Latest / Mythmakers / On Re-reading The Lord of the Rings

Transcript

On Re-reading The Lord of the Rings · Mythmakers

0:00
Welcome to Mythbakers, the podcast for fantasy fans and creatives brought to you by the Oxford
0:14
Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I hope you've been enjoying the recent
0:21
podcast with lots of guests. We visited Star Wars, we've visited the people who played
0:28
Dungeons and Dragons and the Laughing Community, we've heard from a Theologian, so do check
0:33
back through earlier episodes to find out what we've been doing. But today I thought
0:38
I would talk to you about the joy of reading, talking, but going back and rereading it because
0:46
I'm sure that many of the people listening to Mythbakers are amongst those of us who
0:50
do that. And I thought I'd just take you through some thoughts I was having on this when
0:56
I was drawing up a whole book about the subject of rereading. I've sort of been working
1:02
on it over the years and I thought I'd read you a little bit or talked you a little bit
1:05
about part of it where I look at my fascination with fantasy. So here goes, I hope you follow
1:12
my thoughts. So how often do I reread talking? Well, quite a lot, you'll hear more about
1:21
that in a minute. But since the audio versions are now on my phone, I think I more often
1:27
listen to it again than read it again. But I prefer to listen to a full version rather
1:32
than a dramatized version in order to get to the full joy of the pros and the detail which
1:40
obviously is always lost in any shortened version. But let's start with the first place
1:48
where I started rereading fantasy and that's actually with Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis.
1:54
And here there's a joke I was like to tell when it comes to C.S. Lewis, which is thanks
1:59
to the British TV program Q.I. which goes like this, a man walks into a room and opens a
2:05
wardrobe to hang up his coat. Inside he finds a lion and a witch. What the heck are you doing
2:13
there? He asks. Narnia business snarls the witch. Narnia business. I have been on Narnia
2:23
business since I was tiny. Thinking about this as unearthed a forgotten memory of the person
2:30
who introduced me to Narnia. And that was a girl who must have been I suppose about 11
2:36
or 12. Her name was Geraldine and she lived next door to us. And of course at that age
2:40
she felt inevitably old to a four or five year old. And she also used to come and babysitters.
2:47
But there was a certain part along the fence where I could look through into her garden.
2:53
And I think she caught me there one day. I remember it was the japonica blooms were out,
2:59
which are these sort of dark salmon colored blooms. So she was on one side of the fence.
3:05
I was on my side of the fence with the blossom all around us. And she started telling me
3:11
about this wonderful book should read. It had a lion and a country where it was always
3:16
winter and an evil witch who gave out hot chocolate and Turkish delight. Now at this stage
3:24
I'd never tasted Turkish delight, but I knew instantly that it must be the most divine
3:30
thing in existence. And so without even reading the book, I became hooked on the idea of
3:37
this fantasy. I was a convert. So now I'm on a quest to understand the power of fantasy
3:46
and why it holds so many of us in its role. I do enjoy historical novels and realistic
3:52
novels. I do vary my diet, but I have a deep place somewhere inside me for fantasy.
4:00
And maybe some people when I when I start talking about fantasy already start running for
4:05
the exit. And some just don't get the point. And they're maybe scared off by the fandom
4:12
that Ethan Gilstroth was talking about an earlier podcast, the kind of lapping and comic
4:18
on people who get dressed up and have great fun putting on the ears and the feet and everything.
4:25
And maybe on the underground, if you have no idea what these people are doing on the
4:30
metro, and you see groups, these people, it must seem quite a strange alternative culture.
4:35
But on the other hand, I think they're just having harmless fun and I completely get
4:39
why people do that. An earlier generation had mods and rockers and I think perhaps our
4:45
version of Stormtroopers and elves is much more peaceable and much more fun. But obviously
4:53
fantasy fiction in its modern form isn't for everybody. Opposition rose right at the
4:59
beginning for Tolkien in the Inklings group Hugo Dyson, who was one of them. He is
5:07
supposed to have said when Tolkien got out yet more pages of his book to read, he's
5:15
supposed to have said, oh, not another effing elf, whether or not that's true, an actual
5:22
quote. I think we can understand that the sentiment was one which rejected Tolkien and
5:29
what he had to offer. And Diana Pavlik Glyar, who's an expert on the Inklings, marks this
5:35
moment as a real decline of that support group, the Inklings, because somebody had broken
5:41
the pact which was to criticise but always to value. And that is what a lot of people feel about
5:48
fantasy. They criticise it and have no value for it. And I'm afraid this also goes into the very
5:55
early reviews. I was found one in the Times Literary Supplement on the 25th of November 1955,
6:03
which was incredibly sniffy about this book by Oxford Don. It says, not a work that many adults
6:09
will read right through more than once. I think they've been proved wrong. So it does seem if
6:17
they're right that it is a book that wouldn't bear rereading, but fortunately many of us out there
6:24
are shouting, no, you're wrong. And I'm not the only person who feels like this, I know, because if
6:30
you look at Terry Pratchett's wonderful collection of essays called A Slip of a Keyboard, he reflects
6:38
how he used to read it once a year in spring and only stop when he realised he had such a clear
6:44
recall of the text that he could remember stretches of middle earth landscape as if they were real
6:49
places. Once you've reached that point, I think you've passed beyond reading and sort of moved in.
