Episode 313: The Tower and the Ruin with Dr. Michael Drout

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks For an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading well Explore the lost intellectual tradition And discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The literary life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever-unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and with me is the man I formally called... The guy who carries your bag. The mysterious Mr. Banks. You're hardly mysterious anymore. You're disappointing me. You need to be more mysterious. Maybe I'll get you a cloak. I don't think so. And with us today... I have enough oddities as it is. I'm much more likely to wear a cloak than you. Let's be honest. With us today is someone I'm very excited to introduce you guys to. We are going to be talking to Dr. Michael Drought, a professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where he teaches many things, Anglo-Saxon, Chaucer, science fiction, Tolkien, etc., etc. And we're going to be talking to him about his brand new book, The Tower and the Ruin, J.R.R. Tolkien's Creation. Mike, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. I am very excited. I'm going to really try not to just go full fangirl over here. I'm very excited. And listeners to the podcast have heard me talk about you before. You did a webinar for us last semester. You're teaching a class for us right now. But this is your first time on the podcast. So I'm very, very excited. and I'm going to tell this story because well I like this story and it's my podcast so I'll tell it but I first discovered you a few years back I was like going through audible looking for something to listen to as one does and I saw there was some Anglo-Saxon lecture so I downloaded it to my phone with about a million other things because Mr. Banks and I were going on a trip we were going on vacation we're going on a road trip so I just I had a whole bunch of things in there, you know, in case it turned out to be not very good. I had a backup. And so I put it on and Mr. Banks was in the passenger seat reading a book and I was driving. And I should probably say that a lot of times when I listen to any kind of literary anything that's sort of, you know, for the public or even not for the public, just anything in literature, I'm usually nitpicking it. I'm usually, well, I'll be honest, I'm usually rage narrating it to you, Mr. Banks. Like just It's a running joke. It is. Like, you know, if she's driving and I'm the passenger, I will have a book in my hand. And I never get to read it because there's the running commentary. It's true. I'll get so upset and I'll pause it. If you're in the car, you're a captive audience and I'll just tell you. But otherwise, I just I'll run into your office and you're not going to believe this. And then this guy said this. Oh, this is crazy. His framework's all wrong. And I get very worked up about it. It's what you love about me. but then so I'm putting on the Anglo-Saxon lectures and I'm listening and I'm driving and after a while I noticed that you closed your book and you put it down and you started listening to and then we were driving for I don't know how long and I turned to you and said I think something's wrong I haven't yelled at this guy once and I didn't I didn't yell at you once through the whole thing like he was trial by fire you didn't even know. I mean, you're supposed to, you know, like a controversy equals attention. So I don't know, maybe I failed in that. No, no, I'm a very, very tough audience. And so we got to our hotel, and I was very excited. So I, I called my friend and colleague who works for us, Jen Rogers, because I figured she'll know if this guy's any good. You know, is he just a one hit wonder here? Is he worth me pursuing more of his work? So I called her and said, hey, we found these lectures on Anglo-Saxon. It's by this guy, Michael Drought. Do you know anything about him? She started laughing, and she was like, he's my teacher. He's the one who taught me Anglo-Saxon and Beowulf. Yes, yes, I can vouch for him, which, I mean, that's not very often you get the instant personal, I can vouch for him. So then I just went and listened to everything. I listened to all of the modern scholar stuff, and people have heard me talk about those and loved them all. I started getting your books downloading your scholarly articles and I just was so impressed with all of your work and I started thinking I think we need to collaborate with him, that was my dream so I can't believe you're here I can't believe you're teaching a class on our platform this is all just so incredibly exciting for me and this is usually the part of the podcast where I say a word from our sponsor which is us because this is an ad-free podcast, so no one's going to try to sell you a cell phone plan or diet pills. No ads on here. This is 100% member supported, and the work we do at the House of Humane Letters is what keeps this podcast free and available. And I'm excited to be able to say the advertisement for today is Mike Drought's class going on now on Viking and Old Norse culture. And we're a couple of classes in, and it is not too late to join. Everything's recorded. You can hop in at any time. 16 weeks total? Yep, it's a 16-week class. It's going very well, but I'm not going to just gush about it. Mike, tell our listeners a little bit about what's going on in this class. So this class is, I started developing it back in maybe 2023 when, in the past, I taught a medieval lit class that was sort of one-third Old Norse and Vikings, one-third Anglo-Saxon, and one-third Middle English, then I should have made that fourth, because then we would spend the final part of the semester reading Dante's Inferno, which isn't any of those things. But what I had found is that the students wanted more and more of Vikings and Old Norse. And also, I've led a few tours of the Old Norse, the Viking and Old Norse saga sites in Iceland. And so I sort of, I had this material, I kept, you know, taking more and more time on the Vikings and Old Norse. I'm like, okay, I'll do a whole class on it. And one of the things, one of the motivations for that is I really wanted to teach Njall's Saga. So Njall's Saga is the, by acclamation, the greatest of the sagas. It's also very long. It's got 400 named characters in it by some counts. Many of them have speaking lines, and it's supposedly impossible to teach. I checked. I started Googling around syllabi, and I found one other class in all of the U.S. that year that taught Nyal's Saga. I think it was the University of Pennsylvania. And also there was one in law school of all places, which I wonder how that works. It's a University of Michigan law school class that regularly they read Nyal's Saga. But I thought, I can do it. I can teach it to undergrads. We'll just go, you know, at a deliberate pace through Njál Saga. And I've taught that course twice. And then when I, you know, got in touch with you guys and you were like, would you be interested in teaching something? I'm like, well, Vikings and Old Norse, obviously, in part also because if I try to teach it at Wheaton again, I'll have to go through all the modern nonsensical syllabus development and improvement crap, whereas it's been grandfathered in a weird way before that. So now I get to teach it the way I want to teach it, you know, without all this administrative time wasting. And essentially we try to really do a comprehensive look at Old Norse culture. So we look at both the poetry and the prose. We look at the Eddaic poetry, the most ancient poetry. We look at Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, where that's where we get 90% of our knowledge of Old Norse mythology is from one text. And so we read that, Snorri's Prose Edda. Then we go through some of the shorter sagas, Hravenkel Saga and the Fathir, which are like the saga, they're saga mode stories, but they're not whole sagas. And then we spend the final third of the term on Njal Saga, do the whole thing. And that gives us Scaldic poetry also because there's a lot of Scaldic poetry mixed in with Njal. And so I'm really looking forward to it. I really, you know, it's only two classes in, but I teach it with my eye on the chat window all the time, trying to, you know, catch up with what people are suggesting and saying and asking about. And it's been really fun so far. The kids and adults are having a ball in this class, and I'm laughing to myself that that is the classic HHL student to hear somebody say, no one teaches this in the whole world, and they say, sign me up. I want it. The old song is too hard for undergrads. Oh, let's try it. Let's try it. I don't know how – I won't embarrass anybody to say the oldest person in the class because, I mean, we have some adults in the class. the oldest HHL student is 87 years old isn't that amazing I mean I think that's great right it's a life it's the literary life and then someone in the class reached out to me with a question and mentioned that their 11 year old is the one who insisted that they take the class too I've thrown down the language of some of the Old Norse's I did notice that sometimes so now that I know there's an 11-year-old in the class. Maybe we'll use euphemisms occasionally. But that's pretty exciting, actually. It is. It's extremely exciting, yeah. Someone gets interested in this at such an early age, they have the potential to really develop the language skills, which are what, you know, Old Norse is hard. I won't, there's no getting around it. Like, Old Norse is way harder than Anglo-Saxon. it's less connected to modern English so that you don't have as much automatic vocabulary that comes through and it's a bit more inflected and it's inflected differently so the things you think you know if you know Anglo-Saxon then you're like oh that's totally wrong which is probably by the way the reason that English shifted from an inflected language to an analytic language was the the close but not quite communication between Old Norse settlers and Anglo-Saxon people who'd been there. So when you think that, you know, kids, I didn't learn Old Norse until I was over 30. You know, I'm thinking of people who can get to it when they're, if they want to, they can then, you know, start learning Old Norse when they're 11, 12, 13, 15 is just, I mean, they're going to be so good if they do that. Absolutely. So if you're interested in this class, it is not too late to sign up. Go to HouseOfHumanEletters.com, click on the Teaching tab, and you'll find it there. It's also under the Mini Class tab, so you can find it in a couple different places. And if you're interested but you're worried, oh, no, this is hard books with a college professor. Is this over my head? The answer is no. There's an 11-year-old in here. It is not over your head. You're a fantastic teacher, Mike. You really are. It's a very accessible class, I promise. And no papers, nothing like that. Just read and enjoy. All right. Well, now is the time in the podcast where we like to each share a quote from something we have been reading. Mr. Banks, why don't you kick us off? Yeah, certainly. I was recently reading a biography of the historian, essayist and poet Thomas Macaulay by another historian named Arthur Bryant. And Bryant says this of Macaulay in his last years, quote, he had been so long buried in books that he had almost forgotten the earth around him. What a way to go. Yeah, it's either a warning or a life goal, depending on who you are. Yeah, I didn't take it as a cautionary tale. Maybe that says something about me. All right. Well, my commonplace quote, and I'm going to do my best not to give a long backstory to this, but I picked a Michael Drought quote and not from not from the tower in the ruin. And this really is in my commonplace quote. And I really have said this before on the show. And I say it in my classes all the time. So I thought, oh, let's let's revisit it. One of my absolute hills to die on, I mean, this is right on the front page of the House of Humane Letters website, Recovering the Lost Intellectual Tradition. And one of my hills to die on, one of the things the business is devoted to, the podcast is devoted to, is the idea that if a work of literature is like a tree, you cannot cut it off at the roots and then expect to find a living thing, right? You have to root it in its tradition. and ironically rooting it in a time and a place and people is the thing that actually makes it be able to be universal. And yeah, this is my this is my short version. And I think so many, if not all of the modern bad ways of reading are because we have cut the work off from its tradition. And so we don't know what to make of it. And so this is a quote from one of your lectures that you gave. I think it's the oral tradition series, which is a very special one to me. I think it was in that. And so you said some stuff about people who want to read by cutting a work off from its tradition. And I got very excited about that and I wrote it down. So here's my Michael Drout quote. So you start off saying about these types of readers that they say, I just want to see what the words are on the page. And then you say, let me point out, you don't read ever just the words on the page, because the only way you know what the words on the page mean is how they refer to other things and other words in a network of meaning spread throughout a culture. I said that? You said that. It makes me sound really smart. I like that. Well, that was one of those moments where I thought, yeah, yeah, I can work with this guy. Yep. I mean, it is true, though. I mean, you know, people say, like, that was, you know, for the new critics were one, like, tell me what the words on the page are. I'm like, you don't even know what those words mean, right? We don't know, you know, even, first of all, they all have to mean things related to other words, but that's the shallowest level. They also have meaning connected to other things, and they have connotations, and to just say, like, read the words on the page is deceiving yourself. They would just be black and white dots on a page if you didn't have the whole tradition of language and literature there. You wouldn't know what to make of it. I sometimes give my students, like, in a class, depending on how things are going, I'll say, okay, let's try and experiment. I want you to describe to a Martian a little girl reading the Velveteen Rabbit and crying over it, and explain how that works to someone from Mars. And you start to get, like, oh, well, there's black and white dots on a page, and they make her have ideas in her head about a stuffed toy rabbit that doesn't exist and if it did exist, wouldn't be alive anyway. But she's crying because it's going to be burned up on a trash pile even though it's not alive. And when she's done with it, she has this incredible emotional reaction and the Martian is going, humans make no sense. And of course, like, But all I have to say is reading the Velveteen Rabbit, I have to say anything beyond that, and vast numbers of people feel like something get at their heart right there. So, yeah, I mean, what you said, nothing makes sense separated from the tradition of reading. Reading itself makes no sense separated from the tradition. Absolutely. Preach, preach. All right. I'm like, down girl, down girl. That's not the topic of this podcast. We'll have to have another podcast just devoted to us yelling against the new critics. I would be totally for that. And here's the thing. In many ways, when I wrote The Tower and the Ruin, I was trying to think like a new critic in terms of the best part of the new criticism. Because the best part of it was when you put yourself in contact, engaging with the work with a kind of complete honesty, with not trying to make yourself look better, not look smarter, not look tougher, whatever. But just, you know, if you're going to talk about how this work affects you, you have to, like, find a level of honesty and that's really, and we can talk about this later when we talk about my book, it's really hard. because your natural instincts are to describe your reaction in a way that's going to make you seem smarter, kinder, braver, more insightful. When that is, then it's not doing anything useful because it's not really getting at what the text did to you. So there were good things with the new critics, but there was a lot of just like self-deception. Yeah, exactly so. Exactly so. All right. So what is your commonplace quote? So to be fair, I probably wouldn't have picked my own book except you told me to. Or someone told me to. So here's my quote. A ruin preserves the memory of what has been at the cost of making it impossible not to recognize the permanence of the loss. This melancholy, a longing for the unrecoverable past, is the dominant emotion in all of Tolkien's works, an important reason why they affect readers so strongly. I mean, I could go on, but I think that's enough of it. That's a fine passage. It is a fine passage, and of course, you know, it ties in with the title, The Tower and the Ruin, which of course is a reference to The Monster and the Critics, and using that as your framework for the book. But let's start off by just saying, congratulations. You wrote a book, and that by itself is just huge. And it's a huge book, and it was a hard book. And it's an impressive book. But then to write it and to have it make a splash, it has made a splash. I've been completely astonished by how that's all played out. I didn't expect any of these things. though maybe so when I sent it off to the to my editor I had no idea if he was going to like recoil in horror or if he was going to say yeah okay that's what I was expecting and instead I got back this you know an email that that said you know how much he had loved the book how it made him want to run out and reread Tolkien and then he had this line that I still still remember like being shocked by, where he says, on the one hand, this is as far from a self-help book as it is possibly to be. But at the other, I think people are going to find things in this book that actually helps them dealing with grief and loss and at least thinking about how to understand it. So I was still, I was, you know, I was shocked by that. And then I was amazed, you know, I published quite a number of other things. And I've never had a company like go to bat for me the way that that Norton has has done, you know, hiring a great designer for the jacket and, you know, putting it out there and give and just try, you know, getting it showing up in stores. I mean, people keep sending me pictures of the book saying Spotted in the Wild. And it's been in Seattle and Chicago and Tennessee. And so that's that's exciting, too. But, yeah, it's been a crazy ride. The past month has been not anything I expected or experienced before. Yeah, I mean, academics don't usually get – they don't usually hit number one on Amazon. Yeah, that was – I mean, to be fair, it's number one in the literary criticism category. But still, I'm sure if you scanned the other titles, they're not academic. I beat two things on Jane Austen, so I was like, yes. To explain that, I am the treasurer of the We Hate Jane Austen Club at Wheaton. Unfortunately, right now I'm the only member, but we used to have a president before he retired. Actually, I think Mark Twain was the original president of that. Yes, he's our honorary. He said that, I consider that library a good library which contains no set of the works of Jane Austen, even if it contains no other book. Maybe an exaggeration, but funny nonetheless. I mean, it all started because some of my colleagues were just such Jane Austen fanatics, so we founded this club. And I have this one colleague who's a Victorianist but also teaches Jane Austen and loves Jane Austen. And whenever I lead the Anglo-Saxon Scholarly Sojourns Tour, we always end at Winchester and at Winchester Cathedral. and so I will take a picture of myself standing on Jane Austen's grave and send it to her without comment. To be fair, the grave is right in the middle of the floor of the church. You're supposed to be able to stand. I'm not like, you know, just standing into a cemetery, but the first time I sent it, I got back in all caps, just once, you are standing on her grave! Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. And now 80% of our listeners have just turned off the podcast. Right, exactly. Like, how could he not like Jane Austen? Sorry. What kind of monster have we invited on this show? But in that ranking of British, I wrote two books about Jane Austen that I came in ahead of. So I was, you know, okay, this is it. But that is an accomplishment. The Jane Heiser Intense, that is an accomplishment. I should also say that the audiobook has won an award. You won the Earphones Award, and you were the top audiobook of the week by Kirkus Review. Yeah, I had no idea that was coming. Like, suddenly my publisher emails me yesterday and says, congratulations. I'm like, I didn't even know I had entered the contest. Because you published. You've entered all the contests. They were very nice. And it's good because it was a real challenge doing the audio book, getting to do the audio book, and then actually doing it. And again, in both cases, both the book and the audio, I had an incredible editor for the book, and I had an incredible producer or sound engineer for the audio that made me sound much better than I actually am. So that was a real surprise and just a really exciting yesterday. I listened to the audio book, and I should make clear, you're the narrator for the audio book. And I really enjoyed it. I thought it was really good. And actually, a group of our actually, there's two different groups in our Patreon who are reading The Tower and the Ruin and discussing it. They've got two different paces, the fast readers and the slow readers. So everyone's just enjoying it. And what you said about your editor saying it makes you want to reread Tolkien. That is also what people are saying on the Patreon. Like they want to stop your book and go and read all of Tolkien. And I feel pretty safe saying that's exactly what you want them to do. That is 100% what I wanted. You know, that's the thing is I'm just trying. Mostly I feel like that a lot of what I do is just pointing things out. You know, and that's, I think, what, like, being a teacher is, too. You're not, like, you know, you're not making the new things. You're identifying the great things and saying, oh, if you look at that, oh, you should look at that also. And check out this thing over here. and maybe you can show what the pattern is or how they're connected. But yeah, exactly. I want people to go back and reread it. I'm hoping that when people, even things like when they read The Hobbit again, which I don't have a ton of analysis on The Hobbit, but I have that one section, they think about, yeah, you're right. There is this kind of dialogue going on between the heroic world of the dwarves and dragons and goblins and elves and the bourgeois mundane world that Bilbo lives in. And unlike most writers, Tolkien doesn't just resolve that one's good and one's bad. But, you know, and it maybe explains the, I know a lot of, not so much kids, but more like middle grade high school readers, when they read The Hobbit, they're like, what's the whole thing with the Arkenstone? going on there. Like, why that, you know, they don't like it because it's uncomfortable in a way. You know, the good guys suddenly aren't acting so good. I hope I gave them a reason like, this is why Tolkien did this and I think this is why you should, you know, enjoy it because he's doing something that's really, really interesting there when the tradition is either to say, like William Morris and Walter Scott right the medieval epic heroic period everyone there was so much better than we are now And that a normal like that you know when you see knights and, you know, of course, that's like, yeah, they must have been better than us. Or you can go the Mark Twain route, which is they were just so stupid and gullible and overly religious. I mean, Mark Twain's very bigoted against, you know, Catholicism also and everything in Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's court. Oh, they're just so ignorant, and one sharp operator from Bridgeport, Connecticut could rule the world if he went back there. And yet Tolkien is instead saying, hmm, each has strengths and weaknesses, and it might even be better if they talk to each other and learn from each other. And it's not as sappy. I mean, geez, you know, a couple of the main characters die. There's, you know, sadness at the end of the book, but there's something, you know, there's something there. So that's what I was hoping, you know, to be able to do is a lot of it is the fruit of 28 years of teaching Tolkien class every other year. So I guess 14 classes and just seeing, you know, what students talked about, what they were interested in, what what bothered them or what they didn't explain. It didn't understand and what I could try to explain. so at the beginning of the book I think it's in the introduction you talk about how this is going to be a hard book to read and I was curious who do you think the audience of this book is who is it written for because in my opinion it was not I mean