Latest / Mythmakers / Mythmakers Encore: Tolkien's Modern Reading with Holly Ordway

Transcript

Mythmakers Encore: Tolkien's Modern Reading with Holly Ordway · Mythmakers

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
• 0:10
  creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding, I'm
• 0:16
  an author but I also am director of the Centre and today it is a really great pleasure to
• 0:24
  say that we have a special guest her name is Holly Ordway. Now Holly first came to my attention
• 0:32
  and because she has written this splendid book called Tolkien's Modern Reading, Middle
• 0:37
  Earth Beyond the Middle Ages and that's what we're going to be spending our time talking about today
• 0:44
  but before we do that Holly why don't you introduce yourself and say what you get up to in your day
• 0:50
  job? Well thank you Julia and it's just a pleasure to be on your podcast so obviously I'm a writer
• 0:58
  the Tolkien's Modern Reading One of my books I work for the Word on Fire Institute where I'm the
• 1:04
  Fellow of Faith and Culture so basically I have the great blessing of being a full-time writer,
• 1:10
  speaker I also cultivate writing groups within the Word on Fire Institute so teaching creative
• 1:16
  writing is a really important part of my work and I'm also a visiting professor of apologetics
• 1:22
  at Houston Christian University which has a master of arts in cultural apologetics that I've been
• 1:28
  involved with for many years so sort of a mix of apologetics presenting the Christian faith,
• 1:35
  teaching people how to do that graciously and well especially through culture and the arts
• 1:41
  and the imagination is one strand of my work and then the other strand of my work really quite a
• 1:47
  major one of the strand probably major part of my work is as Tolkien scholar working you know more
• 1:55
  and more biographically on Tolkien the results of which one of which is Tolkien's Modern Reading
• 2:02
  which we're discussing now and then a book that'll be coming out later this summer called Tolkien's
• 2:08
  Faith the Spiritual Biography which we're not going to talk about today but I just mentioned to
• 2:13
  peek the interest of your listeners yeah because we are hopefully going to talk about that later
• 2:20
  in the year so Holly thinking about Tolkien and the word modern that isn't the first word most
• 2:27
  of us go for because we have all well most of the people listening to this will have followed the
• 2:33
  usual story which is Tolkien was very keen on Icelandic stories and medieval stories like
• 2:41
  Sagauein and the Green Knight holding the stories like bear wolf and so on and it's very hard
• 2:48
  to imagine him being interested in anything say you know even Shakespeare seems a bit too
• 2:54
  bit too soon but Tolkien but the really enjoyable thing for me reading your book was it was like an
• 3:03
  enormous box of chocolates that I opened and I could just eat I had to stop myself bolting it all
• 3:09
  down in one go and because you've made a very convincing case for the fact that Tolkien was a reader
• 3:17
  and that didn't mean that his interest stopped back in with what he taught academically it's a
• 3:24
  sort of a wrong association so as there is such a lot in this book and I really would recommend
• 3:30
  people just go and buy the book we're not going to cover everything at all in this podcast
• 3:34
  but I thought we'd break it down into several groups of things that you have traced
• 3:40
  through to his later work so if you're happy what we'll do is we'll start with the things that he
• 3:47
  read as a child so let's work out when that is Tolkien is born right at the end of the Victorian era
• 3:56
  so what kind of things was Tolkien the little boy little boy in short trousers what was he
• 4:03
  reading and what was it that from that reading he carried forward into writing the Hobbit the Lord
• 4:09
  of the Rings the Silmarillion well this is such a big such a big question I'll say a book
• 4:16
  a book length question as you know so we're just going to get little little tidbits of
• 4:22
  of information here so he was a reader all his life and in a sense this seems almost
• 4:32
  inescapable given his his his great literary gifts his his great talent for for communicating these
• 4:39
  wonderful stories you know that's something that surely must have been drawn from a lifetime
• 4:45
  reading and it was but it is amazing how easy it is to to lose track of that as we move into looking at
• 4:52
  his his professional life and then one of the things that I discovered in researching Tolkien's
• 4:57
  modern reading is that these things are both true it's not an either or he definitely did have a
• 5:05
  massive professional knowledge and interest in medieval literature in the sagas quite possibly
• 5:11
  that is the most important influence on his writing this is all true and there's in a lot of great
• 5:16
  scholarship on it but because that's true doesn't mean that it isn't also true that he read so many
• 5:23
  things that were that were modern and I just wanted to know at the beginning that this was such a
• 5:28
  void to discovery for me to write Tolkien's modern reading because I also started out when I began
• 5:34
  the epic of writing this book thinking exactly the same thing as you mentioned that surely you
• 5:40
  know surely he he was just exclusively or mainly interested in medieval literature but I always had
• 5:48
  this sort of nagging question of you know well he he he was growing up and had his adult life in
• 5:55
  a time when there was a lot of really interesting fantasy being written did he know about any of it
• 6:01
  or was he just oblivious I was just curious and there didn't seem to be any good scholarship on
• 6:06
  that subject and then it started also nagging at me the Lord of the Rings is so compelling to modern
• 6:12
  audiences how how could this be written by a man who was only imaginatively nurtured by medieval
• 6:21
  literature this doesn't this isn't quite track and so that set me off when this this project of
• 6:27
  tracing his reading and discovering oh wow he actually read quite a lot through his whole life
• 6:37
  and that makes so much better sense of the way that his creative imagination was formed and of
• 6:43
  course to get back to your your question that started when he was a boy so some of the things that
• 6:49
  he enjoyed then included Andrew Lang's fairy tales so he read the the colored fairy books the
• 6:55
  red fairy book was a particular favorite that he notes he enjoyed well lots you know fairy tales
• 7:05
  in in general he enjoyed lots of boys own kind of adventures he loved H. Rider Haggard authors
• 7:11
  like that and so we can sort of see him getting a flavor of these adventure stories these fantasy
• 7:21
  stories quite quite early on he also enjoyed the George McDonald's tales princess and the goblin
• 7:29
  and his other his other stories although that didn't that enjoyment didn't last into his adult
• 7:36
  his adult life later much later actually towards the end of his life became much more critical
• 7:42
  of of George McDonald's approach literature literary approach a little too allegorical for him I think
• 7:50
  but it certainly fed him imaginatively and then as we move into him being you know a young man
• 7:56
  you know he he loved William Morris for instance and adventure writers like SR Crocket
• 8:01
  but I don't want it to sort of recap the entire several chapters yes yeah so as I said there's so
• 8:07
  much to say that we could just pick out a couple of highlights and that might be of interest to our
• 8:11
  readership and and let's just pause a little bit about the boy's own adventure because
• 8:17
  this was a sort of literature that was developed for boys at school that kind of age of boy
• 8:26
  the idea was it was building young men for the empire so it's got a sort of quieter
• 8:32
  it's not a million miles away from Kipling though Kipling's more interesting when he takes it on
• 8:38
  but you point out that the two books that he gave to the library at his old school is that correct
• 8:44
  are in this genre and you do a wonderful you read them so that we don't have to read them
• 8:53
  but you also look at the difference between the treatment of empire in these stories and Tolkien's
• 8:58
  own writing and I thought that was a particularly interesting you know I loved that part of your
• 9:03
  story your book so would you mind just filling in a couple of details about that to explain what
• 9:11
  time mean about he takes empire differently yeah and that's that's one of the fruits of doing
• 9:17
  this particular project I sent myself out not just to identify the titles that Tolkien knew or
• 9:23
  had read but insofar as it was possible to read them all as you said sometimes so that you don't
• 9:29
  have to your dear reader and sometimes that you might want to because yeah but in the case of the
• 9:34
  boy's own adventure well we live in a time where culturally we're much more sensitive to racism
• 9:44
  and you know anti-semitism and very rightly so and so much so that we can you know
• 9:51
  we're very sensitive to seeing it it can be a bit shocking to read something of that era where
• 9:58
  you need have almost no sensibility whatsoever to notice how utterly racist it is it isn't hiding
• 10:05
  it it comes out and it waxes you in the head with just horrific statements I don't even want to quote
• 10:11
  you know it sort of default assumption that anybody with with brown skin was somehow you know subhuman
• 10:19
  or at least not really not really worth considering not all of the boys on adventures were that way
• 10:26
