Transcript
[0:05] 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 an author but I also run the activities in our centre.
Now I know many of you who listen to this are as keen on Tolkien's work as I am.
In particular many of us share the love of The Lord of the Rings as our favourite novel or three novels.
And I thought I'd set myself a really difficult test today.
And I'm going to also set it for you, which is, can you pick out your five favourite moments from The Lord of the Rings?
And here I'm talking about The Lord of the Rings, the novels and not the films.
We'll perhaps take the film separately on another occasion.
And when I say moments, I am not talking about my favorite character or my favorite location.
I'm talking about just one or two sentences, the things that as I approach them in a reading that I really look forward to because it's the air punch moment where I go, yeah, that's so good.
So that is the limit I've set myself.
Now, I've chosen my five.
[1:33] After much agonizing. And I wonder if you agree with me on them or on any of them, in fact.
So do let me know your own top five.
Before I go to talk about mine, let's think first about Tolkien.
Now, I attended a seminar series back in the autumn called Tolkien at 50, 50 years on from his death.
And one of the most fascinating things that came up during the course of that conference was finding out what Tolkien's favourite scene was, or at least what scene moved him the most and he felt most important.
And the answer is actually quite surprising.
[2:19] It's a scene from a part of the book that doesn't make it over into the film series, and that's the chapter called The Fields of Colmallin.
This comes in the middle of The Return of the King after Frodo and Sam have succeeded in the quest. It's when they wake up.
They've been carried by the eagles to a sort of grassy, idyllic place in Ithilien, which is the wooded area next to Mordor.
And they wake up and they are greeted by seeing Gandalf has survived which they didn't know to this point and they also there is a party where they are reunited with their friends and a ceremony so what is it about this particular part that moved Tolkien so profoundly you can actually see the tear stains on the manuscript which in itself is incredibly moving and it's the moment I think when.
[3:23] Sam gets to hear that their song is going to be sung.
If you remember on the stairs going up to Cirith Ongo, they talk about,
[3:34] Fredo and Sam talk about if theirs would make a good story.
[3:39] And the bit that made Tolkien weep is when they are led by Aragorn and there's sort of a ceremony with all the knights of Gondor and they're led to sit on a sort of throne and everyone kneels to him it's a version of the bit we see in the peter jackson film where everybody bows to the hobbits and then a minstrel steps forward and says no lo lords and knights and men of valor unashamed kings and princes and fair people of gondor and riders of rohan and ye sons of elrond and the dunedain of the north and elf and dwarf and great hearts of the shire and all free folk of the west now listen to my lay for i will sing to you of frodo of the nine fingers and the ring of doom and when sam heard that he laughed aloud for sheer delight and he stood up and cried oh great glory and splendor and all my wishes have come true and then he wept and everyone else weeps as did the writer as did tolkien and you can see how the importance of story and moving people in story is so important to tolkien so using that as our guiding light our silmaril in the darkness we are going to.
[5:05] Think of the five great moments from the novels, all three novels.
[5:10] I could, of course, pick out hundreds of favorite moments, but I had to narrow myself down.
[5:18] So the first of my choices may come as a little bit of surprise, which is I've chosen a moment from The Scouring of the Shire.
So I'm beginning at the end.
Again, I really like this chapter because it wasn't done in the film.
I like the fact it wasn't because it's still mine.
I haven't got other people's images in the way of it.
[5:39] And it's a wonderful little adventure, all of its own, a story after the story.
I think at one point, actually, the four actors who played the hobbits were wondering if they could do a sort of follow-on film of this that would have been great actually maybe someone will get around to doing that anyway they come back to the shire they've been left by gandalf gandalf has more or less said to them look you're great enough big enough people now to do this on your own and that's what we find out everything that they meet in the shire they have a strategy which they have learned from watching the great people they've been amongst plan battles and we just see how competent they've become they it's like the whole of the story up to this point has prepared them for this moment not throwing the ring in the cracks of doom it's this moment of saving their own land from sauraman and it's a great little section all of its own so if you never got around to reading the novel and you don't feel you can read the whole novel do read just these sections because you will get so much pleasure for them and that might encourage you to go and find out what's in the rest of the novel but the moment I absolutely love within it all so they're being very heroic and they're being very competent and they're raising the shire and where they get the sort of mixed feelings of coming back to a land that they've seen changed which was the land that kept them going all during their adventure adventure.
[7:09] Sam goes to see what's happened to his old dad. He knows that things haven't been going well because he got glimpses in the mirror of Galadriel way back in the Fellowship of the Ring.
[7:20] And what's so wonderful is this moment. Gaffer is introduced to Frodo again.
[7:27] So here's our great heroes who have saved the West.
And Gaffer brings everyone down to Earth with a great bump.
He says, it takes a lot of believing, said the Gaffer, though I can see he's been mixing in strange company.
What's come of his waistcoat? I don't hold with wearing ironmongery, whether it wears well or no and there's this wonderful shyer sense which is what they've been fighting for after all that he wants you know it's time to put down the weapons it's time to lay aside the mail and go back to wearing your waistcoat the other nice bit about this which i always think when i read that word waistcoat which is a kind of colloquial way of saying waistcoat is that Tolkien at one stage in his early career worked at the Oxford English Dictionary and he worked on W.
So as well as working on words like walrus, he probably also worked on words like waistcoat.
I read that somewhere, maybe in John Garth. Anyway, I thought that was a lovely thought that he's so aware of this word as he writes it.
So for me, that signifies the humor in the book, but also the good solid values of it's not about war.
It's about fighting to regain peace.
[8:55] And I just think it's beautiful. It's an absolutely wonderful moment. So that's number five.
[9:02] And it's kind of bundled up in the whole scouring of the Shire chapter, to be honest.
So what's that number four on my list? Well, it's another Sam moment, actually.
I was surprised as I crossed things off and narrowed it down how many of these come from Return of the King, because I wouldn't have thought of it as my favourite book as a whole. I like The Fellowship of the Ring very much.
So I found that quite interesting that these moments were falling in the last book.
The bit I found myself going to is the part when Frodo and Sam have been separated.
[9:44] And Frodo is captured by the orcs. He's held at the top of the Tower of Cirith Ungol.
And Sam is looking for him. It doesn't happen in the way of the Peter Jackson films. It's not been a falling out.
Frodo is struck by Shelob, and Sam thinks he's dead and leaves him, which actually in a way is kind of even more awful than a falling out, and then realizes his mistake.
So this is him trying to put that mistake right, trying to go back and find Frodo.
So amongst the darkness, which is described beautifully, Tolkien is great at setting the scene of somewhere really terrible and hopeless and violent and grim and dirty and it's just really well evoked and in this setting of utter darkness and sam at the moment of all is lost because he can't find his master he sits down and sings the most beautiful song uh if any of you have listened to the bbc adaptation of this Sam sings this song beautifully.
[10:58] And the song, I won't quote it all, but I put it in here because this is one where the poetry of Tolkien really shines out like a diamond on a black velvet background.
And it goes.
[11:28] Stars as jewels white amid their branching hair.
It's just wonderful stuff. And that haunted me really during my teenage years.
I used to often hum or sing that to myself.
It seems to sum up that quality that so many of us love of this piercing beauty that Tolkien captures.
And it's something I think I've always looked for and keep on looking for in other fantasy stories and haven't yet found someone who matches him for that perception of beauty.
I can only really find it in other poetry by other great poets.
So I find it always moves me.
[12:13] And well, I might as well read the second verse because it's not much, is it?
And the second verse really applies to him at the the moment he's in though here at journey's end i lie in darkness buried deep beyond all towers strong and high beyond all mountains steep above all shadows rides the sun and stars forever dwell i will not say the day is done nor bid the stars farewell again so beautiful achingly beautiful And it connects to the moment which comes not much longer afterwards when they are making their way across the plains of Gorgoroth, I think it is, to Mount Doom, where they're again surviving on fumes.
And Frodo is asleep fitfully completely exhausted worn out by the ring and Sam looks up and the clouds part and he sees one star and it's a moment where he finds that sort of gritty courage which enables him to support and half carry Frodo the last way so, the foreshadowing of that moment is in this song it's all a beautiful web that's woven all the the way through the book.
Fabulous writing. So that's moment number four for me.
[13:37] What about moment number three? Well, it has to be Erwin.
I mean, talk about Tolkien not doing very good female characters.
No, the ones he does do are so, there's so much in them for us to cheer.
And what's so fun about the moment when Erwin kills the Witch King is that Tolkien is again rewriting Macbeth.
So we all probably know that one of the reasons why Tolkien wrote the Ents marching on Saruman and Isengard is because of a line in Macbeth where the woods of Dunsinane appear to move.
[14:22] And the explanation is given that the marching soldiers are disguising themselves with greenery, like a kind of camouflage.
Large and tolkien found that everyday explanation disappointing and he wanted a real wood to march upon the hot the fortress of the bad guy and so that's what he does with the ents and that's a really good prompt there for any of you out there who are wanting to write if you've got something like that some story that disappoints you you can get a chance to rewrite it in your own way move it to your own world and do what you would have done.
It's a great, or at least really interesting things inside you.
And you'll probably write very well about that as a result.
Anyway, not that part of Macbeth he's rewriting.
He is rewriting the prophecy that Macbeth won't be killed by hand of man born of woman.
The twist in the story is that Macduff has been born of the equivalent of a caesarean section, ripped untimely from my mother's womb, I think is the quote.
There's that little play where the prophecy comes true.
[15:37] Macduff isn't safe because his enemy has had this unusual birth so let's go to the battle of palenor and the witch king which king is feeling very confident about his uh fortune because he knows that no living man may hinder him he tells durnhelm who is erwin this and just to also mention in the book We are held back with the realisation the first time we read it that Durnhelm is Eowyn, though we're guessing, but it's only at this moment we discover who she is, for sure.
[16:20] And of course, the twist in the tale here is no man does hinder him, but he is hindered by two.
He's hindered by a hobbit, who isn't a man, and by a woman.
And so between them, they manage to break the spell and kill the Witch King.
First of all, Merry gets to stab in the back of the leg.
And then, of course, Erwin has the moment where she delivers the coup de grace.
And that gives her the fabulous line where she takes off her helmet and she says to him but no living man am i you look upon a woman airwin i am airman's daughter you stand between me and my lord and kin be gone if you be not deckless for living or dark undead i will smite you if you touch him.
That makes you want to cheer, doesn't it? It's a fabulous moment, so dramatic, and, because the Witch-King has told us of this prophecy, we can see, click, click, click, how the prophecy is about to come true, which adds to our enjoyment of that moment.
So there we are, a bit of rewriting of Macbeth for great effect.
[17:42] That was my number three slot. So what comes at the top of my list?
Well, again, really difficult.
So many things I could have chosen.
But remember, I'm going for just small moments, not whole scenes.
[17:59] And at number two, for me, is the moment when Frodo can't throw the ring in the fire.
It is so important that he can't do it.
[18:12] For all sorts of reasons, thematic for Tolkien's view of the nature of humans and his faith, but also because it is surprising.
The quest, you're supposed to achieve the quest when you're right on the edge.
You are supposed to kill the dragon, seize the Silmarils, whatever it is, you're supposed to be able to do it.
But Frodo, he gets right up to the edge after all that that struggling, all that bravery.
And then he says, I have come, he said, but I do not choose now to do what I came to do.
I will not do the deed. The ring is mine.
And it's a complete, oh no, moment. We're seeing it through Sam's eyes and the devastation is clear.
And again a bit like the prophecy with erwin we begin to see that this whole moment has been prepared for because we all know what happens next it's golem also wanting the ring that proves the thing which actually allows it to be destroyed not frodo's own self-will but something he and bilbo did much earlier and all the other people who showed mercy to golem allows golem to be there at that moment and do the thing by accident.
[19:33] That Frodo cannot do. And of course that, from Tolkien's view of humanity, we are not, We're not, we're not heroes. We are sinful creatures. And so Frodo being weak, he's incredibly strong, but he shares the same weaknesses at us that we can't do it without the help of Providence.
And so that's very important that the quest ends this way.
It may not fit people's ideas of a sort of superhero story or something.
It's not that he isn't a superhero. He is a little Hobbit.
Who's done a really difficult task. And even so, even though he succeeds where others cannot, he still needs the help of something else outside of him to help that moment happen and the ring be destroyed.
The victory over evil for the time being to be achieved.
So that's my second moment, because it's a rude shock, incredibly important and very powerful, for, really opens up what the whole book is about.
[20:46] So what lies at spot number one? Well, you can imagine how difficult it was to pick it, but at spot number one, it comes in the chapter of the bridge of Khazad-dûm in the Fellowship of the Ring.
And it is the moment where Gandalf fights the Balrog.
It's not the, you cannot pass. just know it's you cannot pass uh not you shall not pass you cannot pass it's not that moment it's actually a few lines later where Gandalf has forced the Balrog into the chasm and then he staggers and falls and scrabbles to hold on to the stone and then he slides into the abyss And it's this line.
Fly, you fools, he cried, and was gone.
[21:45] Wonderful bit of writing, because in that it encapsulates Gandalf's character.
Our irascible wizard is still irascible. He's saying, look, I'm creating this time for you to escape, fly.
But it's also done out of love for them.
So he's putting himself dying for his friends.
No greater love has man than die for his friends. It's that thing.
[22:11] And he's dying in Canada. Dying, yeah.
For the moment, dying in character with the you fools.
I also love the bits where he calls Pip in a fool. You fool of a toot.
We are fools in this world. And that's what Gandalf is summing up.
But of course, it's the end to an epic battle.
It's not walking away as the building explodes behind you. Again, in that superhero way.
He is being consumed by that battle and falls into the abyss.
And we on the first time of reading first time of seeing the film we think is gone so we suffer the loss along with the fellowship and so that fly you fools is just epic it's my favorite moment i think in the whole book so loaded with power and meaning so they're my five top moments, I've still got hundreds of others jostling in my mind to join them as I'm sure you have so do let me know your own favorite moments ones that really should have been on my list and I hope you've enjoyed listening.
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