Transcript
[0:00] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
[0:10] And in a change from the usual programming today, I actually have two of our main interests combined in one person. That is both an illustrator and an author because I'm interviewing today John Hendricks, who has recently published the wonderful book called The Mythmakers, which is a graphic novel, which is about the remarkable fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. So that couldn't be better than for a Mythmakers podcast.
[0:44] And John is with us. So hi, John. You're speaking to Julia Golding. I forgot to introduce myself. That's very impolite of me. And welcome to Mythmakers. Oh, so glad to be here. Sure, what a fun topic to get to chat with you about today. So before we talk about myths, because I'm intrigued how you came, you know, circled around to the same sort of idea of making myths that we did on this podcast. I suppose we'll go straight in there as to when you first read C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. I mean, were you, did you do one before the other? Or did you avoid the wardrobe
[1:19] stage entirely and just go straight to a dragon? How did it happen for you in your childhood?
[1:25] Yes. Well, for me, The Hobbit was very, very important to my early childhood. It was a book that I actually carried around with me when I traveled, even when I was not reading it. I just felt like it was an important relic. And the addition I had was the David David Haig illustrated version and or Michael Haig, excuse me. And it had a beautiful illustration of Smaug on the cover. And much like Tolkien, I desired dragons with a profound desire. And so any dragon related content I was very interested in. So I first came to The Hobbit and I don't fully remember when I read Narnia. But I think I read it out of order. I think I started with Magician's Nephew because I did not really see the Christological metaphors and allegory inside the story until much later. And I just read them as wonderful portal fantasy tales because I was reading a lot of that kind of thing when I was young. There is an argument for starting with Magician's Nephew, of course, because that's the genesis genesis to revelation journey through it if you go you know um.
[2:46] Ending up with the last battle. So I don't think that's wrong. I remember as a child rearranging, I got like a box set, which was arranged in order of publication and that annoyed me. So I arranged them in order of story.
[2:59] So I'm with you there on that. And so you're a child who is reading these fantasy stories from over, you know, originating in England that have come over to America. But also as you're an illustrator as well, I was wondering if there were a simile illustrators who really fired your imagination as you were growing up the ones whose pages you would try and climb inside yes well i mean of course these books were richly illustrated and the um the tolkien calendar uh by the brothers hildebrandt uh the david naysmith illustrations um you know i can think of i mean even like the the very tolkienian inspired universe of dungeons and dragons and all of their ephemera that were associated with those games, the monster manuals, the Dragonlance books, all of these were richly illustrated texts that were really important to me. I had the images. I would buy an extra copy of the magazine so I could have one.
[4:03] And then like these fanzines, I would cut out pages to put on the wall of various illustrations of my favorite stories. So I had a lot of those images that were really as important as the stories.
[4:18] Like the stories were the images and the images were the stories to me. What about the world of comics? Because obviously a graphic novel is very, the way it's written is closer to comic than novel. So were you a follower of any particular comic book series? Well, I started out with just loving newspaper comics, you know, Garfield and The Farside and Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts.
[4:41] And then I grew into comics and sort of serialized stories. Of course, I read X-Men and Spider-Man and all those. But it was the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that really took me into the kind of comics that could have a dark, a serious, an adult tone. I had not read The Watchmen until much later in my life, but these sort of longer, sort of well-drawn, robust, full stories that came out as sort of just like big books that you could read in one sitting instead of, you know, serialized stories that sort of went on forever, that was really important to me too when I got to that age when I was reading comics. I could go to the comic book store on my own.
[5:28] So this isn't the first graphic novel that you've written. Perhaps you might want to tell us a little bit about your journey to writing Mythmakers. And then tell us a little bit about what we get when we actually pick up Mythmakers. Yes, it is a graphic novel, although it's graphic nonfiction really is what it is. Sorry, yes, of course. Well, I mean, graphic novel is what the category is. It actually, if you go to Barnes & Noble, they don't have a graphic nonfiction section. So I certainly call it a graphic novel.
[6:00] And yes, I mean, comics, I think in pictures, I start with images and the books that I write, which are for young people, really start with trying to take a complex subject and translate it to an audience to make a legible version of that story, a kind of usable history that can make sense out of something that I'm interested in and that I think the reader could be interested in. So my previous graphic novel for young people was called The Faithful Spy, and it was the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was a German theologian and pastor, who joined a plot to assassinate Hitler. And so that book is a kind of thumbnail history of how Germany fell into the hands of Adolf Hitler, and then the sort of internal resistance inside of Germany that was coming from a sort of rebellious part of the church, a rebellious seminary inside of the Lutheran church that was opposing Hitler. And so that story was one that I thought actually needed images to be told, right? You can, of course, do a more straightforward, and there are wonderful books about Tolkien and Lewis and Bonhoeffer that are, you know, straight prose. But to me, I have always learned better with pictures. And so that is what I am attempting to create with these books.
[7:20] So tell us a little bit about Myth Makers then, because it's not just, you know, day one, Tolkien's born. You're taking a different approach and you're giving it a sleeve, like an album cover sleeve around it.
[7:32] Yes. Yeah. Well, there are these two avatars. In fact, when we start the story, we meet Lion and Wizard, which I would just two characters chosen totally at random to tell the story of Lewis and Tolkien. And they do act as avatars and sort of audience surrogates, where they narrate the story a little bit. They go on adventures themselves. They ride a dragon. They go on a dungeon crawl. And they are sort of our guides through this story. And despite the book having a talking lion in it, I really do want this book to be in the nonfiction section of a library. So I took the scholarship part of it seriously, though I am not a scholar, I'm an artist. I really took a lot of pains to make sure that the book was accurate, that when you see Tolkien and Lewis talking, that that was sourced to a conversation that really existed.
[8:22] That had some kind of documentation to it, with the exception of one notable part in the end. All of the book is basically sourced in real events and facts and history.
[8:34] So as well as the biographical facts of the lives of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, which you'll learn from this, your lion and your wizard are also discussing the nature of literature and the nature of story. And you do this by having a series of portals, like the wardrobe, that they go through, some of which are optional and some of which are in the main text. So that optional aspect reminded me a bit of those choose-your-own-adventure books that used to be, I don't know if they're still around. I love them. Yes, I read them all as a kid. Basically, I just was obsessed with the idea of a book that could be interactive like that. So yes, at one point, these portals were all inside the main body of the text. But my editor was the one who said, I think this is distracting the story. And now I actually think it's a lot more fun as a reading experience that you sort of get these illustrated footnotes that you can go and hop into or skip through depending on how you want to read the story. But yes, I was very much inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure books from my childhood. So a lot of the adventure, of course, is set in Oxford. Did you come here to get some visuals of Oxford or did you just, you know, Google Earth it?
[9:50] Yeah, when I do these books, I really make a point to go and visit these places in person. So I had the distinct pleasure of coming to Oxford for about a week in 2019. And before Eagle and Child had been closed, I went there. I spent many, many evenings there. Went to Lamb and Flag, of course, the kilns, the cemeteries where they're both buried and spent a lot of time driving around the countryside. There's a notable scene in Lewis's autobiography where he talks about going to the Whipsnade Zoo. And so I drove that route. I wanted to see what the countryside felt like so I could capture it accurately in the book.
[10:31] That's quite it. Because I hope you didn't go on the motorways because they didn't exist then. No, I took the back roads. The back roads. Yeah. Because wasn't he in a sidecar or something? He was, yes. Which is hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. Wallace and Gromit stuff.
[10:46] So, we're guided by the lion and the wizard through the world of literature. Can you pick out some examples of what they're talking about to give people who are listening an idea of how you're discussing literature? What is the particular part of storytelling that you are guiding us through?
[11:06] Well, let me use a quote from Lewis from one of his essay or his book, An Experiment in Criticism. He says that the right way you should read literature is not to make a spectacle of the author or to enshrine the author itself, but to use the author as spectacles to see what they are seeing. And so that was the goal of this book is to use Tolkien and Lewis, not just to learn about them as a sort of like, wow, weren't they geniuses, but try to look at the things that they were looking at and the things that they loved in literature. And so to me, that had to start back to the very core of what it meant to write a myth and why human beings make myths. And so for a young audience, I wanted to take them back to the sort of genesis of all storytelling, storytelling back into deep humanity's time when we told stories to one another and how those stories became ultimately the fairy tale or, well, I mean, we're skipping a lot, became the epic. And then sort of Beowulf led to the romance and the romance led to the fairy tale and the fairy tale ultimately led Tolkien and Lewis to write kind of these new mythologies for a new era. And so this book attempts to give a kind of thumbnail version of that story so that you can sort of place yourself in the middle of the history of the great romantic epic.
