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Tolkien 50 Years On · 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 and director of the Centre and I am joined again by Jacob Renica, friend of
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  the Centre and expert on Tolkien and board game enthusiast who is sitting over in Seattle
• 0:28
  in America. Now this year 2023 is unbelievably the 50th anniversary since the death of J.R.R.
• 0:38
  Tolkien who died at a ripe old age in September of 1973 and so no doubt many people are going
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  to be spending this year thinking about what this half centenary means and particularly what
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  is the legacy of Tolkien 50 years on. It's possible that we may have enough distance from him
• 1:03
  to begin to understand how he's helped shape our culture and quite what he means to us all.
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  At least that is the theme that we're going to be discussing today. So Jacob, I was alive just
• 1:18
  when Tolkien passed away, not that I was aware of him, I was far too young for that,
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  but has your whole life been lived post his death? Not fast for exact age, but you look a little
• 1:29
  bit younger than me. For many people like us, we have always thought of him as someone who has
• 1:38
  gone before. We don't have the living memory of him. So let's try and recreate what status he had
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  in 1973 when he died. Just how famous was he? So what's your understanding of his stature
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  on the point at which he left us? Yeah, and I'll be speaking from kind of an American.
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  Yeah, please do. Perspective here. And that's, you know, I'm definitely aware of people and
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  folks that I knew who are older, who read the books as they were coming out. And it definitely
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  had an impact in America. It's really fascinating. The American hippie subculture,
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  where there's this overlap between hippie subculture, anti-war movement at the time,
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  racism, Vietnam, that there's something about these books that just like really captivated these
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  people in that in this is around the same time you had a bootleg paperback version of Lord of the
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  Rings that Ace Books published. And there's a whole legal. But what that did was it made it
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  widely available to a public that some of whom will see this story of, you know, Sauron,
• 3:09
  Mordor, this dark force that's kind of an empire that's kind of, you know, stifling
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  free speech and creativity. And so they're actually, these people are applying this to the American
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  government, to their own country's government, to the war, you know, the, you know, military
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  industrial machine of their own country. And saying like this here is essentially spelling out
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  clearly what is happening, what is wrong with America and what we're protesting against
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  their own country is involved with. So it really struck a chord. Yeah. Over here with some of the,
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  kind of, yeah, politically militarily things that were happening at the time when it came out,
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  when it came out over here. Yeah, I'm funny. You should say that about hippie culture because I was
• 4:00
  quite by a different reading track entirely. I was reading Rupert Everett's autobiography,
• 4:07
  red carpets and other banana skins, which is about the first stage of his career. And he just
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  as a throwaway comment talks about one woman in his circle, like his parents age, who goes away
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  and joins a commune called Lothlorian in the 60s. I'm thinking, oh gosh, so that really was the
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  thing that people were doing. And they were using Tolkienian terms as a shorthand to all sorts of
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  other, we are countercultural, we are protesting. And I've seen the badges, you know, Frodo for
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  president in it. That stuff. Yeah, that, that stuff. And it does, so if we just go back to the point
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  to which the books are published in 1950s, the kind of debates around it then, which Tolkien addresses
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  in his preface is much more about how it reflects on the outcome of the Second World War,
• 5:03
  the bomb, the A-bomb and so on. So that is one of the first things to sort of notice that the
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  books have the applicability which he talked about that each decade, each phase has made their
• 5:18
  own Tolkien. And it's happened quite quickly. So some other writers from the past, it takes
• 5:23
  longer for these cycles to happen, but we're talking it was sort of in overdrive, even towards the
• 5:28
  end of his life. But just going back to 1973, almost all those people were thinking about Tolkien
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  in terms of the books and the art that was inspired by the books. I think the, the beginning of
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  the sort of the cartoon versions, that's the 77, it's a bit later, isn't it? Yeah, I can't remember
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  exactly, but it's not yet become a moving picture of any sort, so it's based on the books.
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  And I think that from an English perspective, everybody here knows what an Oxford professor is.
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  There's a certain tweedy,
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  gent type and he fitted that caricature. So that was quite strongly in people's minds and so that
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  plus the hippie culture was kind of funny, because it seemed like opposite to what he was.
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  Yeah, and, but he was famous enough to have the BBC make sort of programs about him,
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  interview him, which you can find on YouTube. So he isn't obscure, he's not like a forgotten
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  figure, not like Charles Williams or somebody like that from the Inklings. He was noticed, but not
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  his literature was not valued in academic circles. That's absolutely certain. His academic work
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  was valued, but not his books, which were in the Oxford common rooms, were slightly embarrassing,
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  you know, you know, tollers has gone away and written this book about elves, that stuff. So I think
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  while he had his fans and his defenders, you know, from WH aldon onwards,
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  when at the point of which he died, it was seen as a bundle of contradictions that Tolkien had
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  this professorial career and he had his, you know, the lasting legacy of his essays and things,
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  which are still taught and read. And then there was all this fantasy stuff over here,
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  like those little group of inklings put together, you know, a bit iffy, along with CS Lewis,
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  they're all a bit kind of, yeah. So that I think was how it was seen then.
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  Yeah, I know. And it's interesting in America, you have the Tolkien Society of America.
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  Definitely I think latching on to the academic angle. So they meet their first meeting,
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  the Tolkien Society of America was in 1965 and they met beside the statue of Alma Mater
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  on the Columbia University campus. So they're like, so they're invoking
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  as one of the oldest colleges in the US, like really trying to, I think,
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  borrow or get some kind of secondhand, I don't know, pedigree for what they're doing, seeing
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  what they're doing as being worth, worth pursuing, not just from kind of a fan, fun perspective,
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  kind of trivial perspective, but something that's worthy of discussing in depth and
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  treating in articles and symposia and that sort of thing. Yeah, so I think one of the things which
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  kind of helped stabilize some of those contradictions were the work of people like the Tolkien Society.
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  And of course, Christopher Tolkien, who are actually treating the fantasy as seriously as the
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  academic work that he did that Tolkien did. And that real hard work, you know, they were doing
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  the papers, holding the symposium, taking this all seriously in a way which other people weren't
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  the sort of snobby literary people weren't actually kept that side of it alive. And I wonder,
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  it was part of the ingredients that makes him much more, well, we haven't got to today yet,
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  let's move on. So we're talking about our 50 years, Brad. So the 70s we were left with this
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  perplexing figure who's certainly not regarded as great literature, popular but not literature.
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  And then moving on, we start to have people, there's a whole sort of burgeoning of fantasy again.
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  And which is fueled by the books, which has been feeding into people writing that, you know,
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  the classic fantasy three-tone book. But you get outside literature, you're getting things like
• 10:09
  the back sheet, is it the back sheet film? Yeah. And talks about film rights. I mean,
• 10:16
  we were obviously the Beatles tried to make it any one, but that would have been ghastly.
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  Let's plan. I'm pleased that didn't have film. I would have enjoyed it. I would love to see
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  what they did with it. Yeah, the musical might have been all right. But yeah, anyway,
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  that's the inner parallel world, somewhere they've made it, the Beatles in the parallel world. So, yeah.
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  And I think we, I'm beginning to come into my own living memory here, so this helps.
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  So if we think about it in the 80s, it's still a bit, if you said, as I did when I was at Cambridge,
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  I want to actually write my thesis on Tolkien and Lord of the Rings, people did look at you as if,
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  are you sure that's literary enough? I did a, my thesis in my undergraduate degree in my last year
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  was about subcreation and the idea of creativity. And I was looking at CS Lewis and Tolkien.
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  And I know I had to sort of persuade my supervisor that this was sufficiently worthy. I wouldn't have
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  any problem now, because there are courses on it and it would be, there's loads of serious literature
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  written about it, but it wasn't there when I was doing it. So it hadn't yet got over the line
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  of moving to being regarded as literary, but it was prevalent in culture. So we have the Dungeons
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  and Dragons movement movement, yeah. What does Dungeons and Dragons people call themselves as a
• 11:56
  collective fans? Yeah, fandom of that. Beginning of computer games, one of the first things that
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  became a computer game was the Hobbit. I remember it was, people now would think it's just so analogue.
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  It was where you had to type in commands to get through a series of images, but we thought
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  this was amazing. I spent one summer holiday in the 80s playing this. And also the BBC made
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  some fantastic audio versions, which you can still get and still stand up to a listen, including
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  the music, which had been around for a while, but they did a good interpretation of the music,
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  very atmospheric, great cast. And that's certainly where I spent a lot of time listening to that,
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  you know, it was one of my favourite things, on cassette tape back in the day. So we're beginning
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  to get it spreading out, but still I could go up to people and if I said, do you know who Tolkien is,
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  it wouldn't be instant recognition. But I think there's been a sort of, well let's ask about
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  happening in America in the same era. Were you born yet?
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  The 80s, yes. You might not remember that.
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  Wobbling around. Yeah, and I think, and that's where, so, yeah, definitely,
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  like Lord of the Rings, that fantasy culture that wasn't, you know, certainly not mainstream,
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  the high fantasy books wasn't, you know, kind of, yeah, mainstream culture widely accepted.
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  That was a certain strand of fantasy, kind of a hardcore fantasy that people who played games
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  like Dungeons and Dragons would have really loved. And so there's, I think, the greatest
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  association that you had would be between Dungeons and Dragons and Lord of the Rings, which
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  talk about this later, the impact the Lord of the Rings had that's, you know, certain things lifted
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  directly from Lord of the Rings for the creation of Dungeons and Dragons. And then when you have
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  Dungeons and Dragons culturally over here, this association,
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  that Dungeons and Dragons encouraged, if not actively proselytized for the Satan worship,
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  that was a whole, right? So because you have, you do have associations between these people,
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  these people, we're talking like orcs, but they're orcs now. These people who played Dungeons and
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  Dragons read Lord of the Rings, this sort of literature fantasy, this is clearly problematic.
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  So in some cases it's seen with suspicion, sometimes perhaps as a threat of sorts for
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  people, you know, right-minded, upstanding citizens that might need to...
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  Yeah, I think what's going on there is when you get really in love with Lord of the Rings,
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  you kind of live in a world where you're seeing everything through the lens,
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  the Lord of the Rings, it becomes not like a belief system, not like a religion, but it has that
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  power that they become the people you associate with and you've got your own secret language
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  and understanding and shorthands for things. And you can see how people could get suspicious of
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  this. Actually, that reminds me, I did, so cast your mind back to 1987 when I went to college,
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  and at the fair when you have all the University of Societies, I tried to join the Cambridge University
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  Tolkien Society. I did join, I paid my subs, went along to the first meeting and I was such a
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  fish out of water. It was the cliche of extremely... I tried to find a nice word.
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  You can describe them as orcs if you need to.
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  No, no, no, no. They were very gentle folk, but they lacked social skills with women.
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  Let's put it like that. So I come in as bright-eyed lover of Tolkien as a literature, as the book
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  into a room of slightly socially awkward young guys, who's way of sort of welcoming the
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  outsiders talk about different forms of elders. I'm coming in thinking I like this from the point
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  of view of story, I want to write books like this, that's why I'm coming in, that's why I'm in,
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  and I discovered that the way they were relating to Tolkien was at this sort of technical level,
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  which I just wasn't, I needed some crash course in Tolkien's languages to have any common ground.
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  So that's where I think that sense of it was the province of a more nerdy type of person came
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  from is that those who tried to break into it kind of bounced back off because we couldn't sort of
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  relate. That's not the problem now, I think, because it's opened up so more, but that was a 1980s
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  problem. Okay, moving on, we get to the 1990s and at the end, and we of course got the arrival of
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  the internet in the late 90s. Email, hooray. And we get the rumor coming out of New Zealand that
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  somebody is making a film. What was your first reaction when you heard someone was making a film
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  of Lord of the Rings? Well, I'm, I don't know, it's the shamefully late-comer, so I wasn't
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  reading Lord of the Rings. I wasn't something I was aware of, but it went to my to my father's
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  credit, like as soon as that came out, I was out of the country for a while, and then I'd come
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  back and he said it was around around December, this was December 2001, and he said, I'm taking you
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  right now to see Fellowship of the Ring. Okay, so that's where it started. Yeah, so that came over,
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  I saw that, and that's what just like really captivated me and introduced me, and then I just kind
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  of plunged, then jumped straight into the deep end from that, but it was, yeah, yeah, so I can't
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  say what it was like in my circle, it wasn't, it wasn't aware of it then, yeah. So by that point,
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  part of the 90s, I was doing a doctorate in literature, Oxford, so, and talking, looking at it
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  now as literary, it had begun to be more of a sense of its literary value by then, and we were talking
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  about it in our literary circles in Oxford, and my good friend Michael Sinatra, who's now a professor
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  of literature in Montreal, he said, oh, he was the one who told me it was happening, and my reaction
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  was, oh no, that's going to ruin it, because I had in mind those like Harry House, Houseman, those
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  like little figurines, like animated things, I thought, oh, the special effects are going to be
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  terrible, they can't possibly live up to my imagination, the film that my imagination has
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  been playing all these years, I was really worried, who is this Peter Jackson person, you know,
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  how dare he, I was really, really worried, and Michael, bless him, showed me online, one of the early
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  trailers for it, I've heard Peter Jackson talk about this since that trailer was a sort of
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  like experimental things they were putting together, partly to quiet and the worries of people
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  like me, potential audience, the many millions of us who were worried, and I saw that and the landscapes
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  of New Zealand and thought maybe, maybe this is going to be okay, and I wasn't, I didn't go in
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  in to see the film's hostile, I went in hoping, so I was in that band, so I think we can agree that
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  even though Tolkien was important and growing and would often appear on a list of people's
• 20:38
  favourite novels of the 20th century, him and Jane Austen, it's often have, you know, the top two
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  places by two favourite authors, the films then did the thing where his name and his value as a
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  property has gone stratospheric, I mean it's like, if we're going to draw this on a curve, it sort of
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  is doing that and then it goes like that, so going back to you, you fell in love with Tolkien's
• 21:08
  by seeing the film first. Right, yeah. And what did you then think? Did you then wait, did you see
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  all the films, then read the books, or did you? No, I read, I picked up, I picked up, yeah,
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  I picked up the book right after the first film to see what happened next because I was
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  captivated by the world, the ideas, the drama, yeah, the story, the characters, all of that was just
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  a revelation in several ways. And so, yeah, yes, that's why that's when I got into the books and
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  was eagerly anticipating the subsequent films as they came out. Yeah, I can remember the year,
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  you know, each time there was a year between each thing, so you'd come back from the cinema and
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  Aragorn had said something like, let's hunt some walks or something. And you're thinking,
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  you imagine them running across the landscapes and you had to wait a whole year
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  to see that chase. Yeah, the anticipation was fun though, because it was something to really look
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  forward to. So, I think we're describing the global phenomenon just through our own experience of
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  this. So I'm just thinking about your value of Tolkien and he's sort of, so clearly he's given
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  a lot to the whole idea of fantasy on screen. But before we think about that side of him,
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  what about his value to changing the way we look at literature and the place of fantasy and literature,
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  a sort of more, I'm just going to say more serious conversation, but you know what I mean, it's
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  the thing I was, I met in the eighties where you had to argue for him being a literary of literary
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  value, whereas now I think that's gone and he is regarded as being seminal. So looking back with 50
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  years to the status of Lord of the Rings, do you have any feelings or thoughts about it as
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  is placed within literature as a book? Yeah, and his other writings, of course.
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  Yeah, yeah, no, that's a great question. I think that definitely he, I think single-handedly
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  made a case for the value of the genre of fantasy in literary circles, right? So first,
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  there was certainly a stigma, he was kind of carving new ground in his, but he was, he wasn't carving
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  new ground, he was really just kind of dusting off and bringing forward much older and older mode
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  of story, right? And so I think, yeah, that that it's easier to see now, right? So people you can
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  look at, you know, part of the antecedents to Tolkien, and you can really trace a genealogy
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  of serious, he was, he was meticulous, right? You talked about Beowulf, we talked in last time
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  when we were talking about Orricks and possible connections there, you see how well thought out
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  his world as a structure, you see where these certain ideas and strands, tropes and themes,
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  where he's not playing with them, you know, hazardously, he's meticulously crafting stories and,
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  and then now with everything that's come since the publishing of Lord of the Rings from Christopher
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  Tolkien with all of the, you know, history of Middle-earth, showing how painstakingly he was developing
• 24:33
  these ideas. And so I think it's, it's much easier now that you can see all of the, you know,
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  what's off camera off the page, you see how much effort, energy, and really a work of genius that
• 24:50
  it took to put all of this together and went into this. So I think that's helped to open up,
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  like you said, the minds of people to taking this seriously is something that deserves to be
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  studied as a work of art, a work of literature, and a work of cultural significance.
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  I think it's no mistake that he and C.S. Lewis were both medievalists and in Tolkien's case
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  earlier, because when you think of the the great sect texts in those periods, their fantasy works,
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  so bear wolf, we've talked about, which is a liturative poem,
• 25:24
  Sir Gowen in the Green Knight, another a liturative poem, but Mallory, who we don't talk about
• 25:29
  very much in context of Tolkien, but it should be in there, because in a way Mallory,
• 25:36
  with his Arthurian cycle, he is doing the closest thing to the well-building of Tolkien, because
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  the background to Mallory's work is a whole series of stories about Arthur from all sorts of sources,
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  going back many centuries before to over in France and so on, and he's sort of
• 26:00
  building a thread through that, that his Arthurian cycle, and it's in prose, so, and I wouldn't
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  call it a novel, but its story is written in prose, and then at the end of the medieval period
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  going into the Renaissance period, you've got The Fairy Queen, which is a massive work by Spencer,
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  which is an allegorical telling, but obviously The Fairy Queen, it's the world of fairy,
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  with knights and quests and all sorts of stories, so these are the works that were being studied,
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  and it's only when you move on from that, that the fantasy as the genre sort of drops out a little
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  bit, though obviously you can say that some of Shakespeare's greatest plays are fantasy,
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  but I'm thinking further on, so you've got Gulliver's travels, I suppose, Pilgrims progress,
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  though that's sort of allegorical, but it's got giants and things in it, and then you get to the world
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  of the novel, and the popular novels from the 18th century onwards tended to be
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  ones which are like Peregrinations, like travel ones, the sort of Humphrey clinker, that kind of
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  thing, Smollett, or you've got the epistolary novel like Samuel Richardson, or you've got Jane
• 27:29
  Austin, or you've got historical novels, like I'm sort of going forward in time here,
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  Walter Scott, and then you got Charles Dickens, George Elliott, there isn't a big fantasy work
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  there, and fantasy that pops up in the Victorian period is either something like the wonderful
• 27:46
  Alice in Wonderland, or you've got ones who are verging into the sci-fi area towards the end of
• 27:53
  that period, which is things like HD Wells, so I would admit there is the Gothic around, but that's
• 28:01
  horror, Frankenstein, I mean, they are fantasy, but they're sort of in a slightly different
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  bracket in my head, I think, so people who are teaching literary courses and are thinking that
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  the way to go is Ulysses and Virginia Woolf, and all these sorts of, fine, found the idea of it
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  being fantasy, somehow, like fairy stories, children's stuff, and that's where it sort of fell
• 28:27
  away, whereas if you're spending all your academic life teaching, the fairy queen bear wolf
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  going in the green night, the Mortartha and so on, it felt totally natural to think that
• 28:44
  modern fantasy writing could have literary value, so I think it's no mistake that it was
• 28:51
  C. S. Lewis who refounded his form of portal fantasy and Tolkien who founded a sort of new
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  version of a creation of a world fantasy, which he took seriously, Tolkien took his world
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  incredibly seriously, he knew it was a game, so I'm not saying he was humorous, he knew it was like
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  one enormous, wonderful, delightful game, exercise of the imagination, but he also took that
• 29:20
  seriously, because there's nothing more serious than play. Yeah, we should do one of these on
• 29:29
  G.K. Cheston, I must find a cheston expert, because I don't know enough about him, and I know he
• 29:34
  was a huge influence, so looking at I think that I'm very pleased to say 50 years on from the moment
• 29:44
  when Tolkien died where his work was kind of slightly embarrassing for academia, now if you say
• 29:51
  as a student I'd like to do a dissertation on Tolkien, they'll say oh yes, which aspect do you
• 29:57
  want to do it on? They won't say oh you know go away, they'll be interested, and there are some
• 30:03
  fantastic academic books written about Tolkien, papers, and so on, including your own Jacob that
• 30:11
  people can read to sort of open that up in an academic sense. What is for you, what's what academic
• 30:19
  aspects of Tolkien have you followed? What's been the will of the whisper that you followed across
• 30:23
  this particular march? For me, like mythology, myth-building, myth-making, that Tolkien is engaged with,
• 30:36
  for me that's what is fascinating, the development of a cosmology, so part of my academic training
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  is in world mythologies and in different versions of different myths from each of these different
• 30:56
  different cultures, different eras, in different languages, and so there's real affinities that I see
• 31:03
  with how Tolkien is developing his cosmology with his cosmogony, is birth of the world,
• 31:14
  putting that into conversation with some of these world myths is for me very, very enlightening,
• 31:23
  helps to highlight different things that make both Tolkien stand out, and some of these other
• 31:29
  world myths appreciate different aspects of them, so he put so much thought, effort, revisions,
• 31:37
  approach them from different angles, that it's a worthy conversation partner to
• 31:42
  myth that have been around for thousands and thousands of years, so for me that's this part of his
• 31:49
  is kind of putting into conversation, having Tolkien as a conversation partner with
• 31:53
  world myths and what he's doing, so that's one of the things that kind of captured me and got
• 31:57
  me into kind of academic engagement with Tolkien in particular.
