Backlisted - The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien

Episode Date: July 23, 2018

John and Andy are joined by Unbound co-founder and co-author of Crap Towns Dan Kieran and returning guest Dr Una McCormack, NYT bestselling novelist and co-director of the Anglia Ruskin University Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy, to discuss J.R.R. Tolkien's The Return of the King, the third part of The Lord of the Rings. Andy also talks about Russell Hoban's classic Riddley Walker, while John has been reading Crudo, the acclaimed new novel by Olivia Laing.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)6'15 - Sons and Lovers by D H Lawrence6'32 - Happy by Nicola Barker6'56 - The Krull House by Georges Simenon7'51 As Time Goes By - Derek Taylor8'17 Riddley Walker by Russel Hoben13'45 Crudo by Olivia Laing18'53 - The Return of the King by JRR Tolkien* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So my youngest son, Rory, 16, has just been doing his GCSEs, and the school rang this week and said, we've had a message from the exam board saying that Rory Mitchinson's English paper had a story in it of such graphic brutality that they're worried that he might be being

you know he's at risk for abuse or or or or I'm not allowed so the school said well no he just reads a lot of books yeah does his own thing drums and i said and i said he's a quiet lad and he was at he was hilarious he said well you know he said yeah well it was stories on the theme of something unexpected so he said so i don't know i'd sort of written something in class it started as a bit of a cheesy romance and then i sort of thought you know move it into full-blown horror and as it was an exam he said, I'd sort of written something in class. It started as a bit of a cheesy romance, and then I sort of thought, you know, move it into full-blown horror.

And as it was an exam, you know, I sort of thought I'd really go for it. It's great. Everybody at work said, oh, can we option his first collection of stories? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a shoo-in for a Netflix. Well, two things about it. One is obviously, you know,

it sounds like he's done quite well in his English language paper, but the other is it's sort of quite good that the exam board is is that alert i mean it's but it is that thing of imagination imagination and reality they're actually reading them well i did say to rory i said podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us huddled together in the white city of Minas Tirith, gazing nervously across the Pelennor Fields towards the ominous shadow billowing towards us from the black land of Mordor, where the shadows lie. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today is Dan Kieran, author and entrepreneur and co-founder of Unbound,

our sponsors. Dan is the author of 12 books, including the timeless classic Crap Towns, co-edited with our friend Sam Jordison, and the soon to be published The Surfboard, How Using My Hands Helped Unlock My Mind. And we welcome back Dr Una McCormack, a British slash Irish writer and academic who has appeared on two previous Backlisted's talking about, first of all, Georgette Heyer and then Anita Bruckner. I would have to say any employee, prospective employees,

listen, look at Dr McCormack's range. Heyer, B Brookner and Tolkien. Anyway, Una lectures in creative writing at Anglia Ruskin and is co-director of the Anglia Ruskin University Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy, but is best known as the New York Times bestselling author of a series of tie-in novels for both Star Trek and Doctor Who. And you were saying to me earlier, Una, that you've actually taken time out

from writing a book at the moment, haven't you? Which you've got a significant proportion left to go. You took time out for us to re-read Lord of the Rings. I took time out. I am unbelievably under the cosh, but I would drop everything to podcast about Lord of the Rings. Yay! Great! So, John. Well, yes, we are here to talk about Lord of the Rings,

but specifically the third volume in the trilogy, The Return of the King, by J.R.R. Tolkien, first published in 1955 by Alan and Unwin, and easily the least obscure book, I think it would be fair to say, we have ever done on Backlisted, the book of the century. Anyway, before we strap on our shields and face the Nazgul, we're delighted to welcome back our sponsor, Spoke, the sharp, smart online menswear company. Smart online menswear company. Spoke design men's trousers and now seasonally appropriate shorts and polo shirts with a difference. They fit you and not the other way around.

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andy what have you been reading this week oh what have i been reading this week okay so listeners we have had a few weeks off we haven't actually recorded an episode for a month who were i took that opportunity to read 20 books that i didn't have to read for back i've read loads of things that I've been waiting to read for quite some time, but often they sort of had to be put to one side because we were working on episodes about other writers and we had to do all this reading and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I read about 20 books and I just thought I'd mention a few of the books that I read that I really liked in that period. One of them was Sons and Lovers by a little guy called D.H. Lawrence. David Herbert Lawrence.

Sons and Lovers by a little guy called D.H. Lawrence. David Herbert Lawrence. Who I had never read any D.H. Lawrence. And John is, of course, he's one of your favourite authors. He is. He's one of Rachel's favourite authors as well, right? Yeah. So I read that. I thoroughly enjoyed that.

Yeah. I read Happy by Nicola Barker, which has won the Goldsmiths Prize. Yeah, yeah, yeah. which has won the Goldsmith's Prize and is the most wonderful, baffling, typographically challenging, print-defying novel that I've read for ages. I really recommend that, John. That really does things to your head, that book. Really, really great novel.

I read The Crow House, which has just been republished by Penguin. So that's Georges Simonon. It's one of the Romand d'Or. And it was Anita Bruckner's favourite Simonon. And it is incredible. It is a book about immigration and the way immigrants get treated, whether they try to fit in or don't try to fit in. It's incredibly bleak, but also so contemporary. Julian Barnes had a piece in the LRB last year saying that he had read it after Anita Bruckner died because it was her favourite, and that he was totally taken aback about the extent. If you want to read a book about what's happening in Europe at the moment, written 80 years ago, which feels distressingly contemporary,

that's the book to go for. So that's The Kroll House by Georges Simons. And I also read a book that Faber just reviewed, published by Derek Taylor, the Beatles press officer, called As Time Goes By. His memoir written in the mid-70s about working at Apple and about, which is just, you know, that's got Andy Miller written through it like a stick of rock. So I read all these books, but my favourite book that I read,

and actually I'm not going to say too much about it because I think there's a good chance that we will do a full episode of Backlisted on this novel, was Ridley Walker by Russell Hoban, which I've got a Picador copy here, And on the front, they've done that thing where rather than put an illustration on it, they've just filled the cover with quotes from the reviews that were published at the time. This book was published in 1979. A masterpiece, The Observer. Extraordinary, it will be a cult book listener. Stunning, The New York Times, a real achievement, The Guardian.

