Bingo, Odo and Frodo: Tolkien, Lewis And The Discovery Writer

Welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy and it's aimed at all of you who are fantasy fans and fantasy creatives. My name is Julia Golding, I'm the director of the Centre but I also spent most of my time being an author. And today I thought I would do a podcast about the craft of writing because I've been reading a lot about the writing process of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis recently and he got me thinking about that tricky business of deciding just what went on in the creative process. Now of course it's extremely hard to recapture the moment but I think most of us would assume that J.R.R. Tolkien thanks to his huge amount of notes and the sawmarillion and all the many many background pieces of writing that he did behind the story of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. Most of us would assume that he was someone who planned so using the simile of a garden you would think that as a writer he'd be more like Sam Gamji on his allotment you know with his rows of beans and his rows of peas and so on all carefully timed or carefully managed to get the highest yield. But actually when you look at it the reality was very different. I'm very much indebted in these thoughts to the book The Bandus Natch by Diana Pavlak Glyar who looks at C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the creative collaboration of the Inklings. And this episode I'm going to dedicate to Bingo, Odo and Frodo, who were them? Well obviously you're familiar with Frodo, Odo you think of as a saxophone baggins but in fact Bingo, Odo and Frodo were the first version of the Hobbits in what Tolkien called The New Hobbit, the book that was eventually to become Lord of the Rings and how differently we might have felt about a story that had the main character Bingo, anyway I'll leave you to ponder that. But what's really interesting to me as a writer is just how far away from his plan Tolkien was when he was writing this in the late 1930s so he knew that his publisher wanted a book like The Hobbit, that's where he'd created his market and he started writing one which you can see the traces of in the beginning of Lord of the Rings with the party and the emphasis on the fun and games around the huge numbers of people turning up and the jokes surrounding celebrating your 11th birthday and so on. It does feel like a children's book at the very start and that tone carried on in the first draft for a long way. He sent a version of that to his publisher and to see his Lewis and got the same message back and that was too much Hobbit talk, more or less get on with it and so he had to rethink but it's very fascinating to see how lost he was. You would have thought that he would turn to the Legendarium and think ah yes I've got these vast stories here of Silmarils and Melkor and Numenor all these other sort of great stories but when he's writing in the third age at the end of the time period focusing on Hobbits he really doesn't have a clue so it seems rather than an allotment that he's carefully tending he's more or less going out into the wilderness and hacking away to create himself a path. Diana Pavlec Gliars book has the very specific example of what he's doing on the first encounter of the Hobbits and the Black Rider. When it's the first version of this Bingo, Odo and Frodo are walking through the Shire, they hear a horse approaching, they dive into the bushes and this is the description of the horse. And a turn came a white horse and on it sat a bundle or that is what it looked like, a small man wrapped entirely in a great cloak and hood so that only his eyes peered out and his boots in the stir at below. So far so familiar except for the detail of the white horse but it goes on the figure uncovered its nose and sniffed and then sat silent as if listening. A laugh came from inside the hood and it's not a Black Rider at all, it's Gandalf arriving much much earlier in the narrative than in what we're familiar with Lord of the Rings. So we can see here that Tolkien doesn't really have a plan, he just brings Gandalf in without any real thought to the wider story and what he's going to do and no wonder he sort of runs out of steam at this point, he has to rethink what he's doing in this potential confrontation and he comes up with a much better solution and he also rebrands the hobbits to the more familiar Frodo, Pippin and Sam, Mary as your remember is isn't there at this point and it becomes a Black Rider but the approach is very very similar. So here how it appears in the actual published book. Round the corner came a Black Horse, no Hobbit pony but a full-sized horse and on it sat a large man who seemed to crouch in the saddle, wrapped in a great black cloak and hood so that only his boots in the high stirrup showed below, his face was shadowed and invisible. We get a much more sinister figure, the sniffing is kept but it's terrifying as opposed to turning into a jovial Gandalf and then leaping out on him and playing a joke, I mean the whole tone shift is different but what is fascinating is that the skeleton of the first thought is still there but he's just dressed it very differently. So I think this reveals something which if you then go on and look at the other manuscripts in the extra works, particularly those edited by Christopher Tolkien, what you get is a sense how Tolkien carries on changing the underlying structure of his history, the Silmarillion and that sort of work to fit what he's doing in the narrative. I think many of us would have wished him to do much more narrative unless Silmarillion but he really enjoyed the thinking of the histories and the languages, that's what he really inspired him. Now I want to compare this to C.S. Lewis because C.S. Lewis gave an account of how the Narnia