Gone Medieval - Tolkien: Middle Earth & the Middle Ages

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

For millions of Tolkien lovers around the world, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are more than just fantasy fiction. Their rich mix of sacred mythology and archetypal saga stories draw deeply into history and legend and profoundly resonate with universal human experience. But from where did Tolkien derive his inspiration? As with most things, Matt Lewis is determined to claim it as medieval, with the help of today's guest, Tolkien scholar Dr. Chris Snyder.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. This episode was produced by Joseph Knight and edited by Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’You can take part in our listener survey here > Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here.

Find out who we really were. We've gone medieval. For many people, The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings are seminal works of fantasy fiction. Old myths rise from the ground to cling to the trees. Magic is an intangible force still in the world for good or for evil. Immortal beings battle ancient monsters for the future of Middle Earth. Beneath the story is a rich world deeper than the minds of Moria. I'm old enough to remember when the animated films were the only way to see it come to life. Peter Jackson's astonishing movies felt, well, just right. The second season of Rings of Power is about to hit our screens.

This is the work of Sauron. In Sauron's hands, they could work an evil beyond reckoning. As a prequel to the Lord of the Rings, it engages with Tolkien's deep law. But where did that come from? Like all good things, I'm here to claim it as medieval, with the help of today's guest. Dr Chris Snyder is Professor of European History at Mississippi State University. He's the author of several books, including the making of Middle Earth, The Worlds of Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings,

and is an expert on Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, amongst other things. Welcome to God Medieval, Chris. It's fantastic to have you here. Thank you, Matt. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for joining us. I'm really excited to have this chat as a complete Lord of the Rings nerd, pinning a Tolkien expert down to ask them loads of questions about Tolkien and medievalism is like a dream come true for me.

So prepare to be bombarded. I guess my first question would be, where does Tolkien's fascination with medieval history come from? Do we know? Yeah. So he originally intended to study classics and be a classics professor and academic doing Greek and Latin stuff. and that's what he did at Oxford during his first year. He didn't do so well on the first year exams, in part because he had fallen in love with other languages, other than classical languages, languages like Old English, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Finnish and Welsh. And so he was advised.

Maybe he should look into the new major called English, the new subject to read at Oxford, as you would say, because it really had only just been created a few years before at Oxford. And so he switched over to English, and decided to be a specialist in the early medieval English literature. And from then on, he never looked back. And it's interesting that language is such a key part of his story, when the languages of Middle Earth play such a core part in the story as well. He would seem so careful and invested in creating languages that really work for the stories. So I guess that comes from his linguistic interests.

Yeah, I think there's a psychology there with his mother who raised him and his brother. his father passed away when he was, I think, three years old, very young. So he's very close to his mother, and his mother taught him the first languages that he learned, I think, French and Latin from his mother. And then she ended up passing away when he was a teenager. And so I think in part it's his natural linguistic abilities, but also that his love of his mother, his love of his country, and especially of that part of England he was living in, the Midlands, the area around Birmingham. He really had an attachment to and got interested. his family roots in the English Midlands. Yeah, I'm from Wolverhampton, which is kind of the next city just to the west of Birmingham, so it's very much in my realm, and we know all about the two towers and all of those kinds of things in Birmingham. What stage of his career at? Where in his life is he when he starts to write The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings? So he has been composing poetry since he was a student at Oxford, at least, but not publishing much of it. And a lot of it had to do with elves,

who were sometimes called gnomes in those poems and sometimes fairies and goblins. They hadn't quite settled on the whole mythology of elves. But he's writing a lot of that poetry, even before university when he was at King Edwards School in Birmingham. He was writing and fascinated with it. But Hobbits, he hadn't discovered until about the 1930s. And his story is that he was bored while grading student papers. And he turned over in an exam book, a page.

and it was a blank page. And because he was bored, he just wrote on the page, and a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit. And he thought, okay, now I have to figure out what hobbits are. So that's the official story from Tolkien. We do know that hobbits appear in a book that he knew from Edwardian period book about Middle English dialects. So we don't know exactly what they are, but they're in a list of other beings that include goblins and hobgoblins. And so he was probably aware of Hobbit being there and he could play linguistically with what it meant Hobbit. Hobbitla possibly meaning a whole dweller or a whole digger.

