Transcript
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 I'm delighted to say that we are joined by Professor Nick Groom. Now, amongst the many things that Nick has done and we'll be touching on some of them is he is the author of the newly republished and updated 21st Century Tolkien. What Middle-earth Means to Us Today, and that's going to be the centre of what we're talking about. But, Nick, you are actually talking to us from Macau because you are at the university there. Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up on the opposite side of the world to Tolkien?
00:51 - Nick Groom (Guest)
Yes, sure, well, I'm delighted to be here, julia. So thank you so much for inviting me to join you. So I started my career at Oxford University where I studied 18th century, where I studied 18th century literature with Professor Roger Lonsdale. In those days this was the 1980s, early 1990s Tolkien was pretty much ignored by Oxford, so any sort of hopes that I had of studying him there were very soon dashed. In fact, there were no walking tours, there weren't any special areas of bookstores devoted to him, and one day when I was a graduate student, I noticed that the Oxfam shop on St Giles was actually selling Tolkien letters. Sadly, I had so little money I couldn't afford to buy any, but somebody had clearly sorted out their filing cabinet and just dumped these papers in the Oxfam shop. So some regrets about that, but, as I say, I had so little money at the time it just wasn't possible. Could I?
02:04 - Julia Golding (Host)
just interject there. There is a connection. I had so little money at the time, it just wasn't possible. Could I just interject there? There is a connection I don't know if you know this between Tolkien and the founding of Oxfam.
02:12 - Nick Groom (Guest)
Oh, I didn't know that, no.
02:13 - Julia Golding (Host)
Which is that his daughter, priscilla, was one of the very first collectors for Oxfam during the war, when they were collecting for relief of the Greek famine.
02:23 - Nick Groom (Guest)
How interesting the war, when they were collecting for relief of the Greek famine Interesting.
02:25 - Julia Golding (Host)
He helped establish it, and one of the very first people to give a sizable donation was CS Lewis.
02:30 - Nick Groom (Guest)
Right.
02:35 - Julia Golding (Host)
Who gave something like a huge amount for the time, like 500 pounds or something.
02:39 - Nick Groom (Guest)
So yeah, that was very fitting that they were then selling his letters. Well, I wish I could have made a donation myself to acquire them.
02:45 - Speaker 3 (None)
It just wasn't possible.
02:54 - Nick Groom (Guest)
So I then moved from Oxford to teach at the University of Exeter, and any hopes of teaching Tolkien were also dashed. As a junior lecturer I worked at Bristol and also in Stanford and Chicago. In fact, it was just as I was finishing at Bristol and just before I returned back to Exeter that I thought well, I'm senior enough, I might as well just give it a go, see if I can teach Lord of the Rings. Just at the end of a course on English identities. I was delighted for two reasons First of all, that the students were very responsive, and that's clearly what they wanted to be studying. Secondly, that the book wasn't a disappointment, having taught a whole variety of not just modern fiction, 18th century poetry, shakespeare, but I certainly saw that it would stand up to serious critical scrutiny. So then, when I returned to Exeter, I started developing a course devoted to Tolkien, using Tolkien as a way to introduce the students to Anglo-Saxon and Middle English writings, and I taught that for a few years. And then I began to realize that more and more students were coming to that, having seen the movies first, and rather than say that this was wrong, I thought, well, this is actually inevitable. So I developed the course that then included a number, I thought, well, this is actually inevitable.
04:25
So I developed the course that then included a number of adaptations as well, and that's the course that I'm actually now teaching in Macau. So I moved to Macau in 2020, partly because I wanted to change. I'd always been interested in international students and also I wanted to give myself some challenges, really, and also my children the opportunity to see the world from different perspectives. So I also found, coming here, that the students were just as keen to study Tolkien as they were back in Britain. So I have been teaching the course. In fact, tomorrow I'll be teaching the Battle of Molden and then the Homecoming after that. So we do follow the same sort of pattern looking at the Tolkien's influences and some of his other critical and creative work before we move on to the Lord of the Rings and then the various adaptations of it.
05:26 - Julia Golding (Host)
So just that we've got a non-specialist audience listening. So the Battle of Mordaun is an Anglo-Saxon poem and the homecoming of how do you say that? Beornoth.
05:36 - Nick Groom (Guest)
I think it's Beornoth.
05:39 - Julia Golding (Host)
Is a drama, short drama, which Tolkien wrote, which is like a spin-off, his adaptation of the Battle of Morden. So that's absolutely fascinating. So I noticed you said you moved in 2020.
06:00 - Nick Groom (Guest)
Am I wrong in thinking you were butting up against COVID when you moved? Within two weeks, COVID had followed me here and indeed was spreading around the world.
06:06 - Julia Golding (Host)
So it wasn't the happiest of times, but we made it 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.
07:50
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?
08:29 - Nick Groom (Guest)
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 encourages 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 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, you know, elliot, joyce Wolfe, maybe DH 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.
10:49
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 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's readers get very Is possessive the right word? They certainly feel very… 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.
12:10
One of the things that interests me is that Tolkien is described as a world builder. Of course he has this fantastic linguistic foundation, fibon Lirth. He produced maps. Christopher tolkien, his son, um, then um, drew. He has things like the family trees, the genealogies, um, even um heraldry. He was an artist, um as well. So there's a big emphasis on how tolkien creates this sort of uh, really sort of thickly woven, uh watertight world.
12:45
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 I think Tolkien for the few writers to actually recognize and identify and express that he's really really good at presenting loose ends, but in a way that you don't necessarily notice them. 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'll just lose it, he's got no interest in these things. Independently. Tolkien did say that. These things Independently.
13:48
Tolkien did say that Bombadil does not fit, he's an inexplicable element of the world.
13:50
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 not seeing the whole of Middle-earth. 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 learnt. And so we suddenly realise 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, I think.
15:01 - Julia Golding (Host)
A third example, sorry hold that was just going to come in at the fox here. So I come at it from the point of view of a novelist. That's what I do in my profession and I've been doing a sidecast going through Lord of the Rings, looking at it like you're looking at the back of a tapestry, trying to sort of see the joints and the Fox episode when you put it alongside the framing device which he settles on towards the end, that these are the accounts of Frodo and Bilbo and their friends. So the idea is that the reason you get the multiple points of view and dipping into different people's heads in different moments is because they've gathered it all together like a kind of group chat about what happened. The thing that doesn't quite fit is the fox, unless it's a friend, you know. But I think it is showing the working of it having started as a children's story. So those kind of quirky elements were much more at home in the Hobbit.
16:10 - Nick Groom (Guest)
Yeah.
16:10 - Julia Golding (Host)
They were in the sort of mature Lord of the Rings material. So that framing device is quite radical as well, because it does mean that you don't. It's not even a, it's not a universal narrator.
16:25 - Nick Groom (Guest)
No as well, because it does mean that you don't.
16:26 - Julia Golding (Host)
it's not even a. It's not a universal narrator. No, no, not the Dickens style narrator who sits above Tolstoy or somebody. It's not that it's always at the point of view of a character, but someone has woven the stories together and you and the play is that you imagine it being Frodo in his few years after the end of the adventure, before he goes off to the undying lands, and then Sam.
16:51
So that again going to your literary techniques is a very interesting set of of narratorial ambiguities, shifting focuses, which is much more of a modern novel, modern 20th century novel practice.
17:08 - Nick Groom (Guest)
It is, I think, and you see it a lot in Virginia Woolf, for example at the beginning of Mrs Dalloway because we're very frequently being given those perspectives of different characters. Sometimes it's made clear so I talk about Gimli and Legolas in the book that Gimli has what I call a Dwarro-centric perspective, in which he's thinking about, he's using the topography of rocks and stone and so forth as a way not only of comprehending the world but in terms of defining beauty and value, whereas of course Legolas' perception is alvo-centric, it's the elf view of the world and is much more related to trees and to nature and so forth, and that's why they can't really see as the other sees. They can't appreciate, they try to but they can't appreciate the beauty. Legolas can't appreciate grottos and Gimli is frightened of being in the forest. So Tolkien makes that quite clear. In that case he's clearly self-conscious and aware of it. But it also happens in other instances as well, I think, where many times we're not aware that we're seeing things from a character's point of view.
18:32
I think that's really important Again. Another example would be Treebeard. Treebeard talks about nobody cares about the trees. He gives the view from the forest. There's a lovely interview on YouTube where Tolkien says that he'd like to have a chat with the tree to see what the tree really thinks about things. So, again, he's aware of that. One of the more interesting elements of this is when Aragorn is talking about the Black Riders, the Ringwraiths, and he says you know, they have different senses to us. They don't see things in the same way. They have different senses and so they are experiencing the world in a different way than the hobbits or Aragorn might.
19:15
So I think that it's a very it's not just a sort of a modern, it's a very sort of contemporary for the 21st century to be thinking about these alternative viewpoints and really trying to show that the human perspective is only one among many. It's clearly only one among many in Middle Earth, because there are a number of intelligent species, and I call them species. I'm not going to call them races, because I don't think you can say that elves and humans are simply different races. That's like saying that vampires, ghosts and humans are different races. Elves are immortal. Elves can walk across snow. Elves can sleep while they're journeying. So they are clearly different species to humans.
20:02
I think that even within those species there are many different races. There are clearly many races as humans. In the Lord of the Rings there are different races of elves. Legolas, for example, says the Holland elves are a strange race. They're sort of unfamiliar to the Sylvan elves. And we end up with this multiplicity, a very diverse range of perspectives, which I think is really exciting, and I think we are undervaluing Tolkien if we're not really appreciating and enjoying those different perspectives and seeing that, yes, it is a way of making the human perspective just relative, but it's one among many.
20:47 - Julia Golding (Host)
For human read. Hobbit, I think that you mentioned rightly the amount of poetry, and I think the poetry connects to this, because some of that poetry gives access to the worldviews of the culture from which they come. So Gimli expresses his Duaro-centric view in a number of ways, but one of them, of course, is singing the wonderful song or chanting the song in Moria about the great kingdom of the past and the elves. Of course they sing in Elvish and then there's a translation of it which connects with the one sort of extended passage of Legolas in Fellowship of the Ring is, when he's talking about passing of time, how it's like ripples on the stream. So there is an access, through the poetry as well, to these worldviews which is I can't think of another novel that does that- no, and I think you're absolutely right.
21:49 - Nick Groom (Guest)
And it's interesting that when Gimli sings his song, of course it touches Sam's heart Sam is quite a poetic or poetical character, unexpectedly and so there are ways in which the different species can communicate through poetry and song. Of course, it's also worth bearing in mind that there aren't many novels that have so much poetry in them and in terms of book sales, I mean, Tolkien is by far and away the best-selling poet of the 20th century, but people don't really see him in those terms. They might now that the three-volume edition of the poetry has been edited and published, but he does show himself to be experimenting in a range of different sorts of poetic styles, which is again invigorating. I think it's wonderful to have this novel that contains so many different ways of writing, from the mundane frivolity of Hobbiton to these almost biblical or apocalyptic battle scenes which seem to be guided by the hand of fate, in the third volume, in the third volume.
23:06 - Julia Golding (Host)
So I think he does show himself to have this facility for this range of different voices. So we could go on talking about Lord of the Rings. There's so much to cover here, but I would really highly recommend people going to buy the book and read these arguments at greater length and also in much depth, because you really do take a serious look, respectful look, at Lord of the Rings and it doesn't. When you look at your favorite book, you sometimes worry am I gonna go off this if I and it and you? You'll find new things to love in it. I'm sure, but the sort of second half of your book if I think it's about the second half is looking at adaptations.
23:43
First of all, you make the very good point that we shouldn't treat adaptations of Tolkien as if someone's attacking the source material. We should treat it like adaptations of Hamlet or Macbeth, where suddenly it's a Japanese, no drama or something. That's absolutely fine. It's let people play with this material. So let's start with that, which is good introduction to the extraordinary film that was never made by John Borman, and you go into some depth of the treatment here, which I had never read about. I knew it happened, but I'd never actually sat down and thought what kind of film would he have come up with? Can you tell us a little bit about this treatment, how it almost got made and then what it would have been like as a film to watch?
24:34 - Nick Groom (Guest)
Yeah, sure, I'll just preface what I'm saying with two important points. First of all, that the first radio version of the Fellowship of the Ring was actually broadcast before Tolkien had published the Return of the King. So he was fully alive to adaptation, so he wanted to have the works adapted. Even though he roundly criticizes the various versions, he nevertheless was keen to get it out to a different sort of audience. And this is, I think, reflected in the film rights, that when he finally sells them and, um, I make the argument, the I think that this is true that he actually has to sell them, to pay a tax bill, because this is when, uh, the lord of the rings has finally been published as a paperback and it originally came out as a paperback in the us, in a, in a pirated edition, um, and then there was a campaign to have, uh, you know, the official version, so talking would get paid. And then he gets paid too much, he gets a tax bill and one of the things he does is to sell the film rights, and he's been discussing the film rights since the late 1950s and there are various treatments sent to him which he poo-poos, and there comes a point, however, when he doesn't really have a choice. He does have to sell the film rights, but when he does sell them he has a clause allowing any sort of reworking or adaptation. So there's no stipulation that it has to remain faithful to the text. In fact, he said he'd sell the film rights either for art or cash. So he wanted to have something that was going to be high art or it was going to just allow the family to reap the benefits, because in fact they still get a royalty point. This is also very unusual in movie contracts that the Tolkien estate still has a financial interest in any adaptation. But Tolkien allowed changes to be made. I think that's a really important thing to emphasize. So when the rights are acquired, one of the filmmakers who's approached is John Borman, and he's well known these days for films such as Deliverance.
27:12
But what's interesting about him is, first of all, he was absolutely fanatical about adapting Lord of the Rings. He was extremely keen um to do so. Um. He went and uh took his um co-writer to a cottage um in ireland and they took several copies of the book and cut the pages out and papered the walls with pages. So they're literally living inside the book, um and um. He, um, you know, was, you know, eating, drinking, breathing um middle earth during this period.
27:53
But then the adaptation he comes up with is very, very unusual, and I was lucky enough to to get a sight of the script. I read a couple of essays about it which are extremely critical because of the radical changes that were being proposed. It's very visually effective, so if you read the script you can actually see the film playing. It would have been a short adaptation, it would have just been for one movie, so he's going to have to make massive cuts and he'd actually wanted to have Tolkien appear at the beginning almost like a Bilbo character introducing this particular work. But then it's a very adult film and so, for example, the scene between Frodo and Galadriel, which Tolkien has a very slight hint that there's a romantic interest there, because the mirror of Galadriel scene takes place on 14th of February, valentine's Day, valentine's Day. Now, tolkien clearly makes a decision to have it on that particular day and if you look at the chronology in the appendices you do get those specific dates. And it's significant that the company of the Ring leave Rivendell on the 25th of December, that the Ring is destroyed on the 25th of March, which was originally New Year's Day in Britain. Because it's connected, it's nine months before Christmas, which, incidentally, is why we have the tax year that we currently do. When the calendar's changed, the banks wanted to have a 12-month tax year and the banks wanted to have a 12-month tax year Anyway. So those sort of hints are there.
29:51
But in the Borman film there is actually a sex scene between Frodo and Galadriel, which he actually reads very amusingly in the script, because all the other characters are jealous. They all sort of have this fantasy, so he's presenting the characters in these very different ways. There's also a scene where Gimli has to have the password of Moria literally beaten out of him. It's an ancestral memory, so they basically sort of hit him around the head until he sort of has this sort of primal moment where he remembers what the password is.
30:36
Now I'm suggesting some of these things are quite frivolous, but in fact it does build into what I think is a serious version of the film. It has great sort of energy and imagination, but also has some very, I think, quite disturbing elements as well. The figure of Sauron is particularly nasty and sinister and he ends up being the mouth of Sauron. So that's one of the ways in which I think Borman is very good at concisely linking Tolkien's various plots and he also survives at the end and there seems to be some strange, rather brutal way he's dealing with the other characters. The hobbits all sort of drift away.
31:27
At the end Pippin has been dressed as a jester in blood-stained robes by Denethor, suggesting that the previous jester had been murdered, and he becomes sort of quite a forlorn character. Sam and Frodo disappear into the Shire and the ones that we're left with at the end are Legolas and Gimli, who don't really know where to go, and they end up walking to the seashore and standing on the beach and saying, well, this liminal place, this place between the land and sea, is as good a place to any to be. So I think that sort of Bormin he was trying to find the themes, those themes of alienation, exile, loneliness, failure, despair, also the themes of violence and also the romantic themes that run through it and really gives them a different twist. Now, the film was never made. Twist Now, the film was never made.
32:36
But the film that he then made was Excalibur and he's using similar ideas. I think if it had been made it would have looked a lot like Excalibur looks, which is this what I call romantic realism. You get these knights in this sort of amazing armor made by Terry English, and they quickly realized that this was real armor, they could use real weapons and they could really hit each other. But the weapons they're using are so huge and heavy that they're sort of staggering about under the weight of their arms and armor and also under the weight of history and myth, and so they can sort of barely. They can barely function. I think that if the Bormund Lord of the Rings would have been made, it would have used the imagery, the styling of Excalibur and it would have been, I think, a visual treat as well as being a thought-provoking adaptation of the plot.
33:31 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yeah, if anyone's listening to this is getting really angry about elements of that, I think it's worth pointing out that it tells us a lot about the point at which it is invented. So was this dreamt up in the early 70s?
33:47 - Nick Groom (Guest)
Yes, it was the early 70s and he was a 70s and he was, he was a, he was a radical, um, sort of bad boy of the film world.
33:55 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yeah, so that's what they wanted.
33:56 - Nick Groom (Guest)
But I'm interested you should say that people get angry and of course that that's one of the points which I'm trying to make in the book is the idea that people do feel that they own tolkien. They only own a certain, they own a version of him. There's a tolkien who Middle-earth novels in his lifetime, although one of them doesn't mention Middle-earth the Hobbit doesn't mention Middle-earth. It's a Middle-earth novel because of what comes after it. So that's all he publishes, apart from a few interviews and so forth. People are fascinated by his letters and of course the letters were only sent out to individuals and weren't published until the early 1980s. But you certainly find that Tolkien fans, for whom I've got a huge amount of respect I'm a member of the Tolkien Society will quote things about the character Gollum, for example, but that only turns up in a letter that Tolkien is writing, I think, to Pauline Baines. And then, from the time of the Silmarillion, you've got this huge publishing industry of the Silmarillion Unfinished Tales, the History of Middle-earth and a number of subsequent volumes that add a great deal to Middle Earth. But do they add anything to your literary appreciation of the Lord of the Rings? I don't know. I mean. They certainly show you how the Lord of the Rings was put together, but I think In terms of understanding and trying to enjoy these different adaptations, we have to be sort of quite open-minded about it.
35:38
Now, the BBC radio adaptation of the Lord of the Rings is generally celebrated and the work that Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell did on that is a superb, very, very effective radio adaptation. But that takes liberties From the very beginning. It begins with God and being tortured, which was an idea that they discussed with Christopher Tolkien. And of course Tom Bombadil doesn't appear. He appears in very, very few adaptations and there are some sort of striking moments where I think Michael Bakewell has rewritten various passages.
36:23
So it does fit as a radio drama. But if you try to read along with the the book, it's not going to work at all. So I think you just have to accept that going into a different medium it's going to be a different experience. And what you want to do, you want to stir people, you want to stimulate them. That might mean provoking them into thinking about the book by having a radical interpretation. I think it's good that people feel strongly, but they need to perhaps analyze those feelings and see them as positive rather than dismissing the adaptations, because, whether we like it or not, the adaptations are here to stay.
37:07 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yeah, and I think it may have been tough to have that as the first adaptation of Lord of the Rings out there on film. But, just like you were saying, we were talking at the beginning about Macbeth done by a Japanese company or a Russian company. It's going to be completely different from one done by the RSC. So you have to not worry about the source material being damaged. It's still there.
37:34 - Nick Groom (Guest)
It's still going to be there.
37:35 - Julia Golding (Host)
It's still there, everybody, it's still there.
37:38 - Nick Groom (Guest)
And I would hope that when people, if people are encouraged to go and read the books after seeing the film or to reread the books, they will have a much greater appreciation of the books because they'll be able to sort of see around them in different ways and then you know part of the whole font. The enjoyment of literary criticism is to have your ideas about character, structure, plot, themes, to challenge and to think about characters in different ways and sort of see whether they can be reinterpreted. I wanted to add a level of uncertainty to the book, to a book which many people seem to think is a very definite book about good versus evil. I don't think it is at all. I think that there are huge questions about many of the characters and their actions, their attitudes. But that makes them more human. It makes us be able to relate to them. It doesn't diminish them. It sort of shows their shortcomings in ways which is, I think, humane.
38:41 - Julia Golding (Host)
Yeah. So just to sort of finish on the BBC radio adaptation, I'd like to go back to the Bakshi. I'd like to go back to the Bakshi cartoon. But I think what they did brilliantly on the radio is they did a very good job of the music because they had a kind of director's cut extra where if they couldn't fit a song into the radio episode, they would have a bit at the end where you'd get a Treebeard song or something.
39:08
They really lent into the fact that this is poetry song yeah yeah, as well as drama, and so I I thought it was a wonderful adaptation. It's probably probably still my favorite, actually, because I'm free to use my imagination on the visuals.
39:31 - Speaker 3 (None)
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