stories came to be, he's actually like a sort of introductory piece and it appears in the collection of essays of this and other worlds edited by Water Hooper. Anyway, he says, all my seven Narnian books and my three science fiction books began with seeing pictures in my head, at first they were not a story, just pictures. The lion all began with a picture of a fawn carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about 16. Then one day when I was about 40 I said to myself, let's try to make a story about it. Now this suggests a much more person who is writing by discovery, he's got an image and he thinks, okay what's the story about this image? This is the classic approach of the discovery writer who starts with an idea and then goes on to discover the story behind it. But on the other hand, there's also the chance that he worked the other way around too, because Michael Ward's book, Planet Narnia, suggests there's actually a much more complicated and secret underpinning to the Narnia series. This idea that each of the seven books reflects the seven major planets, it's a technique beloved of the medieval writers and CS Lewis as a medievalist, he might well have been having this secret code, this sort of literary joke underpinning what he's writing. So in this scheme for example, the lion and the witch and the wardrobe is influenced by the planet Jupiter. Jupiter gives us the idea of jove and jovial. Michael's argument is that there are many things that happen in line in the witch and the wardrobe, which are best understood if you think about jove being the sort of presiding spirit of that piece. So for example, when the spell is broken and it moves from winter to spring, we skip over March and April and go straight to May, which is a month associated with Jupiter, with jove in the medieval mind, and also the presence of Father Christmas, which we discussed at the livestream just before Christmas, and very literally a jovial figure with his Rubicon face and the sort of fun and joy that he brings. So that's the argument that Michael Ward is making, that actually a book that seems to be a classic discovery writer's book, going from an image is actually much more planned and much more schematic than you might think when you look at it for the first time. So what does this mean for a writer? I think it's probably fair at this point to go back to the little essay it all began with a picture by Lewis, because he gives this word of warning. The editor has asked me to tell you how I came to write the line the witch and the wardrobe. I will try, but you must not believe all the authors tell you about how they wrote their books. This is not because they mean to tell lies, it is because a man writing a story is too excited about the story itself to sit back and notice how he is doing it. In fact, that might stop the works just as if you start thinking about how to tie your tie. The next thing is that you find you can't tie it. I relate to this as a writer because when I go around schools and festivals, I'm very often asked where do you get your ideas from? And it's very hard to go back and unpick where things do come from because it is actually to use a talking image. It's a cauldron of stories that you're dipping into rather than some clear origin story like the radioactive spider-biting spider-man. It's not as simple as cause and effect like that. I thought I did a straight what I mean by taking one of the very first series I wrote. This is a children's quartet called the Companions Quartet. The basic idea in this series is that it's about children who belong to the secret society for the protection of mythical creatures. In their ordinary life, they're going to school and hanging out in coffee shops and all the rest of it. But they also belong to a society outside school whose job it is to protect the mythical creatures. Now, we've reached a point where there are no longer any spaces for these creatures to hide. No hereby dragons on maps. So it's getting increasingly more difficult. And then you also get the problem that their habitats are vanishing so they're pushed into confrontation with humans. Mythical creatures are angry and they are threatening to punish humanity for what they're doing. But there's also another pattern which is my equivalent of the planets in the Michael Ward version of the Narnia stories, which is the idea of the Greek elements of water, earth, wind and fire. So I started out with this structure in mind. I knew that there'd be four. I knew that each book would be presided over by something that would felt watery or earthy and so on. But once I sort of set the mood and the tone, it didn't particularly weigh down on the story requirements. It was just something which I had in the back of my mind. So in each book, I do have a passage, at least one passage, where I celebrate something that reflects the overall theme of that book. Hearing, for example, is a description of a woodland from the second in the series, which is the earth one, which is called the Gorgon's Gaze. The main boy character, Cole, has gone off to Malin's wood, which is under threat from road developments. And he's riding his pony, and this is our first time that we sort of go under the eaves of this forest. They look forward to galloping together through the many different parts of the wood, lofty green halls of beach, dark, mysterious tunnels of oak with acorns crunching underfoot, white-coloured cloisters of silver birch on the sandy ground. Not only were the trees so diverse, they also changed so much with the seasons. One visit, column mags, would brush through the freshly minted greens of spring. Next, they were beneath the riotous leaves of summer, wading hot, deep in brazen autumn, or spooked by skeletal winter. So while that passage is very much influenced by the idea of honouring the Greek