it is scholarly I don't want to suggest it's not but it wasn't like academic in the sense of you know what I mean there are so many academic articles that you're like did you try to make this as obscure and undecipherable as possible? My whole career, I mean, you said you downloaded and you read some articles and books. Even my most, like, I don't know, out there stuff, except for, I would say, how tradition works, because unfortunately its origin was my dissertation, and I was not able to clean all the dissertation out of it. It still smells kind of dissertation-y. but I've always thought that I don't want to write for just my fellow professors. One, I don't like them very much, and I don't really care that much about their opinions, but more than that, I think, you know, the people that I most admire as scholars and writers, people like Tolkien, but people like Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, Richard Feynman, they're able to take things like particle physics and, you know, high-end mathematical models of evolution or chemistry and psychology and explain it to normal intelligent people. And I've just always wanted to do that. I mean, I joked, they actually took this, there was a line in the introduction that my editor took out where, and it was somebody else described it to me when they read a draft of the book, was that this is like Oliver Sacks and Stephen Jay Gould's books got together and had a baby, but it was in the humanities. and I don't mind that at all I kind of want to have that role because I think there's a lot of smart I'm married to an engineer there's a lot of smart people who care about language and literature and culture and feel alienated from the whole I'll say fake but artificial annoying, jargon-filled discourse, and it doesn't need to be that way. If you can explain particle physics to normal people, you'd be able to explain literature. That's where I'm coming from there. My audience is intelligent people, but people who love Tolkien. If that's a Venn diagram, there are intelligent people who don't love Tolkien, but there aren't really any Tolkien fans who are not intelligent. So it does get, you know, that it's a circle within a circle rather than an intersection. It reminds me that in France, they actually have a name for this category of book. I think you're describing, which would be high popularization, basically. And, you know, a book written by an academic for an educated, the general intelligent reader rather than for academic peers, though they could enjoy it as well. And, I mean, I think that you saw that I make, like, actual original contributions. It's not just, I mean, that's why some of it's hard because, you know, you can't really, like, it's funny, though, because one of the, I gave my first, had my first book signing last week up in Peterborough, New Hampshire at a place called Toadstool Books. and the owner of the store is a Wheaton alum and invited me up and he was saying, I did read the whole thing but I found chapter 2 with all those names kind of tough. Okay, you know, chapter 2 I can see that as being tough, which is funny because then when Kirkus Reviews put an audio sample, that's what they chose. Oh, wow. So I don't know. So, you know, what some people find difficult, others don't. But I did not water anything down. And I would say my editor at Norton was amazing, Dan Gerstle. He did not pressure me to water down the scholarly part. It was just, you know, occasionally, can you explain that better? Or let's move that to the explanatory notes. That was a comment I got a lot. Ah, okay. I can live with that. Yeah, I can see that. And I'm also just, I'm incredibly proud that I publish a book that has both footnotes and endnotes. You know, that's what I, was my goal, really. I love footnotes, so I, and I appreciate that the footnotes were in the audio book. I don't, I feel very gypped when that gets left out. That was, like, so one of the things about the audio book, I learned, I was really mad at Mike Drought for the way he wrote without thinking of the audio book. because his long parenthetical comments in the middle of sentences with em dashes or with parentheses, they might be fine on paper, but they are a bear to read and get the inflection of the sentence and of the parenthetical and then back to the sentence. And I was kind of like wanting to kick that guy sometimes when I was trying to read it. When I was listening to the book, because I knew that this would be a book that I was going to talk to you about on the air and I was going to be recommending to our listeners. So I tried to be kind of like two readers at once. You know, do I like it and am I tracking with it? But also, how is our audience going to receive this? And my opinion is exactly what you said, that there are going to be some places that feel a little challenging, but you always manage to bring it back to a very accessible place. Good. Yeah, that's really what I was trying to do. I mean, I wanted it to be that someone who's, you know, because most people have never taken a Tolkien class. And, I mean, I feel sorry for them, but they've never taken a Tolkien class. So it has to be that, you know, sometimes you have to summarize. And I tried also not to make, like, you notice there is no plot summary of The Lord of the Rings. That's right. Absolutely not. And really, I had to do some plot summaries of Silmarillion things just because they're not so well known. but even there at one point I found myself trying to summarize the Turin story and I was like no, no, no, no even if I did summarize it wouldn't make sense to anyone who hasn't read it so we're going to just assume they've read it I wanted to ask you if I may this book when you were presenting it to your publisher the pressee of this book do you think it was easier to sell them on the idea of this book now than it would have been say 25 years ago, if you had had the idea for it then. Oh, 100%. Yeah. 100%. The reason I'm thinking of a, it's kind of a famous incident amongst Tolkienists such as yourself, I know. When the BBC had their famous end-of-century book poll, it was a two-pronged sort of thing. You know, what is the favorite book of ordinary readers on the one hand, and what is the favorite book of, you know, literary critics and journalists, people in the academy? and Tolkien was hands down the favorite of regular men and women. And then I think it was James Joyce's Ulysses. Ulysses, yeah. Yeah, like anybody actually read that. I don't buy that for a second. I've read it. Okay, you've read it, but you were, please, you're so the exception. Checking the box makes me look that smart. If I remember, there was kind of a scandal because they were embarrassed to release the findings or at least some of the people in charge of this poll were because Tolkien is, like, I think he was seen as kind of lowbrow. And is that prejudice sort of dissipating today, do you think? Yes and no. And weirdly, it's dissipated because of the Peter Jackson films, not despite them, which you would think would be the opposite. Right. So, yeah, Tom Shippey's a book, J.R.R. Tolkien, Author of the Century, he leads with the Waterstones poll, the BBC poll, you know, and how scandalized the literary establishment was. Like, how could you put the Lord of the Rings on it? And there was a massive change that happened during and particularly right after the Peter Jackson films. Because before that, like, so just to give an example, when I was first, I was on the job market in 1996, after I was, you know, I defended my dissertation, I was scheduled to defend it in the spring of 97, I had a couple of interviews, and in the practice for those interviews, my whole committee, everybody there told me, tone down the Tolkien. Oh, yeah. You need to be seen. You're a serious scholar. You want to be seen as a serious scholar. So tone that down, you know, quite a bit. and the year after The Return of the King came out, I was asked to be the outside reader for a dissertation in Canada at the University of Western Ontario. And the dissertation was on Tolkien in the context of a few Victorian writers, Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies, and I forget who else. And I'm looking at this guy's vita, and everything he's published and every conference he's gone to has been a really serious, hardcore, linguistic Anglo-Saxon. And so I finally cornered him after the defense. I'm like, what's going on? You're like a technical Anglo-Saxon linguistics person. Why did you do your dissertation on Tolkien and Charles Kingsley? And he goes, because I want to get a job. So things have gone 180 degrees in less than 10 years, right, where it was now seen as you needed to do Tolkien to make yourself marketable. And partly that's because the, you know, the continual, what we both feel very strongly about, the dying off of teaching the literary tradition. So fewer and fewer students were seen as enrolling in medieval lit classes, but they would enroll in Tolkien. And then if they had a good experience there, you could move them, you know, theoretically. And then, of course, what happened is the colleges started canceling the class, so there's nothing to move them to. But they're keeping, you know, the Tolkien because it's popular. And now I think that's almost like the dominant mode. But it's also because it became part of the popular culture. And, you know, I mean, to those of us who love Tolkien, like, it's always been because of the, you know, the 60s and the hippies who loved it. And then the 70s and the Ralph Bakshi thing and 80s and Dungeons and Dragons. But in terms of where someone could be on television and make a Lord of the Rings joke, like Stephen Colbert and Jay Leno at the time, and have the audience get it, that's what really changed things. And then once it's in the popular culture field, contemporary academics feel like they have to critique it. They have to be involved in that. And so it is, I mean, it's also that the whole, like, with the overall sort of decline of reading and literacy, the college-level audience, you know, nobody's reading Ulysses anymore. You know, we used to have a class in my department. The guy who taught it retired never replaced the class. You know, it was just reading Ulysses over the course of a semester. I think even in the time probably since I've graduated college, certainly in the last 40 years, the academic space occupied by scholarship for high modernism, Joyce and Eliot and Virginia Woolf and William Butler Yeats, it seems that that space has diminished somewhat. I think absolutely. It doesn't have the dominant perch it did a half a century ago or maybe more than half a century ago. It used to be that students would come into college, and I could absolutely assume without even asking, that they'd read The Sun Also Rises, As I Lay Dying, The Great Gatsby, and those sort of touchstones from the high modernism, early to middle part of the 20th century. Sometimes they haven't heard of those books. I know. That's insane. But yeah, that really has been a change. But they haven't been replaced with, we did a survey across the department. The only book that made 80% was Frederick Douglass' autobiography of books, which actually is very good. That's interesting. And in fact, we might have made an interesting discovery about it because I hadn't been, so I hadn't read it since grad school, right? And my colleague was teaching it. It's funny because he teaches it in children's lit, even though it's not children's lit per se, but because that's something that every middle schooler or high schooler reads. So he's teaching it that way. And he's reading the opening line. I'm like, that's David Copperfield. It sounds just like David Copperfield. Frederick Douglass, get this from Dickens? And then I did some investigation and no, but it very well may be that Dickens got it from Frederick Douglass. Oh, wow. Frederick Douglass was an enormous sensation in England two years before Dickens started writing David Copperfield. And Dickens gave a copy of that book to a friend of his and recommended it. That's amazing. Wow. You know, there's but the point being that like the overall, you know, the high modernist canon has fallen apart. And it hasn't been replaced with anything. You know, for a while, it was Beloved from Toni Morrison, which I actually love. I love that book. I think it's a, you know, I think that she out-Faulkner's Faulkner, which is a cool thing to do. But now that's even out. Like, you know, there's no, it's just kind of a mix of, it's not even, I don't know what it is that the canon is now. Right. Though we're hearing more and more that students don't read whole books in high school. they just read excerpts, short stories, and abridgments, which is, I mean, it's very hard to know what to do. Then they come to my Tolkien class, and I tell them, by the way, we're reading The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, the short works, some of the scholarship. Try to keep up. Uh-huh. Yeah. I love it. But part of what we're talking about and why The Lord of the Rings was kind of an embarrassing thing for scholars to talk about or even why the Academy is embarrassed that it's so popular is because of the longstanding, not just preference, but almost they made a principle out of the fact that realism is a higher art than fantasy and romance. and that of course that's another big hill that I die on and I really liked when you talked about this in chapter four which was my favorite chapter of the book patterns because anybody who knows me knows that's my love language patterns in literature the whole book could have been that as far as I was concerned I could not get enough of that I even when I opened the table of contents I was like wait a whole chapter on patterns I'd have to wait four chapters to get there but it was it was worth it was worth it was so good but you you talked about that. And you talked about how, yes, Tolkien's not writing in the realism genre, but he is writing realistically. And one of my favorite things to say is, I tell this to my students all the time, realism is a narrative construct. And you pretty much said that in the book. You said, realism is narrative art, and it's no more realistic than literature that follows a different set of conventions. I think that, I believe that, absolutely. And maybe one of the only good things to come out of postmodernism is the demolition of the realist conceit. In other words, that, you know, Theodore Dreiser is more real than William Faulkner. Because, you know, but really all we mean there is that people like that, like Dreiser or Edith Wharton, are describing minute details of physical things, right? Like, that's the real convention in realism is that you'd say, I mean, you could say Stephen King is a realism writer when he uses brand names of, you know, he talks about, he says Captain Crunch rather than just cereal or, you know, anything like that. And it's just a set of conventions. I don't know how you say it's more realistic except that your sense of realism is brand names and the kinds of material that the clothing is made of or the cut of it or any of those details and you can find those things in Jane Austen in the Brontes I sat through a long talk one time that was on the different kinds of windows in the Brontes' writing and their meaning. And it sounds like one of those ridiculous academic things, but I actually found it fascinating because casement windows had a different meaning than sash windows in the early 19th century because you only had casement windows either in really fancy, wealthy things like castles or poor people's houses who hadn't been able to update the sash windows. So sash windows was a middle class thing. And depending on how it's being used, it's either like a positive thing, like, well, they at least have sash windows in their house, or like they're the kind of people who have sash windows instead of casemans. And nobody thinks that Brontes are realism, right? Like, you know, they have ghosts and giant liver-colored dogs. And, you know, so, you know, I just reject that idea entirely. And I would say also, you know, I would say Tolkien is more textually realistic, if you want to, you know, go that way, than the people who... So my, like, you know, my shame or whatever is when I was an undergrad, I was a creative writing major. and my idea was that I was going to write fantasy literature that did it right, meaning it was going to be fantasy literature in the realism mode, and it was horrible. It was just awful. I look back at it, and I'm like, I can't stand to read this sentence again, and that's because that turns out to be not what the conventions of fantasy are or what people want out of fantasy literature. I mean, I will say that's probably what you would call the magical realism, right? The 100 Years of Solitude, or the short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a