The Rest Is History - 225. J.R.R. Tolkien

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is one of the most prestigious authors in modern history, best known for writingThe Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In the first of two episodes, Tom and Dominic explore Tolkien's childhood, his relationship with religion, and the impact that the rapidly changing English countryside had on the creation of Middle Earth. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. Hello, welcome to The Rest is History. Now, last week I went on a quest.

It had long been an ambition of mine to visit the grave of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. And with this new Amazon series coming out, I thought, what better time? So I set off from my home, left my beloved home behind. There was a tube strike, so I had to walk miles and miles and miles. Then I had to get on a train. It was very crowded. I had to stand the whole way. Then Tolkien's grave is the north of Oxford, so I had to walk all the way up there. I was about a mile away from the grave, and by now the burden of my quest was feeling very, very heavy on me. And I could well have abandoned it altogether, were it not for the fact that about a mile

from Tolkien's grave, I met up with my loyal retainer, a simple countryman of humble yeoman stock, Dominic Gamgee Sandbrook. And Dominic, in my hour of need, I needed the solid yeoman strength that only you could provide. And what was your response to my suggestion that we go and visit Tolkien's grave? I suggested we went for steak and chips. You did? And then after we'd had it, after we'd had lunch, you had a car. So you could have taken me there in your car.

And did you do it? No, no, I didn't. But I mean, to be fair, Tom, we had to have our photos taken. I think it's Mr. Tom, actually. Your bodyguard? No, his guard. So anyway, so we met up in Oxford last week. And obviously, Oxford is a place that is hallowed by the memory of J.R.R. Tolkien,

who is the subject of today's episode, prompted by the fact that, as I said previously, that Amazon are doing this. Well, it's a kind of prequel, isn't it, to Lord of the Rings? Yes, that's right. And The Hobbit and all that kind of stuff. But, Dominic, I think before we tuck into Tolkien and all that kind of stuff, we should absolutely recognize the fact that there are lots of people out there who've never read Tolkien. And it's not just that they haven't

read Tolkien, they militantly don't want to read Tolkien. He despises everything about it, the dragons, the elves, all that kind of stuff. So just to give some obvious examples, we had Judith Downey. I have not read the books. I did see film number one in my role as grandmother. My question is, can you bring to bear your customary wit and wisdom? Charming, Judith. Thank you for that. That's nice. Sufficient to maintain my interest for the interminable number of episodes you will inevitably produce. And we had Richard H. I have never read any Tolkien. Is he really that significant? And if so, why? Domin Tolkien. Is he really that significant? And if so, why,

Dominic, is he really that significant? Yes. So this is a history podcast. And so let's say right at the beginning, it's not a sort of Tolkien, I mean, though Tom and I may prove to be Tolkien enthusiasts, may reveal ourselves to be Tolkien enthusiasts, it's not a Tolkien enthusiast podcast. And it's absolutely aimed at people who love the books, but also people who have no intention of ever reading a single word. And the reason, the justification really, Tom, is that Tolkien is a significant historical figure. I think for two reasons. One, just very starkly, his book, The Lord of the Rings is the single best-selling english language book

of the 20th century and therefore presumably i mean certainly probably the world in the world yeah so i think probably the world i think there might be some chinese contenders um but certainly in the west uh the lord of the rings stands alone really as the by far the most successful book probably the most influential if you went into the any bookshop in Britain, America, Australia, you could take out probably scores, if not hundreds of books that have been very, very clearly directly influenced by Tolkien. And so the question is, why has it been so successful? Exactly. So the question is, why so successful? But also, I think the second reason why it's interesting is that Tolkien, I mean, he's obviously a historical figure.

He's somebody who was born in the 1890s, came of age just before the First World War, fought in the First World War at the Battle of the Somme. And after that, had actually a pretty quiet life, as we'll go on to discuss. But his books are a brilliant window, I think, into understanding the preoccupations and anxieties of going from the late Victorian period through to the Cold War. So anxieties about war, about technology, about industrialization, about the changes to the landscape. So they're seen as prefiguring the environmental movement, for example. I mean, there's an awful lot there. There are a lot of threads to unpick. And all of that without really, we don't need to talk about, we don't actually need to talk about a single elf. If you're an elpaphobe, don't worry.

I think we will talk about elves because I would say there's a third reason why Tolkien is a valid and interesting subject to study. And that is quite aside from the fact that he's a kind of colossal British cultural icon. So we've already done, we've done the Beatles, we've done Ian Fleming, we've done Agatha Christie, we've done George Orwell. All of you. Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes. So they are all massive British cultural figures that have also had a global resonance. But Tolkien is far more than any of those. He is a major, major scholar of key aspects of history, specifically the languages of the early Middle Ages, the German languages in particular, but also of the history.

And so his perspective and his views on early medieval language and on the history of that period is also, I think, worth looking at. So I think that's a third reason. Yeah. I mean, just to qualify that a bit, or to amplify it, Tolkien is the single most important person to have ever written about Beowulf. They're kind of, in many ways, one of the great founding documents of English literature and of the English language. Tolkien is the man who basically brought it into the limelight, into the sort of scholarly limelight. So even if he'd never published a word about Middle-earth and all that sort of stuff, he would be remembered by scholars

as the man who had basically put Beowulf front and centre. So that makes him interesting too, especially when you think the bloke who sort of, as it were, rediscovered Beowulf is also the bloke who fought at the Battle of the Somme. Yeah. I mean, you could, but you could go further and say that certainly in the English speaking world, Tolkien has probably had a greater influence on how the Middle Ages are popularly understood than anyone else in the 20th century. Yeah. I mean, you could draw a line from Walter Scott through Tolkien to Game of Thrones on TV right now. Yeah. So Walter Scott, I would say, would be his only rival as someone

who has influenced the popular understanding of what the Middle Ages were like. So I think for all those reasons, he's absolutely a valid subject of study for a history podcast. But I think precisely because he does kind of generate animus as well as devotion, it's probably worth our while just describing the kind of the parabola of our relationship with him, which is actually quite similar, isn't it? So presumably you read him as a boy. Yes, The Hobbit first um i first encountered the hobbit on jack and ory so um some listeners may remember jack and ory that ran on the bbc where people read bits of stories so i read the hobbit and then i read the lord of the rings i think i'd read the lord of

the rings certainly by the time i was about 10 or 11 um and and like a lot of people who read at that age especially sort of small boys who love stories of battles. Nerdy history boys. Yeah, nerdy history boys. Thank you, Tom. I immediately, it became enshrined right away in my mind as the best book. As the best book I had written. I had, yeah, absolutely.

And of course, do I still think that? No. But it's probably still my sentimental favorite. It would be my comfort read. And actually, I'd never thought about it in a sort of critical way at all until about probably in my 20s. And I read a great scholar called Tom Shippey, himself a great scholar of Anglo-Saxon. Who succeeded to Tolkien's academic – Yeah, so he's professor of – what was it?

The Bosworth – something Bosworth what was it, the Bosworth, something Bosworth, Rawlinson and Bosworth, professor of Anglo-Saxon. Right, and he basically wrote a couple of books, one which said Tolkien's work is all rooted in his scholarly study,

in his study of languages. And I found that absolutely fascinating. And then he wrote a second book called J.R.R. Tolkien, Author of the Century, where he was talking about Tolkien as a very specifically 20th century writer, as a writer of the world wars and of the age of modernism. And I found that absolutely fascinating. And since then, I've thought, you know, how odd it is that Tolkien suffers from the condescension of sort of academic posterity when he's so clearly a really,

really interesting character and writer. I was going to say, when I read the Tom Shippey book on author of the century, I think he calls him that, doesn't he? Because there'd been a poll of the general public in 1999 to find out- Tolkien always wins these polls, doesn't he? And Tolkien always won. And lots of kind literary taste-setters were indignant about this. I remember reading and thinking, this is such a Sandbrook theme. He'd be so on Tolkien's side against whoever it was, sticking up for Virginia Woolf or whatever. Exactly. Tolkien has always suffered from this sort of...

I remember when Tolkien won the... I think it was the Waterstones at an end of century poll. And he won, as he always does, by a canter. And Germaine Greer was quoted saying, I have dreaded this. You know, I've dreaded this moment. I knew this would happen. And I sort of thought, well, isn't it interesting then to say, well, why did it happen? Rather than just to bemoan it. I mean, the interesting question is why?

And we'll go on to discuss that later. But it's very you saying, you know, Sound of Music outsold Sgt. Pepper. It's the classic Sandbrook manoeuvre. So I was also, I loved The Hobbit, but I had a particular reason for reading Lord of the Rings, which was that my father, his first job as a solicitor was in Oxford, and he had to take Tolkien's will to him. So he took him to, Tolkienlkien had this garage and they went in and discussed the will um and and also the other thing is that we lived i think for the

first few months of my life we lived in a village called brill which is um east of oxford and means so it's brie hill so brie is the brie is appears in the lord of the rings isn't it and of course tolkien died quite a rich man tom so his will was a document of some consequence so anyway so my father who was aware of him but had never read him and so when i said i wanted to read lord of the rings he was quite keen and so we read it together um so i have that as you know it's kind of very it's great memory for me and i read it again and again and again and then i kind of cast it aside as I would childish things. That was very much my feeling kind of the Viking, the Norse myths and things, which are incredibly important to the fabric of Lord of the Rings,

but also all kinds of historical episodes, sieges of Constantinople, sieges of Augsburg by the Magyars, all this kind of stuff that suddenly I understood where all these elements in Lord of the Rings were coming from. Kind of like the mingling of different themes that you get, say, in TSA, it's the wasteland. And we talked about Tolkien as a kind of 20th century author. I think there's a really strong element of that. It's just that

he's drawing on much, much more obscure reaches of history and language than say, Eliot was or someone like that. And then when I wrote Dominion, I needed someone that the theme of Christianity and the horrors of the Second World War and the Third Reich and all that kind of stuff. And I actually thought Tolkien would be perfect for that because, of course, he was a very devout Christian. He was very devout Catholic. And I think that's a really, really important part, not just of how and why he comes to write what he does, but actually, I think also of his appeal. So maybe come to that later. Yeah, his books have, once you see it, you can't unsee it, the kind of spiritual dimension to them, I think. So as preparation for writing that chapter, I reread Lord of the Rings for the first time

since I must have been about 13. And I was stunned at how much I had missed, stunned at how clearly it holds a mirror up to the horrors of the mid-20th century, really, really in a really fascinating way. So I'm sure we'll come to that. Let's start with Tolkien. So our plan for those listeners who haven't deserted us because they're terrified of elves is we'll talk about Tolkien

and then we'll go on to talk about the books and the themes. And this is a two-podcast job. So, gird your loins. We ride a daybreak. It should really be three, so on and so forth. It should be. Well, it should be a trilogy, although Tolkien himself hated

The Lord of the Rings being described as a trilogy because he conceived of it as a single work. Anyway, listen, we don't want to disappear into nerdishness too soon. So, yeah, let's start, Tom, by talking about Tolkien. And funnily enough, for a very English, for somebody who believed himself to be an intensely English writer and whose dream was to create a mythology of and for England,

he had a German surname. So he's a Germanic stock. I think his ancestors came from Gdansk, Gdansk, didn't they? Well, only one side. Yes. So his father's side. That's right. But his mother's side, Suffield, came from Evesham.

They're Midlanders. And so Tolkien totally parked on one side, the German side. It was all about the fact that he'd come from Mercia. Yeah. But that's understandable when you get into his family history, as we will. But the other thing that's interesting is that he's not actually born in the Midlands or indeed in England.

He is a son of empire, actually, because he's born in South Africa, in Bloemfontein in, what is it, 1892. And his father, Arthur, very good Victorian, very telling name a sensational mustache yeah um worked in a bank didn't he he was a very i think it's fair to say a very unglamorous man yeah yeah the banker of rohan it doesn't so they so they had moved out to south africa um i think i guess they got married in Cape town,

his parents. Yeah. So he, so Arthur was working out there to begin with. And then Mabel, who was his mother, went out to join him. And they,

yeah, they, so they got married in Cape town, had a honeymoon and then settled in Bloemfontein, which Arthur loved and Mabel hated. Yeah. And actually, so she,

she hates it so much that when, so he's crossing John Ronald rule Tolkien. So when young Ronald, as he when, so he's crossing John Ronald Rule Tolkien. So when young Ronald, as his friends call him, or John Ronald, when he's about, what is he, about three? He's just turned three. Mabel decides to go back to England. And he's got a younger brother by this point as well, Hillary. Yes, Hillary. Is it Hillary?

Yes, it is Hillary. With Hillary. So off they go to England. And the plan is that Arthur will join them, basically, when he's, I guess, served out his notice with the bank or whatever it is. And that plan does not work out because he dies of rheumatic fever before he's even basically boarded the ship. So suddenly Mabel is back home in England, a widow exactly, with these two very small boys. But what's important then for Tolkien's story, and indeed for the genesis of his fiction,

is where they live, because they live in a place called... Have you ever been to Serhol, Tom? Have you been to Serhol Mill? No, I haven't. But I've actually been reading quite a lot about it, and I now want to go. So it was a village in what was then North Worcestershire on the fringes of Birmingham. Birmingham, the great Victorian city.

Joseph Chamberlain's city. Pumping out smoke. Sees itself as the first city of the empire, a massive kind of urban leviathan. The din and the clash of industry. Exactly. Wheels turning. Yeah. And they're on the fringe.

They're on the... And Tolkien... And they grow up in this little village where it has a sort of a mill with a water wheel and little copses where you can run and hide and meadows and streams.

And it's completely idyllic, but it's also obviously completely threatened and indeed doomed by the expansion of the city. I mean, I think one of the... It has... It obviously has an absolutely seismic effect on Tolkien. And the city. I mean, I think one of the reasons, it obviously has an absolutely seismic effect on Tolkien.

And he says, I mean, he claims that he remembers it, coming to it because he also remembers being in South Africa. And so it's the contrast that makes him fall in love with England, he says. Now that may well be a bit of a kind of myth-making, but there's no question that he feels very, very emotionally tied to the trees, to the mills, to everything that evokes the beauties of rural Warwickshire. And as you say, the fact that it is menaced by the encroachment of industry is hugely important.

And that's a big theme of English life, by the way, in the 1890s, 1900s. Lots of writers at the time wrote about this. So HG Wells is the classic example. He writes about what happens to Bromley, sort of Southeast London, swallowed up by the expanding city. And that's a big theme of kind of Edwardian letters. But also the reason I think Tolkien has this incredibly sentimental attachment to this place, which is basically the prototype for the Shire, the place his hobbits come from in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, I think is because he loses it before he's entered his teens. Because they move out of Serhal. They end up moving closer and closer to Birmingham. And then his mother dies when he's 12. Yeah.

But one of the reasons why they, well, two reasons why they move. One is because Tolkien's very, very bright. And he is going to King Edward's, so the best grammar school in Birmingham, which is in the middle. So it's a long way for him to walk otherwise. So they have to move in closer. But also it's because, and again again this is a key influence on tolkien his mother mabel has converted to catholicism so they need to go to a catholic church and so that's the other reason that they move and she falls out with her family doesn't she her family really take against it

who are methodists methodists and yeah i mean really not keen on potpourri. And so I think the young Tolkien experiences this as a kind of, you know, the fall. Yes, absolutely. He goes on to say that every story is the fall. The idea of the fall from grace, the fall, the loss of grace, that is a very common theme of British writing in this densely populated urban imperial society, industrial society at the turn of the 20th century. so he's orphaned by the time he's what 12 um and he and his brother become wards of a catholic priest called father morgan and they basically end up moving in with an aunt don't they i mean to give people a sense anybody who knows birmingham but doesn't know tolkien um they basically move from the the sort of england's green and pleasant land sort of you know woods and babbling brooks and stuff they move to to what is now very close

to the five ways roundabout in the center of birmingham so this kind of huge clamor and industry and factories and all that i mean as a as a kind of literary archetype it's not just edwardian is i mean this is kind of dickens this is off to the blacking factory kind of level of trauma i think yeah and and and also of course also you have in dickens the the trauma of being orphaned of adults as oppressive figures and as you say the young tolkien's go off to stay with their aunt who is a very unsympathetic figure and then they end up staying in a um with another woman who's equally who's equally i think not not maternal but they seem tyrannical, don't they? All these, they're sort of Roald Dahl aunts.

Kind of David Copperfield. Yeah, so Roald Dahl. It's that kind of quality. But also lodged with the second of these rather tyrannical aunts is a girl called Edith Bratt, who is not at all a brat. She's a very quiet, calm, clever girl who's very very good at piano um three years older than tolkien and they fall madly in love and the priest the priest the priest is not having it at all he bans them from seeing each other doesn't he and they can't communicate

or something for three years i mean an absolutely extraordinary thing to do to teenagers. But Tolkien's quite a, he's a very serious person. You know, he's very intense. And I think that's true throughout his life. And he takes a lot of teenagers just say, sod you, you know, I'm going to see you. Yeah, I'm running off. But no, he takes this quite, I think he breaks the vow once to see her or to communicate with her. But otherwise, absolutely adheres to it. And I think the reason for that is partly because Father Francis has independent means and is helping to keep the boys. So he feels grateful for that, doesn't want to offend or upset him. And I think also he's very,

very devout Catholic and feels, in a way, he's already getting into the idea of quests and romance. So he's passionately devoted to Arthurian literature, all that kind of stuff. And I think he feels that this is a test that he and Edith have to go through. Yeah, he's quite idealistic. He's very idealistic. And in due course, he will mythologize their relationship to spectacular effect. Anyway, but what that does mean is that now that girls have been parked to one side, he can focus on doing what chaps do, which is play rugger and hang out with other chaps and talk about scholarly things. Languages.

Stuff like that. So we said he goes to the school King Edward's Birmingham, long established, famous, prestigious private grammar school. And he joins, I think there's two organizations that really matter. And if you want to read more about this, I know we've both read and hugely enjoyed the books by John Garth. He wrote a fantastic book about Tolkien at the Great War, and the Great War is not just about the Great War, it's also about Tolkien and the Edwardian period

and the school that he goes to. And one of the things he joins is the cadet force. So this is a very Edwardian thing. So Garth has found this photo that shows Tolkien in 1907 at the age of 15, looking very pale and very serious in his military uniform on the day that Field Marshal Lord Roberts, the great hero of the British Empire, the man who'd won endless victories, who'd won the Boer War, he comes to visit the school and all the boys are lined up and Tolkien is right there.

They are being trained for war. They have a sense that a war is coming and that Britain will be tested and that they will be tested. Everything they do at school really is preparing them for this. As you said, on the rugby field, the sense of camaraderie, doing your bit, being part of the team, all of this stuff. And Tolkien undoubtedly... Play up, play up, and play the game.

Play up, play up, and play the game. Tolkien undoubtedly takes this very seriously. And I think the empire and serving your country, serving king and country, is a huge part of his worldview, actually, even if it's unconscious. I think it could not be otherwise. Well, I mean, just a reminder of, because Lord of the Rings ends up being the toast of hippies in the 60s. But one of Tolkien's earliest and most vivid memories is of a sailhole being lit up with bonfires and fireworks to celebrate queen victoria's jubilee

and that will feed into the opening of lord of the rings so you know he has a long life and and his roots in this pre-war society are really really strong really intense but already he is also starting to inhabit a very distant world so i think isn't he he he does he trains on horseback and he's not actually very good at that but he's had experience of kind of riding with cavalry so that's something obviously that stays with him and he's also i mean he's doing latin and greek as as all boys of his age and and class at grammar school would do um but he's also become obsessed by germanic languages and so they do they have this school play where everyone has to talk in latin but he turns up and talks in gothic which i think i mean that's pretty precocious but he was

17 or something yeah there's virtually nothing left he's not even i don't think i think he finds got gets into gothic possibly even before before that when he's even younger. I mean, it's absolutely extraordinary. There's virtually nothing written in Gothic that remains. It's a sort of loads of bits of it are lost, and he becomes completely obsessed by it. And he's got this group of friends, hasn't he? They meet for tea, and they meet in a place called Barrow's Stores, in a department store. So it's a tea club and a Barrow's store, the TCBCs.

Sorry, TCBSs. The Tea Club Barovian Society, I think they call themselves. And there's four key members and he's one of them. And they are, when you read John Garth's book and he reproduces lots of their letters and so on, I mean, they're very, by adolescent standards, they are intensely idealistic. Are they Aesthetes? There's a bit of that about them, butistic. Are they Aesthetes?

There's a bit of that about them, but they're not just Aesthetes. So they're looking back to the world of the Norse and the Anglo-Saxons and so on. And in that, they bear the imprints of the Victorians, don't they? I think that there's actually quite a hostility to the idea of being an Aesthete. So in due course, Tolkien will be a great enthusiast for Baggy Tweed and all that kind of stuff. I think it's a kind of conscious desire to have nothing to do with that side of ship. As also, so we had quite a lot of questions

saying Tolkien doesn't seem to be tremendously interested in women. We might come to that later, but women don't feature prominently in Lord of the Rings or indeed in The Hobbit. And I think that the fact that he has Edith as this great romantic object of devotion, I mean, she's incredibly important to him. But in a way, precisely because he's got that sorted and got bit marginalized,

he can now focus on just hanging out with chaps. Yes. And that kind of very intense masculine camaraderie which is a very edwardian thing isn't it yeah he buys into that hugely um and so in due course he gets a scholarship to go to oxford he goes to the same college exeter as two people who i think are excellent kind of precursors for tolkien so one of them very famous will William Morris, the great kind of Victorian polymath. We talked about Morris to Iceland in a holiday podcast. And of course, Morris is the person who really makes the Icelandic sagas and things trendy for idealistic younger people in the decades that follow. So in other words, of Tolkien's generation.

And the other person who also went to King Edward's is the painter Edward Burne-Jones. And he's obsessed with, you know, the medieval, with King Arthur, with all that stuff. And he's a pre-Raphaelite. Yes. And that idea of a group devoted to high-minded medievalism is absolutely something that Tolkien and his friends buy into. So it's more than a hobby for them. It's a very common thing in late Victorian Edwardian British culture, this revulsion from industry and from the machine age and from urban modernity and this sort of idealization of a lost world of knights and paladins and maidens.

And I mean, you see that everywhere in late Victorian culture. An incredibly intense experience of friendship. So two of them go to Oxford, including Tolkien, two of them go to oxford including tolkien two of them go to cambridge and they kind of meet up at regular intervals and it's this so one of them's a poet one of them tolkien is is thinking of becoming a philologist um one of the painter i mean it's it's one of them's a musician it's this idea that they will you know they take themselves very very very seriously um and the fact that they all equally you know they all take themselves seriously and they all sustain each other in their sense that what they're doing is important i think is you know especially when you think central to their they're 19 they haven't done

anything yeah they're just writing poems to read at their little meetings but as you say they to them everything they write is sort of loaded with this cosmological um importance and tolkien is already writing some of the stuff i think so 1914 he writes the first what what looks now like the first fragment of this great corpus of legends. Do you have it? Do you have the Old English? I don't have the Old English. Are you going to read it, Tom? Yeah.

Go on. So this is from a poem by Kinnewulf called Christ. Eala Earendel Englabertast of a Mittengard monum sended so that's uh hail a arendel um brightest of angels over middle earth uh you have been sent to man to mankind to men so so that's not tolkien is it that's anglo-saxon that's anglo-saxon but the question is what is a arendel and tolkien is pondering this in 1914 whereas he's on the lizard i think isn't isn't he? He's on a holiday on the lizard, somewhere like that. And he wrote about it in a piece of fiction that he published later. He said, I felt a curious thrill.

So reading those lines, I felt a curious thrill as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind these words if i could grasp it far beyond ancient english um and that question of of who or what aurendal is haunts him and in one level it's it's christ but in another level maybe it's you know it's the morning star or the evening star it's a star that enables navigators to follow as they sail out into the Atlantic. And so he writes this poem, doesn't he, in which Earendal is a mariner, and is setting out across the ocean, rather, as the Irish saints had done. And I think, Tom, if history had played out differently, we wouldn't be doing this podcast, and this poem would be utterly forgotten. But that very summer,

that's the summer of the assassination of Sarajevo, of the slide to war. And I think it's the First World War and what happens next to Tolkien that completely, it doesn't change his trajectory, but it gives it a charge that it would not otherwise have had. And it's that, I think, that is the defining and the seismic moment in his life. And I think we should come to that after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews,

splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking about the life and times of J.R.R. Tolkien and we've got as far as the First World War. So Tolkien's instinct when war breaks

out, interestingly, is not to rush to the battlefront, is it? Because he's very conscious that he wants an academic career and he doesn't want to rush off and jeopardize that and not graduate and not get the qualifications he needs. So he leaves it a year or so and he starts to get hints from his relatives. I know everybody else is at the war where what are you doing but he i mean he basically he signs up but he can put it on hold yes so there's no question that that once he's finished his degree he will go so he gets his degree he gets a very good first which means that he will be able to pursue an academic career should he survive the conflict but in 1915 he he is commissioned and he joins the Signals. And Gordon Crowe will be very excited to know that among all the other skills that he learns as a Signals officer, he learns

to handle pigeons. So that's tremendous. If you're interested in pigeons, if you've come to this podcast for Tolkien, we have pigeons for you, would you believe, in the Restless History's back catalogue. But I mean, if you think about believe in the rest of history's back catalogue but i mean if you think about um lord of the rings there's quite a lot of birds and sending messages and things like that so tom i'm trying to drag you back from pigeons don't get into another piece of podcast so he's joined the 11th lancashire fusiliers because his friend has christopher is it christopher wiseman one of them has one of the the tcbss yes yes joined the lancashire fusiliers so all his friends have joined up the whole little group of them they and they has joined the Lancashire Fusiliers. So all his friends have joined up, the whole little group of them. And they believe in the war as a slightly idealistic crusade, don't they?

They believe a new Britain will be created at the end of the war, and it'll be their responsibility to do it. And so Tolkien and co. get posted to France, his battalion, in the summer of 1916, just in time, for the show that is being planned near Albert, which turns out to be the Battle of the Somme. And he's not there on the first day, but one of his friends, Robert Gilson, is. And he is killed on the first day. One of the 20,000 people, British soldiers who are killed on the very first day. And then Tolkien himself is inevitably drawn into the horror. And in John Garth's book, which we were talking about in the first part of this episode,

he describes they're going into trenches littered with bodies, body parts, the mud, the rain, the horror. And for a young man, for an idealistic young man who's basically spent far too much time reading Finnish grammar books, this must have been an absolutely searing and indeed life-defining experience. And he's at the cutting edge of a number of seismic developments in the history of warfare that will then have obvious echoes for anyone who has read the novels or seen the films. So he's there on the 15th of September for the debut of the tank. Yeah. And tanks, when you think of the greatth of september for the debut of the tank yeah and tanks you know when you think of the great battering rams and the dragons and all the the huge elephants that's

something but but also he is he's there while the red baron is doing his stuff in the air overhead oh i hadn't thought of the red baron yeah so the so the red baron is is you know becoming the the great fighter ace of the uh of the air air and basically enables the German Air Force to win control of the battlefield. So that sense that there is danger in the air, which again is something that you get throughout Tolkien's fiction, the sense that danger lurks there um and in due course it won't be you know it's not planes but um witch kings on pterosaurs is what it will be but i mean it's it's pretty clear that the the you know the inspiration for that sense of terror isn't just you know medieval literature it's clearly coming from his experience on in in the trenches um As is also, the hobbits have to go to this land called Mordor for complicated reasons we won't go into

for those who haven't read the books or seen the films, but he has to get rid of the ring and thereby destroy evil by dropping it in the crack of a volcano. Very complicated reasons. And Mordor is a land of darkness and horror. And Tolkien said later about this that the war so the first world war made me poignantly aware of the beauty of the world i remember miles and miles of seething tortured earth perhaps best described in the chapter about the approaches to mordor so yeah i think that that sense of the earth being tortured

which had been floating there really ever since you know he moved to birmingham is is enhanced massively of course by the spectacle of what the horrors of war are doing that's right well there's a chapter called the um the dead marshes and uh the heroes fredo and sam they see the the the swamps are full of dead bodies. And obviously, that clearly comes from the experience of somebody who was on the Western Front in 1916, who saw the fields, the puddles, the gullies, the trenches littered with British and German bodies. And actually, Tolkien once said that the real theme of the Lord of the Rings was death. And you can understand why, because if you look at the figures, from his school, King Edward's, 243 boys were killed in the First World War.

From his Oxford College, Exeter, 141 young men were killed in the First World War. And Tolkien himself could easily have been killed, but he was fortunate. I mean, it seems weird to say it because he contracts a disease which could conceivably have killed him which is called trench fever which he gets from lice doesn't he um so

you're bitten by the lice you you get this kind of very severe kind of flu um i know it's not flu before doctors write in to complain but anyway he's invalided out. And basically, his war is kind of over from that point. So he's invalided out in, I think, the autumn of 1916. And then he spends the rest of the time recuperating. So we forgot to mention that he had married Edith. He'd become betrothed to her in 1914 before the war. She had become a Catholic. He'd basically, that was a non-negotiable. She had to become a Catholic. We had a couple of people commenting about that saying you know what kind of you know he obviously hasn't got it has got it in for women because his wife he forced her to become a catholic

i mean it's a sign i think of his intense piety that he takes it so seriously and she's so devoted to him that she will risk the you know the displeasure of her family by doing it and so she she had she'd married him just before he goes and she then she she follows him around she's pregnant then has a child then gets pregnant again so really tough for her as he's moved from hospital to hospital and then post to post and every time he seems to be recovering he relapses again and there is a key moment where he gets um he's at a place called roost which is just south of the humber and there's a wood and he goes with edith into this wood and it's spring and it's spectacularly beautiful and he's lying you know he still haunted by the prospect i think this is 1917 so still haunted by the prospect that he he will probably have to go back to the front, but it is breathtakingly beautiful. It's English spring.

It's everything that he would dream of. And Edith dances for him and he clings to the memory of this and he constructs a story about a mortal Beren and an elf, an elvish princess, and elves are immortal. And it's about the love between the mortal and the immortal. And in due course, the immortal abandons her immortality, and they marry and have a kind of short life together. And this is a story that Tolkien writes again and again and again over the course of his life. And when in due course they die on the tombstone that Dominic prevented me from seeing, Tolkien describes himself as Beren and Edith as Luthien. And it's obviously the story that more than any other is the wellspring of his his emotional life and it's it's framed in in you know these ancient languages these ancient epics but it's clearly also massively bred of

the war and tolkien as the person who is who probably will die i mean it's it's it's it's so painful yeah it's the kind of thing people would imagine people sniggering at or sneering at. But actually, it's very moving when you read the way he writes about it and the fact that it's chiseled on their tombstones and so on. It obviously means an enormous amount, you would assume, to him, but also to her. I would say it's the emotional heart. I mean, because it's also something that then reappears in Lord of the Rings with Aragorn. Well, people tell the story, don't they? They're conscious of it as a story.

So Arwen also is an elf who's immortal and Aragorn's immortal. So it's obviously this idea of a man who is doomed to die in love with someone who will be immortal is absolutely the heart. Anyway, Tolkien doesn't die. No, he doesn't but it's about this point tom that he starts he's he's scribbling away at his stories not the stories that most people now associate with tolkien the hobbit and the lord of the rings but he's he's creating this whole um world of legend these myths and folk tales and so on, that he's scribbling, as he says himself, in huts full of blasphemy and smut. So in other words, in these sort of jerry-built huts where soldiers are recuperating, he is scribbling on some piece of paper the sort of stories that he

was thinking about before the war, except that now they are so, they are doom laden and there's this sort of the preoccupation with death and with immortality and with sort of cities that are doomed. So the first story he writes, The Fall of Gondolin, 1917, which you can now buy, which is posthumously published. That's about a city that is attacked by these kind of great sort of mechanical dragons and falls inevitably. And there's this sort of pessimism and sort of despair at the heart of the story. And you can absolutely, this is a response to the First World War. You wouldn't have got it without William Morris and the high Victorians and the sort of medievalism of that period. But you also wouldn't have got it, I think, without the experience of the trenches and the Western Front.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's the first piece of writing, isn't it, where you can see the horrors of mechanized warfare being recalibrated and kind of given the appearance of dragons and balrogs and all these kind of monsters. Yeah, and it's very powerful. But I think also what's incredibly important for understanding Tolkien's literary direction, but I think also the appeal that he has held, certainly for English readers, is that he is consciously trying to fill what he sees as a gap. So he's been reading in Finnish literature, and he's incredibly impressed by the antiquity of these Finnish tales. And he reads in Norse epic, Icelandic epic.

Again, he's very, very impressed at the way that these ancient stories and legends have survived. And he is terribly upset that England doesn't have anything really comparable, perhaps Beowulf, perhaps a few other poems, but not much else. And he blames the norman conquest for this so he is he is the french who the villains time well he he's he's so he has very kind of very very dogmatic opinion so he's very keen on finnish but hates french he goes to paris and complain you know you talked about the um talking about the officer's mess but he views um paris in a very similar way he complained about the vulgarity and the jabber about the officer's mess but he views um paris in a very similar way he complained about the vulgarity and the jabber and the spitting and the indecency that's what i think

very very soundbrooke but he goes on about the normal conquest in the way that that that people who are upset about britain leaving the eu go on about the brexit vote it's the great trauma it's the great horror and he experiences as vividly and viscerally as someone today might kind of lament Brexit. And so he sets himself the task of reconstructing the legends and the stories that England might have had yes and it's important to say tom he doesn't do this from nowhere no he's so immersed in the languages and the history of language that he's picking up these tiny fragments isn't he and and so that's where the um the aurendal the one that we we read just before comes from that that for tolkien it's the language that comes first and then he has to decide you know what do these words mean what do these names mean where are they these names mean? Where are they coming from? And that becomes his great mission. And his feeling is that it's not just that England has lost its mythology, but it's also that England is, and I think to a degree

that probably most people would find risible, except that Tolkien believes and feels it so strongly that he has indeed achieved what he set out to do, which is astonishing, and create this mythology. But he feels that England was sacred to a kind of people who haunt the mythologies of the North. This idea that there was a people who lived in these lands that were somehow higher than mortal humans, to whom originally he gives the name of gnomes. Yes, unfortunately. Do you know the garden gnome, Tom, was not invented until the late 1930s.

So when Tolkien first calls them the gnomes, that's not a ludicrous and sort of... No, but it does seem very funny. I mean, now it's completely ludicrous that he calls them the gnomes but that's only because we think of victor meldrew ordering 290 garden gnomes or whatever it was in one foot in the grave but um uh they they are basically elves aren't they there they are they're they're kind of a bit like there's an element of the angel about the elves don't you think with for talking uh so in the in the medieval literature in the

norse literature elves are much more ambivalent figures they're quite dangerous quite dark dark so we've recorded an episode um about norse sorcery viking sorcery that will be going out and elves are kind of part of this this strange world that include dwarves as well um that that lived beyond the limits of the human in in Viking world. So elves are clearly coming from that. And what Tolkien hates about the role that elves and fairies and all that kind of stuff plays in England is that they've been prettified and kind of diminished. They're kids figures, aren't they?

They're kids figures, the kind of thing that Arthur Conan Doyle, you know, the girls, the fairies in the garden. He doesn't like, he hates that. And so he wants to kind of revive that. And he comes to feel basically that England was the great home of the elves. And I know I can hear people who hate Tolkien kind of laughing at this. But I think he's coming to this idea of coming out of the war, and I think it matters terribly to him. And that the measure of how deeply he feels it is precisely the kind of emotional heft that this world comes to carry,

not just for Tolkien, but for millions of people, and not just living in England either across the world. This thing about myth and the obsession with myth, with legend, with kind of folk tales, it's not just a legacy of the kind of late Victorian period, but also you see it all everywhere in the interwar culture. So, I mean, it seems odd to put Tolkien, and to some listeners it would seem almost blasphemous to put Tolkien with these writers. But let's think about William Butler Yeats in Ireland,

or indeed James Joyce, taking, you know, who's fascinated by myths and legends and new ways of working on them, or T.S. Eliot, another writer. You mentioned Eliot before, somebody who coming out of the First World War is thinking about picking up fragments from the shattered remains of Western civilization to try to make something new. I mean, Tolkien is, okay, he might seem a million miles away, but I think there are definite kind of correspondences there. And even if you hate Tolkien, he's clearly part of the same milieu in a way. So maybe come to Eliot later when we look at the experience of the Second World War, because I think there are really interesting and perhaps overt parallels there but just on the on the topic of

joyce who you'd say ulysses is as different a novel as you could imagine to lord of the rings except that both of them both joyce and tolkien in their unbelievably different ways are obsessed by language so when tolkien at the end of the war, Tolkien gets a job working on the dictionary. So he becomes a lexicographer. He does W, doesn't he? The Oxford English Dictionary. He does WA. So he does one power and one and all kinds of things like that.

And then he gets a job at Leeds. And then he gets a job at Oxford. And this is the Rawlinson and bosworth professorship and basically from that point on you know he stays at oxford um and humphrey carpenter in his biography says that at this point his his life you know his his life stops being interesting basically you know he just leads the life of an oxford don but all the time tolkien is thinking about language and is obsessed by it. And I think that, so if you wanted to compare,

say a chapter from Lord of the Rings with a chapter from Ulysses, you could do it. You could do it. So there is a chapter in, in Ulysses that has the, you know, critics call it the Cyclops. It's,

it's Leopold Bloom, the hero of ulysses meets with an irish nationalist in a pub and kind of gets into the irish nationalist throws a glass at him and bloom leaves and that's basically the plot but the whole thing is couched through um various forms of english starting from the earliest form of old english and going right the way up to the present day joyce is fascinated by the way in which English as a language evolves, and he makes play with this throughout the chapter. In Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has this chapter called the Council of Elrond, where various peoples from different parts of Middle Earth come and meet. And again, you can exactly gauge how ancient are people they are by the kind of

english they use so the hobbits who are representatives of 1920s england speak in a contemporary form of english but then you have men you have dwarves you have elves they all come from different periods of history and they all have subtly different forms of English, subtly different forms of vocabulary. And I think that the parallel is perhaps, I think an intriguing one, the way in which both Joyce and Tolkien in their very, very different ways are using language to express quite important truths, I think, about the instability of things. Because if language is constantly evolving, then it means that people can be left behind. That's interesting, isn't it? But I think the difference is that Joyce is well known in the 1920s. I mean, this is not the difference, it's a difference. And Tolkien is completely and utterly obscure. So all the work he's doing on his languages and

his sort of imagined worlds and things, it's a bit like the equivalent of a train set in an attic. I mean, he does it he does it when he comes home you can imagine edith saying what are we doing tonight and he says well i'm writing about the gnomes again you know it's very highbrow kind of battle reenacting isn't it it's kind of dressing up in the civil war uniform or something and he takes it tremendously seriously um he has a new friend who he meets in i think 1926 called c.s lewis who is a like-minded because he's lost all but one of his friends yeah in the first world war line doesn't he that by 1918 i had lost all but one of my closest friends exactly so he's got one left and he doesn't actually see

him very much or get on with him very well anymore because he's a methodist headmaster isn't he he becomes a headmaster exactly in somerset or something like that i think um so so tolkien's there in oxford he meets this big ebullient ulsterman called cs lewis who obviously went to a very good school tom as you will as you all know top absolutely top school um like the very best podcasters and um lewis is is interested in language too and he's interested in Norse myths, and he's interested in Anglo-Saxons and all of that kind of stuff. And they go to the pub and they read each other's stuff and they have a tremendous time. But Tolkien, there's no reason to think he's ever going to be, apart from his academic work and his interest in Beowulf and

these kinds of things, there's no reason to think that he's ever going to be a public figure of any kind. And then the famous story is that basically, cause he's not very well paid and he's hard up, he's marking, you know, school certificate exam papers in the summer. And the story goes,

it's about 1930 one day. He's completely bored. You can imagine the scene, you know, mid afternoon, another paper, and he, there's a blank. You can imagine the scene, you know, mid-afternoon, another paper, and there's a blank page in one of the scripts, and he scribbles in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. And then he doesn't know what to do with it.

He knows it's the beginning of a story, but he doesn't know what. Well, what a note. What a note, Dominic. The rest is is history the rest well the rest is is history talking episode part two i think yes we don't do that as a sign off as much as we should you know so i think we should draw a line there under today's episode and then come back uh in our next episode look at the hobbit look at the Lord of the Rings look at elves we've got them

elves we've got them not another f***ing elf which C.S. Lewis didn't say did he no and that will have to be that will have to be bleeped that will

I can't believe you I can't believe you went there oh so disrespectful that's the apocryphal story anyway so we will we'll see you next time and

to Mordor to Mordor bye bye Anyway, so we will see you next time. And... Temodo. Temodo. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening,

bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.