00:00 Hobbits
00:45 LOTR
01:07 Elvish
01:27 Allegory
02:02 Reviewer
02:10 Death
03:16 Fan mail
03:28 Escapist
03:38 When was 13
03:46 Writes Elvish
04:45 FOOD?!
05:01 Beer
05:21 Smoking
05:38 Invented Ring inscription/Black Speech
05:55 Black Speech
06:07 Cult
--- B&W ---
06:42 (no audio) pipe w/glasses
07:01 (no audio) takes off glasses
07:20 Hobbits
07:37 Roos, memory
08:04 Life after WW2
09:30 Manor Road
10:35 Recollection
11:03 Elves Dwarves Men
13:12 Silm
13:50 Silm
14:16 BBC 1962
--- Oxford Tour ---
20:45 Walks into house
21:10 Tour#1 better quality
23:30 Tour#2 low quality
25:35 Fireworks
25:45 Claps/Yeah
26:05 Aerial view
26:33 In a field
Credit to TalkingAboutTolkien
00:45 LOTR
01:07 Elvish
01:27 Allegory
02:02 Reviewer
02:10 Death
03:16 Fan mail
03:28 Escapist
03:38 When was 13
03:46 Writes Elvish
04:45 FOOD?!
05:01 Beer
05:21 Smoking
05:38 Invented Ring inscription/Black Speech
05:55 Black Speech
06:07 Cult
--- B&W ---
06:42 (no audio) pipe w/glasses
07:01 (no audio) takes off glasses
07:20 Hobbits
07:37 Roos, memory
08:04 Life after WW2
09:30 Manor Road
10:35 Recollection
11:03 Elves Dwarves Men
13:12 Silm
13:50 Silm
14:16 BBC 1962
--- Oxford Tour ---
20:45 Walks into house
21:10 Tour#1 better quality
23:30 Tour#2 low quality
25:35 Fireworks
25:45 Claps/Yeah
26:05 Aerial view
26:33 In a field
Credit to TalkingAboutTolkien
Category
đč
FunTranscript
00:00The actual beginning, though it's not really the beginning, but the actual flashpoint was, I remember very clearly, I can even, I took, I can still see the corner in my house in 20 Northmore Road where it happened.
00:11I got an enormous pile of exam papers there, and marking school examinations in the summertime is an enormous, very laborious and unfortunately also boring.
00:27And I remember picking up a paper and actually if I nearly gave an extra mark for it, an extra five marks actually, one page on this particular paper was left blank, glorious, nothing to read.
00:38So I scribbled on it, I can't think why, in a hole in the ground lived a hobbit.
00:42I think that was eventually published in 1937.
00:46I now wanted to try my hand at writing a really stupendously long narrative and to see whether I had sufficient art, cunning or material to make a really long narrative which would hold the average reader right through.
01:06No, no, I wouldn't mind other people knowing it and enjoying it, but I didn't really want to make, like some people who have been equally inventive in language have done, who sort of make cults and have people all speaking it together.
01:18No, I don't desire to go and have afternoons talking Elvish to chaps.
01:21One thing, of course, Elvish is too complicated, I've never finished making it.
01:27People do not fully understand the difference between an allegory and an application.
01:32You can go to a Shakespeare play and you can apply it to things in your mind if you like, but they're not allegories, at least most of them are not.
01:39There are some more allegorical elements, for instance, in The Tempest than the most, but...
01:48But certainly, I mean, many people apply it to nuclear, the ring, particularly the nuclear bomb, don't they?
01:57I think that was in my mind, the whole thing is only an allegory of it.
02:02But it isn't. One reviewer once said, this is a jolly, jolly book, isn't it? All the right boys come home and everybody's happy and glad.
02:08He said, it isn't true, of course. He can't have read the story.
02:11If you really come down to any large story, it interests people, it can hold them attention for a considerable time or make...
02:19A story's practically always, a human story's practically always about one thing, aren't there?
02:24Death.
02:26The inevitability of death.
02:29I don't know whether you would agree with that, but anyway, that is...
02:34What, um...
02:35There was a quotation from Simon Beauvoir, that I read in the paper the other day, which seems to me...
02:43I think I'll read it to you.
02:46There is no such thing as a natural death.
02:50Nothing that happens to man is ever natural.
02:53Since his presence calls the whole world into question.
02:57All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident.
03:02And even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustable violation.
03:06We may agree with the words or not, but those are the...
03:11Are the key spring of the laws of the ring.
03:16A vast number, I can judge from my very considerable fan mail,
03:21I should say that only a small proportion I possess, and even of those, not very many have really read the books with any attention.
03:29Well, it is meant to be escapist, because I use escapism in its proper sense.
03:33It was a man getting out of prison.
03:36I first began seriously to invent languages, about when I was 13 or 14.
03:42I've never stopped, really.
03:44Languages have a flavour to me, which I...
03:46I never understand people saying, for instance,
03:48it was awfully dry and dull, because a new language to me is just like taking a new wine or a new sweet beat or something.
03:57All I'm doing now is to try and write in Elvish,
04:01try and write in Elvish, because my writing is very inferior to the Elve.
04:06The standard greeting when meeting,
04:09a star shines upon our meeting.
04:17Oh, God.
04:20I've made a mistake, haven't I?
04:22I've made a mistake.
04:29Shall we?
04:31And that stands for
04:33Ellen
04:36Silla
04:38Rumen
04:39Omentielvo
04:41It's a piece of rather beautiful language, I think.
04:46Food?
04:47I've never been a trencher man.
04:49I've never been a trencher man, therefore I make...
04:52But I like, I must say, since England produces the best basic food in Europe,
04:58on a whole, it does.
05:03Yes, yes, I drink drinks each day.
05:05I like, of course, being elevated.
05:08I'm very fond of beer.
05:20I've always...
05:22always smoked.
05:24I sometimes smoke beyond the point when you enjoy it, which is silly,
05:27but I do smoke and enjoy it, and as a matter of fact, it's now so tied
05:31to writing that I can't write without it.
05:36I invented that in a bath, I remember.
05:38Yes, I remember inventing that in one of the baths
05:41when I was having a bath in 20 North of Rome.
05:44I still remember kicking the smoke out of the bath.
05:47I still remember kicking the sponge out of the bath
05:50when I got the last I think I'd ever live, all right, and jumped out.
06:07I don't live in America. Surely they should tell me.
06:09I should like to ask them some questions of how such things arise.
06:12I observe in general that America has...
06:15North America has always been much more easily kindled
06:19than England or indeed any country in Europe.
06:24And for instance,
06:28the Dickens cult and the extraordinary excitement about Dickens,
06:32so the only people who came down to the quay to watch the mail ship coming,
06:35the only thing they wanted to know was what happened with the next chapter.
06:38They weren't worried about goods.
06:42They weren't worried about goods.
06:44They weren't worried about goods.
06:46They weren't worried about goods.
06:48They weren't worried about goods.
06:50They weren't worried about goods.
06:52They weren't worried about goods.
06:54They weren't worried about goods.
06:56They weren't worried about goods.
06:58They weren't worried about goods.
07:00They weren't worried about goods.
07:02They weren't worried about goods.
07:04They weren't worried about goods.
07:06They weren't worried about goods.
07:08They weren't worried about goods.
07:10They weren't worried about goods.
07:12They were not worried about goods.
07:14They weren't worried about goods.
07:16They weren't worried about goods.
07:18They weren't worried about goods.
07:20Hobbits?
07:22Well, you meet them you know.
07:24Hobbits by nature and hobbits by stature
07:26and hobbits happened to be both, you know...
07:28There must be places fairly remote from here, like a little place on the extreme east coast
07:44called Roos, R-O-O-S, various places of that kind, but of course, since I'm always very
07:49conscious of my position, as I say, I can remember a position which by the window I
07:53was, when I'm writing a lot of places I've lived in, of course, are connected with the
07:58family in my mind, with the story, the emotions at the time, because I lived first in a little
08:05house which again, fate follows me again, is the first house I ever had, and I think
08:09it's now just been destroyed, and it's now called Pusey Street, then when I came back
08:14to Oxford, I live in two houses in Northmore Road, they're both associated with my writing,
08:20in particular the second one, number 20, which now belongs to Trinity College, and
08:28which was built by Basil Blackmore, and then when the war was over, and most of what property
08:39I had had been destroyed, I had to move back to a little house in Manor Road, which is
08:44now opposite the English Library, that's where the Lord of the Rings, amongst others, was
08:50actually finished, or finalised, as they would say. A lot of the writing and revision
08:55took place at an interesting place, a house I think which belonged to the Lytton family,
09:01I think it belonged to Bulwer-Lytton actually, which then became, since then, become a school,
09:07the Oratory School, which was moved from Edgbaston in Birmingham, and then moved there in the
09:12war time. There was a headmaster friend of mine, who stayed a whole large part of one
09:17of the long vacations there, and was given one of the master's rooms where I had public
09:20peace and quiet, and I banged away at a typewriter and I did most of the revision of the Lord
09:27of the Rings.
09:28Manor Road, of course, everything is destroyed, I mean Manor Road, which I lived in, has now
09:34been completely destroyed, there's an enormous combined English and law library built there,
09:41which isn't bad, I think, at all. A lot of it inside is very good, isn't it?
09:49In there, amongst other things, which is connected, I suppose, with me, there's a bronze bust
09:54of myself, which has an interesting history. It was done by my daughter-in-law, Faith Falkenbridge-Tolkie,
10:08and it was exhibited in the British Academy, where I was, tearing down the roof. It was
10:17eventually presented to me by the English faculty, but it was only a plaster cast, and
10:24so I used some of the ill-gotten gains of the Lord of the Rings to have it cast in bronze,
10:28of about only one thermodosis, and presented it at the end of my career to my father-in-law,
10:32and it was a fine bust. The Lord have us now, I think. I haven't the slightest recollection whatsoever,
10:38I normally preserve a very bright visual recollection of where I was, where I am, and things that
10:44are associated with what I'm looking at. I haven't the slightest recollection of anything,
10:47either the position, where the window was, myself, or the thoughts, anything, I have
10:50the whole of the end chapter. That came straight out of the leaf mode. There was no difficulty,
10:57no sense of trouble of composition, it must have been sort of burgeoning then.
11:03Everybody, including the divine spirits, under God, makes mistakes in this mythology, and
11:09of course the gods made a primary error, instead of leading the elves and men to find out their
11:13way under the guidance of God, they invited the elves, because the rebel amongst them,
11:19the wicked god, Melkor, was alive, was a devastated large part of the world. They took them back
11:29into their paradise to the west to protect them. And so the whole machinery starts from
11:35the rebellion of the elves, and therefore the rebellion of the evil they did in their
11:43bursting out from paradise. So what you've got in our period is two lots of elves, ones
11:49that never started, just didn't want to be bothered to be anything higher than they were,
11:55ordinary woodland elves of the far east, those who started to go to the divine paradise
12:01and never got there, which are the grey elves of the west, and those who got and came back
12:09as exiled. The high elves who sing this song to Elbereth in the beginning of the Lord of
12:18the Rings are exiled elves, who had once known what it was to see the neurgic gods
12:25in person. Now dwarves creatively don't do this particular thing. They have certain grievances
12:37against men, against elves, they are incarnate in bodies rather like ourselves, we don't
12:43know much about them, but they apparently are mortal though they are long-lived. Why
12:47do they come into the scheme? Well of course they've got a great deal of thought to provide
12:53their origin. I don't think I was saying anything about it at the moment, but they have a rational
12:58origin related to that theme, but they're not part of the children of God. That's all
13:05I can really say about this. Men are just men.
13:09I raised my children, the two older ones, who took kindly and on the whole favourable
13:20interest in it. But they criticised very severely, and first opened my eyes to the whole situation
13:28which led to my essay on fairy stories, criticised very severely all those things which by owing
13:33to bad models I thought were suitable to put into a children's story. They hated the
13:39sides, anything like, so now I've told you enough. They loathed anything that made it
13:45sound as if you were talking to an actual audience.
13:51There are in existence a very large collection, now a collection practically written, but
13:55legends about the world of the past, particularly after the exiles came back and conducted their
14:04war against the devil in the north-western part of this world we live in, and the connection
14:10of the men who joined in with them.
14:14You're obliged, any author I imagine, is obliged to call on his stock, private stock.
14:26Is this another word for what Freud would call the unconscious?
14:30No.
14:31No, I don't think it was.
14:32No, both, both. What is himself, both no doubt what he inherits, his unconscious, and what
14:38he has is part of his mental make-up and reading, his memory, but he may not have the object
14:47of revealing that or lecturing to anybody or even trying to put forward his view as
14:52a total one or a good one.
14:54Let's avoid the word lecture for a moment because it suggests a propagandist work and
14:58I don't think anybody is really talking about that.
15:00Well, they have been, so perhaps...
15:02Well, I'm not and you're not, so let's not.
15:04No, good, good.
15:05But let's then accept the fact that out of this stock you invent the world, and this
15:10stock does include a stock of ideas about how worlds ought to be.
15:16No?
15:17No, because I don't believe that there is any one recipe at any one time.
15:23You don't yourself make out a recipe for personal behaviour, you don't believe you yourself
15:28ought to live in a certain sort of way.
15:30Ah, well, but I thought you were talking about worlds when I thought you were thought to
15:34think, for instance, that a lot of kings and obviously the hereditary principle is
15:39a strong thing, and so on, but...
15:43Well, let's be plain, for instance, in this particular world that you have invented the
15:47hereditary principle is very strong.
15:49Yes, yes, yes.
15:50Though not ubiquitous.
15:51The hobbits don't have one, do they?
15:53No, quite so, no.
15:54But do you yourself look back on a world in which the hereditary principle is strung with
15:59affection?
16:00I do, yes, obviously.
16:02But, we were told, is also very much easier, very much, well, I find it very much easier
16:09to one out of which to make a story.
16:12And you're only concerned with making a story?
16:15It was my primary concern, which I started out with.
16:18And you took 14 years to make the story?
16:20Quite so, yes.
16:21And this was a story in...
16:23But that is partly out of the fact that I'm a meticulous sort of bloke.
16:28And that I took 14 years, not for the general things it is now, but for finding time schemes
16:35and getting everything right, and so on.
16:37Well, for instance, this whole matter of the appendices, 100 pages, language, social customs,
16:42history, normally if you had been writing a history as a historian, all these would
16:46have existed on a card index before you ever began to write.
16:49Yes.
16:50Is this true for the whole nutshell?
16:52Yes, one thing that, for instance, in the marks you made at the beginning was the fact
16:56that time passed and the Hobbits grew into this world.
17:01As a matter of fact, what really happened was that because, having already constructed
17:05the world, they became drawn into it.
17:09The world was constructed like a model aeroplane?
17:11No, no, no, no.
17:12But it existed in posse and in large scale plan before the Hobbit was written.
17:18The Hobbit was in fact originally an attempt to write something outside it and grew into it.
17:24So that you had invented, literally invented, the world before you even wrote the Hobbit?
17:28Oh, yes, indeed.
17:29Why?
17:33I don't think so.
17:34I could not really say why one wishes to create a thing like that.
17:38Well, then, all right, how?
17:40What started it?
17:41There must have been a point at which quite suddenly, like God, you chose to make the
17:47world like that.
17:48I was going to use that illustration.
17:52Because, as I've said elsewhere, I think that if you wish to push me back into what
17:57semi-theological or philosophical, I think because being made by a creator, one of our
18:03natural factors is wishing to create.
18:06But since we aren't creators, we have to sub-create.
18:08That is to say, we have to rearrange the primary material in some particular form which pleases,
18:14which may, it isn't necessarily a moral pleasing, it's partly an aesthetic pleasing.
18:19Then you make this distinction between what pleases aesthetically because it's balanced
18:22and what pleases morally.
18:24God, we may assume, made a moral rather than an aesthetic choice.
18:29That I...
18:30Now, is this too great an assumption?
18:32It's one which required a very long time to debate, but I should have thought that we're
18:37dealing with something which we're only looking at facets of one whole, but certainly an aesthetic
18:42whole is surely, an aesthetic facet is as strongly to be predicated as a moral one.
18:46In this world that you yourself have made, the complexities that exist, exist mostly,
18:52it seems to me, outside the creatures of the world.
18:55There is an absolute evil and there is an idea of absolute good.
18:58Would you agree?
19:00Mordor, after all, is a principle of absolute evil.
19:03I don't believe in absolute evil, but I do believe in absolute good.
19:06Let's say...
19:07If you don't believe in absolute evil, why did you create the Dark Lord, who seems to
19:11be the apotheosis of it?
19:13But he said in the book that he himself is not evil to begin with.
19:16Ah, he fell.
19:18Like Lucifer.
19:19Yeah.
19:20So you're...
19:21Well, he's several stages down from Lucifer.
19:23You do believe then that there can be a state of absolute good from which most people do
19:28fall.
19:29It's said, for instance, there's no religion in the book.
19:31No, there isn't, for reasons which are partly ascetic, partly auctora, and partly the history.
19:37This book, so-called Lord of the Rings, comes at the end of a long series of stories I've
19:42created in which the situation would be explained.
19:46Why?
19:47There were no, for instance, churches, rituals, and temples, and so on.
19:50Yes, but surely you shouldn't read into the book a kind of allegory of the H-bomb.
19:53What is said somewhere in the book is that the One Ring is a power so enormous that even
19:59if a good man were to use it against a bad, it would corrupt the good man.
20:04But that is a thing which other people have arrived, other views, other people arrived
20:08at long before the H-bomb was invented.
20:11Also, I may say that I began building the stories in which the Dark Lord, when I was
20:17an undergraduate, they were already in an advanced stage during the First War.
20:21The H-bomb hadn't been heard of.
20:24If you were to be remembered as the man who has made the Lord of the Rings, would you
20:28rather be remembered as a man who has said something or as a man who has made something?
20:33I don't think you can distinguish.
20:35The made thing, unless it says something, won't be remembered.
20:45It's finally the real old basic thing which must have occurred often in literature, the
20:49reluctant hero.
20:51And the story, in essence, is the adventures of this little chap.
20:57Then, of course, you move out into the wilder world where imagination can be let go.
21:19Of two very English and extremely British parents.
21:28I think it was a kind of double coming home, which made the effect of the ordinary English
21:33meadows, countryside and bricks so immensely important to me.
21:43I was, on the whole, a rather puny, over-mothered, timid little creature who was not much of
21:50a success.
21:51I eventually became a fairly ordinary scholar.
21:55Turned out to be good at rugby, football and all other things.
22:05Let me say at once that, owing to the casualties in the war in those days, I think there were
22:10very few people to elect.
22:17Too big a job for me, really.
22:25Which means to say that I was legally removed.
22:40It's a pity it couldn't be in the springtime when that tree wouldn't look sad, but covered
22:44with leaves, you see.
22:45Look old, but not sad.
22:47And these, that looks like kind of plain, doesn't it?
22:54Whatever that tree is.
22:55And these are limes.
22:57Limes have to show, however old they are, they're lovely green in spring.
23:06I have always, for some reason, I don't know why, been enormously attracted by trees.
23:12All my work is full of trees.
23:14I suppose I have actually had some simple-minded form of longing, actually, who would like
23:22to...
23:23I should have liked to be able to make contact with a tree and find out what it feels about
23:26things.
23:31And the old end says a few things, doesn't it, about feeling the sap run up and the openness
23:37of the sun.
23:39A lot of trees have gone, big trees from there, you see.
23:42There's a much more woody, and there was a long line of trees of this kind and a younger,
23:46all along the wall, so those houses couldn't see you and couldn't see them when they were
23:49in leaf.
23:50Yes.
23:51There's a much more secluded garden.
23:52Why didn't they change the scholars instead of the books?
23:56I said, you'll pardon me, madam, been very foolish of them.
23:59She said, why?
24:00Those towers, sir?
24:01I said, our scholars come and go.
24:03Our books must remain with us.
24:06She said, thank you very much.
24:08I said, it is my pleasure.
24:10There was lots of...
24:11Oh, that's wonderful.
24:12That's wonderful.
24:13They're all togged up there.
24:14I've never seen them so tidy.
24:15It seems to me that there is an air of what I would call Donnish pastime about all Tolkien's
24:27works.
24:28Can't get out.
24:29It's great to get everything in the way.
24:30I'll try and tie it up, won't I?
24:32Oh, that's the entrance to the office at the bottom and above it you have the queen's room.
25:00What kind of office?
25:01Where Queen Henrietta...
25:02Actually, the office, of course, is dealing with the estate's office now, where they deal
25:08with all the estates belonging to the college.
25:11And here's the bursar just coming across.
25:13He's very helpful.
25:15And there, through the door, there sharp right, of course, is the estate's office.
25:21Quite a modern little fella.
25:26It's a pity the book didn't catch on a bit sooner, isn't it?
25:30Wish me luck.
25:41That's a good one.
25:42Put a high 10 on it.
25:47Hey!
26:00And all the lands that you see, and those that lie round about them, shall be dwellings
26:12of men.
26:15What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
26:30The Third Age was my age.
26:39I was the enemy of Sauron, and my work is finished.
26:45The burden must lie now upon you and your kindred.
26:50And the power of the Three Rings also is ended.