element of earth, actually I'm aware as the writer that there's many other things going into it. So I grew up near Epping Forest. It's a large, publicly-owned forest on the edge of London. And that's where I would go walking as a child with my parents. And that description of the different areas in the forest, so a place where there are silver birches, a place where there are beaches and so on, that's taken from my memory of those walks. So it's more than one ingredient in my cauldron at that point. Yes, there's an underpinning story. Yes, there is a theme, which is the earth theme. But there's also memory, influence, atmosphere, invention, all those other things happening as well. So going back to where we started with Tolkien and his, does he have an allotment where everything is planned? Or is he growing in the dark for his story? I mean, probably the truth is, it's a bit of both, isn't it? So he did have a structure and a theme and peoples. He already knew about the Hobbits. He had Elven languages. He had a sense of the history. He knew where feet were falling. There had other people had gone before. But he didn't know what happened absolutely now at the moment of writing. He left himself the space to invent. There's probably also an element here that he's writing to please an audience, rather than to please himself. So he knows he has to write a different kind of story from the one he would prefer to be getting on with, which might be elaborating another aspect of Elven history. But no, the publisher and CS Lewis want a story about Hobbits and Hobbits when they leave their safety of the Shire and then come up against the great events of the world. That's where CS Lewis felt the story lay. And I think it's right. So when we're teaching writing as part of what we do at the Oxford Centre for Fantasy on our online courses, I often start with asking people to analyse what kind of writer they are. Are they a chaotic writer with a sort of flurry of ideas or are they somebody who's planned out? They're fancy novels since the age of 13. All sorts of people come through the door. But I think in the end, what happens is all of us are discovery writers at the point of writing that we have to be open to the idea of exploring our image, our road, whatever it is that sparked the original idea from the story. And perhaps here it might be worth quoting another Oxford writer, one of our living greats, that's Philip Pullman, who talks about the process of writing into the dark. I love that image as though you can only see just as far as your candle will flow a little bit of light upon the darkness. And that's what gets him up in the morning to write the next chapter. And for me, while I may have a plan, I also do like to be surprised by my own writing. If you'd like to explore your own writing and see where your story takes you, do think about joining one of our courses or coming to one of the in-person experiences that are going to happen in Oxford this year. We have courses at Merton and Mordeling Colleges, both of which are associated with C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, and it'd be great to see you there. You can find out more details about that on our website. That was enough of the little advertisement there. Let's go back to thinking about the process of writing. Tolkien got rid of Bingo. He kept Odo, though poor old Odo became a Sackville Baggins and very far from a hero. But he did retain Frodo and Frodo then became, of course, his main character. But maybe somewhere in a parallel universe, there is a version of Lord of the Rings that is written with Odo, Bingo and Frodo gang and on adventure. I wonder what kind of book that would have been. It is our tradition to end with where in the fancy world is it the best place for something? And because I've mentioned the companion quartet, which is all about mythical creatures, many of whom are shape-shifting creatures, I thought I would decide where in the world it is best to be a shape-shifter. Now the very first thing I thought of was those many urban fantasy stories about werewolves. I love the Mercedes Thompson's book by Patricia Briggs, which is about a mechanic called Mercedes Thompson, who can change into a coyote. She is based on a Native American tradition, but she also connects to werewolves, so there you get another kind of shape-shifter. So that's one favorite place, but I think it's picked to the post by the shape-shifting demons of Philip Pullman. I have to be loyal to Oxford fantasy writers, of course, but in the Northern Lights or Golden Compass series, what a brilliant idea was it to come up with the idea of a creature that accompanies you as a child, a demon who represents your spirit. Someone was telling me the other day that the idea for the demon actually didn't come to Philip until many, many drafts into the Northern Lights. It's almost impossible to imagine what the book was like without that, but there you go. That's an encouragement for redrafting, if you're writing. Maybe some of your best ideas are still to come. So I think the best fantasy world for shape-shifting is the Northern Lights and the Philip Pullman demons. Though, of course, there is the very sad thing that your demons settles down when you get to maturity. And I'm always bit worried if you end up with a cockroach or something that you almost have no choice but to be a bad guy, don't you, in that case. Anyway, I like the demons at the younger end of the scale when they're still able to change. That's a wonderful idea. That's all for this week. Thank you very much for listening. Thanks for listening to MythMakers Podcast. Bought to you by the Oxford Center for Fantasy. Visit OxfordCenterForFatasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses in person stays in Oxford, plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide.