Transcript
[0:00] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
[0:11] My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author, but I also run the activities of our centre. And I'm joined today by our friend and frequent podcast collaborator, Jacob Rennaker.
[0:23] Who is a story expert and sits over in Seattle, at all i believe so we got the transatlantic um perspective here and this is an episode that jacob and i have been planning for some time so jacob do you want to make the announcement of what we're talking about yes so we're going to be talking about uh and we're going to try to subdue our just over the top excitement for this which is the letters of jrr tolkien the revised an expanded edition uh last year just so you can see why it's taken us a while to plan is that is how big it is so it's quite a bit of reading though we should start out by saying that so i was reading making notes jacob but i think you took a different tack didn't you yeah yeah i listened to the to the audiobook version which is uh just shy of 30 hours uh of listening time but it was worth every minute of it yes is a different completely different experience so I'll be interested to have to hear your experience mine and in the listening the narrators were phenomenal they have so you know in the book there's kind of a preface to each of the letters to provide some historical context then the letters themselves and then.
[1:46] Footnotes and the way that they handle this in the audio book is they have kind of a your third person narrator one a single narrator that's doing all of the introductory matter, and footnotes um and then or after notes because tolkien sometimes footnotes his own letters of course because he's tolkien um but when tolkien is writing
[2:09] they have a separate narrator who does this. And just the warmth of the voice that they chose to narrate Tolkien, it just made me feel like it made these letters feel so incredibly personal, to have that kind of through line here, like I was sitting down and listening to him like dictate these letters. So it was it was a really great experience. So if you've read it, I think there's something to be gained from listening to the letters, because there were several instances that he mentioned, especially for the end of his life, where sometimes he would dictate some of the letters that he was doing. So having some of that more kind of like the oral feel being there in the room with him was kind of a sense that I got, like I was kind of peeking over his shoulder as he was writing these kind of listening in on his kind of internal conversations that he was having. So it was really fun. Excellent. So we'll put a link to the audio version. Is it the Sam West team?
[3:11] Yeah. So the narrators are a well-known theatrical family here in the UK.
[3:19] And they have done some of the other less famous Tolkien books. So the voices might be familiar to those who have bought other Tolkien narrations,
[3:31] other than the Andy Serkis ones, of course. Anyway, so we're breaking this down because we've got a life in letters, which is clearly a big subject. So we're going to first of all give our impression of the overall effect of reading these letters. Is he a good letter writer? What's it like? Is it boring? Is it informative?
[3:54] Those we're going to talk about the following. First of all, about Tolkien's views on his own creativity and his own world. Then we're going to move on to looking how he looks at the world through his Middle Earth. And that's particularly fascinating. And we'll then move into the sort of the life elements, things like relationships of his children, his views on politics, moving into to relationship with nature and spirituality, and then a roundup at the end, a ragbag of things like his adventures in publishing and the film industry, and his frustrations of academia, sort of little bits and bobs which are recurring themes.
[4:39] Okay, so let's start with what you learn from the letters. Are they a good read or a good listen? I would say, yes, they are some of the best letters. That I have come across having read many, many literary collections of letters when I was doing my doctorate. Someone like Jane Austen, who I imagine was a very entertaining letter writer. The letters that were not destroyed by the family.
[5:09] They're very thin in what they allowed to remain because we think that probably a lot of the most interesting stuff was burnt in an attempt to kind of tidy up her reputation, invitation, which is such a shame, but maybe that's what I'd want for my own stuff I might regret later. So reading Jane Austen's letters
[5:30] are rewarding, but they're not as fun as reading Tolkien's letters. I've also just been reading William Wordsworth's letters.
[5:38] And while they are good and interesting, they're also very full of himself. There's a real sense of Wordsworth ego, which he's famous for. I think that I like Tolkien an awful lot through reading his letters and getting a sense of just how chatty he is, even with people writing to him out of the blue.
[6:01] Yeah agreed i think yeah the he's very self-deprecating like to sometimes perhaps to a fault in some of these letters but not not across the board um because when he's passionate about something he gets very passionate um and he's his writing really expands uh in on that and so i think yeah it's really fun he's he's he clearly thinks these things through thinks everything that he's doing through um and so yeah so it's it's really interesting uh like you said Julia to to kind of see his mind working you can see the gears turning um and yeah this life.
[6:39] In letters this is essentially right the his biography the closest thing is one of the things that mentions in the introduction is this is kind of the closest thing that we have to an autobiography of Tolkien is just the collection of letters uh that he wrote himself so yeah I don't I absolutely agree that it's that they're engaging I mean because even the ones that are The letters that are just talking about apologizing for not getting his manuscripts in on time, even those are kind of demonstrating kind of the struggles because he's very apologetic and saying, I'm having this, this, and this kind of come up. And so thank you for your patience. You see him getting frustrated at certain points, which we'll talk about later when we talk about publishing and film. Film, but really just kind of seeing the emotional range that is here, this kind of like thoughtful.
[7:34] It's thoughtful across the board, but then being able to see the emotional range and emotional coloring that these letters kind of provide to him as a person was something that was really meaningful and I think fascinating for me. I think they're very comparable to C.S. Lewis's letters, which are also wonderful letters. And both of them often take a moment to reflect on both themselves and what they're writing. So you get a huge amount of insights in an autobiographical way. So if someone went to my emails, it wouldn't amount to anything as elegant or as thoughtful as these. The art of letter writing where you're actually composing something which isn't as ephemeral as an email which you send off in two seconds. It really shows. I think both of them are excellent letter writers.
[8:25] Right. So let's go to the phases. So in terms of who is he writing to? Well, obviously, he doesn't write to people very much who he's living with.
[8:34] So there's only a couple of letters to his wife because he's living with his wife. So why would he be writing to her? and some of his closer friends who he is seeing all the time he rarely writes to as well because that is a one-on-one conversation and you might be getting references to a conversation he has had with say Charles Williams or C.S. Lewis but mostly the correspondents are outside of Oxford so that's the sort of the feel of it and they go through the phases match his career so the first The first chunk is the rising academic who has started doing this writing and.
[9:16] The publication of The Hobbit, and then the beginnings to come up with a sequel. During the war, the majority of the letters, or the best letters really, are the ones where he's writing to his son, Christopher. And there's a lot about Lord of the Rings in those. And then after that, once the Lord of the Rings, this is skipping ahead quite quickly, but then there is a sort a much broader category of people he's writing to. After that, there are fans writing in, there are publishers, there are people who are about to read and review his work. There's a very interesting letter to W. H. Auden, for example.
[10:00] The latter half of the book, when Lord of the Rings is published, it doesn't tail off. Even up to pretty much his dying day, there are interesting letters being read reflecting on what he's published and what he thinks of it and how it's being received so let's first of all what did you learn most in it about the actual middle earth project and the legendarium because it's more than just middle earth of course uh what did what were your most insightful moments when you were reading the letters, yeah that's a great question i think one of the statements that really struck me was that he said that in retrospect much of my own book puzzles me yeah i got that i yeah.
[10:50] And it's interesting because shortly, I'm just going to go through to my notes on that, because one of the things is you see that he's thinking about themes and they go over more than one letter. So there will be that, he'll say that, then goes on to say, even in a mythical age, there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one intentionally. So it's almost as if he's really happy not to know everything about his own work. And he also says that it's like he's discovering it rather than making it up. Off yes yes that was and he mentioned the same something similar about the ants specifically right that he said that he was that the ants surprised him that he had no intention of putting them in but as he was writing they kind of appeared and he said he felt like he was just reporting at that point he wasn't constructing um and then he tried to go into at that point you know where he thought that ants came from but like something you know somebody was asking it was a a fan that was asking him about the Entwives, whether or not they think that the Ents found the Entwives.
[12:06] And he's very honest in saying, I don't know. I would presume that perhaps they did. I think maybe they didn't, but he didn't have that constructed. So that sort of humility about his own world, that there were things that are kind of developing, percolating, that he hadn't fully realized. He wasn't... he was circumspect about what he said but then there were some points there was something else I noticed when he was talking about his own world when he goes on this, excursus for I don't know how long it was in page length but it felt like it went on for a good six hours not quite six hours but it was very long on the birthday day.
[12:50] Uh customs of hobbits and the development of birthday gift giving uh somebody had a question about uh smiegel and deagle and the the ring being considered a gift when later it says that you know that the hobbits instead of instead of receiving gifts they gave gifts on their birthdays and so he had this whole big detailed uh you know outline of historically how those customs would have changed based on where they were and how it's happening so there are some things that he really could drill down on that he had thought about and felt confident about but there were other parts like the like tom bombadil like the ends where he was more you know leaving those willing to leave those as more as mysteries uh it kind of open-ended in his own mind which is fascinating from a storytelling perspective yeah and also the other thing you get from the letters as particularly the ones written in the 40s to Christopher.
[13:45] Is that you feel as though you're sitting with him composing it. It's wonderful. It's just some of the best bits. He's got this moment where he says to his son, a new character has come on the scene. I am sure I did not invent him. I did not even want him, though I like him. But there he came, walking into the woods of Ithilien, Faramir, the brother of Boromir. And I think that tone captures exactly how he's writing for a majority of the time. It's this sort of wonder at his own fertile imagination, just coming up with characters like Faramir. And later on, he says, of all the characters, I'm most like Faramir. So a character who turns out to be a real reflection of his own inner self is something, a serendipity. It just happened to come.
[14:41] And I know from my own writing that when I, I'm not comparing myself to his level of craftsmanship, but the things I enjoy most as a writer are the moments where my story seems to be running itself and characters do surprise you. They do walk out the woods like Faramir does in that bit. So I would, you know, if you love Lord of the Rings, you will not be put off or disappointed by reading the letters. It's not like seeing behind the curtain you're going to have a Wizard of Oz experience, that it gets smaller. I think not. I think it's almost the opposite. It gets bigger.
[15:18] Absolutely. You definitely get a sense that there's so much more that Tolkien didn't put in.
[15:25] For editorial purposes and trying to hone this down to a pure story, there's so much that he had to cut from just all of the other thought that he had put into each of these characters. So yeah, there's definitely a lot more that you get. It does as expansive as Lord of the Rings feels, right? It's one of the comments compared, you know, comparing Lord of the Rings to a lot of other more contemporary fictions that the depth of world building, it really feels like this is a world and there's so much that's happening outside of the pages. As as much as that is the case for the book itself it's also the case for what was not included in the book right so for tolkien but there's so much more this isn't just he's not just giving you the illusion of there being more that exists for this story it actually exists in his head uh and so this is yeah this is this is really truly an immersive world he has immersed himself in this story and it's it seems to kind of like permeate him and his mind and his thoughts and we'll talk about that uh maybe that might be a good segue for talking about how he sees uh our world kind of.
[16:37] His his uh framework for dealing with lord of the rings uh he kind of sees that as a lens for viewing our own world rather than vice versa yeah so what were your thoughts julia on on uh on tolkien kind of integrating middle earth thought uh and and approaches to how he describes our own contemporary world his own contemporary world well the thing that i think that i really sort of maybe hadn't focused on because when i've been reading about tolkien lately it tended to be in the context of the inklings um so this has really reset my understanding of his creativity because i think far more important was the family context and he does actually say um at one point to christopher that more and more he comes to see he's writing it for christopher tolkien um and it means that within the family is a shared family story so that when he's looking for ways to to express his feelings about the war. He's using the... The common story that he's been sharing. There are two big themes. One is describing war as orcs.
[18:00] In fact, you see this today being used in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, don't you? He was already using it in the Second World War.
[18:09] But not just about the enemy as being like the sort of the evil he's not very keen on hitler i can say that you should probably quote that because it's um he calls him a sort of ruddy little horrible little man doesn't he he's really he doesn't normally swear and ruddy is obviously a mild swear word but he he lets for talking that's like both barrels um so it's not just that he also talks about the common room experience, so of the officer's mess, and how Christopher might be experiencing a sort of, I don't know, laddish culture, maybe, reading between the lines, that perhaps people were not behaving in ways that his whole keen thought was honourable or well-behaved or polite. And so he would talk about that using the language of the orcs and Uruk-hai behavior for things that Christopher is experiencing outside the enemy territory.
[19:19] And then it makes him think about his own experience during the First World War. And he often links back to that. So from what Christopher's going through, there's a sort of a combination of, oh, this is when I first thought of all of this, was when I was in various army huts or even in the trenches, he says at one point, coming up with this way of escape.
[19:46] So he's definitely got this lens of understanding war through the fiction he's sharing with his son. Yeah. But he also uses it to talk about the way we're treating nature. And that particularly comes up once the war context is gone. It's the sort of uglifying of the countryside and the rise of the machine. So what else did you see about the way he used his own story to explain the world he was in?
[20:14] Yeah, that's really interesting, your insight on Lord of the Rings or Middle Earth kind of being a family story. Story uh at least especially with with christopher right so he he uh in one of the letters he he says when when christopher is at war uh out in the field he says i wish that it i can't remember exactly what he was talking about he says i wish that it might be written in runes beyond the craft of kella brimbor of holland uh shining like silver filled with visions and horizons that fill my mind So he's speaking poetically, but he's bringing the elements, the symbols of Middle-earth into his own personal expression. This is a very personal expression to his son, and he's drawing on not Shakespeare, not pre-existing stories at this point. Although he does frequently throw in Middle English or early Old English quotes, just throws in there without translating them, right? Of course.
[21:23] They're meant to evoke certain ideas that are best expressed in that language itself. And so there are certain things that because Tolkien is developing this, that he can best express his own feelings in the language of Middle Earth. So that's one of them. Yeah, the war, when he's talking about World War II and the hydrogen bomb, where he says, we're attempting to conquer Sauron with the ring.
[21:49] Uh right it's his kind of analogy and now other people you'll say like well is is the ring an allegory for nuclear bombs uh and he says no it's not and this shows it's the opposite direction right so this is you're seeing the contemporary setting and he's telling the story and then he's using the language of that story to then compare and contrast to the contemporary situation not this is kind of a one-to-one so yeah using so like talking about war and even at one point this is really charming right when he taught you in a letter to christopher uh he referred to his typewriter as a mordor gadget yeah um that he says that he will forgive it if it brings letters to christopher so he didn't like so he's like this you know machinery um he would prefer to handwrite but he could if he could type faster and get more out to christopher he was willing to do this so i think that was really charming that he's he's seeing these these big ideas and filtering his own experience through this painstaking work that he's put into building this world. So that was, yeah. I really like your insight about this being kind of a shared language with which he could describe. And you're right that he doesn't talk about that in letters outside to his family.
[23:01] Like so to letters to his publishers, he wouldn't necessarily use that same language as heavily, but he certainly does invoke it more in and say like at the very end of his life after Edith's death, he compares his grief and situation to the Baron and Luthien story in one of his letters. I can't remember who that letter was too. But throughout his life, this wasn't just while he was in the thick of writing these stories that he's making these kind of connections, but it's after he's written it, long after he's written it, these are still stories and ideas that are still part of his psyche and that he's using to illustrate and communicate his kind of innermost feelings. And just to show how rich it is, because he's a brilliant prose writer as well.
[23:52] Basically, the upshot of what we're saying is, everybody go away and read these letters. That is what we highly recommend you do. So I was talking about, so he's writing to Christopher. He's not only using the language of the heart with Christopher is the shared story. It's a way. And then he goes on to think, well, why does fantasy work in a situation where we both have faced death? You know, him in the First World War and Christopher at risk in the Second World War. And he says very interestingly that writing is a relief of feelings to rationalize it and prevent it from just festering. In my case, it generated more goth than the history of the gnomes. That's the very early version of this. Lots of the early parts of which and the languages discarded or absorbed were done in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candlelight in bell tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire. Oh it's just so brilliant that last part you just have a image of this young soldier.