This is what literature is meant to be, Anthony Burgess. Can't disagree with any of those. An utterly remarkable novel, which, furthermore, until I opened it up and started reading it, I had no idea was set exactly in the bit of Kent that I live in. Indeed. In a dystopian Kent, which is much like actually Kent is now. It's the chip golem in it.

The chip golem probably, you know what, the chip golem is probably in here somewhere, right? And so I'm not going to read anything from it because you'd need to practice before you read anything loud from this book. It's written in a very brilliant, peculiar, broken-up vernacular that I actually read out parts of this to myself out loud while I was reading because it seemed like the best way to understand what was happening.

I read the opening paragraph to my Masters Creative Writing students and try to get them to guess where it's from. And they never get it, but they kind of, they get to estuary, but they don't get to post-apocalyptic Kent. So I was reading it and enjoying it and being challenged by it and I couldn't quite understand what was going on. And then it gets to a bit, which won't be a spoiler, which society has fallen apart several hundred years in the future,

or no, thousand years in the future, where a group of people tour the country with an ancient Punch and Judy show reinforcing social messages via that route, which I thought was one of the most mind-popping things that I have ever read in a book, a book that had already I would already sent me on a journey I couldn't believe how good it was yeah and the reason why I'm mentioning it

and saying I hope we do it on the podcast is of course that two people around this table have not read it and the other two the two people who have read it is almost their favorite book right it's very close to being I mean it's the one absolutely it's it's unforgettable and if you you know it it's it's the novel when anybody says doing something new with language doing something new with the novel ridley walker is always the the the touchstone for me if i mean because it it's it's fresh i mean you you've just picked it up and read it it was written in 1979 it could have been written i mean i think it's a 20th century novel. It's one of those books that gets into your sort of system,

into your fibres, into your, you can't, very few books do that. You know, you don't forget Ridley Walker ever. I mean, you can give that, you can give that to sort of teenagers. It blew your mind as a teenager. I loved how he does a really brave, several brave things within the novel. The thing I loved was there are bits that are easy to understand. There are bits that you have to stop and try and work out. And there are parts that you're clearly not meant to understand. That, that meaning

has passed beyond the 20th century or 21st century person's ability to decode it that it's it's gone it's too far gone yeah did you you know it's one of your favorite books it is yeah i think mostly for the kind of things that john was saying didn't he famously say he wasn't able to spell again after he's written it so that was it broken it as i say i've sort of read chunks of this out loud and the um the patterns of it because it because it's purporting to be an an oral history as well so you've got to be able to we've got the text but of course it is just spoken really really visual the kind of moments of the kind of set pieces and the payoffs uh extraordinary book and a sense of it's mythic but a sense of hit the wheel of history turning and starting again

the way like paul kingsnorth i mean you know i know when we picking up the wake i felt for the first time here's a here's a novel that's that's that's actually taken on ridley walker and and um i mean it's it's a very different book it's it's sort of set in the past but but what paul kingsnorth does in that book you can can feel, you know, he's been infected by this Ridley Walker virus. It's like that. I mean, properly viral. Once it gets into your bloodstream,

you read differently afterwards, I think. There's another book that I read, which we'll come on to later in this podcast, which reminded me of James Joyce in a bad way. But this reminded me of Joyce in some ways. It really reminds me of Under the Volcano. It cannot be understood at first reading. First reading is your prep for second reading. But while you go along, you get all this incredible stuff from it. So before I ask, just to say listeners, listeners who complain that we don't give you enough notice before when we

announce a book, I'm pretty sure we will do an episode on Rid before when we announce a book. I'm pretty sure we will do an episode on Ridley Walker by Russell Hoban. You might want to get in early. Just read it anyway. And even if we don't, just, yeah. There are other reasons for reading books other than that list is for enjoyment or pleasure. As you discovered. As I've discovered just for one month.

John, what have you been reading this month? Well, I've been reading something that is it's not remotely like ridley walker but it is massively ambitious and uh something i would hugely uh press upon people crudo by olivia lang olivia lang known as a thoughtful elusive complex complex brilliant writer of non-fiction her first uh book which was to the river um which was kind of very english and deep and kind of sebaldian and then she wrote a very different book which is about six alcoholic american alcoholic writers and then she wrote the Lonely City which was about alienation and loneliness and being in a city and painting they're all beautiful uh beautifully written books but this is her first novel and it's called Crudo which is Italian for raw and the what she's done is in a very similar way

but in a very different way to Ali Smith it was very quickly, seven weeks in the summer of 2017. She's tried to capture what's happening in, it's kind of like, the book is a tumult of images, of Twitter feeds, of things happening, news stories. It's hot, the planet's under threat. It's brilliant sort of almost sort of masterclass in how to and how to sort of go from the absurd to the serious and back again. I absolutely loved it. It's the premise of the book. This is what makes it is that the I in the book, the narrator of the book is Kathy Acker, the punk controversialist who died in 1997 of cancer. This is as though Kathy Acker is 40 and has decided to get married. And it's the preparation, the run-up to the marriage. The fact that you know that Olivia Lange recently, or despite writing brilliantly about the joys of living on your own and married,

despite writing brilliantly about the joys of living on your own, married Ian Patterson, a poet, who was previously the widower of Jenny Diskey, a wonderful writer. So it's kind of Olivia Lange, but it's also Kathy Acker. It's about identity, it's about language, it's about news. As far as plot goes, she does get married. The husband, Kathy's husband in the book, wins a poetry prize, which is exactly what happened to Ian Patterson. And then Kathy takes a flight back to America. on kind of amphetamines you know it's like it has that sort of uh it is you're inside this incredibly kind of i'll read a tiny little bit because it's you're inside a conscious

studio visit accomplished pg tips drunk kathy went back to king's cross and met jenny in the pub they talked about marriage how to do it so it didn't bury beneath all its baggage they thought they had a handle on it they thought they could see a way to maintaining their dignity, independence, autonomy, style. But it was touch and go. And they both admitted. Place, cards, stag dues, the whole thing was fucking repulsive. Someone somewhere had told her that day about hearing women say they were voting for Trump because they didn't want to work. I mean, Cathy said, three beers in, we could just fucking abolish not even gender, but people. I think I'm done.