6:57
So after having an apprenticeship in Narnia, I fell in love with Lord of the Rings when I was
7:02
about 10 and I read it at least annually for a decade and I've read it frequently since.
7:08
I wasn't surrounded by those who shared my enthusiasm and Tolkien did prove divisive, argued
7:15
foreign against passionately as we also argued foreign against nuclear disarmament. We were very
7:20
political, my little group of friends. Sally, who's still a good friend and a good friend in my
7:27
school years as well, she held out against Lord of the Rings and even to this day has admitted she
7:32
hasn't overcome her distaste against it. Her resistance is against fantasy as a genre rather than
7:39
anything personal against Tolkien. And I think there's this sense it's just not worth attention
7:45
because it's not, quote, real. Yet huge numbers of people feel exactly the opposite and take large
7:53
doses of fantasy as part of their literary diet. So this raises the question of what kind of power is
7:58
it that fantasy holds over us and what's sending us back to it again? Perhaps some insight can be
8:06
gained from looking at this visual reaction against fantasy by its opponents. I'm not sure that another
8:12
genre meets with such scorn perhaps perhaps I make an exception for romance. I've also written in
8:18
that genre and that is so often dismissed by critics as being not worth attention and then you get
8:28
something like Bridgerton come along which is based on a well-established historical romance novel
8:35
a sort of fairy tale version of historical romance and suddenly everyone wakes up and thinks,
8:39
oh my goodness, these stories to have power. But I suppose it could be just a matter of taste and
8:46
doesn't need a rational explanation. Unease about what it means to be an adult is another problem
8:54
but I think that should be challenged because some people, some detractors, say that fiction that
9:00
contains magical or unreal elements which equals kind of fairy stories is material for children
9:09
and if adults are still reading it they are somehow backward or the nerds. There are faults in
9:18
the logic in the link every link in this chain. It's patronizing to children, it's muddle-headed
9:24
about the content of fantasy but it is true that children are not yet asked to give up their
9:30
love of the magical in some mistaken idea that it's not grown up to like it and adults do come under
9:37
some peer pressure to do so and if you think just looking at the Oscars what they tend to give
9:43
the Oscars for are the hard-hitting dramas unusually you know that sort of gritty or difficult
9:52
or challenging and if those same qualities are in fantasy they don't seem to make the grade
9:58
and it was a real breakthrough when Return of the King won Oscars but it hasn't really returned
10:05
fantasy as a genre hasn't really returned fully into the Oscars stable for what that's worth
10:12
but I would counter that actually rather than being escapist or silly or childish in fact it's
10:20
in fantasy that some of the most serious themes are covered. It's not very as another reason why
10:27
people take against it reading about things that aren't out there in the visible world seems to
10:32
be below their attention for some reason and Margaret Atwood has some quite scathing things to say
10:38
about this she of you know Handmaiden's tale and others. She speculates that science fiction
10:46
of fantasy are in her phrase sent to their rooms as it were for the misdemeanor of being enjoyable
10:54
in what is considered a meritorious way. I think she's right to suspect that some readers believe
10:59
that making it all up are not being realistic in the way they portray the world is either cheating
11:05
or simply easier than the hard graft of being a novelist in the everyday world. That's just
11:13
not true. A counter argument to this one is what Tyree Pratchett makes which is almost all writers
11:20
are fantasy writers but some of us are more honest about it than others. Even the most realistic
11:26
of writers are arranging a little slice of made up on the plate for you and decorating it in the
11:32
icing of the everyday. That aside Pratchett makes a convincing case that fantasy has a different job
11:39
to do than realism, a role that he's fulfilled that fantasy has fulfilled since stories were first
11:46
told. Fantasy should present the familiar in a new light. Fantasy is the ear literature from which
11:53
everything else sprang, which is why my knuckles, that's Pratchett's knuckles go white when
11:59
toe-sucking literary critics dismiss it as genre trash. Pratchett uses his Discworld series to
12:06
comment on lampoon and play with our understanding of the way we conduct our business on earth,
12:12
covering matters from religions to banking to the postal service. Neil Geiman likewise
12:18
examines difficult contemporary themes and it's clearly that when they wrote good omens together,
12:23
that was a very natural yoking of two authors with a not the similar but in tune with each other,
12:29
shall we say. And he, for example, takes issues with things that many of us find hard to look at
12:36
on the streets of our towns and cities and that's homelessness and he turns the invisibility of
12:42
that into the central trope of his excellent urban fantasy, neverware. This London under is the
12:49
world you don't see. Fiction works its own spell and by saying its name, it makes the problem visible.
12:57
And these aren't far-fetched ideas, you know, the idea that they never existed and they're made up.
13:03
Margaret Atwood again makes it clear that there is nothing in her science fiction work, the
13:08
Hans Maiden's Tale, that has not already been tried somewhere in some human society. Just think
13:14
about that. If you've not read it, you might have seen the TV series about that and if you think
13:19
she's saying that absolutely everything here has been tried somewhere. So don't expect to escape
13:26
when you go to fantasy, anticipate instead that you'll be looking in a mirror that reveals more
13:32
than you knew about your life before. So what does the Lord of the Rings do with its new light?
13:40
Tolkien himself believed it was filling a gap. England lacked a complete mythology so he decided
13:45
to provide one. That is fine as far as it goes and I've no idea when I was a 10 that that's the
13:52
job the Lord of the Rings was trying to do. It didn't matter to me and it also wouldn't account
13:58
for its worldwide success in lands for which that has no relevance. For me, it was not that the book
14:05
provided some kind of backstory. It was more that it gave me a huge space for my imagination
14:12
and it's not one that threatened to wear thin if you scratched at the surface. Tolkien understood
14:18
this very well and it worried him that he might add a few scratches to the finish when he undertook
14:23
the Silmarillion and he says the part of the attraction of the Lord of the Rings is I think
14:29
due to the glimpses of a large history in the background and attraction like that of viewing far
14:35
off an unvisited island or seeing the others of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist.
14:42
To the go there is to destroy the magic unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed.
14:49
That's such beautiful way of expressing it of course which it makes his letters a joy to read.
14:55
I didn't read the Silmarillion until much later and the magic was complete the first time I read it
15:02
so the Silmarillion didn't kind of connect in the same way to my imagination. I've appreciated it more
15:08
coming back to it years later. What the 10-year-old found in Lord of the Rings was that she could enter
15:14
into the world and feel as if it were a parallel creation to this one, immersive in a way that
15:22
you know a 4D cinema can only dream of achieving and I don't think I've ever read a book that
15:27
did this before or since in the way it gripped me. Terry Pratchett has a nice phrase,
15:33
dear or Terry Pratchett, much missed. He had a nice phrase for this when he called the Lord of the
15:39
Rings a half brick in the path of the bicycle of my life. Another great image there.
15:47
I too was thrown from the saddle spending days of one holiday sprawled on the living room sofa
15:53
reading without coming up for air then turning back immediately to the fellowship of the rings
15:58
once I'd finished the return of the king because I didn't want to leave the experience
16:04
and no book has come close to evoking this response from me. The depth is peculiar to Tolkien
16:10
because of course I'm sure most of you know he approached his novel from a very different
16:15
direction to other writers. He used it as a game playing with his knowledge of philology, his love
16:22
of languages. He knew how world languages changed and developed so he wanted to run his own experiment
16:29
in his middle-earth laboratory. Maps, names and languages came before plot he said.
16:35
Elaborating them was in a sense Tolkien way of building up enough steam to get rolling
16:41
but they also had a sense they also had a sense of providing the motive to want to write
16:49
and that's in the the Shippee biography of Tolkien he elaborates on that Tom Shippee. A British
16:56
person we live out the daily issue of language just by where we are living in our local road signs
17:05
and I'm sure that's true in its own cultural sense where you are. Places are named and renamed
17:11
over the centuries and we often seek for the stories behind them hidden like clues in the text.
17:17
Some are more obvious and just do what they say on the tin. I live in my city of Oxford
17:23
and this is the place where the oxen folded the River Thames, oxford.
17:29
Okay so that's clear that's the story. Others hide layers of history so where I grew up as a child
17:37
was in a village on the edge of London called Thaden Boys. It's quite a strange name even in
17:44
the English context so that the first part of that Thay, T-H-E-Y, is the name of a Viking landowner
17:54
Thay and so that's the town of Thay Thaden and then Boys or Bois as the French would say is
18:02
forest and it's ineping forest so you've got a marriage there between the Viking history of the place
18:09
and the the French Norman Conquest history of the place. So we also got word histories that are
18:18
personal. I think almost any school child can tell you hopefully they've asked at some point
18:24
what is the meaning of their name but there's also an element where it tells the fashions of the
18:31
Thames when I was at school I was in a class of 30 but it was a bit unevenly gender split so there
18:38
was 11 girls and a really strange thing with three of us were called Julia. Now since then I very
18:46
rarely come across other Julius I mean they exist but it's a rare event to come across another
18:52
Julia. I think my name has fallen a bit out of favour while in the UK at the moment named like
18:59
Jessica Emily Sophie Lily that's also maybe that's the Harry Potter reference. These all have
19:05
become very popular and I find this out because when I do book signings you get a long queue of
19:10
kids and you get used to knowing what the familiar names are and how to spell them. It will change
19:17
again and likewise Middle Earth is not static or sort of one version of it. It's not squeaky clean
19:25
like many other imitative fantasy worlds but it comes with a convincing tarnish and signs of aging
19:34
and there are maps for the maps. I know they're simplified but there's a pleasure in tracing the
19:42
journeys when you flip to and throw in the books to the maps and back and this is something that
19:48
the Peter Jackson films paid homage to in its use of the map as a way of explaining where everybody
19:54
was at various points in the films. So if Tolkien knows exactly where the story has reached on his
20:01
map you put faith in it like a backseat passenger in a car driven by a competent navigator. You're
20:07
able to enjoy the views out of the window while he does the work. Mind you I would just say here that
20:13
Tolkien was a very bad driver so probably not the best image for his maps. I think he was a very good
20:19
walker so maybe I should change that image to one of somebody leading the way in a hiking expedition.
20:25
Anyway connected to this is the physical presence of his world so it's not just a historical
20:32
aspect of it it's the physicality of it. When I'm rereading it now I'm struck by the
20:38
passages I didn't pay much attention to when I was 10. These are usually the passages of natural
20:44
description. His one I particularly like just as the story gets underway before the threat level
20:50
has risen to critical so the three hobbits pip in Frodo and Sam have just set out from Bagend
20:58
and they're on the very first leg and it's the first morning after they've slept out and
21:04
then this is beautiful a couple of sentences. Away eastward the sun was rising red out of the
21:10
mists that lay thick on the world. Touched with gold and red the autumn trees seemed to be sailing
21:17
rootless in a shadowy sea. A little below him to the left of the road ran down steeply into a hollow
21:24
and disappeared. I could go on much more and quote at greater length the very particularness of
21:33
this camping spot the little icy waterfall where they fill their bottles. The tree roots they
21:39
sleep among the stiffness of first waking after sleeping outside and this feels like the kind of
21:46
walk I could take by just going outside of my front door. I don't need to be persuaded to believe
21:53
in Middle-earth I live there and that's why I would take Lord of the Rings with me to a desert
21:58
island because it would be my ticket back home to in my imagination so I could travel home.
22:05
Being a fan of the book doesn't mean I haven't got criticisms to make though they don't really
22:11
matter they're just niggly things that I think of when I read it. As each of our children grew up we
22:17
had we have three. Each one of them got one of their parents reading Lord of the Rings to them
22:23
as a bedtime story. I should can imagine that's quite an investment of time it was like a little
22:28
right of passage in our family. I had the pleasure of doing this my eldest and my youngest and my
22:34
husband did our son in the middle. I can tell you that the chapters are very long for bedtime
22:41
reading is best not to promise a whole one to your child audience. Anyway but on the last reading
22:48
some years ago now my son and I started in September and finished in April so it had a wonderful
22:55
feeling of marking the exact period of time of the main events of the book and it also gave that
23:01
reading an extra dimension of living it out alongside the characters. There's no rushing.
23:07
However I also read the book with a bit of an eye to some of its faults because it was the first
23:12
time I'd read it since I'd got experiences a writer myself and I did find I began to quarrel.
23:20
I began to quarrel with some of the language for example. The archaism of the noble characters
23:27
and the elves and the men of power is a tricky business taking heroism seriously in a cynical age
23:33
and I would you know I'd sometimes sort of give a bit of a huff as I had to read out words like
23:37
deem and verily and the ponderous inverted sentences. I think I swing between sometimes really
23:45
enjoying them and sometimes thinking oh this is a bit overmuch but anyway it's his style so
23:51
I think I just just have to cope with it when I say and talking was aware of this problem of some
23:56
of the more highfalutin language and his answer was to put his critics in his own work
24:02
i.e. the hobbits. They represent the modern reactions to heroic figures in the story and they
24:08
actually helped don't they because they undercut the high-flown moments with humour or by saying
24:13
what they feel when someone's rambled on too long. I'm particularly fond of Bilbo at the council
24:21
of Elrond which is a very long chapter and doesn't quite work as a bedtime story but anyway
24:28
he interacts a couple of times the history of the ring and he finally reminds everyone he's very
24:33
hungry and says that having such high-powered discussion isn't meant for the little by which we
24:40
mean the ordinary people like him so by putting sort of modern misgivings into the text that we've
24:45
sometimes wondered among these giants of men we're always allowed to believe believing them
24:51
without destroying them because we're sort of present in the room in the shape of the hobbits
24:59
and it might also be why part of us so many of us love the journey in that book because
25:04
it's actually turns out I'm sure there's no need to give a plot spoiler here but it turns out the
25:10
unheroic characters the hobbits with their hairy feet and down to earth reactions they are
25:15
actually the true heroes and the so-called heroes the strong people turn out to be the ones who
25:21
have to play the supporting role they're the sidekicks in the end. We can identify with them
25:28
and it suggests that the hobbits if they're like us we might have the similar capabilities in
25:34
ourselves that we had not suspected it's a very optimistic work in that sense and it's so
25:40
bring to reflect that Tolkien and his generation had their wartime experience to learn this lesson
25:47
and I often think when one of the hobbits is taking a really difficult decision to do the
25:52
equivalent of going over the top I often think in my imagination back to that first generation
25:58
of the Great War but when I'm rereading what about the women or the lack of them
26:07
um I think it's probably something which did not worry me at 10 and that was because the Lord
26:15
of the Rings is a fantasy without gender politics at the non-heroic level of the hobbits in
26:20
fact they're hardly any female hobbits mentioned um and the company when they head off
26:27
the main hobbits they're pretty sexless creatures and they only get to get married and sort of
26:34
see that part of their life expand when they get home and that's largely beyond the end of the book.
26:40
Their friendship group though has what you might call the softer qualities or feminine
26:44
qualities of gentleness with each other open affection and reluctance to resort to violence
26:50
they aren't a kind of rugby club on tour smashing up the bars so I didn't feel excluded
26:56
and looking at this now I can see that that friendship group is based on the cultural assumptions
27:02
of Tolkien's era we have to remember that he himself is now an historical figure and that's
27:07
what's underlying his choices he's used to a world where the chaps go off to have adventures
27:12
and the women in the Lord of the Rings it's the shape of poor old libelia sackful baggins
27:16
they're left literally in her case with the washing up and the hobbits don't ever think about
27:22
the absence of females in their number except for the odd pang of Sam remembering Rosie Cotton but
27:28
you know it's they're largely not important the mothers are not present at all
27:35
but one character in Tolkien who's clearly fighting against her gendered role is wonderful
27:40
Airwin and who's met much later in the two towers and she is a young woman who disguises herself
27:46
to go into battle it's sort of the Mulan of the Tolkien world yet she is one of those on a heroic
27:53
plane in the book so we don't actually get her perspective we see others looking at her
27:59
more often she does however make the pleasingly kick-ass edition into the female characters
28:06
because she succeeds with Mary's help to kill the big baddie the king of angmar the chief black rider
28:13
where ages of men wizards and male elf warriors have all failed.
28:19
On my latest read through I was reminded that the women we are introduced to or are mentioned
28:24
which there are few they all actually offer different views of female power when you look for it
28:31
most of them have power and that's really interesting so I mentioned libelia sackful baggins
28:37
the battle axe relative of bilbo she knows how to get her own way doesn't she and in the end she's
28:43
given a little heroic role in that she stands up against saraman when he takes up the shire so
28:49
it's kind of saying oh well you may not like this kind of stubborn woman but gosh she stood up when
28:54
it counted and then we also get a mention of golem's grandmother in one of the accounts of the
29:01
history of the ring and we're told that she's a leader in a matriarchal community and is said by
29:08
Gandalf possibly to be wise in her own way I'd love to know more about this matriarchal hobbitesque
29:14
society so there are other forms of leadership including female ones which are imagined and treated
29:21
as quite natural in middle earth and of course there's preeminent the galladriel who outshines a partner
29:29
keleborn a kind of queen elisabeth with a duke of edembra at her side though one of the rereadings
29:39
having read the Terry Pratchett that came to mind so having read the slip of the keyboard it was in
29:46
my mind when I reread recently and one of my favorite Terry Pratchett quotes is that a genre of
29:52
fantasy is long overdue for a visit by the equal opportunities people and he finds that the roots for
29:58
this stretch back long before the 20th century of course because they're flourishing in a genre
30:04
that we've inherited from myths legends and folklore he's particularly funny when he gets to the
30:10
subject of magic wizards he complains get to do a better class of magic while witches give you warts
30:19
so he wrote in equal rights in response to this which tells the story of a girl who manages to
30:25
break through the equivalent of a wizard glass ceiling maybe now the Harry Potter series has finally
30:32
done for that division i'm not sure somehow still calling Hermione a witch something about that
30:38
word that seems frayed frayed with sharp pointy features and she gets intelligent really rather than
30:45
power and Harry is the one to get to do the defensive warrior stuff and be the ultimate hero
30:51
so Hogwarts I think is an equal opportunities employer so JK Rowling has done a good job at
30:57
rebalancing the scales but the language was perhaps beyond her ability to transform and it might
31:04
take a bit longer before that word which doesn't come with the idea that they give you warts
31:12
it's no wonder that many writers actually handle this by abandoning the witch with a division entirely
31:20
because the language is so hard to redeem the Australian writer Trudy Canavan in her black magician
31:26
trilogy which is about a magician for trainee mages opts for the term magician so that her people
31:33
of any gender can be given the same label so even so even in that book male and female forms of
31:42
magic seem to exist reflected in the career choices of the people in the novel women tend towards
31:49
healing men to fighting and the difficult scientific subjects to tomorrow appears another favorite
31:57
writer and American writer in her song of the lioness which was actually now quite an old book it
32:02
was first published in 1983 but I didn't read it as a child I came to it as a much later in life
32:10
she mains streams magic so that it's part of a skill set of her imagined court of knights
32:16
not exclusive to a set of people called wizards though there are some that exist in the context
32:22
of research and learning in her quartet she examines how a female can get on in a man's world
32:29
the twins in this book Alana and Tom are bound by a tradition which means they have to follow the
32:34
career path that the other one wants so Tom wants to be a magic wielder and Alana wants to be a warrior
32:42
so they do the very Shakespeare Shakespearean thing of swapping and pretending to be each other
32:49
yet Alana even though she gets to be a warrior cannot leave magic behind because
32:57
it is in her bloodline so she gets very good at her profession by hard work and using methods of
33:06
fighting to suit her small frame but she also has magic as well as part of the deal which makes her
33:15
like a hero of her age and this means that she then gets accused when she's an adult that she
33:23
only got the role where she is which is King's champion because of her magic not because of
33:28
all the hard work and excellent sword fighting that went on before which I think many women who
33:34
rise to higher positions you know must recognize that as an accusation what I really then like
33:41
is Pierce goes on to imagine in another quartet the next generation of knights in training where
33:48
women are now allowed to enroll but very few are sounds a bit like trying to get in elite forces
33:53
of the military and in this series protector of the small Kel who is the main female character she
33:59
has no magic and never gets magic but she has many other qualities that make up for it including
34:06
a training in a martial art thanks to her father's diplomatic posting to a culture that's very similar
34:12
to a far eastern one like Japan the last of this quartet deals seriously with the issue of
34:17
displaced people and I've mentioned this in previous podcasts and the nature of true leadership
34:24
gender politics has come a long way in this world by the time she gets to run a refugee camp
34:30
and she's given this role she thinks it's because she's a woman but actually it's not as a punishment
34:34
but because her command to concede that her character and her struggles to succeed as a woman
34:39
in a man's world give her the maturity lacking in her male contemporaries she actually ends up in
34:44
command over some of the people she trained with which is rather nice women don't have to become
34:49
like men but they can be a new kind of warrior so perhaps the witch wizard division in fantasy is
34:55
still to be completely bridged but the trend of late particularly in young adult novels would please
35:01
a visiting equal opportunities inspector I imagine them dodging the booby traps and side stepping
35:08
missiles as they make their visit peering over the top of their clipboards women as assassins tick
35:14
girls as leaders tick dystopia has particularly introduced a strong line of female leads not valued
35:22
for their looks and sweetness but skills and strength um capnis everdeen in the Hunger Games trilogy
35:28
by Suzanne Collins comes to mind she's courageous inventive rivals legolas in the use of the bow
35:36
but more bravely on the part of the writer I think she's not particularly nice she is damaged and
35:41
used by her society but she is never weak and in the post apocalyptic Chicago divergent
35:47
tris is the first in her class to take the leap to join dauntless the warrior class and is the one
35:52
in cordon in the last book to make the ultimate heroic sacrifice so fantasy has moved at the times
36:00
how much the fantasy written reflects its era is actually much easier to see in hindsight so I've
36:08
said that about talking and his assumptions about the men going off on adventures and I don't
36:13
if you've had this experience of rereading fantasy you loved to when you were younger and then
36:17
suddenly thinking oh my goodness look at the assumptions and attitudes in this I had this when
36:22
I went back to read the dragon rider books by Anne McCaffrey which I loved as a teen but I hadn't
36:28
read them since and I picked up the first one again when I was thinking about this theme and
36:33
rediscovered the world of pern a distant planet colonized long ago and threatened every few
36:39
centuries by the passing of a planet that seeds the ground with damaging meteorites dragons are
36:45
natural to the planet and they've teamed up with humans they and their riders are the only one
36:50
who can destroy these seeds when they fall rereading revealed assumptions in it that I've been
36:56
blind to 30 years ago when I first read dragon flight it was already quite an old book it was
37:02
published in 1969 and I think it reflects agenda relationships more of that day an era when the
37:09
equal pay act in the UK was being fought for tooth and nail time of the film made in daginum if
37:16
you've been looking at it's a great film about how women got equal pay for work in a car factory
37:23
it's a very realistic topic for you I don't think I noticed the inequalities as a teen
37:29
but I am now quite disturbed how Lessa who's the female character is portrayed of being very
37:34
jealous of her man shaken by him when she's disobedient that's not good and she chooses her
37:41
sexual partners in some kind of dragon strength contest there may be things like love island
37:46
aren't much better the queen rider by tradition partners the rider of the dragon who impregnates the
37:52
golden queen dragon yeah I can see this is all a bit worrying and if that relationship changes
37:57
at the next mating then so does the human partner a cafe is moving towards a more liberated woman
38:04
by the end Lessa is allowed out of the purger to supply support missions with the men
38:09
so yeah a bit of an advance but the assumption is still that gender does decide the role
38:14
as it would in a beehive or ant colony I think that's probably what she had in the back of her mind
38:19
so human standards are less applicable but it led me to reflect how since it was written there
38:25
been so many changes to women's position in the military but a female fighter pilot is still
38:31
unusual McCaffrey while being dated in some aspects of the battles of the sexes got there before
38:37
the real world did on some others fantasy sometimes anticipates and changes are assumptions about race
38:44
gender and sexuality allowing the world to change in its image rather than just reflect it
38:51
but I must unload such concerns with Sam's pots and pans chuck down the crevice in Mordor
38:58
if I am to travel on more likely to my goal I don't think I've completely unpacked my fascination
39:04
with rereading Lord of the Rings the satisfaction is deeper than memories of a pleasant
39:09
country walk or a sense of history I think that this kind of fantasy offers a spiritual experience
39:14
without the trappings of a specific religion or philosophy talking himself saw it as a
39:19
fundamentally religious and Catholic work as he says in his writings but he wisely stripped it
39:26
of all mentions of God so that the deeper truths were available to all readers no matter what
39:31
creed or no creed that they come from there is a sense obviously in the Silmarillion of
39:36
God and a creator and a sense of providence and hints in Lord of the Rings but it's very very much
39:41
in the background in the Narnia books CS Lewis calls this the deep magic underlying the spells of
39:48
his white queen and so what is the deep magic I think it centers on the nature of courage and the
39:55
sacrifice of the one for the many think of how many of the conversations in the Lord of the Rings
40:01
question the nature of bravery very early on comes one of the wisest exchanges something I recall
40:07
at times of trouble in the world when you know we're facing terrorist attacks or climate disasters
40:13
and you know doubt are aware of it but it's worth quoting again because it's so wise I wish
40:19
it need not have happened in my times said Frodo so do I said Gandalf and so do all who live to see
40:26
such times but that is not for them to decide all we have to decide is what to do with the time
40:32
that is given us it is a deceptively simple answer and also consoling as it points out the path ahead
40:40
you just have to decide what to do from here that is all that can be expected of you
40:46
Tolkien's wisdom on this evokes the ghosts of his 1914 generation sent off to war as well as
40:52
the 1939 one of his sons faced the pain of the families involved I think I only now really appreciate
41:00
now that I've got children of military age and when I see the names on war memorials it's almost
41:06
unbearable to read particularly when there are runs of brothers and cousins from small villages
41:11
are cut down all they had to decide was what to do with the time they had given been given just
41:17
as Frodo does and I think Tolkien has taught me more about the nature of evil than many a sermon
41:24
his evil is scattered and spread among many characters often residing as a duality inside them
41:31
there is a dark lord in a tower but we only see the result of his world view not the person behind
41:36
it as it is experienced by many people who you know that's the kind of experience of evil that
41:42
many people who live under contemporary evil regimes would relate to they don't meet the dictator
41:48
but they see his workings through their society the key to this scattered evil is what
41:55
W.H. Auden identified in his review of Return of the King good can imagine the possibility of
42:01
becoming evil but evil defiantly chosen can no longer imagine anything but itself
42:08
that really is worth thinking about I'll read it again because it's a brilliant quote good can
42:14
imagine the possibility of becoming evil but evil defiantly chosen can no longer imagine anything
42:21
but itself this lack of imagination is present in the choice to take or resist the ring's power
42:27
a test for the hobbits Gandalf Galadriel and Arrigal they all pass it and that one that Boramir
42:34
Denathor Saraman and Gollum fail there are many real world parallels to this and you know
42:42
just need to stop and ask do the perpetrators of terrorist violence stop to imagine anything but
42:47
themselves and their mission the same question applies to the person working the the drone or
42:53
releasing the bomb sitting in their bunker when leaders have ordered them to attack and that's
42:59
the kind of dilemma which the film I in the sky in 2016 picked up you know you might be sitting
43:04
safely with your sandwiches and your Starbucks coffee somewhere and your decisions mean the life
43:10
or death of innocent civilians somewhere else the world could do with much more imaginative sympathy
43:20
Tolkien's encoding of the spiritual values of his faith in his world without making them
43:24
sectarian was an aspect I felt really drawn to and I think that's where I began to get serious
43:29
about him I've even wrote an undergraduate thesis on this subject and I saw it almost as a
43:36
culmination of my reading of English literature at Cambridge University at that age and I've since
43:41
used it as a guide when coming to writing my own fantasy books I admire Tolkien's approach
43:48
as a model that I can use that's better than the heavier handed one taken by CS Lewis and Terry
43:54
Pratchett and Philip Pullman which is much more of a obvious connection to our real world
44:01
I don't get me wrong I love all those stories particularly the Narnia ones but I like this more
44:09
encoded deepest substructure that Tolkien achieves whereas the others seem out to you know
44:15
duke it out over some messages about our world Margaret Atwood attributes the 20th century growth
44:22
in the fantasy genre to the decline of religion religion we no longer believe in the old religious
44:27
furniture are not enough to make it part of our waking realistic life I think I'm tempted to say
44:33
there speak for yourself Margaret as obviously when you look around any society outside of a few
44:38
small western societies there's plenty of people out there with us and see a faith which is very
44:44
much part of their furniture reports of God's death of premature but I do agree with the idea
44:50
that in the changing world of publishing at the very least the old religious furniture is
44:55
considered a matter the excludes or offends large swathes of the market if you want to speak to people
45:02
you can perhaps rather instead reach for an outline as Tolkien does that expresses a fundamental
45:09
truth powered by your private faith or no faith beliefs I think maybe this is recognised by
45:16
people who make films or those who teach creative writing when they talk about the hero's journey
45:24
which tries to express this same thing that there's a beautiful design or a set of principles
45:29
that govern the conduct of life as well as the world of storytelling in the same way that physics
45:36
and chemistry have laws so the very act of shaping a story suggest finding a plan or a purpose
45:44
in the world bit fancy or bit real and I think it's natural for us to look for meaning as Marilyn
45:53
Robinson writes she's a great Canadian writer I'm sure many of you know say that we are a puff
45:59
of warm breath in a cold universe by this kind of reckoning we are immeasurably insignificant
46:06
or we are incalculably precious and interesting I tend towards the second view scarcity is said
46:14
to create value after all and that's from her collection of essays when I was a child I read books
46:23
Tolkien puts it another way but in a more sort of opposite fashion for Lord of the Rings this is
46:30
the hour of the shy folk when they arise from their quiet fields to shake the towers and councils
46:35
of the great so even the smallest and most fragile puff of warm breath the hobbit can prove to be
46:45
the most precious so that's what takes me back to rereading Lord of the Rings so that was quite a
46:53
long journey around the experience of rereading I'd be delighted to hear your experiences of what
46:59
part rereading Lord of the Rings takes in your family and I always have a section in this podcast
47:07
where I think about where in the fancy world is the best for something so as I spent some time
47:14
talking about equal opportunities I thought it might be a good idea to look at the idea of where in
47:22
the fancy world is it the best place to be a woman now it's quite a difficult question this
47:30
because it could be you have to say what part of society are you entering in it's not a common
47:39
experience I actually tried myself to write a fancy world where it was best place to be a woman so
47:44
I might pick that because I actually went you know spent a year thinking about this I wrote a novel
47:52
called Dragonfly which is set in another world and one of the cultures there is a matriarchy
47:58
so I was talking about Golem's grandmother being a matriarch I wonder if that was somewhere lodged
48:03
in my mind when I came up with the idea of creating a matriarchy for for rulers who are all female
48:09
who are all aspects of their religion of the the crown the mother the sort of woman in her prime and
48:16
the child that's the sort of the way the leaders work and I think maybe I did have that there but
48:24
I remember watching a documentary on TV where they were looking at these votive figures the sort of
48:31
stone age votive figures of sort of fecund ladies sort of fertility symbols and then speculating
48:40
there might have been matriarchal societies I'm not sure that that's actually born out by more
48:44
archaeological evidence but that was in there and I thought well wouldn't it be interesting to think
48:48
what that would be so for once I'm actually going to choose my own fantasy world as the answer to
48:54
that the best place to be a woman is in the world of Dragonfly on the blue crescent islands anyway thank
49:01
you very much for listening we have more special guests coming up later in the year and including a
49:07
very special Christmas broadcast but I'll tell you more about that near of the time so thank you very
49:13
much for listening thanks for listening to MythMakers podcast brought to you by the Oxford Center
49:20
for Fantasy visit Oxford Center for Fantasy.org to join in the fun find out about our online courses
49:29
in person stays in Oxford plus visit our shop for great gifts tell a friend and subscribe
49:36
wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide