This episode is sponsored by the Manhattan Rare Book Company.
In 1954, J.R.R. Tolkien was 62 years old,
and had just spent the last 16 years working industriously on a book.
It was now time to release it into the world,
and he was very nervous.
And he should have been,
because no one had seen anything quite like "The Lord of the Rings" before.
It was a huge risk for the publishers
who were convinced that it wouldn't sell many copies.
Who was the audience for this strange book
filled with unfamiliar and unpronounceable names of people and places?
Was it a children's book like "The Hobbit"?
It certainly had wizards and strange creatures,
and it was also an epic adventure of some kind.
It was also very, very, long.
Three volumes in fact,
and several appendices.
But no, it was neither a children's book or an adult novel.
Tolkien wrote to his publisher at the time:
"My work has escaped from my control and I have produced a monster,
"an immensely long, complex,
"rather bitter, and rather terrifying romance,
"quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody)..."
"I now wonder whether many beyond my friends [...],
"would read anything so long."
"We can only imagine what was at stake for Tolkien.
If the first volume wasn't a success,
what would happen to the other two volumes
which he had spent the best part of 16 years writing?
In the early 1930s, when Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford,
he was grading papers when he noticed
that one of the candidates had left a blank sheet of paper.
"Nothing to read. So, I scribbled on it I can't think why:
"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit"
And so, the Hobbits were born.
The Hobbit can broadly be considered a prequel to The Lord of the Rings.
It introduces Tolkien's world of Middle Earth.
The world of Hobbits, wizards, dwarves, and elves.
But it is a much different book,
with a different intended audience.
Upon publication, Tolkien''s friend C.S. Lewis
compared "The Hobbit" to such classics
as "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Wind in the Willows",
and like those works it has often been considered
a children's fantasy book
written primarily for children or adolescents,
but enjoyed by adults as well.
"The Hobbit" was a huge success
and only a few weeks after its publication,
Tolkien met with his publisher Stanley Unwin,
to discuss a sequel.
The writer expressed his desire to publish
a long, detailed, mythological work
about Middle Earth, called the Silmarillion.
But Unwin insisted that what the public really wanted,
was more stories about the Hobbits.
He wanted The Hobbit 2.
Tolkien and Unwin had variations of this debate
for the entire 16 years Tolkien was working on his next book.
Ultimately the Lord of the Rings
succeeded in developing Tolkien's Middle Earth,
without losing the narrative appeal of "The Hobbit".
The result was not so much a sequel but a much more complex, adult work.
In the process Tolkien had invented a whole new genre - the fantasy novel.
"I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size).
I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands,
"I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food."
"- J.R.R. Tolkien
Tolkien in his later years professed to love the simple life,
much like his beloved Hobbits in the Shire.
This desire for peace, security, and companionship, however
was likely the result of his upbringing and young adulthood,
which was anything but peaceful and secure.
This quintessentially English Professor
was born John Ronald Reuel Tolkien in Bloemfontein,
in what is now South Africa, in 1892.
In 1895 Tolkien, his mother, and his infant brother, Hillary,
went to England for a visit to his mother's family,
who like her were British.
But soon after their arrival, his father died in Bloemfontein,
of rheumatic fever,
leaving the family with very little inheritance.
The family stayed in Britain, where she had the support of her family,
and moved to the small village of Sarehole
just outside the industrial city of Birmingham.
Although they didn't have much money,
Tolkien became captivated with his environment.
He would later say:
"It was a kind of lost paradise.
"There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers,
"a great big pond with swans on it,
"a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers,
"a few old-fashioned villages houses
"and, further away, a stream with another mill..."
The village scenery would Inspire the Shire.
But it was just outside the major industrial city of Birmingham
which was expanding rapidly
and in the process absorbing the surrounding villages.
"I was brought up in considerable poverty,
"but I was happy running about in that country.
"I took the idea of the Hobbits from the village people and children...
"The Hobbits are just what I should like to have been but never was...
"an entirely unmilitary people
"who always came up to scratch in a clinch...
"Behind all this Hobbit stuff lay a sense of insecurity.
"I always knew it would go - and it did."
The theme of the destruction of idyllic countryside
would fill his literature.
Tolkien's mother Mabel was the primary influence on his early life.
In 1900 when Tolkien was 8,
Mabel converted to Catholicism.
Her family, who were Methodist, disapproved.
Her father disowned her,
and her brother-in-law, who had been assisting her financially,
withdrew his support.
It was a spectacular fall from grace,
a theme we often find in Tolkien's books.
She homeschooled him until the age of eight,
encouraging him to read widely,
and introducing him to the works of George McDonald and Andrew Lang,
early developers of fantasy literature.
In 1904 however, when a Tolkien was 12,
Mabel died of diabetes,
hastened, Tolkien later believed,
by persecution for her faith,
leaving her two sons orphaned with bleak prospects.
He took refuge in language, learning Chaucer's Middle English,
the old Norse of the Viking sagas,
the old English of Beowulf,
and even reviving long dead languages
and inventing languages of his own.
"I first began seriously inventing languages...
"about when I was 13 or 14, and I've never stopped really."
School was a haven for Tolkien.
He first attended King Edward's School in Birmingham,
and it was here crucially, that he formed his first literary group
the "Tea club and Burrovian Society",
four friends who played rugby together,
and talked about Norse mythology,
while drinking tea and inventing languages.
Groups like this were important to Tolkien
a fatherless boy, and now an orphan.
And it was the first of many literary groups
that Tolkien would form - a fellowship of sorts.
Even this early on, he was obsessed with myths, legends, and folklore,
and concerned with creating a British mythology.
He won a scholarship to Exeter college, Oxford,
and unsurprisingly he showed a special aptitude for languages,
Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Gothic in particular.
Graduating in 1915 with a degree in English language and literature,
with First Class honors.
And it is these studies that will lead
to the creation of a series of languages in Lord of the Rings
which are among the most fully developed fictional languages in literature.
But 1915 could only mean one thing...war.
And almost immediately after graduation
he was commissioned into the Lancashire Fusiliers.
"The Lord of the Rings" is at its most basic level, a hero's quest.
But the hero in this case is not someone strong and fierce
like Odysseus, Beowulf, or Aeneas,
but the Hobbit Frodo Baggins,
a diminutive creature who, at his core, like other Hobbits,
wishes to be left alone to enjoy peace, good food and fellowship,
in his homeland the Shire.
Frodo has no special abilities,
and is extraordinary, only in his courage, loyalty, and incorruptibility.
And the quest of Frodo and his companions is most unusual.
Instead of trying to gain power,
they are dedicated to the destruction of the one thing, a magical ring,
that would give them great power.
In fact, the quest succeeds,
because the idea that someone would forego power
and intentionally destroy the most coveted possession in their world,
is a thought that is impossible for their enemy Sauron to anticipate,
or even to contemplate.
Tolkien was an academic deeply steeped in the tradition of the Epic,
but he also knew how to subvert those traditions,
to create a new kind of Epic,
that address the fears and concerns of his generation
- the generation of World War One.
War of one kind or another permeates "The Lord of the Rings",
through death and loss, through notions of power,
through camaraderie in deathly times,
and eventually through disappointment.
Tolkien took part in the battle of the Somme,
one of the most horrific battles of the 20th century.
Over 3 million men fought in the battle,
which saw over a million killed or injured,
scarring the Earth in one of the most deadliest battles
in human history.
He saw many of his school friends die in the fighting,
and by 1918, he said that he had lost all but one of his closest friends.
In some sense he was lucky
to have contracted a severe case of trench fever
near the end of the battle of the Somme,
and sent back to England to recover.
While convalescing in army barracks,
with the war very much fresh in his mind,
Tolkien put to paper much of the story
that would later become "The Fall of Gondolin",
a story published after his death,
of a cataclysmic battle featuring orcs, dragons, and bullfrogs,
and notably his first work to feature "Middle Earth".
"They walked slowly, stooping, keeping close in line,
following attentively every move that Gollum made.
"The fens grew more wet, opening into wide stagnant meres.
"among which it grew more and more difficult,
"to find the firmer places where feet could tread
"without sinking into gurgling mud...
"Wrenching his hands out of the bog,
"he sprang back with a cry.
" 'There are dead things, dead faces in the water', he said with horror.
" 'Dead faces!' "
Although Tolkien here is describing the outskirts of Mordor
in his fictional Middle Earth,
it is not hard to imagine this as a description of Tolkien's experience
during the battle of the Somme.
The I World War begins as a battle on horseback with cavalries,
but it is the beginning of mechaniZed warfare.
Characters in "The Lord of the Rings"
describe being watched by mysterious figures flying overhead,
and in 1914, airplanes on both sides were first used for reconnaissance,
flying deep behind enemy lines.
Over the course of the war,
aviation developed significantly into a major force,
and by the end of that war
it was obvious that airplanes were the weapon of the future.
"Then Frodo and Sam staring at the sky...
"saw it come: a small cloud flying from the accursed hills,
"a black shadow loosed from Mordor;
"a vast shape winged and ominous."
"It scudded across the moon,
"and with a deadly cry went westward,
"outrunning the wind in its fell speed."
He is at the Somme when tanks were first used,
and although Orcs make up the bulk of Sauron's Army
in "The Lord of the Rings",
one of his most powerful weapons were the tanks of Middle Earth
- the "Olyphants".
Newsreel: "A state of war once more exists
between Great Britain and Germany"
Tolkien began writing "The Lord of the Rings"
at the outbreak of the II World War, late 1937.
So the world was once again on the precipice of war.
Tolkien denied it was an allegory of any kind
in the forward to the book,
but also admitted that an author is influenced by his experiences.
The writing of the novel began during the rise of Hitler,
and continued during the darkest days of World War II,
when all hopes of a peaceful New World Order had vanished,
especially for someone living in England
and in constant fear of air raids and Nazi victory.
"If you really come down to any 'large' story
"that interests people - that can hold their attention for a considerable time
"stories - human stories - are practically always about one thing: death."
The I World War almost certainly had more influence on Tolkien,
but "The Lord of the Rings" can also be considered part
of post-World War II literature,
that includes "The Lord of the Flies", "1984", and "Animal Farm",
books that were marked by their author's wartime experiences,
and deal with the question of good and evil.
"Sauron was become now a sorcerer of dreadful power,
"master of shadows and of phantoms,
"foul in wisdom, cruel in strength,
"misshaping what he touched, twisting what he ruled."
In "The Lord of the Rings"
there is the rise of an evil force Sauron,
who is not unlike Hitler
in his desire for power and world domination.
Just like countries during the war,
some societies in the book,
whether out of self-interest or fear, side with Sauron,
adding to the hopelessness of the good-hearted.
The fate of the world is at stake in both worlds,
and the outcome hinges on a race
to prevent ultimate power getting in the wrong hands.
Crucially, the ring is not just about power,
it is about what we do with power
and how it can corrupt us,
and how that corruption can be addictive
leading to the eventual loss of your Humanity,
as the evil within you is exposed,
absorbing all morals.
The very things that were being discussed
at the outbreak, during, and at the conclusion of World War II.
The horrific evils of the 20th century were just around the corner.
Despite the horrors Tolkien witness firsthand,
"The Lord of the Rings" is not, as you might expect, explicitly anti-war.
Tolkien may describe battles, almost poetically,
and place an emphasis on heroism in combat,
but for a man who spent his life studying traditional myths and legends,
often involving war,
he understood that nobility often means
that we need to take up arms for a "just" cause.
The Lord of the Rings is, in fact,
a book about the "unfortunate necessity" of war
- when it is a just war - against evil.
But crucially, Tolkien also understood
that there was good and evil on both sides of war,
an unpopular sentiment in a time
when those boundaries were being blurred beyond recognition.
He was outspoken against bombing campaigns on German cities,
and even used a quote from "The Lord of the Rings",
in a letter to his son about the campaigns:
"You can't fight the enemy with his own ring
without turning into an enemy".
He knew, as the characters of the fellowship do,
that just because one fights for good,
it doesn't make one immune to the power of evil
- to the power of the ring.
The Fellowship must resist the temptation of the ring,
as we must resist using evil to fight evil.
Tolkien understood that bravery is a complex notion,
for while battles swarm around him
it is our little hobbit Frodo who succeeds on his journey by avoiding war.
But even he is not immune to war's effects and trauma.
When the war is over and he is returning to the Shire,
Frodo confesses to Gandalf,
in one of the most poignant passages in the book,
that he is in pain,
as so many shellshocked men of the trenches were.
" 'Alas! there are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured', said Gandalf.
" 'I fear it may be so with mine', said Frodo.
"There is no real going back.
"Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same;
"for I shall not be the same."
"I am wounded with knife, sting and tooth
"and a long burden.
" 'Where shall I find rest?'
"Gandalf did not answer."
After World War I, and certainly during World War II,
artists and writers had to wrestle with a new reality:
"How to present life in the aftermath of such horrors?"
"Were the old stories of heroism even relevant anymore?"
Tolkien, through his fictional world,
has reinvented the heroic epic for our times.
Giving us a fresh and more ambiguous perspective on modern warfare,
through the realm of fantasy.
You may get all the heroics,
but there are also points when his greatest heroes are full of fear
Reducing "The Lord of the Rings" to a heroic quest or a war narrative,
is convenient and an aid to our understanding,
but ultimately does disservice to the book.
It more likely just exposes our difficulties
in identifying exactly what this strange work is.
"If you want my opinion,
"a part of the 'fascination' of 'The Lord of the Rings"
"consists in the vistas of yet more legend and history,
"to which this work does not contain a full clue..." - Tolkien
The action of the book takes place over a relatively short period of time,
but throughout "The Lord of the Rings",
we hear tales and legends about the past,
often stretching back thousands of years.
Tolkien hasn't just written a story,
but has given us the impression
that we are witnessing a series of events,
inside an entire history that exists outside of the books.
Although he is just one writer,
he has created an entire mythology
comparable to traditional cultural mythologies.
"Bowen: And you took 14 years to make this story.
"Tolkien: Quite so, yeah.
"I took 14 years and not for the general thing it is now
"but for finding time schemes and getting everything right and so on.
Documenting the history of Middle Earth,
was a lifelong project of Tolkien.
In his letters, notes and unpublished works
he filled in details of this mythology,
complete with elaborate genealogies,
and geographical details.
Tolkien had the genius to make it sound
like it was a "real history" he was exploring,
as if he was just "researching" it and reporting it to us.
There had been fantasy books before Tolkien,
but never had there been such successful "world building",
with such a serious tone and seismic events.
"What I'm doing now, is to try and write in Elvish.
"but mt writing is very inferior to the Elves
Their standard meeting when greeting:
"A star shines upon our meeting"
From 1924 to 1945,
Tolkien was the professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford,
and even after the huge success of "The Hobbit"
and "The Lord of the Rings"
he continued to teach at Oxford, until his retirement in 1959.
He developed 15 different dialects for Elvish
for "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings",
and as a soldier during World War I,
Tolkien even developed a secret code to communicate with his wife.
For Tolkien, language is where it all begins.
"The invention of languages is the foundation...
"To me a name comes first and the story follows."
He believed that the nature of a society was Inseparable from its language.
To understand a people, you must understand the language.
The sounds, syntax, and expressions can all evoke a mood
and reveal the values of a people.
And Tolkien has given all of his fictional races in the book,
not only their own complex history,
but also, their own fully developed language,
with its own alphabet, expressions, and sounds.
It is a remarkable encyclopedic feat
that fleshes out even the most minor characters.
At one point, Frodo hears the elves singing in the forest.
It is part of a poem from "The Lord of the Rings" in Elvish,
which some have likened to a Roman Catholic Marian hymn.
The sounds are flowing and musical,
reflecting how the elves speak,
underscoring their reverence for grace, beauty and nature.
The dwarves however speak the more direct language of "Kazul",
reflecting their emphasis on craftsmanship and precision.
The language of the hobbits is filled with colloquialisms,
and expressions centered around the simple pleasures of life.
The orcs have a savage and gutural tongue
that exposes their brutality.
Even among the races of man, Tolkien uses distinguishing styles.
The Rohirrim, pepper their language
with references to horsemanship and warfare,
while those from Gondor speak with a more formal and elevated style,
emphasizing their nobility and ancient heritage.
Passages in invented languages help create an immersive experience
and are critical to Tolkien's world building.
We become convinced that we are learning about a time, different from our own,
from a historical world that really did exist.
Tolkien felt so strongly
about the centrality of language to his work,
that he once commented he would have preferred
to have written "The Lord of the Rings" entirely in Elvish,
but ultimately left in only as much
as he thought his readers would endure.
Because of Tolkien, invented languages
have now become standard in fantasy epics,
most recently seen in modern versions of "Dune" and "Game of Thrones".
This chapter, comes at the end of the book
and doesn't feature in many of the films.
But is an integral chapter when looking at Tolkien.
It is a deeply pessimistic look at what happens
when our returning heroes, the hobbits, go back to their Shire,
this bastion of middle England,
these idyllic agricultural spaces,
to find that everything has changed.
Industry is now polluting their once pure rivers,
and the Shire is now, in effect, a police state.
"It was one of the saddest hours in their lives.
"The great chimney rose up before them.
"and as they drew near the old village across the water,
"through rows of new mean houses
"along each side of the road,
"they saw the new mill
"in all its frowning and dirty ugliness:
"a great brick building straddling the stream
"which it fouled with a steaming and stinking outflow.
"All along the Bywater Rod every tree had been felled."
This is a classic idea of the homecoming hero
facing further obstacles,
that we can find in Homer's Odyssey
amongst other "quest literature".
The Shire is now run by Ruffians with a dictator-like chief
whose gatherers count, keep track of productivity,
and enforce endless rules.
The Hobbit's inns are closed
because the chief disapproves of beer
and beautiful old dwellings are demolished to create ugly new ones
- surely a reference to the desperately needed
new social housing post-World War II.
And there are hundreds of "shiriffs",
a kind of Hobbit police force,
who drag anyone who stands up for their rights to prison.
We can go back to Tolkien's experiences in World War I,
when returning veterans were promised a new life fit for heroes,
but in fact, return to unemployment, continuing poverty,
homelessness - and even worse -
the wholesale destruction of their way of life.
It was a betrayal.
Tolkien was famously anti-industrialization,
and politically conservative when it came to "big government",
and this can be seen as a veiled attack
on the post-war Labor government,
and what conservatives saw as "interference",
"regulation", and even "socialist ideology".
At one point, the Hobbits discuss the gathering of local farming produce,
so, it can be "shared out equally",
but this ideal never quite works the way it should do.
A scathing critique of socialist principles.
The scouring of the Shire chapter
was written after the end of the II World War,
and I think it's hard to deny (although Tolkien did),
that there is also an allegorical element to this chapter,
with the Ruffians behavior echoing the Nazis,
in the way they used collaborators, informers, threats, torture,
and the imprisoning and killing of dissenters.
At one point the "shiriff" Hobbit says:
"I am sorry Mr. Mary, but we have orders".
A chilling phrase that we will hear time and again at the Nuremberg trials.
These are all reflections which would have meant
so much more to a British reader in the 1950s:
The rapid pace of change in terms of industrialization,
devastation of the countryside,
regulations of all kinds,
government interference and the advent of Big Brother.
Yes, everything had changed while the hobbits were away,
but everything had changed for the British too.
This is one of the most complex and contentious issues surrounding Tolkien,
a committed Catholic in a Protestant country,
and one who stated categorically
that "The Lord of the Rings" was not a religious allegory.
In many ways, it is a pagan book
and draws on those sources of the Norse myths
- which are pre-Christian.
There are no churches, no religion and no God
in "The Lord of the Rings".
And yet, when Tolkien was attacked upon publication,
for the apparent lack of religion in the book,
it was he confessed:
"The only criticism that annoys me..."
Tolkien is clear,
that in such a pre-Christian world,
it would have been in congruous
to include any explicit references to Christianity,
and yet, in a private letter,
to the Catholic priest, Father Robert Murray,
Tolkien explained:
"The Lord of the Rings" is of course
a fundamentally religious and Catholic work;
unconsciously so at first,
but consciously in the revision."
That is why I have not put in or have cut out,
practically all references to anything like religion.
to cults or practices in the imaginary world."
"For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism..."
Much has been made in Tolkien scholarship of this letter,
for it seems to conflict with his other more public statements.
"People do not fully understand
"the difference between an allegory and an application.
"But what does it actually mean for a book to be religious,
"or, in this case, a Catholic work?"
Do we have to, as many have done,
make the case for Frodo as a Jesus figure?
Or make direct parallels between Christianity and Middle Earth?
Certainly, there are strong Christian elements throughout,
most evident in the larger themes
of the importance of sacrifice and selflessness,
the focus on hope and redemption,
the lure of temptations and the existence of evil.
These values and others however,
also overlap with similar themes in Pagan literature,
or Norse myths,
or countless other sources Tolkien would have studied.
Perhaps it is simply a case that being a Catholic
was an important part of Tolkien's identity,
and his personal values, fears and concerns
would naturally be manifested in his work.
"You are obliged, any author I imagine,
"is obliged to call on his stock - private stock.
"I am dreading the publication
"for it will be impossible not to mind what is said.
"I have exposed my heart to be shot at."
Tolkien wanted "The Lord of the Rings" published in one huge volume,
with the Silmarilion attached.
But the publishers refused.
And so, the book was split into three volumes,
and published from 1954 to 1955.
When it was finally issued in its entirety,
for the most part the reviews were positive.
"One reviewer once said,
"this is a jolly book, all the right boys come home
" and everyone's always happy and glad...
"It isn't true of course.
"He can't have read the story.
His good friend C.S. Lewis wrote enthusiastically to Tolkien.
"I congratulate you.
"All the long years you have spent on it are justified."
And championed him in print.
The poet W.H. Auden called it a masterpiece
and in his review in the New York Times,
compared it to Milton's "Paradise Lost".
In "The Lord of the Rings",
Tolkien takes Anglo-Saxon and Norse sagas,
ancient Celtic poetry, Milton, Dickens, Browning, and more,
to create his world
- but his comparison with Milton is an important one.
Historically, great poets aspire to write a national epic
in imitation of Homer or Virgil.
Milton famously tried to go beyond the boundaries of a national epic
to explain the origins of all Humanity.
Many have argued that "The Lord of the Rings"
is a national epic for England or Europe.
In general Tolkien was never as explicit as Milton in his motives,
but admitted he was inspired by Finland's national epic the Kalevala,
and throughout his life insisted that Middle Earth
was not an imaginary world,
but rather an imaginary historical moment in our very real world.
Tolkien's new genre - "heroic fantasy",
"epic fantasy", "world-building fiction"
- whatever we choose to call it -
is now a huge part of our culture,
and has inspired an entire industry of movies, books, and games,
centered around epic quests in new worlds.
Without Tolkien, would we even have Star Wars?
Game of Thrones? Harry Potter?
Or games like Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft, Magic: The Gathering?
Tolkien was a giant of literature
who created a world so fully formed,
so complex and so enigmatic
that we forget that the creation of Middle Earth
changed the entire literary landscape.
"Of course, "The Lord of the Rings" does not belong to me.
"It has been brought forth
"and must now go its appointed way in the world,
"though naturally, I take a deep interest in its fortunes,
"as a parent would of a child."
"I am comforted to know that is has good friends
"to defend it against the malice of its enemies."
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Thanks for listening.