Home again, she went on Instagram. Rich, naked and pallid in the ruined, fallout shelters of Orford Nest, somebody's courgettes arranged and lit like a Renaissance painting. Over the course of the morning, she'd become an expert on neo-Nazis. She knew about the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters. She knew that cops were even crazier and more racist and evil than she thought, which, speaking as a cop watcher, Rodney King and Michael Stewart, through to Philandro Castile and Eric Garner, was maximally racist and unjust.

It was late. She was up in her study, listening to trains and a neighbour or burglar hauling sacks of compost in their garden. Red lights, white lights. How close to the state do you want to get? Do you care for the state? Does the state mean anything to you at all? Kathy was a libtard, a regular schmuck, but she was also a biker bitch, a libertarian, live and let die. She didn't give a fuck.

People could rip each other's faces off if that's what they wanted. Only she really hated a racist cop with a gun. Strip them and drive them through the streets like wild pigs. Wouldn't that be the best thing to do? Outside, a man was shouting, no power power in a resigned voice a new camaraderie a green green square like a meadow we can all be friends in kathy was tipsy and punchy kathy's hope is the hardest thing to hide and so it goes on it's it's kind of yeah i think it's i think it's

it's as original and as and as odd and as brilliant. Somebody, I think one of the reviewers said, the Kathy Lacka in the book is, I think, really quite nice. Quite likeable. More likeable maybe than Olivia Lange in 10. So, it's out now. Crudo by Olivia Lange, and it's out now. Is it paper?

Out now from Picador. I've got a proof. I've got a proof. You've got a proof. It's a hardback. It's a hardback at £12.99. OK. We'll pick this up again after some marvellously witty and interesting adverts.

About J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings. But before we start on that, we just wanted to say, OK, so John mentioned it at the start. there are two things it strikes me about us doing the lord of the rings on backlist the first is this is the least backlisted book of all time right dan you would agree with that i yeah i feel like yeah i feel like i've sullied your reputation okay that's the first thing now we'll come on to that right that? That's the first thing. Somebody always has to sullied. And the second thing is, when I let slip that we were going to be doing Tolkien on Backlisted,

several of our listeners expressed scepticism, right? And Anna Twigg, who we love, hello, Anna, quote said, life's too short to read Tolkien, right? Now, I'm not saying if I agree or disagree with that, but what I will say is, why does it provoke such strong reactions and strong emotions from people?

I think it's because it's so ubiquitous. I mean, it's almost a cliche in when you describe his name and the title, people's heads take them to a place that isn't actually in the book. And that's just because it's been so successful. I mean, 150 million copies I read,

this is sold. And of course the films, I think the films, I mean, that's something we'll come onto, I'm sure, which were absolutely fantastic, but very, very different to the trilogy. So yeah, I mean that's something we'll come onto I'm sure which were absolutely fantastic but very very different to the trilogy so yeah I mean I'd be honest I sort of submitted it to you both when I'd had a few beers I thought there's just no way they're going to do this

but I do I genuinely think it is appropriate for Battlested because it's hiding in plain sight people don't read it well you know what Dan when when john says i'll tell you the story now when john said to me dan wants to do the lord of the rings on bat this wants to return the king i just went with no way we're gonna do no way we're doing that you know i don't care if he is one of the sugar daddies behind bat listen there's no there's no way we are doing the return of the king so we made listeners we we made Dan write something we've never done before. We made Dan write a paragraph on why he thought it was a good idea, we should do it. And he wrote the most, Dan, you wrote the most brilliant

three-page pitching document. I did give him that at first. Oh, really? I don't have a degree, so I'll take that. Well, I sent it to you, didn't I? I said said will you will you come in and we so you totally convinced me and i think we can convince everyone who's listening well i hope there's so much to talk about why do you think people glom on to tolkien

when they normally find it when they're they might read the hobbit when they're a child but why do they glom to it as teenagers and then oh wow interesting question well i suppose detractors would say because it's adolescent and juvenile i suppose but um they are of course extremely wrong um why is teenagers oh gosh well it i mean it does have simple emotions in it they are the the simple emotions joy happiness loss it's incredibly intense cast your mind back to being 14 the world is ending like every 10 minutes isn't it or remaking itself of refresh or something and then there's all the uh you feel like you're falling into a bigger world you feel like yeah learning something or exploring something and underpinning it in all this is uh he was a scholar he was a an oxford don you're you are opening up worlds

so people have gone off and you know got nice careers as anglo-saxon lecturers i suppose the thing about it is is it really you either really go for it or you really don't well we've got a clip here a vox pops clip these are this was recorded 50 years ago on the streets of oxford and these are some students who were asked what they thought about Lord of the Rings. I comped together a few of them to give you the full range of opinions. So even then, people were either very pro or very anti. No, I don't at all like Tolkien or what he stands for. It seems to me that his work implies an escape from political and social reality. Now this seems to me is reprehensible.

It's an implication of triviality. It's an implication of regression, a refusal to face up to our political and social problems, our religious problems of today. The trouble is, of course, they make it sound like an intellectualized Dr. Doolittle, and no doubt before very long we'll have Lord of the Rings on ice with Millicent Martin and Margaret Rutherford. But it will become a cult, as it is a cult in America now. It gives you a nice sort of in-feeling to meet another Tolkien enthusiast who will know when you make references to things in the story,

as though you're referring to history. As we do in Spec Frequents. Exactly, the obscure of the reference, the better you feel when somebody else gets it. Well, I, of course, haven't actually read Tolkien, but I think it's marvellous. I think perhaps when he started off writing Lord of the Rings, as he was a philologist and an academic,

he was most interested in the language. But the world that he created to hold the language took him over. She's right. Yeah. She is right. So, I think we've dealt with why we want to talk about Tolkien. Dan, when did you first read The Return of the King? Well, I was quite old.

So, I mean, like most people, I grew up and it was on the bookshelf higher than I could reach. And it was like this enormous collection, this trilogy of books, which I never believed I would ever read. And I read The Hobbit quite young. And then I tried to read The Fellowship of the Ring and like many people I imagine I got stuck at the songs of Tom Bombadil and put it down and then it wasn't until I was 25. Lightweight. I have jokes with friends about the songs of Tom Bombadil but when I was 25 I was actually working at the idler and the films were coming out. And I thought, if I don't read this, then I want the first time I encounter Lord of the Rings, I want to be the director.

I want to be the casting director. I want to be in charge of the special effects. I want to do that in my own imagination before somebody else does it for me. And they did it utterly brilliantly. And so I started reading it on a Sunday. And when it came to Monday morning, I literally couldn't stop reading it. So I bunked off work, The Idler, which they approved of. And then I got to the Monday night and I couldn't, I literally couldn't leave the house. I just had

to keep going. And I bunked off Tuesday as well. And I've never had a book do that. And it's like, when you go running a lot if you're lucky you'll get the occasional runs where you get run as bliss where you feel like you're superhuman you can go forever this was like readers bliss it was like a way of accessing your mind or an escapism and i love video games when i was a kid and i i see this as the original zelda the original massive flow it's about flow, right? Yeah, OK. Brilliant. Yeah, and I've read a lot about how there's a gap

between what we know and what we can articulate in the way the mind works. So the part of your mind that makes decisions has no capacity for language. So you're always trying to bridge the gap between what you know and what you can articulate. And so I think because he was so talented with languages, I think he's doing that.

He's playing in that part of your mind between those two worlds. And he leaves enough for you to do, and you can explore and range within it. So one of the things you get with Tolkien that when people, the detractors, just to go back to, which is to say, you know, he's sort of cloth-eared, you know, he writes bad Victorian poetry. He was massively influenced as a whole generation of readers, the Edwardian period.

Moving stuff, I mean, we'll probably talk again, but the best, I think the best book, and I know you agree on Tolkien that's been published in a long time, is John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War. But the moving accounts of soldiers on the front with copies of William Morris, William Morris's sort of earthly paradise and his quest poems, The Well at the World's End, that there was a vogue for that. And, you know, people say, well, the language in Tolkien is self-consciously archaic.

There's a brilliant thing here about that. It is, you know, the word fell. You can't help but notice the word fell all the time and the these and the thys and the hithers. But he, at the same time, you know, that Wasteland was being written and that Virginia Woolf, he was doing something. He was moving in a different direction, but I think it was equally audacious. He says about Beowulf that the poet style, when it was written in Anglo-Saxon, was already archaic. And he says this sort of thing, the building up of a poetic language out of words and forms archaic and dialectical or used in special senses may be regretted or disliked. There is nonetheless a case for it. The development of

a form of language familiar in meaning and yet freed from trivial associations and filled with the memory of good and evil is an achievement and its possessors are richer than those who have no such tradition and i i have to say if you want to explain why tol so massively popular. It is precisely because he doesn't try and write about the 1920s in a realistic or naturalistic way. I think what's very interesting about the kind of archaic and the heroic language that's being used, Paul Fussell is very good about this,

how the sort of shift to things like glory and honour and triumph and helming and you know marching into battle it's it's happening before world war one yeah and tolkien who's experiences the trenches takes this language and from with the language that he knows well his his knowledge of beowulf the heroic mode and his his actual experience of the worst you know war of the 20th century he spins that in such a way that he's saying here's the truth of what this is all his friends bar one died i would i would like to add to that i was working for waterstones in the late 90s when we did a big promotion on the books of the century which was a

a big public vote and uh perhaps inevitably the lord of the rings won that public vote and although we got a bit of negative feedback about it as you would expect I can remember it being sneered at on Radio 4 the morning it was announced by Mark Lawson as being like a classic rucksack book or a school satchel book or whatever I was very happy to go out and talk about it as a book of the century because it seems to me that it is a book about the 20th century even if it wasn't intended as such that it's a partly a book about what is the one of the great themes of the 20th century well unfortunately it's about the industrialization and mechanization of mass slaughter and that is the theme of the two world wars and that's one of the themes of this book and indeed dan as you say it's the theme of what happens at the end of the book

what happens to the shire at the end of the book, what happens to the Shire at the end of the book. So we have a clip here from 1968 of Tolkien talking about what he felt the Lord of the Rings was about If you really come down to any large story it interests people, can hold them attention

for a considerable time or make stories practically always, a human story, practically always, human stories, practically always about one thing, aren't they? Death, inevitably death. I don't know if you would agree with that, but anyway, that is what I, there was a quotation from Simon Beauvoir

that I read in the paper the other day, which seems to me, put it in a nutjamia room. I think I'll read it to him. There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that happens to man is ever natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident, and even if he knows it and consents to it,

an unjustible violation. You may agree with the words or not, but those are the key spring of the laws of the ring. I was very, very drunk. That's wonderful,

though, isn't it? Absolutely brilliant. And it is a book about death. It springs biographically. He's orphaned very young. His father dies when he's three, and he comes back from South Africa with his mother, who subsequently dies in her 30s when Tolkien is about, oh, he must have been about 11.

So he and his younger brother are orphans. They're left in the care of a family priest because his mother has also converted to catholicism and been sort of ostracized by her family and i think what happens to people when they lose parents at that very kind of young age there's a sense of perpetual exile uh that you know paradise has been lost in some way you know funnily enough one of the other books of the century that I remember talking about is Pale Fire by Nabokov, which has exactly the same theme. And the idea of being exiled from Zembla, from the impossibly perfect world of your childhood, which perhaps didn't even exist in the first place, that you can never get back there. And the Shire comes from his memories of rural warwickshire this sort

of blessed time he has with his mother he's homeschooled the edwardian yeah i mean at that pre-lapsarian feeling that you recently did the pursuit of spring by edward thomas where he rides a bicycle and it's the same that kind of of sense of things being in balance. And then the war destroys that. Exactly that. And I know that one of the things, when it was published in the 50s, that there was a lot of attempts to try and to cast, you know, Hitler as Sauron and the Second World War.

But one of the great things about the Garth book is that he, because he basically has done an amazing research job of Tolkien's war, and he was at the Somme and, you know, saw and experienced, you know, horrific war at its worst, that the First World War, in a way, is a more, I mean, Tolkien himself resisted all attempts to try and read contemporary resonance into his work. In a way, quite rightly, because... Well, he also said, didn't he, he hates allegory and he hates...

He says it's not an allegory for the Second World War, but he did concede that the First World War was formative on it, I think. What he has to say about allegory, it's in the foreword, isn't it? It gets to one of the other themes of the book. He talks about allegory being rooted's in the foreword, isn't it? It gets to one of the other themes of the book. He talks about allegory being rooted in the domination of the author. It's the author forcing a meaning on the

reader, whereas myth or the kind of story is in the freedom of the reader. And the other major theme of Lord of the Rings is domination, power, the use and abuse of power as well. So allegory is tied directly to theme. There's a brilliant interview with him on BBC website, where they raise the idea that it's

about a Christian allegory. And he says that he thinks it's more of an allegory of the human race. He says, I've been impressed we are surviving because of the indomitable courage of quite small people facing impossible odds. They struggle on, almost blindly in some way. Frodo had very little idea, really. By the time he came to the end of the quest, he was beginning to understand things very much more. The wisest bit in the book is when Elrond says, the wheels of the world are turned by small hands

while the great are looking elsewhere, and they turn because they have to, it's a daily job yeah dan you were saying in your already legendary pitching document uh i seem to remember you were saying about power though what una was talking about right so the return of you specifically chose the return of the king rather than the lord of the rings and we should say that in a sense we can see the Lord of the Rings as one novel. We could see it as three novels, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King, which is how it was published. Or we can see it as Tolkien would have preferred it to have been published, which is six separate books, plus the appendices, plus the Silmarillion in one

go. What is it about The Return of the King that you... Yeah, so, well, for me, I mean, I listen to the audiobook, which is interesting because he starts by saying that don't read anything into it, it's just a story. But, you know, I take the role of a reader. I'm of the view that you co-author books you read because of your own situation. So when I read it, I just became fascinated

by the different ways in which man's relationship with power is explored. And it is very male, obviously very few female characters. But I think that I find that extraordinary because when I look at the story and I see Frodo with the ring, I see that we all have that power. We all have the ability to become wild in terms of our aspirations for success, for power. And that's very much the male journey, right? That you will go and make your mark on the world to become wild in terms of our aspirations for success, for power. And that's very much the male journey, right, that you will go and make your mark on the world.

Steve Jobs, make a dent in the universe. This is the sort of narrative that you're supposed to follow as a man. And yet he just gives us character after character that can't cope with it. And they cannot deal with that responsibility when it comes. Refuse that as a set of heroic values that say well actually yes exactly heroic values are a small strip of land which you garden to the best of your ability on the woman thing uh there are indeed there were air there were air quotes there there are indeed more named horses than named women in lord of the rings which is better than actually better than The Hobbits.

However, I will say, and I've read a lot of the scholarship on this kind of thing, he is actually pretty good on women. I think Eowyn's story about the railing she does against the sort of injustice of her, she's got this wonderful line of, oh, yeah, you want me here to keep the house, but if you all die, you won't want the house then. So, you know, I can just get burnt to death.

And she gets the best scene in the entire. Oh, yeah. Killing the witch king. I'm sorry, spoilers. Yeah. I mean, that. You know what? Every time I read that.

If any one of you are listening to this, come at me with a spoiler complaint on The Lord of the Rings. Then you are fools. You are fools. Well that is like the most extraordinary scene. I mean it's brilliantly described. Also, he was once asked which character he most associated himself

with and it was Faramir. Oh no way! He's my favourite character. Of course he should play. And he gets the girl. He gets the girl and he turns it down. He very sweetly says that Faramir's like him, except that Faramir has courage. Yeah.

It's a lovely line. I love, I've just got to do this little bit about Sam as well. He's obviously the amazing character. And I thought this is just after Frodo's been taken from Shelob's lair and Sam thinks he's dead and he's taken the ring. Have we picked out the scene? Oh, is it really? Oh, maybe, I'm sure. I'd love it because it's the most perfect moment

which everyone should learn from, in the book at least. And so he's about to go into Mordor on his own to try and find Frodo. And it says, His thought turned to the ring, but there was no comfort there, only dread and danger. No sooner had he come in sight of Mount Doom burning far away And it says, it became more fell, untamable, saved by some mighty will. As Sam stood there, even though the ring was not on him but hanging by its chain about his neck, he felt himself enlarged, as if he were robed in a huge distorted shadow of himself, a vast and ominous threat halted upon the walls of Mordor.

He felt that he had from now on only two choices to forbear the ring though it would torment him or to claim it and challenge the power that sat in its dark hold beyond the valley of shadows already the ring tempted him gnawing at his will and reason wild fantasies arose in his mind and he saw samwise the strong hero of the, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land and armies flocking to his call as he marched the overthrow of Barad-dûr. And then all the clouds rolled away and the white sun shone and at his command the Vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He had only to put on the ring and claim it for his own and all this could be. In that hour of trial it was the love of his master that helped

most to hold him firm but also deep down in him lived still unconquered his plain hobbit sense. He knew in the core of his heart that he was not large enough to bear such a burden, even if such visions were not a mere cheat to betray him. The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm, his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command. Oh, really good. It's just, come on, people. That's great. Do you want my Sam bit from that moment? Yeah, really good. It's just, come on, people. That's great.

Do you want my Sam bit from that moment? Yeah, go on. This is Sam debating. I think it's just from before then. Right. He's sort of realised that Frodo thinks he's dead and he's trying to decide what to do and wonders whether there is nothing to be done.

Sam looked on the bright point of the sword. He thought of the places behind where there was a black brink and an empty fall into nothingness. There was no escape that way. That was to do nothing, not even to grieve. That was not what he had set out to do. What am I to do then? He cried again now he's seen plainly to know the hard answer see it through another lonely journey and the worst isn't that wonderful yeah not even to not even to grieve that even grieving is living i mean that particular bit of the book the the crossing of mordor and the no No one does despair No one does despair I mean it's 50 miles

of... I mean and the descriptions I mean there are a couple of descriptions which are have to be I think he did say that a couple of the landscapes were influenced by the song Oh absolutely yeah Also the sense we were saying We were saying like the way

one of the things that that really sticks in my memory from the first time I read The Lord of the Rings, which I think I was 12, is those scenes and the physical suffering of Frodo and Sam go on much, much longer than any normal novelist would do. They keep going. In fact, they take up effectively two-thirds of the whole of The Lord of the Rings. And I wondered whether that sense in the trenches of you would live through hell

and it would only be one day and then the next day you'd do it again is one of the things that's feeding into that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lovely thing that C.S. Lewis reviewed in 1955, and he says, this war, he talked about it as surprising realism, this war has the very quality of the war my generation knew. It is all here, the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front when everything is now ready, the flying civilians, the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front when everything

is now ready, the flying civilians, the lively, vivid friendships, and the background of something like despair, and the merry foreground, and such heaven-sent windfalls as a cache of tobacco salvaged from a ruin. The author has told us elsewhere that his taste for fairy tale was wakened into maturity by active service. That, no doubt, is why we can say of his war scenes, quoting Gimli the Dwarf, there is good rock here, this country has tough bones. And I think that's true. I think he writes about battle a lot, Tolkien.

I'd like to go back to this idea that the book could have been published in a number of different ways. And one of the things I think is fascinating about the phenomenon of Lord of the Rings is the constant tension from its very first publication through to the present day of, on the one hand, the aims of the author or authors, if we bring Christopher Tolkien, his son, into the picture, and the response from the publishing world and the public. That tension was there from the beginning.

It seems to be ongoing now. And one of the things that happens to The Lord of the Rings is its first paperback edition is published in the mid-1960s in America. The perfect moment for it to be discovered by the counterculture. And it becomes the counterculture Bible. That's why you hear Led Zeppelin. It sounds funny to us now listening to hear Led Zeppelin. But in the context of the counterculture and it becomes the counterculture bible that's why you hear leds it sounds funny to us now listening to led zeppelin but in the context of the counterculture it's the core one of the core counterculture texts and there was a constant and there has ever

ever since been a tension between how do i the author process these people not understanding my book and this is goes back to what i was talking about about the tension between what the tolkien's wanted these books to be and how they have been received by millions of people christopher tolkien said well the films are terrible because they are they've been made mechanically for an audience of 14 year olds and they've only taken the things in the books that 14 year olds would like and actually going back to it i can i have some sympathy with that i certainly have sympathy with that over the hobbit movies uh which i absolutely i mean don't even go there i i think that the films are intermittently successful uh i think fellowship is probably the best adaptation um

because fellowship is the book that is most i thought narrative i thought two towers was i mean i think the battle scenes is pretty spectacular in two towers but they you know they they they have to have silly then dan tell us what they leave out okay well i'm of the film of return of the king i was gonna i was just gonna defend the films just a little bit first just because when you watch all the extended editions as i have yeah um the amount of work and the amount of love in that film is enormous and i agree and i would hate the re-reading return of the king as i was this week and and seeing how beautifully they adapt yeah and they've taken lines i mean oh it's made with great love it's made with great love but so that's

the so i do think they're wonderful but yeah, so what actually happens in Return of the King is that Saruman and Wormtongue are not killed. He doesn't fall off the Tower of Orthancan. He's not impaled on a spike. He is let free, let go, and he wanders the wilderness. And what happens when the hobbits return in their finery and having literally saved the world they get back to discover that saruman and worm tongue have scoured the shire they have destroyed it in they have fell trees they have burnt things they've enslaved the hobbits and it's purely out

of spite because he felt they were up themselves and needed to be taken down a peg or two so they so they get home without all their fame and without their incredible friends and they have to fight all over again and and it's the reason it's my favorite bit of the book is and i i see it as a meditation on success because anybody who's had any kind of success will tell you it feels amazing and then you go home and you have the same arguments and the same mundanity and i just love the fact that he doesn't let them off that hook yeah he makes them go back and and rebuild and fight again there's a the beautiful thing also i think is frodo coming back yeah he's so changed and there's that lovely thing where they frodo again spoiler alert at the grey havens so sam says you know i thought you were going to enjoy the shire too for years

and years after all you've done so i thought too once but i've been too deeply hurt sam i tried to show save the shire and it has been saved but not for me it must often be so sam when things are in danger. Someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. But you are my heir. All that I had and might have had I leave to you. And also you have Rose and Eleanor and Frodo lad will come and Rosie lass and Merry and Goldilocks and Pippin

and perhaps more that I cannot see. Your hands and your wits will be needed everywhere. You will be the mayor, of course, as long as you want to be, and the most famous gardener in history. And you will read things out of the Red Book and keep alive the memory of the age that is gone so that people will remember the great danger and so love their beloved land all the more.

And that will keep you as busy and as happy as anyone can be as long as your part of the story goes on. I think the last three, four chapters of The Return of the King are as good an ending of a novel as anything in 20th century literature. I think particularly, actually, The Scouring of the Shire and The Grey Havens. That last two pages in particular, again, and spoilers, I don't want to read it out because you've either read it and you'll have it in your own head,

but it seems to me so well-judged, perfect, sad, the idea that you are passing from something. And then you have that amazing final line of, well, I'm back well wonderful yeah it seems like an odd thing to talk about but um john and i run a venture we have run a vc back technology business so we spend a lot of time with incredibly rich and successful people and i have met billionaires that are like frodo at the grey havens they have they have achieved huge success and they have got to a point where it wasn't

what they thought they were going to get isn't there. And I think this is something, this ties into the whole problem with men and power, is that they get power and it isn't what they thought it would be and they can't cope with that. And then the rest of us pay various prices as a result. Just to pull back to one of the other books we were talking about earlier,

Ridley Walker, he dispatches with this in the first paragraph, Ridley goes on a boar hunt and hunts a boar and kills his boar and proves he's a man. And this is all in the first paragraph, he goes, it all felt a bit stupid. Yeah, that was it. But that is a very particular type of despair, which not many people will feel sympathy for,

but it's a powerful thing to experience. But you know what? I think there's a... I hear what you're saying, Dan. I think there's a thing... One of the things I think resonates with people when they read The Lord of the Rings, that the process you've referred to

might equally apply to a period of illness or a period of fighting or you know i love there's a brilliant quote about writing but reading this book reminded me of writing a book in as much as it is naive to think that the writing of the book will not affect you and that you will be the same person at the end of writing the book that you were at the beginning. Yeah, absolutely. Right? Right. That you are changed by something that becomes like the cast

left by the worm, effectively. That you're somewhere else. You've crawled through the book. The book is the evidence of you passing through it, but you're not the same anymore. Yeah, absolutely. On Scouring of the Shire, I completely agree that it's like the book in microcosm. You've got sort of, it's about tyranny.

Yeah, like without it, it's totally out of balance. Yeah, yeah, it's bringing it all home. It shows you that everything that was happening that was heroic and gradual, these big places, matters down in the smallest places as well and it also has one of my favorite lines of the book which is sam's dad skewering him yeah what's becoming your west skit son oh you don't hold with oinmungry where as well i know and it's just like i've just saved the world and you're you know humiliating me in front of my girlfriend. I love that. This brilliant thing that just Ronald Hutton, the historian, said, which about the kind of the world, which I loved. You're going back to your PowerPoint.

He says that it's basically that it's the physical, that Middle Earth is like the geography reflects that of the post-Roman Europe. physical that middle earth is like the geography reflects that of the post-roman europe most of its western sector is a land of ruins half remembered great rulers economic contraction and small successor states its northeastern population populated by different warlike peoples in a state of constant flux with vast forests subsistence agriculture and wooden trading posts southeastern quarter containing gondor a centrally governed urbanized and literate remnant of the former imperial state in In true post-Roman manner, the northern frontier of the latter is guarded by a settled group of barbarian federates, the people of Rohan, who formed a province as a separate kingdom while bound by treaty to aid the remainder of the empire when required. So Gondor is a

Byzantium and Rohan is the Viking world. And of course, medieval England is the Shire. I remember somebody saying to me once that this is a sort of fantasy in a way of Tolkien is sort of unifying Roman and Anglo-Saxon culture in this book. Yeah, but he was setting out to write a mythology. Yeah, that's a mythology for England. I'm going to have to reminisce now

because we're coming on to something that I really want to talk about. So right, like 19... So in 1980, I won the only prize that I've ever won for anything, right? Which was, I read the scene in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the whale gets, sperm whale gets, no, the bowl of petunias gets turned into a, no, it gets turned into a, yeah, it gets turned into a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias. I read that out loud. I won the spoken English prize at my school. And with the book token, I got the hardback of The Fellowship of the Ring.

Right. And that was the first. I was 12. I read The Fellowship of the Ring. Then I went out. And with the book tokens for my birthday or Christmas, I got the hardbacks of The Two Towers and The Return of the King. I read those.

I read them three or four times. And then I went out and I thought, wow, what am I going to read next? I know. They'll get the follow-up, The Silmarillion. So 1981, 1981, I begin to read The Silmarillion. And in 2018, I finished it, right? I read The Silmarillion last week and I did it. I got the audio book and the copy of the book that I bought in 1981.

The audio book is done by martin shaw of the professionals and listen he deserves a knighthood for reading out the name so far anything else so what i did was i read along with martin shaw and sometimes i put martin shaw on triple speed just to just to just to crack on through it but before i tell you what i thought about the silmarillion uh a couple of months ago on The Archers, Linda Snell read Rob's favourite book, The Silmarillion, and this

is what she says about The Silmarillion. You've got to be kidding. This is what she said. Here we go. I have never been so bored in my entire life. There is no way this could be described as literary fiction. It is a collection of random notes cobbled together after Tolkien's death, which, in my opinion, puts a rather large dent in his reputation.

But he creates an entire world. He creates, at infinitely tedious length, a personal fairyland, peopled by this vast array of interchangeable characters, all with silly names. The whole thing is turgid, bloated, sententious. Oh, I'm sorry you don't like it. And in my personal catalogue of unreadable books, it definitely earns the number one spot. There's plenty of people like me who believe it's a masterpiece.

I know. I know. I can't begin to explain that, but I deeply regret the ten days of my life that I have devoted to the wretched thing. Feel better now. Now.

That is so, that's unbelievable. She read it in ten days. When I said that I was reading this on Twitter, the reaction that I got to, that I was just from reading a book was incredibly strong from people coming back, the minority of whom said, it's great. The vast majority of whom said, why are you putting yourself through this? And Chris McCrudden, who's a listener, who we love

Chris, industry expert said, that is a terrible, terrible terrible book i actually ended up thinking that it's not a terrible terrible book it is and in fact in artistic terms it's very true to the the goal that first jrr tolkien then christopher tolkien set themselves so what it is is it's not an easy book to read and it's a very poor follow-up if you think think of it as such, to Lord of the Rings. And this goes back to that tension I'm talking about, the tension between what the Tolkiens were trying to create and then being totally banjacked by the massive cultural and commercial impact it has. And if you go back to the Silmarillion, which we all remember from our childhoods, I think.

I mean, it's one of the biggest publishing events of the 70s. If you go back and read... I got it when it came out. If you go back and read the jacket blurb, what's fascinating is I'd always thought the publisher had misrepresented it, right? You go back to the jacket blurb, it basically says on the jacket blurb,

don't expect Lord of the Rings, right? They didn't misrepresent it. In fact, it's the public, the public across, that they don't get another Lord of the Rings, right? And actually, I really respect Christopher Tolkien and Harper Collins, as it became, for staying relatively true to the goals of the project, which was produce one difficult-to-read volume after another, which nevertheless, at this point quite serious,

nevertheless accurately represent J.R.R. Tolkien's life's work. That's what he wanted to do, and we could pass judgement on that. And whether or not you think that's more valuable than you know the collected works of t.s elliott or you know i i do think he's i think he is a great artist i think he's doing something it's so remarkable when you when you the scale of it that the the and the the energy i mean it's it's remote like you andy i i don't think the cimmerillion is a bad book i think it's quite hard work. But I wouldn't want to read really challenging books all the time. I try and read a mixture of things.

But in the case of The Silmarillion, I sort of thought, do you know what, I'm really pleased I read it because guess what, I understand it much better for having read it. I didn't enjoy it a great deal. I found it hard work, but it gave me an insight into The Lord of the Rings and the insight into the Tolkien's and an insight into world-building.

Mythopia, I believe he calls it, doesn't he? Legendary. Surely that has to be why it resonates. I mean, when I found out that he was upset that we lost our mythology in England because effectively we inherited all these French stories of King Arthur and we had lost our mythology and he wanted to create one for this land. There's a great quote where he says,

it is in this world, it's just another stage of its imagination. So he was trying to lay that down. So for me, it's the kind of building blocks that you don't see that give you lord of the rings and that is such an audacious thing to texture it's the stuff that you have imagined yeah yeah and that you know intimately and this is true for building a character in a novel the stuff that you know about the way they move the way they speak the way they can put themselves in a room and for tolkien it's just from the ground up. It's, you know, down to the names of the flowers. It's down to the, you know, the way the river tinkles.

It's such a celebration of language. I mean, that's what I think is so true. What I loved in the book, which you don't get in the films, is, you know, that you realise that the whole, it's not just Gondor, the whole, all the regions of Gondor and the sense of the cultures. And I love the, I thought that was also a travesty in the film, the Wozes, the wild men, Ganbury Gan,

who is a kind of, you know, sort of a remnant, kind of sort of Neanderthal sort of wild men, which is, there's just, like you say, the layering is so, and yes, sometimes the lists of names of mountains and things can get you know can weigh you down but part of it is just part of that is rendering something so so completely in three-dimensional as you say in terms of texture it it seems odd to me that a book that's been so loved by so many people and I think has been massively influential, I mean... Well, a contemporary fantasy wouldn't exist as a genre without it.

That is true, isn't it? I mean, my instinct is that that's true. And even if it's just a case of, you know, Moorcock or Mieville reacting against it, I think possibly we're a little bit past that now. Yeah. But all those sort of big blockbuster 70s and 80s well i read so i read i must have read lord of the rings half a dozen times when i was a teenager

stephen donaldson right i read stephen donaldson once yeah yeah me too yeah yeah it's not even it's like a bad glass of actually you know what i went i know what i did for this in addition to reading the silver brilliant i listened to the the music at the start of this episode, is the theme music from the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Lord of the Rings. I went back and listened to that. Oh, my God, it's so brilliant. It's got Ian Holm in it. It's got Michael Horden as Gandalf.

It's got Robert Stevens as the most unsavoury Aragorn. I know, yeah. It's got John LeMessurier in it. It's got Bill Nye. Jack May. It is, oh, it's incredible. It's absolutely brilliant. Oh, Dan, if you've not, you've got to listen.

If you haven't, it's really outstanding. I think I heard that before I read Lord of the Rings. It's quite hard for me to sort of disentangle them in my mind, actually. No, it's absolutely superb. Really, really good, yeah. And nature too. I mean, you've got to just chip that in like the writing the nature natural world is completely you know and i grew up in hampshire and the new forest and for when when i read it it takes me home and i think wherever you you know whenever someone reads it you have that

if you have that tie to the natural world where you grew up in that environment, you're seeing your own, the landscape of your childhood when you read it. And that's why, for me, it's such a comforting book. Right. Well, it seems painful to leave the shores of Middle Earth, as always, but we shall do it. Let's sail into the Grey Havens, shall we? There's a part called the Grey Havens?

Anyway, huge thanks to Dan and to Una and to our producer, Nicky Birch, and to Unbound, and to our hip-hugging sponsor, Spoke. We've just got time to slip in a quick Unbound project worth backing, rather on message, I think. It's Dicemen Games Workshop, 1975-85, by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson. backing rather on on message i think it's dice men games workshop 1975 to 85 by ian livingston and steve jackson we should do a bat listed on warlock of fight from now on well look it's ian and steve were the games geeks who founded games workshop in the flat in shepherd's bush in 1970s the journey of how games workshop grew into becoming the world's

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And of course, you can and will still contact us on Twitter, Facebook and Boundless. We hope you've enjoyed it as much as we all have. God, I was looking forward to this episode. Yeah, me too. Oh, God, I really you know, even as I slogged as Martin Shaw pushed me unwillingly through the Silmarillion, I thought this is going to be

brilliant. Dan, it has been brilliant. Thank you so much for choosing it. If you've enjoyed it, please consider leaving us a review with appropriate stars. If you feel so for choosing it. If you've enjoyed it, please consider leaving us a review with appropriate stars if you feel so moved on iTunes or whichever platform you get your podcasts. Thank you, folks. We'll be back in a fortnight. Until then, fare forward, travellers. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts,

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