On Re-reading The Lord of the Rings

Welcome to Mythbakers, the podcast for fantasy fans and creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I hope you've been enjoying the recent podcast with lots of guests. We visited Star Wars, we've visited the people who played Dungeons and Dragons and the Laughing Community, we've heard from a Theologian, so do check back through earlier episodes to find out what we've been doing. But today I thought I would talk to you about the joy of reading, talking, but going back and rereading it because I'm sure that many of the people listening to Mythbakers are amongst those of us who do that. And I thought I'd just take you through some thoughts I was having on this when I was drawing up a whole book about the subject of rereading. I've sort of been working on it over the years and I thought I'd read you a little bit or talked you a little bit about part of it where I look at my fascination with fantasy. So here goes, I hope you follow my thoughts. So how often do I reread talking? Well, quite a lot, you'll hear more about that in a minute. But since the audio versions are now on my phone, I think I more often listen to it again than read it again. But I prefer to listen to a full version rather than a dramatized version in order to get to the full joy of the pros and the detail which obviously is always lost in any shortened version. But let's start with the first place where I started rereading fantasy and that's actually with Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis. And here there's a joke I was like to tell when it comes to C.S. Lewis, which is thanks to the British TV program Q.I. which goes like this, a man walks into a room and opens a wardrobe to hang up his coat. Inside he finds a lion and a witch. What the heck are you doing there? He asks. Narnia business snarls the witch. Narnia business. I have been on Narnia business since I was tiny. Thinking about this as unearthed a forgotten memory of the person who introduced me to Narnia. And that was a girl who must have been I suppose about 11 or 12. Her name was Geraldine and she lived next door to us. And of course at that age she felt inevitably old to a four or five year old. And she also used to come and babysitters. But there was a certain part along the fence where I could look through into her garden. And I think she caught me there one day. I remember it was the japonica blooms were out, which are these sort of dark salmon colored blooms. So she was on one side of the fence. I was on my side of the fence with the blossom all around us. And she started telling me about this wonderful book should read. It had a lion and a country where it was always winter and an evil witch who gave out hot chocolate and Turkish delight. Now at this stage I'd never tasted Turkish delight, but I knew instantly that it must be the most divine thing in existence. And so without even reading the book, I became hooked on the idea of this fantasy. I was a convert. So now I'm on a quest to understand the power of fantasy and why it holds so many of us in its role. I do enjoy historical novels and realistic novels. I do vary my diet, but I have a deep place somewhere inside me for fantasy. And maybe some people when I when I start talking about fantasy already start running for the exit. And some just don't get the point. And they're maybe scared off by the fandom that Ethan Gilstroth was talking about an earlier podcast, the kind of lapping and comic on people who get dressed up and have great fun putting on the ears and the feet and everything. And maybe on the underground, if you have no idea what these people are doing on the metro, and you see groups, these people, it must seem quite a strange alternative culture. But on the other hand, I think they're just having harmless fun and I completely get why people do that. An earlier generation had mods and rockers and I think perhaps our version of Stormtroopers and elves is much more peaceable and much more fun. But obviously fantasy fiction in its modern form isn't for everybody. Opposition rose right at the beginning for Tolkien in the Inklings group Hugo Dyson, who was one of them. He is supposed to have said when Tolkien got out yet more pages of his book to read, he's supposed to have said, oh, not another effing elf, whether or not that's true, an actual quote. I think we can understand that the sentiment was one which rejected Tolkien and what he had to offer. And Diana Pavlik Glyar, who's an expert on the Inklings, marks this moment as a real decline of that support group, the Inklings, because somebody had broken the pact which was to criticise but always to value. And that is what a lot of people feel about fantasy. They criticise it and have no value for it. And I'm afraid this also goes into the very early reviews. I was found one in the Times Literary Supplement on the 25th of November 1955, which was incredibly sniffy about this book by Oxford Don. It says, not a work that many adults will read right through more than once. I think they've been proved wrong. So it does seem if they're right that it is a book that wouldn't bear rereading, but fortunately many of us out there are shouting, no, you're wrong. And I'm not the only person who feels like this, I know, because if you look at Terry Pratchett's wonderful collection of essays called A Slip of a Keyboard, he reflects how he used to read it once a year in spring and only stop when he realised he had such a clear recall of the text that he could remember stretches of middle earth landscape as if they were real places. Once you've reached that point, I think you've passed beyond reading and sort of moved in. So after having an apprenticeship in Narnia, I fell in love with Lord of the Rings when I was about 10 and I read it at least annually for a decade and I've read it frequently since. I wasn't surrounded by those who shared my enthusiasm and Tolkien did prove divisive, argued foreign against passionately as we also argued foreign against nuclear disarmament. We were very political, my little group of friends. Sally, who's still a good friend and a good friend in my school years as well, she held out against Lord of the Rings and even to this day has admitted she hasn't overcome her distaste against it. Her resistance is against fantasy as a genre rather than anything personal against Tolkien. And I think there's this sense it's just not worth attention because it's not, quote, real. Yet huge numbers of people feel exactly the opposite and take large doses of fantasy as part of their literary diet. So this raises the question of what kind of power is it that fantasy holds over us and what's sending us back to it again? Perhaps some insight can be gained from looking at this visual reaction against fantasy by its opponents. I'm not sure that another genre meets with such scorn perhaps perhaps I make an exception for romance. I've also written in that genre and that is so often dismissed by critics as being not worth attention and then you get something like Bridgerton come along which is based on a well-established historical romance novel a sort of fairy tale version of historical romance and suddenly everyone wakes up and thinks, oh my goodness, these stories to have power. But I suppose it could be just a matter of taste and doesn't need a rational explanation. Unease about what it means to be an adult is another problem but I think that should be challenged because some people, some detractors, say that fiction that contains magical or unreal elements which equals kind of fairy stories is material for children and if adults are still reading it they are somehow backward or the nerds. There are faults in the logic in the link every link in this chain. It's patronizing to children, it's muddle-headed about the content of fantasy but it is true that children are not yet asked to give up their love of the magical in some mistaken idea that it's not grown up to like it and adults do come under some peer pressure to do so and if you think just looking at the Oscars what they tend to give the Oscars for are the hard-hitting dramas unusually you know that sort of gritty or difficult or challenging and if those same qualities are in fantasy they don't seem to make the grade and it was a real breakthrough when Return of the King won Oscars but it hasn't really returned fantasy as a genre hasn't really returned fully into the Oscars stable for what that's worth but I would counter that actually rather than being escapist or silly or childish in fact it's in fantasy that some of the most serious themes are covered. It's not very as another reason why people take against it reading about things that aren't out there in the visible world seems to be below their attention for some reason and Margaret Atwood has some quite scathing things to say about this she of you know Handmaiden's tale and others. She speculates that science fiction of fantasy are in her phrase sent to their rooms as it were for the misdemeanor of being enjoyable in what is considered a meritorious way. I think she's right to suspect that some readers believe that making it all up are not being realistic in the way they portray the world is either cheating or simply easier than the hard graft of being a novelist in the everyday world. That's just not true. A counter argument to this one is what Tyree Pratchett makes which is almost all writers are fantasy writers but some of us are more honest about it than others. Even the most realistic of writers are arranging a little slice of made up on the plate for you and decorating it in the icing of the everyday. That aside Pratchett makes a convincing case that fantasy has a different job to do than realism, a role that he's fulfilled that fantasy has fulfilled since stories were first told. Fantasy should present the familiar in a new light. Fantasy is the ear literature from which everything else sprang, which is why my knuckles, that's Pratchett's knuckles go white when toe-sucking literary critics dismiss it as genre trash. Pratchett uses his Discworld series to comment on lampoon and play with our understanding of the way we conduct our business on earth, covering matters from religions to banking to the postal service. Neil Geiman likewise examines difficult contemporary themes and it's clearly that when they wrote good omens together, that was a very natural yoking of two authors with a not the similar but in tune with each other, shall we say. And he, for example, takes issues with things that many of us find hard to look at on the streets of our towns and cities and that's homelessness and he turns the invisibility of that into the central trope of his excellent urban fantasy, neverware. This London under is the world you don't see. Fiction works its own spell and by saying its name, it makes the problem visible. And these aren't far-fetched ideas, you know, the idea that they never existed and they're made up. Margaret Atwood again makes it clear that there is nothing in her science fiction work, the Hans Maiden's Tale, that has not already been tried somewhere in some human society. Just think about that. If you've not read it, you might have seen the TV series about that and if you think she's saying that absolutely everything here has been tried somewhere. So don't expect to escape when you go to fantasy, anticipate instead that you'll be looking in a mirror that reveals more than you knew about your life before. So what does the Lord of the Rings do with its new light? Tolkien himself believed it was filling a gap. England lacked a complete mythology so he decided to provide one. That is fine as far as it goes and I've no idea when I was a 10 that that's the job the Lord of the Rings was trying to do. It didn't matter to me and it also wouldn't account for its worldwide success in lands for which that has no relevance. For me, it was not that the book provided some kind of backstory. It was more that it gave me a huge space for my imagination and it's not one that threatened to wear thin if you scratched at the surface. Tolkien understood this very well and it worried him that he might add a few scratches to the finish when he undertook the Silmarillion and he says the part of the attraction of the Lord of the Rings is I think due to the glimpses of a large history in the background and attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island or seeing the others of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To the go there is to destroy the magic unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. That's such beautiful way of expressing it of course which it makes his letters a joy to read. I didn't read the Silmarillion until much later and the magic was complete the first time I read it so the Silmarillion didn't kind of connect in the same way to my imagination. I've appreciated it more coming back to it years later. What the 10-year-old found in Lord of the Rings was that she could enter into the world and feel as if it were a parallel creation to this one, immersive in a way that you know a 4D cinema can only dream of achieving and I don't think I've ever read a book that did this before or since in the way it gripped me. Terry Pratchett has a nice phrase, dear or Terry Pratchett, much missed. He had a nice phrase for this when he called the Lord of the Rings a half brick in the path of the bicycle of my life. Another great image there. I too was thrown from the saddle spending days of one holiday sprawled on the living room sofa reading without coming up for air then turning back immediately to the fellowship of the rings once I'd finished the return of the king because I didn't want to leave the experience and no book has come close to evoking this response from me. The depth is peculiar to Tolkien because of course I'm sure most of you know he approached his novel from a very different direction to other writers. He used it as a game playing with his knowledge of philology, his love of languages. He knew how world languages changed and developed so he wanted to run his own experiment in his middle-earth laboratory. Maps, names and languages came before plot he said. Elaborating them was in a sense Tolkien way of building up enough steam to get rolling but they also had a sense they also had a sense of providing the motive to want to write and that's in the the Shippee biography of Tolkien he elaborates on that Tom Shippee. A British person we live out the daily issue of language just by where we are living in our local road signs and I'm sure that's true in its own cultural sense where you are. Places are named and renamed over the centuries and we often seek for the stories behind them hidden like clues in the text. Some are more obvious and just do what they say on the tin. I live in my city of Oxford and this is the place where the oxen folded the River Thames, oxford. Okay so that's clear that's the story. Others hide layers of history so where I grew up as a child was in a village on the edge of London called Thaden Boys. It's quite a strange name even in the English context so that the first part of that Thay, T-H-E-Y, is the name of a Viking landowner Thay and so that's the town of Thay Thaden and then Boys or Bois as the French would say is forest and it's ineping forest so you've got a marriage there between the Viking history of the place and the the French Norman Conquest history of the place. So we also got word histories that are personal. I think almost any school child can tell you hopefully they've asked at some point what is the meaning of their name but there's also an element where it tells the fashions of the Thames when I was at school I was in a class of 30 but it was a bit unevenly gender split so there was 11 girls and a really strange thing with three of us were called Julia. Now since then I very rarely come across other Julius I mean they exist but it's a rare event to come across another Julia. I think my name has fallen a bit out of favour while in the UK at the moment named like Jessica Emily Sophie Lily that's also maybe that's the Harry Potter reference. These all have become very popular and I find this out because when I do book signings you get a long queue of kids and you get used to knowing what the familiar names are and how to spell them. It will change again and likewise Middle Earth is not static or sort of one version of it. It's not squeaky clean like many other imitative fantasy worlds but it comes with a convincing tarnish and signs of aging and there are maps for the maps. I know they're simplified but there's a pleasure in tracing the journeys when you flip to and throw in the books to the maps and back and this is something that the Peter Jackson films paid homage to in its use of the map as a way of explaining where everybody was at various points in the films. So if Tolkien knows exactly where the story has reached on his map you put faith in it like a backseat passenger in a car driven by a competent navigator. You're able to enjoy the views out of the window while he does the work. Mind you I would just say here that Tolkien was a very bad driver so probably not the best image for his maps. I think he was a very good walker so maybe I should change that image to one of somebody leading the way in a hiking expedition. Anyway connected to this is the physical presence of his world so it's not just a historical aspect of it it's the physicality of it. When I'm rereading it now I'm struck by the passages I didn't pay much attention to when I was 10. These are usually the passages of natural description. His one I particularly like just as the story gets underway before the threat level has risen to critical so the three hobbits pip in Frodo and Sam have just set out from Bagend and they're on the very first leg and it's the first morning after they've slept out and then this is beautiful a couple of sentences. Away eastward the sun was rising red out of the mists that lay thick on the world. Touched with gold and red the autumn trees seemed to be sailing rootless in a shadowy sea. A little below him to the left of the road ran down steeply into a hollow and disappeared. I could go on much more and quote at greater length the very particularness of this camping spot the little icy waterfall where they fill their bottles. The tree roots they sleep among the stiffness of first waking after sleeping outside and this feels like the kind of walk I could take by just going outside of my front door. I don't need to be persuaded to believe in Middle-earth I live there and that's why I would take Lord of the Rings with me to a desert island because it would be my ticket back home to in my imagination so I could travel home. Being a fan of the book doesn't mean I haven't got criticisms to make though they don't really matter they're just niggly things that I think of when I read it. As each of our children grew up we had we have three. Each one of them got one of their parents reading Lord of the Rings to them as a bedtime story. I should can imagine that's quite an investment of time it was like a little right of passage in our family. I had the pleasure of doing this my eldest and my youngest and my husband did our son in the middle. I can tell you that the chapters are very long for bedtime reading is best not to promise a whole one to your child audience. Anyway but on the last reading some years ago now my son and I started in September and finished in April so it had a wonderful feeling of marking the exact period of time of the main events of the book and it also gave that reading an extra dimension of living it out alongside the characters. There's no rushing. However I also read the book with a bit of an eye to some of its faults because it was the first time I'd read it since I'd got experiences a writer myself and I did find I began to quarrel. I began to quarrel with some of the language for example. The archaism of the noble characters and the elves and the men of power is a tricky business taking heroism seriously in a cynical age and I would you know I'd sometimes sort of give a bit of a huff as I had to read out words like deem and verily and the ponderous inverted sentences. I think I swing between sometimes really enjoying them and sometimes thinking oh this is a bit overmuch but anyway it's his style so I think I just just have to cope with it when I say and talking was aware of this problem of some of the more highfalutin language and his answer was to put his critics in his own work i.e. the hobbits. They represent the modern reactions to heroic figures in the story and they actually helped don't they because they undercut the high-flown moments with humour or by saying what they feel when someone's rambled on too long. I'm particularly fond of Bilbo at the council of Elrond which is a very long chapter and doesn't quite work as a bedtime story but anyway he interacts a couple of times the history of the ring and he finally reminds everyone he's very hungry and says that having such high-powered discussion isn't meant for the little by which we mean the ordinary people like him so by putting sort of modern misgivings into the text that we've sometimes wondered among these giants of men we're always allowed to believe believing them without destroying them because we're sort of present in the room in the shape of the hobbits and it might also be why part of us so many of us love the journey in that book because it's actually turns out I'm sure there's no need to give a plot spoiler here but it turns out the unheroic characters the hobbits with their hairy feet and down to earth reactions they are actually the true heroes and the so-called heroes the strong people turn out to be the ones who have to play the supporting role they're the sidekicks in the end. We can identify with them and it suggests that the hobbits if they're like us we might have the similar capabilities in ourselves that we had not suspected it's a very optimistic work in that sense and it's so bring to reflect that Tolkien and his generation had their wartime experience to learn this lesson and I often think when one of the hobbits is taking a really difficult decision to do the equivalent of going over the top I often think in my imagination back to that first generation of the Great War but when I'm rereading what about the women or the lack of them um I think it's probably something which did not worry me at 10 and that was because the Lord of the Rings is a fantasy without gender politics at the non-heroic level of the hobbits in fact they're hardly any female hobbits mentioned um and the company when they head off the main hobbits they're pretty sexless creatures and they only get to get married and sort of see that part of their life expand when they get home and that's largely beyond the end of the book. Their friendship group though has what you might call the softer qualities or feminine qualities of gentleness with each other open affection and reluctance to resort to violence they aren't a kind of rugby club on tour smashing up the bars so I didn't feel excluded and looking at this now I can see that that friendship group is based on the cultural assumptions of Tolkien's era we have to remember that he himself is now an historical figure and that's what's underlying his choices he's used to a world where the chaps go off to have adventures and the women in the Lord of the Rings it's the shape of poor old libelia sackful baggins they're left literally in her case with the washing up and the hobbits don't ever think about the absence of females in their number except for the odd pang of Sam remembering Rosie Cotton but you know it's they're largely not important the mothers are not present at all but one character in Tolkien who's clearly fighting against her gendered role is wonderful Airwin and who's met much later in the two towers and she is a young woman who disguises herself to go into battle it's sort of the Mulan of the Tolkien world yet she is one of those on a heroic plane in the book so we don't actually get her perspective we see others looking at her more often she does however make the pleasingly kick-ass edition into the female characters because she succeeds with Mary's help to kill the big baddie the king of angmar the chief black rider where ages of men wizards and male elf warriors have all failed. On my latest read through I was reminded that the women we are introduced to or are mentioned which there are few they all actually offer different views of female power when you look for it most of them have power and that's really interesting so I mentioned libelia sackful baggins the battle axe relative of bilbo she knows how to get her own way doesn't she and in the end she's given a little heroic role in that she stands up against saraman when he takes up the shire so it's kind of saying oh well you may not like this kind of stubborn woman but gosh she stood up when it counted and then we also get a mention of golem's grandmother in one of the accounts of the history of the ring and we're told that she's a leader in a matriarchal community and is said by Gandalf possibly to be wise in her own way I'd love to know more about this matriarchal hobbitesque society so there are other forms of leadership including female ones which are imagined and treated as quite natural in middle earth and of course there's preeminent the galladriel who outshines a partner keleborn a kind of queen elisabeth with a duke of edembra at her side though one of the rereadings having read the Terry Pratchett that came to mind so having read the slip of the keyboard it was in my mind when I reread recently and one of my favorite Terry Pratchett quotes is that a genre of fantasy is long overdue for a visit by the equal opportunities people and he finds that the roots for this stretch back long before the 20th century of course because they're flourishing in a genre that we've inherited from myths legends and folklore he's particularly funny when he gets to the subject of magic wizards he complains get to do a better class of magic while witches give you warts so he wrote in equal rights in response to this which tells the story of a girl who manages to break through the equivalent of a wizard glass ceiling maybe now the Harry Potter series has finally done for that division i'm not sure somehow still calling Hermione a witch something about that word that seems frayed frayed with sharp pointy features and she gets intelligent really rather than power and Harry is the one to get to do the defensive warrior stuff and be the ultimate hero so Hogwarts I think is an equal opportunities employer so JK Rowling has done a good job at rebalancing the scales but the language was perhaps beyond her ability to transform and it might take a bit longer before that word which doesn't come with the idea that they give you warts it's no wonder that many writers actually handle this by abandoning the witch with a division entirely because the language is so hard to redeem the Australian writer Trudy Canavan in her black magician trilogy which is about a magician for trainee mages opts for the term magician so that her people of any gender can be given the same label so even so even in that book male and female forms of magic seem to exist reflected in the career choices of the people in the novel women tend towards healing men to fighting and the difficult scientific subjects to tomorrow appears another favorite writer and American writer in her song of the lioness which was actually now quite an old book it was first published in 1983 but I didn't read it as a child I came to it as a much later in life she mains streams magic so that it's part of a skill set of her imagined court of knights not exclusive to a set of people called wizards though there are some that exist in the context of research and learning in her quartet she examines how a female can get on in a man's world the twins in this book Alana and Tom are bound by a tradition which means they have to follow the career path that the other one wants so Tom wants to be a magic wielder and Alana wants to be a warrior so they do the very Shakespeare Shakespearean thing of swapping and pretending to be each other yet Alana even though she gets to be a warrior cannot leave magic behind because it is in her bloodline so she gets very good at her profession by hard work and using methods of fighting to suit her small frame but she also has magic as well as part of the deal which makes her like a hero of her age and this means that she then gets accused when she's an adult that she only got the role where she is which is King's champion because of her magic not because of all the hard work and excellent sword fighting that went on before which I think many women who rise to higher positions you know must recognize that as an accusation what I really then like is Pierce goes on to imagine in another quartet the next generation of knights in training where women are now allowed to enroll but very few are sounds a bit like trying to get in elite forces of the military and in this series protector of the small Kel who is the main female character she has no magic and never gets magic but she has many other qualities that make up for it including a training in a martial art thanks to her father's diplomatic posting to a culture that's very similar to a far eastern one like Japan the last of this quartet deals seriously with the issue of displaced people and I've mentioned this in previous podcasts and the nature of true leadership gender politics has come a long way in this world by the time she gets to run a refugee camp and she's given this role she thinks it's because she's a woman but actually it's not as a punishment but because her command to concede that her character and her struggles to succeed as a woman in a man's world give her the maturity lacking in her male contemporaries she actually ends up in command over some of the people she trained with which is rather nice women don't have to become like men but they can be a new kind of warrior so perhaps the witch wizard division in fantasy is still to be completely bridged but the trend of late particularly in young adult novels would please a visiting equal opportunities inspector I imagine them dodging the booby traps and side stepping missiles as they make their visit peering over the top of their clipboards women as assassins tick girls as leaders tick dystopia has particularly introduced a strong line of female leads not valued for their looks and sweetness but skills and strength um capnis everdeen in the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins comes to mind she's courageous inventive rivals legolas in the use of the bow but more bravely on the part of the writer I think she's not particularly nice she is damaged and used by her society but she is never weak and in the post apocalyptic Chicago divergent tris is the first in her class to take the leap to join dauntless the warrior class and is the one in cordon in the last book to make the ultimate heroic sacrifice so fantasy has moved at the times how much the fantasy written reflects its era is actually much easier to see in hindsight so I've said that about talking and his assumptions about the men going off on adventures and I don't if you've had this experience of rereading fantasy you loved to when you were younger and then suddenly thinking oh my goodness look at the assumptions and attitudes in this I had this when I went back to read the dragon rider books by Anne McCaffrey which I loved as a teen but I hadn't read them since and I picked up the first one again when I was thinking about this theme and rediscovered the world of pern a distant planet colonized long ago and threatened every few centuries by the passing of a planet that seeds the ground with damaging meteorites dragons are natural to the planet and they've teamed up with humans they and their riders are the only one who can destroy these seeds when they fall rereading revealed assumptions in it that I've been blind to 30 years ago when I first read dragon flight it was already quite an old book it was published in 1969 and I think it reflects agenda relationships more of that day an era when the equal pay act in the UK was being fought for tooth and nail time of the film made in daginum if you've been looking at it's a great film about how women got equal pay for work in a car factory it's a very realistic topic for you I don't think I noticed the inequalities as a teen but I am now quite disturbed how Lessa who's the female character is portrayed of being very jealous of her man shaken by him when she's disobedient that's not good and she chooses her sexual partners in some kind of dragon strength contest there may be things like love island aren't much better the queen rider by tradition partners the rider of the dragon who impregnates the golden queen dragon yeah I can see this is all a bit worrying and if that relationship changes at the next mating then so does the human partner a cafe is moving towards a more liberated woman by the end Lessa is allowed out of the purger to supply support missions with the men so yeah a bit of an advance but the assumption is still that gender does decide the role as it would in a beehive or ant colony I think that's probably what she had in the back of her mind so human standards are less applicable but it led me to reflect how since it was written there been so many changes to women's position in the military but a female fighter pilot is still unusual McCaffrey while being dated in some aspects of the battles of the sexes got there before the real world did on some others fantasy sometimes anticipates and changes are assumptions about race gender and sexuality allowing the world to change in its image rather than just reflect it but I must unload such concerns with Sam's pots and pans chuck down the crevice in Mordor if I am to travel on more likely to my goal I don't think I've completely unpacked my fascination with rereading Lord of the Rings the satisfaction is deeper than memories of a pleasant country walk or a sense of history I think that this kind of fantasy offers a spiritual experience without the trappings of a specific religion or philosophy talking himself saw it as a fundamentally religious and Catholic work as he says in his writings but he wisely stripped it of all mentions of God so that the deeper truths were available to all readers no matter what creed or no creed that they come from there is a sense obviously in the Silmarillion of God and a creator and a sense of providence and hints in Lord of the Rings but it's very very much in the background in the Narnia books CS Lewis calls this the deep magic underlying the spells of his white queen and so what is the deep magic I think it centers on the nature of courage and the sacrifice of the one for the many think of how many of the conversations in the Lord of the Rings question the nature of bravery very early on comes one of the wisest exchanges something I recall at times of trouble in the world when you know we're facing terrorist attacks or climate disasters and you know doubt are aware of it but it's worth quoting again because it's so wise I wish it need not have happened in my times said Frodo so do I said Gandalf and so do all who live to see such times but that is not for them to decide all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us it is a deceptively simple answer and also consoling as it points out the path ahead you just have to decide what to do from here that is all that can be expected of you Tolkien's wisdom on this evokes the ghosts of his 1914 generation sent off to war as well as the 1939 one of his sons faced the pain of the families involved I think I only now really appreciate now that I've got children of military age and when I see the names on war memorials it's almost unbearable to read particularly when there are runs of brothers and cousins from small villages are cut down all they had to decide was what to do with the time they had given been given just as Frodo does and I think Tolkien has taught me more about the nature of evil than many a sermon his evil is scattered and spread among many characters often residing as a duality inside them there is a dark lord in a tower but we only see the result of his world view not the person behind it as it is experienced by many people who you know that's the kind of experience of evil that many people who live under contemporary evil regimes would relate to they don't meet the dictator but they see his workings through their society the key to this scattered evil is what W.H. Auden identified in his review of Return of the King good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil but evil defiantly chosen can no longer imagine anything but itself that really is worth thinking about I'll read it again because it's a brilliant quote good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil but evil defiantly chosen can no longer imagine anything but itself this lack of imagination is present in the choice to take or resist the ring's power a test for the hobbits Gandalf Galadriel and Arrigal they all pass it and that one that Boramir Denathor Saraman and Gollum fail there are many real world parallels to this and you know just need to stop and ask do the perpetrators of terrorist violence stop to imagine anything but themselves and their mission the same question applies to the person working the the drone or releasing the bomb sitting in their bunker when leaders have ordered them to attack and that's the kind of dilemma which the film I in the sky in 2016 picked up you know you might be sitting safely with your sandwiches and your Starbucks coffee somewhere and your decisions mean the life or death of innocent civilians somewhere else the world could do with much more imaginative sympathy Tolkien's encoding of the spiritual values of his faith in his world without making them sectarian was an aspect I felt really drawn to and I think that's where I began to get serious about him I've even wrote an undergraduate thesis on this subject and I saw it almost as a culmination of my reading of English literature at Cambridge University at that age and I've since used it as a guide when coming to writing my own fantasy books I admire Tolkien's approach as a model that I can use that's better than the heavier handed one taken by CS Lewis and Terry Pratchett and Philip Pullman which is much more of a obvious connection to our real world I don't get me wrong I love all those stories particularly the Narnia ones but I like this more encoded deepest substructure that Tolkien achieves whereas the others seem out to you know duke it out over some messages about our world Margaret Atwood attributes the 20th century growth in the fantasy genre to the decline of religion religion we no longer believe in the old religious furniture are not enough to make it part of our waking realistic life I think I'm tempted to say there speak for yourself Margaret as obviously when you look around any society outside of a few small western societies there's plenty of people out there with us and see a faith which is very much part of their furniture reports of God's death of premature but I do agree with the idea that in the changing world of publishing at the very least the old religious furniture is considered a matter the excludes or offends large swathes of the market if you want to speak to people you can perhaps rather instead reach for an outline as Tolkien does that expresses a fundamental truth powered by your private faith or no faith beliefs I think maybe this is recognised by people who make films or those who teach creative writing when they talk about the hero's journey which tries to express this same thing that there's a beautiful design or a set of principles that govern the conduct of life as well as the world of storytelling in the same way that physics and chemistry have laws so the very act of shaping a story suggest finding a plan or a purpose in the world bit fancy or bit real and I think it's natural for us to look for meaning as Marilyn Robinson writes she's a great Canadian writer I'm sure many of you know say that we are a puff of warm breath in a cold universe by this kind of reckoning we are immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting I tend towards the second view scarcity is said to create value after all and that's from her collection of essays when I was a child I read books Tolkien puts it another way but in a more sort of opposite fashion for Lord of the Rings this is the hour of the shy folk when they arise from their quiet fields to shake the towers and councils of the great so even the smallest and most fragile puff of warm breath the hobbit can prove to be the most precious so that's what takes me back to rereading Lord of the Rings so that was quite a long journey around the experience of rereading I'd be delighted to hear your experiences of what part rereading Lord of the Rings takes in your family and I always have a section in this podcast where I think about where in the fancy world is the best for something so as I spent some time talking about equal opportunities I thought it might be a good idea to look at the idea of where in the fancy world is it the best place to be a woman now it's quite a difficult question this because it could be you have to say what part of society are you entering in it's not a common experience I actually tried myself to write a fancy world where it was best place to be a woman so I might pick that because I actually went you know spent a year thinking about this I wrote a novel called Dragonfly which is set in another world and one of the cultures there is a matriarchy so I was talking about Golem's grandmother being a matriarch I wonder if that was somewhere lodged in my mind when I came up with the idea of creating a matriarchy for for rulers who are all female who are all aspects of their religion of the the crown the mother the sort of woman in her prime and the child that's the sort of the way the leaders work and I think maybe I did have that there but I remember watching a documentary on TV where they were looking at these votive figures the sort of stone age votive figures of sort of fecund ladies sort of fertility symbols and then speculating there might have been matriarchal societies I'm not sure that that's actually born out by more archaeological evidence but that was in there and I thought well wouldn't it be interesting to think what that would be so for once I'm actually going to choose my own fantasy world as the answer to that the best place to be a woman is in the world of Dragonfly on the blue crescent islands anyway thank you very much for listening we have more special guests coming up later in the year and including a very special Christmas broadcast but I'll tell you more about that near of the time so thank you very much for listening thanks for listening to MythMakers podcast brought to you by the Oxford Center for Fantasy visit Oxford Center for Fantasy.org to join in the fun find out about our online courses in person stays in Oxford plus visit our shop for great gifts tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide