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Tolkien's Modern Reading with Holly Ordway · Mythmakers

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
• 0:10
  creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding, I'm
• 0:16
  an author but I also am director of the Centre and today it is a really great pleasure to
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  say that we have a special guest her name is Holly Ordway. Now Holly first came to my attention
• 0:31
  and because she has written this splendid book called Tolkien's Modern Reading, Middle Earth
• 0:37
  Beyond the Middle Ages and that's what we're going to be spending our time talking about today
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  but before we do that Holly why don't you introduce yourself and say what you get up to in your day
• 0:49
  job. Well thank you Julia and it's just a pleasure to be to be on your podcast. So obviously I'm
• 0:56
  a writer the Tolkien's Modern Reading, one of my books I work for the Word on Fire Institute where
• 1:02
  I'm the Fellow of Faith and Culture. So basically I have the great blessing of being a full-time
• 1:08
  writer, speaker. I also cultivate writing groups within the Word on Fire Institute so teaching
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  creative writing is a really important part of my work and I'm also visiting professor of
• 1:21
  apologetics at Houston Christian University which has a master of arts in cultural apologetics
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  that I've been involved with for many years. So sort of a mix of apologetics presenting the Christian
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  faith, teaching people how to do that graciously and well especially through culture and the arts
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  and the imagination is one strand of my work and then the other strand of my work really kind of
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  major one of the strand probably major part of my work is as Tolkien scholar working you know
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  more and more biographically on Tolkien the results of which one of which is Tolkien's Modern Reading
• 2:01
  which we're discussing now and then a book that'll be coming out later this summer called Tolkien's
• 2:08
  Faith the Spiritual Biography which we're not going to talk about today but I just mentioned to
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  peek the interest of your listeners. Yeah because we are hopefully going to talk about that later
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  in the year. So Holly and thinking about Tolkien and the word modern that isn't the first word most
• 2:27
  of us go for because we have all well most of the people listening to this will have followed the
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  usual story which is Tolkien was very keen on Icelandic stories and medieval stories like
• 2:40
  Sagawein and the Green Knight, Old English stories like bear wolf and so on and it's very hard
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  to imagine him being interested in anything say you know even Shakespeare seems a bit too
• 2:53
  bit too soon but Tolkien but the it really enjoyable thing for me reading your book was it was
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  like an enormous box of chocolates that I opened and I could just eat I had to stop myself
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  bolting it all down in one go and because you've made a very convincing case for the fact that
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  Tolkien was a reader and that didn't mean that his interests stopped back in with what he taught
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  academically as a sort of a wrong association. So as there is such a lot in this book and I really
• 3:28
  would recommend people just go and buy the book we're not going to cover everything at all in
• 3:32
  this podcast but I thought we'd break it down into several groups of things that you have traced
• 3:39
  through to his later work. So if you're happy what we'll do is we'll start with the things that
• 3:45
  he read as a child. So let's work out when that is Tolkien is born right at the end of the Victorian
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  era. So what kind of things was Tolkien the little boy, little boy in short trousers, what was he
• 4:02
  reading and what was it that from that reading he carried forward into writing the Hobbit,
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  the Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion? Well this is such a big such a big question I'll
• 4:15
  book a book length question as you know so we're just going to give little tidbits of
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  of information here. So he was a reader all his life and in a sense this seems almost
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  inescapable given his his his great literary gifts his his great talent for for communicating these
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  wonderful stories you know that's something that surely must have been drawn from a lifetime of
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  reading and it was but it is amazing how easy it is to to lose track of that as we move into looking at
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  his his professional life and then one of the things that I discovered in researching Tolkien's
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  modern reading is that these things are both true it's not an either or he definitely did have a
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  massive professional knowledge and interest in medieval literature in the sagas quite possibly
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  that is the most important influence on his writing this is all true and there's a lot of great
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  scholarship on it but because that's true doesn't mean that it isn't also true that he read so many
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  things that were that were modern and I just wanted to know at the beginning that this was such a
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  void to discovery for me to write Tolkien's modern reading because I also started out when I
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  began the epic video writing this book thinking exactly the same thing as you mentioned that surely
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  you know surely he he was just exclusively or mainly interested in medieval literature
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  but I always had this sort of nagging question of you know well he he was growing up and had his
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  adult life in a time when there was a lot of really interesting fantasy being written
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  did he know about any of it or was he just oblivious I was just curious and there didn't seem to be
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  any good scholarship on that subject and then it started also nagging at me the Lord of the Rings
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  is so compelling to modern audiences how how could this be written by a man who was only
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  imaginatively nurtured by medieval literature this doesn't this isn't quite track and so that
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  set me off on this this project of tracing his reading and discovering oh wow he actually read
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  quite a lot through his whole life and that makes so much better sense of the way that his creative
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  imagination was formed and of course to get back to your your question that started when he was a boy
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  so some of the things that he enjoyed then included Andrew Lang's fairy tales so he read the the
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  colored fairy books the red fairy book was a particular favorite that he notes he enjoyed
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  what lots you know fairy tales in in general he enjoyed lots of boys own kind of adventures
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  he loved H. Rider Haggard authors like that and so we can sort of see him getting a flavor of
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  these adventurous stories these fantasy stories quite quite early on he also enjoyed the
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  George McDonald's tales princess and the goblin and his other his other stories although that didn't
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  that enjoyment didn't last into his adult in his adult life later much later actually towards the
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  end of his life he became much more critical of of George McDonald's approach literature literary
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  approach a little a little too allegorical for him I think but it certainly fed him imaginatively
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  and then as we move into him being a you know a young man you know he he loved William Morris for
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  instance and adventure writers like SR Crockets but I don't want to just recap the entire
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  several chapters yes yeah so as I said there's so much to say that we could just pick out a
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  couple of highlights and that might be of interest to our readership and and let's just pause a
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  little bit about the boys own adventure because this was a sort of literature that was developed
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  for boys at school that kind of age of boy the idea was it was built in young men for the empire
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  so it's got a sort of quieter it's not a million miles away from Kipling though Kipling's more
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  interesting when he takes it on but you point out that the two books that he gave to the library at
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  his old school is that correct are in the genre and you do a wonderful you read them so that we
• 8:49
  don't have to read them but you also look at the difference between the treatment of empire in
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  these stories and Tolkien's own writing and I thought that was a particularly interesting you know
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  I loved that part of your story your book so would you mind just filling in a couple of
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  details about that to explain what I mean about he takes empire differently yeah and this
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  that's one of the fruits of doing this particular project I sent myself out not just to identify
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  the titles that Tolkien knew or had read but insofar as it was possible to read them all
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  as you said sometimes so that you don't have to do reader and sometimes that you might want to
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  because yeah but in the case of the boy's own adventure um well we live in a in a time
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  where culturally we're much more sensitive to racism um and you know anti-semitism and very
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  rightly so and so much so that we can you know we're very sensitive to seeing it it can be a bit
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  shocking to read something of that era where you need have almost no sensibility whatsoever to
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  notice how utterly racist it is it isn't hiding it it comes out and it waxes you in the head with
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  just horrific statements I don't even want to quote um you know it's sort of a default assumption
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  that anybody with with brown skin was somehow you know subhuman or at least not really not really
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  worth considering um not all of the boys and adventures were that way um but it was certainly much
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  more common than well it was extremely common um and so much so that it was you know you just kind
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  of have to accept that it's there you're going to have to encounter it when you read um these stories
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  and there's also a very strong sense of yes of empire that's you know the the British people are
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  going to go out and have this empire and that it is unambiguously good not of course empire
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  is neither unambiguously good nor unambiguously bad it's as complex as the people who were
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  living it out um but there's definitely a sense in these stories that ra ra you know for the empire
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  we are definitely the rightful rulers of the world no questions asked so then reading these um
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  and knowing that Tolkien read authors like Herbert Hayens um Alexander Donald who wrote particularly
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  sort of racist um story set in the outback realizing then that he
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  he differed from these he made a definitely a conscious shift away from these toxic elements and I
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  think that that's really that was really illuminating for me um he you know growing up in this culture he
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  could easily have taken a lot of these assumptions on board without himself being consciously racist but
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  still appropriating these tropes and his images and by and large he rejects them um now there are
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  one or two unfortunate images that do make it their way into the Lord of the Rings which people
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  will call attention to but if you look back at the kind of literature that he grew up with
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  it's quite striking to see how thoroughly he has rejected that entire approach for instance in
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  the Lord of the Rings we've got the whole story of Ganburigan the Aboriginal figure um and if you
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  look at some of the stories that he would have read when he was growing up these were figures that
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  would have been treated with contempt ridicule treated as subhuman um you know that would
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  taking them as equals would not have been an imaginative possibility for someone like Hayens or
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  Donald in the Lord of the Rings we have Thayoden treating respectfully with Ganburigan um asking for his
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  advice um we see Amar being maybe a little bit you know possibly a little bit racist like well what
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  is he know and getting put down like no no he's correct and then I think most strikingly the wild
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  help them you know help the help the men of Rohan and then when air going his king and he comes
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  he comes back he asks Ganburigan what would you like what do you what do you want um and Chris
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  Ganburigan's request is that he be allowed he and his people be allowed to live freely and not
• 13:22
  be hunted anymore like animals and this is granted and King you know King Erdogan King Alessar
• 13:29
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  but I think this is striking in that Tolkien is not glossing over racism middle earth he is
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  acknowledging that the people of Rohan did behave in a racist manner toward the wild man they used
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  to hunt them and it's a really subtle point that is often overlooked that Tolkien is is really
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  challenging the kinds of boyzone tropes that he would have grown up with and saying yeah this is
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  a sort of thing that happened and it shouldn't have and in middle earth we're going to
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  show that it happened and also show that it shouldn't have and I think that's a really good example
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  the way that he's creatively engaging with some of these more difficult tropes from from his boyhood
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  reading yes and you also get the wonderful moment when pharma actually stops and says and thinks
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  about the motive of the enemy the south souteron the fallen soldier and one of the things that you
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  don't find in boyzone stories is much worried about everyone else is thinking about your presence
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  there so I mean I think that's a so I think you're right and Tolkien is very advanced both in what
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  he writes and in his you know his own personal reaction to people asking him about the origins of
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  his name and all sorts of things and chose his advance for a man of his era doesn't mean that he's
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  you know fully signed up to what we would now expect but let's give him a break you know he's
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  we're talking about pretty much 80 years ago so in his own context his his advance excellent so
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  of all of those stories that he read as a child what do you think would be the one that he would
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  point to as his his kind of favorite among them is it the fairytales um I'm not saying the one
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  that influenced him most because of course you can be influenced by something you don't like
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  you can be like and you make that point there can be the writing against something but with cs
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  Lewis we get a clear sense where he sort of picks out a few books in surprise by joy that these
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  are the ones that you know lit my imagination is there something similar for Tolkien that people should
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  perhaps actually go away and read and think about well I think in terms of sparking his imagination
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  one author that he encounters a little well we don't know quite when he first encountered the
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  full works of William Morris but he encountered William Morris to a certain extent as a boy because
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  as a retelling of the sort of Sigurd in the red fairy book that comes from from Morris but then
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  certainly by the time that he got to Oxford and undergraduate he was reading William Morris and
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  these are these sort of adventures these these pros romances in the in the medieval sense of the
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  word where Morris is taking making new fantasy stories sometimes set in fantasy worlds and telling
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  them in a deliberately archaic style very distinctive archaic style and Tolkien was absolutely
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  knocked out by them he read everything that William Morris wrote as far as I can tell had
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  some like eleven volumes of his of his works at one point and we know we know that he was specifically
• 17:13
  influenced by several of them because he names them and one of the ways this influences him is that
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  he reads some of Morris's pros romances that mix verse and prose and he even writes to to
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  Edith that he's going to try that and he does in some of his early tales with a legendarium
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  so we can see that you know Tolkien himself is pointing out quite early on the way that he's
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  inspired by another author's technique in this case Morris to to try something out and if you look
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  at the early stories of say the fall Gondolin and you've read William Morris you can absolutely see
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  that he's he's imitating assimilating Morris's archaizing style very very archaic in language
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  and the interesting thing is that this disappears almost entirely by the time he gets to the Lord
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  of the Rings because he's he's mastered the way that the way to use archaisms Morris never did
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  Morris wasn't a linguist Morris was just sort of making things up as he went along and it makes
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  it Morris is not terribly readable today um he's he's a niche interest
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  Tolkien takes that influence and transforms it he takes the idea of using archaic phrasing
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  and then figures out how to do it in a way that is utterly natural his characters only speak
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  with the more archaic tones in moments that are appropriate in moments of high emotion or high
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  solemnity and of course is balanced by the the naturalism of the hobbits so again we have a very
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  interesting study of the way that we have a an important early influence that he takes up into
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  his creative imagination digests and and transforms yeah it's interesting actually that William Morris
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  who again I think we've we've had a myth maker on him with Ingrid Hansen who's a specialist on
• 19:16
  Morris and so I'll put a link in the show notes people want to listen because he's such a complex
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  character but you would have said during his lifetime people would have thought that his creative
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  footprint was going to be about his prose writing and his poetry but actually now it's probably more
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  about his politics and his ascetic the William Morris ascetic which is incredibly powerful and then
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  if you don't know what it is just google it and you'll see oh yes I do know what it is so um
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  yeah I'm absolutely fascinating figure and because of his interest in Iceland and Icelandic stories
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  could well see there's a lot of common ground between him and talking so moving forward
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  the contemporary era of children's book for him were obviously the 1930s and when he's
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  and late 20s 1930s when he's got his own family and we know from the father Christmas letters that
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  he is an involved parent he's creating stories for his children he's reading to them
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  what's the current more current generation of stories so we're thinking Edwardian
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  early 20s would you say were the most notable ones for you to pick out as an influence
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  I'm thinking more of the Hobbit here the way he decided to tell the Hobbit I think in the
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  contemporary what's the bedtime story well is it because one of the one of the specific influences
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  that he notes for um the Hobbits is George McDonald so that's worth noting a little bit
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  Donald is in the Victorian era but he notes McDonald as a specific influence um of the books of
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  that era that were notable for the Hobbit one is a charming book that is I think very difficult
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  find today called the marvelous land of snurgs by the remark we named EA Wick Smith
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  and snurgs are very Hobbit-like and Tolkien loved it and and his children loved it so this is a
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  this is a book that was sort of feeding that that creative imagination of that time
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  he also as we go forward into the into the 30s he was a great admirer of Arthur Ransom the Swole
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  is an Amazon series and in fact quite late in life he had a he had a volume of secret water on his
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  bookshelves so he clearly retained an affection for it um even into his his his late life and the
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  Ransom books were favorites of his children but they're also books that he enjoyed as we as we know
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  from an absolutely charming exchange of letters that he had with with Ransom Ransom wrote to him
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  and about the Hobbits and pointed out that in the first edition he had had made some um
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  phrases that seemed off because he called Bilbo a man at one point so this is a hobby he's not a
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  man so why would you why would you call him that and Tolkien could be prickly when when criticized
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  but he could also be very open to criticism when it was presented in a way that was clearly showing
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  sympathy with his own with his own aims and Ransom just hit the note perfectly he writes as a humble
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  Hobbit fancier and and and and presents it as if it was just a scribal mistake basically
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  similar to how Lewis had had framed some of his own comments on on Tolkien's work and Tolkien
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  responded enthusiastically made the changes in the next printing of the Hobbits so we have that
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  greater consistency of phrasing thanks to Ransom and they had just a delightful exchange of letters
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  in which Tolkien expressed his appreciation for for Ransom's writings and these are books that
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  are worth reading they are still in prints and they are very much worth reading um I'm currently
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  engaged in in reading them to my god children um they're wonderful children's adventures um
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  every whole someone's um no you know very well drawn characters um and interestingly they're not
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  fantasies for the most part there's a couple that have been but the main body of the story swallows
• 23:40
  Amazon swallowdale ones like that secret water their stories of a family of children and their
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  friends who go on holiday admittedly with a freedom that seems fantastical to those of us who live
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  in you know the 21st century what the parishes let them go off on an island and camp for a month
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  um but it was realistic for the time and they have perfectly sort of ordinary adventures
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  very well told very engaging and I think this is worth noting because Tolkien as a writer chose
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  to work in the genre of fantasy but that by no means indicates that he only enjoyed fantasy writing
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  many of the children's authors that he enjoyed growing up with fantasists as we've already been
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  mentioning but he also enjoyed more realistic stories including more realistic children's stories
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  like the swallows names on his books but what's interesting from the fantasy point of view in the
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  swallows and amicens is you see the children creating the fantasy so they they create characters
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  themselves of pirates and they give ordinary people different names so you watch the game being
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  played and I think that's very appealing that's one of the reasons why there's such wonderful books
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  um because it does feel absolutely in the mind of children on holiday uh you know is they're
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  wonderful books I agree with you and the other thing of course about random is uh he did his own
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  illustrations and drew his own maps which of course Tolkien I think is a bet Tolkien's a better
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  craftsman in that sense but that example of an illustrator a writer being his own illustrator I
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  think was very encouraging um just yeah just on the um the the the question of illustrations and maps
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  one of the things I love finding out from your book is about the Tolkien's aspirations for his own
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  map based on um the the map that he got from you might be able to put your finger on the reference
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  quicker than me um the pottery shirt that was created yes he's one of the he's one of the major
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  influences H writer Haggard um and uh that's that that's the shirt of emanartis and I've got an
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  image of it in my photogallery um this is and that falls sort of into the category of Boise's own
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  adventure um but also gets an entire chapter of its own in in my book I've got the picture here
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  so we can there we go yes everybody that's the shard of emanatus and this is a yeah this is a
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  really fascinating instance of Tolkien um of genuine influence um that we can trace this is from
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  a story by H writer Haggard um and an adventure story from the book she 1887 which is a sort of a
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  Boise's own adventure with fantastic elements um the these these characters go off to Africa and
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  they discover um this basically immortal woman um known as she who must be obeyed uh and it's
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  it's you know they fall under her thrall and all that and the shard is is the start of the story
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  it's the it's the engine the machine that starts everything going because it's got um the
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  story of um of who she is and how she has affected um this one particular family and this sort of
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  quest for vengeance um written on the shard now the interesting thing is that Haggard didn't just
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  invent this shard for the story but he manufactured an artifact um an actual pottery shard had it
• 27:25
  inscribed in and Greek marked it up it's so realistic um that he was we showed it to some
• 27:32
  different people and many of them knowledgeable people thought it was real and then had it reproduced
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  as an image in the frontispiece of of his book um and it's currently in museum marked as
• 27:46
  effectively fortunately um but the shard itself has an artifact is very important to the plot
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  but I think one of the things that captivated Tolkien's attention he mentions specifically
• 27:58
  mentions the shard as something that interested him as a boy it's an artifact that's extra textual
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  that adds this very similitude to the whole story and that ultimately what he does with the book
• 28:13
  of mezzar bull um because we read about it in the Lord of the Rings this this book with the blackened
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  you know pages and the last you know the last words of the dwarves the drums the drums from the
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  deep they are coming it's such a fantastic bit of the story but he also created three pages from
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  this book um which are now uh you can see them they're at the they're at the uh
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  Haggerty Museum of Art at um in Marquette University in Wisconsin and he very carefully
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  crafted them he poked little holes where the binding would be he'd use different colors
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  and he he burnt the edges they're incredibly detailed and he went through various iterations of
• 29:00
  making them um ultimately hoping that they would be reproduced in the book which they weren't
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  because it was too costly to do the uh the um the the printing in color but this idea of having
• 29:13
  an artifact outside the text that referred back to the text that in some way um supports the
• 29:21
  authenticity of the narrative as it has historical narrative which of course is Tolkien's you know
• 29:27
  his is conceit in the Lord of the Rings that it's that's history told by the Hobbits well here's
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  an artifact here's a page from the book of Mazar Ball and we can trace at least some of that
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  inspiration to Haggerd and the shirt of Aman artist that we have um in she so as as we were saying
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  at the beginning there was so much to say and all of these things so we but we've got to keep moving
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  on so let's think about adult books uh and their influence um and we can unfold in here of course
• 29:56
  works of the other inklings too is there any particular ones that you'd pick out um as being
• 30:02
  ones that Tolkien admired not necessarily that he used as examples but things that we know he was
• 30:08
  reading uh that we're part of that compost he was making for his own imagination
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  yeah i mean in a way i think this most striking thing is just the breadth of his reading
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  and one of the one of the things i try to argue in Tolkien's modern reading for the show
• 30:26
  is that we we've really got to stop trying to find one to one influenced things sometimes we can find
• 30:34
  them um especially if Tolkien himself has identified ones like we've just been talking about
• 30:40
  the book of Mazar Ball and the shirt of Aman artist that there's a very clear and strong connection
• 30:45
  similarly with Morris and some of his his experimental language and and and style even with those
• 30:51
  though we can never say that because there is this connection there are therefore no other connections
• 30:56
  it's always multiple influences can be feeding into the same you know the same scene even
• 31:03
  can have multiple influences from different authors but i think even more than that as we look at
• 31:09
  the breadth of his reading um you know he read he read um everyone from
• 31:16
  EM Forster to James Joyce uh you know Chesterton Bellock um you know all sorts of you know
• 31:26
  Catholics non-Catholics atheists like H.D. Wells and all of Stapleton um he didn't like all of them
• 31:34
  but he liked many of them he called H.D. Wells an old master um of science fiction and it's this
• 31:41
  diversity of reading that i think is most striking that he read so so widely and i think his
• 31:50
  interest in science fiction was one that particularly struck me um he names for instance Isaac Asimov
• 31:55
  as a favorite author sadly he doesn't give any specific titles but i was able to trace through a
• 32:02
  very early use of the word robot um before it was commonly used in in in um regular usage
• 32:12
  i think he had read it as a most robot stories quite early because he used to read the American
• 32:16
  science fiction magazines um and this again we don't tend to talk about all this it points to
• 32:22
  a much more nuanced attitude about technology than people usually think that the Tolkien had and
• 32:27
  gave a whole chapter to that but mostly i think you know i've got i've got a whole chapter on
• 32:32
  on um his his Catholic taste meaning his his broadly ranging taste and i think that is
• 32:42
  is really notable you know he read poets like like Tennyson um in all sorts of poets um
• 32:51
  so i could go on more names but i think it's the breadth of his of his adult reading that is
• 32:56
  particularly striking yeah and i think as you said the the fact that he read westerns and he read
• 33:02
  uh the golden age murder mysteries he was particularly admiring of Agatha Christie
• 33:07
  wasn't he and i find that just delightful um and uh and interesting that in a way clears up
• 33:13
  something that is uh often quoted he's he has a quite contancers remark about Dorothy Sayer as
• 33:19
  in the letters about how he could stand um the later lord peter mysteries when harry evane um
• 33:24
  isn't involved um and he can be quite sort of cranky when he's when he when he's saying these things
• 33:30
  but he often is very hyperbolic in the way express this things but it's interesting to note that he
• 33:37
  he notes that he had read the lord peter rooms he novels from the beginning so he had been reading
• 33:44
  them all while he read them all um and so he couldn't have hated the last one so much because
• 33:49
  harry evane comes in you know in in strong poison and she shows up the next two he read them all
• 33:54
  he obviously had enough of an interest to keep reading he preferred the earlier ones
• 34:00
  well once different about the earlier ones well they're more puzzle-like they're more purely about
• 34:05
  the detection and the mystery whereas later sayer shifts to more um psychological and
• 34:13
  sort of interested in the relationship between between peter and harry it
• 34:16
  they're quite different the early ones and later ones it's a it's a difference of taste but
• 34:21
  interestingly this ties in to the fact that he also he didn't care for chesterton's father brown
• 34:29
  stories he liked he loved many of other chesterton stories including the flying in things like
• 34:35
  that did not care for the father brown stories those are much more psychological they're not
• 34:41
  really about the plot and what who's his favorite mystery writer Agatha Christie who is a good
• 34:48
  study of character but her her strength is in her clever plotting so this just shows what what's
• 34:55
  his preference for mystery story a good clever plot so he's not really sliding sayers he's just
• 35:00
  indicating the kind of mystery story that he likes is plot centered rather than character centered
• 35:07
  yeah i i don't know i'm not sure about that because i i read that that comment on Dorothy
• 35:13
  L sayers and i'm actually reading a lot of Dorothy L sayers at the moment having started at the
• 35:19
  by chance i started at the other end at the last one because it was one in the house um and the
• 35:24
  thing about the ones of harry at vain is that the point of view switches to harry at vain and it
• 35:30
  becomes quite a feminine story so gaudy knight for example which many regardless one of her best
• 35:37
  novels lord peter winsey doesn't actually turn up until two thirds of the way through half way
• 35:44
  through um and i just wonder if the fact that Dorothy L says is shifting to a female viewpoint and
• 35:53
  basically it's about female friendships female academics um the establishment of women's college
• 36:01
  the way it's accepted or not accepted in Oxford i just wondered if some of those things were
• 36:06
  pressing on nerves for him because there is it's not lovely dovey it's not actually it's not on
• 36:12
  romance in the conventional sense at all it's definitely got more psychological exploration
• 36:18
  and then turning back to agatha christie she isn't as simplistic as people think depends which story
• 36:24
  you read so it's something like the hollow again the um it's a poirot story poirot doesn't turn up
• 36:31
  quite long way in and it's actually a very interesting psychological examination of a lot of
• 36:38
  different suspects with this idea of the hollow as a sort of image resonating through so i think
• 36:44
  they're both much better interesting writers and i i just think perhaps i don't know i think that
• 36:54
  maybe Tolkien is missing some of the things that Dorothy L says is trying to do he's not her best reader
• 37:00
  he's not well that's that's certainly could be could be the case and again we shouldn't read too much
• 37:06
  into yes a comment but i will know though that's the reasons that you gave why godi knight might
• 37:12
  possibly press on nerves i would argue our reasons why he ought to have liked it yeah well
• 37:20
  you know was this is not as well known as it should be Tolkien was a firm supporter of women's
• 37:25
  education um he he was a tutor for the women's colleges very early on and was particularly
• 37:34
  well liked by them he didn't just do it because he had to it was it was convenient that with edith
• 37:39
  at home he could have students at his house without needing extra shaperone because at the time
• 37:43
  women students were shaperone um but reports from the students themselves as i've read in you know
• 37:51
  various college books were all favorable they liked him they felt that he respected the women's
• 37:56
  students he gave them a really a fair shake which sadly some of his his other colleagues didn't
• 38:02
  his daughter Priscilla recalled that he was always a hundred percent supportive of her education
• 38:08
  made no differences between her and her brothers in terms of her going to Oxford and noted that
• 38:13
  he was he very fond of Lady Margaret Hall where where she went he knew um the head the the head
• 38:19
  mistress there and he had a number of very good friends in the English faculty who were women such
• 38:24
  as Dorothy Everett who was a co-founder of the cave which was a co-educational um literary club
• 38:32
  and that the cave doesn't get much press because everyone thinks about the inkling which is only a
• 38:35
  man but Tolkien was also a co-founder of a men and women's mixed club that gets no attention
• 38:41
  because it doesn't fit the narrative right um so i think that's whatever reasons he had for
• 38:47
  not caring for gaudy night it wouldn't have been because he was irritated about the the idea of
• 38:52
  of women's education or or or women's opportunities because insofar as we can see how he actually
• 39:00
  supported women students he would have been for it rather than against it he could have been
• 39:07
  irritated by Harriet i find Harriet a little annoying a time myself yeah that that's possible i
• 39:13
  was actually meaning more that it was giving Oxford a bit of a bad press in it because it makes
• 39:20
  it feel as though the women aren't one anyway that's that we could have actually could have a whole
• 39:24
  section on Dorothy L says because what people might not know is she sort of runs parallel to the
• 39:28
  inklings um because she's also doing similar things to Charles Williams she's writing plays for
• 39:34
  the Canterbury Festival like to hear Elliott and Charles Williams um she's doing theology
• 39:40
  like CSU so she's a really interesting parallel figure anyway well put her to side because she
• 39:45
  isn't that and she's big for Tolkien i don't think so you know we'll move her to one side um
• 39:52
  so i think wrapping this up here and again i reiterate that the best thing anyone can do listening
• 39:59
  to this is actually go and read the detail of your very well argued book and another thing i
• 40:03
  would just mention about it is your own clarity of writing is that there's a summary of what is
• 40:09
  said at the end of every chapter it's a student's dream so uh or somebody who might have forgotten
• 40:16
  they can go back and and see what you've talked about in each chapter which is
• 40:20
  very kind of you thank you for writing your book like that uh and i i absolutely loved it really
• 40:26
  enjoyed it um i have given you a little bit of warning holly um but let's see if we can
• 40:34
  do our next thing which is we always end with a segment where we look at all the fancy worlds
• 40:40
  out there from film and television and books poetry whatever you could even pick up an artwork
• 40:47
  of a painting and say where in all the fancy world is the best place to have this
• 40:53
  this experience and because we spent some time thinking about boys own adventures so
• 40:59
  let's take away the kind of empire aspect of it but you know the sort of kid going out on their own
• 41:06
  having a rip-roaring time where do you think is the best place in all the fantasy worlds for a child
• 41:14
  as opposed to a hobbit for a child to actually go on adventure well i i gave i gave some start
• 41:21
  about this um and i was thinking initially well i might put forward voyaging on the dawn treter
• 41:27
  in Lewis's Narnia very good see very fun that that is my probably my personal favorite of the
• 41:33
  Narnia books it's such a great story um but you know considering that we have been talking about
• 41:38
  Arthur Ransom you know and we know we know that Tolkien admired Ransom i might plump for a
• 41:43
  slightly modified version of fantasy and say i think it would be great fun to you know to go
• 41:50
  and and visit wildcat island with the with the swallows and the amazons and have a summer of pretending
• 41:57
  to be pirates or whatever or mountaineers or whatever their their latest adventure would be or
• 42:04
  for instance there's winter holiday where they they pretend to be polar explorers and in a sense
• 42:10
  that would be the great boyzone fantasy girls are also invited which is nice and i think Tolkien
• 42:16
  would appreciate that especially with the daughter um boys and girls adventure and there's excitement
• 42:22
  there's a bit of drama and danger but there's also a sense of safety because you know nothing nothing
• 42:28
  terrible happens to these to these children and and that's that's rather pleasing adult books terrible
• 42:34
  things can happen to the characters um as they do for instance and in the Lord of the Rings um and
• 42:40
  even in the Hobbits characters die um but in the world of the swallows and amazons you can just have a
• 42:46
  rip-roaring holiday adventure and have nice things to eat for tea so i think about this i all sorts
• 42:53
  of options that come up to me like you know Peter Pan another Edwardian story um but actually to
• 43:01
  get the flavor of this world of the boyzone which was came out of Victorian period i think
• 43:08
  actually an adventure in the Indiana Jones world is actually quite close to what these were
• 43:16
  doing but in a bit more acceptable world because you know Indiana Jones famously say it belongs
• 43:22
  in a museum um and that idea of sort of going and going into pyramids to have adventures seems to
• 43:31
  the best place to have an adventure um like that little uh that boy actor who's just now one is
• 43:38
  Oscar many years later in the Temple of Doom it could sort of come alongside Indiana Jones and have
• 43:44
  an adventure um thank you so much uh Holly uh for taking us through that and um yeah for bringing
• 43:53
  Tolkien up to date and making us remember that he was an early adopter of that top technology
• 44:00
  the tape recorder um so thank you very much my pleasure
• 44:10
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