  but it was certainly much more common than well it was extremely common and so much so that it was
• 10:34
  you know you just kind of have to accept that it's there you're going to have to encounter it when
• 10:38
  you read these stories and there's also a very strong sense of yes of empire that's you know the
• 10:45
  British people are going to go out and have this empire and that is unambiguously good now of course
• 10:51
  empire is neither unambiguously good nor unambiguously bad it's as complex as the people who were
• 10:58
  living it out but there's definitely a sense in these stories that ra ra you know for the empire
• 11:05
  we are definitely the rightful rulers of the world no questions asked so then reading these
• 11:13
  and knowing that Tolkien read authors like Herbert Hans Alexander Donald who wrote particularly
• 11:19
  sort of racist um story set in the outback realizing then that he
• 11:25
  differed from these he made it a definitely a conscious shift away from these toxic elements
• 11:32
  and I think that that's really that was really illuminating for me um he you know growing up
• 11:39
  in this culture he could easily have taken a lot of these assumptions on board without
• 11:44
  himself being consciously racist but still appropriating these tropes and these images
• 11:50
  and by and large he rejects them now there are one or two unfortunate images that do make
• 11:57
  it their way into the Lord of the Rings which people will call attention to but if you look back
• 12:01
  at the kind of literature that he grew up with it's quite striking to see how thoroughly he has
• 12:08
  rejected that entire approach for instance in the Lord of the Rings we've got the whole
• 12:14
  story of Ganburigan the aboriginal figure um and if you look at some of the stories that he would
• 12:21
  have read when he was growing up these were figures that would have been treated with contempt
• 12:26
  ridicule treated as subhuman um you know that would taking them as equals would not have been
• 12:34
  an imaginative possibility for someone like hands or a Donald. In the Lord of the Rings
• 12:40
  we have Thayoden treating respectfully with Ganburigan um asking for his advice um we see
• 12:48
  um Aoma being maybe a little bit you know possibly a little bit racist like well what does he know
• 12:53
  and and getting put down like no no he's correct and then I think most strikingly
• 13:00
  the the wild men help them you know help the help the men of Rohan and then when air going
• 13:06
  as king and he comes he comes back he asks Ganburigan what would you like what do you what do you
• 13:13
  want um and Chris Ganburigan's request is that he be allowed he and his people be allowed to live
• 13:22
  freely and not be hunted anymore like animals and this is granted and King you know King
• 13:29
  Erdogan King Alessar grants them the the the woods but I think this is striking in that Tolkien
• 13:35
  is not glossing over racism middle earth he is acknowledging that the people of Rohan did behave
• 13:42
  in a racist manner toward the wild men they used to hunt them and it's a really subtle point
• 13:49
  that is often overlooked that Tolkien is is really challenging the kinds of boy zone tropes that
• 13:55
  he would have grown up with and saying yeah this is a sort of thing that happened and it shouldn't
• 14:01
  have and in middle earth we're going to show that it happened and also show that it shouldn't have
• 14:06
  and I think that's a really good example of the way that he's creatively engaging um with some of
• 14:11
  these more difficult tropes from from his boyhood reading yes and you also get the wonderful moment
• 14:18
  when pharaoh mere actually stops and says and thinks about the motive of the enemy the south
• 14:23
  south are on the fallen soldier um and one of the things that you don't find in boy zone stories
• 14:30
  is much worried about what everyone else is thinking about your presence there so I mean I think
• 14:35
  that's a so I think you're right um Tolkien is very advanced both in what he writes and in his
• 14:43
  you know his own personal reaction to people asking him about the origins of his name and all
• 14:48
  sorts of things um chose his advance for a man of his era doesn't mean that he's you know
• 14:53
  fully signed up to what we would now expect but let's give him a break you know he's we're talking
• 14:58
  about pretty much 80 years ago um so in his own context his his advanced excellent so um
• 15:06
  of all of those stories that he read as a child what do you think would be the one that he would
• 15:13
  point to as his his kind of favorite among them is it the fairytales um I'm not saying the one
• 15:21
  that influenced him most because of course you can be influenced by something you don't like
• 15:25
  you can be like and you make that point there can be the writing against something but with C. S.
• 15:30
  Lewis we get a clear sense where he sort of picks out a few books in surprise by joy that these
• 15:36
  are the ones that you know lit my imagination is there something similar for Tolkien that people
• 15:41
  should perhaps actually go away and read and and think about well I think in terms of sparking
• 15:48
  his imagination one author that he encounters a little well we don't know quite when he first encountered
• 15:55
  the full works of William Morris but he encountered um William Morris to a certain extent as a boy
• 16:00
  because as a retelling of the story Sigurd in the red fairy book that comes from from Morris
• 16:07
  but then certainly by the time that he got to Oxford and undergraduate he was reading
• 16:11
  William Morris and these are these sort of adventures these these pros and romances in the
• 16:18
  medieval sense of the word where Morris is taking um making new fantasy stories sometimes set
• 16:24
  in fantasy worlds and telling them in a deliberately archaic style um very distinctive archaic
• 16:32
  style and Tolkien was absolutely knocked out by them he read everything that William Morris
• 16:39
  wrote as far as I can tell I had to send like 11 volumes of his of his works at one point
• 16:45
  and we know we know that he was specifically influenced by several of them because he names them
• 16:51
  and one of the ways that this influences him is that he reads some of
• 16:56
  Morris's pros romances that mix verse and prose and he even writes to to Edith that he's going to
• 17:02
  try that and he does um in some of his early tales to the legendarium so we can see that you
• 17:09
  know Tolkien himself is pointing out quite early on the way that he's inspired by another author's
• 17:15
  technique in this case Morris to to try something out and if you look at the early stories of say
• 17:21
  the fall of Gondolin and you've read William Morris you can absolutely see that he's he's
• 17:28
  imitating assimilating Morris's archaizing style very very archaic in language and the
• 17:36
  interesting thing is that this disappears almost entirely by the time he gets to the Lord of the
• 17:41
  Rings because he's he's mastered the way that the way to use archaisms Morris never did Morris
• 17:49
  wasn't a linguist Morris was just sort of making things up as he went along um and it makes
• 17:54
  Morris is not terribly readable today um he's he's a niche interest
• 18:01
  Tolkien takes that influence and transforms it he takes the idea of using archaic phrasing
• 18:09
  and then figures out how to do it in a way that is utterly natural his characters only speak
• 18:16
  with the more archaic tones in moments that are appropriate in moments of high emotion or high
• 18:22
  solemnity and of course is balanced by the the naturalism of of the hobbits so again we have a
• 18:29
  very interesting study of the way that we have a an important early influence that he takes up
• 18:35
  into his creative imagination digests and and transforms yeah it's interesting actually that
• 18:44
  William Morris who again I think we've we've had a myth maker um on him with Ingrid Hansen who's
• 18:49
  a specialist on Morris and um so I'll put a link in the show notes people want to listen because
• 18:54
  he's such a complex character but you would have said during his lifetime people would have thought
• 18:59
  that he's creative footprint was going to be about his prose writing in his poetry but actually
• 19:05
  now it's probably more about his politics and his ascetic the William Morris ascetic which is
• 19:11
  incredibly powerful and then if you don't know what it is just google it and you'll see oh yes
• 19:16
  I do know what it is so um yeah I've absolutely fascinating figure and because of his interest in
• 19:23
  Iceland and Icelandic stories you could well see there's a lot of common ground between him and
• 19:29
  talking so moving forward um the contemporary era of children's book for him were obviously the
• 19:38
  1930s and when his late 20s 1930s when he's got his own family and we know from the Father Christmas
• 19:46
  letters that he is an involved parent he's creating stories for his children he's reading to them
• 19:53
  what's if the current more current generation of stories so we're thinking Edwardian early 20s
• 20:01
  would you say were the what most notable ones for you to pick out as an influence I'm thinking
• 20:07
  more of the Hobbit here the way he decided to tell the Hobbit I think in the contemporary what's
• 20:13
  the bedtime story well isn't it because one of the one of the specific influences that he notes
• 20:19
  for um the Hobbits is is George McDonald so that's worth noting a little bit of Donald is in the
• 20:24
  Victorian era but he notes McDonald as as a specific influence um of the books of that era that
• 20:32
  were notable for the Hobbit one is a charming book that is I think very difficult to find today
• 20:38
  called the marvelous land of snurgs by the remark we named EA Wick Smith um and snurgs are very
• 20:47
  Hobbit like um and Tolkien loved it um and and his children loved it so this is a uh this is a book
• 20:57
  that was sort of feeding that that um creative imagination um of of that time he also as we go
• 21:05
  forward into the into the thirties he was a great admirer of um Arthur Ransom the swole his
• 21:12
  Amazon series and in fact quite late in life he had a he had a volume of secret water on his
• 21:18
  bookshelves so he clearly retained an affection for it um even into his his his late life and the
• 21:26
  Ransom books were favorites of his children but they're also books that he enjoyed as we as we know
• 21:32
  from an absolutely charming exchange of letters that he had with with Ransom Ransom wrote to him
• 21:39
  and about the Hobbits and pointed out that in the first edition he had had made some um
• 21:46
  phrases that seemed off because he called Bilbo a man at one point and says that this
• 21:51
  is a hobby is not a man so why would you why would you call him that and Tolkien could be prickly
• 21:58
  when when criticized but he could also be very open to criticism when it was presented
• 22:04
  in a way that was clearly showing sympathy with his own with his own aims and Ransom just hit
• 22:11
  the note perfectly he writes as a humble Hobbit fancier and and and presents it as if it was just
• 22:18
  a scribal mistake basically uh similar to how Lewis had had had framed some of his own comments
• 22:24
  on Tolkien's work and Tolkien responded um enthusiastically made the changes in the next
• 22:31
  printing of the Hobbits so we have that greater consistency of phrasing thanks to Ransom
• 22:38
  and they had it just a delightful exchange of letters in which Tolkien expressed his appreciation
• 22:43
  for for Ransom's writings and these are books that are worth reading they are still in prints and
• 22:50
  they are very much worth reading um I'm currently engaged in in reading them to my God children
• 22:56
  they're wonderful children's adventures um they're very wholesome ones um no you know very
• 23:04
  well drawn characters um and interestingly they're not fantasies for the most part there's a couple
• 23:10
  that have an illness but the main body of the story swallows Amazon swallowdale once like that
• 23:17
  secret water their stories of a family of children and their friends who go on holiday admittedly
• 23:24
  with a freedom that seems fantastical to those of us who live in you know the 21st century
• 23:31
  what the parents just let them go off on an island and camp for a month um but it was realistic
• 23:37
  for the time and they have perfectly sort of ordinary adventures very well told very engaging
• 23:45
  and I think this is worth noting because Tolkien as a writer chose to work in the genre of fantasy
• 23:53
  but that by no means indicates that he only enjoyed fantasy writing many of the children's
• 23:59
  authors that he enjoyed growing up with fantasists as we've already been mentioning
• 24:04
  but he also enjoyed more realistic stories including more realistic children's stories like the
• 24:10
  swallows names on the books but what's interesting from the fantasy point of view in the swallows
• 24:14
  and amazons is you see the children creating the fantasy so they they create characters themselves
• 24:21
  of pirates and they give ordinary people different names so you watch the game being played and I
• 24:28
  think that's very appealing that's one of the reasons why there's such wonderful books um because it
• 24:33
  does feel absolutely in the mind of children on holiday you know it's their wonderful books I agree
• 24:40
  with you and the other thing of course about random is he did his own illustrations and drew his own
• 24:45
  maps which of course Tolkien I think is a bit Tolkien's a better craftsman in that sense but that
• 24:51
  example of an illustrator a writer being his own illustrator I think was very encouraging
• 24:59
  um yes yeah just on the um the the the question of illustrations and maps one of the things I
• 25:05
  love finding out from your book is about the Tolkien's aspirations for his own map based on
• 25:13
  um the the map that he got from you might be able to put your finger on the reference quicker than
• 25:20
  me um the the pottery shirt that was created yes I heard yes he's one of the he's one of the
• 25:27
  major influences H writer Haggard um and that's that that's the shirt of eman artist and I've got
• 25:34
  an image of it in my photogallery um this is and that falls sort of into the category of boy's
• 25:40
  own adventure um but also gets an entire chapter of its own in in my book I've got the I've got
• 25:47
  the picture here so we can there we go yes everybody that's the shard of eman artist and this is
• 25:55
  yeah this is a really fascinating instance of Tolkien um of genuine influence um that we can trace
• 26:02
  this is from um a story by H writer Haggard um and an adventure story from the book she 1887
• 26:12
  which is a sort of a boy's own adventure with fantastic elements um these these characters go
• 26:19
  off to Africa and they discover um this basically immortal woman um known as she who must be obeyed
• 26:27
  and it's it's you know they fall under her thrall and all that and the shard is is the start of the
• 26:33
  story it's the it's the engine the machine that starts everything going because it's got um the
• 26:39
  story of um of who she is and how she has affected um this one particular family and this sort
• 26:47
  of quest for vengeance um written on the shard now the interesting thing is that Haggard didn't
• 26:53
  just invent this shard for the story but he manufactured an artifact um an actual pottery
• 26:59
  shard had it inscribed in and Greek marked it up it's so realistic um that he was we showed it
• 27:07
  to some different people and many of them knowledgeable people thought it was real
• 27:11
  and then had it reproduced as an image in the frontispiece of of his book um and it's currently
• 27:18
  in museum marked as effectively fortunately um but the shard itself as an artifact
• 27:25
  is very important to the plot but I think one of the things that captivated Tolkien's attention
• 27:32
  mentioned specifically mentions the shard as something that interested him as a boy
• 27:38
  it's an artifact that's extra textual that adds this very similitude to the whole story
• 27:45
  and that ultimately is what he does with the book of mezzar bull um because we read about it
• 27:51
  in the Lord of the Rings this this book with the blackened um you know pages and the last you
• 27:57
  the last words of the dwarves the drums the drummers from the deep they are coming it's such a
• 28:02
  fantastic bit of the story but he also created three pages from this book um which are now uh you
• 28:12
  can see them they're at the they're at the uh um Haggard Museum of Art at um in uh
• 28:19
  Marquette University in Wisconsin and he very carefully crafted them he poked little holes
• 28:25
  where the binding would be he'd use different colors and he he burnt the edges
• 28:31
  they're incredibly detailed and he went through various iterations of making them um ultimately
• 28:37
  hoping that they would be reproduced in the book which they weren't because it was too costly to do
• 28:42
  the uh the um the the printing in color but this idea of having an artifact outside the text
• 28:51
  that referred back to the text that in some way um supports the authenticity of the narrative
• 28:58
  as it has historical narrative which of course is Tolkien's you know his his conceit in the Lord
• 29:03
  of the Rings that it's that's history told by the hobbits well here's an artifact here's a page
• 29:08
  from the book of mezzar bull and we can trace at least some of that inspiration to Haggard
• 29:13
  and the shirt of ammon artist that we have um in she so as as we were saying at the beginning there
• 29:20
  is so much to say in all of these things so we but we've got to keep moving on so let's think about
• 29:24
  adult books uh and their influence um and we can unfold in here of course the works of the other
• 29:32
  inklings too is there any particular ones that you'd pick out um as being ones that Tolkien admired
• 29:39
  not necessarily that he used as examples but things that we know he was reading uh that
• 29:45
  were part of that compost he was making for his own imagination yeah i mean in a way i think
• 29:52
  the most striking thing is just the breadth of his reading and one of the one of the things i
• 29:58
  try to argue in Tolkien's Monor reading for the show is that we we've really got to stop trying
• 30:04
  to find one to one influence sometimes we can find them um especially if Tolkien himself has
• 30:12
  identified ones like we've just been talking about the book of mazzar bull and the shirt of
• 30:16
  ammon artist that there's a very clear and strong connection there similarly with morris and some
• 30:21
  of his his experiments language and and style even with those though we can never say that
• 30:27
  because there is this connection there are therefore no other connections it's always multiple
• 30:33
  influences can be feeding into the same you know the same scene even can have multiple influences
• 30:39
  different authors but i think even more than that as we look at the breadth of his reading um
• 30:47
  you know he he read he read um everyone from e.m. forster to um James Joyce uh you know
• 30:57
  Chesterton Bellock um you know all sorts of you know Catholics non-Catholics atheists like h2
• 31:04
  well is not stable then um he didn't like all of them but you like many of them he called h2 well is
• 31:11
  an old master um of science fiction and it's this diversity of reading that i think is most striking
• 31:21
  that he read so so widely and i think his interest in science fiction was one that particularly
• 31:27
  struck me um he names for instance Isaac Asimov as a favorite author sadly he doesn't give any
• 31:33
  specific titles but i was able to trace through a very early use of the word robot um before it was
• 31:42
  commonly used in in um regular usage i think he had read as a most robot stories quite early because
• 31:50
  he used to read the american science fiction magazines um and this again we don't tend to talk
• 31:55
  about all this it points to a much more nuanced attitude about technology than people usually
• 31:59
  think that the Tolkien had i'd give a whole chapter to that but mostly i think you know i've got
• 32:05
  i've got a whole chapter on on um his his Catholic taste meaning his his broadly ranging taste and i
• 32:13
  think that is is really notable you know he read poets like like Tennyson um in all sorts of poets um
• 32:25
  so i could go on more names but i think it's the breadth of his of his adult reading that is
• 32:31
  particularly striking yeah and i think as you said the the the fact that he read westerns and he read
• 32:36
  uh the golden age murder mysteries he was particularly admiring of agatha christy and i find
• 32:43
  that just delightful um and and interesting that in a way clues up something that is uh often quoted
• 32:51
  he's he has a quite contancers remark about Dorothy sayer as in the letters about how he
• 32:54
  couldn't stand um the later lord peter mysteries when harry evane um is involved um and he can be quite
• 33:01
  sort of cranky when he's when he's when he's saying these things but he often he's very hyperbolic
• 33:07
  in the way he expresses things but it's interesting to note that he he notes that he had read
• 33:14
  the lord peterims he novels from the beginning so he had been reading them all while he read them all
• 33:21
  and so he couldn't have hated the last one so much because harry evane comes in you know in
• 33:25
  in strong poison she shows up the next two he read them all he obviously had enough of an
• 33:31
  interest to keep reading he preferred the earlier ones well once different about the earlier ones
• 33:36
  well they're more puzzle like they're more purely about the detection and the mystery
• 33:42
  whereas later sayer shifts to more um psychological and sort of interested in the relationship between
• 33:49
  between peter and harry it they're quite different the early ones and later ones it's it's a
• 33:54
  difference of taste but interestingly this ties in to the fact that he also he didn't care for
• 34:02
  chesterton's father brown stories he liked he loved many of other chesterton stories including
• 34:08
  flying in things like that did not care for the father brown stories those are much more
• 34:15
  psychological they're not really about the plot and what who's his favorite mystery writer
• 34:20
  agatha Christie who is a good study of character but her her strength is in her clever plotting
• 34:27
  so this just shows what what's his preference for mystery story a good clever plot so he's
• 34:33
  not really sliding sayers he's just indicating the kind of mystery story that he likes is plant
• 34:39
  centered rather than character centered yeah I don't know I'm not sure about that because I
• 34:45
  I've read that that comment on Dorothy L sayers and I'm actually reading a lot of Dorothy L says
• 34:51
  at the moment having started at the by chance I started at the other end at the last one because
• 34:56
  it was one in the house um and the thing about the ones of harry at vain is that the point of
• 35:02
  you switches to harry at vain and it becomes quite a feminine story so gaudy night for example which
• 35:08
  many regardless one of her best novels lord peter winsey doesn't actually turn up until
• 35:16
  two-thirds of the way through halfway through and and I just wonder if the fact that Dorothy L says
• 35:23
  is shifting to a female viewpoint and basically it's about female friendships female academics
• 35:34
  the establishment of women's college the way it's accepted or not accepted in oxford I just
• 35:38
  wondered if some of those things were pressing on nerves for him because there is it's not
• 35:43
  lovey-dovey it's not actually it's not on romance in the conventional sense at all it's definitely
• 35:50
  got more psychological exploration and then turning back to agatha christy she isn't a simplistic
• 35:56
  as people think depends which story you read so something like the hollow again the um it's a
• 36:03
  poireau story poireau doesn't turn up till quite long way in and it's actually a very interesting
• 36:10
  psychological examination of a lot of different suspects with this idea of the hollow as a sort of
• 36:16
  image resonating through so I think they're both much better interesting writers and I I just think
• 36:25
  perhaps I don't know I think that maybe Tolkien is missing some of the things that Dorothy L says is
• 36:32
  trying to do he's not her best reader he's not well that's that's that shouldn't it could be could
• 36:38
  be the case and again we shouldn't read too much into yes a comment but I will know though that
• 36:44
  the reasons that you gave why goddy night might possibly press on nerves I would argue our reasons
• 36:51
  why he ought to have liked it yeah well you know was this is not as well known as it should be
• 36:57
  Tolkien was a firm supporter of women's education um he he was a tutor for the women's colleges
• 37:05
  very early on and was particularly well liked by them he didn't just do it because he had to it was
• 37:12
  it was convenient that with edith at home he could have students at his house without needing
• 37:16
  an extra shaperone because at the time women students were shaperone um but reports from the students
• 37:23
  themselves as I've read in you know various college books were all favorable they liked him they
• 37:29
  felt that he respected the women's students he gave them a really a fair shake which sadly some of
• 37:35
  his his other colleagues didn't his daughter Priscilla recalled that he was always a hundred percent
• 37:41
  supportive of her education made no differences between her and her brothers in terms of
• 37:45
  were going to Oxford and noted that he was he very fond of Lady Margaret Hall where where she went
• 37:51
  he knew um the head the head mistress there and he had a number of very good friends in the English
• 37:57
  faculty who were women such as Dorothy Everett who was a co-founder of the cave which was a co-educational
• 38:05
  literary club and that the cave doesn't get much press because I've run things about the inkling
• 38:09
  which is only a man but Tolkien was also a co-founder of a men and women's mixed club that gets
• 38:15
  no attention because it doesn't fit the narrative right um so I think that's whatever reasons he
• 38:21
  had for not caring for Gotti Knight it wouldn't have been because he was irritated about the the idea
• 38:26
  of of women's education or or or women's opportunities because insofar as we can see how he
• 38:34
  actually supported women students he would have been for it rather than against it he could have
• 38:41
  an irritant about Harriet I find Harriet a little annoying at times myself
• 38:46
  yeah that's possible I was actually meaning more that it was giving Oxford a bit of a bad
• 38:52
  press in it because it makes it feel as though the women aren't one anyway that's that we could have
• 38:57
  actually could have a whole section on Dorothy L says because what people might not know is
• 39:01
  she sort of runs parallel to the inklings um because she's also doing similar things to Charles
• 39:07
  Williams she's writing plays for the Canterbury Festival like T.O. Celia and Charles Williams
• 39:13
  she's doing theology like CSO so she's a really interesting parallel figure anyway well put her
• 39:19
  aside because she isn't that and she's big for Tolkien I don't think so you know we'll move her
• 39:24
  to one side um so I think wrapping this up here and again I reiterate that the best thing anyone
• 39:33
  can do listening to this is actually go and read the detail of your very well argued book and
• 39:37
  another thing I would just mention about it is your own clarity of writing is that there's a summary
• 39:43
  of what is said at the end of every chapter it's a student's dream so or somebody who might have
• 39:50
  forgotten they can go back and see what you've talked about in each chapter which is very kind of
• 39:56
  thank you for writing your book like that and I absolutely loved it really enjoyed it um
• 40:03
  I have given you a little bit of warning Holly um but let's see if we can do our next thing which
• 40:09
  is we always end with a segment where we look at all the fantasy worlds out there from film and
• 40:16
  television and books poetry whatever you could even pick up an artwork of a painting and say
• 40:24
  where in all the fantasy world is the best place to have this this experience and because we
• 40:31
  spent some time thinking about boys own adventures so let's take away the kind of empire aspect of it
• 40:37
  but you know the sort of kid going out on their own having a rip roaring time where do you think is
• 40:44
  the best place in all the fantasy world for a child as opposed to a hobbit for a child to actually
• 40:51
  go on adventure well I gave I gave some thought about this um and I was thinking initially well I
• 40:58
  might put forward it voyaging on the dawn treader in Lewis's narrative very good see very fun that
• 41:05
  that is my probably my personal favorite of the Narnia books it's such a great story um but you
• 41:11
  know considering that we have been talking about Arthur Ransom you know and we know we know the
• 41:15
  Tolkien admired Ransom I might prompt for a modified version of fantasy and say I think it would be
• 41:22
  great fun to you know to go and and visit um Wildcat Island with the with the swallows and the
• 41:29
  Amazon's and and have a summer of pretending to be pirates or whatever or mountaineers or whatever
• 41:36
  their their latest adventure would be or for instance there's winter holiday where they
• 41:41
  they're gonna be polar explorers and in a sense that would be the great boy zone fantasy um
• 41:48
  girls are also invited which is nice and I think Tolkien would appreciate that especially with
• 41:51
  the daughter um boys and girls adventure and there's excitement there's a bit of drama and danger
• 41:59
  but there's also a sense of safety uh because you know nothing nothing terrible happens to these
• 42:04
  to these children and and that's that's rather pleasing um adult books terrible things can happen
• 42:09
  to the characters um as they do for instance and in the Lord of the Rings um and even in the Hobbits
• 42:15
  characters die um but in the world of the swallows and Amazon's you can just have a rip roaring holiday
• 42:22
  adventure and have nice things to eat for tea so I think about this I've all sorts of options
• 42:28
  that come up to me like you know Peter Pan another Edwardian story um but actually to get the flavor
• 42:37
  of this world of the boy zone which came out of Victorian period I think actually an adventure
• 42:43
  in the Indiana Jones world is actually quite close to what these were doing but in a bit more
• 42:53
  acceptable world because you know Indiana Jones famously say it belongs in a museum um
• 43:00
  and that idea of sort of going and going into pyramids to have adventures seems to me
• 43:05
  the best place to have an adventure um like that little uh that boy actor who's just now one
• 43:13
  is Oscar many years later in the Temple of Doom he could sort of come alongside Indiana Jones
• 43:18
  and have an adventure um thank you so much uh Holly uh for taking us through that and um yeah
• 43:27
  for bringing Tolkien up to date and making us remember that he was an earlier doctor of that
• 43:33
  top technology the take recorder um so thank you very much my pleasure
• 43:45
  thanks for listening to MythMakers podcast brought to you by the Oxford Center for Fantasy
• 43:52
  visit Oxford Center for Fantasy.org to join in the fun find out about our online courses
• 43:59
  in person stays in Oxford plus visit our shop for great gifts tell a friend and subscribe
• 44:06
  wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide