The Daily Signal - JRR Tolkien's Message for the Modern World

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

J.R.R. Tolkien, author of "The Lord of the Rings," calls us to be heroic and to sacrifice for one another, according to the author of a new book on Tolkien's "Sanctifying Myth." "I'm very glad when I look at the numbers of how many books of Tolkien's still sell and that almost anything that is publishable has been published by Tolkien," Bradley Birzer, a history professor and the Russell Amos Kirk chair in American studies at Hillsdale College, tells The Daily Signal. Birzer, who recently published a second edition of his book "J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-Earth," calls Tolkien's enduring popularity "a healthy sign in society." "I don't think society is healthy right now, but I think that's one of the healthier signs of society," he explains. "I think Tolkien teaches us to be ourselves in the best way, to be our authentic selves, to be made in the image of God, to do what we're meant to do. I think he calls upon our uniqueness, each of us made individually in the image of God, and I think he calls us to be heroic." "I think he calls us to sacrifice for one another, and that was as true in Tolkien's life as it was in his writing," the Hillsdale professor says. "I think one of the great things about Tolkien is, when we praise him, we can praise him as a person. There aren't real serious personal failings. He didn't own slaves. He didn't have all these other things that we can dismiss Thomas Jefferson for." Birzer addresses the "literary archaeology" of Tolkien and explains why he thinks "The Lord of the Rings" is "our great story of the modern world." The history professor also addresses his personal dislike for the Peter Jackson films, why Tolkien initially distrusted the very modern technology that led his books to become one of the most popular movie trilogies in existence, and how Tolkien addressed the world of Middle-earth. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tolkien teaches us to be ourselves in the best way, to be our authentic selves, to be made in the image of God, to do what we're meant to do. I think he calls upon our uniqueness, each of is made individually in the image of God, and I think he calls us to be heroic. This is Tyler O'Neill with the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, September 6th. That was Dr. Bradley Berzer, an old professor of mine. He's the history professor and Russell Amos Kirk chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College. And I mean, he just has to love. I mean, as a Russell Kirk scholar, he's one of the many, many things that Dr. Berzer knows so well.

He has to love that that's his chair at Hillsdale. But Dr. Berzer and I sat down for a wonderful discussion about his new book. It's actually a new addition to his first. first book, which is J.R.R. Tolkien's sanctifying myth. It was a wonderful discussion we talked about the lessons that Tolkien has for heroism today and what it means to be a hero and how we should look at the world. I think one of the things we often lose sight of is just the magic and the majesty of the Christian worldview. And, you know, in particular, Tolkien was Catholic, but I think there are a lot of lessons that he has for all sorts of Christians. If we would listen to the old

master and read the wonderful stories that he wrote, specifically the Lord the Rings, you know, the Silmarillion. Dr. Berzer has this wonderful way of taking you through it in his new book. Everything about Tolkien's world just stands out. It's shock through with the Christian message. And, you know, God is everywhere in these stories, but he's never explicitly mentioned. And it's just a wonderful way that Tolkien had of bringing myth to life. So stand by from my discussion with Dr. Berzer after this. For over 35 years, the Heritage Foundation Job Bank has been helping conservatives at all professional levels find employment in key positions in Washington, D.C. and across the country.

We can help you connect with positions in the administration on Capitol Hill, in public policy organizations, and in the private sector. To learn more about the Heritage Foundation Job Bank, go to heritage.org slash job dash bank. This is Tyler O'Neill. I'm managing editor at The Daily Signal, and I'm honored to be joined by Brad Berzer. He's the history professor and the ruffer.

Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College, former professor of mine, the author of numerous books, and co-founder of the imaginative conservative. It's a real pleasure to have you on. Tyler, it's great to see you. It's been too many years since you were in my classroom, but I still have very fond memories. Very fond. We had a lot of great discussions. So thank you. Thanks for doing this, too.

Yeah, no, my pleasure. and I particularly enjoyed your book. I have to admit, I haven't finished every part of it. Oh, yeah. But it's a new book is J.R.R. Tolkien's sanctifying myth. This is the second edition. Right. Kind of odd to call it new when the first edition came out in 2002.

I found it, I mean, I'd like you to really address this, but it was interesting. You had two corrections after. you know, 21 years. Do you want to just go over briefly what those are? Oh, sure. Yeah. So this was actually, it was my first book. And I was a young, I was 34 when that came out.

So, yeah, there was almost a different career in some ways, but I loved it. And I had a great time writing it and researching it. But I think I did mess up on two things. So one, there's this kind of. I've seen it as a meme, unfortunately, and it's the only time I've inspired a meme, and it's not true. There was a story of Tolkien, and the way I presented it in the book, was that Tolkien and Lewis had dressed like bears at a party. And that did happen, but it wasn't C.S. Lewis. It was another friend of Tolkien's who actually did that.

And I messed up on that. So that was one thing. The other thing was a little more serious, and more of a matter of interpretation than me just getting my facts wrong. But in the original book, I had basically just quoted Tolkien himself and taken him at face value that he was a poor soldier in World War I. And I had the great opportunity, not to go into too much detail about this, but I had the great opportunity to meet Sir Martin Gilbert, who was the, the, famous, he's passed away now, but was the famous Churchill biographer and a great, great man. And he actually read my book amazingly enough and wanted to talk about it. And we went out to lunch, his wife and Sir Martin, so Lady Esther and Sir Martin and me.

And we went out to lunch and he told me that he really liked my book, which was great, but that I got one thing very wrong. And that was the comment that Tolkien was a poor soldier. And what Sir Martin told me was that every soldier who survived World War I, they all had survivors' guilt. And that every one of them thought they were a poor soldier because they had not died in the war. And that changes a lot. And I'm sorry that in my original book, I had that wrong, but I'm very glad to be corrected on it. Well, have only those two things.

You know, that you were on stand up for 21 years, I think. Yeah. No, and I mean, reading this book is clearly a testament to your love of the subject material. I sensed, you know, a deep resonance from the way that you've, you led your class when I was in it. Gosh, like 10 years ago. But, yeah, so weird to think. And then, you know, just the way you delve into his Catholicism. the deep roots. I was reminded a lot of Western heritage growing up at Hillsdale and studying that when I'm reading the book. And your discussion of myth, let's get into this notion of sanctifying myth, this view, you know, a lot of moderns look at myth as something to be derided or dismissed. But I think you really resurrect, and not that it needs to be resurrected, obviously Tolkien's work stand on their own, but you present the view of myth in a cogent and

intellectually strong and really Christian rooted way here. Yeah, thanks, Tyler. That was something that I really enjoyed doing. And a lot of that did come from my own experiences at Hillsdale and having, as you know at Hillsdale theological discussions with a variety of different people, getting into the idea of what exactly is myth versus story, what story versus theology, all of those things. And Tolkien himself, anything that I got right in that book, I owed a Tolkien because I was really trying to draw as closely as I could on Tolkien and Lewis's own understanding of mythology.

And then another figure who was one of their friends, a guy by the name of Owen Barfield, one of the inklings who's unfortunately, I think, been forgotten in a lot of ways. And Charles Williams as well. I mean, they all dealt with mythology. All of the inklings did. And we're trying to figure it out. There's kind of a moment in the late 19th century where there were figures like Andrew Lang, someone we've almost entirely forgotten, though he's still remembered in Scotland to a certain degree.

but it started writing about what is the relationship of myth and language. How do we understand Genesis? How do we understand St. John's Gospel? Especially if we're thinking about myth and mythos. But myth, Tyler, really, and again, I'm so indebted to my own Hillsdale experience of both teaching and learning this as I'm teaching. But myth really goes back to Plato. And a myth, and you can still find this in the Oxford English Dictionary, but a myth is simply a story that has a god or gods in it. It has something supernatural that can't be

explained away by mere logic or by mere rationality. So there's nothing insidious about a myth in and of itself. A myth is just a story with the supernatural in it. That's its original definition. And so by that definition, which I think is a very good definition, we can then talk to about Genesis or we can talk about St. John, not as those things aren't literally true, but that they're also mythically true in some way. And so Tolkien, in his very famous Andrew Lang lecture, named after the guy I just mentioned a bit ago, that he gave in the late 1930s in Scotland, he gives this lecture called on fairy stories. And at the end of this, we don't know if he actually did this in front of the audience or he only did this

later when he was writing it up as a speech. And then it's now available as a book with Verlund Fliger. One of the great Tolkien scholars has edited and done a very nice job with it. But he says at the end that the Gospels are perfect myth, that they tell us something that we want to be true. And it is, in fact, true, not just in the story, but in the primary world that is in our primary world, our world itself. And so there's this just kind of gloriousness to it. He calls it, he coins a term, he calls it a eucatastrophe, the opposite of a catastrophe, the good, joyous ending, rather than the dower ending or the dower conclusion. And that's what Christianity is. It is the story of our happy ending. Even though we live in the long defeat, we know that Christ has already won.

The victory is there, but it still has to go through the process of history before we actually get to it. Yeah. How would you say Tolkien sanctified the notion of myth? I mean, you go through mentioning many times Beowulf, which he had a deep love for. Memorized much of it. Yeah, these Nordic, these Scandinavian myths. Right. And then, you know, he, I love the way he describes him.

himself as a secondary creator, more of a discoverer of Middle Earth, which he thinks was created by God. And he thinks God is the main character throughout the entire story, but never explicitly named. Right. Right. I mean, there's a form here, Tyler, and I'll you, this is not my expression. This is from other Tolkien scholars. But there's a form of literary archaeology that's going on with Tolkien.

That is, he's discovering these things that have always been there. And it doesn't mean, of course, that there was always a Frodo, but there is the story of Frodo and the story is timeless, the story of sacrifice of leaving one's hearth and home, going out into danger, overcoming that danger through great personal sacrifice. And so the Lord of the Rings is from my, and the Silmarillion as well, but the Lord of the Rings especially, is kind of our great story. of the modern world.

It doesn't have anything to do with Stalin or Hitler. And yet, because of Stalin or Hitler, it has great resonance with us, even though it's a myth and much bigger than anything we could imagine coming out of Soviet Russia or out of Nazi Germany or out of the Kaiser's Germany of World War I, which of course Tolkien, again, as we've talked about, was a soldier in that war. So I think that when we, and I'll just throw down the gauntlet for. for a moment. I think that when we study Western civilization, we often do it in terms of the great stories. We think about Homer and the Iliad and the Odyssey. We think about Virgil and the Aeneid,

but also the Georgics and the eclogs. We think about Dante and the Divine Comedy. We think about Melton and Paradise Lost. But if we jump to the modern world, I think our equivalent of those great stories of the past is really the Lord of the Rings. And I think that it will be read 500 years from now in the way that we read Dante. Scholars were one day read Tolkien to try and understand our era and figure out what we're doing here. So we never, obviously, when we study the Middle Ages, we don't take literally that Dante traveled through hell and through purgatory and heaven. He didn't? Yeah, he did not.

No, as far as we know. But clearly there's a mythic element to that. And I think the same thing is true with Tolkien, with that story, with the Lord of the Rings in particular, and that's how it will be seen. And even today, Tyler, I got to teach, you know, it's always a great privilege. But I taught two Western heritage courses, and we started Herodotus. You know, what a difference between Herodotus, who wants to tell us all about patriotism and mythology and the gods and everything supernatural versus Thucydides who's so straight-laced. and Thucydides doesn't want anything supernatural at all, tainting his narrative. And I'm, you know, I love, I love them both.

But if you said, Brad, you have five days to read one of these books and it's for pure entertainment, I would always pick up Herodotus over Thucydides. Just because I just, I love the writing and I love the way that he approaches story. Well, it makes me think of Charles Taylor and this notion of the buffered self. where we are individuals atomized, you know, not impacted by the things around us. And this very modern notion that kind of conflicts with the view of the enchanted world that he talks about that we've kind of moved beyond. And I almost I almost think that Tolkien is a master at bringing back that enchanted world. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. I just in the 20th century, I can't imagine anyone better. I think Lewis gets really close, especially in his space trilogy, but it's still not at the level of Tolkien. You can just feel it. Of course, Tolkien started his mythology, his larger mythology. He started at around 1913, and it wasn't, yeah, we're right now, and I didn't know if this was why you wanted to talk about this, Tyler, today, but we're just a couple of days away from the 50th anniversary of Tolkien's death. here on September 3rd will be the 50th anniversary of his death. So you can imagine here's a man who from 1913 until 1973 was creating this story.

And then after he passes away, his son Christopher takes over. And his son Christopher just died a couple of years ago. He lived into his mid-90s. So here's a man who takes over the mythology in his 40s and basically gives it five. decades and at this point you know in 2023 probably as far as I know about 95 to 98% of Tolkien's mythology has been published but there's still a few things that are out there that are still to see the light so it's taken two men in their adult careers to make this mythology and so you know when Lewis who's a genius when Lewis sits

down and writes a science fiction novel in a couple of months. It's just no way it's going to quite reach what Tolkien and his son were doing with that larger mythology. And again, nothing against Lewis. I love Lewis. But they have very different styles in the way that they approach their own mythologies. Yeah. No, I mean, you talk about Tolkien and Lewis and a large part of your book, you know,

naturally is mentioning them. But something that really stood out to me was the whole Ulster, Protestant, like, dislike and the way that Tolkien seems to have thought of Lewis, you know, he was very proud that Tolkien played a role in allowing Lewis to come back to the faith, but then might have not been very happy that Lewis embraced a view of Christianity that Tolkien thought was holding back the maturity of the faith. Yeah. that's a hard one, I think, in a lot of ways, and I think it requires a lot of nuance to kind of

figure out what their relationship is. They're best friends at one level, but they're also kind of rivals at a different level. And Tolkien was never really happy that Lewis became the kind of popular theologian that he became. Tolkien thought it was untoward, that it was something that Lewis was doing that he really didn't have the right to do. So I'll mention another book that it came out, I think it came out yesterday. If not, it's coming out today, but I think yesterday is Holly Ordway's book called Tolkien's Spiritual Journey. I can't remember exactly what the title is. I had a chance to read the spiritual biography. Thank you. Yes. And I had a chance to read it this summer. And Tyler, if you can get her on, I would highly recommend it. I actually

think it's the best book I've read on Tolkien. And I've tried to keep up with all the scholarship. But I think Holly has done, and I've only met her once. So she came to Hillsdale last year and I got to meet her. I really liked her as a person. But I wouldn't say we're friends or anything. We just know each other. We're allies. But I think her book, this new book is fantastic. And I would highly encourage your listeners to get it. So the reason I bring it up now is she actually thinks that the falling out between Tolkien and Lewis has been really exaggerated, that we have just a couple of quotes from Tolkien. We know that Tolkien could be very grumpy at times and just say kind of absurd things. You know, like when he basically says he doesn't like Dante or we know that's not true because he was a part of the Dante literary society.

And clearly within the Western tradition would have known Dante and respected him. But he'd make these statements every once in a while. and they're just kind of nutty. And I think that there were a couple of lines where Tolkien said some things about Lewis, sometimes to another student or another faculty member, other times in his letters. But it would often be countered them by other things

in which he would say that he had this deep understanding of Lewis, respected Lewis as a great man. So this one thing you bring up, and it's one of the pieces of Tolkien's writing, that has not been published. And that makes me wonder about it in large part because I think the Tolkien estate doesn't want it really to be out there.

But in 1964, Tolkien wrote either a long article or a short book about Lewis and called the Ulsterior motive. Yes. It's a great title, right? Brilliant. Right, from Ulster. It's a great title.

And only two questions. quotes of it have ever been published or have seen the light of day. And basically what they say is that once Lewis became Protestant, and I think there was a bit of a class issue here as well. Remember, Lewis grew up in an extremely wealthy upper middle class family. I think that's something we often forget about him because we remember his loss of his mother and we think about him growing up in tragedy. But he grew up in very wealthy circumstances, whereas Tolkien grew up in absolute poverty, especially after his father died and his mother converted to Catholicism. So for Tolkien, his Catholicism is always really tied to two things.

It's tied to his mother's sacrifice because the family wouldn't help her out when she got tuberculosis because they made her and she didn't do it, but they wanted her to renounce her Catholicism. But it's also then tied into Tolkien's poverty as a child as well. So I think when Lewis became Protestant, it wasn't just that there was a difference in their way of understanding the world in terms of theology. I think that there was a difference in understanding their socioeconomic place as well. And so it was a class statement, as much as it was a religious statement, I think, on Tolkien's part, to not, for Lewis not to not. to have become Roman Catholic. Yeah.

Yeah, that's very helpful. I got some of that from those passages, but that class, you know, the oppression sort of system. It's very easy for us modern Americans to forget how embedded the hatred was there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and even, I mean, I don't know if it's gone completely. It's just been changed into symbolic form.

I mean, imagine there's still bonfire day on November 5th, right? It's Guy Fawkes Day in Britain. It's as big as Halloween is here. And, of course, it's a celebration of the failure of Catholics to reclaim England. And that just, you know, you grow up with that, that dislike of the Pope and that dislike of everything Catholic. And even if people don't say that anymore, oh, of course, we don't hate Catholics anymore. I mean, there's still every November 5th you're celebrating a holiday that at least was really. rooted in that. So it's just it's a part of the culture, I think, for the British themselves not to

like the Pope at all, even though Catholicism is actually relatively strong in Great Britain. When you had a very interesting chapter about Tolkien's relationship to modernity that I want to touch on briefly. Sure. Because it strikes me, you know, I grew up watching the Lord of the Rings films, the Peter Jackson movies, which I will say are a fantastic adaptation. But that said, obviously, Tolkien did not want his books adapted. And you have this passage that really struck me where he was complaining about the idea

of even having his voice recorded reading the Lord of the Rings because that is a machine. And I'm just like, I'm sitting in awe because I watch those movies and I love those movies to death. And, you know, I think they capture so much of the heart of the Lord of the Rings. And then you see, you know, the Hobbit movies, which, you know, if Tolkien saw those, he would be just as angry, you know, probably far. angrier than most of the fans. And then, of course, the Amazon series, which just, like, threw the legendary amount out the window, it seems. But, you know, I guess how do you think as a Tolkien scholar, as someone who studied these

things, written about them, you know, would he see a difference between the Peter Jackson, you know, the original trilogy as it were? And then these almost bastardizations, we'd say. or would he just say that it's all bad? Yeah. It's a great question, Tyler. And again, I think that it probably deserves a pretty nuanced answer. Within Tolkien scholarship, there's a real divide over those who think, again, that Tolkien

was just being cranky about certain things versus having a really holistic philosophy against modernity. I tend to come down on the side that he fits in. with a number of Christian humanists in the 20th century, like Romano Gwardini or Russell Kirk, that he was deeply skeptical of the modern world and the modern project. But again, I brought up Holly Ordway a little bit ago.

Her previous book, which was also excellent, was called Tolkien's Modern Reading. And she makes the argument that no, Tolkien really wasn't anti-modern. In fact, he embraced modernity at this level and this level and was not anti-bat at all. And she makes a very persuasive case.

In my own scholarship, I took it in a slightly different direction because I am more interested in the context of this Christian humanism. But it's amazing to me that when we look at these figures, or Christopher Dawson is another one, Hans Erz von Balthazar, there are a number of the T.S. Eliot, there are a number of these great figures, Willa Cather, who were really arguing about the nature of modernity, and their kind of confusion with modernity. So the way I describe it in thinking about Lewis and Tolkien

is that they generally thought, and this is both very Catholic and very Anglican at the same time, they generally thought that nature groaned with the fall, but that nature itself wasn't fallen in and of itself, like man is fallen. Man is definitely fallen. But nature has been misdural. directed in some way. And so they, in their writings, Lewis and Tolkien, both really praise

agricultural life. You get up with the sun, you go to bed with the sun, you do certain things in summer that you don't do in the fall, that you don't do in the winter or the spring, and you live with the liturgy of the seasons. And they were pretty taken with that idea. Whereas they saw machinery as a counterfeit. Machinery doesn't work with nature. It tries to dominate nature. And so we have that great story. And you just mentioned it, Tyler, a story that comes from George Sayer, who was a student of both Tolkien and Lewis, and ends up being a headmaster at a school. And he's the first to come to Tolkien's house in about 1952, and he comes with a huge tape recorder, a big reel-to-reel tape recorder.

And Tolkien at that time was very frustrated because he couldn't find a publisher for the Lord of the Rings. part of that was Tolkien's own fault. But it was also Tolkien was being pigheaded about what could be published and what couldn't. And thank God he was because we get Tolkien's vision ultimately. But he was being very pigheaded with his publishers. And so George Sayer says, well, you know, why don't you read some of this into the tape recorder? And Tolkien was deeply skeptical. And as you know this story, he says the Lord's Prayer in Gothen.

to make sure that this machine is not possessed. And he doesn't do Latin because obviously the devil would know Latin, but he may not know Gothic, old German. So it's just it's so characteristic of Tolkien to do something like that, something both brilliant and nutty all at once. And once he did that, then he actually read and he was an excellent reader, excellent reader. And we still have those.

You can still get from Amazon or probably on iTunes. You can download Tolkien reading. He reads chapter 5 from The Hobbit, which is the riddle game. He reads excerpts from various things like Baron and Lutheran from the Lord of the Rings. And it's beautiful. And there are moments even where Tolkien cracks himself up. He'll say his poetry and he says it right. You know, at the end of it.

And it's still in the recording. hasn't been edited out. So it's wonderful, absolutely wonderful. But yeah, it took him a bit. I mean, he had to prey over the machine before he did it. And that's pretty wacky. So maybe he'd pray over the DVD player before. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. So to get to the movies, in on fairy stories, Tolkien actually makes an argument that fantasy can never be transferred to to the theater or the stage or to the film, to the silver screen, because in its most intimate moments,

fairy or myth has to be dark. And the only way he says that you could really show that in a visual presentation would be to be unremittingly dark or violent. And he was very skeptical about that, that that becoming an actual visual. But remember, too, Tyler, as much as Tolkien complained about what might happen, he did sell the movie rights. So he is responsible at least for New Line Cinema and these other, he made the money off of that.

And so he is at some level responsible for those films. But I've not watched the Amazon one. I tried, and it's not philosophical on my part. I don't watch a ton of TV. There are certain things like I'll watch Stranger Things or I'll get into a series here or there. We just watch the new Star Trek series, Strange New Worlds. I enjoyed it very much. But I just, I have not immersed myself in that Amazon series.

And I watched the first episode and I thought it was goofy. I just, I did not like what they did with Galadriel. And so I just didn't watch anymore. But frankly, that's kind of irresponsible on my podcast. part, especially as a Tolkien scholar, I think I really have a duty to go back and watch it at some point. So at some point, I will. How dare you not watch the show that minimizes the character that echoes, you know, echoes the Virgin Mary. And like, makes her. I'm a huge collateral fan. So absolutely huge. So I'll be curious to see where it goes. But yeah, it just didn't grab me at all.

So I'll have to try it again. And I actually, I have a stress ball or something if you ever really watch it because. Yeah. I wasn't. So my book originally came out like a week or two weeks before the two towers came out in theaters. And so I had seen Fellowship of the Ring. I had not seen the two towers or the return of the king when I wrote the book. I don't know if I would change much now.

You know, Tyler, it's I don't love the movies. I like the soundtrack a lot. And I think there are certain things that the movies did extremely well. I think Aowen, they get her absolutely right. I think they get Aragorn right. Overall, I wasn't as happy with the Frodo Sam relationship, especially as it developed in the return of the king. Really?

Because I don't feel like Sam or Frodo would ever betray one another at all. And there's that moment where they separate. And I realize for a movie, you kind of need that. dramatic moment. I can see why from Peter Jackson's standpoint, he did that. But I didn't like it. And yet my kids, so my oldest Tyler is 24 and my youngest is 12, my kids love the movies. Love them. And my students love the movies. So it's really, for me, as a 55-year-old, to say, oh, I don't know if I like the movies or not. That's just me being cranky. Because I grew up with the books. And I didn't come to the movies until I was in my 30s.

So my imagination was formed by the books rather than by the movies themselves. So I'm not really the best critic overall. Well, I can imagine when my now four-year-old daughter eventually sees these old movies that she might not think of as relevant. I'm just like, oh, what's she going to think? So there's, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, are there lessons, and I mean, I'm sorry to keep going on and on. If you need to go, let me know. Oh, no. This is great.

But are there lessons for today, for, you know, either our political moment or our, you know, I think we have this bizarre, you know, pseudo-religion on the left that's competing with Christianity and, you know, not just Roman Catholicism and. Protestantism, but even, you know, weird offshoots like Mormonism and like, you know, and even Islam, you get a lot of conservative people who are revolting against this very leftist ideology that we see from transgenderism to CRT to a bunch of other things. Sure. And are there, you know, would you say there is wisdom that Tolkien has? for this moment, either for conservatives or for the culture at large? Yeah, again, Tyler, excellent question.

And I like, so I'm not even sure how many times I've read Lord of the Rings now. In my adult life, I've tried to read it once a year. I haven't always succeeded in doing that. But I find every time I read it, there's new wisdom there. So I started reading it right before I was a teenager and I've been reading it now for 40-some years. And it's just always meant something to me. And I think part of it is the story is just timeless.

Yeah, it's a story about, again, leaving hearth and home, going into danger, overcoming that danger through great personal sacrifice. And as much sacrifice as you can possibly imagine without it being Jesus on the cross. You know, incredible sacrifice. So, yeah, I think, and I think it's a very good sign. that Tolkien's popularity has remained. I, you know, whatever I think about the movies, I'm very, very glad that they did as well as they did.

I'm very glad when I look at the numbers of how many books of Tolkien still sell and that almost anything that is publishable has been published by Tolkien. You know, there's so many books out there on Tolkien by Tolkien. And I think that's a healthy sign in society. I don't think society is healthy right now,

But I think that's one of the healthier signs of society. And I think Tolkien teaches us to be ourselves in the best way, to be our authentic selves, to be made in the image of God, to do what we're meant to do. I think he calls upon our uniqueness, each of us made individually in the image of God. And I think he calls us to be heroic. I think he calls us to sacrifice for one another. And that was as true in Tolkien's life as it was in his writing. So this isn't, I think one of the great things about Tolkien is when we praise him, we can praise him as a person. There aren't real serious personal failings.

He didn't own slaves. He didn't. There's all these other things that we can dismiss Thomas Jefferson for. We can't do that with Tolkien. In fact, Tolkien was anti-Semitic. He was pro-black. I mean, anything that you can imagine that we may now think of as a. sensitive issue. Tolkien was on the right side of that quietly, but he was on the right side of that.

So I think that he's just, and yet he's a daily mass Catholic conservative. And so I think he always spoke to our humanity. He spoke to the best of what we are and what we can be. Well, that's amazing. Is there anything else you'd like to add from the book for, you know, our audience? Well, it's so meaningful to me to see you, Tyler, and to talk to you. This is great. So thanks, especially as I mentioned, I had two classes this morning and then office hours. So two hours of office hours, and now I get to talk to my old students. It's a good day. And the weather, I assume the same in D.C. The weather is perfect today. It's 67 and no humidity. It's just, yeah. So it's a good day. Yeah, three hours of office hours.

Yeah, right, right, right. Well, yeah, but I've had good office hours. So, yeah. Yeah, no, I really miss it out there. Yeah, I wish I could go back, hopefully, at some point. It'd be great to have you back, really great. I'd love to see you. I'd love to have you in the classroom again.

You can tell me if I've changed much since you were here. Well, thanks again so much. Besides just getting grayer and wrinklier and wrinklier, right? More crumaginly? I don't know. I don't think I'll ever seem that curmudgeoning. I'm cranky like Tolkien every once in a while, but maybe not, I'm not old enough yet to be. Now, Paul Marino is curmudgeon, but I don't think I'm there yet. So, but maybe soon. Maybe when I get into my 60s, I'll be curmudgeonly. Well, here's hoping not. You always have that, that bright approach to things.

Well, thank you so much again, Dr. Burrude. And it's great talking, Tyler. Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode of the Daily Signal podcast. If you appreciated what you heard here, please leave a five-star rating and review on iTunes, on Amazon, wherever you get your podcast. And we read and appreciate all of your feedback. Just a reminder later today, we're going to have another version of this show. The top news of the day.

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