Transcript
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.
I'm the Director of the Centre, but I am also an author and creative myself.
And we've now reached the end of our season of Mythmakers,
and we're going to delve back into the highlights of what we've covered this year.
So if you've missed our episodes, listen out to our short excerpts
and see if you want to dip back in yourself and see what we've been up to.
These are our top five listens,
so we're going to go in reverse order,
starting with the fifth most popular of our offerings this season.
And that is a conversation I had with a friend of the Centre and creative himself,
Jacob Renneker, who as you'll hear from his accent, is based in America.
And we spent one of our podcasts discussing why go small.
And then one thing which I think should not be forgotten is the whimsy that you have
if you go small.
And I was thinking here of books like The Borrowers Series.
I don't know if that's well known in the US.
It's about a miniature family who live – so they cobble together their environment
from like matchboxes and safety pins, and they go to sea on the river in a little boat.
It was made into a BBC TV series over here, so it's quite well known as a sort of
my era children's book.
And there was of course Mrs Pepperpot, who was another delightful series
where Mrs Pepperpot gets shrunk, a bit like the Tom Thumb story.
So there's the whimsy to that, to suddenly seeing the world
and how the world would appear if you were but a couple of inches high.
And that led me to thinking about Beatrix Posser, because in a way,
the majority of her stories, particularly things like The Tale of Two Bad Mice,
is definitely showing the whimsy of scale.
So the mice, Hunkamunka and the other one, Thomasina?
No, that's the name of one of the dolls.
Anyway, I've forgotten.
Hunkamunka I definitely remember as the name.
So they move into the doll's house in the nursery and then get very annoyed
that the fires aren't real and the plaster food is actually not edible
and they start smashing it all up.
I loved that story as a child because I could really relate to this thing
of the disappointment of it not being real and the idea of the mice moving
into what is your playhouse.
So there's this whimsy and that connected thought in much more
of the current generation.
It led me to thinking about Ant-Man.
Have you seen the first Ant-Man film?
Yes, I've seen all of them.
Yeah, of course you've got a kiddie, so of course you're going to see all of them.
But I absolutely adored the way the big finale happened on a train set.
I was much more interested in the hilarity of seeing Thomas the Tank Engine
being used as one of the big set piece things.
That scale, like the miniature world, I thought that was just wonderful
and that's what Ant-Man should be doing in my view.
That uses that scale thing to whimsical advantage.
Have you got any other favourite perhaps over in the U.S.
thing, miniature people stories which I and European listeners
might not be aware of?
The one that comes to mind is in part the scale, but it's also in terms
of the nature of the being, and that is the Indian in the Cupboard series.
This is kind of a precursor.
So in the vein of Velveteen Rabbit, where an animal or a toy story
where toys actually have feelings, thoughts, some sort of inner life,
and the Indian Cupboard series follows the adventures and misadventures
of these small figures, the Okoloc cowboys and Indians, as they're referred to,
and what happens when the doors are closed, when the children are away.
That sort of thing.
That's another one area, and you see that in the Toy Story films,
it's really accessible.
In part, it's their size.
You see the world, the camera is entirely from their angle.
So what does it look like?
Under the bed is their norm, where the dust bunnies and everything are.
So that's their odds and ends that have rolled under the bed.
That's their geography.
So it's interesting, yeah.
So seeing the world from that perspective and how silly some things seem
when you're on the ground kind of pointing up,
seeing what things other people are concerned with,
that people that are kind of closer to the ground and smaller
don't seem to be as concerned about, that's something they definitely see
satirically used in some of those films.
Of course, thank you for mentioning Toy Story,
because that would have been a big gap if we'd forgotten that.
I love how the little plastic soldiers all move.
Like they can't move their legs separately because they're on those --
Right, they're just going to waddle.
The detail of that is so charming.
But because you're convinced by that world as being a complete world,
it doesn't mean it's low stakes.
The stakes there are high about survival, friendship,
being separate, finding your way home.
They're all big stakes, but within a small world.
Yeah, and sometimes the stakes are higher because you're smaller.
I'm reminded of the film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,
and not so much the sequels.
So it's changing perspective.
So you're shrunk, and so something that seems just everyday,
ordinary, like the sprinkler going off,
that could have disastrous effects on these children
who are the size of the head of a pin.
These drops of water become deadly projectiles.
Yeah, exactly.
So that film is great.
It's saying everyday, what does it look like to be an ant?
Or something that usually you might want to step on,
or might be a nuisance, how a small creature you can connect with
and can actually help if given an opportunity to.
So there's lots of things that you can do, again,
with that kind of shift in perspective and make you look at the world,
reevaluate your assumptions about something.
Is it valuable? Is it trash? Is it worth discarding?
Is it something that should be valorized?
All of those are questions that when you shift perspective,
they really raise those questions.
Okay, and so the last thing I thought of,
and do come up with any more in this line,
the last thing I think that's happening is about access.
So you get access, if you go small, you get access to worlds
which you would otherwise not be able to see.
So you mentioned like the ant colony,
so that reminds me of films like Ants, for example.
And then there's the traditional tale of the ant and the grasshopper.
So you get access to little worlds that you wouldn't otherwise see.
Ant and grasshopper, of course, is another satire.
So they can do more than one thing at the same time.
But I was thinking particularly of Alice in Wonderland,
because that is one of the most famous scenes of shrinking and changing scale.
But there's the idea of going through the small door to this magical world.
And if only you get it right, that idea of a secret access,
if you get to be small enough to slip through, down the rabbit hole.
Again, it presumably means rabbit holes aren't person-sized.
So there's a sense of access there.
And that leads me to think of the films where,
I can't remember the name of the film,
but I remember watching it where they shrink to go inside a human body.
That's Inner Space.
Well, there's an episode of the Magic School Bus that does the same thing.
But it was done, yeah, there's a Martin Short film called Inner Space,
where they shrunk down and accidentally injected,
or purposefully, I can't remember which one,
it was injected into somebody.
So you're seeing the human body from the inside and the perils of being microscopic.
Yeah.
So again, it gives you access to this new world.
It's a kind of portal, in a way, by going small.
And I think all of this is joined together by the idea that in fantasy,
what you're doing by scale is reframing whatever is your ordinary world by changing the scale.
It becomes a commentary on the ordinary world.
And now coming to the podcast at place number four,
this was our Halloween episode where Jacob and I looked into the history of vampires
and werewolves in fantasy literature.
And the little section you're going to hear is about vampires, the sexy fantasy creature.
Enjoy.
So there's all these, the vampire folklore, but I think there's a huge thing here,
which the 19th century vampire has then put into 20th century and 21st century,
which I'm sure we're going to talk about now,
is that vampires are considered to be sexy.
It's about a form of sublimated sex without actually the idea of being bitten
and turning women into vampire maidens.
All this kind of stuff.
There's a kind of Harem thing that he has going.
There is an element of adult pleasure going on in vampires,
which you don't get with an ogre or a troll or anything like that.
Not usually.
Yeah.
And I think there's, you can see that thread.
You just think of who is cast in the movies to play these characters
and what the modern version of vampires have done with it.
It has taken that element very much more strongly, with some exceptions,
which we'll get to when we talk about the modern period.
I think that Bram Stoker, and it's also a connection here to the theatre,
because I think Bram Stoker often wrote, I think it might even have started
as a melodrama, but anyway, he was from that world of the Victorian stage.
So there's a connection there to the moustachioed, twirling villain
of Victorian tying maidens to train tracks.
It's got that kind of heightened, silly drama in it,
which is quite enjoyable if you sort of go with the make-believe.
And the other thing I'd say about it is that actually there's some
interesting female characters in Dracula.
And I think her name is Minnie, I think.
Not Lucy, the one who was sticking in, but the other one.
Because she's got a typewriter and she's sort of an early woman,
a new woman, sort of doing, she is more active than sometimes
the heroines were in Victorian novels of the same period.
So you can see how that then transfers for them to be the vampire hunters
of the female Van Helsing and, of course, Buffy later on.
You can see the growth of a female character here coming out of that.
So shall we move on from Bram Stoker?
Because I think what next happens is, of course,
that the story gets picked up by early Hollywood.
It's one of the sort of early films, isn't it?
Right, yeah, Bela Lugosi.
Yes, kind of iconic as Count Dracula.
So it has a life definitely on film, in other novel adaptations.
