Front Burner - How war, industry and religion shaped Tolkien's Middle-earth

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

Amazon has tapped into the power of J.R.R. Tolkien, spending around $715 million US on its new series, The Rings of Power, reportedly the most expensive TV show ever made. What is it about Tolkien's fantasy realm of Middle-earth that has held our attention for so long, since his early writings in the 1930s? Today on Front Burner, we're talking to historian Dominic Sandbrook — co-host of The Rest is History podcast — about how Tolkien's world strikingly mirrors our own, from war, to modernity, to greed, to the fight to save the environment.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. The actual beginning, though it's not really the beginning, but the actual flashpoint was I remember very clearly... Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson.

That is J.R.R. Tolkien. And he's talking about the moment he began to write the book that would become known as The Hobbit. It's the late 1920s. He's a professor at Oxford. He's sitting in his study in the house he lives in with his family. It's a house with big windows and a door that leads to a garden. He's marking exam papers. It's laborious, he says. Boring. And I remember picking up a paper and actually if I nearly gave an extra mark for it,

five marks, actually, one page on this particular paper that was left blank, glorious. Nothing to read, so I scribbled on it. I can't think why. In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit. But even though the words came to him in a flash, the world of The Hobbit, Middle Earth, had been with Tolkien for a long time. In a letter to a friend, he would say it was like asking man when language started.

It was inevitable. It has always been with me. Decades later, the world that Tolkien created endures. You shall not pass! Since The Lord of the Rings was published, it's gone on to sell 150 million copies, becoming one of the best-selling books of all time. It would go on to be adapted into an Oscar-winning series by Peter Jackson, a historic filmmaking feat in and of itself, in scale and production. And now in 2022, Amazon just spent $715 million on a new Lord of the Rings series, the most expensive TV series ever made. Haven't you ever wondered what else is out there? There's wonders in this world beyond our wandering. So what is it about Middle Earth that has held our attention for so long?

Today on FrontBurner, we're talking to Dominic Sandbro world still possesses so much imaginative power and how in some ways it strikingly mirrors our own, from war to modernity to greed to the fight to save the natural world. Hi, Dominic. Thank you so much for being here. Hi, thank you so much for having me. It's a real treat to be on the show. It's actually such a treat for me to have you on. I have to say I've been looking forward to this conversation all week. I'm also a huge Lord of the Rings nerd and I'm a huge fan of your podcast. So thank you.

huge fan of your podcast. So thank you. Maybe we could start by giving people a very, very brief summary, which I will admit is not an easy thing to do. If you were to take a stab at it, what is the basic storyline? Wow, that's a tough question. Okay, here goes. So the story basically concerns a magic ring. So you're in this sort of fantasy world, medieval world, and the magic ring so you're in this sort of fantasy world medieval world and the magic ring has passed into the possession of some people called the hobbits so they're like yeah i mean everybody knows what a hobbit is they're kind of like human beings but they're but they're a little bit shorter with hairy feet hobbits have been living and farming in the four farthings of the shire for many hundreds of years i'm content to ignore and be ignored, but where our hearts truly lie

is in peace and quiet and good till death. For all hobbits share a love of things that grow. And the hobbits discover that this ring is a terrible weapon. It's like a sort of cross between the

atom bomb and the key to life itself. One ring to rule them all. One ring to find them. One ring to bring them all. And in the darkness, find them. And it's being sought by this dark lord called Sauron, who lives in a distant kingdom called Mordor. And he is hoping to retrieve the ring

and to use it to complete his conquest of Middle-earth. And so the hobbits, effectively, they sort of trudge across this world with a group of friends of various races, so dwarves and elves and so on. I will help you bear this burden, Frodo Baggins, as long as it is yours to bear. If by my life or death I can protect you, I will.

You have my sword. And you have my bow. And my axe and their mission effectively is to destroy the ring by throwing it into the volcano in which it was forged which has the excellent name of mount doom and so we follow the hobbits on their journey and to see whether they can in fact destroy the ring or whether they will yield to its corrupting power because one of the other brilliant things about tolkien's ring is that the more you use it the more you become addicted to using it and it brings out the evil within you so well i feel like you really nailed that oh that's kind of you thank you i mean it took tolkien i think a thousand pages but i mean

why was he faffing around i mean it took me about 90 seconds. That was a really good Coles notes. I know that it was heavily influenced by Beowulf, a very, very old English poem, the oldest surviving epic poem, one of the most important translated works of old English literature. But there's also so much more to The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's writing that I want to get into discuss with you today. And I wonder if it's worth us taking a moment to learn a bit about Tolkien himself. Who was he? How would you describe him? So Gerard Tolkien was an enormously respected scholar. He spent most of his life at Oxford University, but before that, his life was pretty interesting. He was born in Bloemfontein in South Africa in 1892. So he's a child of empire, really. His father had a very

glamorous job of being a bank manager. And when Tolkien was three, his mother, who hated life in South Africa, brought him back to England, to Birmingham, which is the second biggest city in England, industrial city. And his father was due to follow them, but his father died of rheumatic fever before he even got on the boat. So Tolkien ended up with his mother living in Birmingham in the years before the First World War. She died as well as he was entering his teens, so he was an orphan. He went to school in Birmingham, a very famous sort of prestigious school called King Edward's Birmingham. When he left, he went to Oxford University to exit a college at Oxford, and he

became absolutely passionate about languages, about the history of languages. So you mentioned Beowulf, the great old English Anglo-Saxon poem. That was absolutely meat and drink to Tolkien. He was obsessed with all this sort of stuff. But then the single biggest moment in his life was the First World War, because like all of his friends from school and university, he joined up. His first great experience of war was on the western front at the battle of the Somme the at that point the bloodiest battle in human history in 1916 and by the he was invalided out in the end he suffered something called trench fever which could could kill you you got it from lice but Tolkien didn't die and by the end of the

war 1918 all but one of his friends were dead so he was the only one left apart from one other and that experience found its way into his books i mean so that stuff that i was telling you about the hobbits the adventure the idea of the group of friends going far from home and death kind of stalks them on the road there's a chapter called the dead marshes which you talk about being a clear example of his experience in the war right absolutely absolutely so so the western front i mean lots of again lots of listeners will probably know this the western front in france and flanders between 1914 and 1918 it is a battle scarred muddy sodden landscape it's a landscape from hell really sort of shell holes and corpses buried in the mud and all of this sort of stuff and Tolkien worked all of that into his depiction of the hobbit's approach to Mordor the sort of

dark land of the enemy in the Lord of the Rings so there are moments when his two great heroes frodo and sam when they see in the in the puddles in the water of this kind of blasted wasteland they see dead bodies and dead faces staring up at them there are dead things dead faces in the water All dead. All mutton, elves and men and oxes. A great battle long ago. And if you put side by side the prose of those bits of the Lord of the Rings and the accounts that soldiers and war reporters were sending home from the Western Front in 1916, 1917. I mean, they're pretty much identical. It's so interesting, right? Because I think for a lot of people, they may just think of the books as this fantasy land. To see them so closely mirror history and Tolkien's own life experiences. I just want to swing back to languages for a second, his study of languages, a really interesting piece of this for me and our producer, who is also a Lord of the Rings nerd, Simi. We're just like a bunch of

Lord of the Rings nerds here. There's no shame in that. There's absolutely no shame in that at all. Yeah. Is that like for Tolkien, the language came first, right? Not the story. Like he said, and here's the quote, the invention of languages is the foundation. The stories were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me, a name comes first and the story follows. Exactly right. And that will strike some people, I think, as a bit odd.

But that's exactly how he thought of it. I think I did try to use the languages, which I did understand, which is, after all, the primary and most important of all cultural penitentiary. I tried to use them for that purpose, to categorise. Also, of course, gives me great pleasure. I always, in writing, always start with a name. Give me a name and it produces a story, not the other way about, normally.

So basically, Tolkien was obsessed with old English, with old Finnish, with old Gothic, with these Finnish, with old Gothic, with these kind of vanished Germanic languages from sort of medieval or dark ages Europe. Languages have a flavour to me, which I never understand people saying, for instance, it was awfully dry and dull, because a new language to me is just like taking a new wine or a new sweetbeet or something. And in his spare time, I always sort of think of it as like, you know, there's that kind of stereotype

of the husband who's got a kind of train set in his attic or something, or some sort of strange little project in his shed that he devotes enormous amounts of time to. And for Tolkien, that was kind of making up languages. So in his spare time, he would make up or imagine what languages might have been.

Well, because I started trying to invent them almost at once, because the same way that my reading of myth has been disturbed, because I've never hardly got through any fairy stories that I wanted to write by myself. And he started developing kind of Elvish and all of these kinds of things.

Actually, long before, decades before, he started writing the all of these kinds of things actually before he long before decades before he started writing the story of the lord of the rings so it's exactly that he developed the languages because that was his day job that was his job at oxford university was the history of language so he started doing that and only then did he get into writing the kind of the stories and the folktales so he's also really fascinated with myths that was true of a lot of people at the beginning of the 20th century myths were very much in the air at the time and i think tolkien like a lot of writers i mean james joyce t.s elliott very kind of sort of highbrow writers tolkien was trying to find a way to understand the horrors of the 20th century through the kind of the literary myths of the past and he does this

by developing his own myths because he thought that England, because it had become an industrial society and all these things before anybody else, he thought that England had lost touch with its myths. This mythology, you can't have mythology without an ideal, usually something gone, right? From the past that you strive towards,

the idyllic English, the village green, right? And so how did he react to the rise of industry then in his work? Yeah, so I think that's a huge theme of Tolkien's writing. I mean, Tolkien, I said he was born in 1892. So he grows up reading a lot of the books of the kind of late Victorian era. And running right through that was this sort of idea that England had once been this green and pleasant land, but all of that had been destroyed and blighted by the rise of industry, the rise of railways and factories and so on, which obviously was more pronounced in England than anywhere else. Tolkien lived, as I said before, in Birmingham. Birmingham, anyone who's ever been there knows it's a big industrial city. And he started out when he first came to England as a little boy. He lived right on the fringes

in a kind of village. But that village was swallowed up eventually. So all the little kind of woods and the streams and all of that sort of stuff that he had known as a boy, that was swallowed up by the city. And he had a real horror of that. He sort of reacted against it. And running right through the lord of the rings is this sort of idealized vision so the shire the country that the hobbits live in is a kind of idealized almost kind of victorian edwardian sort of as you said a village green kind of england but it's menaced the whole time by factories and by wheels and inventions and contraptions which the kind of the bad guys, as it were,

are always tinkering with and always hoping, you know, they love all this sort of stuff. But for Tolkien, the machine is the enemy, really. And so the ring, the device at the centre of the book, the ring stands for kind of knowledge and mastery over the natural world and science and technology and all these things that Tolkien thought were bad. I mean, Tolkien was world, and science, and technology, and all these things that Tolkien

thought were bad. I mean, Tolkien was even, you know, he was an incredibly reactionary writer. You know, left to him, he would have turned the clock back hundreds and hundreds of years. And at the time, that was thought of as extremely conservative, you know, an ultra-conservative kind of. But of course, now, you know,kien's book has been taken as a great bible for the green movement tolkien seems ahead of his time because of his kind of ecological warnings about what we were doing to the natural world the landscape and all this sort of stuff it's talking mary the tree is talking tree i am no tree i am ant. I am on nobody's side because nobody is on my side, little hawk. Nobody cares for the woods anymore. It's really interesting to see this idea that industry and technology is a great threat

represented in Tolkien's work through the destruction of trees. Like you see Isengard, which really captures his idea that like the new world is in decay, the old world is being destroyed and steel and factories are being used to destroy the forest. You know, it just it feels like a very pointed metaphor. Yeah, absolutely. and Tolkien was obsessed with trees Tolkien loved trees there's a brilliant clip of him on in a BBC documentary saying entirely earnestly with a very straight face to a slightly bewildered BBC reporter that he always wishes he could talk to trees he's convinced they would have something interesting

to tell him I should have liked to be able to make contact with a tree and find out what he feels about things to him the tree is find out what he feels about things. To him, the tree is the symbol of a kind of innocent natural world. And as you say in the book, this evil wizard Saruman, who's obsessed with machines and sort of contraptions and things, he cuts down all the trees around his great tower so that he can make kind of orc factories. The old world will burn in the fires of industry the forests will fall a new order will rise we will drive the machine of war with the sword and the spear and the iron fists of the horse.

And that, Tolkien, I think is the perfect metaphor for what industry and sort of human arrogance, I suppose, has done to the natural world. Another major event that seeps into lord of the rings is the second the second world war and this idea of evil moral ambiguity even the mechanisms of war and can you tell me about why the second world war and that very dark chapter in history was so important in Tolkien's writing? I think it's massively important. So I think the Lord of the Rings is, I mean, there aren't many novels that are about both world wars, but I think the Lord of the Rings is absolutely about both world wars. So he starts writing the Lord of the Rings at the end of the 1930s. So in the era of appeasement, and you can definitely see that in the book. I mean, Tolkien bitterly resisted the idea that his book was an allegory. And he sort of said, oh, it has no political significance at all. But authors always say that. And if you read his book now, you see very clearly there are people who are appeasing the enemy. There are weak leaders who think that you can't stand up to evil. There's all this sort of stuff, which is very much of the 1930s.

there's all this sort of stuff which is very much of the 1930s it took Tolkien an enormous amount of time to write the book so he doesn't actually get published till 1954 much of it is written during the second world war when his sons are serving in the RAF and we know from Tolkien's letters to his son Christopher that he was he was really preoccupied with bombing with aerial bombing as so many people of course were in the Second World War. More and more Allied formations are speeding on their way to other vital points in Germany's railway network. So the idea of a threat from the sky, which you see in the Nazgul, which are the servants of the Dark Lord who kind of swoop down on these sort of hideous kind of lizard-like flying beasts. They were once men, great kings of men.

Then Sauron the Deceiver gave to them nine rings of power. Blinded by their greed, they took them without question, one by one, falling into darkness. But also Tolkien was really exercised by the idea that we were doing to Germany what they had done to us. We were using their own weapons against them, which is, of course, that metaphor of the ring, the ring being the enemy's weapon, but which will corrupt you if you use it. And he says many times to his son, you know, I worry that by bombing Dresden, by bombing Berlin and so on, and then, of course, with the atom bombs dropped on Japan, that we are actually turning ourselves into the enemy by using his weapons. And that's why it's so important to him that the central sort of mission of the Lord of the Rings is not to use the enemy's weapon against itself, but to destroy it.

And I think what that actually reflects is, you know, he's wrestling, as so many people were, is it no holds barred against the Nazis, or are there some things we just won't do? And I think that's a very mid-20th century kind of anxiety. If he'd been a Victorian writer, he would just have had goodies and baddies. But because he's a 1940s writer, everybody has within them a kind of weakness and a kind of corruption.

And I think that's, you write that kind of thing if you've seen men under pressure in the trenches and if you're very conscious of, you know, the headlines in 1945 or whatever. it's it's so terribly true it's the good people do the damage so often yeah i think a lot of people would probably say that that's why the the movies by peter jackson also felt so relevant in the early 2000s right in the midst of the war on terror maybe for some of those same reasons yeah no i think that's absolutely right because i think it's a perennial anxiety isn't it are we do we lose something of ourselves in the fight against evil do we become evil in our own

in our own way and i think absolutely they struck a chord then and i think you know we're not that far tolkien died in the 1970s're not that far away from his lifetime. And those sort of concerns, not just about their capacity for evil, but about the dangers of science and industry and about what we're doing to the natural world and about, you know, have we lost touch with something innocent in the world? I think those are very much the sort of concerns

that you'll see, you know, you open any newspaper today and you'll see them. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix.

I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cops. Another really interesting thing I learned recently was what a huge impact the books had on counterculture in the 60s. People would wear shirts that said Frodo lives, like Led Zeppelin was really into Tolkien. The drums were shake, the castle castle wall the ring rays are out in black to me the 60s kind of falls very neatly into two kind of halves so the first half is very

optimistic and in love with modernity and everybody's you know people are sort of dreaming about wearing plastic clothes and going on holidays to mars and stuff and then the second half particularly with the vietnam war is much darker much more conflicted much more anxiety about science and technology and so on it's at that point pretty much exactly that point that tolkien's book really found a mass audience in north america so there was a company called ace books that brought out basically a pirated edition, paperback edition in 1965 in North America. And Tolkien sued them and then brought out his own edition. And it really struck a chord with young readers because I think in the age of Vietnam, they were, you know, they were looking for sort of something old fashioned and small and against, you know, the man and the establishment and all this kind of thing and the system. And Tolkien's story, because he kind of idealises smallness,

you know, the little people who turn out to be the heroes, who are not warlike, you know, and actually like to mind their own business. I've always been impressed. We are here surviving because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds. I thought the wisest remark in the whole book was that where Elrond says that the wheels of the world are turned by the small hands

while the greater looking elsewhere are turned because they have to, because it's the daily job. I think that really struck a chord with the counterculture. And then, of course, at the end of the 60s and early 70s, you get the beginnings of the Green Movement. So all the stuff that you were just saying about the trees, that absolutely struck a chord with kind of slightly hippie-ish. So absolutely not the audience, I think, that Tolkien would have had in mind.

I think in his mind, his audience were men like him in sort of tweed jackets, smoking pipes in kind of wood paneled uh rooms in in medieval colleges that was the audience he had in mind but certainly by the end of his life he had this huge audience a very young audience that he had never imagined just as like a random sidebar when you talk about his intended audience when i was in high school i did a a stint at um like one of those programs at oxford and i did like an entire end of semester projects on all the bars and that tolkien and cs lewis would drink at um the eagle and child is the most famous one yes yes the eagle child yeah it's a long time ago um you, I think that you mentioned before that he has said

that his work or he doesn't like his work being described as allegorical, right? But he has described it as fundamentally Catholic, which I think maybe might not be so obvious for a lot of people when they read it. Like, unlike when you read C.S. Lewis, you're like, oh, this is definitely a religious allegory. But how does his deep Catholicism manifest in his work? Well, it's interesting, isn't it? Because I think a lot of people are surprised by that. Tolkien was an intensely passionate Catholic. He was so sort of serious about it that his wife, Edith, basically, he wouldn't marry her unless she converted to Catholicism.

And she alienated a lot of her family who were Methodists, I think, by doing so. So that just tells you how seriously he took it. There's no God in the Lord of the Rings. God isn't mentioned. Nobody goes to church. Nobody really prays. So it seems absent. But it's there, I think, in two ways. First of all, the calendar is sort of mapped onto the traditional Catholic calendar. in two ways. First of all, the calendar is sort of mapped onto the traditional Catholic calendar. So the day on which the ring is destroyed is a day that in the early church was sometimes seen as the day of Easter, or it was the day of the Annunciation when the Virgin Mary finds out that she's going to give birth to the Son of God. So Tolkien picked that very deliberately. This was the sort of, you know, the most important moment of his book, and everything was building up to that. But the other thing that I think is very important is the sense of sort of sin, of human sin, which is obviously, you know, deeply embedded in Catholicism. I mean, it's

difficult to describe it without really giving the most horrendous spoilers, but I think it's fair to say that the absolute climax of the book is it's not the heroic outcome that you think. So actually you think that it seems possible that corruption and evil will triumph. And then there's this kind of dramatic intervention. And that to Tolkien was really important. It was a moment of kind of divine grace almost. Tolkien absolutely thought of it as a Christian and specifically a Catholic book. He's so aware of our potential for kind of as a christian and a specifically a catholic book he's so aware of our

potential for kind of sin and the importance of divine grace in kind of saving us and it's so easy to miss that I know there's so much that we can talk about, but one thing I did want to hit on with you is that one of the critiques of Tolkien's work is, of course, the absence of women, people of color, and his portrayal of, like, the orcs or the southrons. The latest Amazon series loosely based on his world has tried to remedy that and i wonder if you could talk to me a little bit about

why that's created controversy uh well golly there's an awful lot to unpack there so on the women tolkien's writing for other men i think that's the truth of it you know you talked about the pub he's writing for his friends that he meets in the pub. He's been to an all-boys school. He's been to an all-boys university, Oxford. His Oxford College in those days. His friends are all male. There are women in The Lord of the Rings and actually some very heroic women.

So the character of Eowyn is given a tremendously sort of heroic narrative. But you're right. By and large the male characters are numbered the female by about a thousand to one i don't think he would have he would have been bewildered if you said that was a problem um and people didn't really comment on it in the 1950s but obviously it's understandable that now if you're making a series for the 21st century you're probably unlikely to to copy that on the issue race again i don't think tolkien by any means thinks that the orcs are,

they're meant to be sort of debased versions of humanity. He sees them as like Grendel in Beowulf in the Anglo-Saxon poem, or as like the monsters and trolls from the Norse myths. I don't think he thinks of them by any means as sort of black or Asian peoples. He does, of course, have, you mentioned these characters called the Southrons or the Easterlings or the Haradrim. They are described as dark-skinned.

Now, there is a moment, actually, they're not evil. There's a moment when one of the hobbits looks at them, a dead body, and he thinks about the lies that must have brought,

that this man is a man like him and that the lies that have brought him to the battlefield and all this sort of stuff. So there's a sort of acknowledgement of if you like, and that's the weird word to describe of a hobbit, but that kind of shared humanity.

I mean, by the way, it seems blindingly obvious to me that if you're making a series in 2022, it's going to reflect the world of 2022. I mean, it'd be kind of weird if it didn't. Just like Tolkien's book reflected the world of 2022. I mean, it'd be kind of weird if it didn't. Just like Tolkien, you know, Tolkien's book reflected the world wars. So the Amazon series reflects the 21st century. I mean, that's completely understandable.

I mean, Tolkien, he wanted to create a mythology for England. So the mythology that he's creating in the 1930s is of course all white because England was overwhelming. I mean, almost entirely white, except for a few ports and London. If he were writing that book now, I'm sure he would write it differently, because he would be reflecting the different racial makeup of England today. Just before we go, this has been so great. Thank you so much. It's so interesting. I wonder, we were actually all kind of curious who your favorite

character in Lord of the Rings is. My favorite character? Well, I mean, everybody knows, you will know as well as I do, that the hero of the Lord of the Rings is really Sam, Sam Gamgee. It's not, I mean, Frodo is great and stuff, but Sam is really the person who stands for the reader, I think. I just want to say that when you said Sam, three of our producers just wrote in our chat, yes, I also had written down Sam as my favorite character. Thank you, Dominic. Thank you so much for this.

It was a lot of fun. Thank you. Brilliant. Thank you very much. Thank you. Just in the darkest depths of Mordor I met a girl so fair But Gollum at the evil war Crept up and slipped away with her

All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thank you very much for listening. We'll talk to you tomorrow. I ain't nothing happened to me, love. I guess I'll keep on rambling. I'm gonna shake it. Save myself.

I gotta find my baby. I'm gonna rattle on. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.