• 32:03
  Yeah, so I think that's one of the wonderful things about the richness of the material is that
• 32:08
  you can take it into, you can look at it in a linguistic aspect, you can look at its theology,
• 32:14
  you can look at its well-building, you can look at its themes, you can look at its
• 32:20
  relationship to eco-criticism, I mean it's so rich, and so the fact that people didn't see that
• 32:26
  and thought it was just a fantasy story back in the 80s is that's a real improvement, so
• 32:34
  50 years on we can celebrate that we've matured as judges of Tolkien's work, which is good,
• 32:41
  so thinking about now Tolkien is hot property, no one's going to make a fortune out of writing
• 32:48
  an academic paper on Tolkien, I'm sorry Jacob, that's not what other money lies,
• 32:53
  yeah, so Tolkien now has become a property that has value for the world of film and television,
• 33:02
  so we've have previously discussed things like the rings of power, the Peter Jackson films,
• 33:09
  and so on, but should we move a little bit wider than that and see what else
• 33:15
  owes its existence to there having been Tolkien, because I think a lot of the big
• 33:22
  stonkings, sort of big fantasy series do actually owe their existence to
• 33:27
  they're having been Tolkien to start with, and so I'm looking at you, Wheel of Time,
• 33:33
  the Witcher, what else is there?
• 33:38
  Emma Throne's, I think all of these exist because the Peter Jackson films were success,
• 33:49
  if we rerun history and the fellowship of the ring was panned, that they did animation
• 33:58
  that was just no good, you know, that special effects were rubbish,
• 34:03
  any of the cast was unwatchable, you know, all the things that could have gone wrong,
• 34:09
  Peter Jackson turned out to be a terrible director, I think we would not,
• 34:14
  we would not have had this, because I think it's different from the Harry Potter things that come
• 34:20
  along, I think there's a whole strain of fantasy films of Harry Potter-esque aspect, which follow one,
• 34:28
  all the ones set in schools, like, is it the magicians, that one, which is a high school version,
• 34:36
  and even something like Wednesday, the new Netflix series, these all seem much more like
• 34:43
  sons and daughters of Harry Potter, whereas the big epic fantasy ones seem to own their
• 34:50
  existence to Tolkien, I think that's probably why they're there, but do you think they're right
• 35:00
  thinking that Tolkien's made a way, because I haven't seen these things being as successful,
• 35:06
  Game of Thrones was, because I'd say that was like a kind of bleaker Lord of the Rings,
• 35:13
  it's like Lord of the Rings with Byzantine politics, more of the Rings run by the
• 35:21
  Borses, you know, something like that. Yes, yeah, plus seasonal depression,
• 35:28
  yeah, it's really interesting because I remember having a conversation with somebody
• 35:33
  was pretty soon after Game of Thrones came out talking about Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones,
• 35:39
  kind of putting those in conversation with each other, with a student who was just noticing
• 35:46
  out tonally that Game of Thrones was watching it, that that seemed like it was kind of a one-time
• 35:55
  watching for him, he's like, yeah, like, yeah, I like to enjoy it, I'm not going to watch it again,
• 36:00
  or as with the Lord of the Rings film, it was one that for him, it was palatable that the tone,
• 36:08
  everything, it was something that bore multiple rewatches, and so I think, yeah, there's something
• 36:18
  about the type of show, yeah, that while Game of Thrones tells a particular type of story and
• 36:22
  a particular type of approach to life, I don't know that people want to be having that on repeat
• 36:29
  all of the time and just kind of watching that and those particular lessons, like what you learn
• 36:34
  about humanity and in particular, the negative part of humanity, or that if that's what you want
• 36:41
  reinforced, I think part of what Tolkien does is, while there is certainly you see people who are
• 36:48
  corrupted and you see traders and, you know, especially in the Silmarillion, right, you see some people
• 36:56
  that some some some true tragedies happen, that there is still this kind of like
• 37:03
  undergirding idea of hope, there's some strand of hope that comes through, even even though you're
• 37:10
  you're facing this long decline, right, you know, that the world is actually ending,
• 37:16
  but yeah, there's something here that is hopeful, that is pulling through this, this kind of
• 37:20
  sweetness intermingled with the sorrow, which goes back to Tolkien's cosmology and the creation
• 37:26
  of the world itself, so I think that is is important and sets it apart from a lot of these other works.
• 37:33
  I think it's like the Starglass, you know, the Lady Gladriel's gift to Frodo, the book feels like
• 37:37
  that, it's shining bright in the darkness, and you can bring it out and make it shine,
• 37:42
  funnily enough, today I was doing a school visit about my books to do like an assembly style event,
• 37:50
  part of what I do is I create stories with the children, and they have like a card they can
• 37:58
  select, they can't see what they're selecting, so it's a random selection thing, and then ask them
• 38:02
  which which story they like best, and one of them had had a bittersweet ending, that was one of the
• 38:07
  endings that were selected, and one boy chose that as his favourite story, and I said why why did you
• 38:15
  like that story? And he said, I like endings that don't feel too happy. There's something in us that
• 38:25
  is fine to watch, you know, the Reading Bells sort of ending, I think there is a recognition
• 38:31
  that, you know, we're all going to die, there is an element where it feels closer to a lived experience,
• 38:37
  even though it's a fantasy world, where there is this sadness within the happiness,
• 38:46
  and also a sense of redemption about that, you know, the idea that sacrifice isn't wasted,
• 38:52
  Frodo's sacrifice is worth it, even though it's personally costly, and all that is really the
• 39:00
  most profoundest parts of life, and that's why people rewatch, I'm sure, because it reaffirms
• 39:07
  some of those hopes that we have for the meaning of our existence, it sounds all very serious,
• 39:14
  but that is really the value I get from Lord of the Rings, and many other people do.
• 39:21
  We've talked about the sort of film and TV world, but we mustn't forget, I mean a huge, even
• 39:26
  way bigger, actually, in terms of monetary value, is the games and video games aspect of this.
• 39:32
  Now, I'm not a great game player, but when my kids were growing up, we did have the
• 39:37
  PlayStation games of Lord of the Rings, there was a very good
• 39:46
  sort of EA games, or somebody came out with a sort of playable version of it,
• 39:51
  and I just enjoyed running around in the landscapes that they were created, and this is
• 39:56
  way back, this is back in the 2000, so I'm sure now it's far better, far more sophisticated.
• 40:01
  I'm just not very good at that kind of thing. I don't want to spend hours to learn it,
• 40:05
  but I know a lot of people get a lot of value out of that.
• 40:08
  Are you Jacob a secret gamer?
• 40:10
  I'm a story gamer in that I play games. I don't like getting bogged down in the mechanics and
• 40:22
  things that it's mostly, I follow games that have good solid stories and character develops,
• 40:28
  and that sort of thing, so that those sorts of games I like. So, like, you know, real playing
• 40:32
  games, those video games that are kind of the RPG realm sometimes are a bit difficult,
• 40:37
  because there's a lot of specifics, a lot of points and math that you have to do in those,
• 40:47
  and that isn't as interesting to me as the core of the story, but yeah, but I understand,
• 40:52
  I recognize, and I tried what I think is, you know, Legend of Zelda, the original game,
• 41:00
  I first came out with, for Nintendo, I know that the writers of the first two games were
• 41:05
  big Tolkien fans, and that was, you know, kind of creating this kind of questing fairy tale,
• 41:11
  but the most recent kind of open world game, the Breath of the Wild, the Legend of Zelda,
• 41:18
  Breath of the Wild, massive, beautiful world. I don't think something like that would be possible
• 41:25
  without Tolkien, really, in a sense, right? So, he kind of laid this foundation of world building,
• 41:33
  and what that can do, and I know I was talking with somebody at Netflix a few days ago
• 41:40
  that's in their spectacle and event television programming. So, they're dealing with a big budget,
• 41:48
  things like Stranger Things, like Wednesday, Shadow and Bone, I don't know if there's
• 41:54
  another one of these, so these, these are big budget, they recognize that there needs to be a
• 42:01
  large canvas and a large backdrop, and so they're looking for works that lend themselves well to
• 42:09
  beautiful visuals, you know, sweeping landscapes, these ideas that are really capturing people's
• 42:16
  imaginations, visually, and the world itself, right? So, politically, whatever's happening there.
• 42:24
  So, I think that that's certainly the same here for these video games in that, you know,
• 42:31
  I think the popularity of open world games where you just want to get into and explore a world,
• 42:36
  not necessarily just like follow a quest, and you have kind of like a linear start here,
• 42:42
  go here, and here's the conclusion, but the open world games is really fascinating because it
• 42:47
  gives players a chance to just run around and live as if they're in this world, right? And I know
• 42:56
  that there's some anticipation and mixed feelings by some about the game that's coming out about
• 43:07
  Hogwarts legacy, that's an open world game, so this is an opportunity for people to
• 43:14
  get into Hogwarts and like really get there, like walk around, experience it, touch it, taste it,
• 43:23
  in a sense, in a video game sense. In a video game, in a video game sense, right? The
• 43:29
  theme parks are different thing, which I think there could be some connection there with
• 43:32
  that's a different type of world building and experience, but in the video games, that allows
• 43:37
  you to do more things, right? So it allows you to fight that you aren't probably going to be doing
• 43:42
  to the same degree in your neighborhood. I hope you're not. I'm not encouraging that would
• 43:46
  actually discourage sword fighting, spell casting where you're actually inflicting bodily harm
• 43:53
  on other people. Yeah, it could be a game. Yeah, right. Do it in a video game. Get it out of your
• 43:57
  system, but I think that that like what Tolkien did was he invited people into this world. That's
• 44:01
  why people, you know, kind of dressing up these communes that you were talking about earlier,
• 44:06
  they want to like step into and live this in some way, shape or form, like they want to be a part of
• 44:11
  it. And video games is an excellent way for people to get into that mindset, that kind of immersive
• 44:17
  storytelling experience. Yeah, and it reminds me of, I mean, clearly it's probably
• 44:22
  something to do with the rights because I'm someone who tried this, but we've got the Harry Potter
• 44:27
  world over in Isilanta, isn't it? And in this country, we got the Harry Potter studios experience,
• 44:36
  so extensions, you know, visit, which is close to that visual experience. The one obviously is
• 44:42
  about making the film rather than a world that you enter. And no one's done the Tolkien world,
• 44:48
  unless you can argue, the entirety of New Zealand is that I remember living in Oxford that we
• 44:55
  were thinking, well, let's repurpose Paul Meadow and turn it into Tolkien world. And what would
• 44:59
  you put in it, you know, you'd have like, pneumonia, dungeon experience, and of course, I don't
• 45:06
  think it works because the scale, whereas Hogwarts is like this little, they are little,
• 45:14
  little sets like Diagon Alley, Hogwarts, you know, it does feel more, more theme parky than saying
• 45:22
  we're going to build La Flora, and it would just not work, it would be, it would not feel,
• 45:30
  yeah, it would, it wouldn't have the authenticity, which actually makes us all believe that somewhere
• 45:35
  middle earth exists. So I don't think it, anyway, if someone is planning a Tolkien world, let me know,
• 45:42
  and I'll go and visit it, but I don't think I'd like it. Yeah, I'd love to hear Julia, your thoughts
• 45:49
  on fantasy genre since Tolkien, the kind of echoes, ramifications, things that you've seen,
• 45:59
  people do well, like the kind of positive, yeah, implications of of Tolkien.
• 46:06
  It is interesting that fantasy, so my writing career began in 2006, and actually the dominant fantasy
• 46:14
  genre there was Harry Potter, it brought a lot of money into fantasy publishing, I mean, that's
• 46:22
  just the economics of it had changed. So, and the other big books around at the same time was The
• 46:28
  Philip Pullman, Northern Lights. Both of whom, you can see, I'm sure, JK Rowling read Tolkien and
• 46:39
  it's things like the spiders, that kind of thing feels as though there is an element of she's enjoyed
• 46:46
  the Tolkien fantasy world, but she's actually parking much more to the school story than she is
• 46:54
  the fantasy story, the sort of the worst witch kind of story that already existed.
• 46:58
  So, I think what you see there in fantasy is there's this sort of, it's like a,
• 47:08
  like like a sort of ongoing mixing in of ingredients folding in, coming up with something new,
• 47:16
  Tolkien called it the Coldrinner story, so each time there's a scoop in and a serving,
• 47:20
  but you can see in the sort of adult fantasy books that were published post Tolkien that there
• 47:29
  was an expectation of long big series, that just the fact that it was quite fine to turn up with
• 47:37
  something that was 100,000 words long and in three volumes, he made space for that in a way that
• 47:46
  I don't know if that's good or bad, you know, long form is not always good, but it did sort of
• 47:51
  open that out as an expectation and changed how fantasy publishers thought about things.
• 47:58
  So, I remember reading things like the Stephen Donnellson chronicles autonomous
• 48:05
  covenant, those ones, which felt very elements of Tolkien were creeping in
• 48:14
  and the chronicles are, it's very Tolkien named Pellinor
• 48:25
  about a girl who's a slave who rises up and that's got, I'm trying to think the name of the
• 48:30
  author of those, but there were quite a few books that felt very close to Tolkien and of course
• 48:38
  Eragon, which you know is very, very close. So clearly there was a bit of a stranglehold
• 48:47
  of Tolkien in everyone's imagination and it's quite hard to break away from that because if you
• 48:52
  get such a dominant present like that, if you're trying to think up a Woodland realm, even just
• 48:58
  saying Woodland realm, everyone thinks, oh, you're talking about elves and you're talking, you know,
• 49:01
  so it has been called the anxiety of influence, hasn't it, by T.S. Eliot? I think there was that
• 49:08
  was going on. Have we got through that possibly? I think it's just a question of folding the material
• 49:15
  in better. So, you know, Christopher Harleini has come back and written more books, he won't be
• 49:21
  writing like he did at 16 or 17 when we wrote those books. People, and I think now, what you see
• 49:31
  in a lot of fantasy writing is a picking up the theme of the worry about the environment, which Tolkien
• 49:39
  obviously has with the ends and ceremonies, so he's like way out in front of people worrying about
• 49:47
  this, but you very rarely now read a fantasy series without the environment being really the
• 49:53
  major threat, you know, it's there as a, you know, major major theme, as it should be because it
• 49:59
  is the problem of our times. But I think one of the problems we've got with Tolkien is he was so
• 50:08
  brilliant at creating his whole world-building languages and what have you, that if somebody else
• 50:18
  does that, do we have the patience to give them the serious attention that we give Tolkien?
• 50:24
  I think this is what I see with Patrick Rothfuss and the name of the wind in that series,
• 50:36
  so he's clearly, and he's recognized this, so he loves Tolkien, and so he wants to be as careful
• 50:44
  and precise as possible in his world-building use of language, geography, and that, and what
• 50:53
  that's done from, unfortunately, from a consumer's perspective is they want, I need this book now,
• 51:01
  right? So I read this one, I need the next one, so they want volume, and so, you know,
• 51:07
  folks waiting for so long for the next installment, and you have something similar happening
• 51:14
  with George R. Martin and the Game of Thrones for the next book there, but particularly,
• 51:19
  I think with the name of the wind, I think it's more self-conscious. The Patrick Rothfuss is,
• 51:26
  he understands the seriousness with which people are approaching his work, and because he said,
• 51:34
  like, I am being serious about this, and so people are taking it seriously, and so now,
• 51:38
  it's kind of reflexive, and he's saying, oh, people are going to be taking this seriously,
• 51:42
  I need to make sure it's airtight, and so there might be some anxiety of his own influence
• 51:49
  in the sense of, like, setting up this, you know, here I said, I set the bar this high with the
• 51:55
  first book, and I want to continue this story, I have to ensure that the quality of the second book
• 52:01
  is at least as good as this and thought through, and that everything has to be perfectly
• 52:08
  internally consistent with this world, so I think what Tolkien did unintentionally is, you know,
• 52:17
  he said a standard for the crafting of stories that now, for some people, it's good and bad,
• 52:24
  right, too much sword, that it makes people more self-aware of how they're approaching the
• 52:30
  world-building process, and people, the audience readers of these books are paying more attention
• 52:38
  to that sort of thing, but at the same time, it's making it sometimes perhaps unnecessarily difficult
• 52:45
  for certain authors who are spending far longer in this sort of process than perhaps they need,
• 52:51
  or even want to, to tell the story that they want to tell, they feel obligated to flesh out and
• 52:57
  create an entire, you know, family tree of languages before they begin to write. So we teach creative
• 53:05
  writing at the Oxford Centre for Fantasy, and we very much encourage fantasy writers to come,
• 53:09
  because we understand that urge, and I've got students who are doing this, and the difficulty
• 53:16
  is moving away from that to actually write the story, so you don't want to film a really,
• 53:21
  and you want Lord of the Rings in that sort of, in order for someone to read it.
• 53:29
  Well, yeah, disco. And I think, yeah, and I think Tolkien, what he was interested in doing was
• 53:33
  creating a world, and there were stories that existed within this world. And so that's why
• 53:41
  world-building was so important for him, because he wasn't just concerned about one particular
• 53:45
  story that he wanted to tell, unless it was the story of creation as a whole. That was the kind
• 53:51
  of overarching story, but he, you know, he said he wanted to create kind of essentially a canvas
• 53:59
  that other hand goes broad enough that other hands and minds could connect, right? So he was
• 54:06
  wanting to create his words where a body of more or less connected legend that were linked
• 54:12
  into a majestic hole, but it would be big enough to leave scope for other minds and hands
• 54:18
  to do it, and not just in written form, right? But Tolkien said that initially his grand vision,
• 54:26
  that other people would come in with, he said, wielding paint and music and drama. So
• 54:32
  this was something that's big enough to capture multiple art forms. And, but for writers,
• 54:39
  that's not necessarily what they're about, right? It's the telling of a particular story or a
• 54:44
  self-contained story, or a series of stories, and not necessarily creating an entire canvas that
• 54:48
  people could explore, not just in prose, but in poetry, and in art, and in music, and that's
• 54:59
  absolutely wonderful. And exactly why we set up the center is to encourage all those forms of
• 55:03
  creativity. But actually, your question was really maybe think that I think where it's gone,
• 55:09
  this world building is to collective efforts like the world of Star Trek. So that's quite serious
• 55:18
  about things like learning Klingon, and having languages, and timelines, and multiple timelines,
• 55:23
  and obviously it's somebody somewhere is keeping the Star Trek, you know, Bible of events,
• 55:30
  so that it's all straight. But people say, oh, we're not just going to have a sort of
• 55:35
  funny old language, which could be inconsistent. No, we're going to have a structured language,
• 55:39
  which is Klingon, which is going to be this. And I don't think you'd get that without talking.
• 55:43
  And over in the Marvel Universe, you've got similar sort of seriousness to
• 55:53
  the whole sort of cartoon, the McCommick version, and you know, there's a very seriousness to
• 55:59
  looking at it as an encyclopedia of characters, and different stories, and different versions of
• 56:05
  stories, and the experts in those universes know exactly where they are and what they're doing.
• 56:12
  And I think the Marvel Universe is, you know, huge.
• 56:16
  Yeah, no, you see that in the films, yeah, especially, so I think you're right,
• 56:19
  that you have different stories that are connecting together to make a larger story,
• 56:24
  and right, so you have an overarching story with smaller stories, and that's not unique to
• 56:27
  talking in particular, but I think definitely you're right that you wouldn't necessarily get that,
• 56:32
  the care of crafting all these different pieces in something large, and as sweeping and cinematic,
• 56:39
  you might even see it more so in Star Wars, in like the original Star Wars.
• 56:44
  Star Wars, because you have both you all do these books and comics and video games and films
• 56:51
  and television series, and they all have to be coordinated now, and then which ones
• 56:56
  are seen as being canonical versus, and at what point does it something considered canon?
• 57:03
  And then you have things like the Disney acquisition that kind of throws everything into chaos,
• 57:07
  but the people are tippening attention to all of these different things and keeping them straight,
• 57:13
  and seeing it as one consistent coherent whole, and that's I think absolutely kind of an echo
• 57:22
  or an inheritance or a legacy of Tolkien and the care with which he was putting together an
• 57:28
  entire world with multiple stories, characters, spanning eons of time, and I think it's wonderful.
• 57:36
  Yeah, so I think probably just to sort of sum up this discussion that really looking at
• 57:43
  Tolkien 50 years on, I think whilst maintaining the whole sort of wonderful creativity and playfulness
• 57:50
  of what he's done, is that he's also taught us all that it's fine to be serious about fantasy.
• 57:56
  You know, that it's something that everyone can share, so I think it's a way that it brings people
• 58:04
  together, we can all share it and have fun with that fantasy, and I think that's his real legacy,
• 58:09
  because it sort of sums up what we've been talking about in academia, in the sort of literary world,
• 58:16
  in the extension through games, and that seems to be what's lying at the heart of his success.
• 58:23
  Yeah, and I'd think what I'd add to that is it's truly mythic what he's doing,
• 58:30
  and in part of that, like in myth, there's a myth almost in a sense requires belief in it,
• 58:38
  right? You have to buy into it, you have to have a suspension of disbelief, which is
• 58:44
  stated positively belief, right? So you have to go in with the possibility of belief,
• 58:50
  right, with the risk, the hazard of belief, and he genuinely believed in his world,
• 58:58
  right? He saw what he was doing as being real, and as having some real lasting value,
• 59:04
  that at the act of sub-creation, as being valuable in and of itself, right? So in
• 59:10
  Mythopia, his poem, he states, you know, that these are things, these works, these ideas,
• 59:18
  they're enduring, and he believes they could continue to endure and take on more greater life,
• 59:23
  in some way, shape or form, but the scope and scale, I was having to, no, I'm thinking back,
• 59:29
  the quality of what he's doing is mythic, right? And so in Lewis's review of Fellowship of the
• 59:36
  Rings, he's talking about, you know, how people are receiving it, and Lewis says,
• 59:44
  what shows we are reading myth, not allegory, what's, you know, direct kind of one-to-one comparison,
• 59:49
  is that there are no pointers to specifically theological or political or psychological
• 59:54
  application. Myth points for each reader to the realm he lives in most. It is a master key,
• 1:00:00
  use it on point or you like. So Tolkien didn't have a specific point necessarily who's trying to make
• 1:00:07
  his dealing with the fundamental, you know, human experience and did so in such a significant and
• 1:00:15
  poignant way that anybody, no matter where you are, they could find some point of relevance,
• 1:00:19
  it could resonate in some way. And so he thought about it and cared about it and believed in
• 1:00:27
  the life that he was living, right? I think that he appreciated his own world. You read his
• 1:00:32
  letters, right? There's significant overlap between what he believes, you know, his religious life,
• 1:00:39
  his political life, right? His life is an environmentalist in a sense. Well, he believed and cared
• 1:00:46
  about deeply. And so he took that care that he had for life and put that into his writing. And so
• 1:00:53
  because of that, you know, deep belief that he has in the world that he was living in, I think
• 1:00:58
  that's what makes it so powerful and relevant. He wasn't just putting on shows like,
• 1:01:02
  what's going to convince people that what's going to keep people reading or
• 1:01:08
  should I put in a plot twist here? Yeah, I need to act break or whatever, right? He's more
• 1:01:13
  concerned about what are these? Well, how does history unfold? Right, no, he's actually right,
• 1:01:19
  right? And what do humans do? What is the human story? And like really because he really cared
• 1:01:24
  about that and put that into that that was the bedrock of his writings and his characters and
• 1:01:29
  everything that that that's what I think has allowed it to endure so long and have such a lasting
• 1:01:36
  impact on the world itself. And that's actually another very helpful insight into the impact of
• 1:01:44
  Lord The Rings is from Orden, the poet Orden, who was one of the early reviewers. And he
• 1:01:50
  sums up what you were just saying really. He says to begin with, no previous writer has to my knowledge
• 1:01:55
  created an imaginary world and a famed history in such detail. But it is a world of intelligible
• 1:02:01
  law, not mere wish. The reader's sense of the credible is never violated. So I think that's what
• 1:02:09
  sums it up that it basically feels real talking has been the subcreator that he was aspiring to be.
• 1:02:19
  So even though the world just exists in our imagination, it's as real as anything like that can be.
• 1:02:26
  And certainly for me as a writer, so taking this down to the personal level, I don't think I
• 1:02:31
  would be a writer today if I hadn't read Tolkien because I wanted to do that.
• 1:02:37
  I wanted that is that first to do that. I said, wow, you did that. I want to do that. I don't do it
• 1:02:44
  in the same way as him at all. But he is the inspiration that I want to follow. So you know,
• 1:02:55
  I'm very pleased that he joined us on the earth for the length of time he did.
• 1:03:02
  What about you? Is that something that are you inspired to be creative as a result of reading
• 1:03:07
  Tolkien? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And in my own writing, that's hovering in the background.
• 1:03:16
  And I think what he, for me, showing that the people that exist in whatever fantasy world that you
• 1:03:24
  have, they have beliefs like Tolkien himself had certain beliefs. And so you see what the elves
• 1:03:31
  believe, what the orcs believe, what, you know, Melkor believes what any of the other, I know,
• 1:03:40
  I nor believe. And you see that shapes their world, how they act as well. And so that's something
• 1:03:49
  that's kind of constantly as I'm like, what they're not, this isn't just how they're, what they're
• 1:03:55
  doing. It's what they're thinking about. There's more that's kind of going on in people's minds
• 1:04:01
  in the background and creating that. So what is, what is the world? What are, what are the thoughts?
• 1:04:05
  What's the world view? That's something that is definitely stuck with me in, in my own writing.
• 1:04:14
  Thank you. And so to finish, we have two things we do. One is wearing all the fantasy worlds is the
• 1:04:21
  best place for something. And then we have a tip. So we've been talking about talking 50 years on
• 1:04:27
  almost from the day he died. So I was thinking, where in all the fantasy world is the best place
• 1:04:35
  to be talking? Think here about him as a professor of languages and literature. So if you had a
• 1:04:44
  little professorial character sitting in some, in one of these fantasy worlds, what would be a good
• 1:04:49
  place to be, do you think? The treaty gentleman who smokes a pipe? Where would you take it?
• 1:04:54
  Well, I was, yeah, when I was, I don't know if the jacket would work as well, but in the same
• 1:05:00
  world I mentioned, you know, the name of the wind by Patrick Rothfuss, the school system there,
• 1:05:06
  right? So it's a university. And so thinking about that university setting and not just university
• 1:05:12
  setting, but where language is directly tied to magic, where Tolkien's use of language, he would
• 1:05:20
  be able to work different types of magic than he already has in the pros and worlds that he built.
• 1:05:26
  I think that would be, I think he would probably enjoy that.
• 1:05:30
  That's a very good shout. I was thinking of version of the Grins with the diversity world,
• 1:05:34
  which again, but I came down to thinking actually that he would fit in very well in Jonathan
• 1:05:40
  Strange and Mr. Neural, the Susanna Clark. I think you'd feel quite at home in one of the,
• 1:05:47
  you know, arcane university rooms there, the practical magicians. Yeah, I think I could see him
• 1:05:53
  fitting in very well and actually not noticing much difference. It's a bit like Oxford.
• 1:06:02
  And what about a tip? Have you got a tip to share with us?
• 1:06:05
  Yeah, so looking at Tolkien's life as a whole, one of the things that I've done, you know, I,
• 1:06:11
  I can't blame my parents for this for not raising me from the youngest of age, letting me know who
• 1:06:17
  Tolkien was and what he made. But I have learned from them. And so one of the first books I've
• 1:06:26
  been reading to my, my little son is called John Ronald's Dragons. It's a children's book. Are you
• 1:06:33
  familiar with that? No, sounds wonderful. Yeah, so it's a Carolyn McAllister and Eliza illustrated
• 1:06:40
  by Eliza Wheeler. Gorgeous illustrations. It's a book about Tolkien's young life, because
• 1:06:47
  it just took the big dark here. You can see just this style. You see Tolkien, it's basically
• 1:06:55
  taking him through his childhood about how he loved dragons, how his mother read him stories,
• 1:07:00
  and how he's looking for dragons in the world around him. And he's not quite finding those,
• 1:07:08
  he's looking for them at school, he's making up languages, and he's exploring, finds different
• 1:07:19
  bits and pieces in the environment, a church, you know, he finds not dragons, but different parts of
• 1:07:25
  things. And in war, he finds different things that aren't quite dragons, right, tanks that are
• 1:07:31
  belching flames. And then, but then later, as he's a professor, he writes, you know,
• 1:07:38
  in a hole in the ground, lived the Hobbit. And then he talks about his, you know, Bilbo, and how
• 1:07:43
  Bilbo is the one that actually leads him to find the dragon that he was looking for since he was
• 1:07:50
  a child. And so it's a sweet story. That's absolutely charming. Tell us the title of that again.
• 1:07:55
  Yeah, so this is John Ronald's Dragons by Carolyn McHallister, illustrated by Eliza Wheeler.
• 1:08:03
  Okay. And it's actually, it's well researched. So you have, and there's, you know, an author's note
• 1:08:09
  that has, you know, full kind of like one page biography of Tolkien, the illustrator's note,
• 1:08:14
  and she, she notes all of the different historical references that she's included,
• 1:08:20
  like the different colored fairy books that Tolkien used, including those, right?
• 1:08:26
  Which, and different things, yeah, languages that are kind of callbacks Easter eggs
• 1:08:32
  are actually spelled out here in the illustrator's note. There's a bibliography at the end
• 1:08:37
  with, you know, for more. For a picture book, that's pretty hard to talk about, right? So it's
• 1:08:41
  right, but the kids aren't reading this part, but it's, it's, yeah, but I am so for the parent
• 1:08:46
  and the other dogs. So there's, there's something for everyone, but it's just a sweet story. And,
• 1:08:50
  you know, my son knows who John Ronald is, and we talk about him sometimes, he knows who's
• 1:08:56
  Malguise, because he's here in the book, and we talk about that. So it's, yeah, so that's my,
• 1:09:01
  my tip is if, if, for those of you who want to share your love of Tolkien and what he's brought
• 1:09:09
  to your life and your imagination, that book, John Ronald's Dragons is a great way to introduce that
• 1:09:14
  to younger readers and minds. We must invite them on the podcast. That sounds fabulous.
• 1:09:21
  So my tip is, is it January now or early February? And you may be thinking about getting fit. So
• 1:09:32
  my children who have all grown up have given my husband this app, which is a walking app,
• 1:09:39
  which maps number of steps you do onto the journey of the fellowship. And the first
• 1:09:45
  instalment is you walk from Hobbiton to Bri. Now this is all very well, but actually the map they give
• 1:09:51
  isn't terribly detailed. So the perfect, it's, it's nice, but it's not as good as my old favorite
• 1:10:00
  book, which I have on my shelf, which is the Journeys of Frodo by Barbara Straykey. So my top tip is
• 1:10:07
  if you're going to do this walking app, marry it by, we're following the journeys in Barbara's
• 1:10:12
  wonderful book where she has done a wonderful, everything's on there where they stop for lunch,
• 1:10:19
  where they meet the black rider. And it really helps. If ever you've been confused,
• 1:10:23
  reading Lord of the Rings, exactly where Bri is in relation to Archie and all that kind of thing,
• 1:10:29
  just look at her maps. She's done a wonderful job. So my top tip, if you want to get fit,
• 1:10:34
  walk to Bri or eventually to Wardle, but have alongside the Journeys of Frodo book, which is
• 1:10:42
  I think still in print, but it's, it's a real assistance when you're reading Lord of the Rings as well.
• 1:10:48
  So Jacob, thank you so much. I'm sure we'll be talking again about the 50th anniversary of Tolkien's
• 1:10:54
  death, but I just wanted to start the year by having an overview of where we've reached in 2023.
• 1:11:02
  So thank you very much.