In this BBC-interview from 1964 (released in 1971) Tolkien sits down for a talk with Denys Gueroult.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and academic, best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Inspired by British adventure stories, European mythology and catholicism, Tolkien created an enormous high fantasy (epic fantasy) world with its own languages, races, geography, mythologies and both heroic, evil and complex characters.
Tolkien was also a close friend of his fellow fantasy writer C. S. Lewis. They were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as The Inklings.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and academic, best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Inspired by British adventure stories, European mythology and catholicism, Tolkien created an enormous high fantasy (epic fantasy) world with its own languages, races, geography, mythologies and both heroic, evil and complex characters.
Tolkien was also a close friend of his fellow fantasy writer C. S. Lewis. They were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as The Inklings.
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00:00Professor Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings is one of the most remarkable works of fiction of the century,
00:06and I'm going to start with one or two questions about possible source material.
00:13For example, I thought that conceivably Midgard might be Middle-earth or have some connection.
00:20Oh, yes, they're the same word.
00:22Most people have made this mistake in thinking Middle-earth is a particular kind of earth or is another planet,
00:26you know, in the science fiction sort, but it's simply an old-fashioned word for this world we live in,
00:32as imagined, surrounded by the ocean.
00:34It seemed to me that Middle-earth was, in a sense, as you say, this world we live in,
00:39but this world we live in at a different era.
00:42Well, no, at a different stage of imagination, yes.
00:45This is interesting because in The Lord of the Rings, particularly in appendices,
00:50you go to great trouble to get your chronology exactly correct with respect to the four ages that you write about,
00:57but you make no attempt at all to tie this up with time as we know it today.
01:01Why is this?
01:03Because it would have been impossible,
01:05because it would have completely interfered with and trampled one in a free invention of history and an incident of one's story.
01:13Nevertheless, despite what you've just said,
01:15it seems to me that one could place most of the action, if not all of the action, within a fairly definite sort of time.
01:22It won't really work out, you know, either paleontologically or archaeologically at all, actually.
01:28I mean, you can't really relate the landmasses I've described them satisfactorily to the landmasses we know now,
01:35nor, of course, can you really have such a sort of mixed culture as I describe,
01:40which includes the tobacco umbrellas and other things to what little is known of archaeological history.
01:46I wanted people simply to get inside this story and take it in a sense of actual history.
01:52It seemed to me that to be cut off by a big abyss of ages had exactly the same effect as you get in a scientific story
02:00when you go into some remote part of the galaxy.
02:03They don't really explain how, but you get the sense of being far away, that's all.
02:07In a possible world, but far away.
02:09This is the same sort of thing in time, isn't it?
02:12Oh yes, but in what one might call science fiction, the authors seldom go to the trouble,
02:17anything like the trouble you've done, in tying this imagined world so closely to the world as we know it.
02:22Because so much of this is very close to what we know, I won't say today, but in the recent historical past.
02:28Oh yes, it resembles some of the history of Greece and Rome as against the perpetual infiltration of people out of the east, doesn't it?
02:35Yes.
02:36Yes, it certainly does that.
02:37But then, of course, a poor man who's building a story has to build it out of some of the things he himself knows.
02:43He doesn't rush around to Roman history and go and see what happened to it.
02:47But, I mean, if he's been brought up, as I was, on ordinary history and on his reading,
02:53that would be the material out of which he constructs.
02:56I've been interested in the fact that many of the names of which you have created,
03:02thousands in the book, literally thousands, are very close to Norse legend names.
03:09For example, Gimli is the name of a hall of gold.
03:12That's another point, yes.
03:14This particular lot of dwarves, as I call them, came from the extreme north of my geography.
03:20And therefore, in translating, as I explained in the section on translation,
03:25the kind of language they came up against there would be of a northern kind.
03:30The dwarves, you remember, are represented as extremely secretive people
03:34and have private names in their own secret language and public names like gypsies.
03:41Therefore, I gave the dwarves actual Norse names, which are in Norse books.
03:46That's quite different.
03:47Not that my dwarves really are at all like the dwarves of Norse imagination,
03:52but there's a whole list of rather attractive dwarf names in one of the older Aedaeic poems.
03:57I'm afraid I simply begged them.
03:59But not only in the dwarves, though, but among the descendants of the elves, the race of Númenor,
04:07it seems to me that one or two of the names relate to other things.
04:12You speak of the two trees of Valinor, Laurelin and the Telperion, if my pronunciation is anything like that.
04:19Laurelin and Telperion, yes, the golden song and the white silver.
04:26Are these in any way reflections in your world of the great world tree, the Norse world tree?
04:33No, no, they're not like it.
04:34They're much more like the trees of the sun and the moon.
04:36It was covered in the far east in the great Alexander stories.
04:40Trees play a very important part throughout the Lord of the Rings.
04:44For example, well, the mallorn trees in Lothlorien and the white tree of the citadel of Minas Tirith.
04:51Oh, yes, they're all descendants, yes.
04:53These are trees that are more than trees because they are symbols of great importance.
04:58Is there something in your own life, in your own background...
05:01They're not symbols to me at all. I don't work in symbols at all.
05:05Other people can find that they are symbolic, they may be symbols in my mind,
05:08but they're not symbols to me in my conscious mind at all.
05:11I'm entirely stoically minded.
05:13Well, this is true, perhaps, but nevertheless you use the white tree of Minas Tirith as a symbol of lordship, of kingship, do you not?
05:22Oh, well, yes, yes, an emblem, certainly, yes, yes, yes.
05:25But not symbolic of anything more than...
05:27Well, what are the leopards of England symbolic of?
05:30I take your point.
05:32Now, the rangers, they protect men and hobbits from Sauron's servants,
05:37but particularly they seem to have a fondness for the shire.
05:41Have you a particular fondness for these comfortable, homely things of life that the shire embodies?
05:46You know, home and pipe and fire and bed, the homely virtues.
05:51Haven't you?
05:53Haven't you, Professor Tolkien?
05:54Of course, yes, yes, yes, yes.
05:55You have a particular fondness, then, for hobbits?
05:57Yes, that's why I feel at home.
05:59The shire is very like the kind of world in which I first became aware of things, very like,
06:04which was perhaps more poignant to me because I wasn't born in it.
06:07I was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa.
06:09I was very young when I got back, but at the same time,
06:12it bites into your memory and imagination even if you don't think it has.
06:17If your first Christmas tree is a wilting eucalyptus,
06:20and if you're normally troubled by heat and sand,
06:24then to have, just at the age where imagination is opening up,
06:28suddenly find yourself in a quiet Warwickshire village.
06:32I think it engenders a particular love of what you might call central, midland,
06:37English countryside based on good waterstones and elm trees and small, quiet rivers and so on,
06:43and, of course, sort of rustic people about.
06:46At what age did you come to England?
06:48I was opposed when I first landed. I was about three and a half.
06:50Pretty poignant, of course, because you see, one of the things why people say they don't remember
06:54is because it's like constantly photographing the same thing on the same plate.
06:59Slight changes simply make a blur.
07:02But if a child's had a sudden break like that, it's conscious.
07:06What it tries to do is to fit the new memories onto the old.
07:10I've got a perfectly clear vivid picture of a house,
07:13but I now know that it's a beautifully worked out pastiche
07:16of my own home in Bromford End and my grandmother's house in Birmingham.
07:20Because I can still remember going down the road in Birmingham
07:22and wondering what had happened to the gallery, what had happened to the balcony.
07:25So constantly I do remember things extremely early.
07:27I can remember bathing in the Indian Ocean when I was not quite two and I remember it very clearly.
07:33I'm going to return again also to this business of memory and looking back a great distance.
07:39Let me turn to another subject for a moment.
07:42Frodo accepts the burden of the ring and he embodies as a character
07:47the virtues of long-suffering and perseverance.
07:50And by his actions, one might almost say in the Buddhist sense, he acquires merit.
07:54He becomes, in fact, almost a Christ figure.
07:57Why did you choose a halfling, a hobbit, for this role?
08:01I didn't. I didn't do much choosing. I wrote the Hobbit choosing.
08:04All I was trying to do in the role was to carry on from the point where the Hobbit left off.
08:09However, I got Hobbits on my hand, didn't I?
08:12Indeed, but there's nothing particularly Christ-like about Bilbo.
08:14Oh, no.
08:18No?
08:19It seemed to me strange that a small Hobbit from a small encampment...
08:23I don't say that he was Christ-like. I think it's impersonal.
08:26But, of course, he has some of the features of Christ.
08:29I guess accepting of a...
08:30Perhaps I've exaggerated.
08:32Accepting a burden.
08:34But in the face of the most appalling danger, he struggles on and continues and wins through.
08:40But that seems... Well, I thought it was more like an allegory of the human race.
08:43I've always been impressed.
08:45We are here surviving because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds.
08:53Jungle, volcanoes, wild beasts.
08:56They struggle on, almost blindly in a way.
09:00Flodo had very little idea, really.
09:03Of course, by the time he came to the end of his quest, he was beginning to understand things very much more.
09:08I thought the wisest remark in the whole book was that where Elrond says that the...
09:13The wheels of the world are turned by the small hands while the greater looking elsewhere.
09:17And they're turned because they have to.
09:19Because it's the daily job.
09:21Did you intend, in The Lord of the Rings, that certain races should embody certain principles?
09:26The elves' wisdom, the dwarfs' craftsmanship, men, husbandry and battle and so forth?
09:30I didn't intend it, but when you've got these people on your hands, you've got to make them different, haven't you?
09:35Well, of course, as we all know, ultimately, we've only got humanity to work with.
09:39It's the only claim we've got.
09:41And, of course, any races you make, if they're speaking and thinking, are...
09:45What?
09:46Taken from certain parts of humanity as one knows it.
09:49With slight alterations of emphasis.
09:51That's all you can do, isn't it? Really, ultimately.
09:54Because the elves are simply, in a sense, an expression of certain, not really wholly legitimate, desires the human race has about itself.
10:02We should all, or at least a large part of the human race, would like to have greater power of mind,
10:10greater power of art, by which I mean that the gap between the conception and the power of execution should be shortened.
10:17We should like that, and we should like, of course, a longer time, if not an indefinite time, to go on knowing more and making more.
10:23Well, therefore, we make the elves immortal, in a sense.
10:26I had to use immortal, but I didn't mean that they were eternally immortal,
10:29merely that they are very longeval, and their longevity probably lasts as long as the inhabitability of the earth.
10:36The dwarves, of course, quite obviously, couldn't you say, in many ways, they remind you of the Jews?
10:41All their words are Semitic, obviously, and constructed to be Semitic.
10:45There's a tremendous love of the artifact.
10:48And, of course, the immense warlike capacity of the Jews, too, which we tend to forget nowadays.
10:55Hobbits are just more rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the general small reach of their imagination,
11:03but it's not the small reach of their courage or latent power.
11:07You're obviously intensely interested in age for its own sake.
11:12I mean, Fanghorn, for example, and the Ensign are the eldest.
11:16They have been in existence longer.
11:18Tom Bombadil is described, in fact, is he not, as the eldest?
11:23He's, of course, a very odd character, but we won't interfere with you now.
11:27You were asking about age.
11:28Age as such.
11:29Antiquity.
11:30Antiquity.
11:31You're greatly interested in long life, in longevity.
11:33The Eldar's descendants all have this gift of longer life.
11:37Could you expand on that?
11:39That's different.
11:40Longer life, that's purely, that's one's self.
11:45That's because it's an added power in this world.
11:47Also, if you are an intelligent and artistic person, it gives you more time,
11:52either to perfect your work or to do more.
11:56That's rather different to the appeal of antiquity itself.
11:59I love history, and I always feel you, even when you walk into a room, you really want to know the history,
12:06but not only the room, but the people.
12:08You walk in with all this tremendous history behind us,
12:10but if you're writing a story in which you know you're going to come to the end of that history,
12:13the history's always backwards, isn't it?
12:16Did you evolve a system for naming these races,
12:19and therefore their histories and alphabets, literature, and so on?
12:23I didn't evolve it.
12:24I merely used what I knew.
12:28That is a rather different question, really, but every human being,
12:33at least every human being that's gifted at all in that way, has what you might call his own native language.
12:39That's quite distinct from the first learnt.
12:41What we call a native language of first learnt.
12:44But every human being has an individual linguistic character,
12:50as he has an individual face, colouring, and body.
12:57And I think, therefore, you find that people have what I should call linguistic predilections.
13:02But, of course, like one's physical characteristics, that shifts a bit as you grow,
13:07and also as you have more experience.
13:09Well, the language I've entered tried to fit my actual personal linguistic predilection or pleasure.
13:16Well, now, obviously from history, those two languages have got to be related.
13:20They're quite different.
13:21All you do is you have to posit a purely invented original form,
13:27or original sound scheme,
13:30and then you have to make language A develop certain sound laws and come to B,
13:35and certain other ones produce B.
13:38They were then B related, now they're a little related to C, but it will have that sort of feeling.
13:42So, therefore, if you have, for the purposes of the plot, or purposes of some part of the book,
13:46to invent a new name for a new character,
13:48you consciously say to yourself, in Quenyard his name will be so-and-so,
13:53but in Sindarin his name will be this.
13:55Yes, you do have that.
13:57The first test is it has to sound a nice name to me, even if I don't know what it means.
14:01But then you, of course, come across this unfortunate fact
14:05that it doesn't always happen that if you then work those same elements with the same meaning into a name,
14:13it doesn't always come out as a nice name.
14:15So then you have to give them another name or do something about it.
14:19Yes, it's a minor technical craft, actually.
14:23Well, it's an interesting technical craft because you do it with equal success
14:26when you name unpleasant characters, like orcs.
14:29Because all your unpleasant characters are instantly identifiable as unpleasant characters
14:34the minute one reads their names.
14:37Yes, I suppose they would. You wouldn't like to think much of a chap called O'Glow, could you? No.
14:41Yet dwarves, although they have names composed of similarly uncomfortable consonants to the English ear,
14:49the names are not unattractive. Immediately they're attractive.
14:52And this seems to me to be one of the great strengths of the book, this enormous conglomeration of names.
14:57One doesn't get lost, at least after the first reading, after the second reading of the book.
15:02Well, it doesn't get lost. I'm very glad you told me that because I gave a great deal of trouble.
15:05Well, one must, you see.
15:06My thing is I did try to use the languages which I did understand,
15:09which is, after all, the primary and most important of all cultural benediction.
15:13I tried to use them for that purpose, to characterize.
15:16Also, of course, it gives me great pleasure, a good name.
15:19I always, in writing, always start with a name.
15:22Give me a name and it produces a story, not the other way about, normally.
15:26Of the languages you know, which were the greatest help to you in writing The Lord of the Rings?
15:31Oh, no.
15:33Well, because I started trying to invent them almost at once,
15:36because the same way that my reading of myth has been disturbed
15:41because I've never hardly got through any fairy stories, I've wanted to write by myself.
15:47It's perhaps an arid discipline to trace back anyway to sources in a work of this sort.
15:52But do you trace, in the languages you invented, more to Scandinavia or later things like Middle English?
16:03I don't know.
16:05Of the sort of modern name, I used to say that Welsh was always attracted by its style and sound more than any other,
16:12even though I first only saw it on coal trucks. I always wanted to know what it was about.
16:16It seems to me, certainly, that the music of Welsh comes through in the names you've chosen for mountains and for places in general.
16:24Do you acknowledge this?
16:26Yes, very much.
16:29A much rarer but very potent influence on myself has been Finnish.
16:36Now, women play very little part indeed in The Lord of the Rings.
16:40Eowyn is almost the only woman in the book who shows any sign of sexual awareness at all.
16:45Did you deliberately exclude sex from the book?
16:48No, but after all, these are wars and a terrible expedition to the North Pole, so to speak.
16:55But other writers have occasionally allowed their characters to digress, if it be digression in this way.
17:03Surely there's no lack of interest, is there?
17:08Oh, it's not a case of lack of interest at all.
17:10Wouldn't you have thought that Galadriel... Every character is tempted at some point.
17:14Wouldn't you have thought Galadriel's temptation and what she says about herself is significant?
17:19Yes, I think so, but it's always at one remove.
17:24I don't know how to explain it. I know that one reviewer explained it.
17:30He said it was written by a man who's never reached puberty and knows nothing about women except for a schoolboy.
17:36And all his characters, all the good guys come home like happy boys, safe from the war.
17:44I thought it was very rude from a man as far as I know his childhood to write about a man surrounded with children,
17:52wives, daughters, grandchildren. Still, it isn't that. That's not the reason.
17:56Only because it's equally untrue, isn't it, that it's a happy story.
18:01One friend of mine said he only read it in length because it was so hard and bitter.
18:05To turn to a practical point, how did The Lord of the Rings develop from The Hobbit, because clearly it developed?
18:12Oh, yes. Of course, The Hobbit was successful. Naturally, I was pressed for a sequel.
18:20I looked for the only point in it that showed signs of development.
18:25I thought we'd choose the ring as the key to the next story. That's the mere germ, of course.
18:32Then one saw, of course, that if you're going to make a... I wanted to make a big story. I felt it had got to be the ring.
18:38Now, it's not a magic ring. I invented that little rhyme. I remember my bath one day.
18:43Now, this germ actually, of course, is also present, isn't it, in many mythologies?
18:47In Scandinavian mythology, there are the rings of power, are there not?
18:51Yes, yes, there are.
18:52It's guarded by dragons, is it not, in Germanic legend?
18:55The ring, yes.
18:56I suppose Smaug might be interpreted as being a sort of Fafnir, you see?
19:00Oh, yes, very much so, except no. Fafnir was a human being, you see, or a being.
19:05A humanoid being who took this form, whereas Smaug is just pure intelligent lizard.
19:12You have a fondness for intelligent lizards.
19:15Dragons always attracted me as a mythological element.
19:19They seem to be able to comprise human malice and bestiality together so extraordinarily well,
19:25and a sort of malicious wisdom and shrewdness. A terrifying creature.
19:29Asking how The Lord of the Rings began leads on to this question.
19:35It then grew. It then grew without control.
19:37Without control. This is the point. You did not have a scheme?
19:40No, no.
19:41No outline at all?
19:42Well, except there was a major one that the ring had got to be...
19:44I mean, did you know the ring had to be destroyed from the beginning?
19:47Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. It was quite early.
19:50Therefore, at some point, a hobbit has got to make his way to the Cracks of Doom, obviously, hasn't he?
19:55That's the only thing. And several times I tried to write that last scene ahead of time.
19:58It didn't come out. It never worked.
20:00Oh, I had to wait for it to come through.
20:02Did you decide right at the beginning that Gollum was to play such a part,
20:08or did you go back to the book after and write in the various linking parts of Gollum?
20:13You couldn't get Gollum out, could you, if you think of Gollum's relation to the ring?
20:16If the ring is going to be important, then the Gollum business must be important.
20:19I liked him better than all the other characters, and I'm much more sorry for him.
20:23But, you see, this is interesting because he's practically the only grey character,
20:27with the possible exception of Barnamere, right through the book.
20:29And Denethor, yes.
20:31And Denethor, yes. The others are almost completely black and white.
20:36They all have their temptations, actually.
20:38They all have their temptations, but nevertheless, the moment you've established your character,
20:42your reader knows what his own personal character is.
20:46He's going to be a goody or a baddy.
20:48Yes, yes. Well, of course, yes. One knows that isn't generally true.
20:51We'll have to simplify a little.
20:53But that's why Gollum is so interesting, because one, you know,
20:56he almost repents at one point, doesn't he, where he sees Frodo?
20:59That is, to me, the most poignant, the centre of the whole story,
21:01the most poignant moment of all, because it's so terribly true.
21:05It's the good people who do the damage so often.
21:07It was a fairly suspicious faithfulness which was very much justified,
21:12which ruined Gollum.
21:14You see, that if you go a long, long way in wickedness,
21:17then comes your chance, which you can't therefore demand,
21:20that it should be made nice and easy at that point.
21:22It's going to be probably very sticky, the last chance,
21:25and it was too sticky for Gollum, because I spent a lot of thought on it.
21:27Because he grew on me. I mean, I almost could see Gollum.
21:30Where I've been most criticised by certain people,
21:33and where I think I'm the most right, is making point of fact,
21:36and praise them for seeing it,
21:38is that Frodo actually failed.
21:41The thing that some people have said about it is extraordinary.
21:43Because of course, in this age, when we are now faced with
21:46the absolute certainty of pressures which can't be resisted,
21:50people have to realise more clearly than ever did before
21:54that the motives which would go into such a situation are so important.
21:59It's very rash to put yourself in a position to know it would be too powerful for you.
22:02That's presumption.
22:03If you go into a good mood and then land in a position which you can't face up to,
22:07then that's up to the government, isn't it?
22:09Some people have been very angry about it.
22:11The sort of people who deprive a man of his citizenship
22:14when he came back after being brainwashed into a ratty
22:17or given something away, I suppose.
22:19That's a sign of mind that is still in one's system.
22:22It's true, yes.
22:24But you find that your correspondents, in fact,
22:26complain a great deal about certain incidents in the story,
22:29or have complained.
22:31I once said, and I think it's roughly true,
22:34that if I was to listen to my correspondents,
22:36every part of The Lord of the Rings is a failure or its only weakness.
22:40On the other hand, there's another list
22:42which every part of it is a particular strength.
22:46At what point, I'd like to know, if you can judge at all,
22:49did the book take control of you?
22:51Long before I wrote The Hobbit and long before I wrote this,
22:53they had constructed this world mythology.
22:55It was already in existence. It was offered to the publishers before.
23:00This mythology and the Eldar and the Valar and the Western Paradise
23:05and the Elves and the Dwarves and so on,
23:07they don't arise the first time in this book.
23:10They'd already been constructed.
23:11There's nothing in the appendices referred to
23:14that hasn't already been written.
23:16So you had some sort of scheme on which it was possible to work?
23:19Well, it meant others.
23:21Well, it got sucked into it, as The Hobbit did itself.
23:25You see, The Hobbit was originally not part of it at all,
23:27but as soon as it got moving out into the world,
23:29it got sucked into it.
23:31So your characters and your story really took charge?
23:38I say took charge.
23:39I don't mean that you were completely under their spell
23:41or anything of this sort.
23:42Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
23:43I don't walk about dreaming at all, no.
23:46No, no, no, it isn't an obsession anyway.
23:49Other people have had written large things.
23:51They were the same sensation that you have sometimes.
23:53It may be a purely psychological delusion.
23:57You have a sensation that at this point,
24:02A, B, C, the only A, one of them is right,
24:05and you've got to wait till you see.
24:07Of course, that's no doubt subconscious,
24:09because I'm working on these things.
24:11Anyway, it's no good trying to anticipate,
24:14because all the things I've tried to write ahead of time
24:16just to direct myself all proved to be no good when you got there.
24:20A story has to be written backwards as well as forwards.
24:23I thought probably, yes.
24:25What was he, Boromir?
24:27Well, he had to be put back.
24:28Boromir came in at a certain point,
24:30but he had to be put right back into book one.
24:34Of course, I had maps.
24:36If you're going to have a complicated story,
24:38you must work to a map,
24:40otherwise you can never make a map of it afterwards.
24:43The moons, I think, finally,
24:45the moons and the suns have worked out
24:46according to what they were in this part of the world in 1942, actually.
24:49They must have something.
24:50I mean, I'm not a good enough mathematician or astronomer
24:53to work out whether they might have been sent down 8,000 years ago,
24:55but as long as they correspond to some real configuration,
24:58I've always been...
25:00Moons are much more tricky to deal with than suns, of course.
25:02But on the whole, I don't think a moon is full
25:04or rising in the wrong place.
25:06You began in 1942. Did you write it?
25:10No, I began as soon as Hobbit was out, in the 30s.
25:14And when did you...
25:15It was finally finished just before it was published in 54.
25:17I wrote the last thing about 1949, I think.
25:21I remember blotting...
25:22I remember the...
25:23I actually wept at the Field of Cormelin,
25:26where, of course, tears come easier, I think,
25:29at the Good Day No More, I think.
25:31But then, of course, there was a tremendous lot of revision.
25:35I typed the whole of that work out twice,
25:39and lots of it many times,
25:41on a bed in an attic.
25:43Well, they couldn't afford the...
25:45of course, the typing.
25:47There were some mistakes still.
25:50What amuses me to say,
25:52because I suppose I'm in a position
25:53where it doesn't matter what people think of me now,
25:55some five mistakes in grammar
25:57from a professor of English language,
25:58a little rather shocking.
26:00I haven't noticed it.
26:02There was one where I used bestowed
26:03as the past participle of bestride.
26:07Well, there's a lot of things like that, yes.
26:09Will you ever correct them in another edition?
26:11I have sent you some corrections.
26:13There always seem to be new ones cropping up.
26:15Yes, there are some.
26:16And, of course, dwarves are really a mistake in grammar, of course.
26:18I've tried to cover it up,
26:19but it's just purely the fact that
26:22I have a tendency to increase
26:24the number of these vestigial approvals,
26:26which is a change of concept, like leaf-leaves.
26:29My tendency is to make more of them than are now standard.
26:32And I find I really thought dwarves were dwarves.
26:35Why not?
26:36Did you evolve the languages before you wrote the book?
26:38Oh, yes.
26:39Yes.
26:40Well, yes, I evolved them a little, I mean.
26:43Indeed, long before.
26:44In fact, they began before the fall of mythology.
26:47For what purpose?
26:48Just for fun?
26:50Expressing one's own tastes.
26:54After all, isn't that what artists do?
26:57Of course, but you see,
26:58an artist paints a picture presumably for himself,
27:01but occasionally with communication in mind.
27:03Had you invented these languages
27:05with any sense of communication with other people?
27:07No, but I hope to find one.
27:08I found it in the book.
27:10Yes, yes, yes.
27:11Of course, it's not uncommon, you know.
27:13Most of my boys are frowned on
27:15because they get a guilt complex about it
27:17because it's taking off their time from something else.
27:19An enormously greater number of children
27:21have what you might call a creative element in them,
27:23as you would suppose.
27:25And it isn't necessarily limited to certain things.
27:27They may not want to paint or draw,
27:29they may not have much music,
27:30but they nonetheless want to create something.
27:33And if the main mass of education
27:37takes linguistic form,
27:38it'll take, their creation will take linguistic form,
27:40even if it isn't one of their talents, won't it?
27:42It's so extraordinarily common.
27:43I once did think it's an awful pity that it didn't...
27:46There ought to be some organised research in it, I think.
27:48It'd be very fascinating,
27:49not only from the point of view of art education
27:53and impact of education on that part,
27:55which would be fascinating from that point of view,
27:57but it's extraordinarily interesting
27:59in getting a large body of records
28:03of the linguistic predilections of children at certain ages.
28:06Do you feel any sense of guilt at all
28:10that as a philologist,
28:11as a professor of English language,
28:13with which you were concerned
28:14with the factual sources of language,
28:16you devoted a large part of your life
28:18to a fictional thing?
28:20No, no.
28:21I sure as dung language is a lot of good, you know.
28:24No, I...
28:25No, no, there's quite a lot of linguistic wisdom in it.
28:28I don't feel any guilt complex about The Lord of the Rings,
28:30as many people have said.
28:32Now we know what you've wasted,
28:34wasted the last 14 years upon,
28:37you can now get on
28:38and complete some of those professional tasks
28:40which you've neglected.
28:41And so, usually after I die out,
28:43I was more busy working at my proper things
28:45than I'd been for a long while.
28:47Yes.
28:48Is the book to be considered as an allegory?
28:50No.
28:51No.
28:52I just like allegory, whenever I smell it.
28:54Do you consider the world declining
28:55as the Third Age declines in your book,
28:57and do you see a Fourth Age for the world at the moment,
29:00our world?
29:01Well, the person of my age, you see,
29:03is exactly the kind of person who's lived
29:05through one of the most quickly changing periods
29:07of narrative history.
29:09The world is a totally different place now,
29:12at a speed which everybody feels that.
29:14Anybody who lives over 70 begins to feel that.
29:17All through history you can see that they do.
29:19But surely there's never been, in 70 years, so much change.
29:23Oh, surely never, no.
29:24I mean, one doesn't have to be 70 years old to appreciate this.
29:26The world which I brought up as a small child
29:28was indefinitely closer to the world, say, of Shakespeare.
29:33There's an autumnal quality throughout the whole
29:35of The Lord of the Rings.
29:37There's a sense of continuous change.
29:39Each character feels himself to be part of a story
29:41that's forever continuing.
29:43In one case, a character says the story is continuing,
29:46but I seem to have dropped out of it.
29:48However, everything's declining and it's fading,
29:51at least towards the end of the Third Age.
29:53Every choice tends to the upsetting of some tradition.
29:55Now, this seems to me to be somewhat like Tennyson's
29:58the old order changeth, yielding place to new,
30:00and God fulfills himself in many ways.
30:02Where is God in The Lord of the Rings?
30:04He mentioned once or twice.
30:06Is he the one about the Elder?
30:08The one, yes, the one, yes.
30:10Despite the continuous war between evil,
30:14personified in Sauron, and good,
30:17you never personalise or personify goodness.
30:20Good is there, but it's totally abstract.
30:23You don't attempt to ascribe any godship to it, particularly.
30:30No, no, this isn't a dualistic mythology based on...
30:34No, certainly not.
30:36But, I mean, the whole book is nevertheless
30:38nothing but the battle between good and evil.
30:40Well, that's, I suppose, an actual conscious reaction
30:42from the stuff that I was brought up in,
30:44a war to end wars.
30:46Which I didn't believe in at the time,
30:48and I believe in less now.
30:50If I can take this a bit further, I may make my point clearer.
30:53In battle, Frodo and Sam call on Galadriel,
30:57all their native country.
30:59Gimli calls on his ancestor's axe,
31:01if I read your appendices correctly.
31:03And the men call only on their swords by name,
31:07or on their kings or lords.
31:10I would expect them to call on their gods,
31:13and yet, amid thousands of names,
31:15you don't name the deities of any of the races you've invented.
31:18Why? Have they no gods, their son?
31:20There aren't any.
31:21I would have thought a story of this sort
31:23was almost dependent upon an intense belief
31:26in some theocratic division, some hierarchy.
31:29It is indeed. That's where the theocratic hierarchy comes in.
31:32The man of the 20th century must, of course, see that you must have,
31:37whether he believes it or not,
31:39you must have gods in a story of this kind.
31:41But he can't make himself believe in gods like Thorn, Odin,
31:45Aphrodite, Zeus, that kind of thing.
31:48You can't believe that the men in your story would have called on Odin?
31:52I couldn't possibly construct a mythology
31:54which had Olympus or Asgard
31:58on the terms which the people who worshipped those gods believed in.
32:02God is supreme, the creator,
32:05outside, transcendent.
32:08But the place of the gods is taken,
32:13so well taken, I think it really makes no difference to the ordinary reader,
32:17is taken by the angelic spirits created by God,
32:20but created before a particular time sequence
32:23which we call the world, which is called in the language AI,
32:26that which is, that which now exists.
32:28Those are the valor, the power.
32:30It's a construction, you see, a mythology
32:32in which a large part of the demiurgic thing has been handed over
32:36to powers which are created therein under the one.
32:39It's certainly likely much more elaborate and more thought out
32:42that C.S. Lewis' businessman is out of the sun of the planet
32:45where you have a demiurgos who is acting in command of the planet Mars.
32:52And the idea there was that Lucifer was really the one in command of the world,
32:56but he fell.
32:57So it was a silent planet.
32:59That was the idea. Well, this is not the same with me.
33:01Yes, yes.
33:02So then you have, in your theocracy, you have an ultimate one
33:07whom you call...
33:09It's called the one only.
33:10The one only.
33:11And then the valor, who are considered as living in Valinor.
33:14This particular little group of them who were
33:18moved from other parts of the universe to this part because they became interested in it.
33:22In the book, I get the impression you always see power as being physically in a high place.
33:27You have a high seat.
33:29There's Orthanc, Medusel, Barad-dur,
33:32the towers of Minas Tirith and Morgul and Cirith Ungol.
33:36They are always high, physically up.
33:38Is power for you always, so to speak, at the top of a mountain or top of a mountain?
33:41Well, that's just a symbol, isn't it?
33:42Or no, as a matter of fact, isn't it just a story telling?
33:44You want towers and so on that could have them down the dungeon or underneath it.
33:47There are.
33:48In fact, Morgoth, the prime mover of evil, of whom Sauron was only a petty lieutenant,
33:53lives in a dungeon.
33:55He must be in a fortress of some kind.
33:58Not that Valinor has any high towers, just a...
34:02Well, that is almost without the world you describe, isn't it?
34:05It's in the physical world, according to the myth.
34:07Ah.
34:08Until the downfall of Atlantis.
34:10I have an Atlantis complex in addition to all these other things.
34:14And quite independent of that, a permanent dream that I had, you know,
34:19let's say that the ineluctable wave has been one of my nightmares.
34:24Sometimes coming in over the open country.
34:26It always ends by one surrendering oneself.
34:28One wakes up to it.
34:30It comes at all kinds of points.
34:32Whenever I used to doodle or draw,
34:34it's nearly always a lone figure with a vast oceanic wave coming in.
34:40So, of course, I had to write quite independent Atlantis stories,
34:43which I call Númenor, which means the land of the extreme West.
34:47Well, this is the fable, you see.
34:49The whole question of the human fall is left off the stage, naturally.
34:53It occurred, but they're not known.
34:55Since the regrace of these people,
34:57they were given this great island, the first of all West,
35:00not in the divine world, not in the immortal world, to live on.
35:03Then, of course, will always come a seemingly meaningless band,
35:07like the fruit of the tree of evil.
35:10Lewis used to say the same thing in his parallelogram.
35:12Their band was they mustn't say West.
35:14They did, eventually.
35:16Hence the ultimate downfall.
35:18It then became only intellectual.
35:20It lived then only in memory.
35:21It lived in time, but not present time.
35:23And, of course, Númenor was drowned,
35:25and the Earthly paradise was removed,
35:27and so then you could then get South America.
35:29So the world became round.
35:31It always had been a vast globe,
35:33but people can now say round.
35:35Discovery is round.
35:36That was my solution of the thing.
35:38I also wanted to give Paul Medantius
35:40some universal application.
35:43The point is, really, I wish, I'm sorry,
35:45but as they get to that, you suddenly see
35:47the view coverage of the world going down like a bridge.
35:51You are on a line which leads to what was.
35:54Of course, I don't know what your theory of time is,
35:56but what was, what is, if it ever had an existence,
35:59must still have that same existence.
36:01But there is itself.
36:03You can't go too deep into those things,
36:05but they really are setting back to a world of memory.
36:09In this world which you might have created,
36:11had you been given the power to do so,
36:12had you been one of the Valar,
36:13had you been, save the mark, God,
36:16would you have created a world
36:17which is so solidly feudal as the Lord of the Rings?
36:20Oh, yes, very much so, yes.
36:22Yes, I think the feudal...
36:23I mean, you mean feudal...
36:25In the widest sense.
36:26In the French sense, not in the strict way...
36:28Oh, no, no, no, no, no, in the widest sense.
36:30Hierarchical, rather, yes.
36:31Hierarchical, exactly, yes.
36:33Yes, I think so.
36:34I mean, that power should descend
36:36by a line of kings to their sons.
36:38Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.
36:40I don't know about that.
36:42No, it's a very potent
36:44story-making and motive thing,
36:46but how far one's age has really worked
36:50better than any other system
36:51in looking at the history of the world,
36:53one doubts pretty much.
36:55It's never been worse, at any rate,
36:57than the struggle for power
37:00that always ensues when you haven't got
37:02some line of descent which can't be questioned.
37:06You're wedded to the feudal system, in a sense.
37:10Not, I don't mean the medieval feudal system,
37:12but the idea of power descending
37:14through blood or through marriage or...
37:17Yes, I'm rather wedded to those kind of loyalties
37:19because I think, contrary to most people,
37:21I think that touching your cap to the squire
37:24may be damn bad for the squire,
37:25but it's damn good for you.
37:27Do you find a continuing interest
37:29in the Lord of the Rings by people?
37:31Do people still write to you,
37:32despite the fact that the book's been out for ten years?
37:34Dozens of letters a week, yes.
37:37I'll have to keep it secret to answer them, yes.
37:39Were you surprised at its success?
37:42Nobody would have been more staggered, you know,
37:44unless it was possibly Sir Stanley Admin.
37:47I was up at Sir Stanley Admin's birthday celebration
37:50and a bookseller came up to me.
37:52I don't usually greet him with such fervour,
37:55but he said that while he got copies,
37:58it sold so well it practically kept him going for a while.
38:02Well, he gets his guinea off the set, you see.
38:05Almost the last question.
38:07Do you, in fact, believe yourself,
38:10not in the context of this book,
38:11but believe in the sense of straightforward, strict belief,
38:14in the Eldar or in some form of governing...
38:19Well, the Eldar mustn't be distinguished.
38:21The Eldar are only...
38:22The Valar, I mean, I'm sorry.
38:23Yes.
38:29Are you, in fact, a theist?
38:31Oh, I'm a Roman Catholic.
38:34A devout Roman Catholic, yes.
38:36But I don't know about angelology.
38:38Yes, I should have thought almost certainly.
38:40I mean, yes, certainly.
38:42Well, they seem to me to be the saints,
38:44or the equivalent of the saints.
38:46Well, they are in some way, yes.
38:47They take the place in this book of the things
38:49which in many evil and holy legends you have,
38:51the gods and the invocation to the saints,
38:53which are lesser angels.
38:54Yes, they do.
38:55Oh, well, obviously, many people have noticed
38:57that the being to the lady of the Queen of the Stars
39:00is much like Roman Catholic invocations of Our Lady.
39:02Do you wish to be remembered chiefly
39:04by your writings on philology, on other matters,
39:09or by the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit?
39:14I shouldn't have thought there was much choice
39:16in if I remember at all.
39:17If it were by the Lord of the Rings, I'd take it.
39:19I wouldn't mind the other being remembered,
39:25but I am conscious that they're small
39:29and not very important.
39:30Won't it be rather like the case of Longfellow, won't it?
39:32People remember Longfellow wrote Hiawatha
39:35and perhaps one or two other things.
39:36I forget if he was a professor of modern languages.