Transcript
00:05 - Julia Golding (Host)
Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. Today I am delighted to announce that we are joined by Professor John Holmes from Birmingham University. Now, John, I met first when he was performing I think is the right word his wonderful lecture on Tolkien, on dragons, at the Story Museum back in the autumn, and more about that, anon. But we'll also be touching on John other interests, which bring him into contact with the world of fantasy that we're all interested in, because he specialises in Victorian literature and culture and of course, this is the seedbed out of which writers like Tolkien and CS Lewis emerged. And he's also got an interest in the role of science. So the world of science fiction is not a huge step away. So, John, welcome to Mythmakers.
01:11 - John Holmes (Guest)
Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.
01:13 - Julia Golding (Host)
So let's start with Tolkien. Perhaps we'll start first of all with how you first met Tolkien's books and what came in the way that you ended up being Tolkien in many senses when you do this particular lecture.
01:31 - John Holmes (Guest)
Yes. So, like a great many people, I first read Tolkien as a child or young adult. So I read the Hobbit and then I remember reading the Lord of the Rings when I was about 13, I think 12, 13. I had to write a book review of it at school and consequently I decided to make it at least three book reviews because I figured that it was a big enough tome to justify that. So I read Tolkien. Then I became a big enthusiast for Tolkien, read the Lord of the Rings perhaps four times in that kind of early teen, early to mid-teen period. Bought the Unfinished Tales. When that came out I picked up a copy of the Silmarillion, Started to acquire the History of Middle-Earth. As those books started to appear and then about five volumes in, I think I sort of parted company with Tolkien for a while. I was a bit saturated. I think I sort of parted company with Tolkien for a while.
02:24 - Julia Golding (Host)
I was a bit saturated.
02:24 - John Holmes (Guest)
Yeah, and then in my late 20s I decided to reread the Lord of the Rings and was delighted by how well it had worn as far as I was concerned, because I knew a lot of people who became quite sniffy about Tolkien as they matured, as they saw it themselves anyway, and I found actually that the book was every bit as commanding and compelling as it had been when I was younger. And then that process sort of rolled on. So I read during the COVID pandemic, I read the Lord of the Rings aloud to my younger daughter, which was just a wonderful experience for both of us. It was wonderful to find voices for the characters. But also you got it so much deepened my appreciation of Tolkien's prose and the kind of variousness of his style and the richness of his landscape description. I loved those long processes of the journey in the Lord of the Rings. So that was sort of the personal side of it. And then in terms of the professional side of it, as you say, I'm originally an expert on Victorian literature and culture or a scholar of Victorian literature and culture, an expert by now. So I hadn't really worked very much on fantasy, but I'd worked a lot on the pre-Raphaelites who have a fantastical element we might touch on that a bit later and I started to work actually on Tolkien or to think about Tolkien again.
04:06
I started to work actually on Tolkien, or to think about Tolkien again, because of a collaboration with our Forest Research Institute at Birmingham, the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research, and they had a PhD program where academics at Birmingham could bid for PhD projects, and it struck me that there are a lot of forests in fantasy fiction.
04:27
I was obviously very familiar with Tolkien I'd known Ursula Le Guin for quite a long time and had recently started reading William Morris's fantasies because I had a PhD student working on those and it occurred to me that these forests we knew in scholarly terms. We know quite a lot about Gothic forests, people have written quite a lot about Gothic forests, but people have written less about fantasy forests and particularly about the ways in which they create a much more positive model for human relationships with forests and trees. So I wanted to explore that in collaboration with Biforce. So that's how I started working professionally, got a fantastic PhD student called Dion Dobrinsky, did a marvellous PhD, which we're hoping to publish a book from in a series that I edit for Bloomsbury, and then, well, the story about becoming Tolkien is another one. Well, the story about becoming Tolkien is another one. So maybe I should tell you a little bit about how I came to perform the Dragons lecture, how we unearthed that.
05:36 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yes, so I think the first thing to establish for listeners is that you haven't made this up.
05:42 - John Holmes (Guest)
No.
05:43 - Julia Golding (Host)
This is a lecture which Tolkien actually did give. Yeah, I think it was a Christmas event, wasn't it A bit of fun? Yeah, so why don't you sort of set the scene for when the original lecture was presented?
06:07 - John Holmes (Guest)
Yes, so the original lecture was given on New Year's Day in 1938. So it was just after the publication of the Hobbit. Tolkien was a professor at Oxford at the time and the lecture was one of a series of Christmas lectures about six or eight Christmas lectures that the Oxford University Museum of Natural History gave annually. So it always had a series it invited speakers in. Often they would be Oxford academics and Tolkien was both an Oxford academic and a celebrity, and these lectures were, of course, aimed at a family audience, like Christmas lectures, like the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, for example.
06:43
And I don't know who it was who had the idea of inviting Tolkien, although, yes, I can't. I don't recall whether the collected letters includes a letter where he accepts the invitation. It does include a letter where he writes about his hesitations about having accepted the invitation because he's now having to write the lecture. But somebody must have had the idea of inviting him, presumably because he was a bit of a celebrity and they thought it would be entertaining and engaging to have a lecture on dragons in a museum that was full of dinosaur remains and dichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs and pterodactyls, and so the lecture actually starts with quite a long section on dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles, with quite a long section on dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles. Anyway, the reason this sort of came to my attention is I've been doing a lot of work with the Oxford Natural History Museum. I have done a lot of work on the actual building itself, which is a fantasy text in its own right.
07:41 - Julia Golding (Host)
I've written a whole children's book about that.
07:43 - John Holmes (Guest)
Oh well, there you go. Yes, it's right, by the building. It is astonishing, um, a beautiful piece of architecture and wonderfully um elaborate and lots of individual imagination that's gone into the creation of it. Anyway, I've been working a lot with them because I because actually that building was was, uh, decorated the the decorative art there was inspired by pre-raphaelitism, because actually that building was decorated, the decorative art there was inspired by Pre-Raphaelitism and several of the Pre-Raphaelites were involved in one way or another. So it was part of a project I was doing on the Pre-Raphaelites and science that got me involved with the museum. Anyway, at some point the director of the museum, paul smith, recently retired, uh mentioned to me that they'd recently discovered some magic lantern slides in their collection which they'd been cataloging and which had been uncatalogued for such a long time. That were by tolkien. There were images from Tolkien's drawings. There are seven of them. It's actually four images and three duplicates, and they're all images of dragons. One of them is the very famous painting of Smaug.
08:55 - Julia Golding (Host)
I've actually got it on my mug. There we go oh well, there you go.
08:58 - John Holmes (Guest)
Yes, exactly, precisely, that's the Bodleian Library. Yes, yep, and there's one from rover random and uh, the other two are two of his sort of rather lovely doodles of of dragons. Um, anyway, they found that they had these sides and then they found that the lecture had been given in. Uh, I mean, they rediscovered or re-recalled that the lecture had been given in 1938. And then it transpired that the manuscript of that lecture is in the Bodleian and it's only been published once in an extremely expensive commemorative edition of the Hobbit. So it's not really readily available. So we thought we would recreate it using the original Magic Lantern slides, those four images by Tolkien, but also in the lecture itself. In the manuscript he very conveniently has noted where he's using a new slide and what it's a slide of, and not all of those slides, but a lot of those slides are identifiable within the Oxford University Museum Magic Lantern slide collection.
10:12 - Julia Golding (Host)
Can you explain to the modern generation what a magic lantern is?
10:17 - John Holmes (Guest)
Oh, yes, yes, so a magic lantern. Well, it depends how modern the generation is. For a generation of our, our generation, it's the precursor to the slide projector. Um, so what it is is a, it's a, it's a device, it's a, it's a, a wooden box. Typically it was powered by um limelight in the 19th century, so by, by, by lime, uh, the illumination given up by lime, burning lime. Nowadays you can use electricity, which is rather safer.
10:46
Yeah, um, and a magic lantern slide is a transparent piece of glass, a pane of glass, or two panes of glass with an image between them, but, but, um, uh, more typical, so typically a pane of glass with a photograph on it or a, uh, a drawing on it, and you project light through that and then project it onto the wall or onto a um, you can project it onto a screen, uh, so it's very. It's basically, I suppose, if for us it's the precursor of the slideshow, for a contemporary generation it's the precursor of a powerpoint presentation, effectively, um, and it's an early 19th century technology that was very sensational, which is why it was called the Magic Lantern. People would go around the country giving Magic Lantern lectures and kind of phantasmagoria shows of extraordinary things that could only be seen through this new technology.
11:43 - Julia Golding (Host)
Wonderful. So when you read the lecture itself, what kind of impression did you get of Tolkien? Was it the one that you already knew, or did you find a new side to him?
11:56 - John Holmes (Guest)
I found in some ways a new side to him. It's a funny lecture, playful, isn't it Playful, it's entertaining. And of course this is partly the tolkien, the tolkien, if you like, the tolkien who narrates the hobbit to some extent. Um, he's, he's written at the same time it's the same, he's aware of the child audience, but at the same time it's's also partly Tolkien the academic. So there's a lot of discussion of etymologies.
12:32
Where does the word dragon come from? It's partly autobiographical. He talks about his childhood and collecting fossils on the beach and thinking they were perhaps dragon's teeth. So you've got different sides to it. And then there's also Tolkien, tolkien the storyteller, but not the teller of his own stories, because he retells in the lecture the stories of Beowulf's encounter with the dragon, of Sigurd's encounter with the dragon. He mentions St George, so he's Thor, there's a story about Thor and St George, so he's Thor, there's a story about Thor. So you get to see Tolkien playfully retelling other stories, often stories that he's more seriously retold in his own poetry, for example, or translated in the case of Beowulf. But yes, it's a very engaging, also slightly Donnish. Some of the jokes are a bit sort of obviously Oxford, yeah, and sort of public school.
13:31 - Julia Golding (Host)
Public school yes, he's expecting an audience of boys who kind of get the jokes.
13:38 - John Holmes (Guest)
Yes, yes, and I mean his own children were at the Dragon School in Oxford at the time, or had been recently. So there's a joke about the Dragon School as a school for dragons, and so some of that feels a bit sort of of its moment.
13:54 - Julia Golding (Host)
But that is part of its delight, isn't it? Yeah, exactly, we're in the 1930s when we're listening to you do this.
14:01 - John Holmes (Guest)
Exactly exactly, and I was lucky enough to be able to find in a secondhand clothes shop in Oxford a waistcoat that looks almost exactly like one that Tolkien used to wear, admittedly after the war. But so that's sort of part of the effect. And then the other thing, that kind of fed into all that was trying to recapture Tolkien's voice, which was an interesting exercise because we've got a lot of recordings of Tolkien, which was an interesting exercise because we've got a lot of recordings of Tolkien, but they're almost all post-war, so they're almost all from the 50s and particularly the 60s, late 60s, often by which point he's a much older man, and so there are a couple there are just two recordings from the early 30s. There are a couple there are just two recordings from the early 30s, but they're on records that were made to teach non-English speakers how to speak English.
14:52
So he's talking in an extraordinarily clipped and precise way and I gather in real life he was actually quite a mumbler. So he's obviously that's not really him, but one of those is about, uh, I think uh sort of going to the tobacconists and it's a sort of set of instructions, so so that wasn't the voice I wanted, so I was trying to base it much more on the, the older tolkien's voice, but in some ways slightly of what try and clear out elements of that that were just a result of a of aging yes, I was at a that's one of the tolkien lectures last friday with dimitra um femi, who's respected, uh, yes, and there was a discussion in the questions afterwards about how tolkien pronounced.
15:49 - Julia Golding (Host)
Tolkien pronounced mythology because apparently he said mythology, did he? Yeah, mythology, uh, which is I don't know if he was making a pun, but, um, I think his spoken voice is would probably be to us be a bit disarming, because the upper class tones of the 30s yes crown, for example, yes, it's very close in the mouth. So probably your interpretation of it, um, will need to come to something which is more listenable to the modern audience, and I think you did that brilliantly, thank you. Thank you, you do do this lecture when invited, do you know?
16:20 - John Holmes (Guest)
yes, well, yes, well. So I've done it three times so far twice at the ox University Museum, where it was premiered, if you like, originally, although the lecture theatre is no longer the same structure as it was when he gave the lecture. So twice there and once so far at the Story Museum. I'm giving it again at the Story Museum in April. Very nice, again at the Story Museum in April. So, yes, I'm available, as long as the Tolkien estate have the right of refusal, because it's their document, if you like. So they have to approve it when we go ahead, which they've done so far. Very kindly.
17:00 - Julia Golding (Host)
Excellent, so moving sort of a bit further back in time, from the 1930s to the Victorian period, which is where you started academically. If someone is wanting to understand what the Victorians were doing in fantasy which of course is the stuff that Tolkien's reading as a little boy where would you suggest they start?
17:24 - John Holmes (Guest)
Where would you suggest they start? Well, so it depends a little bit what kind of fantasy you're looking for. So obviously, I mean I think we can safely say without question that Lewis Carroll's Ellis books are probably the most famous Victorian fantasy, but they're unlike really anything else.
17:44
Yeah, because he's a mathematician, because he's so extraordinarily um uh, nimble with his tricksy imagination and and kind of playful, but not just playful in an, in an easy way, playful in a very precise and extremely clever way. Um, they're nonsense as much as they are fantasy, um, so I wouldn't necessarily start with carol, even though he's obvious place to start, because he's so different. Um, so you could start with George Macdonald, and George Macdonald certainly was an influence on Tolkien. The Princess and the Goblin, the Princess and Curdie, those books you can really tell when you read the Hobbit, that Tolkien's goblins are scenes in Thranduil's palace, the Elf King's palace in Mirkwood, that are very reminiscent of scenes in some of Macdonald's books. What Macdonald doesn't offer, though, is the kind of expansive imagination of a Tolkien you can't. Macdonald's worlds aren't fleshed out to quite the same extent. They're not as consistent. In fact, he likes playing with inconsistency, I think. So in that sense, I don't think, if you're coming from Tolkien, I wouldn't step back into McDonald to find something that sort of will satisfy that same impulse.
19:18
The person I'd go to is William Morris, and that's really for particularly his very late fantasy of all. So he's sort of inventing the genre. I know that's a slightly old-fashioned way of thinking about it. That's the kind of line that's peddled by the people who republish a lot of these books in the Ballantyne series in the 1970s. But fantastical, so not real worlds in his books that have those horizons, those distant horizons that can then open out to something that, like tolkien's imagination, um, and the ones I would really really recommend are, uh, the well at the world's end, which is a, is a very expansive book it's. It's a bit like the lord of the Rings in the sense of being a quest narrative, but it's also. Its actual structure is there and back again to take that subtitle from the Hobbit.
20:31
But it's different in that you don't have quite such a stark contest with evil that you have in the Lord of the Rings. Not quite so much is at stake, but you do have clear moral forces and clear exploitative forces that they're pitted against. You also have a sort of birth almost of the, the superhero figure in a way, when the, the protagonists, um, man and a woman, make it to the well at the world's end, drink from the well and become kind of uniquely powerful. Um, and then the other really fascinating, brilliant morris fantasy is the water of the wond's Isles, which has a heroine.
21:25
The central figure in that book is called Bird Alone and she is I mean, in a way it's a sort of perhaps surprisingly for Morris, but it's a proto-feminist fantasy in some regards it's very much about her realisation of herself and it's partly through and this is less surprising coming from Morris, through labour, through craft, but it's also through encounters with and bettering these witches that she encounters, one of which has kidnapped her as a child and brought her up. But that again is another wonderfully expansively imagined landscape. All this said, morris is a much harder writer to get into stylistically than Tolkien because he writes in a self-consciously archaic language. It's a bit like the most archaic reaches of Tolkien's language.
22:23
More like the Silmarillion kind of yes, a bit like the Silmarillion or like some of those passages around the Ride of the Rohirrim, when Tolkien's language becomes most sort of expressively medievalist.
22:37
But actually you have to at least double, if not square, that to get to Morris's prose and then and that's all the way through. But on the other hand, what I would say about that to any reader who's interested press through the first five pages, you'll get the hang of it. And thereafter it's actually quite a plain style. It's not unduly elaborate, the sentence structure is not overly played or kind of unduly contorted. It's actually very accessible once you just get into the vocabulary and start to sort of accept the use of words like cheap, like cheaping, um to mean trade or um other kind of examples, the burg instead of the town, um, these sorts of specific words that he, he chooses to use. But once you're there it's actually quite an accessible style, very readable, and I feel I think particularly um. When I last read the World at the World's End, I had that feeling of contented immersion in the book, in the story, in the place, that I find really quite rare but that I definitely get with the Lord of the Rings as well.
24:00 - Julia Golding (Host)
So William Morris is a fascinating person. I think he's actually underexplored in terms of film, tv, all sorts of things, yet we are surrounded by well, particularly his design. Yeah, my house has William Morris curtains and you know he's become very popular as a designer wallpaper. But of course he was part of the arts and craft movement. But he was also a pre-raphaelite in many ways, or friends with the raffleites, would you say he was a pre-raphaelite or just friends with he is a product of pre-raphaelitism, let's say that I mean he's.
24:43 - John Holmes (Guest)
he's certainly he's, he's part of the core of what's known as the sort of second generation pre-raphaelites. So the first generation pre-raphaelites are the pre-raphaelite brotherhood themselves, with christina rossetti and lizzie siddle in their sort of orbit. They gather in 1848. They publish their magazine, the Germ, in 1850. And that's the most famous ones Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, william Holman Hunt and another four friends of theirs, and they're all painters and they're all poets. And painting and poetry are very intricately connected in pre-raphaelitism and they're all looking to to kind of two influences one is the medieval italian past and the other is modern science, curiously enough, and the idea of experiment and looking, looking closely and impartially at nature and whatever you're studying, in a way through the art. That's the first generation by the late 50s.
25:49
Dante Gabriel Rossetti has gone off on his own in some regards, but his poetry particularly has caught the attention of William Morris, edward Byrne-Jones, both students at Oxford at the time, algernon Charles Swinburne, the poet, another student at Oxford, and they form a sort of second generation and at that point they turn much more towards the fantastical imagination, mythology, away from science, although still very much embedded in nature and looking closely at nature. So in that sense Morris is at that core of the second generation Pre-Raphaelites, but he only produces one painting. So if you think painting is what Pre-Raphaelites do, he doesn't really do it. On the other hand, he creates all those fantastic designs that you're talking about and as a narrative artist he's a fantastic poet, much, much, much underrated as a poet. He's also, of course, a wonderful designer of stained glass, working very closely with Burne-Jones, and that's a sort of bejeweled medium for telling stories, and particularly stories about, about the past and about religion. Not that morris was religious himself.
27:07 - Julia Golding (Host)
so he, I think he's, he's definitely embedded in that and I think the pre-raphaelite influence is still felt in fantasy today, in the versions of medieval worlds, because they had this sort of hyper-reality to their artwork, which is often based on intermediary text. Wasn't it Like illustrating Keats or Shakespeare or something?
27:28 - John Holmes (Guest)
Yes, or Tennyson, oh yes.
27:30 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yes, so something like Erwin's dress in Lord of the Rings looks to me straight out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, as opposed to something that an Anglo-Saxon woman would have worn.
27:44 - John Holmes (Guest)
Yes, absolutely Absolutely. The aesthetic of fantasy, illustration and therefore fantasy, tv, fantasy, cinema is. I mean, you can trace a direct line back to the Pre-Raphaelites, particularly, I think, the second generation People like Burne-Jones, who, of course, was Morris's closest friend and they worked extremely closely together. In fact, several of Burne-Jones's paintings are illustrations for poems that are written by Morris. So one of the reasons, I think, one of the reasons I think you're right that Morris is underrated today, or at least this aspect of Morris, not the designs, but the literary side His books are extraordinarily long, particularly the Earthly Paradise. It's a wonderful, wonderful poem. It's 40,000 lines of verse, and so, in a sort of world of clicks and Instagram posts, it doesn't get read. People don't take the time or feel that they have the time, but it's so worth it because you can just immerse yourself in it, and that immersion is what then leads to something like the Perseus series of paintings by Burne Jones or the Pygmalion series by Burneones. They're both derived from Morris's retellings of classical mythology within the earthly paradise.
29:06 - Julia Golding (Host)
I think he's also for fantasy writers, if you're thinking. Well, I don't sort of culturally chime with the more sort of lower-C conservative Christian world of, say, the Inklings movement, though, having said that, tolkien was an anarchist at heart, but anyway, they, you know, they had fairly socially conservative values. Morris is not, that is a radical. He's, uh, one of the founders of, like, the labor movement really yeah, absolutely and it was a whole life expression of his belief.
29:42
So the fantasy writing is part of this, but the workshop women employing women to do embroidery, and I mean it's absolutely fascinating. There's a wonderful biography, isn't there, of morris. That is quite a chunky tone fiona mccarthy is that the one yes yes, morris, a Life for Our Times. Yes.
30:02 - John Holmes (Guest)
Tremendous, really tremendous.
30:04 - Julia Golding (Host)
If you're wondering how to get hold of what he's around, I would suggest you could have a look at that biography.
30:11 - John Holmes (Guest)
Definitely, and the socialism is hugely central to Morris, and though it's really interesting how that plays out in the fantasy novels, because it's very obvious in his utopian novel News From Nowhere, which is a socialist, it's a sort of medievalist socialist future. In fact it's a kind of I mean, you said Tolkien was an anarchist at heart.
30:35 - Julia Golding (Host)
Well, in the sense that he wanted the Shire to be self-governing. Yes, yes.
30:41 - John Holmes (Guest)
I mean Tolkien. There's certainly one letter where he describes himself Tolkien does as either an anarchist or an absolute monarchist, this sort of your poison, yes, not really finding, yes, not really finding his place within the politics of his time. But he's but Morris too was very much drawn to the sort of his time, but he's um, uh but, but morris too was very much drawn to the sort of anarchist side of socialism and and, and it may be that some of that emerges in the fantasy novels particularly. It's particularly, I think, in well, the feminist side, in in um water of the wondrous isles, but also the socialist side, in the Well at the World's End, where some of the most sort of rebarbative and unpleasant social structures come within this town that is called the Burg of the Four Friths, which is sort of a medievalized imagining of effectively a bourgeois that is enslaved. Actually the peasant class is around and so that's sort of there. It's not there at first glance, but you can see that it is there in terms of the politics of those fantasy novels.
32:00
But I think, I think that the attraction that tolkien, that morris, held for tolkien, is really interesting, given that morris, certainly from the 80s onwards, is a committed socialist and that tolkien is is, broadly speaking, as you say, a sort of small c conservative. Morris is, at least to all intents and purposes, an atheist, uh, certainly an agnostic. Tolkien is a roman catholic, quite devout, um. And yet there's, tolkien clearly recognized an affinity with morris, and I think particularly it's around a critique of contemporary society, and especially around a critique of, I suppose, industrial, contemporary industrial society, something that is equally distasteful to both of them and often for the same reasons, equally distasteful to both of them, and often for the same reasons. I think Tolkien's conservatism doesn't mean that he's not. He doesn't place a value on social justice, he absolutely does. And of course they both place a value on environmental justice too.
33:13
And to come back to the Victorian thread, the granddaddy of both of them in that regard is John ruskin, who's and ruskin's uh, a pioneering thinker in terms of, um, environmental justice, of recognizing that people's environmental conditions and damage to the environment at large is directly connected to their social conditions, uh, that that we should think also about other beings within the environment, damage to animals and plants, to nature as a whole. These are, these are things that really chime. You can see it in in morris's work, you can see it in tolkien's ends. It's definitely coming through there.
33:58
And politically, ruskin defined himself in virtually the same breath as he described himself as a conservative of the old school, of Walter Scott's school, of Homer's school, whatever that means. And equally he said I'm a communist of the old school, the reddest of the red, and that kind of shackling of those things. The idea that actually this isn't necessarily a left-right opposition, it's actually a moral position that Ruskin, morris and Tolkien are all taking is something that I think runs through that and forms a kind of lineage there so this is, this is taking us into the realm which I wanted to ask you about.
34:47 - Julia Golding (Host)
That fantasy is easy to see when you're sitting. Some decades, some centuries, apart from the fantasy book that you have in mind, it does distill the concerns, concerns of the age, when you look at it.
35:02
So, for example, something like Frankenstein, which I know is actually a Regency rather than a Victorian- novel but you can see the fears about electricity and capturing electricity, the ambition of science, all sorts of things, the nature of life, how do lives get generated? But of course, mary Shelley is reflecting something of her time which turned out to be a mythology that was applicable at all times, including to our own, and gets even more apparently applicable as we go on. You say that when you were studying the victorian culture, you were finding your understanding of the politics sharpened by the fantasy lens that you were looking at in these different writers you were coming across. Because it's odd, isn't it? They're moving aside from real world, like the realistic novel. Yeah, yeah, of course you know the george elliott style of writing, though she did do historical novels too.
36:02
Um, yes and sometimes that sidestep makes things even clearer, like a magic lantern. Sorry, like a magic lantern. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah um, so I think.
36:17 - John Holmes (Guest)
So, I think it sometimes makes it less immediately apprehendable, but then it becomes more apprehendable as you spend time with it. So Morris's Earthly Paradise, which I mentioned, which is I mean, in a sense it is it's not a fantasy novel, but it's a series of 25 fantasy narratives across the poems, most of them retellings from myth or medieval legend, but the central story is not. The central story is about a group of a sort of motley crew of men and women in the mid-14th century, just as the plague is beginning to hit Europe, who decide to set sail in search of an earthly paradise in the West, and they have a series of encounters, adventures, let's say, in what we must take to be different parts of the Americas, I presume, which all of them are, if you like, almost darkly satirical mockeries of that idea of the earthly paradise, um, uh, including being worshipped as gods and yet kept as prisoners. But when they, where they finally end up is on an island in presumably the middle of the atlantic, where there's a sort of weird preservation of greek culture, and then then then the wanderers and their hosts settle down to storytelling. Now that whole poem is framed with a beginning where Morris says forget six counties overhung with smoke. He's urging you to take your imagination away from mid-Victorian London, but he's doing so to open your mind to the possibilities of other ways of living than mid-Victorian London, and I think that's what fantasy so powerfully can do. It's something that's there in Tolkien, too, and it's one of the reasons why these books still speak to us today. I think it's exactly what you said about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
38:35
In the 60s and 70s, tolkien's Lord of the Rings was frequently read as about the bomb, and it's sometimes been read as historically sort of about World War II or even about World War I and his experiences in World War I, but it reads now very profoundly as about an environmental crisis, a catastrophe that's written across Middle Earth and that is being driven by an impulse that is darkly selfish, exploitative and in some ways associated with industrialization and iron as well.
39:15
So it's a story that we can read in its moment, like you were saying about Frankenstein, but it's also a story that resonates for us profoundly now, and partly because, I think, precisely because it isn't a realist story, because it isn't a book about something that was happening in 1954 or 1939.
39:38
It's a story that fundamentally sets itself against realism, and this is, of course, what Tolkien says in his lecture on fairy stories that one should see fantasy as escapism, but not escapism in the sense of the flight of the deserter, but escapism in the sense of the escape of the prisoner, the idea that this is actually liberating us, it's enabling us to imagine the world in different ways.
40:07
There's a very powerful, fairly recent essay by well, not that recent, but by the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, called the Great Derangement, where Ghosh argues this is, I think, about 2016 or something like that. He argues that realism can't cope with the environmental changes that are happening around us today because it's too trapped in a notion of what is normal and they no longer are normal, whereas fantasy, on the other hand, can help us, I think, to think through those problems because it can imagine things on that scale. It can imagine things being other than they normally are, and that can also give us a place to reach towards actually a better world. There are better worlds to be found in Tolkien and in William Morris than the increasingly broken world we're inhabiting than the increasingly broken world we're inhabiting.
41:09 - Julia Golding (Host)
Well, I think that's a wonderful tip or lesson for those who are thinking about fantasy writing, because we're talking about applicability here, how you can be applied, and it's very liberating to see that as justifying what your project is about. So can I ask you a little bit about the forest schools and forest research? Yeah, I said in my notes to you that I can't go in a wood without thinking about Ents.
41:33 - John Holmes (Guest)
Yeah.
41:33 - Julia Golding (Host)
And one of my favourite CS Lewis quotes is he does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods. The reading makes all real woods a little enchanted, so I wanted to ask you about your experience working with the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research.
41:49 - John Holmes (Guest)
Yes, certainly. So. This also goes back, interestingly enough, to the Oxford University Museum, because it was there that I first met a chap called John Iles, who has been involved for a long time with an organization well, it's the charity that John Ruskin set up called the Guild of St George, and they own the charity owns a plot of land in the Wyre Forest in Worcestershire, which is about 25 miles from Birmingham, where my job is, and this plot of land was originally the core of it was originally given to the guild well, given to Ruskin, and then passed on to the guild by the mayor of Birmingham the then mayor of Birmingham as a place to experiment with other ways of living and experiment with putting into practice his ideas of sustainability and craft and living in tune with nature and so forth. And then it was expanded in the 1920s when the Guild bought a decent-sized piece of woodland to avoid it being sold to the Forestry Commission. Now you may remember that there's one point in Tolkien's letters where he likens the Forestry Commission to Sauron, although he says that the difference between them is that the Forestry Commission is at least capable of repentance. And they have repented, definitely, but in those days the Forestry Commission was substantially involved in felling old oak woodland for the purposes of planting quick-growing conifer woodland. So this patch of old oak woodland was rescued by the Guild of St George and it's called Ruskin Land in honour of John Ruskin.
43:44
And so we thought, I thought, and the team I was pulling together thought, this would be a wonderful place to do some experimental literary criticism, to see what happened if you took people into a forest an actual forest, and read fantasy forests there with them, and to see how it changed their perspective on either the real forest or the fantasy forest, or indeed both. Now at ruskin land there is a particular structure, which is rather delightfully called the dragon's nest that was built from fallen pieces of oak wood by an architecture school. So it forms a wonderful focal point for what my PhD student, who I mentioned already, dion Dobrinsky, what he devised in the way of reading walks. So he would take groups of students initially though we've done this also with members of the public around Ruskin land pausing, reading relevant passages from fantasy novels, seeing how it affected their perceptions of the forest and their attitudes to the forest, and he did this as part of the PhD. His actual PhD research was to take a group of students three times during the year, and the year he did this was the year after the COVID pandemic.
45:08
So these were students who'd probably spent their first year undergraduate, or maybe their A-level year, bottled up or locked down, or however you want to phrase it, certainly deprived of access to nature. And it was just revelatory for them, and also for us as researchers, to see how it enlivened their sense of the forests, of the things, the processes going on, the living organisms around them, but also, crucially, the valuing of the forest. It made them very alert to, I suppose, both the value of the forest to them and actually the intrinsic value of the forest. So it really bore out what I sort of hoped it would bear out, which was that fantasy forests do indeed enchant, actually in the way that CS Lewis talks about, and they don't take you away from the reality of a forest, they just give you a much richer sense of the possibility of life in that forest, of what's going on, why it matters, especially when you ally that with the whole recent research about plant communication I don't know if you're aware of it.
46:26
It's often phrased in terms of the wood wide web and Suzanne Simard's ideas of the mother tree, which is the sort of notion that older trees effectively protect the trees that are there Well, not necessarily only their saplings, but the other younger trees within a space of woodland. And that, of course, feels much less unlikely if you've been reading about and thinking about Ents, and, equally, the Ents feel much less unlikely if you've been reading about and thinking about the science. So there's a way in which they imaginatively open each other out. I think it's been a wonderful, rich experience and it's a fantastic location to do it. But, as Dion's been showing in some of the work he's done since you can actually do this with any piece of woodland or even, to some extent, parkland where you happen to be he's produced some A-level resources that can be used in schools around the country, um for for english, but also for biology and geography, using literature to to flesh out the experience of and understanding of forests I suspect there'll be a number of teachers uh to this.
47:44
I hope so.
47:45 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yeah, so where would they go to see these resources?
47:48 - John Holmes (Guest)
So they're on the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research Education portal. So if you were to search Birmingham B-I-F-O-R, I always think we should somehow get ourselves a bofer and a bomber as well, but I'm not sure quite Buy for education. That would be the place to look brilliant that was.
48:10 - Julia Golding (Host)
I desperately want to now go on one of these woodland works walks as a child brought up near epping forest, which, oh yes, has its own fascinating history. Um given by queen victoria to the people anyway. That's another conversation. Um by william morris as well, that's another. That's another episode. Um. So, just as a little bit of fun, um, I did warn you in advance. I always ask my guests where in all the fantasy worlds is the best place to do something? Um. So we've been to inns, we've been to libraries, we've been musicians, assassins, all sorts of things. Where is the best place, do you think, to rock up and give a lecture on dragons? Which of all the fantasy worlds would you like to do that?
49:02 - John Holmes (Guest)
So, because you forewarned me a little, I've been chewing that over and I've been thinking about places where you wouldn't do it.
49:09
You wouldn't go and give Electron Dragons in the Shire because they wouldn't appreciate it, they wouldn't want to be unsettled by it. You wouldn't go to Lothlorien because they'd know all about it anyway and they wouldn't want to hear about it either. If you had to do it in Middle-earth, I think think numinal would probably be the place where the audience would be most interested and probably appreciative. But actually, the place, the place I'd like to go is that island in the earthly paradise, that island where the wanderers rock up, where they share tales, because this the the both the wonders themselves and the hosts, clearly love tale telling, sharing stories. Uh, the wanderers share lots of mythological, lots of medieval, legendary stories as well, so I think they would appreciate it. There is another answer, of course, which is what we said earlier, which is that, in a sense, the place to give that lecture that is already a fantasy space is the Oxford University Museum, where he gave it in the first place.
50:02 - Julia Golding (Host)
Oh, that's pretty good. Yeah, I think, thinking about it, the choice is between a fantasy world where dragons exist.
50:10 - John Holmes (Guest)
Yes.
50:11 - Julia Golding (Host)
And a fantasy world where either they existed in the past or are rumoured to exist, or definitely thought not to exist. Yes, so you could be quite risky and say, right, I'll go into the Game of Thrones world.
50:24 - John Holmes (Guest)
Yes, yes.
50:26 - Julia Golding (Host)
Clearly a different perception in that than at the Shire.
50:30 - John Holmes (Guest)
The other place you could go actually would, of course, be Ham, where Farmer Giles hangs out. Yes, because there you'd have a tame dragon that you could actually draw into the lecture yourself.
50:42 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yes, I'm sort of pondering whether or not it'd be a good idea to do it in earth sea, the earth oh, yes, of course I could get a job as a sort of academic in one of the magic schools there and travel around lecturing on dragons, so that was my pick yes, that's, that's also an excellent choice.
51:02 - John Holmes (Guest)
That's an excellent choice. The tol Tolkien's lecture, of course, is also about dinosaurs too, which makes it doubly tricky, because you need to have somewhere where you can have both dragons and dinosaurs in your point of reference.
51:14 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yes, that's a struggle.
51:16 - John Holmes (Guest)
Yes, it is. I feel like there must be somewhere.
51:21 - Julia Golding (Host)
Thank you so much, John. Thank you for being with us on Mythmakers. Thank you so much, John.
51:28 - Speaker 3 (None)
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