[25:09] Just disappearing into his world under the most horrendous of of situations and he's sharing this with his son and this is where i think perhaps it's worth talking about we don't see some of the relationships with so like priscilla who stays in oxford mainly we don't there's not many letters to her at all. I think there's perhaps two or three very functional letters. It doesn't mean they don't have a close relationship. It's just not being mediated by letter. But then you also get the letters to his other son, Michael, which make an interesting contrast to the ones to Christopher. So Michael, I think, has a more difficult relationship with his father and he's having a more difficult experience of growing up. And you get to see Tolkien feeling that he's been a failure as a father. And there's a heartrending letter where he does say that. He says, I don't think I talked to you enough. But he does send his son quite long letters about religion and finding solace in faith in a way that it seems like a very good father to me. But he is his so you do get the sense of the difference between.
[26:25] I was talking, obviously Christopher was the son who was very much on his wavelength and shared in the project. And Michael inevitably isn't Christopher and was having his own difficulties. So that's quite an interesting insight to the pain of parenthood that Tolkien, when you can't quite solve your child's problems and you don't always approve of what they're doing because he was trying to he'd fallen in love with someone and they thought it was all a bit fast.
[26:56] So you do get a little insight of what's going on in the family behind all of this yeah that was great that was yeah good good seeing there i definitely saw that with you know the letters to his children where he's saying you know pray for me or i attended mass for you uh you definitely get that kind of personal touch that's woven into the different letters to his children that that fatherly concern, kind of a spiritual stewardship that he felt for his children. And so he's saying, if you're able to, please attend mass, right? So he's still, after the children have left home, because it's something that's so deeply meaningful for him. And at some point, like you said, he says how attending mass is something that's like like helping him work through his disappointments frustrations and pain um then he is encouraging that in in his children uh in in some of those letters so that was really touching to see like kind of the fatherly uh concern for them in all of their areas of life but including um the kind of religious kind of spiritual life he definitely brings that up in different letters the tolkien The Tolkien 50 lecture series has just had a...
[28:13] A guest appearance by michael's son um another tolkien family and i think you got the impression there that it was difficult being the grandson of someone famous and it was even more difficult being the son of someone famous because i think that tolkien obviously tolkien's view is quite a traditional view of catholicism so if you even old-fashioned within catholicism so i think if If you weren't quite following in those footsteps, it was quite tricky.
[28:46] And that was some of the choices being made there, I think, added to a sense of distance. But there is a lovely letter on faith, letter 54, written because the letters, they've retained the lettering numbering from the first edition of the letters. And any new letters they've given sort of 54a and so on so that you can still read across if you come across a reference in critical works about tolkien but um he writes a lovely letter to christopher about angels i'm not sure angels aren't some something i often think about but.
[29:25] Clearly they're a big part of tolkien's mental furniture because he talks about gandalf being like a guardian angel and he says angels are not a plump lady with swan wings good i'm glad to hear that but the bright point of power where that lifeline that spiritual umbilical cord touches there is our angel facing two ways to god behind us in the direction we cannot see and to us i've never written anything as beautiful as that to my children sorry kids but i thought isn't that a beautiful thing to write to somebody, and so those letters to Christopher are a real high point I think he goes on pretty soon afterwards the next letter to have a joke about C.S. Lewis being called an ascetic and, Because apparently when C.S. Lewis started doing his theology, people were calling him ascetic. He said, oh, that's not the Lewis I know. He put away three pints in a very short session we had this morning and said he was going short for Lent.
[30:31] So the opposite of ascetic. So the sense of humor and the twinkle in the eye
[30:38] keeps coming through as well as these moments of spiritual reflection. I also thought that he was very, this is a little bit more connected to where we started talking about what we learned about Middle-earth, is he often thinks about the motives of his characters in a way here, which I found really illuminating, particularly on, and it links to spirituality, hence what led me to think of this, is he really does consider Gollum to have almost repented and he said it's just a careless word from sam that sets him back into his, unrepentant golem and he talks about the difference between sam and frodo he says sam's more interesting frodo because he has to be high-minded is less interesting is it so, and sam is actually one of the characters he really sort of he sort of separates out and talks about almost more than any other character in a way, thinking about where the name came from, about who he was based on the servants during the First World War and so on, so it seems as though Sam in a way is the heart.
[31:51] Of Middle-Earth or the Hobbit part of Middle-Earth for him. Did you get that impression? Does that come through when you were listening to it? I'm trying to think, yeah I mean certainly there are questions that I remember that you know.
[32:04] Fans had about you know or other people recognize that there was somebody else whose name was sam gamgee uh and and talking about uh about that um and how he developed that character and where the name came from the inspiration but yeah that's uh yeah he definitely brought up a i remember you know several on several different occasions where he he does bring up that point that gollum was near-repentant if it weren't for a careless word. And he brought that up in several different places. So it's clearly something that wasn't just kind of a passing idea for Tolkien.
[32:44] But that was clearly something that he kept thinking about and felt that he needed to keep sharing. So definitely the idea of really kind of inhabiting the emotional lives of the characters um you know so much so that he could give in uh one of the later letters where he's talking about um frodo's uh failing you know somebody that's like why did frodo fail is that was that a failure is that a moral of moral failure on frodo's part he then uses that to talk about morality about uh grace um and then kind of the same in the same letter uh lengthy letter about whether or not Frodo was good or bad for having kind of fallen apart at the end and not being able to just throw the ring into Mordor or into Mount Doom while he was in Mordor.
[33:35] He gives all kind of like glimpses into what could have been. So he said if Gollum would have had the ring and possessed it, here's what here's what probably would have probably would have happened if frodo would have kept the ring and and and lived here's what probably would have happened and if gandalf would have taken the ring here's what probably would have had would have happened to gandalf and how he would have developed uh developed so he's he's thought through i was just so impressed by that that he's given so much thought into the motivations um uh desires uh needs and wants of each of these characters that he could plug in another way these characters is like okay you want to say what would have happened here's what would have happened because here's what gollum uses to make decisions here's what gandalf uses to make decisions so just he knew so thoroughly each of these characters uh that was so impressive to me that he'd given that much thought that it was so i think easy i don't know how easy it was but it seemed at least it came across as a kind of.
[34:37] Effortless in uh in in this particular.
[34:40] Letter um it was a letter 246 where he kind of then outlines then what all of the different possible trajectories kind of alternate kind of these alternate endings that you could have had uh for for the ring that he could do that and he seemed fairly confident but yet he was still kind of circumspect in saying i can't say for sure this is what it would have happened but it seems likely that this would have happened to be able to talk in that way of that level of understanding just kind.
[35:08] Of demonstrated to me the care and respect he had for the characters that he was creating yeah and and just if you're talking about letter 246 i like letter 244 which does a deep dive into erwin and faramir so you see what we're saying there's so much more we all want more talking but there is so much more here so um moving on to what we don't like okay so as much as Tolkien is clearly someone I adore his writings what have you there are moments in the letters where I don't like him very much and I have to remind myself he is a man of a certain age writing at a certain time and the area I struggle most with is his is writing letters about women and um if you wish to skip over this letter when you're reading it perhaps that's one way if you're if you would have a problem with about it like i did 38a.
[36:12] It's it's, There is something good about it. Let me talk about what's good about this letter is basically this is where Michael's having his one where he says he wants to marry someone who they think it's all too quick. Clearly in the background, Edith has sent him a letter, which has been a bit like that angry email you send and you regret. It's not gone down well. And Tolkien is coming in and trying to tidy it up and mend the family hurt about this. But he does make some terrible sweeping comments about women being not able to understand their own feelings um but i was on the other hand he does mention that edith is going through the menopause the change of life and i thought oh actually that's quite advanced for a man in, of that era to actually be able to be up front with his son about female biology is quite advanced So I kind of thought, oh, well, okay, I'll let it pass.
[37:15] But that was the moment where I thought, yeah, there is a, I feel the period in which you're writing Tolkien and I feel the gap. Most of the time I feel on his side, but there I was chucked out of my little fandom into thinking, oh dear, that's not quite so enlightened, is it? C.S. Lewis does similar things, by the way. So it is, I think, the era they're in where they probably knew less about women outside their own family and so judged a lot of people on the basis of how they're feeling about their wife at the moment. Is there anything else that you found that, so we're not giving just a flattering portrait, was there things about this?
[37:57] That revealed a more gritty or the waltz and all aspect to a letter writer yeah um that's good yeah yeah good yeah good good explanation on that that letter and that one he does and there's there's some interesting stuff where he's talking about marriage right that gives him an opportunity to kind of outline his theology his philosophy and theology of marriage um which there there are some yeah some bright spots in there and other spots that don't age well that letter letter 43, has a very good thing which is but the real soulmate is the one you were actually married to.
[38:34] Right yeah when he says yeah he says and he said that this is this is fascinating he says like nearly everyone makes a mistake in who they marry and it cannot be otherwise most don't know any better right uh so like it was like most of us he says like if we would have like been older and learn more and understood more about ourselves he he he supposes that most of us would actually pick somebody different uh once we have a better sense of like self-understanding but he says the point is to like make that work and that really reminded me of uh leaf by niggle um right it's kind of like quasi autobiographical work where at the very end you know our niggle has just been annoyed so much by all of the you know neighbors who are asking for things from him different responsibilities. All he wants to do is to paint a tree. He wants to paint not even trees, just like leaves, because that's the only thing that he's good at. But then his neighbor keeps interrupting him. They both die, you know, he's kind of resentful towards the neighbor.
[39:28] They both die, they kind of encounter each other in a sort of afterlife. And the neighbor apologizes, you know, to him says, I wish things, you know, would have been different. And then you know, niggle says, they could have been different, but they couldn't have been better. And so this idea that Tolkien brings into the legendarium that even Melkor's.
[39:55] You know greatest attempts at uh pain of like trying to wrench the plan of aero eluvitar to try to do damage to that something greater is able to weave that into something more beautiful than it would have been if that kind of you know tragedy or violence hadn't happened in the first place so all of these things kind of i think i i see them kind of like you know crisscrossing coalescing as kind of this kind of uh constellation of ideas in tolkien's mind uh that there's something there that you can that there's something yeah larger that can unify and bring certain points together um and i think maybe that's how i approached tolkien's letters recognizing that there were some of these things that were like i said in the the niggle um leaf by niggle that niggle is so bothered by the you know the community that's asking him for help that he so he's clearly tolkien gets grumpy about being interrupted for working on this and you know We see it writing as, in some senses, as a luxury, right? He just wanted to write. There's a man that just wanted to make up languages and develop them and just write stories, but he couldn't. And so he's constantly frustrated by his job that was paying the bills at the time. Adorable, really, isn't it? His annoyed professorship. He's so annoyed. He just wants all of this to go away.