The one that I'm probably most familiar with in the earlier period
is the mid-50s with Richard Matheson's I Am Legend,
which is a kind of development of vampires.
So in I Am Legend, and it was adapted into a film with Will Smith,
but in the film adaptation, the vampires are depicted more as zombie-like creatures,
whereas in the novel itself, they're definitely vampires, referred to as such.
What's interesting with Matheson's treatment is he kind of tries to come up with
scientific reasons why vampires would react the way they do to garlic, to sunlight, to metals.
And so it's really interesting in that sense, kind of trying to provide a more rationalistic explanation
for how, if vampires existed, how might that work?
Because this is also one of the first, or not one of the first,
it's an early example of a novel that takes the idea of a pandemic ravaging the globe
and then transforming the population into some, decimating or transforming the population into something monstrous.
So the pandemic is responsible for turning most of the world into these kind of vampiric creatures.
So you have this kind of semi-scientific, rational approach to how that might develop
to make it more, I guess, reasonable, plausible, even, perhaps.
So it's more of a science fiction-y strain, but not going into space science fiction,
but rather trying to root, trying to take the vampire mythos and root it in science
or tie it in some way to a scientific process and method,
which I found is really interesting, kind of a different take on a vampire.
And then my next sort of stepping stone is the Anne Rice vampire series
and then the film Interview with a Vampire, which I've seen they've just remade, haven't they?
I haven't watched it yet, but I saw there was a trailer, a new trailer coming out.
Adaptation. I know there's a series, a television series.
Oh, it's a series, is it?
A more long-form television, yeah.
Was that an early Tom Cruise film?
Yes, yes, Tom Cruise, Christian Dunst, Brad Pitt, I believe.
So when you were talking about the people that they cast as vampires,
you don't get much more of an attractive slant to vampires
than you do with the film Interview with a Vampire.
So there's that. And then the Anne Rice books, I think, maybe the films as well,
have spawned a whole genre of urban fantasy.
I think we can just hit on a few headlines on that.
There are some that follow pretty much the same playbook
of the sort of sexy gentleman vampire type, which you see in...
Actually, that's the kind of thing you get in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, isn't it?
They're all incredibly good looking and they have that appeal to them.
But then you get...
There's a very long series by a writer called Christine Feenan
that has... What she does is she separates out the vampires
into the original kind of healthy, unfallen Carpathian people.
And then they have a subset who are the ones who are sort of degenerating
and they're like the vampires.
So she's sort of able to keep a healthy relationship going
between her characters by having the real evil done by a separate sect of people.
And then another way it was handled is, of course, in Twilight,
where you've got the story...
That series basically has vegetarian vampires, if that's...
I think they call themselves that.
So Jacob's... Which way around is it?
- I've tried to remember. - Yeah, Edward's...
Edward Cullen, that's right.
Gosh, it's terrible, my memory of Twilight is fading.
Edward's family are sort of basically controlling their appetites
with very strict rules.
And this is where I think that the connection to sex is apparent
because it's all about restraint.
And I've got this little theory that in the same way as you can have romance,
really intense romance, as you can in something like a Jane Austen,
with very little physicality.
There isn't a Jane Austen sex scene.
It's not necessary because it's all intense emotion and romance.
I think what was happening in Twilight, which obviously was a YA book,
before they get married in the last book,
but it was all about a very intense, sublimated romance
with the metaphor of not going too far was about sucking...
him succumbing to the temptation of drinking her blood.
And it's quite funny when you actually see that
because it's the kind of language that allows young teen readers
to feel all those emotions without doing a sort of erotica,
Fifty Shades, which is where it went next when someone did fan fiction.
So those intense rules connected Twilight to a sort of romance world of vampire.
And so it meant that the people who were the bad vampires
were the ones who were living outside the strict rules.
They were basically very promiscuous in terms of their blood drinking and murderous.
So yeah, it's quite fascinating watching how that developed.
So I hope you enjoyed being spooked by the vampires and werewolves from that episode.
Moving on at number three, I had the great pleasure of talking to Dr. Holly Aldwy,
who is one of the new generation of Tolkien scholars.
I met her first in her wonderful, wonderful book called Tolkien's Modern Reading,
which I highly recommend, but she published more or less around the anniversary
of Tolkien's passing, the 50th anniversary.
Her book, Tolkien's Faith.
Holly herself is a convert to Catholicism,
so was very interested in this aspect of Tolkien.
And I learned a lot talking to her about the actual nature of Tolkien's faith,
because I'm afraid I had a rather broad brush view of what it meant to be a Catholic.
And she did a deep dive into a particular form of Catholicism,
which is based on the oratory movement,
and links that to the nature of worship and spirituality in Middle Earth.
It's very much, you don't have to be a Christian or a Catholic to enjoy this.
It's quite revealing the way she talks about how Tolkien's faith fed back into Lord of the Rings.
That thing you said about how the liturgy is very Tolkienian,
or Tolkien was inspired is fascinating.
I can't wait to read your book so that I can find out the detail of that.
But what do you think there was in the English version of Catholicism in particular
that inspired Tolkien creatively?
Is there anything you can think, oh yes, there's some kind of aesthetic here,
some sort of feeling about his faith that then becomes woven into the creation of Middle Earth?
- Well, this is a huge question.
To kind of narrow it down a little bit,
to be a Catholic in England was its own experience,
which we've already sort of lightly touched on.
But specifically, I think he was really influenced by oratorian spirituality,
which is a charisms within Catholicism.
I think often people who are not Catholics, and many who are,
tend to think of Catholicism as uniform, like, well, this is what all Catholics do.
There are obviously many things that all Catholics do,
but there's a lot of diversity of sort of spiritualities within Catholicism.
The Dominicans are very much, their ministry is preaching,
their churches tend to be much sort of simpler, like Blackfriars in Oxford,
very sort of simple, plain design.
There's the Franciscans with the emphasis on poverty of life.
So there's different sort of spiritualities within Catholicism.
And oratorian spirituality is not very well known.
This is the congregation founded by St. Philip Neary,
who was an Italian saint, 16th century,
who inspires the oratory in Rome, and it goes, it spreads to other places.
And John Henry Newman brought it to England.
And there are a couple of interesting points about the oratorians.
One is that they place a particular emphasis on ministering to the more highly educated in the community.
They always go into cities, and they, so Birmingham, for instance,
and they all, they place a great emphasis on music and beauty in the liturgy.
And this is then an aesthetic he grew up in, in this real sense of beauty.
And we can't take that for granted because not all English Catholic churches are,
or certainly would have been then, beautiful or with good music,
because as partly as a result, well, as a result of the Reformation
and the establishment of the Church of England,
all of the existing churches, which had been Catholic up to that point,
were converted to Anglicanism. Catholics no longer had places of worship.
And even after, I mean, and for a long time, it was illegal to be a Catholic, to attend Mass.
Even after those penalties were lifted, it wasn't until 1791
that Catholics could even build churches again. And even then there were restrictions.
They couldn't, for instance, put steeples on them for a long time,
because it would call too much attention to these, you know, these Catholic places.
And of course, Catholics in England were much poorer,
significantly poorer than their Anglican counterparts.
So the churches tended to be cheaper and uglier, generally speaking.
And so there's a real cost in lots of ways to becoming a Catholic,
not just socially, but even aesthetically.
And that would have been something that Tolkien would have been well aware of.
In the oratory, he had the great privilege of being able to grow up surrounded by beauty.
And interestingly, he would also have seen that happening,
because when he and his mother and his little brother started worshipping at the Birmingham Oratory,
it was not the big, beautiful church that we see now if we go and visit it.
That was built during Tolkien's teenage years.
It was originally a very small, shabby kind of blah building
that was then rebuilt into this big, beautiful church, sort of built up around him.
So he has this early exposure to beauty and music, and a sense that it's important.
It's not just a little optional extra, that it's an important way that we worship, that we express our faith.
And one other point I'll just make briefly, although I talk about it at much greater length in the book,
oratory and spirituality really puts a great emphasis on joy.
It's a spirituality of joy, but it's a spirituality that incorporates sorrow.
Joy is not the same thing as happiness.
And I think that this has profound influence on Tolkien,
and we can see it in many ways throughout his whole work.
All of his ability to get through these sorrowful periods and still have a sense of joy.
That's very much in line with the spirituality of the oratorians.
I suppose the one big difference, thinking about it between Middle-earth's perception of faith
and what we might or might not believe, is they knew the gods were there.
The Valar were over in the Undying Lands, and there's nobody who says,
"Oh, Eru Ilúvatar doesn't exist." It's not a world of doubt. Do you agree?
It can be a world of despair, but...
Well, that's a really interesting question.
I mean, Tolkien is obviously writing Middle-earth from a point of view of natural theology.
This is a pre-Christian world. He's very clear. It's a pre-Christian world.
So, obviously, there isn't any Christ figure in it.
He's also very clear that the Valar are angels - angels or archangels.
He makes the point in one of his letters that the inhabitants of Middle-earth might call on the Valar
as a Catholic would on a saint. So, they're intercessory figures.
But of course, Eru Ilúvatar - Tolkien's quite clear - is God, as he understands him.
The one God. The God.
He is not visible to the people of Middle-earth in that sense.
Just as now. Perhaps much less so, because this is pre-incarnation.
We see, not so much in Lord of the Rings, but in the Legendarium,
the story of Númenor is a story of worship of Eru,
perverted into human sacrifice and worship of Morath.
So, I think Tolkien's not specifically working in the very modern struggle with does God exist,
because he's working in a natural theological framework in which he's taking it for granted that God does exist.
But he's still certainly giving plenty of room for the people of Middle-earth to act as if God doesn't exist.
No, that's true. And there's also plenty of room for the bad guys and the fallen good guys
to try and achieve a power that is not appropriate for mortal or immortal people even.
Like the Ring, for example, because it corrupts.
But this theme is intriguing me, and I'm sure this is what I'm going to be reading your book to find out.
It's things like, well, why can't men and other races go to the land, the undying world?
Why can't they go there? Why are they separated? Why are only elves allowed?
Because that's the place where the angels hang out.
Why do men not know what happens to them after death, whereas elves do know that they wait in the halls of Mandos.
And there's some suggestion that they sort of come back again. They don't leave the confines of the world.
These are all really perplexing theological questions in a sense.
But they're very different from the kind of theological questions we would be asking in our world,
because we don't have those dilemmas.
Maybe disagree, because I think we're asking those questions.
I mean, we don't ask them the same way as the elves, because we're humans, not elves.
But what happens when we die is quite possibly the question, right?
What does happen? Can we be sure? Where do we go?
That's as profound a question now as it would be for Baron in Middle-earth.
What I meant was there isn't a group of people who have special access.
That part, the big division between elves and men, the immortal, that obviously isn't our lived experience.
The theology of that, why that is set up like that, is something which is made up for Middle-earth.
And that's what I think Tolkien's way, he's exploring certain points.
Now, obviously, fundamentally, Tolkien is telling a story.
It's the narrative, the characters, I mean, his elves come out of his languages.
So he mustn't ever, ever fall into the trap of thinking that he had a theological puzzle he wanted to work out,
and so therefore he could keep the X, Y, and Z characters.
Utterly antithetical to Tolkien's way of thinking.
But that doesn't mean that he didn't think about these things and weave them in.
Because he writes, for instance, that the main theme of Lord of the Rings is death and the desire for deathlessness.
And this is a theme that he explores throughout the whole Legendarium.
And the elves allow him to do this in a really interesting way,
because the elves don't experience death in the same way that humans do.
So what it effectively allows them to do, by contrast, is to explore what does death mean?
In what way is death a gift to the human race?
Why might elves view it as a gift, when we might view it as a burden?
So the separation of the elves as these people who did have a chance to see the light more directly,
and yet they still managed to fall and rebel.
I mean, the whole story of the Silmarillion is "Fëanor, please stop it!"
"Fëanor, no! Fëanor, don't!"
"Give up! Give up! They're not yours!"
Coming in in second place is a compilation of interviews I had with four experts on the four main Inklings.
So they first met in 1926 at a meeting of the English faculty.
And they'd both actually recently joined the English faculty.
Lewis had been in Oxford before, but he'd just got his job here at Magdalene.
And Tolkien had just arrived as the new Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon from Leeds University.
And they met there at a meeting where they were discussing syllabus reform - a rather dry topic.
But actually it was quite heated, because there was a lot of antagonism between the English literature side of the course and the English language people.
And Tolkien and Lewis found themselves on opposite sides of that debate.
But despite that, they got to know each other, got on very well, because they both shared this love of the mythologies of the Anglo-Saxons and Norse mythology.
And so they quickly came to become close friends, even though they were on opposite sides of that debate.
And they went on to have regular meetings in a reading group, didn't they? Can you tell us something about the Coalbiters?
So one of the things that Tolkien set up shortly after he came to Oxford was this old Icelandic reading group, which was called the Coalbiters.
It was sort of modelled on a Viking club that he'd set up at Leeds.
And what he was trying to do was to promote the understanding of an ability to read Icelandic literature in the original Old Norse.
And he invited Lewis to join that group. And Lewis had already fallen in love with Old Icelandic literature, even as a child.
As a 13-year-old, he'd discovered the poetry of the Vikings, essentially, but he couldn't read it in the original.
So this was a great opportunity for him. And Tolkien invited a number of distinguished philologists from around the university.
So the Professor of Celtic was a member of it, the Professor of Byzantine Greek, the Professor of Comparative Philology.
So it was a pretty highbrow get together. And they essentially were set chunks of sagas or poems to translate in advance.
And then they'd turn up at the meeting and Tolkien would kind of help them through, essentially.
And how did that Coalbiter group become the Inklings?
Well, it didn't directly in the sense that Lewis was going to lots of reading groups, discussion groups.
Pretty much every night he went to something. So he set up the Mikkelmesk Club here in Magdalene, which was a kind of philosophical debating society.
He was going to the Socratic Club, a kind of religious debating group.
And he had beer and Beowulf with his undergraduate students. And the Inklings itself started off as a group at University College,
which is where Lewis had been an undergrad. And he and Tolkien were invited along as senior members.
But it was essentially an undergraduates reading group where they read their own compositions to each other and commented on it.
And it kind of fizzled out because it was being led by undergraduates who left the university.
And then the Inklings itself started, borrowed the name from that group.
And it was really centered around Lewis himself and Tolkien, who was a particularly close friend by that point,
and their other friends and associates, not necessarily all members of the university, but connected with it.
And many with the same kinds of interests. And it became a kind of group for sharing work in progress and commenting on it.
So what do you think a meeting of the Inklings would have been like?
Because we are actually sitting here in the new building where they met in very much a room very similar to where they met every week.
That's right. Yeah. So they would have turned up, I think, about nine o'clock.
And it began with Lewis essentially saying, "Who's got something to read?"
And then somebody would begin by just reading a section of something that they had been working on.
If it was Tolkien, it was likely the next installment of The Lord of the Rings or the New Hobbit book, as Lewis always referred to it.
In Lewis's case, he read them The Problem of Pain and his science fiction works, The Out of the Silent Planet, Perilandra, The Great Divorce.
And essentially they went round the room and read a bit and then made comments on each other's work.
It would often lead into other kinds of discussion on sort of themes that had emerged, even though they were quite different, many of the contributions.
So Warnie Lewis, Lewis's brother, was a member and wrote 17th century French history.
Lewis's family doctor, Humphrey Havard, was an Inkling and would give accounts of his latest mountaineering holiday.
And you wonder how they managed to find common themes with this, but that's seemingly what happened.
And this would go on quite often until quite late in the night.
So you hold Lewis's position now at the college as professor of English language and literature.
What aspects of Lewis's interest in medieval literature and earlier literature did he share with Tolkien in particular?
Well, both Lewis and Tolkien were interested in medieval literature broadly conceived.
So Tolkien had the chair of Anglo-Saxon literature and was particularly engaged with the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf.
It's a work that he was involved in translating. His translation's only recently been published.
He gave a very important lecture about Beowulf, which kind of stimulated lots of new work as a poem.
And so that was a work that Lewis himself would have been teaching regularly.
He had his beer and Beowulf sessions with his undergraduate students.
And you can see that certainly influencing both of their fiction.
I mean, it's the most obvious, I suppose, in The Hobbit, because it's the story of a dragon sitting on a treasure hoard.
Somebody steals a cup from the treasure. He takes out his vengeance on the local town, burning it down.
And then Beowulf has to come and kill the dragon. And it's clear echoes there of the events at the end of The Hobbit.
And they both would have talked widely across the Middle Ages.
So Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian poem, which Tolkien himself edited.
The edition that he edited is still one that we use today with students.
And there's a nice copy of it that survives, Lewis's own copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the Bodleian Library, heavily annotated.
You can see his reactions to some of Tolkien's editorial decisions, not always favourable.
And so that, again, is a work that you can see cropping up in both of their fictions, particularly in the Narnian stories, I suppose, where Arthurian literature has an important part to play.
That was Owen Barfield talking about his grandfather, the original inkling Owen Barfield.
Colin Duryez was talking to us about Tolkien.
Alicia Smith took on the wonderfully mystical Charles Williams.
And Professor Simon Horrobin, who holds the chair that was held by C.S. Lewis at Magdalen, was talking about C.S. Lewis.
This was an evening that we had with these four experts, re-running a Inklings meeting.
And we've put out two parts of that evening.
I'm afraid I've run into some technical hitches with the other parts and I hope to dig them out of my files at some point.
But you can also listen to those if you have a look at season four of Mythmakers.
So we're still waiting for the Charles Williams and the C.S. Lewis parts, but the Owen Barfield and the Tolkien parts are already up.
So what was our number one listen of this season?
It's not that surprising because we know here at Mythmakers that any time we mention the characters surrounding the Peter Jackson version of Lord of the Rings, that certainly gets a lot of you listening.
And we had the pure delight of listening to the Andy Serkis version of The Silmarillion when it was released over the summer.
And a friend of the Centre who's done some of our courses, a wonderful writer from Australia called Andrew Head, who is blind and so accesses most of these texts by the audio version, so is my go-to expert.
He and I discussed Andy Serkis and the strengths and otherwise of his reading of The Silmarillion.
So Andrew, but when we've talked about these versions before, you and I had both agreed that we really liked the earlier version, which I think was only from maybe 2015.
It's not that old. The Martin Shaw version, reading of The Silmarillion.
Do you have any words to say on that? I mean, if someone's already got the Martin Shaw version, do they need to go out and get this one? What would they be missing out if they didn't get this one?
Well, they're certainly missing out on the extra information you get in the foreword and the preface and the talking letter because Martin Shaw version doesn't have it.
So if you're, you know, especially from a blind person's point of view, I was quite, I did not expect those three little beginning parts.
So I was quite chuffed to and it's always interesting to read more on Christopher Tolkien's point of view and Gerard Tolkien's point of view and Christopher Tolkien in particular provides good insight into how and why he wanted to publish The Silmarillion after his father passed away.
I think that the Martin Shaw is very, you know, his voice is lovely. It's a very, another voice, not that dissimilar to Andy Serkis. It's resonant. It's got a sense of gravity about it.
I would say that he has a couple of little mannerisms, which Andy Serkis has avoided and Tolkien rather overuses the word therefore.
And when it comes up in the text, Martin Shaw lands rather heavily on that, therefore, therefore.
And I, once I noticed that I got a little bit, okay, and Andy Serkis doesn't do that. I was listening out for it.
So I think that possibly the Andy Serkis narration has that edge just as a narratorial voice.
He gives it more variety. He pushes the drama a bit further. I wouldn't have thought there was a huge amount of difference between the narrations in the chapters where there are less dramatic episodes where it's more of an account of the ages.
They're just two different voices. But I would say if you're going to sort of do a toss up between the two, I would now go if I was starting afresh, I'd now go for the Andy Serkis one.
Yes, I think I would too. But it's always a bit of a, I guess it depends on your mood, because I do still quite like Martin Shaw's version.
He has a great voice as well, as you say. So yeah, next reading, next time reading round, I'm unsure which one I will do.
Well, there's nothing stopping us shuffling between the two.
For a bit of variety, have one voice read one chapter and one voice read another. I can see an advantage to doing that.
Oh, that's a good idea. The other thing I like about the Martin Shaw version is you get music in that one sort of at the end of each of the main sub stories.
Oh yes, you're right. Although I love, you're right, there's great music. It's like a sort of, it picks up the feeling of the incoming tide and you know, it's got a really atmosphere.
Yes, you're right. They should have done that with the Andy Serkis one. I think it's his name publisher. So they missed a trick there.
Oh, yeah.
Lovely punctuation marks.
Yeah, it really adds a bit to the atmosphere and epicness of the tale. They don't seem to do music as much in audio books these days.
Well, didn't they also, this is us being quite, you know, not many people will have noticed this, but I think the old Lord of the Rings reading by, I've forgotten his name, Robert Ingalls also had music at the end of each book.
It does, yes.
Yeah, bring back the music.
Yeah.
So let's talk about our favourite parts. We can put aside, you know, the two narrators. Well done both for sitting there and reading quite a difficult book. What is your favourite part of The Silmarillion? If you were just going to dip back in and listen to one or two chapters, what would you go for?
Oh.
I've stumped you there, haven't I?
Yes, that's a difficult one. Well, you said a couple, so it would have to be Beren and Luthien. And then it would have to be the Achalabeth or the Downfall of Numenor.
Oh, okay. That's interesting. So Beren and Luthien are like the precursor to Aragorn and Arwen. They are the man and an elf who fall in love. And Tolkien identified very much Beren and Luthien. In fact, on his gravestone, he and his wife are known as Beren and Luthien. So it was his heart story. And I completely agree. I think it's two chapters. One of, in the Andy Circus, it's extremely well read as well. And it has the talking dog.
So what's not to like? There's the folkloric structure of the hero being set an impossible task. He has to go and get one of the Silmarils from the hand of Melkor, who's like the biggest baddie of them all. It's very much like one of those fairy tales. He sets off and Luthien, who is actually really the hero of the tale, let's face it, she goes with him. Hooray!
One of the, what's the word? Are we allowed to say kick-ass heroines of Tolkien? Doesn't feel very Tolkien. Feisty. Maybe that's a bit more Tolkien. I'm not sure I'd go for the Númenor section, but I would go. It is fascinating. I actually like the poetry of the language of the very beginning, which is the Aenar, I can never say this, Aenar Lindelay.
Yeah, that is the setting up of the world. I love the image of the music and how it's described. This does feel very biblical, or actually Miltonic in the way it's described. And I just think it is such, the language is so beautiful. I wouldn't mind if it was Martin Shaw or Andy Circus, both of them read it very well. So perhaps on my either or, I'll do Martin Shaw for that. And then I'll do Beren and Luthien with Andy Circus.
And then everybody's happy. So that's my pick. And then the last question to you is, which of these stories would you most like to have seen written up into a full length book? You told me before we started this call that you've actually read some of the later curated, longer length versions of these stories and you have views on them.
Would you like to share those views and then tell us what you would like to have seen written up in the same way as a sort of Lord of the Rings style book?
Yes, well, you've got The Children of Hurin, which is a full length standalone novel. It's had parts from The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales that aren't quite exactly the same brought together. And then a bit from the history of Middle Earth, I believe as well.
Turned it into a full length seven hour audio book, but the audio book is seven hours. And for those that don't know, that is read by the wonderful Christopher Lee, who played Saruman in the movies. So that's well worth a listen to that one.
And then you have Beren and Luthien and The Fall of Gondolin. They're the other two longer tales. And there's bits, you know, bits from The Silmarillion and other papers that have all other writings that have been brought together.
But they're actually interspersed with the story, but then interspersed with Christopher Tolkien's notes and sort of showing you how the story's changed over time.
So you get characters with different names and different happenings in the events in the story. And then Christopher Tolkien's writings come in and explains how it's changed over the many, many years.
Then you get the next part that's, how do I put it, similar, sort of shows the story evolving over time.
Is this what, the successive drafts of the story?
Yes. Yes, that's it. Thank you. Yes. And he sort of all brought them together. And you still, don't get me wrong, you still get the story.
And as I say, it's interesting to hear that, but it does, if you're expecting a story, it does at times make it a little bit tedious and a bit difficult to get through.
Even for me, who enjoys hearing more about the processes as an author, it can be a bit challenging to get through.
Yes, because what you're really listening to is a story of how a story is written, isn't it? Rather than the actual story.
Yeah.
Kind of a meta.
So that's our number one listen. We look forward to creating a new season of Mythmakers after our holiday break.
And if you have any ideas of writers you'd like us to reach out to, to be interviewed, or indeed any anybody who you think might be an interesting guest to come along from other forms of fantasy creativity, such as music or gaming or anything else.
We are open to your suggestions. So do send us a message and we'll see what we can do.
But until the new year, wish you very happy listening.
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