Latest / Mythmakers / Dragons, Victorians and Forests: Professor John Holmes on Performing Tolkien's Lecture, William Morris and Much More!

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Dragons, Victorians and Forests: Professor John Holmes on Performing Tolkien's Lecture, William Morris and Much More! · Mythmakers

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
• 0:11
  creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding.
• 0:17
  Today I am delighted to announce that we are joined by Professor John Holmes from Birmingham
• 0:24
  University. Now, John I met first when he was performing, I think is the right word,
• 0:30
  his wonderful lecture on Tolkien on Dragons at the Story Museum back in the autumn,
• 0:38
  and we're about that a non. But we'll also be touching on John's other interests,
• 0:45
  which bring him into contact with the world of fantasy that we're all interested in,
• 0:50
  because he specialises in Victorian literature and culture, and of course this is the
• 0:55
  seed bed out of which writers like Tolkien and CS Lewis emerged. And he's also got an
• 1:02
  interest in the role of science, so the world of science fiction is not a huge step away.
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  So John, welcome to Mythmakers. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.
• 1:13
  So let's start with Tolkien. I first start first of all with how you first met Tolkien's books
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  and what came in the way that you ended up being Tolkien in many senses when you do this particular
• 1:29
  lecture. Yes, so like a great many people, I first read Tolkien as a child or a young adult,
• 1:37
  sorry, I read the Hobbit and then I remember reading the Lord of the Rings when I was about 13,
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  I think 12, 13. I had to write a book review of it at school, and consequently I decided to make
• 1:49
  it at least three book reviews, because I figured that it was a big enough to justify that.
• 1:55
  So I read Tolkien then. I became a big enthusiast for Tolkien, read the Lord of the Rings,
• 2:00
  perhaps four times in that kind of early teen, early to mid teen period. But the unfinished
• 2:08
  tales when that came out, I picked up a copy of the summary and started to acquire the history
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  of Middle Earth as those books started to appear. And then about five volumes in, I think I sort of
• 2:20
  partied company with Tolkien for a while. I was a bit saturated. Yeah. And then in my late 20s,
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  I decided to reread the Lord of the Rings and was delighted by how well it had worn as far as
• 2:35
  I was concerned, because I knew a lot of people who became quite sniffy about Tolkien as they
• 2:42
  matured as they thought, sorry, themselves anyway. And I found actually that the book was everybody
• 2:47
  as commanding and compelling as it had been when I was younger. And then that process sort of
• 2:54
  rolled on. So I read during the COVID pandemic, I read the Lord of the Rings aloud to my younger
• 3:01
  daughter, which was just a wonderful experience for both of us. It was wonderful to find voices
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  for the characters, but also you got it so much deep into my appreciation of Tolkien's prose
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  and the kind of variousness of his style and the richness of his landscape description. I
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  loved those long processes of the journey in the Lord of the Rings. So that was sort of the
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  personal side of it. And then in terms of the professional side of it, as you say, I'm originally
• 3:38
  an expert on Victorian literature and culture, or a scholar of Victorian literature and culture,
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  an expert by now. So I hadn't really worked very much on fantasy, but I'd worked a lot on
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  the pre-rapheolites, who have a fantastical element. We might touch on that a bit later.
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  And I started to work actually on Tolkien, or to think about Tolkien again, because of a collaboration
• 4:07
  with our Forest Research Institute, Birmingham, the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research.
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  And they had a PhD program where academics at Birmingham could bid for PhD projects. And
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  it struck me that there are a lot of forests in fantasy fiction. I was obviously very familiar with
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  Tolkien. I'd known Ursula Gwynn for quite a long time and had recently started reading William
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  Morris' fantasies, because I had a PhD student working on those. And it occurred to me that
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  these forests, we use in scholarly terms, we know quite a lot about Gothic forests. People have
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  written quite a lot about Gothic forests, but people have written less about fantasy forests,
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  and particularly about the ways in which they create a much more positive model for human
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  relationships with forests and trees. So I wanted to explore that in collaboration with Biford.
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  So that's how I started working professionally, got a fantastic PhD student called Dion de Brinsky,
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  did a marvelous PhD, which we're hoping to publish a book from in a series that I edit for Bloom's
• 5:16
  Brie. And then, well, the story about becoming Tolkien is another one. So maybe I should tell you
• 5:29
  a little bit about how I came to perform the dragon's lecture, how we unearth that.
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  Yes. So I think the first thing to establish for listeners is that you haven't made this up.
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  No. It says is a lecture which Tolkien actually did give.
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  Yeah. The Christmas event wasn't it a bit of fun.
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  So why don't you sort of set the scene for when the original the original lecture was presented?
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  Yes. So the original lecture was given on New Year's Day in 1938. So it was just after the
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  publication of the Hobbit. Tolkien was a professor at Oxford at the time, and the lecture was one of
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  a series of Christmas lectures, about six or eight Christmas lectures, that the Oxford University
• 6:16
  Museum of Natural History gave annually. So it always had a series that invited speakers in,
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  often they would be Oxford academics. And Tolkien was both an Oxford academic and a celebrity.
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  And these lectures were of course aimed at a family audience, like Christmas lectures,
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  like the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, for example, are. And I don't know who it was who
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  had the idea of inviting Tolkien. Although, yes, I can't, I don't recall whether the collected
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  letters include the letter where he accepts the invitation. It does include the letter where he
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  writes about his hesitations about having accepted the invitation because he's now
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  having to write the lecture. But somebody had must have had the idea of inviting him presumably
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  because he was a bit of a celebrity. And they thought it would be entertaining and engaging to
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  have a lecture on dragons in a museum that was full of dinosaur remains and dickier
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  sores and pleases sores and teradactyls. And so the lecture actually starts with a quite a long
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  section on dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles. Anyway, the reason this sort of came to my
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  attention is I've been doing a lot of work with the Oxford Natural History Museum. I've done a
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  lot of work on the actual building itself, which is a fantasy text in its own right. I've written
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  I've written a whole children's book about that. Oh, well, there you go. Yes. So, and it is astonishing.
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  Beautiful piece of architecture and wonderfully elaborate and lots of individual imagination that's
• 7:56
  gone into the creation of it. Anyway, I've been working a lot with them because because actually that
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  building was was decorated, the decorative art there was inspired by pre-riffilism. And several
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  of the pre-riffilites were involved in one way or another. So it was part of a project I was doing
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  on the pre-riffilites and science that they got me involved with the museum. Anyway,
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  at some point, the director of the museum, Paul Smith recently retired, mentioned to me that
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  they'd recently discovered some magic lantern slides in their collection, which they'd been
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  cataloging and which have been on cataloged for such a long time, that were by Tolkien. There were
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  their images from Tolkien's drawings. There are seven of them. It's actually four images and
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  three duplicates. And they're all images of dragons. One of them is the very famous painting of
• 8:54
  smoug. I've actually got it on my mug. There we go. Oh, well, there you go. Yes, exactly, precisely.
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  It's probably in library, yes. Yep. And there's one from Rover Random. And the other two are
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  two of his sort of rather lovely doodles of dragons. Anyway, they found that they had these sides.
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  And then they found that the lecture had been given on their rediscovered or re-recorded, but
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  the lecture had been given in 1938. And then it transpired that the manuscript of that lecture is
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  in the Bodleian. And it's only been published once in an extremely expensive commemorative edition
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  of the Hobbit, so it's not really readily available. So we thought we were recreated using
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  the original magic lantern slides, those four images by Tolkien, but also in the lecture itself,
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  in the manuscript, he very conveniently has noted where he's using a new slide and what it's a
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  slide of. And not all of those slides, but a lot of those slides are identifiable within the
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  Oxford University Museum Magic lantern slide collection. Can you explain to the modern generation
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  what a magic lantern is? Oh, yes, yes. So a magic lantern,
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  well, it depends how modern the generation is. For a generation of our generation, it's the
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  precursor to the slide projector. So what it is, it's a device. It's a wooden box, typically.
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  It was powered by limelight in the 19th century, so by lime, the illumination given up by
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  lime burning lime. Nowadays, you can use electricity, which is rather safer. And a magic lantern
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  slide is a transparent piece of glass, a paint of glass, or two paints of glass with an image
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  between them, but more typically a paint of glass with a photograph on it or a drawing on it.
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  And you project light through that and then project it onto the wall or onto a, you can project it
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  onto a screen. So it's very, it's basically, I suppose, if for us it's the precursor of the slide show
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  for a contemporary generation, it's the precursor of a PowerPoint presentation, effectively.
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  And it's an early 19th century technology. There was very sensational, which is why I was called
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  the magic lantern. People would go around the country during giving magic lanterns lectures
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  and kind of phantasmagoria shows of extraordinary things that could only be seen through this
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  new technology. Wonderful. So what did you, when you read the lecture itself, what kind of
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  impression did you get of Tolkien? Was it the one that you already knew or did you find a new
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  sight to him? I found in some ways a new sight to him, it's a very, it's a funny lecture.
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  Playful, isn't it? Playful. It's very entertaining. And of course, this is partly the Tolkien,
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  the Tolkien, if you like, the Tolkien who narrates the Hobbit, to some extent. He's written
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  at the same time, he's aware of the child audience. But at the same time, it's also partly
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  Tolkien the academic. So there's a lot of discussion of etymologies, whether where does the word
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  dragon come from? It's partly autobiographical. He talks about his childhood and collecting fossils
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  on the beach and thinking they were perhaps dragon's teeth. So you've got different, different
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  sides to it. And then there's also Tolkien, Tolkien the storyteller, but not the teller of his own
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  stories, because he retells in the lecture the stories of Beowulf's encounter with the dragon,
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  of Sigurd's encounter with the dragon. He mentions St George. So he's a Thor, there's a story about
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  Thor. So you get to see Tolkien playfully retelling other stories, often stories that he's more
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  seriously retold in his own poetry, for example, or translate it in case of Beowulf.
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  But yes, it's a very engaging, also slightly Donif. Some of the jokes are a bit sort of
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  obviously Oxford. And sort of public school. Public school, yes.
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  Yes, he's expecting an audience of boys who kind of get the jokes.
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  Yes, yes. And I mean, his own children were at the dragon school at Oxford at the time,
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  or had been recently. So so there's a sort of there's a joke about the dragon school as a school
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  for dragons. And so some of that feels a bit sort of of its moment.
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  Part of it's that is part of its delight, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. We're in the 1930s when we're
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  listening to you do this, not exactly exactly. And I was lucky enough to be able to find in a second
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  hand clothes shop in Oxford, a waistcoat that looks almost exactly like one that Tolkien used to wear
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  admittedly after the war. But so that's sort of part of the effect. And then the other thing
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  that that kind of fed into all that was trying to recapture Tolkien's voice, which was an
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  interesting exercise because we've got a lot of recordings of Tolkien, but they're
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  almost all post-war. So they're almost all from the 50s and particularly the 60s and late 60s
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  often. By which point he's a much older man. And so there are a couple, there are just two recordings
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  from the early 30s, but they're on records that were made to teach non-English speakers how to
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  speak English. So he's talking in an extraordinarily clipped and precise way. And I gather in real life,
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  he was actually quite a mumble, so he's obviously that's not really him. But one of those is about
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  I think sort of going to the tobacconists and it's a sort of set of instructions. So that wasn't
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  the voice I wanted. So I was trying to base it much more on the older Tolkien's voice,
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  but in some ways slightly of what, try and clear out elements of that that were just a result of
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  of aging. Yes. I was at one of the Tolkien lectures last Friday with Demetra Femi who's
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  respected Tolkien. Yes. And there was a discussion in the questions afterwards about how Tolkien
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  pronounced mythology, because apparently he said mythology. Did he? Yeah, mythology, which is,
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  I don't know if he was making a pun, but I think his spoken voice would probably to us be a bit
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  disarming, because the upper-class tones of the 30s, you know, surround, for example.
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  Yes. Very close in the mouth. So probably your interpretation of it will need to come to
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  something which is more listenable to the modern audience. And I think you did that brilliantly.
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  Thank you. Thank you. You do do this lecture when invited. Do you not? Yes. So I've done it three
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  times so far, twice at the Oxford University Museum, where it was premiered, if you like,
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  originally, although the lecture theatre is no longer the same structure as it was when he
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  gave the lecture. So twice there, and once so far at the story museum, I'm giving it again at
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  the story museum in April. So I'm available as long as the Tolkien estate have the right
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  of refusal, because it's their document, if you like, so they have to approve it when we go
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  ahead, which they've done so far, very kindly. Excellent. So moving a little bit further back
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  in time from the 1930s to the Victorian period, which is where you started academically.
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  If someone is wanting to understand what the Victorians were doing in fantasy, which of course
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  is the stuff that Tolkien's reading as a little boy, where would you suggest they start?
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  Well, so it depends a little bit what kind of fantasy you're looking for. So obviously,
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  I mean, I think we can safely say without question that Louis Carroll's Alice books are probably
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  the most famous Victorian fantasy, but they're unlike really anything else, because he's a mathematician,
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  because he's so extraordinarily nimble with his tricksy imagination and kind of playful,
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  but not just playful in an easy way, playful in a very precise and extremely clever way.
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  They're nonsense as much as they are fantasy. So I wouldn't necessarily start with Carroll,
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  even though he's obvious place to start, because he's so different.
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  You could start with George McDonald, and George McDonald certainly was an influence on Tolkien.
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  Princess and the Goblin, the Princess and Curdy, those books, you can really tell when you read
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  the Hobbit that Tolkien's Goblins are, in some ways, the descendants of McDonald's Goblins,
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  even, I think, also actually Tolkien's, that there are scenes in
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  Friend Will's Palace, the Elk King's Palace in Merquard, that are very reminiscent of scenes
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  in some of McDonald's books. What McDonald doesn't offer, though, is the kind of expansive imagination
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  of a Tolkien. McDonald's worlds aren't fleshed out to quite the same extent. They're not as
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  consistent. In fact, he likes playing with inconsistency, I think. So in that sense, I don't think,
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  if you're coming from Tolkien, I wouldn't step back into McDonald to find something that sort of
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  will satisfy that same impulse. The person I'd go to is William Morris, and that's really
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  for particularly his very late fantasy novel. So he's sort of inventing the genre. I know
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  that's a slightly old fashioned way of thinking about it. That's the kind of line that's
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  peddled by the people who republish a lot of these books in the Valentine series in the 1970s.
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  But it is also true that Morris is imagining expansive quasi-medieval but fantasticals
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  and not real worlds in his books, that have those horizons, those distant horizons that can then
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  open out to something that, like Tolkien's imagination. And the ones I would really,
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  really recommend are the world at the world's end, which is a very expansive book. It's a bit like
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  the Lord of the Rings in the sense of being a quest narrative, but it's also its actual structure
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  is there and back again to take that subtitle from the Hobbit. But it's different in that
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  but you don't have quite such a stark contest with evil that you have in the Lord of the Rings.
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  Not quite so much as at stake, but you do have clear moral forces and clear exploitative forces
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  that they're pitted against. You also have a sort of birth almost of the superhero figure in a
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  way when the protagonist's man and a woman make it to the world at the world's end, drink from
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  the well and become kind of uniquely powerful. And then the other really fascinating brilliant
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  Morris fantasy is the water of the Wander's Isles, which has a heroine. The central figure in
• 21:25
  that book is called bird alone. And she is, I mean, in a way, it's a sort of, perhaps,
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  surprisingly for Morris, but it's a it's approach of feminist fantasy in some regards. It's very much
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  around her realization of herself and it's partly through, and this is less surprising coming from
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  Morris, through labor, through craft, but it's also through encounters with and bettering
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  these witches that she encounters, one of which has kidnapped her as a child and brought her up.
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  But that again is another wonderfully expansively imagined landscape. All this said,
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  Morris is a much harder writer to get into stylistically than talking because he writes in a
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  self-consciously archaic language. It's a bit like sort of the bit like the most archaic
• 22:21
  reaches of Tolkien's language. More like the Sumerillian. Yes, a bit like the Sumerillian,
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  or like some of those, to some of those passages around the ride of the Rohirim when Tolkien's
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  language becomes most sort of expressively medievalist, but actually Morris, I mean, you have to
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  at least double if not square that to get to Morris's prose. And then, and that's all the way
• 22:46
  through. But on the other hand, what I would say about that to any reader who's interested,
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  press through the first five pages, you'll get the hang of it. And thereafter, it's actually
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  quite a plain style. It's not unduly elaborate. The sentence structure is not overly played,
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  or kind of unduly contorted. It's actually very accessible once you just get into the vocabulary
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  and start to sort of accept the use of words like, like, teaping to mean trade or other kind of
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  examples, the berg instead of the town. These sorts of specific words that he chooses to use.
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  But once you're there, it's actually quite an accessible style, very readable. And I feel,
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  I think particularly when I last read The World of the World's End, I had that feeling of
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  contented immersion in the book, in the story, in the place that I find really quite rare,
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  but that I definitely get with the Lord of the Rings as well. So William Morris is a fascinating
• 24:04
  person. I think he's actually under-explored in terms of film TV or sorts of things. Yet,
• 24:11
  we are surrounded by, particularly his design. My house has William Morris curtains.
• 24:19
  He's become very popular as a designer wallpaper, but of course he was part of the arts and craft
• 24:27
  movement, but he was also a pre-raffelite in many ways, or friends, a pre-raffelite. Would you
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  say he was a pre-raffelite or just friends with? He is a product of pre-raffelites,
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  let's say that. He's part of the core of what's known as the second generation pre-raffelites.
• 24:50
  So the first generation pre-raffelites are the pre-raffelite brotherhood themselves,
• 24:56
  with Christina Rosetti and Lizzie Siddhal in their sort of orbit. They gather in 1848,
• 25:03
  they publish their magazine The German 1850. And that's the most famous one,
• 25:09
  Santa Gabriel Rosetti, John Everett Millet, William Holman Hunt, and another four friends of theirs.
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  And they're all painters and they're all poets and painting and poetry are very
• 25:20
  intricately connected in pre-raffelites and they're all looking to kind of two influences.
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  One is the medieval Italian past and the other is modern science, curiously enough.
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  And the idea of experiment and looking closely and impartially at nature and at whatever
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  you're studying in a way through the art. That's the first generation.
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  By the late 50s, Santa Gabriel Rosetti has gone off on his own in some regards,
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  but his poetry particularly has caught the attention of William Morris and would burn
• 25:59
  Jones, both students at Oxford at the time. Alginon Charles Swinburne, the poet,
• 26:06
  another student at Oxford, and they form a sort of second generation. And at that point,
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  they turn much more towards the fantastical imagination, mythology away from science, although
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  still very much embedded in nature and looking closely at nature. So in that sense,
• 26:26
  the Morris is at that core of the second generation pre-raffelites, but he only produces one
• 26:33
  painting. So if you think painting is what pre-raffelites do, he doesn't really do it. On the other hand,
• 26:38
  he creates all those fantastic designs that you're talking about. And as a narrative artist,
• 26:45
  he's a fantastic poet, much much much underrated as a poet. He's also, of course, a wonderful
• 26:53
  designer of stained glass, working very closely with burn Jones. And that's a sort of
• 26:57
  visual medium for telling stories and particularly stories about the past and about religion,
• 27:05
  not that Morris was religious himself. So I think he's definitely embedded in that.
• 27:10
  And I think the pre-raffelite influence is still felt in fantasy today in the versions of Medieval
• 27:18
  Worlds, because they had this sort of hyper-reality to their artwork, which is often based on
• 27:24
  intermediary text. Wasn't it like illustrating geets or Shakespeare or something?
• 27:28
  Yes, or Tillerson, or yes.
• 27:30
  Yes. So there's something like Airwind's dress in Nord of the Rings looks to me straight out of a
• 27:38
  pre-raffelite painting, as opposed to something that Anglo-Saxon woman would have worn.
• 27:44
  Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. The aesthetic of fantasy illustration, and therefore fantasy
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  TV, fantasy cinema is, I mean, you can trace a direct line back to the pre-raffelite,
• 27:56
  particularly I think the second generation. People like Burn Jones, who of course was Morris's
• 28:01
  closest friend, and they worked extremely closely together. In fact, several of Burn Jones's
• 28:07
  paintings are illustrations for poems that are written by Morris. So
• 28:13
  one of the reasons, I think one of the reasons I think you're right that Morris is underrated
• 28:17
  today, or at least this aspect of Morris, not the design, but the literary side. His books are
• 28:23
  extraordinarily long, particularly the earthly paradise. It's a wonderful, wonderful poem.
• 28:30
  It's 40,000 lines of verse. And so in a sort of world of clicks and
• 28:38
  Instagram posts, it doesn't get red. People don't take the time or have the feel that they have
• 28:44
  the time, but it's so worth it because you can just immerse yourself in it. And that immersion
• 28:50
  is what then leads to something like the Perseus series of paintings by Burn Jones,
• 28:56
  or the Pigmalion series by Burn Jones. They're both derived from Morris's retellings
• 29:02
  of classical mythology within the earthly paradise.
• 29:06
  I think he's also for fantasy writers. If you're thinking, well, I don't sort of culturally
• 29:12
  chime with the more sort of lower-sea conservative Christian world of, say, the Inklings movement,
• 29:20
  though, having said that, talking was an anarchist at heart. Anyway, they had fairly
• 29:27
  socially conservative values. Morris is not that. He is a radical, he's one of the founders of
• 29:34
  like the Labour movement, really. Yeah, absolutely. And it was a whole life expression of his belief.
• 29:42
  So the fantasy writing, he's part of this, but the workshop,
• 29:48
  women employing women to do embroidery and walk the making. I mean, it's absolutely fascinating.
• 29:54
  There's a wonderful biography, isn't there, of Morris? It's quite a chunky toast.
• 29:57
  Well, if you own a coffee, is that the one you have to do? Yes, yes.
• 30:00
  Morris's a life for our times. Yes, tremendous, really.
• 30:04
  If you're wondering how to get a hold of what he's around, I would suggest you could, you know,
• 30:09
  have a look at that biography. Definitely. And the socialism is hugely central to Morris.
• 30:16
  And though it's really interesting how that plays out in the fantasy novels because
• 30:21
  it's very obvious in his utopian novel news from nowhere, which is a socialist, it's a sort of
• 30:28
  medievalist socialist future. In fact, it's a kind of, I mean, you said, talking, talking was
• 30:34
  an anarchist at heart. He wanted the shire to be self-confining. Yes, yes. I mean,
• 30:41
  talking, there's certainly one letter where he describes himself, talking does, as either
• 30:47
  an anarchist or an absolute monarchist. It's not really finding, yes, not really finding his
• 30:55
  place within the politics of his time, but Morris too was very much drawn to the sort of anarchist
• 31:02
  side of socialism. And it may be that some of that emerges in the fantasy novels, particularly
• 31:11
  is particularly, I think, in, well, the feminist side in Water of the Wondrous Isles, but also
• 31:18
  the socialist side in the well at the world's end, where the most, some of the most sort of
• 31:26
  a rebarbative and unpleasant social structures come within this town that is called the
• 31:33
  Berger before Fritz, which is sort of a medievalized imagining of effectively a bourgeois that is
• 31:42
  enslaved, actually, the peasant classes around. And so that's sort of there. It's not there
• 31:53
  at first glance, but you can see that it is there in terms of the politics of those fantasy novels.
• 32:00
  But I think the attraction that Morris held for Tolkien is really interesting, given that Morris,
• 32:09
  certainly from the 80s onwards, is a committed socialist, and that Tolkien is broadly speaking,
• 32:15
  as you say, a sort of small sea conservative. Morris is at least to all intents and purposes
• 32:21
  in atheist, certainly an agnostic. Tolkien is a Roman Catholic, quite devout. And yet there's
• 32:30
  Tolkien clearly recognized an affinity with Morris. And I think particularly it's around
• 32:40
  a critique of contemporary society, and especially around a critique of, I suppose,
• 32:47
  industrial, contemporary industrial society. Something that is equally distasteful to both of them.
• 32:58
  And often for the same reasons, I think Tolkien's conservatism doesn't mean that he doesn't
• 33:06
  place a value on social justice. He absolutely does. And of course, they both place a value on
• 33:11
  environmental justice, too. And to come back to the Victorian thread, the granddaddy of both of
• 33:18
  them in that regard is John Ruskin, who's, and Ruskin's a pioneering thinker in terms of
• 33:29
  environmental justice, of recognizing that people's environmental conditions and damage to the
• 33:35
  environment at large is directly connected to their social conditions, that we should think also about
• 33:44
  other beings within the environment, damage to animals and plants, to nature as a whole.
• 33:49
  These are things that really chime. You can see it in Morris's work. You can see it in Tolkien's
• 33:54
  sense. It's definitely coming through there. And politically, Ruskin defined himself
• 34:03
  in virtually the same breath as he described himself as a conservative of the old school,
• 34:11
  of Walter Scott's school, of Homer's school, whatever that means. And equally, he said,
• 34:18
  I'm a communist of the old school, the redist of the red. And that kind of shackling of those
• 34:23
  ideas that actually this isn't necessarily a left-right opposition. It's actually a moral position
• 34:32
  that Ruskin, Morris and Tolkien are all taking is something that I think runs through that forms
• 34:40
  a kind of lineage there. So this is, this is taking us into the realm, what I wanted to ask you about,
• 34:47
  that fantasy is easy to see when you're sitting some decades, some centuries apart from the fantasy
• 34:55
  book that you have in mind. It does distill the concerns of the age when you look at it. So for
• 35:02
  example, something like Frankenstein, which I know is actually a regency rather than a Victorian novel.
• 35:09
  You can see the fears about electricity capturing electricity, the ambition of science,
• 35:17
  all sorts of things, the nature of life, life to get generated. But of course, Mary Shelley is
• 35:24
  reflecting something of her time which turned out to be a mythology that was applicable at all
• 35:31
  times, including to our own and gets even more apparently applicable as we go on. Do you say that
• 35:38
  when you were studying the Victorian culture, you were finding your understanding of the politics
• 35:43
  sharpened by the fantasy lens that you were looking at in these different writers you were coming
• 35:48
  across. Because it's odd, isn't it? They're moving aside from real world, like the realistic novel.
• 35:57
  Of course, you know, the geogeliot style of writing, though she did do historical novels too.
• 36:03
  Yes. And sometimes that sidestep makes things even clearer.
• 36:08
  Like a magic lantern. Like a magic lantern.
• 36:14
  So I think it sometimes makes it less immediately apprehendable, but then it becomes more
• 36:28
  apprehendable as you spend time with it. So Morris is earthly paradise, which I mentioned,
• 36:34
  which is, I mean, in a sense, it's not a fantasy novel, but it's a series of 25 fantasy narratives
• 36:45
  across the poem, most of them retellings from myth or made evil legend. But the central story is
• 36:51
  not the central story is about a group of a sort of motley crew of men and women in the mid-14th
• 37:03
  century, just as the plague is beginning to hit Europe, who decide to set sail in search of an
• 37:11
  earthly paradise in the West. And they have a series of encounters, adventures, let's say,
• 37:23
  in what we must take to be different parts of the Americas, I presume, which all of them are,
• 37:31
  if you like, almost darkly satirical mockeries of that idea of the earthly paradise,
• 37:41
  including being worshipped as gods and yet kept as prisoners. But when they, where they finally
• 37:47
  end up is on an island and presumably the middle of the Atlantic, where there's a sort of weird
• 37:52
  preservation of Greek culture and then the wanderers and their host settled down to storytelling.
• 37:58
  Now, that whole poem is framed with a beginning where Morris says,
• 38:02
  forget six counties overhung with smoke. He's urging you to take your imagination away from
• 38:10
  mid-Victorian London. But he's doing so to open your mind to the possibilities of other ways of
• 38:16
  living than mid-Victorian London. And I think that's what fantasy so powerfully can do. It's
• 38:23
  something that's there in Tolkien too. And it's one of the reasons why these books still speak to us
• 38:29
  today, I think. It's exactly what you said about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
• 38:34
  In the 60s and 70s, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was frequently read as about the bomb.
• 38:42
  And it's sometimes been read as historically sort of about World War II, or even about World War I,
• 38:48
  and his experiences in World War I. But it reads now very profoundly as about an environmental crisis,
• 38:54
  a catastrophe that's written across Middle-earth and that is being driven by an impulse that is
• 39:02
  darkly selfish, exploitative and in some ways associated with industrialization
• 39:11
  and iron as well. So it's a story that we can read in its moment, like you were saying about
• 39:19
  Frankenstein, but it's also a story that resonates for us profoundly now. And partly because I think
• 39:27
  precisely because it isn't a realist story, because it isn't a look about something that was
• 39:32
  happening in 1954 or 1939. It's a story that fundamentally sets itself against realism.
• 39:44
  And this is of course what Tolkien says in his lecture on fairy stories that one should see
• 39:51
  fantasy as escapism, but not escapism in the sense of the flight of the deserter, but escapism in
• 39:57
  the sense of the escap of the prisoner, the idea that this is actually liberating us. It's enabling
• 40:02
  us to imagine the world in different ways. There's a very powerful fairly recent essay by,
• 40:13
  or not thought that recent, but by the Indian novelist Amitabh Ghost called the Great Darrangement,
• 40:18
  where Ghost argues, this is I think about 2016 or something like that, he argues that
• 40:24
  realism can't cope with the environmental changes that are happening around us today,
• 40:33
  because it's too trapped in a notion of what is normal, and they no longer are normal.
• 40:40
  Whereas fantasy on the other hand can help us, I think, to think through those problems,
• 40:45
  because it can imagine things on that scale, and it can imagine things being other than they normally
• 40:50
  are. And that can also give us a place to reach towards actually a better world.
• 40:56
  There are better worlds to be found in Tolkien and in William Morris,
• 41:01
  than the world we, the increasingly broken world we're inhabiting.
• 41:06
  Well, I think that's a wonderful tip for this, and for those who are thinking about fantasy writing,
• 41:13
  because we're talking about applicability here, how yours can be applied, and it's very
• 41:16
  liberating to see that as a, you know, justifying what your project is about.
• 41:24
  So, can I ask you a little bit about the forest schools and forest research?
• 41:27
  Yeah. I said in my notes to you that I can't go in a word without thinking about ends.
• 41:33
  One of my favourite CS Lewis quotes is he does not despise real words, because he has read
• 41:39
  of enchanted words. The reading makes all real words a little enchanted. So, wanted to ask you
• 41:45
  about your experience working with the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research?
• 41:49
  Yes, certainly. So, this also goes back interestingly enough to the Oxford University Museum,
• 42:00
  because it was there that I first met a chap called John Isles, who has been involved for a
• 42:08
  long time with an organisation, both the charity that John Ruskin set up called The Guild of St George.
• 42:15
  And they own the charity owns a plot of land in the wire forest in Worcestershire,
• 42:24
  which is about 25 miles from Birmingham, where my job is. And this plot of land was originally,
• 42:32
  the core of it was originally given to the Guild, well, given to Ruskin and then passed on to
• 42:38
  Guild by the mayor of Birmingham, the then mayor of Birmingham as a place to experiment with
• 42:44
  other ways of living and the experiment with putting into practice his ideas of sustainability
• 42:48
  and craft and living in tune with nature and so forth. And then it was expanded in the 1920s,
• 42:57
  when the Guild built a decent sized piece of woodland, so I bought a decent sized piece of woodland
• 43:04
  to avoid it being sold to the Forestry Commission. And you may remember that there's one point
• 43:09
  in Tolkien's letters where he likens the Forestry Commission to Sauron, although he says that
• 43:14
  the difference between them is that the Forestry Commission is at least capable of repentance.
• 43:22
  And they have repented, definitely. But in those days, the Forestry Commission was substantially
• 43:26
  involved in felling old oak woodland for the purposes of planting quick growing conifer woodland.
• 43:32
  So this patch of old oak woodland was rescued by the Guild of St George. And it's called
• 43:38
  Ruskin land and in honour of John Ruskin. And so we thought, I thought and the team I was pulling
• 43:48
  together thought this would be a wonderful place to do some experimental literary criticism
• 43:55
  to see what happened if you took people into a forest, an actual forest and read fantasy forests
• 44:04
  with them. And to see how it changed their perspective on either the real forest or the fantasy
• 44:11
  forest or indeed both. Now at Ruskin land, there is a particular structure which is rather
• 44:18
  delightfully called the Dragon's Nest that was built from fallen pieces of oak wood by an architecture
• 44:27
  school. So it forms a wonderful focal point for what my PhD student who I mentioned already
• 44:33
  de-onderbrinsky, what he devised in the way of reading walks. So he would take groups of students
• 44:38
  initially, though we've done this also with members of the public, around Ruskin land,
• 44:44
  causing reading relevant passages from fantasy novels, seeing how it affected their perceptions
• 44:52
  of the forest and their attitudes to the forest. And he did this as part of the PhD, his actual PhD
• 44:58
  research was to take a group of students three times during the year. And the year he did this
• 45:04
  was the year after the COVID pandemic. So these were students who probably spent their
• 45:13
  first year undergraduate or maybe their A-level year bottled up or locked down or however you
• 45:18
  want to phrase it, certainly deprived of access to nature. And it was just a revelatory for them
• 45:25
  and also for us as researchers to see how it enlivened their sense of the forest,
• 45:32
  so the process is going on, what the living organisms around them, but also crucially the
• 45:40
  valuing of the forest. It made them very alert to, I suppose both the value of the forest to then
• 45:50
  and actually the intrinsic value of the forest. So it really bore out what I sort of hoped
• 45:58
  you would bear out, which was that fantasy forests do indeed eat in chant actually in the way
• 46:02
  that C.S. Lewis talks about. And they don't take you away from the reality of a forest. They just
• 46:09
  give you, they give you a much richer sense of the possibility of life in that forest of what's
• 46:14
  going on, why it matters, especially when you ally that with the whole recent research about plant
• 46:23
  communication. I don't know if you're aware of it. It's often phrased in terms of the wood-wide web
• 46:31
  and Suzanne Semard's ideas of the mother tree, which is the sort of notion that older trees
• 46:37
  effectively protect the trees that are there, well not necessarily only their samplings, but the other
• 46:44
  younger trees within a space of woodland. And that of course feels much less unlikely if you've
• 46:53
  been reading about and thinking about ends, and equally the ends feel much less unlikely if you've
• 46:58
  been reading about and thinking about the science. So there's a way in which they they imaginatively
• 47:04
  open each other out. I think it's been a wonderful rich experience and it's a fantastic,
• 47:13
  it's a fantastic location to do it, but as Dion's been been showing some of the work he's done
• 47:18
  since, you can actually do this with any piece of woodland or even to some extent parkland where
• 47:24
  you happen to be. He's produced some A-level resources that can be used in schools around the
• 47:29
  country for English, but also for biology and geography, using literature to flesh out the
• 47:38
  experience and understanding of forests. I suspect there'll be a number of teachers listening to
• 47:43
  this. I hope so. Yeah, so where would they go to see these resources? So they're on the Birmingham
• 47:51
  Institute of Forest Research Education Portal. So if you were to search Birmingham BIFOR,
• 47:59
  I always think we should somehow get ourselves a Beaufort and a bomber as well, but I'm not sure
• 48:03
  quite sure. By for education, that would be the place to look. Brilliant. That was, I desperately
• 48:11
  want to now go on one of these woodland works, walks as a child brought up near Epping Forest,
• 48:18
  which has its own fascinating history. Given by Queen Victoria to the people,
• 48:26
  anyway, that's another conversation. Well, by William Morris as well.
• 48:31
  That's another, that's another episode. So just as a little bit of fun, did warn you in advance.
• 48:38
  I always asked my guests where in all the fantasy worlds is the best place to do something.
• 48:45
  So we've been to inns, we've been to the libraries, we've been musicians, you know, you could
• 48:49
  assassins or sorts of things. Where is the best place do you think to rock up and give a lecture
• 48:57
  on dragons, which of all the fantasy worlds would you like to do that? So because you've
• 49:03
  forewarned me a little, I've been chewing that over and I've been thinking about places where
• 49:08
  you wouldn't do it. You wouldn't go and give a lecture on dragons in the shire because they wouldn't
• 49:12
  appreciate it. They wouldn't want to be unsettled by it. You wouldn't go to Lothlorian because
• 49:16
  they'd know all about it anyway and they wouldn't want to hear about it either. If you had to do
• 49:20
  it in Middle-earth, I think Numenor would probably be the place where the audience would be most
• 49:24
  interested and probably appreciative. But actually the place the place I'd like to go is that island
• 49:30
  in the earthly paradise, that island where the wanderers rock up where they share tales because
• 49:38
  both the wonders themselves and the hosts clearly love tale telling, sharing stories. The wanderers
• 49:45
  share lots of mythological, lots of medieval legendary stories as well. So I think they would
• 49:50
  appreciate it. There is another answer, of course, which is what we said earlier, which is that,
• 49:55
  in a sense, the place to give that lecture that is already a fantasy space is the Oxford University
• 50:01
  Museum where he gave it in the first place. That's pretty good. Yeah. I think,
• 50:05
  thinking about it, the choices is between a fantasy world where dragons exist. Yes.
• 50:11
  And a fantasy world where either they exist in the past or a rumoured to exist or a definitely
• 50:16
  thought not to exist. Yes. So you could be quite risky and say, right, I'll go into the
• 50:22
  the Game of Thrones world. Yes. Yes. Clearly a different reception in that than at the Shire.
• 50:30
  A lot of the other place you could go, actually, would of course be Ham, where Farmer Giles hangs
• 50:37
  is there you'd have a tame dragon that you could actually draw into the lecture yourself.
• 50:42
  Yes. I'm sort of pondering whether or not it'd be a good idea to do it in earth sea.
• 50:48
  The earth. Oh, yes. Of course. I could get a job as a sort of academic in one of the
• 50:54
  magic schools there and travel around lecturing on dragons. So that was my pick.
• 51:00
  Yes. That's also an excellent choice. That's an excellent choice. The Tolkien's lecture, of course,
• 51:05
  is also about dinosaurs too, which makes it doubly tricky because you need to have somewhere where
• 51:10
  you can have both dragons and dinosaurs in your point of reference. Yes. That's a struggle.
• 51:16
  Yes, it is. I feel there must be somewhere. But yeah. Thank you so much, John. Thank you for being
• 51:22
  with us. Thank you. Mythmakers.
• 51:24
  Thanks for listening to Mythmakers Podcast.