definite it were it was of profound importance to my father that in that relationship indeed to both of them in fact that they drifted apart in there later on I think myself is it was sad but I think I would say it was no more than the drifting apart I didn't think myself then did you really requires to be studied in it in depth I think what I should concentrate on was the extraordinary support of mind of taste that they offered each other 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 the 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 again great encouragement over their writings I think that it was the most tremendous grief and blow and when Lewis died even though in the years preceding Lewis's death following Lewis's marriage and also after his move to Cambridge they've not met regularly and they seemed 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 the affection remained in the letter he wrote to me which is in response to a letter I wrote to him a sympathy after Lewis his death he said that he had the normal feelings of them for the man of his age who feels his losing his leaves one by one but the Lewises 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 tokine 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 it in Tolkien's case both specifically in the Lord of the Rings and generally in his other works I have a passenger taken from my father's story Leif by Nicola which is probably the most obviously autobiographical of anything he wrote I think and mr. Nicol is is a painter who can never get his big work finished which is the painting of a tree and finally he comes to die which is what is called in the story going on a journey and he finds himself eventually in another country nickel 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 marvellous 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 the Dow of course it was beginning to rise again the great green shadow came between him and the Sun niggle looked up and fell off his bicycle before him stood the tree his dream 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 tokine is that he was a very private person he didn't expect as I going to have biographical criticism perpetrated on him and I don't think I'd have liked it if it had happened having said that nobody can avoid putting their personal life into that fiction I mean what else have you got to put into it other than in his case that the learning so I'm sure that in many respects like for instance his war service his experience with the war and also their 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 a very much part of his fiction and one way of looking at 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 it's 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 and gained 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 invocation of 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 chiminea 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 had 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 hedge rows were broken great wagons 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 platter 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 talking I think had a melancholic streak perhaps that's putting it too far I would put it this way that 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 talking obviously continues to think about death and a part of his mythology is to construct a race of creatures who are deathless and who wish to escape from deathlessness in the way the 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 or 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 with 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 interests people hold them the attention for a considerable time or make their stories fact he always a human story Spectre always about one thing out there death inevitable death the passage in The Lord of the Rings which most clearly recalls the first world war is that 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 fantastic illusion because the dead bodies aren't really there they've been buried many ages ago but actually the fact that is an illusion makes you think that this is a reflection of a reality which talking had himself seen there is no such thing as a natural death nothing that happens to man is ever natural since his presence calls the whole world into question all men must die but for every man his death is an accident and even if he knows it he was sensitive a nun adjustable violation we may agree with words or not but those are they are the key spring of the laws of 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 the name give me a name and his produces story not the other but 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 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 Laing which goes over Woodhouse more 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 talking knew that actually nobody around here it says wood house they all say wood house and actually some of them say wood O's now a wood O's is a different thing from a wood house and talking thought it might have meant once upon a time not house in the wood but would do whassa which means wild man of the woods woodwose satyr and that in a sense is the start for his picture in the Lord rings of GaN Bui GaN the headman of the of the wusses in the woods well talking obviously thought to himself what is it woodwose did they really live here it's a very good place for wood roses because it is that they were heavily forested and steep site where wild men look for a long period well he obviously thought about that he 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 I think he was interested in that was that he knew that Brill had a Celtic element in it it means Bri Hill and when he looked at the map he discovered those a little cluster of these Celtic stroke anglo-saxon compounds and of course he 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 oftenly 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 her 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 m-net and when I first read this as our m-net never never come across it don't know that word wonder what it means so I looked it up in the in the Oxford book of place names and of course there is a place called M Ness actually Tim Ness and it's in Norfolk and then I worked out what it meant an old English and it means a man mess the even meadow and I realized actually that what talking that 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 have called the flat grass plain what would there would be four step or four Prairie what would the native English word for that be Eddie answered that actually would be an EM net and we haven't got any M nets in England except actually of course in Norfolk that's the one place we do find flat grass Plains so he told himself that this is the answer to it and again the the sort and the word and the place name give you a major element in in in the culture in the whole build up offer the Riders of Rohan of the riddermark so all the time I think his mind turned on names and places and landscape and history and it's from that that the fiction develops the love of of word law came 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 has it where I heard it and and put it down and to other things that give it its incredible coherence and convincing Ness inducing what Coleridge called the suspension of disbelief it's that the language is so coherent where as in many other fantasies you feel then 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 but 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 to plant riders it was so powerful the other thing I remember too is that when I came to read the book and reread 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 went up from the back riders and that I think remained in my mind is a very important fact about literature but 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 whodunits rather unsatisfactory former 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 and that's forever if it's if it's very different 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 absorbed 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 medieval II 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 but 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 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 of Gollum has or the kind of childishness that makes Gollum terribly attractive but Frodo 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's very tough on Frodo oh and I 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 further prepare to leave in the last ship well here at lasts 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 gray earth and the light of the glass of Galadriel the freddo Borglum odin 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 freddo 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 gray 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 from the sound of them sent 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 home words 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 gray 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 by water so came back up the hill as day was ending once more and he went on and there was yellow light and fire with him and the evening meal was ready and he was expected Rose drew him in and set him in his chair and put little Eleanor 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 I can that he had to rewrite her a part of the Lord rings because he or at least to her chapter which was might have been quite a lot because he had described something as being by full moon and realized on looking back at the time scheme that he was a day in advance that the moon couldn't have been full till the next day and I mean one person a thousands of readers would probably have noticed that but it was he wouldn't dream of leaving something like that in the moon's I think finally the moons and Suns that worked out according about they were this probably well in 1942 actually I mean one I couldn't I'm not good enough neither is nor astronomer to work out where they might be seven thousand eight thousand years ago but as long as they correspond to some real configuration of what has been nothing despite Tolkien's perfectionism the Lord of the Rings was at last published in three volumes during 1954 in 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 how they would take it and rayna run win 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 abhorred 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 the values the values affect 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 it's like a kind of secular Messiah nism 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 talking 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 public 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 to and they are very keen that as many people as possible should read advance 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 of my favorite comment is by the reviewer in The Times a tree supplement 25th November 1955 who nailed his colours 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 it's 1,200 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 is being read through by an enormous number of adults many more times than once another classic I think really again you know book when people might possibly have have learnt better this book says talking in a very advanced critical language that of the Lord of 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 of the narrative but they have given much infantile happiness to the talking 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 necessaries than 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 talking 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 that 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 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 condom Nations there were some significant good reviews burn 11 wrote that it will 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 realize what it was trying to do and then they realize they didn't like that so they denied their own response and that I think is the worst thing a critic can do when you you know it in your heart well 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's a kind of a self-censorship there I think that one thing is that there's a kind of ideological opposition the talking 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 where everything was irony now talking 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 say the critics thought the academic world saw 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 where this is a success but we're not going to admit that they'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 gonna 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 what are they gonna 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 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 talking's book were many of his fellow academics and this attitude prevails today the academic reaction has been I think comically bad 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 ever truck from the the moment the Lord of the Rings was published you've 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 doesn't like it 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 one that quite to know how he managed to do that but I think there's another reason which is this that talking 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 people were quite prepared to accept it it was a minority subject taught to small numbers of students which could perhaps safely be patronized and what i think was particularly irritating was to find that 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 aware 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 well a shock and 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 it's very Englishness I think he's profoundly English and very deeply rooted in a particular time in his countries and in Western European history a sort of between the wars period which I think has worked 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 wasn't aware that the book had gotten a sort of second wind because I would see people reading it in grocery store lines and bus queues 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 Marya 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 tear 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 dismal a and mainly 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 hit one can't help remembering that the hemline of the dark satanic Mills of course I've been schooling for a year so I know otherwise I suppose I just his description of the of these houses with ugly narrow windows correspond it so very much to amount as other things that the 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 if you can spot those buildings even today immediately because they was the window the proportions of the windows are so ugly strangely narrow high shouldered unpleasant and and it was so strange as he should describe exactly the same kind of ugliness that to me is the essence of ugliness but bad architecture so to speak so I suppose that's what I what I try to put in Queen Margherita has continued to be inspired by talking's writing this is a watercolor that did some time I think in the late 70s probably anyway after I'd read The Silmarillion it's really after the story of torrential rain bias when his old father is released and comes back and finds I think it's his wife is his wife sitting at the stone which was put up where we're turning 90 and and his sister were buried JRR 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 talking was concerned that the work was often misinterpreted as allegorical or condemned as escapist many people applied to a nuclear this is the ring to have taken to the nuclear bomb not there I think that was in my mind is the whole thing I really love it but it doesn'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 and what he called fantasy the world he created exists for itself and for what it tells you and for what the light who 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 well 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 as often being used as a means of attack on the very conception of fantasy or the secondary world and he'd 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 this isn't such a pleasant place into a secondary world that may not be very much more pleasant for the senior is very different and there are terrors as well as beauties in the secondary world but it is not um he said that his critics had chosen the wrong word they 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 prison by which in other contexts is regarded as a renewable 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 talking 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 pain gave him when the money beyond the Flair 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 talking interested in whatever happened to be 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 knocks for dawn and to look like when I knew him he was gray-haired Swift of speech but a little bit incomprehensible of times he spoke 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 soul of courtesy he was Victorian by nature of birth rarely and he had many Victorian qualities which I think we missed today that innate courtesy in dealing with people and especially with people either generation as I was he never made me I 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 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 silver illion that he couldn't finish he couldn't finish her 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 for the beginning in 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 private 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 began Galadriel enters out of The Lord of the Rings into the world of the elves in Berlin all new stories begin right up to the end of his life Galadriel position in the elder days were still being developed so this was 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 a way from the old legends Turin Baron 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 studied and he became more and more interested I think more and more more and more interested in the what we 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 and shall rightly declared the the fundamental underpinning concern of all his work was death the Intolerable fact and the nature of the elves came 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 was the life of the elves was coterminous with the life of Dada dadah being the elvish work for the world our world which middle-earth was apart and so in his later years he became involved in profound attempt to determine the nature of an immortal being who is nonetheless incarnate and possesses a body this word in turn was beginning to develop new stories within muscle marilla and i think the whole thing simply became too large too complex to have so precise to attempt to impose her precise a metaphysical explanation on it was perhaps the 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 anything was any real evidence for it I think he deeply wanted to finish it but cut too large too large of a task to tag 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 2nd 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 best-seller interest in Tolkien's writing is as flourishing today as ever with each new generation discovering the delights of his created world there is a great hunger for some kind of literary tradition I feel among my students so that I get students who've read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings 10 times and students who've never read it but are pulled into it by the idea that there's a connection between the me to evil in 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

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Length: 107min 48sec (6468 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 08 2014