So that was probably all in the back of his mind. But in the 30s, he says he discovered the hobbits and he started telling his children's stories about them. And he eventually wrote the stories down and he shared them with C.S. Lewis who thought they were quite good. And in 1937, a book appears called The Hobbit, written. primarily to be a children's book. But I think those of us who know the Hobbit pretty well know that it gets dark and serious as it goes on and becomes more than just a children's book

and more than just adventures of a Hobbit. Yeah, and I guess it has those elements of what we would see in a Pixar movie today where it's aimed at kids, but there is lots for the adults who are probably reading this to the children. There is lots for the adults to enjoy in it too. And I think Pixar are really good at that. And it sounds like Tolkien was trying to hit that balance too, that it needs to be fun for the children,

but it also needs to be interesting for the person reading it to the children? Right. I was just talking this summer to one of Tolkien's grandchildren, and he said that we really need to go back and reread the Hobbit, that there's a lot more there

than we've been talking about. There's a lot more to discover there, that it's a very serious work. And so I take that seriously because he remembers his grandfather telling him stories. And I think that's true. There's a great depth there.

And C.S. Lewis, I think, would agree that it has a greater depth And it's worth reading as a child and reading throughout your life, one of those kinds of books, maybe on a handful of them that he would recommend, like the Alice in Wonderland Books and Wind in the Willows, for example. But in writing it, even though he was an amateur novelist, he'd never written a novel before. And according to the experts, making amateur mistakes in terms of how he was writing the story, he still stumbled upon this world of rich history and language and events. eventually decided, once we at least get to El Ron's appearance, that he's going to connect

his world of the hobbits to his world of Middle Earth that he had been creating for decades that included these elves are fairy creatures. Yeah, and I think one of the most impressive and compelling things about Tolkien's Middle Earth is just the breadth and the depth of the law that surrounds everything that's going on. Right. You always get the sense that there is a backstory to the backstory, to the backstory, to the backstory, to the backstory that goes on and on ad infinitum backwards. I wonder whether there are things that we can see Tolkien specifically drawing on from his medieval experiences, his medieval teaching, that he

specifically draws on to help create the world of Middle Earth. Yeah, so there are two things going on there. One's the veris of Militude that this seems like a real world. And the other is that this seems like a really old world that has been there for a long time and that there are depths of civilizations and cultures in the soil, in the landscape. But if you look again closely at this, you'll see that the further you go back, the greater those civilizations are. So the golden age is always in the past. It's always the era before that is the greater period. And that I would argue is very much the worldview of most Europeans in antiquity in the Middle Ages. That history is going backwards. It's devolving. So if you read

something like Hesiod's works or Homer, that the great period of gods, the gold in an age, is in the past, and that devolves to an age of silver, then an age of bronze, and then finally to an age of iron. And you could argue we're still living in the iron age, right? We're building things with iron, but iron is not as beautiful as gold. The first thing I teach my students in medieval courses is you have to crawl into a medieval worldview, into the mindset of a medieval person, and not be like a typical progressive American or progressive European, where we think things are always getting better because we're building better toys, essentially. But that didn't exist.

It didn't exist in antiquity for various reasons, but it certainly didn't exist in the Christian worldview of the Middle Ages in which the height of history was the incarnation, right? God becoming flesh. Jesus' appearance is the height. And everything after that has to, for the story to work out, has to be going to hell in a handbasket, as we would say, right? And so history is devolving to the point of the apocalypse. So if you combine those two things, this classical worldview of ancient civilizations that were better and better in the past with this Christian world of devolution that we're heading to a catastrophe, that's, I think, explains how Tolkien builds his worlds and builds his timelines within those worlds.

Yeah, it's fascinating. Can we spot specific medieval sources being referenced in Tolkien's work? Yeah, all over the place. The first one, of course, is Beowulf. It's a text that everybody who learns to read old English or English accent struggles with. Some of us love it. Some people probably hate it. Some people don't want it to be on the syllabus for English students at Oxford and Cambridge anymore. Yeah, I can't say I've ever studied it properly myself, but you must feel like you're Beowulf fighting the monster. just trying to wrestle with the text. Exactly, and it disappeared. So for most of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, early modern period, writers didn't know about it. Chaucer doesn't quote Beowulf.

So even Canterbury Tales and Baywolf are both medieval texts. They have no connections. That's how long the Middle Ages is, how old it is. But Beowulf, yeah, wasn't rediscovered until the late 18th century and no scholarship really existed until the 19th century when Tolkien was reading material himself. So he enters into the conversations about Beowulf pretty early on, those scholarly conversations, and he writes an essay called Beowulf

The Monsters and the Critics, in which he takes on some of the others, people who interpreting it as a not very sophisticated text. Again, an amateur author who didn't know what he was doing, and Tolkien very much defends Beowulf as a masterpiece in and of itself. It's not a classical epic, for example. It's not a classical tragedy. It has these qualities of early medieval texts, which are not intuitive. We don't, most of us don't read them. So you do need interpretive skills and linguistic skills to figure out what's going on there. But he plays with it in fun ways throughout all the works. But of course, they appear in Smauk, the dragon, and Bilbo as the thief who is stealing a cup or gold from the dragon hoard is very much reference to Beowulf towards the end, Beowulf's own

death, and also the legend of the dragon Foffner from Old Norse literature. So those are two sources, the Edda's, both the prose edda and the verse Edda and Dunbeowulf are very much sources throughout Tolkien's Middle Earth writings. And then as an Arthurian specialist myself, I like to see all the times he borrows from the King Arthur stories. And I think that we see that kind of depth of history in Mallory's Mortarthur, for example. A little bit of Jeffrey Obama's history of the Kings of Britain, which is the first big story to include Arthur. But definitely Mallor's more Darthy as a text that he knew well and CS Lewis knew well. And so it helped connect them and was, I know a text that they talked a lot about.

But that is a kind of an epic world in which the Knights of the Roundtable keep getting more and more numerous and all of them have their own adventures and it keeps going out and out forever. So you can see how this would fit perfectly with a Netflix streaming series. you could just create adventures about knights forever. So I think that's a text, the Orlando stories are similar, the stories about Roland that are written in the Renaissance, and they're having those layers and layers of interweaving the adventures

of different heroes on quests. Is it too simplistic to see Aragon as a kind of really Arthurian figure at the center of the story? This idea of a promised king who's coming back? Yeah, I've thought about writing a book called The Return of the King that's already been used, unfortunately. that title, but it could very much be a book about. The legend of Arthur from the early 12th century, at least, has been about Arthur's disappearance and expected return, the expectation that Arthur

is not really dead, that he's on the Isle of Avalon, or he's sleeping in a cave somewhere, or he's under an enchantment, or he's in the fairy realm. There are lots and lots of versions of these stories, and more than we even possessed, because we know that travelers in Cornwall, and whales were being told by locals these kinds of stories about Arthur, that he may be gone, but he'll return one day to restore the sovereignty of the Britons. So you can see there, that's absolutely Erdogan's story. He is returning to be the king of Gondor, and he is the rightful heir to the throne, and the sword that he bears is his symbol of his right to the throne. So that's, of course, very Arthurian. Tolkien doesn't usually like to admit to influences

When you read his letters and the things he says to people, he usually tries to throw us off the trail a little bit off the scent by saying, you can't figure out my minds. Authors are not that easy to discern how they work, but that hasn't stopped us from trying. Yeah, and I think you can see the whole of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings as basically a medieval chivalric romance story. But I guess the thing I find striking is that somewhere along the line,

Tolkien, he's discovered the hobbits. So those at the centre of his big chivalric romance are these tiny little helpless people, as opposed to the glittering knights that we might expect, the Arthur and his knights in their armour who are going to use their physical prowess to destroy evil. Do you think there's a reason why Tolkien deliberately chooses Hobbits as his heroes? I think he stumbled onto this. Again, if he's an amateur novelist writing the Hobbit, and he just comes up with this small furry creature that will entertain his children by talking about that creature with furry feet.

He realizes probably soon that he has stumbled on an age-old formula for quest tales. So if you start a story with the hero being small, being a child or diminutive, not a great physical hero, and they're home, and it's a good home, but it's not complete. And that small character goes into this other realm where there are adventures with knights and dragons and goblins and other creatures of the fairy realm. And they discover things about themselves, discover their heroism, discover their purpose. And then they return home again as more whole, complete creature that more may be respected by their neighbors. Fill in the blanks. How many of those stories have we seen?

just in the last few decades, right? That is a formula that has worked for T.H. White and the sword and the stone. That is a formula that works for Harry Potter, that works for Golden Compass, you know, on and on. It is just a successful story writing formula. And I think he probably didn't start out saying, I'm going to write this kind of thing, but I think it works out that way. You're right. He picks the small person as the hero, and that's not something you would see in Beowulf, right? It's not the celebration of the small. It's the celebration of the mighty, the powerful. Same thing with classical epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey, right?

It's not about the small people. It's about the heroes, the world of the heroes. So in that way, Tolkien's writing like a modern, because more of us are small people, not great heroes. And so more of us will be drawn in a democratic world to a hero if they are unassuming, if they're small, if they're discovering themselves on this journey. So you can see how he's combined a modern mentality, something that we like a lot, with things from ancient and medieval literature. And maybe that combination is why his books are the best-selling works of fantasy in the world. Yeah, I think it's that switch from having a hero that is someone you might aspire to be, but you could never imagine yourself being. You know, you can't be Beowulf because he's almost some kind of supernatural.

he's the strongest, he's the fastest, he's the best. What Tolkien does is switch that out for someone who is completely identifiable to anybody who is reading, the small person who has no strength, no power in the world, but will change the course of history. And without totally rewriting the script, for example, a movie version of Wicked is coming out. And that's an example of modern novelists and playwrights. Sometimes want to just reverse the script and say, villains are not villains, they're the heroes or I'm going to change this story completely.

Tolkien doesn't work like that at all. The Hobbit also has to realize that even at the end of his adventure in which he has shown great courage, he is not a large person. He is not a great physical hero. And so Gandalf reminds Bilbo of that at the end of the Hobbit that you're only a small person in a big world. And so there's that sense of humility there, that it's not the revenge of the small people. It's just finding nobility within the average person.

And the other element, I think, there of influence for Tolkien, is that he found this in the trenches of the First World War. That he, as an officer, was with common soldiers from working class backgrounds who were not Oxford, Cambridge, educated, dons, and students. They came from all over the country. They were the small people who made the country work. and especially that soldier who was assigned to the officer as his Batman. And he was really close to his Batman and his servant, not the word we would use today, but he was helping the officer. He was really close to that person.

And he does admit that Sam Gamji is very much modeled on the Batman of Lieutenant Tolkien in the First World War. Yeah, it's fascinating that you can view the fellowship as a parallel for that idea in Tolkien's modern world of lots of different people being thrown together for a common purpose that is kind of bigger than any of them. And they may get separated, they may go different directions, but they're all still pursuing that core aim of destroying the evil at the heart of the story. That's right. And again, you can imagine having made that decision to fight in the Great War himself and a war in which he lost many of his friends and having to support his children who were fighting

or serving in some capacity in the Second World War, that he was a believer in king and country, and there is a time to fight for your homeland. So that conversation about isolationism versus the noble war is, I think, a conversation that runs throughout the Lord of the Rings, more so than the Hobbit, a very serious conversation that many of the creatures have, for example, in Fandgorn, Treebeard, and the ants talk about whether it is their time to fight or not. And that was, of course, what many men, in particular at the time, were asking themselves about whether to commit to fighting against Germany in the First World War, let alone in the Second World War. T.H. White has this very similar kind of inner conversation that he works out through the Book of Merlin because he's trying to decide whether to commit to combat in the war.

Hopefully you can tell me if I'm miles off the market, but I've always kind of viewed the March of the Ents when they do have this conversation about should we take part in the Trump? troubles of the world and Mary and Pippen are trying to say, you know, you're part of this world, what happens to this world will affect you. The ends go on their march and we see them tearing down the industrialisation of Saraman's domain. I've always kind of viewed that as perhaps a comment on industrialisation. Tolkien is living in Birmingham in one of the most industrialised parts of Britain. Is it a comment on that juxtaposition between industrialisation and nature and the idea that nature will one day fight back if we don't take care of it as we industrialise? Do we get any sense of that from Tolkien's thinking?

Yeah, I think many people do give that echo criticism or the green reading of the text. And I think there's a lot of justification to that. That's one of the interesting things about studying Tolkien as a writer, is that he appeals to a lot of different kind of modern demographics. The Green Party, on the one hand, conservatives, hippies in the 60s. A lot of people have come to Tolkien. And I would agree that he gives us enough information in his personal rights. writings, his letters, and other things that we know. He was not a fan of technology. He did not

like to drive cars. He didn't even like the fact that there were cars in Oxford drove him crazy. As someone who walked and rode bicycles all the time, that the automobile was ruining Oxford in the early 20th century from his perspective. But yeah, he saw this as a child in Birmingham, and he comments upon it in different ways in different texts. And again, occasionally gives us a clue in his letters that he's on the side of nature. Yeah. We talked a little bit earlier about the idea of past civilizations always being better that they're held up as a model for the way the world should try to get back to.

And rings of power kind of takes us back into the history of Middle Earth. So it's almost a prequel to the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. And it seems to parallel lots of ancient European stories. So we get the destruction of Newman, or it has a little bit of, got to be Atlantis, surely, this idea that an advanced civilization can suddenly be washed away. So Tolkien is even borrowing from ancient history to feed his ancient history of Middle Earth. Yeah, the Atlanta's myth appears first in Plato, I believe, and that's a powerful myth about a great civilization, even greater than our world, but one that is now lost under the sea.

There's a version in the Celtic mythology of a world that is underneath the sea as well, either off the coast of Cornwall or off the coast of Brittany that there's this ancient world that has been swallowed by the sea. So Tolkien had a lot of material he could draw from and was drawn to the Numenor story because that idea of a wave coming and engulfing the world, that appears as a nightmare in the Lord of the Rings of the Rings, as well. So I thought the Rings of Power season one was really interesting because the series is about the second age of the story of Numenor primarily. But it begins in the first age with this flashback of Galadriel in a golden age. Again, an age before there was even a sun and the moon, all the light of the world of Ea was being cast by these two trees.

And so you get this glimpse of Gladriol's past that she's that old, that she goes back thousands and thousands of years to this age in which the elves are living in proximity to these angelic figures, the Valar. I hesitate to call them gods. If it were a pagan mythology, they would be gods. But I think in Tolkien's worldview, they're like powerful angels, come to Earth to help create Earth. The elves are living with them. And then they have this rebellion. They don't do what the Valor tell them to do. And Galadriel is one of those who leaves this great world behind to go to Middle Earth. So even there, you have this devolution. And because of economic and legal parts of all of this, the producers of that Rings of Power series could only tell stories about really the second age as they appeared in the appendices of the Lord of the Rings and references in the Lord of the Rings,

not from the Somerilion, which is the bigger mythology that you get the full story of the creation and the first age as well. Yeah. And that makes me think further about the idea that back in Lord of the Rings, sort of in the future from the Rings of Power, there is still an interest in a constant reference to the buildings of these older ages. So they're around weather top. There's all these ruined places of the ancient world around. And that seems to me to feed in or play with the medieval obsession with ancient Rome, you know, Romanesque architecture. They're always trying to recreate the architecture of the past and they're really interested in these remnants of what they considered to be a greater, better world. And that seems to exist in Lord of the Rings too. Yeah. And so I think you

famously see it in the Renaissance, right, in which people like Leonardo and Michelangelo were going and looking at Roman statuary and doing drawings based on these classical statues. That was how they learned to be artists and sculptors, in which the many classical texts, including Plato, were rediscovered in the Renaissance. But as a medievalist, I want to say the Middle Ages had that first, and there's an argument that there was a 12th century Renaissance in which there was, in the universities that were arising,

people going back to reading the classics in a deeper way and in and of themselves, apart from how classical works relate to Christian works. So I think it's just a constant going back to good authors is the way I would think of it. Many of those good authors were classical authors, including pagan authors, not Christian authors, but yet these are great works of philosophy and literature. So you're going to go back to these texts again and again. And this is one of the interesting things you find with Tolkien and Lewis, who are both famously Christians, Tolkien's mother converted to Catholicism when he was still a child,

So he was a Catholic, his whole life, and Lewis famously converted to Christianity later in life, but became a Christian apologist. These two Christian authors bonded over pagan literature. They bonded over stories about Beowulf, about Seyghur, about the classical heroes and heroines and gods and goddesses. So they wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted to keep telling these stories that were as rich as the stories from pagan mythology, but always try to make it consistent with their own faith as well. So my second book on Tolkien called Hobbit Virtues was very much a kind of exploration of that, how Tolkien uses literature to talk about classical virtue ethics,

the way Aristotle defines virtues. That is something that Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages goes back to Aristotle and gives his version of that. So you can see, I think, the Renaissance and the Middle Ages both as this returning to a golden age. So it sounds like we could fairly reasonably, correct me if I'm wrong, but we could equate the Middle Earth timeline to medieval European timeline in the sense that we have these ancient events that are precursors to more recognizably medieval world. So Tolkien is sort of using the real timeline and shifting it over into a fantasy world. Yeah, I think several people have attempted to do this. I did in my first Tolkien book and making of Middle Earth with the Silmarillion.

And I think the Newmanorians are, again, key there because they're the civilization that brings civilization to other parts of Middle Earth, right? They're expert shipbuilders and farmers and things. So they go to Middle Earth and teach other parts of Middle Earth these advances, technological advances. I've made an argument that there's a lot of ancient up to the early Middle Ages. A lot of that history lay on top of the second age, especially of Middle Earth, as we see it in the Somerilion. And if you look at Gondor as the great civilization, the Newmanorian civilization, the great empire, it has around it these other civilizations of men like the Rohirum who are noble, but not as technologically advanced, right? They live in timber halls as opposed to stone palaces.

And so I think Tolkien is throwing us a clue there about looking at the Roman world in comparison to the world of the barbarians, i.e. much of Western Europe and Northern Europe at the time, right? The Germanic and Celtic worlds, who had a nobility, who had great mythology, who are great warriors, but do not come from that Mediterranean civilization like the Gondorians did originally as an island empire itself. I think there's a lot of those kind of games you could play with the Silmarillion. And if we can make those kind of comparisons with the timeline, I wonder whether we can do it with the geography of Midlerth. It's kind of always struck me that you have the idyllic shire sitting up there in the northwest,

roughly where Britain might be. You travel south and east a little bit. Mordor might look somewhere like Germany would be. Is this playing into Tolkien's, again, view in the 20th century world, that Germany has been the big enemy twice? Can we overlay that kind of geography over it as well as the history? Yeah, he very much didn't want us to make political allegories out of his writing. And so when the ring appears as this great weapon that can end the war, a lot of people in the

1950s, especially read into that nuclear weapons. The ring is an atomic bomb that is it could win the war. It's what we have to resist. And so he saw that when he was still alive, and he was very much against that. So I would hesitate to put Germany and Mordor together because even though he may have been fighting political enemies in Germany and World War I and his family and friends in World War II, his life. love of Germanic literature, I think, would say, no, Germany can't be Mordor. Now, some people would

push that further east and say that really the kind of the bad people all live in the east and in the south. So he must have had in mind somewhere in the Middle East and Asia, if you push the map even further. But then you run into, I think, some problematic areas of racism and Eurocentrism. So, again, I think the Shire looks like Oxfordshire and the Midlands. I think that's as far as I'll go. I'll just say that. I think that's pretty safe to do that part of the map. Absolutely fair.

Why then do you think Tolkien found that a medieval influenced fantasy world was such an ideal playground? These books are, if everybody hasn't read them, everybody knows about the Lord of the Rings. Everybody must be aware of the stories of the Hobbits and the Ring and the elves and things like that. Sure. What is it about us when Tolkien wrote in the 20th century and now in the 21st century that we're still interested in those medieval themed stories that look like a chivalric romance? Yeah, as an American, this is not my soil, right? I grew up around American Civil War battlefields, American Revolutionary War. That was in my soul. And yet, none of that interested me. I was interested in medieval literature and medieval history. So in some cases like Tolkien's, you can say that. It was writing about his land, the mythology for England. But I think the Middle Ages is so long and rich of a tapestry of history and archaeology and literature that it appeals to a lot of people that you see this in Japanese culture as well,

that there's all around the world. Tolkien's works have been translated in just about every language, and people from non-European cultures find something that they love about it. So I think it's, again, in part that the Middle Ages is a thousand years. long. And it is not one empire or one country. It's dozens and dozens of cultures and countries. It's dozens of languages and dialects. It's literature, not just the famous stuff that everybody knows, like the Homeric literature in the classical world, but it's the more obscure works that it's fun to discover, to read this Arthurian romance for the first time that you didn't know existed, or to read

a Renaissance version of a chivalric romance that people, haven't talked about. I think there's a lot to discover about the Middle Ages, both alien enough and familiar enough to us. It hits that right kind of balance. And other scholars have said that people like Umberto Echko have written quite a bit about this, what draws us to the Middle Ages. I think that's part of the formula. Taking dragons seriously is part of why we love medieval things. Dragons are not to be laughed at. They're not the soft cuddly toys. They're not friendly comic characters. they are the representation of intelligent evil and greed and avarice. And those are universal things, right?

And so it's those myths that we associate with the Middle Ages. I think that really are universal myths. Well, I mean, here on God Medieval, we're all for saying that the Middle Ages are perfect. Clearly they're not. But, you know, a great place to draw from and to set things and everything else. So thank you so much for joining us, Chris. It's been absolutely fascinating to try and pick some of this apart

with someone who knows Tolkien's work as well as you do. so thank you very much for your time. Oh, thank you, Matt. It's been a lot of fun. Appreciate you having me on. Thank you very, very much. If you've enjoyed this episode, you might like a couple of others

that dealt with history on screen, like our episode on Jan Zizka, the inspiration for the film Medieval that we did with the director. If you'd like to explore Beowulf, a big inspiration for Tolkien's work, then you can find the brilliant Janina Ramirez in our back catalogue to tell you more.

There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday. so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts, ad-free, and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe.

As a special gift, you can also get 50% off your first, three months when you use the code medieval at checkout. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.