Mythmakers Season 7 Wrap Up

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 and today we are bringing you a wrap-up episode of our latest season of Mythmakers. We're doing this in two parts. We're looking at our top five more general podcasts about things to do with fantasy, and then next week we'll be looking at our top five episodes in our Lord of the Rings Sidecast as we read our way through the Fellowship of the Ring. Now coming in at number five is the episode I did with my frequent podcast partner, Jacob Rennaker, where we discussed our verdict of the film the War of the Rohirrim. 00:56 This came out during the winter and it was a cartoon treatment of that part that they had dug up from the appendices in Return of the King. So have a listen to see what we made of that particular film. We're used to talking in terms of Tolkien, about the elven cultures, who have these sort of centuries and centuries of ages of history, but Rohan is like the new kid on the block, but to them they feel old, their culture is already old. So it's interesting. I like that. Different perspectives of different cultures, all that is is great fun, um, and that's one of the richness of Tolkien. So, in terms of the Rohan perspective on this in the story, the voiceover is given by Miranda Otto, who is Eowyn in the Lord of the Rings films, so it is a kind of back in the mists of time. 01:55 This is the story of the shield maiden, which, of course, is the basis of her character. She refers to herself being a shield maiden. So they've lovely, it's a lovely fact to choose that and pick that point up, because it's not in the Tolkien sketch. The um, the daughter of helm, isn't even named um and she's certainly not called a shield maiden. So this is an invention which is fitting within the world that they've put into the story. So, um, do you want to sort of sketch out the, the, the line of the story that they've taken from the Rohan culture, without too many plot spoilers? 02:39 - Jacob Rennaker (Guest) so, uh, conflict between so this is so Rohan is kind of a confederacy of different, almost like tribal units that are kind of unified under a head, and that is Helm Hammerhand, who's our you know, kind of main character at the very beginning of the story that this really hangs on in the appendices. 03:00 It's really Helm Hammerhand and how, how, what his legacy is setting up, moving from the first line of Kings of Rohan to then our kind of following second line of kings, so Helmhammer Hand leading a confederation of horse lords, I guess, if you want to call them different domains, and right Conflict with with one of them. That leads to kind of a all out battle between Helm and his and those who are, who are allying themselves with him, and Frecke, who's the head of the other, the other house, and his group that was following him. Helm ends up having to escape to the Hornburg and hole up with his people while they are then sieged during a terrible winter, a terrible winter, and the story then kind of follows the story of the siege and then how the siege lifts and resolves with how Rohan is settled in the aftermath of this large, very elongated battle that took a toll on both sides really. 04:23 - Julia Golding (Host) So those of you who are ticking off your sort of writer points, there is an important inciting incident at the beginning, which is in the Tolkien version of this, which is Freke comes to ask for Hera, who is how they decided to name Helm's daughter, hera's hand, in marriage for his son Wolf. And Helm takes this as an insult because Freke and his chaps are from the sort of wilder edges, the Dunlendings, the wild men. If you're thinking of the Lord of the Rings films I think it's possibly only in the extended edition, but anyway there's a sense that these wild men are allying with Saruman in that and attacking Rohan. So it's an age old conflict that keeps bubbling up. But at this point Freca is kind of extending a potential olive branch, but Helm thinks he's wanting to take the throne, doesn't trust the olive branch, so they go outside and have a scrap and Helm bashes Freca. Freca dies and that means that Wolf the son is out for revenge and is poisoned. Really His whole mind and mindset is poisoned by his desire for revenge. So it drives him into sort of Jacobean revenge tragedy, extremes of wanting to stamp out Helm's children, get his revenge on Hera and so on. So that's the inciting incidents at the beginning. Okay, so we have a story here which has revenge. It has a heroic woman arising to the top of her, leading her nation after everyone else has been killed, leading her nation after everyone else has been killed. I would say that just on the level of story. While it is great to see a female-centric story in the Tolkien world and hurrah for that I mean that's one of the best things about this film is that I did like to see the idea of picking up on the shield maiden. Hira is accompanied by her sort of serving lady Olwen, who then transpires is a shield maiden. It's played by the rather fine actress Lorraine Ashbourne, who British people will know from TV over here. It was bugging me who she was and then I saw her picture and thought oh yeah, I know exactly who you are, great character actor over here. That is, for me, the guts of this film and why I liked it Coming in at number four. 07:21 Get Ready to be Cursed. Cursed because you can join in the conversation I had with Dr Eleanor Baker about an intriguing little volume that she made for the Bodleian Libraries, where she dug through their archives and found some curses about whether or not you can read or destroy or damage writing. All good stuff for fantasy writers to delve into. So, looking through the book, it's a beautifully produced book, as the Bodleian Library books often are. It is done chronologically, so you go from the very oldest curses that you could find to contemporary ones. We're talking about curses about books. Do you want to actually um sort of explain the the actual scope, because obviously cursing more generally is a very long-standing human occupation, but we're talking about a particular kind of curse yeah, absolutely, and, julia, you're completely right in that curses are found among the earliest of human writings. 08:29 - Eleanor Baker (Guest) Curses have existed as long as writing has, so they're a kind of conceit, a way of imagining the power of the word that is quite familiar to us across different time periods. 08:41 What I'm focused on in this book is curses which think about what is termed in academic study, the material text, and that is what it sounds like. It's literally the thing that words are on. So we start off at the beginning of the book with examples from the ancient near east, in just before 3000 bce, and, as you say, we finish in the, the modern era. But the, the initial curses that we're looking at are written on on monumental stone, stelae, which are stone monuments which are taller than they are broad, and they were being inscribed, uh, with a text form called cuneiform, which is formed of little triangles which kind of pressed into clay or inscribed into stone, and they warn things like whoever defaces this text, whoever scrubs out the name of the king and replaces it with their own, will face the wrath of a multitude of different gods. So there's this warning about not editing the text, not destroying the monument, and this is picked up later on by medieval writers who then go on to write these curses when the technology to develop the book is made. 09:59 - Julia Golding (Host) So that condition, that desire to protect the written word and also the material thing that the written word is placed on, is something that we've continued across different time periods, across literary history Of course, when we think of the pre-printing press age, just the huge expense of producing a text, I mean, no doubt it cost an awful lot of money to build one of these monumental stelae as well. So, equally, you don't want that defaced. But let's just go to the medieval period, where you've got all the parchment you have to produce and then you've got the monks sitting up painstakingly hand copying everything you wouldn't have a library of. Just we're both sitting in houses full of books. That was incredibly rare. 10:47 The people who had books were very high status individuals. They would have been kings, they would have been bishops, um, and the idea of somebody coming in and stealing a book would be the equivalent of stealing a jewel. Literally it's, it's, it's very high status. So you can see why a curse is employed. One of the things that came up again and again in the curses you found in the medieval period was the um, anathema, uh, curse. Do you want to talk a little bit about words that become almost like a magic spell? 11:21 - Eleanor Baker (Guest) curse? Yeah, absolutely you. You've really kind of struck at the heart of medieval curses there. You're completely right to identify the manuscripts made of parchment sheets, later paper sheets bound in leather, sometimes really richly decorated. In and of themselves as well, they might have kind of these elaborate gold settings with jewels, literally on the front cover, so they become this form of treasure. But there are also treasuries in a different way and they're kind of word treasuries, because often these books were produced, as you identify, in scriptoria, so the writing rooms of monks and nuns. They were likely to contain theological devotional texts, nuns, they were likely to contain theological devotional texts, and so the text itself had an importance beyond the book itself. It's something of divine importance. Yeah, so you can absolutely see that there are lots of different layers of value that are kind of compounding together that might make someone want to protect it with a curse In terms of the, the different phrases that um people come up with. 12:29 Yeah, anathema literally means, in Latin, cursed, uh, it's, it obtains these connotations of um, excommunication, particularly um, of being removed from the society, of the church, literally being cast out by, by society as you know it. 12:51 So the threat of of being excommunicated, of being anathema was really strong. But there's also a sense that anathema has this kind of incantatory quality in and of itself. It's a Latin word and perhaps a word that, despite people knowing its meaning, has a sort of rhythmic quality to it as well. It's often placed in conjunction with another word, which is sort of a nonsense word in the way that it manifests. It's placed together with another word, anathema, maranatha, and together they have this really incantatory quality. The letters are almost scrambled between the two words, and maranatha doesn't actually mean anything. It doesn't directly translate. It's a process of transliteration, so it's moved from a different language, uh, with different letter forms, into another, and therefore the sense of the word, the meaning, hasn't been translated well either. So it's almost got the same sense of abracadabra that this kind of the words themselves hold power, even if that power is not specific. 14:07 - Julia Golding (Host) and hocus pocus and hocus pocus. Exactly today it's expecto patronum and so on these use we can see how we have in our western brain, somewhere vaguely latin sounding words, equal magic yeah, absolutely, and in some ways that's reflective of the, the differences in literacy rates and who had literacy and which languages were the vernacular. 14:36 - Eleanor Baker (Guest) so the language of the spoken people, that the spoken language of the people so you can imagine, for people whose spoken language was english and who perhaps didn't have the ability to read or write would have gone to church services and heard Latin spoken Words like anathema would hold that incantatory quality because they have a general sense of what that word evokes but not a full conception of its meaning. 15:07 - Julia Golding (Host) And in third place we return to Jacob and I discussing things to do with the Inklings, and in this episode we took a close look at the Discarded Image, which is a book CS Lewis put together towards the end of his life based on lectures he gave to undergraduates helping them get inside their medieval mindset. So you have to imagine that CS Lewis gave this first as a series of lectures. As Jacob said, he was faced with rows upon rows of students who were pitching up at Oxford and then Cambridge, who had come with a modern mindset of science. Things had been set out into space. They knew how big the universe was, or had an inkling of it anyway. I think it's got bigger since and he felt there was a need to give them a guide to how people before the modern times thought, because so much was being missed when students were reading medieval literature. And right towards the end of his life he compiled these lectures into a book called the Discarded Image. Rather poignantly, the prologue is written in 1962 and the book is published in 1964. And 1963, the interveninging year, is the year in which he dies, so it's very much something that comes out right at the end of his career. 16:39 Okay, so that was the purpose of this book, just so you can sort of feel what it's like to read. It is a scholarly book and there are large chapters on things like the Latin writers that the medievals were reading, who aren't on any present day bestseller list, people like Plotinus Boethius, who I think is probably I certainly knew a bit more about him. I certainly knew a bit more about him. And then there was sort of the old faves, like Aristotle and others, description of the Greek writers like Plato and so on. So he does the Greeks, he does the Latins and tries to show the continuity between those writers and the medieval, to then pick them up in the period which he was teaching in. So if you skip those chapters, the nub of the argument comes in the beginning material and the epilogue at the end. So that's what we're going to be concentrating on. So, jacob, do you want to have a stab at describing what the medieval universe was like? 17:51 - Jacob Rennaker (Guest) at describing what the medieval universe was like. Yeah, this is fascinating. It took Lewis a number of different lectures so I don't think I can do it in any shorter of a time than he did, but I'll try so just kind of. 18:04 The 20,000 to 30,000 foot view is a kind of intricately woven, carefully planned, interconnecting set of heavenly bodies, earthly bodies, all governed by, you know, by God essentially, but with layers, levels that all relate to each other in different ways but that are all firmly interconnected and, like I said, interwoven. And it's organized. You can label everything. Everything has its proper place, everything makes sense. It's a given that things are going to make sense. There's, there's a reason and rationale for it all. 18:57 Uh, and the medieval uh mind, as, as lewis says, uh, enjoyed this sort of categorization, um, and this sort of complexity. Uh, and just contemplating this model was something that authors, that really kind of sparked them and drove them. So they didn't see repetition of the model, trying to re explain it, as being something that would be dull to them. Rather, it was something that they thought that they looked upon with a sense of joy and delight and that if they could recapitulate this model, they could explore it, they could kind of detail the interconnection between these different parts. That that was something that delighted them and presumably delighted their audience. That the reason why Lewis says that they spoke about this model so much was because they enjoyed it so much, uh, and that that might be a difference. 19:54 It wasn't a sense for a drive for novelty, um, uh. Rather it was a sense of kind of like comfort not just comfort, but like really deep appreciation for, uh, respect for, and kind of an enlivening by, these sort of principles that stood as fundamental. So you can see everything, everything is explainable and you can enjoy it again and again, and there's always more to kind of see and understand. But it's all there, it's all laid out. You just have to remember it. 20:27 - Julia Golding (Host) I think one of the. It's a kind of instinctive version of the universe. So if you imagine us standing outside looking up at the skies, um, this model of the universe, which goes back to the greeks, um, and probably before that starts with the idea of the earth, is not exactly at the center, but it's at the bottom, and then above that are the spheres, and the spheres are all the seven planets, and the moon is counted as a planet in their separate spheres. So you've got the moon, mercury, venus, sun, jupiter not the very outer layer, planets like Uranus, because they weren't yet discovered. So you've got seven of them sort of stacked up. And then, beyond that, you've got the fixed stars, and beyond that you've got the sort of prime mover, because they understood that for in order for the spheres to be revolving, there had to be something to set them in motion. The other thing was that it was felt that this was like an eternal universe. They didn't have a sense of it being created. That was the Greek version of it. Of course, by the time you get to the medieval version, they've got the idea of the Christian worldview, of there being a creation moment. So there were some dissonance between what Christianity had entered into the model and what the Greek scientists had. What the Greek scientists had. 22:11 And coming in at number two is another conversation that Jacob and I had, and this time we look at the beautiful new edition, the scholarly edition, of Tolkien's poetry. It's a wonderful three-volume set that spans his poetry from his war years all the way up to the very last poems he wrote, and here you have a little section where we discussed his playful poems, some of which appear in the Lord of the Rings. I was drawn to talking about the playful poems because that is a thread that goes all the way through. So he starts writing these when he's a young father, sort of playing around with the idea of the nursery rhyme, having a sort of bigger backstory, and then he reworks some of them to fit into the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. When he needs a poem, so he goes to his drawer of his notebook of poetry and draws them out and shifts and changes them to fit the context. And then, of course, later on he puts together the tom bombadil collection of poems, where some of these get reworked again and he blows off the dust of some others that he has. Um so, and then, of course, he does publish that volume of poetry during his lifetime. So I would say he hoards poetry like a dragon and polishes them up for display at the right moment. 23:42 We should also mention we probably won't go into detail about this because I don't think either of us speak Anglo-Saxon or Elvish but there are long poems written in other real and invented languages. He clearly the thing about the connection between his interest in languages and his interest in poetry is sound, that they sound wonderful even if you don't know what they are saying. The translations provide a wonderful insight into what's going on, but in a way, you don't need that because it's the sound of them that is so intoxicating. And that is something which he did, both professionally. There were some attempts to encourage students of these languages by writing new poetry for them in it, but also what you were mentioning about sparring with them and creating his own and, of course, exploring the possibilities of Elvish in verse. So there's that area in the book as well. So if you're interested in this, do dip into those sections of the three volumes. 24:57 By the way, it's very clearly signposted. Each volume has all the poems listed at the beginning. You just need to look down, find the one you want to follow and go to it. It's very clearly signposted, anyway. What I want to talk about now, clearly signposted anyway, what I want to talk about now is how so many of the poems of that early period start in one context and get dragged into the middle earth context. I've got a couple in mind, but was there anywhere? 25:23 - Jacob Rennaker (Guest) you followed the footnotes and thought this is a really interesting evolution, giving insight into his thinking yeah, the, the earliest one, that, really, where I realized that this was going to take me a lot longer than I thought it was, was getting into the thick of the footnotes for the Grimness of the Sea, later titled the Tides, later titled Sea Chant of an Elder Day, finally titled the Horns of Yilmir or Olmo. So, you see, it's a poem that starts about just his feelings about the coast and the ocean against the shore. That's what it initially was. But then through these successive kind of iterations, revisitings, reworkings, it becomes, you know, a poem about a song of 74 lines that Tour makes for Arendelle musings, kind of just capturing his feelings, staring at the coast, to then being fully incorporated into his legendarium in this, you know epic uh, poem. Essentially that's fully, um, you know, embodied by some of the characters that he's created here, uh, and actually done in their, you know, voice and from their perspectives, uh, to fit consistently within his larger legendarium. So that was the one that, for me, kind of, you know that kind of changed. You see it, no pun intended, you know, ebbing and flowing from his between all of these different versions and all of the different individual, you know strikethroughs and, and you know, edits and reworks. So that one that was probably the one for me that was the earliest on that, just kind of signaled to me like, okay, here's, like you said, he's, he's hoarding these ideas that he has. 27:19 I don't know if, like hoarding, I'd say maybe, uh, I love that image. I'd say for him it's, it's kind of like you know, cultivating if, if gold, gold was living, which the dwarves would say it is. So I don't want to say that gold it doesn't actually have life, um, but it's, you know, he's he's kind of storing these away and like bringing them out, not just like to polish them but to kind of like water them and see if there's something that he can add to or join to this larger kind of organic organism, this world that he's creating. Is this something that he can transplant from this original context and will it survive, if given the proper care and feeding, in this new world legendarium? 28:04 Because I think he assumes that the legendarium has been kind of essentially a constant his whole life and so anything that he's created possibly has roots or connection. It's all watered by the same rain and life and by the same sun that he's been experiencing his whole life, and so I think that's why he sees it as that he could just like rifle through his file cabinet and and say here's, here's a poem about you know any of these things, and he would actually look at it and take it seriously as something that could possibly fit in here. And so that was a fascinating this, this grimness of the sea going to the horns of yilmir, uh, transformation as kind of his process of trying to get his mind around his whole life and his whole creative identity as a creator or, sorry, as a sub-creator. So yeah, that's probably one for me, I don't know which one's for you. 29:02 - Julia Golding (Host) We're fascinating. Yeah, another one in that early batch is one called the Trees of Katerian which is based on the real city of warwick. Now warwick is, um, it's probably about 50 miles north of oxford and would have been a place that he he certainly visited or and met his wife there during these sort of war years, that early stage of the marriage. It was one of the places he was near, so it was a very special, beautiful place for them and it is a very beautiful city. It's got a fabulous, absolutely jaw-dropping castle. So all very mythic. And finally, our most popular episode was a conversation I had in two parts with Professor Nick Grimm, who has written the book about to hit the world. But we go on to look at how he has given serious attention to Tolkien's writing as literary works in the same way you would other modernist writings. So we've got a non-specialist audience listening. So the Battle of Maldon is an Anglo-Saxon poem and the homecoming of how do you say that? Beornoth. 30:32 I think it's Beornoth, beornoth is a drama, short drama, which Tolkien wrote, which is like a spinoff, his adaptation of the Battle of Maldon. So that's absolutely fascinating. So I noticed you said you moved in 2020. Am I wrong in thinking you were butting up against COVID when? 30:55 - Nick Groom (Host) you moved. Yeah, within two weeks COVID had followed me here and indeed was spreading around the world. So it wasn't the happiest of times, but we made it Tough, Tough beginning. 31:08 - Julia Golding (Host) So your book charts the writing of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings with a sort of academic interest. To start with, I would say that if you want to gen up on a kind of modern way of looking at the writing and reception and possible interpretation of the book, this is a great paperback to buy. But you also then go on to do what lots of people really want to read about, which is have a serious attention to the various adaptations. So we're going to start first of all with the material, which is the kind of thing that you wanted to do at university and were not allowed but are now doing, and that is looking at how the context of the composition of these novels and where they fit amongst other 20th century books at the same time, how that's enriched your understanding. I just wanted to particularly start this by your wonderful jaw-dropping moment, a bit of a mic drop moment, where you talk about how, when you reach the appendices in Return of the King, if you're following him and you're sticking with it, you suddenly find out that actually Tolkien admits to having translated his story from Westron common speech English. So the Shire is not really the Shire, but Susa and Sam short for Samwise from the Anglo-Saxon is not really Sam, but Ban Banazir, All words based on the ancient Gothic language. 32:45 And you're making the argument here that you've got a. Suddenly you're chucked out of a familiar world into this unfamiliar, and you call it the mise en abyme, the idea of suddenly you're dropping through a world into the abyss, which was great. I'd forgotten. Well, not forgotten, but not really thought about it. In what a rude shock that is when you read that. So what have you found by treating Lord of the Rings as a serious literary work? What kind of sides has it made you think about the book, where it sits within 20th century literature? 33:24 - Nick Groom (Host) Well, that's a very interesting question because of course the tradition of Tolkien criticism and scholarship has really been led by those working on earlier literature, such as Anglo-Saxon medieval period, as a way of hunting for Tolkien's sources and showing how inventively and creatively he adapted materials, and also as a gateway to introduce readers to that earlier period of literature. So in that sense Tolkien's a bit of a godsend for medievalists because it encouraged his readers to return to that period. But I really felt that Tolkien as a stylist, as a creative writer, had been overlooked, because what those studies do? They tend to take him out of the 20th century and put him into a rather sort of separate or a unique or an individual category, and so he's not treated as part of the literary history of the 20th century. In fact this has been changing over the past few years, but certainly when I was studying and first teaching 20th century literature, there'd be a focus on what we would call the modernists, and many, many writers who you might be familiar with were excluded from that. There used to be an emphasis on Elliot, joyce, wolf, maybe D H Lawrence some controversial figure these days Lately, perhaps William Golding. But university courses haven't been very good at including not only Tolkien but also writers like George Orwell, for example, who are similarly internationally well-known. So I really wanted to see how Tolkien might fit into that literary history, but not just through whether he's using the same sorts of devices, playing the same sorts of language games. Can he be treated alongside somebody like James Joyce, but really to delve further into the way he writes and his particular strengths as a writer. 35:51 I really believe in the value of literature and I think that's something that for many critics this is sort of something which is seen as I don't know being unfashionable or ideological or whatever. But I think we have to be able to, as critics, have sort of the courage of our convictions and say when we think a writer is good and why they are particularly good. And I thought, well, I must take this to Tolkien and try to argue that Tolkien is as good a writer as his contemporaries, although he may be using different techniques, have a very different perspective on things. So I really wanted to think about those elements. Also, Tolkien readers get very is possessive of the right word. They certainly feel very keenly. I think it is that Tolkien belongs to them and this does sentimentalize his writing and there's a strong identification with many of the characters, but also when I was rereading it I realized not only what a dark book it is, but also how it's full of failure and uncertainty and ambiguity. 37:06 One of the things that interests me is that Tolkien is described as a world builder and of course he has this fantastic linguistic foundation, fibon Lirth. He produced maps which Christopher Tolkien, his son, then drew. He has things like the family trees, the genealogies, even heraldry. He was an artist as well. So there's a big emphasis on how Tolkien creates this really sort of thickly woven, watertight world. But it's not. It's full of loose ends and it's full of unexplained contradictions, because that's what our world is like. We don't explain everything, we don't have answers for every experience or phenomenon or episode and express that he's really really good at presenting loose ends, but in a way that you don't necessarily notice them. 38:12 So an obvious example is Tom Bombadil, who simply does not fit in the story. I mean, he is from another world, the ring has no effect on him, he's not interested in it. He has that lovely line when Frodo says, well, why didn't we leave the ring with Tom Bombadil? And Gandalf says, well, he'd just lose it, he's got no interest in these things Independently. Tolkien did say that Bombadil does not fit. He's an inexplicable element of the world. 38:46 He was writing about Tom Bombadil before he wrote Lord of the Rings world. He was writing about Tom Bombadil before he wrote Lord of the Rings, and he continued to write about Tom Bombadil after Lord of the Rings, but not in a way that really enhances our understanding of Lord of the Rings, except to demonstrate that when only getting a partial view of this world, we only get a partial view of Middle Earth. We're get a partial view of Middle Earth. We're not seeing the whole of Middle Earth. 39:08 A more, I think, subtle example would be the fox that sees Frodo and Sam as they're leaving the Shire. And all of a sudden you're in the mind of this fox who's thinking isn't it strange that these hobbits are out at this time of night? And then Tolkien says well, why they were out. The fox never learned. And so we suddenly realize that sort of foxes are sentient, they're having their own experiences, they're looking at the world in a particular sort of foxy way, and so you get a perspective on things that doesn't explain the story, but it deepens it by showing us there are things that we're not understanding, and there are things that aren't being explained. 39:59 - Julia Golding (Host) Thank you for listening to our wrap-up episode and we look forward to seeing you when we return after the summer with a whole new series of Mythmakers. 40:21 - Speaker 2 (None) Visit OxfordCenterForFantasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses, in-person stays in Oxford, plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favourite podcasts worldwide.