The Rest Is History - 226. The Lord of the Rings

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

Written in stages between 1937 and 1949, The Lord of the Rings is one of the best-selling books ever written, with over 150 million copies sold. Join Tom and Dominic in the second of two episodes on the life and work of J.R.R. Tolkien, where they discuss the themes of encroaching industrialisation, the air defences of Mordor, and whether the Scouring of the Shire was an allegory for post-war Attlee Britain... 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 there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down

on or to eat. It was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort. This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of the hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected. You could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. But this is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbour's respect, but he gained, well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end. And Tom Holland, did the Hobbit gain anything in the end?

He gains a ring. He does indeed. But he also gains, so this is Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbits, published in 1937 by J.R.R. Tolkien. And of course, we did the first episode on Tolkien earlier this week, the time of the Amazon series, and this is the second. But he gains a sense of adventure, a love of the amazon series and this is the second but he gains a sense of adventure a love of the quest um experience of foreign climes and the sort of satisfaction of being

part of a journey and part of a sense of camaraderie and all those kinds of things and tom we talked in the first episode about uh tolkien's experience of the first world war there's a little element of that in this book don't you think of the journeying far from home with a band of friends when you see that even more in the lord of the rings the sequels yeah but yeah and and then he comes back and he's had experiences that he can't readily explain to people yes and there's always a slight uh feeling that these experiences have marked him so much that he isn't really a Hobbit anymore. That's right. He's changed. And as you say, this will be a much profounder theme in Lord of the Rings, which is the sequel.

But I think, so in the first part, we were talking about how Tolkien is this philologist. He's obsessed by the languages and the literature and the history of the early Middle Ages, of the Northlands. And he writes this kind of English mythology. And it's full of high elves and people called Luthien and all this kind of stuff. And basically, it's everything that people hate and despise about Tolkien who haven't read him. It's seen as being humorless and earnest and elves and dragons and things no one would ever have heard of tolkien had he not most improbably introduced into this world of of high elves and so on basically stanley baldwin kind of that's right i kind of um and i said so stanley baldwin is you know he smokes a pipe he He wears a waistcoat.

So he's the British Prime Minister three times in the interwar period. Yeah, he's a man of the West Midlands. And he, I suppose he becomes a bit notorious for not having rearmed Britain, for not having. That's fake news and very harsh. However, there's an element of truth to it that he speaks for the English who have had enough of war and foreign troubles and don't really want to have anything to do with it, just want to stay in their hobbit holes. But Bilbo then goes off and realizes that the world is quite a dangerous place. And again, this will be a huge theme in Lord of the Rings. Do you think that's fair? I think Bilbo is absolutely a Stanley Baldwin figure. In fact, some of our listeners, some of our club members asked, tongue in cheek,

is Bilbo Stanley Baldwin? And I don't think, obviously, Bilbo is not modelled on Stanley Baldwin, but Bilbo comes out of the same world that Stanley Baldwin is the defining politician of. So Baldwin celebrated domesticity, the country, nostalgia, as you say, kind of introversion. And Baldwin sort of sells himself as a great sort of interwar archetype in Britain in the first part of the 20th century called the little man, the ordinariness, respectability, you know, tending your garden, doing DIY, you know.

Grand pencil, T-forks. Absolutely that. Hot butter. garden yeah doing diy you know grandparents on tea forks absolutely that hot bilbo bilbo is is very recognizably i would say a character born of the post-world war one age of the 1920s and 1930s so tolkien creates him and he's a modern figure i mean bilbo has tea bilbo has clocks he's not he smokes a pipe doesn't he smokes a pipe, doesn't he? He smokes a pipe. And he's in the Middle Ages, so he can't call it tobacco. So he has to call it pipe weed.

So we were talking in the first episode about the different linguistic registers that Tolkien uses. And you made what some listeners may have considered a ludicrous comparison with James Joyce. Tolkien does use different registers. He does think very carefully about language. And it seems to me that one of the great beauty, the great charm of The Hobbit, which I think is a perfectly conceived children's book. So the plot is that Bilbo gets chosen by the wizard Gandalf to go on a quest with 12 dwarves. Yeah. It's a story very much aimed at children, isn't it? I mean, there's no... Lord of the Rings, it is not. But I think it's impossible to read The Hobbit when you're a knight and not enjoy it.

It's perfectly calibrated. So the highlights are they go across misty mountains. Bilbo gets lost. He meets a creature called Gollum who lurks in the depths of the mountains and has a ring that makes you invisible bilbo takes the ring golem is distraught it's the last thing that bilbo hears is golem wailing after the ring uh they go through a deep wood called murkwood they um arrive at the mountain spiders in it giant spiders um they get to a misty mountain where there's a dragon guarding great treasure the dragon gets killed the dwarves take back a great jewel that they've lost and they

they they this mountain had been their kingdom that the dragon had stolen from them and they get it back and then it goes back home and that's basically basically yeah that's very very simplistic terms that is exactly the plot but the as the charm of it is the collision of the modern and the archaic. So the dwarves, the dragon, the spiders, the mountains, these are all very clearly drawn from the world that Tolkien studied in his day job. From the Norse myths, from the Finnish myths, from Anglo-Saxon poems, the names are taken from old English poems and things. But Bilbo, as we were saying, he's Stanley Baldwin dropped into this world. And that's the fun of it, I think.

That's the charm and the uniqueness that makes it different from the high Victorian fantasy stories that Tolkien would have read as a boy. And there's one other element, actually, I think, which is really interesting. Tolkien didn't just read stories about fairies. He also read the stories of Ryder Haggard, the imperial adventure stories, which are always quests. So King Solomon's Mines or She, which both were written in the 1880s, mid-1880s, about people going to Africa and discovering lost cities and mysterious queens and all this stuff. And there are definite elements of that in The Hobbit, of sort of keys and locking doors and lost maps and all these things. And you can see why. If Tolkien had never written anything but The Hobbit,

I think The Hobbit would still be loved as a great children's story. Yeah. But what obviously transforms his reputation is that at the end of 1937, so the book's just been published. By the end of 1937, the publisher, Stanley Unwin says, how do you fancy, you know, we'd love to do a sequel. And Tolkien says, well, I've had this train set in the attic, which are all these kinds of myths. And he obviously shows this to the publishers and the publishers, the color drains from their faces. And they say, no, no, no. Can you basically do The Hobbit 2? That's what we want. And he starts doing that and it gets completely out of hand.

So from them commissioning it to publication is, I think, best part of 17 years for The Lord of the Rings to be written. The Lord of the Rings turns into, it's no longer a children's book. I mean, children can read it, but it's clearly not pitched as a children's book. Well, there's a brilliant moment. So Tolkien is writing it, and he's not focusing on Bilbo. But what is it? Bilbo's adopted son?

I can't remember what their exact relationship is. Nephew? Yes. Something like that. Bilbo's nephew Frodo, who he's basically adopted. But this is before he becomes Frodo, and he writes this note. Bingo Bolger Baggins. Bad name. Let Bingo equal Frodo and he writes this note bingo bulgar Baggins bad name let bingo equal Frodo I mean you couldn't

have had Lord of the Rings if he was called bingo bulgar Baggins Tolkien's initial choices are always bad because we said in the last podcast that the elves were going to be gnomes but also there's a character called Aragorn who you know to not to spoil it for our listeners, but Aragorn is basically King Arthur, isn't he? He's an exiled king who's trying to get – he's got this sword, which is the badge of his kingship. Nick Scalabar, kind of. Wants to reclaim his throne. But he's first introduced to our heroes as a mysterious ranger, a hooded figure, a man of the sort of the hills and stuff called Strider.

But Tolkien's initial name for him was Trotter. So if they were called Bingo and Trotter, Bingo and Trotter, it would have been much less successful. Bingo and Trotter meet the gnomes. But also the kind of the great villain who essentially is a kind of Satan figure in Lord of the Rings is Sauron. Son the great sauron the terrible um and this is a figure who has already appeared in in you know tolkien's collection of of myths and legends in which he initially appears as a cat

do you know i didn't know he appeared so initially the initial name for sauron was tevildo the prince of cats like kind of old possum i mean it's yeah yes so but he got there in the end to be fair because because the names are absolutely fundamental and once you've heard the names you know basically where they're coming from um so yes absolutely so yeah so he he sets off so we should just i suppose very quickly give the plot of lord of the rings shouldn't we i mean it's quite imagine condensing that in a minute so basically the ring that bilbo took off gollum turns out to be a ring that is the key to the the fate of the whole of middle earth so the whole world of mortal men and dwarves and elves and also these these kind of twisted tortured elves who've become orcs who are kind of monsters um and whoever controls the ring basically

will have mastery and sauron in in in the distant land of mordor is plotting um a great military conquest of the world but to absolutely secure his victory he needs to get this ring and frodo bilbo's nephew uh gandalf the wizard who had originally sent Bilbo on the quest, Aragorn who you mentioned, various other hobbits, a dwarf, an elf, another man. I mean, it's impossible to describe it without getting the sense of hackles going up from people who hate this kind of stuff but anyway basically they they decide they had they they decide that the only thing that they can do is to destroy the ring which sauron it never crosses sauron's mind that they would want to do that because the ring is the key to great power so the idea that you would want the idea that you would want to get rid of the ring that you would want to essentially to kind of celebrate your weakness is impossible for Sauron to comprehend. And in the end, Frodo, who is, you know, I mean, he's a hobbit, very short, not the kind of person who anyone would think would be a great warrior.

He ends up doing this great thing. He destroys the ring. Well, or does he? I mean, that's an interesting question itself. So the great criticism of the Lord of the Rings for people who hate it is that it is silly and childish and escapist. And I think we can safely debunk the escapism, Tom, because we talked in the first podcast about the searing impact of World War I.

Tolkien starts writing The Lord of the Rings just before the outbreak of the Second World War. So we're talking late 1937, 38, 39. So the Stormclouds are very much, I mean, to use my favourite cliche, the Stormclouds are very much gathering. In the first part, I talked about this chapter, the Council of Elrond, which is held at a place called Rivendell, where the Fellowship of the Ring, the group of people who had come together to go on this mission, so Gandalf and frodo and the hobbits and the elf and the dwarf and so on and aragorn they decide that they're going to go and um the only way that they can defeat sauron this kind of great menace that

is brewing in the east is um is to is to throw away the ring and to throw it into this volcano and he is writing that chapter in september 1939 so all the various people sitting around saying how are we going to defeat this this terrible evil this terrible evil how are we going to do it it's clearly i mean it it would be incomprehensible if it's not you know the news of the war isn't of course i'm talking the backdrop to that well i was about to say the device of the ring. So magic rings are ten a penny in kind of Norse myths and legends and fairy stories and folk stories.

But the ring is such a brilliant creation. I mean, even if you despise Tolkien, the ring is a very sophisticated kind of literary device because the ring is not just the key to power. It's not just the ultimate weapon, but it is a symbol of corruption, of technological and sort of intellectual and moral corruption. So the more you use it, the more you become addicted to it.

And over time, you lose your, as it were, your humanity. If you're a hobbit, your hobbitness, the more you are exposed to it. So it's like a combination of, the ring means power, and it kind of means mastery. It means dominion over other people, but also over the natural world. But it also is a kind of symbol of hubris. And it also kind of brings out the evil that is in you. Yeah. And I think, you know, we are talking about the mid-20th century, the age of concentration camps, of totalitarianism, of dictatorship, all these things.

The ring is very clearly – the ring would not have been invented by a mid-Victorian writer, maybe even by an Edwardian writer. I think – but it feels to me like – I mean, Tolkien is writing The Lord of the Rings at the same time that people like, let's say, William Golding, he's going to go on and write The Lord of the Flies in the middle of the 1950s. The other people are wrestling with questions about evil and power and thinking, if we bomb the Germans, are we as bad as them? These kinds of issues are absolutely bound up with the device of the ring. Right. So Tolkien writes about this quite a lot to his son,

Christopher, who was training with the RAF. And this is in the context of the RAF launching bombing campaigns over Germany. And Tolkien is very, very against this, very hostile to this. And he frames it specifically in terms of Lord of the Rings, which he's writing as these bombing campaigns are going on. So he says, you can't fight the enemy with his own ring without turning into an enemy. And he says of the bombing campaigns that it's an ultimately evil job, for we are attempting to conquer Sauron with the ring, and we shall, it seems, succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons. So essentially, the Lord of the Rings is consciously written

as a mirror that is being held up to the moral dilemmas that confront the allies in the Second World War. How much evil can you inflict in the name of defeating evil? And at what point does doing that mean that you yourself become evil? And I think that in that sense, and this is what I absolutely didn't see when I read it as a child, but it seems very clear to me. The Lord of the Rings is the great novel on the horrors of the mid-20th century. And it spans all shades and kinds so there's there's orwell is there as well so um there's a very very kind of uh big brother quality to to sauron and his lieutenants the symbol of sauron is a great blinking eye that is surveying everything yeah and will see you no matter where you hide. I mean, again, that's a very Orwellian image, isn't it?

And the orcs, they're always kind of telling on each other, you know, I'll give your name and number to the Nazgul, who are the kind of the ringwraiths, the figures of terror who patrol the sky. So it's even, again, just as I'm sure the Ghost of the Red Baron haunts these terrifying so the ring razor nine um kind of cloaked figures whose faces you never see they're just kind of images of the grim reaper i suppose and they ride on um a kind of pterosaurs and tolkien was actually asked are they pterodactyls and he said no but they're pterodactylic which i love very precise but but

so one of the things at the end is that after frodo has has thrown the ring into the uh the where i'm giving all kinds of spoilers away but what the hell people know this that the the quest does to that extent okay okay we won't give away how and why it happens but the ring is destroyed and mad doom erupts and gandalf gets on an eagle and flies across mordor and rescues him and Sam and bring them back. And people say, well, why didn't they just do that in the first place? Well, the answer is very clear. The Nazgul on their pterodactyls are essentially a kind of air defense system.

You can't penetrate it until they've been destroyed, which they do once the ring gets destroyed. That's a very clear power. Clearly, how you defend territory from aerial intrusion is absolutely a part of it and all the more so because tolkien was an air raid warden oh was he i didn't know that that's a very nice um he was so he was an air raid warden in north oxford and again in um the echoes of the blitz the echo of the aerial war are through Lord of the Rings. So you have, with a piercing cry out of the dim sky fell the winged shadows, the Nazgul stooping to the kill. And this could be the war in heaven, or it could be Stukas. And Tolkien describes people in a besieged city, besieged by the Nazgul.

They thought no more of war, but only of hiding and crawling and of death. And that could be about the Germans bombing London, or it could be about the British bombing Hamburg. But Tolkien is also very aware, isn't he? I mean, that thing about the British bombing Hamburg, he's aware in a way that previous writers of this kind of adventure story had not been, I think, of the moral ambiguity of the age. So we talked, when we were talking about The Hobbit,

you mentioned this character Gollum that Bilbo gets the ring from. So Gollum is this sort of wizened goblin-like creature who it turns out used to be a hobbit who has been corrupted. And were this a Victorian story? So some people have said Gollum is a kind of vision of Grendel from Beowulf, Tolkien's great sort of academic obsession, or he's a vision, he's a version of the character Gagul from Ryder Haggard's book, King Solomon's Minds,

Tolkien's great favourite when he was a boy. But actually, as The Lord of the Rings goes on, it becomes clear that Gollum and Frodo, there's a real Jekyll and Hyde quality to them, that in some ways they are mirrors to one another. And actually, as the book goes on, Gollum becomes more like Frodo and Frodo becomes more like Gollum. So the classic thing that people say who hate Tolkien and hate The Lord of the Rings is it's very simplistic. It's goodies and baddies, kind of black hats and white hats. And actually, that's not really true at all. The great hero, Frodo, by the end of the book, he's becoming increasingly corrupted. And the lines between good and evil are becoming increasingly blurred. And again,

I think that's something that you write in the 1940s, but you wouldn't have written in the 1840s or the 1890s even. Yes, I think that's true. And I think that there are morally complex figures who are redeemed or who are lost. I think the idea that it's just goodies and baddies, only somebody who hasn't read the book could think that. However, I do think that that criticism is responding to something that I think is precisely what has made Lord of the Rings so successful, which is that it does have a very strong, unrelativistic sense of good and evil. And Tolkien is a Catholic. He believes

in good and evil. He believes in God. He believes in hell. And I think a huge part of the reason for the Lord of the Rings success is that it packages for people who may not be Christian, who may find a lot of the institutional baggage of Christianity off-putting, who may find a lot of the theological implications of Christianity unsettling, it packages for them the incredible drama of that Christian story of heaven and hell, of redemption, of their being good, of their being evil, in a way that is clearly incredibly powerful. Well, that's interesting that you say that, Tom, because of course, in some ways, it would appear to be a pagan book, right? It draws inspiration from the Norse myths. The characters don't go to church. There are no churches, it seems. There's no talk of God.

There's obviously no talk of Christ. So tell us about some of the ways that, well, the medieval quality and the, you know, the 1930s, 1940s waistcoat wearing, T-fork wielding quality of middle England. And I think there's a similar tension between the fact that Tolkien is a very, very devout Catholic. I mean, a really devout Catholic, but he's also obsessed by the literature and the spirit of the old North, as he puts it, which is pre-Christian and in which characters live believing that everything is going to be destroyed and that all you can do is show courage in the face of utter destruction. And that is, again, it's an incredibly creative tension, I think, that runs throughout the book. So God is not mentioned in the book. There's nothing that we would recognize as religion in Lord of the Rings. There's no overt reference to anything that's Christian, but

the Christian elements are clearly very, very present, of which the most obvious is the way in which Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring generally are committed to the idea that rather than use something that will make you strong, you throw it away. And the echo there of the Christian idea of the crucifixion, that God himself becomes weak and suffers death rather than kind of manifesting himself in glory. Yeah, the emphasis on sacrifice. Yeah. So Christ gives up his divine power to suffer death and thereby to redeem the world. And that is very clearly intended by Tolkien because the date that he gives for the destruction of Sauron, the defeat of Sauron, the destruction of the ring is the same day that in Christian mythology,

it's the date of the creation of light. When God says, let there be light, it's the date of the the creation of light you know when god says let there be light it's the it's the date that abraham is supposed to have been told to sacrifice isaac and is prevented from doing it uh it's the date that um christ is conceived in the virgin's womb it's the that he suffers death uh 25th of march that is that is a very clear signal, I think, as to what Tolkien is doing. He's trying to kind of preserve this. I mean, what's odd about Lord of the Rings and what's odd about Tolkien is that in some sense, he clearly believes that the plot of Lord of the Rings really happened. That in some sense, elves and dwarves and everybody did kind of exist. And to that extent, I think he sees it. So Christian writers had this idea that what they called a preparatio evangelium, that pagans were in some sense aware of what was to

come, the Christian story that was to come, and there are foreshadowings of it. And I think that that is what Tolkien is doing in Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings serves in that way. And I think that that kind of power is a really strong explanation for why people feel it. And it may be that it's not just filling a kind of Christianity-shaped hole in English life, but specifically a Catholic-shaped hole. Ooh, that's a big claim, Tom. Well, so Lord of the rings is about loss yeah everybody everybody apart from humans apart from men in lord of the rings ends up losing they destroy sauron but as a result they themselves are destroyed so the elves the dwarves the well the dwarves are going

to go off to their to their underground lairs aren't they but even presumably the hobbits they they're all going to fade. Because everybody says the world of men, this is a new age. The great sort of polycultural mix of the third age of Middle Earth is doomed. And the elves actually leave Middle Earth for good, don't they? They disappear off into the equivalent of heaven, I suppose. And so there's a kind of absence there, which clearly for Tolkien on one level is about the sense of loss that he suffered in the war, the loss of his friends. It's about the sense of loss that he goes to Serhol and it's been turned into a suburb. Well, there's a fabulous book by Matthew

Lyons. I don't know if you've read it there and back again, where he goes around following in the footsteps of Tolkien. And he points out, which I didn't know, that there's this vision of what will happen to the Shire. And in the very first draft, this great chocolate factory gets built. Oh my God, Bourneville. So Bourneville, which is just down the road from Zarehold. So obviously there's this idea that that's loss, that the woods get destroyed and you have chocolate factories built. It's the right way for Cabra's dairy milk. But Tolkien sees this in the broadest sense. So he said, I am a Christian and indeed a Roman Catholic so that I do not expect history to be anything but a long defeat, though it contains, and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly, some samples or glimpses of final

victory. So only a Catholic growing up in a Protestant country, I think, could frame Christian history perhaps in quite that way. But it echoes a very famous line from Galadriel, who is the queen of the elves, who is the main figure I gather in the Amazon series. And she says, she's an elvish queen who who's whose whole power will be destroyed when the ring is destroyed but who is committed to the idea that that destroying the ring is the only way to win so she is essentially allowing her own power to be destroyed in the cause of a greater victory and she she echoes exactly that those lines of tolkien she says together through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat well that idea the long defeat is quite a norse myth idea though isn't it they they believe there

was a terrible fatalism to the sort of the vikings sense of their world and their destiny absolutely but the weird spin that tolkien gives that is to recalibrate it as a catholic yeah as as a christian story and that at the end, the end of days, victory will be won, and everything will be redeemed, and everything will be restored, and everything will be given back to life. I mean, I think the interesting thing about, I agree with you that Tolkien's Catholicism is tremendously important to him, and clearly he felt that it was there on every page of the Lord of the Rings. But it's interesting that the readers don't see that often. And it's certainly not as glaring to unsympathetic readers as, let's say, the Christianity in The Lion, the Witch,

and the Wardrobe, his friend. I mean, people really, really sort of kick against. I mean, I love C.S. Lewis's books, but people kick against them because they think it's pure Christian apologetics. But nobody really says that about The Lord of the Rings, do they? They don't, because it's not an allegory in the way that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is. It's much stranger than that. And I think that Tolkien's Christianity is much stranger, because it's shot through with this sense of pessimism that derives from his fascination with the Northern legends. And I think also the way in which he fuses it with echoes of contemporary events. So we talked about Elliot, T.S. Elliot,

who was also an air raid warden during the war, as Tolkien was during the Blitz. And in the Four Quartets, so Little Gidding most famously, Elliot is looking back to history to make sense of the horrors of the present, pretty much in the same way that Tolkien is. And in that, he meets with a kind of ghostly figure in the midst of an air raid. And then Eliot writes that in the disfigured street, he left me with a kind of valediction and faded on the blowing of the

horn. And this kind of conjures up the dawn after an air raid. And in Lord of the Rings, you get this very, very famous moment where Gandalf is confronting the Lord of the Nazgul, the Witch King on his pterodactyl. So a bit like the Nazgul has descended a bit like a kind of German bomber over London. And then suddenly, in the distance, they hear horns wildly blowing. So it's exactly the same thing. The blowing of the horn and the blowing of the horn ends the air raid. Dawn comes, light comes. Rohan had come at last. Rohan had come at last.

So the echo of little Gidding is, I think, very clear. So Eliot and Tolkien both knew this guy, Charles Williams, who was a kind of very mystical Christian of the kind that would exactly appeal to both Eliot and Tolkien. And I wonder if there's some, you know, I don't know if Tolkien read Eliot, but that sense of air raid wardens, of danger from the sky, of the way in which it gets framed in kind of Christian mythology. It's a very, very strange inimitable mix, but both Eliot and Tolkien are doing it. And they're doing it in a way that I think speaks incredibly profoundly to people who may not be remotely Christian or may not be remotely interested in any of the kind of the paraphernalia, the mythic paraphernalia that the two men are respectively drawing on. Whether in poetry or in prose,

Eliot and Tolkien are both kind of onto something that people clearly, not just in Britain, but around the world find incredibly powerful and moving. And I think it is that kind of fusion of Christian mythic ideas with a hardly one sense of not exactly victory over the horrors of the age, but a sense that they can at least be faced, that you can look into their face. And I think that's the power of it. Tom, before we start this podcast, I think Tolkien skeptics and Rest is History skeptics

would have expected us to talk about three things. They'd have expected the appearance of Stanley Baldwin. They'd have expected you to dissect the air defenses of Mordor. And they'd have expected Christian mythic ideas. And we've given them all three, and dinosaurs in the first half. So in the second half, I think we should talk a little bit about Tolkien's politics, which I think are really interesting. I think The Lord of the Rings is a political book, and race, because this, of course, is something that the Amazon series has very visibly tried to change and that Tolkien and his relationship with race is something that for his critics is now, I think, probably item number one on the charge

sheet. And we will be discussing that after the break. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. 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. It was one of the saddest hours in their lives. The great chimney rose up before them. And as they drew near the old village across the water, through rows of new mean houses along each side of the road, they saw the new mill in all its frowning and dirty ugliness, a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a steaming and stinking outflow. All along the bywater road, every tree had been felled. That is from a chapter called The Scouring of the Shire in Lord of the Rings, and it describes the return of the hobbits from their great quest back to the shire this um vision of edwardian rural

england to discover dominic yeah the house builders have been at work yes so there are a little developers have been in yeah that's right yes um so this is that now this is a chapter this is one of the last chapters of the book it's it's almost entirely missing well pretty much entirely missing from the film versions because the director of the films, Peter Jackson, said that he didn't really know what to do with it, and he felt it was jarring. And I think that's such an interesting choice that he made. I think it's the wrong choice, because to me, this is one of the elements of the book that clearly lifts it above the high Victorian fantasy adventure quest model that Tolkien had clearly had in mind somehow

since he was a boy. So again, one of the common things that Tolkien's critics say is, well, it's just a sort of trite childish story of good versus evil. The baddies are defeated, good triumphs, hurrah, hurrah. And this is fit for infants and adolescents. I think this chapter completely gives the light of that. So clearly at some level, there's a First World War thing going on here. So famously, David Lloyd George, not a friend of the rest of his history, had promised Britain's servicemen that they would return to home as fit for heroes. actually, they returned to a very gray, miserable decade, the 1920s in Britain, not the roaring 20s at all, an age of high unemployment

and homelessness and injured servicemen begging on street corners and so on and so forth. So there's an element of that about it, I think. The returning veteran, I mean, it's a bit like, you know, Vietnam veterans returning in the 1970s to America, the returning veteran who sort of feels miserable. But also, I mean, I think this absolutely cuts to the heart of Tolkien's political and religious and kind of cultural vision. banal and humdrum way their cherished bit of england as it were has changed it has become more modern it's become more industrial there are as you as you described in that brilliant passage there are chimneys and factories so in other words serhole has become birmingham yeah um in the scramble has moved in right the cadbury's manufacturers uh have set up shop. But also, I think there are clearly an obviously ideological political dimension. Gerald Tolkien was very conservative. I mean, he was insanely conservative.

Insofar as he must have voted, because most people did vote, and I imagine he would have seen it as his civic duty. I think it's almost impossible to imagine him voting anything other than he would have voted, I think, grudgingly for the Conservatives. But, I mean, Dominic, Stanley Baldwin's great. He was a great builder, wasn't he? Great house builder. But Stanley Baldwin, of course, never went on a quest. I think this is the issue.

I suppose. So Stanley Baldwin is Bilbo in chapter one, but not subsequent chapters. But they're coming back and they're seeing all these houses being built. Well, they don't like the houses. They don't like the houses. But I think a lot of, I mean, so the Scouring of the Shire is written, that chapter is written, I think, after the end of the Second World War. So under the Attlee government. Under the Attlee government.

Now, some people, you know, Tolkien bitterly resisted any claims that there was any kind of allegory. He said, I don't like allegories. The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory. And I think it's not meant to be an allegory for the Attlee government. But as with the climate of the 1930s, it's hard to believe that the headlines and the cultural conversation in the late 1940s didn't influence what he's writing. So to give you some examples, the shire is now under the command of a chief who sends out gatherers and sharers who go around, we're told, counting and measuring and taking things off to storage so that the farmers don't see their own products again. The inns have been closed because the chief doesn't hold with

beer. I mean, that sounds very much like a kind of early 20th century conservatives' complaint that do-gooding liberals and interfering bossy Labour politicians are closing all the pubs. And the authorities have recruited hundreds of policemen, and they're called sheriffs, who we're told like minding other folks' business and talking big. And if any of us small folks stand up for our rights, they drag him off to the lockholes, to the prison, and so on.

So all of this is a portrait of a world in which of surveillance, of ration books, of interference, of big government, of people building council houses, of a sort of an anti-conservative administration. Now, again, I don't think Tolkien means it deliberately as an attack on the Atlee government. I don't think he would do anything so simplistic. But I think there is a sense in which this is – he described himself once as a sort of conservative anarchist.

And I think that's exactly what this is. It says, leave us alone, don't interfere. But it's also, I think that pessimism, that gloom, you know, because we've been led to believe that the hobbits are the incarnation of Englishness and of good heart, stout-hearted Englishness. And yet it turns out lots of them are happy to collaborate with the new regime.

Lots of them are happy to inform. We're told that they have lost the will to fight, that they've shrunk inside their own homes. So it's very down. It's very grey. It's very down. But you can understand why Peter Jackson didn't want to put it in his Hollywood movies. But I think the fact that he didn't suggest to me that he misunderstood what Tolkien was

trying to achieve. I mean, it appears very fleetingly as a kind of glimpse of the future. But in that future, as I remember, it's the orcs who are doing it and not the hobbits. Because the point is, it's the hobbits themselves that are doing most of the heavy lifting in this sort of new regime. So, I mean, when you say that Tolkien is conservative, I mean, I don't think that adequately expresses. I mean, he's not an enthusiast for democracy, for instance. because of all his obsession with kingship for example he he's i mean he's literally in favor of a sacral kingship i and so this is what aragorn becomes this kind of king arthur figure in lord of the rings this

is basically tolkien's what you know that there should genuinely be a some king with a magic sword that will yeah in everything will be harrah for the king with the magic sword. And I think he kind of believes that in the same way that he thinks that Ells once really walked, you know, England's green and pleasant land. He doesn't, he doesn't believe it, you mean? He doesn't, he doesn't believe it. But, but I mean, clearly he, I mean, he is massively, massively not of the left. He's, I mean,

he's so reactionary that basically his, his vision of the ideal form of government is 6-3-7 or something. But I think that another aspect of that passage that I read where the trees are chopped down to make ways for houses, it's a reminder of just how conservative what we would now call the Green movement was for most of the 20th century. So today, by and large, green causes are associated with the left. So there's the kind of the watermelon is the accusation from people on the right that you're green on the surface and red in the heart. Purist red deep down but actually one of the many ways in which lord of the rings is very very much the novel of the 20th century is is that tolkien is way ahead of anxieties about

where the environment is going um and his yes his association more tom to the degree that basically he's against the industrial revolution i mean wholesale yeah lots of kind of radical greed you know radical greens on the left today would be who would say you know it's it's the whole problem is industrial civilization and capitalism we need to get rid of it i mean tolkien would wholeheartedly agree but his solution would be that we go back and have a kind of communitarian um existence we go back and we have a king with a magic sword but basically yeah bring back the feudal system. Again and again and again throughout Lord of the Rings, industry, the destruction of trees,

he loves trees with, again, a kind of mystical sense. The wizard who is, again, I'm giving away spoilers here, but who turns out to be behind the scouring of the Shire. He's obsessed with technology. He destroys trees, he burns them, he turns what had previously been clean flowing rivers into slurry tips. They're very like the water companies at the moment. We're told he loves wheels and contraptions and all these kinds of things. But also, again, a very kind of a prefiguring of modern anxieties. He breeds this kind of terrifying race of monsters. He's kind of experimenting with what we would now call genetics, I suppose, even though genetics hadn't been developed at that point. So he's such a paradoxical figure that he's so reactionary.

He's so reactionary. And yet in so many ways, he's so progressive. Well, that's obviously why his books. Yes, why hippies come to love them, why the counterculture in the 60s come to love them. Yeah. So that's an interesting story in itself, Tom, because his books were,

they weren't massively successful in America until somebody printed a pirate edition in 1965. Is that the one with two emus on the cover? I think it's something like that. A Christmas tree and two emus. He asked, why have you done that? And he said, I've never read it. No, I think it's something like that had a christmas tree and two emus he asked why have you done that and he said and he said i've never read it now i think that's actually a british i think that's the first british edition had had exactly that but no the american version ace books did in 1965 it was a complete rip-off because they claimed that the tolkien had no

copyright in america he then produced a new edition for america that he did have copyright on and of course that comes out at precisely the moment when there's a huge appetite for kind of countercultural stuff. So the Vietnam War is in full swing. The hippie movement has taken off. People start wearing these badges that say Frodo lives, Gandalf the president. Tolkien is hobbit forming. So this is, yeah, Tolkien is hobbit forming.

So this is Richard Nixon's America. And Tolkien takes off and he is seen as a Bible for countercultural, small is beautiful, you know, the green movements, the age of limits. And that, in a way, I mean, that's still part of his appeal, I think, particularly to sort of to countercultural people who might be otherwise uncomfortable with some of his politics. But what is the, I mean, you mentioned about the wizard Saruman breeding these creatures, these monsters. And of course, that raises a question that is not one that people posed to, or people addressed to Tolkien's work 20 or 30 years ago, but they certainly do now, which is about Tolkien and race. Because you see quite often now, critics, particularly in America, who will say, Tolkien, by pitting hobbits, men, elves, dwarves against this race of monsters called orcs,

he has basically created a racist work that racial assumptions permeate the Lord of the Rings, that it is the North and the West are good, the East and the South are bad, all of this kind of business. Tom, what do you think about all that? Do you think there's some truth in that? I think there's no question that, I mean, I said at the beginning of the first episode we did that I think Tolkien's influence on how the Middle Ages is seen is absolutely fundamental at the most popular level and i think that idea of kind of white white skinned golden haired kings with magical swords fighting black hordes of orcs is crucial part of what animates a sense that the study of the Middle Ages is inherently racist or has a huge problem with racism. So this is a big thing in American younger academics who now

say the whole field of medieval studies is permeated with white supremacy. I mean, I was only reading something about this at the weekend. The American Historical Association has been cancelled in recent days, Tom. So this is a huge issue, particularly in the United States. And I think that Tolkien is a man of his time. Well, he's not even a man of his time. I mean, he's a man who's reactionary even by the standards of the 30s and 40s. So I don't think that if Lord of the Rings was published now, I think that sensitivity readers would not really let quite large elements of it go through. So I don't think that if Lord of the Rings was published now, I think that sensitivity readers would not really let quite large elements of it go through. So I don't think that they would allow orcs to be described as black-skinned, which-

Or swarthy, for example, is the kind of word that- Kingdoms of men who ally themselves with Sauron, the Dark Lord, are clearly modelled on Arabs and Ethiopians and people from the Deep South. And that's pretty clear from Tolkien's own writings that he's drawing on that. The dwarves are pretty clearly, there are echoes of how medieval Christians saw the Jews in them. The draw, interestingly, in The Hobbit, lost their homeland. Lost their homeland. There are 12 of them, like the tribes of Israel. Their language is loosely based on Hebrew. So I think that Tolkien is using, well, it's not so much modern categories of race, but medieval categories of difference.

So in a way that I think people would find awkward now. But I think that Tolkien is reactionary because essentially his prejudices, attacking the city, the great city, the shining city, this city that is a capital of a long fall, all that remains of a once great empire. I think he's very consciously evoking echoes of the Arab sieges of Constantinople, or the Hungarian sieges of the siege of Augsburg that gets foiled by Otto the Great with his great cavalry charge and all that kind of thing and I think he's doing that partly because these are the echoes that move him they're bread of his reading but I think also because he's he's situated in a world where there really aren't that many Arabs living in Oxford so he doesn't really ever come come across them. So he's thinking of them as people who are kind of remote. I think it wouldn't occur to him in a million years that an Arabic reader

would ever come across it. And you may feel that that's kind of special pleading for him, but I think that you can see what he's doing with the medieval stereotypes with what he does with the Jews. And he did know Jews. So when he's an air raid warden, his fellow air raid warden for a lot of that time is a Jewish scholar with whom they get on very well. And Tolkien was a great admirer of the Jews. He's asked when his book is published in Germany, he needs to fill in a form about whether or not he's of Aryan stock. Now he writes one letter where he says he's really offended by being asked if he's of Aryan stock. He doesn't really recognize the category. And then he writes another letter, I think, where he's asked if he's got Jewish

antecedents. And he says, I mean, to cut a very long story short, he basically says, I wish I did. I'd be very happy if I did. Yeah. So he gets asked if Tolkien is a Jewish name and he says, it is not Jewish in origin, though I should consider it an honor if it were. And also he was very hostile to the way that Wagner portrayed Jews in The Ring Cycle. He hated The Ring Cycle. He hated everything to do with Wagner. And I think that there is a very conscious element within his portrayal of the dwarves who go on the mission to get back, the Lonely Man, to get their kingdom back from the dragon. I think there is a kind of echo there. I mean, so he actually said in an interview,

so 1962, I think, 1963, something like that, that I do think of the dwarves like Jews, at once native and alien in the habitation, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue. So no author today would ever frame it in those terms. But equally, Tom, I don't think you would look at that and say those are the words of a vicious anti-Semite, would you? I mean, you wouldn't remotely say that. No, they're not. So Tolkien is basically recalibrating medieval negative stereotypes

of Jews in a way that he sees as heroic. And he is, in doing that, he's doing what he always does, which is he draws on the legacy of old English poetry. So he translated a book called Exodus, which portrays Moses as a great warrior. And so that's what he's doing with the dwarves. He's portraying Jews that are medieval, that are integrated with the Northern myth. So he gives the dwarves in The Hobbit Nordic names. So he's fusing them, which is, and you see the same thing with Minas Tirith, which is this city that is clearly based loosely on Constantinople. It's a kind of Rome that never falls. But he also compares that to the people who live there as having the clear purity of Jewish monotheism, he says. So

he's fusing there the Roman and the Jewish. So he's fusing these elements that are often not fused in a way that suggests to me that he absolutely was not anti-Semitic. I was going to say everything we know from his writings more generally, Tom, is that he's not somebody who by the standards of mid-century britain wears prejudice heavily i mean he he everything we know about him so he writes to his son and says how much he deplores um the the racial system in south africa for example in his native south africa he there's also other elements so for example it's sometimes said well his books are all about whiteness. And that's actually not quite right. I mean, there was a character who we've already mentioned called Saruman the White, who is the very embodiment

of whiteness, who actually turns out to be the most dreadful Taurac. Similarly, you mentioned the thing about the armies who end up allied with the baddies um are dark-skinned they're from the south and all this but there's a very telling moment when one of the heroes sees one of them and he's dead and he looks at him and he feels sorry for him and he thinks he's a man just like me you know well he's not a man because the heroes are hobbits but he's a he's a he's a person of you know dignity and whatever yeah but what's just like me you know, dignity and whatever. Yeah. Just like me.

What's his story? What's his story? What has brought him here? How tragic that he's lying dead and all this sort of thing. And I think also the other element that people often talk about with Tolkien, Tolkien juxtaposes light and shadow. He talks about the darkness, the dark lord, the black speech, all of those kinds of things. And people say, oh, golly, this is imperialism and white supremacy and stuff. I think that's completely wrong. Those things are all there in the Norse myths, the idea of shadow versus light,

and they're all there in the Bible. So Tolkien's great favourite saint was, you know, his name, John. So Saint John, who writes about, you know, the light coming into the darkness. And that sense of light is very, very strong throughout Lord of the Rings. It's theologically bred. Tolkien had no interest, I think, in real interest in racial politics in the way that it would be understood now. No, I'm sure that's right. And he's writing it before that becomes a kind of current issue.

But having said that, I mean, I do think that we talked about how Tolkien has no interest really in the German side. He identifies very strongly with this sense of being the progeny of generation after generation after generation of people who've lived in the Western Midlands, in Mercia. And that sense of identification with the West Midlands is so strong to him. So it's there in the portrayal of the Shire. The Shire is the West Midlands is so strong to him. So it's there in the portrayal of the Shire. The Shire is the West Midlands, it's Warwickshire, but it's also there in Rohan, which is this kingdom, which is clearly, it's not just an Anglo-Saxon kingdom, it's the Mercian kingdom. It's the kingdom, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom.

It's Mercia if they had horses, basically, isn't it? So Mercia is the Latin for the mark and Rohan is called the mark. I mean, it really couldn't be clearer. Their emblem is a white horse on a green field. So that's drawing on the white horse of Uffington, which is on the side of this hill, this green field. The language that they speak corresponds not just to Old English, but to the Old English as spoken by the West Mercians. And you have this brilliant letter that Tolkien writes to his son where he's objecting basically to globalization. He's objecting to the way that everywhere is becoming the same. And he says, the bigger things get, the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. And Tolkien's solution to this is that he is going to refuse to speak anything but old Mercian. So Tolkien's reaction to globalization is, let's speak old Mercian. So that sense of identification with this particular place, so the soil, or actually the air, he calls it. So as early as 1917, he's talking about the

distinctive air. And interestingly, he counterpoints that with the Mediterranean world. So he's counterpointing the air of the North, so Scandinavia and Britain and Ireland, with the air of Roman Greece. But that's what's important to him. But I think it is possible to misinterpret that now. And it seems to me that if Tolkien is writing, you know, if his ambition was to write a mythology for England, it's important that that mythology, if it's to have any sense of some sense of being a mythology for England, that it should be a mythology for England as England is now, as well as it was in demented ambition, isn't it, to write a mythology for your own country when, as he sees, it doesn't exist. But I mean, by any standard, you would have to say he succeeded. Because The Lord of the Rings, you know, this project that would seem completely ludicrous to many writers in the 1930s and 1940s, and indeed got, you know, some considerable stick from early reviewers. That project turned out to be one of the most successful cultural projects of the 20th century. Completely, completely.

But wouldn't you agree that the risk is that this mythology for England that he created in the 40s, which kind of took wing in the 50s as immigration was happening into england that the risk is that because he's writing it at a time where basically everyone is white that there is a risk that that mythology becomes associated with a kind of england is for white people attitude um i don't think well i think the very fact of the amazon series so this new series which is the has given us the peg for our where they've they've made a deliberate attempt haven't they they've got black hobbits and well they've got lenny henry who is probably the most famous black west midlander yeah in england so that seems to

be entirely appropriate i mean it seems entirely with the grain of going with the grain of of everything that tolkien's ambitions would have been, I think. Well, people who are Tolkien critics, who defend Tolkien, sort of Tolkien scholars, will often say he created a world that was by definition multicultural. Yeah. And, you know, different languages. I mean, basically, the theme of The Lord of the Rings is different species, I guess, working together. Yeah, the three peoples.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there's no doubt that Tolkien is a product of empire, that he's read Ryder Haggard, that he never questions these things. But why would he? I mean, most people don't in the 1930s and 1940s. It seems to me completely absurd to expect Tolkien to be a man of, I mean, he was barely even a man of the 20th century intellectually. I think the weird thing about him is the way in which, again and again, he's so reactionary that he ends up becoming almost by our standards progressive. It's kind of like... So the environmentalism.

Yeah, it's kind of like fascists ending up like communists. It's that same kind of weird, I suppose, like a ring, isn't it? Very nice image, Tom. Do you think, I mean, his book has proved enormously successful, far more successful than, so his critics said at first, I mean, they were saying in the 1970s, even in the 1980s, it will eventually be forgotten as merely a diversion for teenagers. That clearly, you know, has not worked out

because it's proved enormously successful. But do you think it will continue to be one of the books that people read and reread? Are people going to be reading it in the 22nd century? I'd have thought so, because there's clearly something about it that tugs you in. I mean, it's an incredibly well-told story, isn't it? Aside from anything else. It's an incredibly exciting adventure story with few parallels. Tom, I think it's fair to say that there's so many things we haven't talked about so we haven't talked about the streams of women we haven't talked about sam as our first world war batman uh we haven't talked about gollum as much as i was hoping to basically because we're

lord of the rings nerds and we could have uh bored on for hours couldn't we and we should confess at this stage that many years ago we had an ongoing marathon where we watched the extended editions of the films together with takeaways and our respective wives refused to join us. And that tells its own story, doesn't it? But on that bombshell, I think we should probably let, because we've been talking for over an hour,

we should probably let people go about the rest of their lives. But, Tom, since we started with the beginning of The Hobbit, I think we should end with the end of The Lord of the Rings. Would you like me to give another of my nice readings? Yeah, like your Larkin. Like my Larkin, exactly. People were moved to tears by that. Or indeed, my readings from my own books, Adventures in Time,

which are available right now. And actually, J.R. tolkien is the opening character of my book about the first world war which if you have children or you know children or you've ever been a child i advise you to buy forthwith uh and of course he's also a key figure in your book chapter on the second world war dominion which i will say strongly recommend that you buy so jr tolkien was a great great believer in commercial self-promotion, wasn't he, Tom? He truly was.

Well, he appeared in a calendar. Yes, he did. But he's sitting, he's fully encased in tweed, isn't he? He's not a Chippendales type. Sitting next to an oak. Stanley Baldwin type. Yes. He's dressed as Stanley Baldwin.

Okay, here we go. At last the three companions turned away, and never again looking back they rode slowly homewards, and they spoke no word to one another until they came back to the shire, but each had great comfort in his friends on the long grey road. At last they rode over the downs and took the east road, and then Merry and Pippin rode on to Buckland, and already they were singing again as they went.

But Sam turned to buy water, and so he came back up the hill as day was ending once more. And he went on, and there was yellow light and fire within, and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in and set him in his chair and put little Eleanor upon his lap. He drew a deep breath. Well, I'm back, he said. Goodbye. 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.