[41:21] Uh even though it's what's providing yeah the money for his family to survive um he is you can you can tell that the health you know edith's health is taking a toll on him he doesn't you know he doesn't come out outright and say like this is really frustrating i feel like it's holding me back from what i want to do but kind of like reading between the lines you get this tension that like he says like i want to write but you know i have to be i had to take care of edith i know i had this deadline but i had to take care of edith and he clearly sees that as a responsibility but it wasn't a like a joy you know joyful magical responsibility that he has it wasn't this kind of romantic idea uh in the classical sense of uh of of love and marriage uh it was this reality of.
[42:10] Age and the the long defeat really i think that's if you can kind of see that illustrated in his constant frustration all the way through the end of his life that he wants to do more but like things keep going and slowing down and he recognizes that he can't do as much as he could and he's sad about that so you kind of see personally reflected this long defeat as he wants to write this beautiful sweeping uh you know myth but he's constantly curtailed uh at every turn and he's just kind of squeaking things out and trying to get trying trying trying, knowing then fully embracing that like i'm never going to be able to do all of this um and there's a sense of kind of like sorrow that kind of pervades especially i think some of the later letters in that sense yes so i think just to sort of refine the comment about his job it's not so much the academic research side of it and the language side it's the marking.
[43:05] Marking uh which he had specifically the yes the exams yeah that that although he did have i mean there were there were individuals you know he would talk about uh school meetings and just like his you know disdain for some of these faculty meetings that he had to had to sit and be a part of and some you know snipes that he would make at different uh you know faculty members um but again for him that was in the context of for some people that was their entire world was academia damien that's how they made their identity for him his identity i feel like was as storyteller and as kind of a chronicler of middle earth that's where he seemed to receive his sense of personal fulfillment and self-worth was through that and so to the point that those other things got in the way of that and affected that he was bothered by them and perhaps disproportionately um but but from within his context it was his sacred his kind of sacred responsibility was to develop it was to write and develop middle earth uh and then anything that got in the way with that was uh was evil in a sense he that he never he never says it's evil but it bothers him and he reacts uh sometimes i think disproportionately yeah so you get a sense of this is where you have to just, you're meeting a full person a grumpy frustrated you're meeting him um.
[44:27] He can be a bit snappy, a bit curt, but that's all the rich texture of human life. And obviously, sometimes he'll be writing to get it off his chest as well. So writing is therapy. So I'm not passing judgment. I'm just aware of the historical gap between our generation and his. And we're not cancelling him, don't worry. Right, no, no, no, not at all. It's just the sort of awareness that, and also these were private letters, of course, let's not forget, that he had, these were not for me to sit and read. It was him trying to advise his son. So, you know, let's move on from that.
[45:11] So we're beginning to touch on his adventures in publishing and latterly in film. I think some really interesting letters there's this feeling of we know the end of the story and he doesn't and there are several moments when he says things like I'm afraid I've made a great mistake in making my sequel too long and too complicated and too slow in coming out it is a curse having the epic temperament in an overcrowded age devoted to snappy bits he definitely hates, wouldn't he and and you're saying no don't keep going don't give up you know it's almost if you could take away the knowledge that um it actually all does have happy ending he does publish there is some nail-biting moments where you're thinking he's not going to finish you know he's he's he's losing the will to complete it and that's where you get um the idea that c.s lewis is saying come come on, come on, Tollers, you've got to finish this. And obviously having to write it for Christopher, so Christopher gets to see what happens at the end. So it's quite exciting to see how the actual writing gets done.
[46:29] Yeah there's yeah you see i have one of the interesting comments uh that he made early on kind of to kind of presage all of that is that he felt that he was trying to come up with a sequel to the hobbit right the hobbit so you see the hobbit like how it develops how it was received and his you know genuine it seems like genuine surprise that more than 20 people were actually interested in the hobbit so he's and then he's getting money from it as well which is really helping his family situation which he brings up over and over again is you know like we're struggling financially so clearly finances were something that i don't know exactly what his finances were but for him it seemed to be a weight kind of a fairly constant weight that he didn't feel like he had enough and he was struggling to make ends meet with his family um but kind of before that as he's and then as the hobbit is you know increasing in popularity and sales and his publishers are asking him, can you write a sequel to this because it's being so well received and they could smell money.
[47:30] He said that he was struggling to conceive a sequel to The Hobbit because he, quote, had squandered all of his favorite themes, motifs, characters on The Hobbit and was afraid that there wasn't enough left for a meaningful sequel to The Hobbit, right? So seeing that, now seeing Lord of the Rings and everything that spawned, right? You know, you're like, that seems like like how ridiculous is that but that's something he really felt that he just like, put so much into the hobbit of just you know like all the his his favorite ideas right kind of like, motifs characters themes um which is i think really interesting as you know as an author uh you know for for writers for all the the creatives that are they're listening right that it's i think there's a.
[48:17] Tendency to like reserve your best ideas and be sparing with what you do tolkien had so but he wasn't you know planning in the long term for this he just put everything into the hobbit and then when he's asked for a sequel said oh dear i put everything i put all of my ideas into the hobbit how can i possibly do this but then as he was thinking and sitting with it and having the ideas i had the intersection of the hobbit and how that could connect to the larger or legendarium that's when things started firing and he started coming up with even greater ideas you know a grander scope and of characters of themes um so i think that's really telling you know you kind of see him as a in artistic crisis there um uh working through that personally is what can he commit to writing a sequel to the hobbit because at that point he thought that was the best you know he'd put everything in that he had to give personally for what he liked and actually wanted to write but then in sitting with it and exploring it more that gave rise to even larger ideas that he hadn't considered possible in the first place so that was that was really interesting seeing his doubt about his ability to write anything and then just kind of a lesson kind of a creative lesson that yes to put everything that you have into the project that you're doing right now spare nothing um make it the greatest thing ever and like trusting that.
[49:42] You can do something even better. As good of the ideas that you have right now, even better things can grow out of that if you're taking this work seriously.
[49:50] Yeah, and the other thing sort of in thinking back as what almost happened is that he kept sort of saying, oh, I've got this thing called the Silmarillion. Or it wasn't.
[50:03] How about this? And everyone gets saying, well, not sure. Not sure it's commercial, Mr. Tolkien. and it also i hadn't realized how close he'd come to not publishing with um reyna unwin the lord of the rings there was all they were sitting on it for a long time and he started talking to another publisher who seemed to potentially be interested in doing the silmarillion as well and that's sort of the alternative history that he went he decided to go with that publisher.
[50:32] And went first with the silmarillion i can just what would the world have made of that would they they've even got as far as reading Lord of the Rings. It's quite fascinating that it, how it almost happened um and he did use the interest from the other publishers to actually get unwin to finally commit to publishing so that was quite interesting watching him managing his publishers uh yeah yeah that was there a lot there are a lot of those letters and it looks like a lot of the um uh expanding you know the additional letters are it seemed to me at least percentage wise as i was listening it seemed like there are an awful lot of them that are the newer letters are some of these shorter letters that were to the publisher. So you get to see more of his editorial interaction than you would have seen in the original letters compilation. Those are some of the ones that were trimmed out. But yeah, you definitely see him struggling, wrestling with, he wants the Silmarillion published. But Julia, that's a fantastic thought experiment, right? If he would have gone with the other publisher and published Silmarillion first.
[51:49] Would people have gotten to the Lord of the Rings or would the sale of Lord of the Rings, if people just would have given up on him after that? Because it seems like now the easier entry, point of entry, popularly at least, for a broader audience is Lord of the Rings because it's an engaging story with characters, full characterization, it's a full narrative as opposed to snippets of history, mythology, genealogies, and whatnot. So thinking about what it would have been like, would the.
[52:24] Fantasy genre in publishing have... Developed in the same way if tolkien had not published lord of the rings first that's one of the things that he's talking about he said like he mentions like it seems like with this he says i'm not doing anything new and like groundbreaking there are these different authors that he's reading it's interesting to see that he's reading other fantasy authors.
[52:47] Who aren't well known right now that were at the time um but but now have kind of you know fallen and off the popular you know out of popular uh imagination uh but he says you know that with this there really seems to be uh a hunger for the sort of thing that he himself is doing the way that he is presenting the fantastic the fairy tale he calls it the fairy tale yeah fairy tale right right right right and so yeah and so he so he he says that he's noticing that this is there's there's kind of an itch that he has been scratching that's that you're broadly speaking with this and so lord of the rings really it seems like at least according to from his letters internally that this is really doing something kind of fan the flames of fairy tale as a genre that then kind of develops into fantasy literature and then that's what kind of makes it possible to open doors and let other publishers take more risks on other fantasy literature because of the success of lord of the rings he gets to do a lap of honor in a sense because he's successful in his own time and he he's able to say my instinct that there was you know the conversation he had with c.s lewis that they would write the things that no one else was writing because people weren't writing what they wanted to read which is a very good reason for writing a book book, and he's finding his audience, which is wonderful.
[54:16] Just to move on to his discussion about film, there's a very interesting long letter, 210, which is a breakdown of the Zimmerman treatment of Lord of the Rings. That version doesn't get made, obviously. But it is interesting him seriously thinking through how would this story adapt? How would it break down? And I think he felt that quite often his intention was misunderstood, surprise, surprise, by the person who was trying to adapt it for a film treatment. Treatment and the he's particularly interested in the misunderstanding of the power of the black riders because he says their peril is most entirely due to the unreasoning fear that they inspire like ghosts so trying to make something too concrete to um lord knows what would have happened in a 60s treatment of this but to sort of yeah to yeah not to miss out the emotional impact of what's going on there i think we were quite fortunate that the film wasn't made.
[55:27] Yeah i don't think that that would have been the beatles one wasn't made i mean it would have been fun but only a serious attempt i think would have been really quite um tricky to to like right right i think the beatles the beatles adaptation probably would have focused an awful lot on tom bombadil tom bombadil might have become the the main character of lord of the rings in that adaptation which that's that's the other parallel you know we're talking about all these things where different routes were taken that there is another thought experiment to think well what happens if the main so i think now a lot of people approach all the rings from the films rather than the books sadly do go and read the books if you haven't folks but um at least they've got a decent set of films to base it on but what happens if it had been the beatles had taken over and it become totally subsumed underneath their fame and fortune it would have been a different universe i think.
[56:26] So just to sort of wrap up, we've talked about his frustrations in academia,
[56:29] and then we've got his retirement, and he's still writing interesting letters in his retirement. He doesn't really ever stop, to be honest. He's writing right up to the moment that he dies, really, very interesting letters. So I would say one of the favorite things I've read this year, possibly last few years, highly recommended wonderful production it's a lovely hardback book if you're wanting to treat yourself um beautifully set out um so put it on the wish list as a birthday present highly recommended so i'd give it 10 out of 10 it's delightful yeah and i think one of the he mentions there that uh assault in uh one of the letters 190 says a solitary art is no art And so seeing these letters, like you really kind of see him. He wasn't just completely isolated in his like creative life. He's willing to share these things and talk about it and discuss them with others. And these letters kind of show him in conversation, right? His work in conversation with, with other people. And so, yeah, absolutely. It really is.
[57:40] It helps me appreciate Tolkien better, the world that he created, the thought that he put into that, and his relationality with other people, right? So he's part of an ongoing conversation about art, about what is meaningful.
[57:55] And his kind of contribution to that, and how seriously he takes it, and responding to questions, concerns of other people. It is it is it is a real delight increase not only gives you all sorts of uh fun bits and pieces additional information about characters in lord of the rings and the hobbit um and the broader legendarium uh but also gives you this kind of double insight into the mind of tolkien about this creator his creative process following him through that there and his family relationship you know as a full like you said earlier julia is kind of like a uh the rich tapestry of this person you see him and kind of all all different kinds of lights um really impressive really inspiring i think uh uh from his kind of the takeaway at the end that even at the very end of his life um he was still getting ideas for stories based on names from the silmarillion he's thinking about just just the names like oh here's another story but he's he was he wanted to put it into readable form and but he realized that he was running out of time so he wanted to at least hurry up and sketch out um ideas of some of these for others to make use of and so i think this has demonstrated you know how many how many people have been inspired by lord of the rings to write fantasy to write sci-fi try anything at all and so i think that that was you know a testament to uh his character and devotion to the craft of writing that.
[59:20] He could inspire so many other people in the way that he wrote um and yeah that that others have got their start with lord of the rings to then go on to live wildly fulfilling creative lives. Many of you are probably listening to this right now.
[59:36] So we're going to finish with our usual wherein all the fantasy world is the best place for something. And we've chosen letter writing. But before we get there, just is worth hanging on to the end of this podcast because I want to reveal one really shocking point that came up in the letters. I've got one. Have you got one that you've prepared? I've got I've got a couple. Yeah. You've got to pick one. My most shocking fact that I learnt in letter 27 is that hobbits wear boots.
[1:00:09] He says there is in the text no mention of him acquiring of boots. There should be. He's dropped out somehow or other in the various revisions. The bootings occurred at Rivendell and he was again bootless after leaving Rivendell on the way home. And i i'm just shocked i'm sincerely shocked i think perhaps maybe that was just a tolkien doesn't have to be entirely consistent because he doesn't make any mention of the next round of people going through rivendell putting on boots but i just thought oh my goodness i can't imagine hobbits wearing shoes bootings maybe it was with the snow because they they they go up the the um The Misty Mountains, don't they? And with the dwarves. It's the Hobbit he's talking about, not the Lord of the Rings. So maybe it was special snowshoe boots or something.
[1:01:06] I don't know. What's your top? To pick one that just made me smile was that Shadowfax went west to Valinor with Gandalf. Yes. Somebody asked about Shadowfax. He says, I'm sure Gandalf would have taken him when he left. He would have taken Shadowfax. And they said, Shadowfax got to go west? That's so great. Just imagining Shadowfax, such a great character. And then just to think of Shadowfax on a boat sailing with the wind from Balinor just kind of like blowing through his mane just delighted me. So there's all sorts of little bits like this that are in there. So, yeah, that was just really fun, surprising and delightful for me to come across. Yeah. So moving away from these wonderful letters, Jacob, where do you think in all the fantasy worlds is the best place to write a letter?
[1:02:04] Um, I'm going to go with the wizarding world specifically because it has the best variety of delivery methods for letters. Yeah, I agree. Uh, different, right? So you have your owl deliveries, uh, which are just fun. Howlers, right? As if you're really upset with somebody and you need to get your point across, uh, that's an effective mode for getting across certain points.
[1:02:28] Um, Professor Umbridge's flesh writing. Uh, I don't know what. that one's a little bit painful but it's it is variety and then in the fantastic beasts what was really fun uh the film version um where you have these origami rats and memos that are you know folded into the shape of little rats and then kind of like crawl through tubes um so kind of animated letters so yeah just lots lots of fun different ways to to get your message to other people i think the delivery method that's kind of what i focused on i think that would be fun, That was going to be my pick as well. But I just suppose that whilst we've been talking about Tolkien, there doesn't seem to be much of a postal service going on in Middle Earth, but there is in the Shire.
[1:03:10] And so that's not a bad place to be a post, you know, write a letter and even be a postman or post person in the Shire because it seems to involve walking around, dropping letters, agreeing to go to parties and thanking people for presents. So it seems quite nice. nice not many tax demands amongst that as far as i can make out so yes i agree harry potter has really done a very good um job at making the letter fanciful and of course your letter from hogwarts is the moment that is the great moment when your life changes so yeah i agree with your pick well thank you so much jacob for talking um about the letters with me they are wonderful everybody. So I hope that you'll rush off and enjoy a summer of reading Tolkien's letters. It's a nice long read and could be taken in stages, but they're highly recommended. Thank you very much.
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