[12:34] Yeah, and I appreciated that you also included some of the sources which they were less familiar with from other cultures, which are part of this sort of global tradition. Because, of course, they can't know everything, can they? So your lion and your wizard are able to say, oh, yes, this was also happening in India at the same time, which was, I think, that's why it's a good nonfiction source for that.
[12:55] So one of the things that struck me is how the friendship between c.s lewis and tolkien itself has become a kind of myth um and so do you want to tell us a little bit more about the story that writers and scholars have told about that and also your reflections on the nature of that that friendship i mean it is the theme of your book of course so i'm not expecting
[13:22] you to explain everything. But I'm interested in how the friendship itself has become mythologized. Well, this was actually the core of the idea to me, was illustrated versions of Narnia and Middle Earth. We have dozens of them, and they're awesome. Every time a new edition comes out, I always get them. I'm obsessed with the way people visualize these subcreated worlds. But I had this idea that Lewis and Tolkien also subcreated a third thing, which was, as you said, their own friendship or the inklings. This vision of a literary life that is shared with friends in dark pubs, talking about poetry or the greatest ideas of life at the end of a hard day. This is like as much of a fantasy as Narnia on some level. I am a university professor, and I do not spend two to three days a week with my friends talking about poetry in pubs, and I wish I did. So I wanted to illustrate that version of...
[14:25] Of that fantasy world. And honestly, it sort of now lives in Oxford as its own kind of idea of what this literary life is with your friends. And so, yes, this was part of what I wanted to illustrate in this book and to let readers kind of step into that world a little bit, just like they do Narnia
[14:44] and Middle Earth when they read their stories. I mean, I'm aware that the center I've created in Oxford is part of that mythologizing because we have a house in Northmore Road just down from Tolkien's house where people live and we call them the inklings on the doorbell it says the inklings though they're from all over the world and and male and female so they don't fit uh the gender balance how long until I can join that's basically you're very welcome anytime uh it's there for scholars to come as well so yeah seriously keep in touch um but I think one of the things that I was thinking of reading this you mentioned something which often gets forgotten in that story is not only were the Tuesday lunchtimes at, Eagle and Child, other pubs during the war when the beer ran out, and the Thursday evenings.
[15:34] In Maudlin College where the real sharing of work got done, but there was also a sort of bilateral friendship between Tolkien and Lewis at one point where they would meet at the Eastgate Hotel, which is just across the road from Maudlin College and quite close to Merton as well. Um so they had it was definitely they were a focus when they were both creating um when they were really starting to get right writing in a non-academic sense and as you say it's a huge amount of time that they spent doing this so do you want to tell us a little bit about the, the bad fairies at the feast um not that they were bad fairies but they had a sort of.
[16:16] Dilution diluting effect. And that was Charles Williams. And I suppose Hugo Dyson. Well, and and I think it's actually I had somebody who wrote me who said, like, I had to put the book down when I realized that their friendship was was breaking apart or becoming strained. And they didn't know about that part of the story. And they were very sad. And they said, but I did pick the book back up because I said, I need to trust the author and where you're taking us on this story. And they said they were glad that they finished it. But yes, the sort of tragedy and triumph of their friendship was that they were fallible human beings, just like all of us. And as their friendship became more and more important and others came into that circle, it created some tension. And I think Tolkien was clearly jealous of how much Lewis loved and admired and kind of even imitated Charles Williams' style in some of his writings. And Williams was also a very bold personality in the room. Tolkien was much more, you know, sort of by the way and very kind of mousy in some of his conversational style. So Williams was a real contrast to that. And and Hugo Dyson, of course, very famously in a reading at one of the Inklings at Maudlin College, as Tolkien pulled out another tome of Lord of the Rings.
[17:41] Hugo Dyson shouted out, oh, God, not more elves. Um, so there was a lot of tension within the group because they really did give honest feedback to one another. And I think that's on some level why the group was successful and also why it had a lot of tension inherently baked into it. It is the kind of friendship circle you see in like teen girl movies where the new kid comes in and it's, it upsets the dynamics. That's what it reminded me of.
[18:09] I was, when I was reading the new edition of Tolkien's letters, one tiny little detail struck me, which was at one point he makes mention of Charles Williams actually typing up chapters of Lord of the Rings for him. So he was friends with Charles Williams. Yes. C.S. Lewis was a better friend, you know, the closer friend. So I think that's what was going on. And I think the other thing I was thinking about was.
[18:33] We are saying, oh, isn't it sad that it came to an end? But actually, wasn't it amazing that it lasted as long as it did? Because I don't think I've ever been part of a friendship, group friendship like that, that has met so often and for so long. I can manage annual meetings with friends, but I certainly couldn't do it three times a week or twice a week.
[18:56] Yes. Yes. No, I think their friendship and their group of, they really have inspired many, many artists over the years and community reading groups with their sort of faithfulness to one another over those many years. And, you know, of course, this side of heaven and the new creation, we are all going to experience loss. And their lives as it, you know, came to full bloom also eventually came to loss together. And I think there's a lot of explanations about that. It's tragic.
[19:32] It's also, as a story, really, really interesting. I mean, on some level, the arc of their story sort of mimics in a way. I mean, I was writing a myth about them. And so in some ways, I felt like I had to give them a kind of mythic ending to that story to get to their own sort of eucatastrophe in this journey. But yeah, I think it's inevitable when you're studying groups of creatives like this to the dynamics of how those personalities interact. It's fascinating. One of the things which I've always sort of been annoyed by is how when you go to university syllabus describing 20th century English literature, that you'll have lots of room given to the Bloomsbury group, which was indeed a very important group. Um but very little i haven't seen anybody doing the same thing in a university syllabus to say well by the way there was also this group called the inklings and by the way they established.
[20:39] Major genres in fantasy and also were friends with um t.s elliott and dorothy l says you know that it seems as though there's a bias against looking at the inkling seriously as a literary group in university world. Is that the same in America or is that just a UK phenomenon?
[20:57] Yeah, you know, that's interesting. I think it kind of depends on what place you're at, perhaps. I think in America, there is certainly, you know, it's sort of the thing a prophet is never honored in his own hometown, but certainly the inklings in America have developed a sort of mythology to them. Now, perhaps because of their religious trappings, they are sort of seen in a different category than the Bloomsbury sort of classic high literature group. And maybe Lewis and Tolkien and Williams can be seen almost as writing more genre fiction. I would say that's not really what they were doing. But yeah,
[21:38] I can certainly see that as a bias. They're also war writers in my view. But anyway, I think that is changing because I've noticed there's much more academic interest, serious academic treatment of Tolkien now, huge, globally, but also in the UK. So he's certainly, I think, crossed over into being treated seriously. But I haven't seen the rest of the Inklings moving with him. But it may come. It may come. So going to the story of their Christian friendship, I was wondering if you ever challenged yourself to think up an image to represent their two different church traditions, because though they shared Christianity, they actually were from very different parts of the church and would have perceived the differences between them.
[22:25] Yes, you know, I mean, and I think that can actually be attributed to some of what caused their tension in the later form of their life, especially as Lewis married a woman who was divorced. And I think he withheld that from Tolkien because he knew it would make him upset. But, of course, the act of not telling one of your closest friends about your marriage, that is also a pretty big violation of trust. Um, so yes, I, I think it's, it's actually in our, you know, on our contemporary moment, it's hard to believe that the division between Anglican and Catholic would be so stark. But of course the history of that, especially in the UK is, is, um, is quite tragic. Um, you know, and, and today we think, gosh, well, anybody who believes in God is probably basically on the same side of the ledger. Right. And but back then, the fact that they were close at all over that divide is actually just as interesting to me. So, yeah, I think it's a great point.
[23:25] And they also going back to the Charles Williams presence.
[23:28] So he was even more challenging out there in this whack-a-doodle fringe of believing in magic. Yeah, not a technical term, but yeah, I probably should rephrase that. I'll annoy the child. I tried in the book because I said, like, when I described William, something like he believed in magic and not the fairy kind or something like that like yeah he he had uh i mean i i find his writing totally i'm enamored by his stuff uh and i find it enigmatic it's hard to describe exactly but i i know i can see why lewis was taken with it uh because there is a sort of real squirrely quality about the way he wrote that is quite quite wonderful and very daring each novel is a different genre totally within fantasy so uh yeah i think he's totally fascinating yes um one of the uh elements which i really enjoyed was your summing up i think it was in a conversation between the um lion and the wizard about why they fell out fell out not just about their religious points of view but also their approach to story because tolkien didn't really warm to the world of Narnia.
[24:43] And you summed it up as being a mythos-logos division. Do you want to explain a little bit about that? Because I think it's fascinating. Yeah. Now, this was something I tried to, I think maybe scholars that really study them might be a little, you know, they might feel like this is too broad. But I tried to help readers think about the way they created stuff. And I use this divide of logos or word or, you know, logic versus mythos or story.
[25:14] And Tolkien's entire world came out of a building of a language, right? He made his Elvish languages because he wanted to figure out a way to make a star shined on the hour of our greeting a sort of in-world myth that made sense. And so he made a language for that phrase, and then he made a people to inhabit that language. And everything fell out of this logical, like, fine carpentry of building this world piece by piece so that it all made sense. And so Lewis, on the contrast, was much more interested in this holistic vision of the story, the sort of impression. He had these images in his head of a fawn carrying a package in the snow and a lamppost in the woods. And so it was like, where does this come from? I don't know. And so Tolkien was, I think, under the impression that Lewis was very slapdash in his construction of mythology. The you know the father christmas thing uh fawns you know talking animals it was all just to him a big sloppy mishmash and um i think he felt some jealousy i can't remember if this is in the book or not but he sort of thought that tolkien kind of stole some of his um naming ideas from things and you mean lewis stole from tolkien i'm sorry yes lewis stole from tolkien some of his naming sort of ideas and he often sort of thought that like Lewis stole some stuff from.
[26:44] Williams that Lewis was kind of like a magpie he just kind of picked up stuff and ran with it and so I think that that left him feeling like Lewis had not done the hard work that Tolkien had done I mean Lewis wrote seven Narnia books in seven years and Tolkien spent 17 years just on Lord of the Rings so you can see how that would create some creative tension in their friendships. It's interesting putting that alongside the sort of Michael Ward, Planet Narnia. Yes. Which is actually, it may look as though it's thrown together. Actually, it's got deeper planning underneath it. If you look a bit deeper, I don't know if you were convinced by Michael's argument on that. Okay. So just to give some context for listeners, amazing book by Michael Ward, Planet Narnia, which tries to deconstruct this idea that Narnia was kind of a slapdash construction. And honestly, I went into that book very skeptical. It seemed like an insane premise to me, but he won me over. I mean, by, by, by halfway through the book, I was amazed.
[27:50] And it, it does track with what Lewis was like. It just, to me, it just added up and it rang true to me. So I think he makes a very convincing argument that these, that these books, even maybe if they weren't as logically and systematically planned as Tolkien's were, they were absolutely and intuitively designed as to mimic this mythological medieval vision of the cosmos that Lewis was totally taken by. And so, yes, I really love that book.
[28:25] Yeah. So that's another for the reading list, if people are listening to this. Um you mentioned at the end that you had to leave things out to fit the story um was there something that one of them i totally agreed with if you're writing for younger people you don't want to talk about the machinations of academics trying to get colleagues elected to chair so it's just not going to be interesting is it it's super it's super uninteresting but very nerdy but important to them it was really important to their friend and i just i had to cut it you Yeah, fair enough. Good choice. But was there perhaps an attractive story vignette that you really wanted to get in, but it didn't fit in with the main story, which is around their friendship, you know, things outside their friendship, which didn't fit in this story? I think the story of Pauline Baines, who was the illustrator for people know Narnia, but also Middle Earth.
[29:18] And actually, Tolkien was the one that brought her to Lewis. I had to leave basically that whole narrative out, even though it's actually really relevant to their friendship. It felt like a sidecar to the story, and literally every page had to be used well because I was just cramming so much in. So that's one I left out. I mean, I don't think I even mentioned Till We Have Faces, which is Lewis's self-described favorite book that he wrote most likely with joy, his wife. And that's another one. like i don't know how i didn't really talk about that but again i'm trying to keep the main story the main thing with this particular audience i'd love to see an illustrated version of till we have faces by the way oh i'll do it yeah i'll do it right now let's get the lewis state on the phone i'm i'm ready it's a fantastic um and surprising novel because it's told from a female point of view and it's a retelling of the psyche um myth but focused on her sister so really really surprising. You would not guess it's written by the same person as who wrote Narnia.
[30:27] That's been a fascinating romp through Mythmakers, John, and it is the perfect Christmas gift for those of you listening to give your bookish fan of Tolkien or Narnia who is ready to hear about the authors. But it's also, I would say, not just for children. There is levels and elements in this which an adult would really appreciate it. And if you don't, um.
[30:53] If you don't feel like sitting down reading one of these scholarly works, you'll get pretty much everything you need to, to be honest, in your version of it.
[31:02] So I would highly recommend it for adults too. We always have a little question at the end of our Myth Makers episodes where we think about where in all the fantasy world, so leaving behind just Oxford fantasy, we can go to Star Wars, we can go Star Trek. Um we always think where in all the fantasy worlds is the best place to do or be something, and i was wondering where you thought would be the best place to be a cartoonist taking the idea of a graphic novel you can mention some of the dangerous places to be a cartoonist because i think particularly if you're in the world of political cartoons you might want to avoid some some fantasy worlds but do you have a pick where you'd like to sit down and be a cartoonist oh man I mean, I read all of the Game of Thrones books and was really lost inside that story in a really wonderful way, which is it's such a critique of Tolkien in a way, while also being a love letter to Tolkien.
[32:02] So, yeah, you know, maybe if I was posted on the Great North Wall, I would like to draw from that point of view, perhaps. But yeah you know I actually there are some even in the Harry Potter universe there are I believe some political cartoons that appear in the in the Daily Prophet I think but again that you know that's interesting to think of how drawings and cartoons interact with, fantastical worlds but yeah that's a great question and you'd get the chance then to make your cartoons moving in the Harry Potter world in that yes that's amazing that's right so that would be a very good pick I think for me, those are all excellent suggestions. I think it would be quite fun to be a cartoonist. Well, where it would not be fun would be in the world of Star Wars under the Emperor. Yeah, that's right. You wouldn't last long. No, yeah, that's right. You'd be part of Admiral Ackbar's sort of propaganda team or something.
[33:02] But that could be quite fun, but short-lived. I think I'd like to go somewhere that's got a really sort of vibrant life with markets and people and different cultures. So I was thinking there's an American writer called Tamora Pierce who has created a world of knights and lady knights and legends. And I would like to be in the market at Tortal, which is like her main capital. So they've got an enlightened king then. So I probably would survive. I'd like to be there. Oh, that's great. And get a chance to draw magic as well. That's awesome. Thank you very much, John, for joining us. And good luck with the next project. Have you got anything on the cards at the moment you can tell us? Yes. You know, my editor gives me two weeks to take a break, and then we start the next one. Oh, nice.
[33:56] No, the thing on my desk right now is a sequel to Drawing as Magic, which is my sketchbook workbook about how you generate your own ideas. So I've got a sequel to that called 100 Things, and that will be out next year. But the next long form graphic novel I'm working on is going to be a retelling of the Salem Witch Trials. Yes, I wanted to do a scary book. I've always loved this story. I've been fascinated by its sort of mystery. And most people, they probably have read or watched The Crucible, and that's about all they know about it. And Crucible's great, but it's, you know, a work of art. It's really not the full story. So it's much weirder and scarier than you think.
[34:43] Wow, that is quite a mic drop moment. I look forward to reading that book because, as you say, it's a fascinating story. Thank you so much for being with us, John. Okay, bye-bye.
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