very old man with enormous wings, where an angel shows up in somebody's backyard from a storm, but his feathers are all dirty and beaten up, and he gets tipped, and they end up sticking him in a chicken coop because he smells bad. And, like, nobody wants that. I mean, you know, people are like, oh, wow, that's so cool and interesting. that these Latin American writers developed this, or you could say Borges is involved there. Borges is more like Tolkien in the textualization of stuff. But I just don't think that realism equals good. It's just realism equals realism, and it's just another name for things. You can call it modernist, call it postmodern, call it whatever name you want. That's just a way of carving out a category out of the complexities of all the different variations. Yeah, it's a weird example of how in the vocabulary of literary criticism, sometimes words that should be descriptive merely become laudatory or pejorative. realistic I would say is maybe certainly in a stage of the history of literary criticism was one such word. And I think it's funny too when you look back on it, right? We have in art there's Soviet realism. Yeah, right. When you look back at those pictures nothing could be more like fake. You know, like oh, the scrapping young man holding a sheaf of grain with, you know, and it's like socialist realism and it was propaganda. Totally fake but somehow people thought that was more realistic. I don't even know if it's more realistic than like Art Deco, which was going on at the same time, right? They're just different. Exactly. And that's another hill for me to die on that all literature is conventional and you just have to understand the conventions of it. And we're used to the quote unquote realistic convention. So we decide that's what's correct. And then we read another kind of convention and we decide it's wonky. And of course, Tolkien is using a lot of conventions. and I liked that you pulled a lot in the book from On Fairy Stories and you showed, you know, what he's doing with those conventions, escape, recovery, consolation. Wow, that's funny because I got a ton of criticism that I didn't talk enough about On Fairy Stories. Really? Like it didn't have its own chapter, but it was everywhere. Because I feel like I don't understand it enough to, you know, explicate the whole thing. I'm more like pulling from the different pieces of it that I do understand. Right, right. Giuseppe Pizzini, his book, which it's funny because we didn't know each other. We're working on, you know, our books came out within like three months of each other. And his book, Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation, is essentially reading Tolkien entirely through on fairy stories, like almost to the numbered section way. But we ended up with whole chapters on frame narratives and on patterning and stuff. So it's really interesting that we came sort of from totally different angles. I think of myself as a literary historian, and he's a classicist, but I think he thinks of himself as coming to Tolkien more from the philosophical and religious point of view. You know, I feel like I should say this, too. I listened, and a lot of our listeners listened to the Modern Scholar series you did on Tolkien in the West, which are fantastic lectures, but you don't just recycle that for this book. This book had a lot of new things that I hadn't heard you say before. Not for lack of wanting to. So what happened, the way this book came about, I'd been telling this joke for too long that I had a Tolkien book that's been 80% finished for eight years because it was. And what I'd done is I'd started with the, you know, I wrote the lectures for Tolkien and the West. And by the way, the way that modern scholar things work, at least with my, the producer, is I was only allowed to have four pages of notes for any lecture because he didn't want reading. And he's like, you academics always just read your own prose. So, you know, make it notes and extemporize around them. Now, I will say they were very like 10 point font. You know, they were very there were a lot of notes, but it was still notes. And so my idea was I was going to turn Tolkien in the West into a book on Tolkien. And I tried and I quit and I tried and I quit and I did a bunch of other stuff instead because I was never at all satisfied with it. And then in the fall of 22, I got – it was right before the Rings of Power Amazon series was coming out. And I had a New York Times reporter reach out to me. And you learn a lot of stuff. And you learn that, like, for example, we want to run something in the opinion section that says, you know, essentially don't treat Middle Earth like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Do you know anyone who would be willing to write that? And I'm like, well, yeah, I would be willing to write that. I mean, they were like, you know, do you know a scholar who feels that way? I'm like, I feel that way. So there was a lot of back and forth, and I gave them what they wanted, but it was okay because it was what I wanted to say anyway. One of the things I said was I haven't seen. I'm not one of the people who's seen the previews of The Rings of Power. They're like, that's better. Just write what you would make as an argument because our audience won have seen The Rings of Power either because of when we going to run this So I wrote this thing it was called they titled it Don Make Tolkien a Cinematic Universe And the next day I got an email from Dan Gerstle, who was an editor at WW Norton, and he said, I read your article, I liked it, you must have a Tolkien book in you. And I laughed, and I said, you know, I've had one that's been done, 80% done for eight years. And he said, well, why don't you send me a treatment in two weeks? You know, send me what you're going to do and we'll talk more. Now, this was, you know, we'll get to this, I'm sure, later, but this was in the, you know, the first few months after my son had passed away. And I was, you know, kind of, well, still kind of a mess. And I went and looked at that old book that, you know, the draft, and I hated all of it. It was just, it didn't feel right. It didn't feel real. It felt way too much like following the pattern of all Tolkien books, which is you have an introduction that talks about his life. Then you have a chapter on The Hobbit. You have a chapter in The Lord of the Rings. You have a chapter in The Silmarillion. You do the minor works or the scholarship, and then, you know, you rap. And I just, I didn't feel right about that. And I was basically going, planning on sending Dan back saying, I actually don't have a Tolkien book. And I was sitting up just late one night and I started like typing, you know, like, well, what would I say if I was putting this together? And I put together the kind of general structure of the tower and the ruin. then, which is I'm going to try to be synthetic about Tolkien's work all the way through rather than devote a chapter, you know, to each work. And I'm going to try to look at the things that make it feel different. And I'm going to talk about the way I read it, not because I think I'm so particularly interesting, but because I'm the only reader that I can be 100% accurate. about. Right? Like, that's why, you know, people say it's like a memoir, and I appreciate that. But the real reason is that's my tool for understanding it, is how does it affect me? And the way to get away from, you know, solipsism on that is, if I explain it well enough, do you at least see how it could affect me that way? So rather than making up some kind of, you know, the ideal reader, or the typical person will read this like this, because I don't know what those people think. And all the writers who do say that, you know, all the scholars who say that, the horizon of expectations, I think they're just kidding themselves. Like they, they're just telling you what they feel anyway, but they're hiding it behind this letter. So I'm just going to, you know, say that. And I thought what I was going to write was, and I can explain how this book is, feels like an experience and how it is a comfort in grief. and that's what I intended to write. I sent it off to Dan and he wrote back, this is not at all what I expected, but I think we should go with it. And he offered me a contract and more importantly, he offered me a deadline. And I had a sabbatical coming up and I started writing. And it was a struggle. It was really hard to take all this other work I'd done and trash it, essentially, and rewrite it from scratch. Like, there's nothing in the book that I pasted in from elsewhere, except maybe a couple paragraphs from an essay I'd written called The Tower and the Ruin for a book that came out of Ireland in, like, 2013, I think, just because, like, that's where the name came from. And it just sort of pulled together. But even to the last minute, like, the chapter that's called text was called heterotextuality. And Dan's like, you know, I read my eye down that table of contents, and that just stands out like a sore thumb. You need to come up with another name for that. Like, it's amazing. I've never had an editor in all these years, all the things I've published. I haven't had like bad editors, but what I've realized is that academic editors are either gatekeepers or cheerleaders. And Dan, as an editor, was I'm going to make this book better, but better means more like what you want to say. Right. Rather than like what I want to say. I was so lucky. And I was also lucky. I've had so much bad luck with editors. They've been fired out from under me. When I did the Tolkien Encyclopedia, the entire encyclopedia division was fired one afternoon, and it was only that my book was almost in production, but still they never input all the corrections I'd made by hand. The new person coming in wasn't really an editor. It was during the financial crisis lead up, and he's just like, yeah, we sent it to a professional copy editor. It's fine. Dahl Golder is spelled three different ways on two pages. Oh, my gosh. I'm sure that killed me. I still have the box in the attic that I must have spent 20 hours marking up every page of this gigantic thing, and then they told me not to send it to them because it was too late. It had already gone to print. So instead, all of that, I had all these bad luck with editors. Dan got promoted to be editor-in-chief of Norton while the book was still in production. Oh, nice. You had some good luck this time. Yeah, exactly. I was really lucky. And same thing like with the audio. I had a great I had an absolutely great sound engineer who kept fixing mistakes I'd made, catching mistakes that I didn't even know I'd made as as I was reading them so that we could stop and go back and rerecord the sentence. I don't know how anyone reads with that level of attention and notice you left an S off the end of a word. I really liked the personal anecdotes and because I really reflected on this afterwards and I think you did accomplish what you tried to. I think that the personal anecdotes end up being sort of a model of how a person reads less than about it's all about me. And I thought it transcended you. And I also got really excited because another big idea that we promote on this podcast is that what you're supposed to have when you read is a literary experience. and we have we have done actually two series on c.s lewis's experiment and criticism where we've tried to explain like hey this is what he's saying don't analyze it to death have a literary experience and very often people struggle to understand what that means um and that was one of the things that kept getting me excited the whole way through i was reading it going he's explaining what it is to have a literary experience so you divided the book really into two parts So the first half is how Tolkien created this world, and then the second half is how we receive it. Yeah, that wasn't – I mean, that is how it turned out. I can't say that was an articulated part of the plan in the beginning. It was more that – I mean, the beginning part was just I was like, how did he do this? And I wanted to answer all the possible hows, right? Like, so how specifically did it happen over time? because he didn't set out, you know, he didn't set out to write The Lord of the Rings. He set, and he didn't set out, like one of the things I tried to finish beating to death, the dead horse, of that he did not set out to create a mythology for England. That's not what the plan was. You know, the plan was something else, and it evolved over time. And I wanted to point out that a lot of the things that it was, it's actual the course of development and composition that gives it the characteristics that it has. And, you know, I wish I had come up with this term before I published the book instead of after. but the book the thing that's special about Tolkien and particularly about The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is it has a grain like wood grain right? You could have some extruded plastic thing that's flawless, it has no grain at all and it's as perfect as perfect can be or you can have something that's all full of what we call figuring in like hobbyist carpentry and figured you know wood is the the most valuable wood, even though it's the hardest to work with, because it gives you the beauty of the naturalness, but it's also not even and it's not consistent. And, I mean, the term of grain comes from Roland Barthes, of all people, you know, the arch postmodernism guy, who has an essay called The Grain of the Voice, where he argues that certain French opera singers that I've never heard of are better than other French opera singers I've never heard of, even though the second group has a more pure and perfect tone, he likes the humanness of the first group. And he says, because their voice has a grain. And if you think about, like, even in terms of that, like in terms of popular music, we like things that are imperfect. You know, people like Bruce Springsteen. He's not the greatest singer in the world. Nobody's going to put Bruce Springsteen, you know, in an opera. thing, but there's something about it that gives this sense of authenticity and emotion. And I think that Tolkien's work is, it's all the little things that might be thought of as imperfections that make it feel more true. I'll use true instead of real. It feels more true than, you know, so many of the generic fantasy that's being written now. I mean, I think that you could say, for example, that Brandon Sanderson is a really good craftsman, and he polishes everything, and he's got a clear, you know, his world building has been obviously thought out in excruciating detail, and, you know, it's complexity, but it lacks something that Tolkien has. I think it lacks grain. I really liked those sections when you kept talking about how does he create the effect of making it feel true. You also talked a lot about, well, to use C.S. Lewis's phrase in experiment, the atmosphere. He has a medieval atmosphere. And my husband likes to tease me sometimes because I can have very, very un-technically precise intuitive categories. And so ever since I was a kid, when I would read a book, I would feel like this book has heavy sentences or this book has light sentences. And I didn't mean by that like a lot, like Charles Dick has like a lot of words or big words. It wasn't that. It was more like there was a weight to the world in those sentences. And some books just felt like the words were floating off the page. I realize that's an almost ridiculous thing to say. But that was an interesting distinction. I've never thought of this before. Okay. Yeah. Another one of Angelina's crazy distinctions. And I felt like what you were describing in the book was why Tolkien's sentences feel heavy to me. I mean, that makes sense to me. I obviously didn't think of it in those exact terms, but though now I'm thinking of a line from the Monsters and the Critics, where one of the things is Tolkien complains that all these people have said that Beowulf has dignity, and it has weighty words, and yet they then say it's bad after they say it has all these good things. and he's very frustrated with that. He's like, higher praise you could not find and yet, he's talking about W.P. Kerr, not the Neil Ripley Kerr of the Catalog of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts but the W.P. Kerr, the great Victorian polymath scholar who was an absolutely great scholar and, you know, read everything, it seems. One of those, like the last people who'd read everything that was published, ever written in the Middle Ages and had an opinion about it. There's not many like that. Lewis was like that, too. More so than Tolkien. Lewis read everything. That's right. And so to go back to the essay, The Monster and the Critics, one of the things that Tolkien describes is that the Beowulf poet creates a world in which you're entering a room, and in that room is all these doors and windows, and you can look out of them and see another room that has all these doors and windows. and I also felt like you were describing how Tolkien does that also. There's just a world, and you can keep opening doors, and there's a whole world. And I guess, to take my analogy of thin and heavy, it's kind of like, do I feel like I'm in a real house, or do I feel like I'm in a Hollywood soundstage? Yes, I think that's right. And I don't think he soundstages anything. I mean, the closest thing that you could see to that would be that little throwaway, you know, the Cats of Queen Beruthiel, because when he used it, he didn't have a story behind it. Later on, he did. He made up one. But when he used it, it was just like, you know, I need a metaphor. Cats, Queen Beruthiel sounds good, because cats can see in the dark. You don't need to know the details of that. But yes, and that's, I mean, that's the crazy thing. It's also, by the way, one of the problems that I find in teaching Tolkien is that I always have a few students who really have so thoroughly read The Silmarillion, and they know what all the references are, which is what Tolkien intended when he, you know... I mean, I talk about that in the book, that by the time he gets to 1949, when he's finishing off the narrative, he knows he's got something good. He knows The Lord of the Rings is good. It's fascinating, too, that Allen and Unwin published it because they thought it was important art. And that's why you also get those initial reviews from people like Edmund Wilson and Edwin Muir, which is they're treating it as if it's got pretenses at high art, and they're upset because it's different than the high art they're used to. It's only after the whole 60s counterculture, phenomenon that Tolkien gets put down for being middle or lowbrow, in the initial reviews of it, it's seen as trying to be, you know, Lewis compares it to Orlando Furioso, which is a terrible comparison, and Tolkien thought it was a terrible comparison too, but he didn't compare it to, you know, Mark Twain or, you know, he was comparing it to something that's trying to be literary art, but it just didn't fit all the, you know, we talked about this, it didn't fit all the conventions. So I think that that's, you know, what I was trying to get at was sort of how did this happen? Some of it was intentional. Some of it was he just stumbled into it. Some of it, it seems clear to me that he just, in the innumerable revisions and the fact that he had to type it himself, but he couldn't touch type. So, you know, it was a very laborious process of typing up the entire manuscript. he ended up with seeming inconsistencies and what some people would think of as flaws that actually contribute to making it feel not like a stage set. What's the difference between a stage set? It's a beautiful door, but then there's nothing behind it. With Tolkien, there's the equivalent of the pipes and the electrical conduit And the repair that somebody made 20 years ago the wrong way is all inside that wall. And you can sense it. You can feel it. Absolutely. It makes such a difference because I'm the kind of person when I'm watching a movie, I can tell if there's nothing in that coffee mug. Right? They're talking. They're swinging it around. I'm thinking it would have killed you to put water in there. You could have some weight or a woman's purse when she obviously, the actress has nothing in that bag. It's obvious the way it's moving on her body and she's swinging. Those kinds of things drive me crazy and pull me out of the story. So, again, maybe I'm very sensitive to that. But I liked all the technical stuff in the book about how he pulled that off. I wanted to ask you, you had mentioned Edwin Muir and Edmund Wilson. Edmund Wilson especially had a pretty notoriously damning review. Those awful orcs. Yeah, yes. Now, and, of course, Tolkien's lifelong friend Lewis writes, you know, very glowingly when the books are first published, and W.H. Auden also. Other than that, are there any major critical names in that first wave of critics who respond to the book who give him a positive notice? Or was it kind of just critically trod upon for a long time? No. I thought it was. And certainly Shippy and others helped to give the impression that all the right people hated The Lord of the Rings when it came out. But we just published an article in the latest Tolkien Studies where somebody went back and read all, and tabulated and read all the reviews in the first two years. And actually, most of them are positive. Oh, really? Really? That's interesting. Yeah, most of them are positive. They're not mostly by people that you recognize, but they turned out to be like people who were sort of big in the British literary establishment in the 19th. Throw some names at me, if you could indulge me. If I can run in the other room and grab it, I can't do it off the top of my head. We can pause for a second, yeah. Okay. Okay. So the article is by Matthew Thompson Handel, or Handel, H-A-N-D-E-L-L, and it's reconsidering the early critical response to The Lord of the Rings. I mean, he argues also that even Muir and Duggan, who was another, like, sort of the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, who did get quoted all the time for the things that they said that, like, it lacks... I'm sorry, is that Alfred Duggan? Yes. Okay. I know the name, yeah. Who gets, you know, quoted for a negative review. It turns out even those reviews are a lot more equivocal than how they're quoted. So Muir reviewed each volume as it came out. And I mean, I quote him, too, as saying like one of the dumbest things that ever has been said about the Lord of the Rings. But he also had a lot of positive things to say, especially in the first two books. I'm looking for the list. Here we go. Paul Jordan Smith reviewed The Return of the King in the Los Angeles Times. And he said, When great scholars are blessed with wit and sometimes permit a vigorous imaginative sense to play at ease in their libraries and romp through their gardens, you end up with something like the Lord of the Rings. Charles A. Brady, who was a professor of English at Canisius College in Buffalo, reviewed The Return of the King in the Buffalo Evening News. He was positive. Howard Spring for Country Life. Louis J. Halle in the Saturday Review and was he said the Lord of the Fellowship of the Ring was so readable that this reviewer was all but incapable of putting it down at any point Tolkien's inventedness is of that order which because it challenges the credulity of us ordinary mortals we call genius Wow Derek A. Traversi in a British periodical called The Month which was a respected periodical. He was a Shakespearean, and he's called The Lord of the Rings a literary feat unique in recent times. There is a blending of heroic pessimism with the restrained hope that comes with Christian faith. Anthony Boucher, or Boucher, I went to school with a kid who was Boucher, spelled B-O-U-C-H-E-R, but I bet it's Boucher, published in a magazine of fantasy and science fiction, so you can expect that that would be positive. and Bernard Levin in The Truth a British periodical though he wrote it under a pen name Tolkien's imagination is so rich and fantastic in nature and his book is conceived on so vast and audacious a scale that it seems almost as though he has added something not only to the world's literature but to its history oh wow, that's a good line that's a really good line that's really interesting I guess I had, like everybody else sort of been under the impression that while, you know, Tolkien sold a lot of books right out of the gate, everyone with a pen hated it? Yeah, it turns out not so much. Not the case, yeah. And I think that the impression and probably a lot of the critical dislike came when it became such a youth culture book. Oh, okay. Came with the hippies. With Led Zeppelin and the hippies and all that. Yes, exactly. And then, you know, because it wasn't marketed at that at all. Like, it was marketed, you know, Alan and Unwin, Tolkien had the greatest contract in, I don't know if you guys know this, but, you know, most writers, right, they might get 20%. Someone like Stephen King gets, like, 30% of revenue. Alan and Unwin told Tolkien, look, we cannot give you an advance on this. We think we're actually going to lose money. and they printed 3,000 copies of the Fellowship and of the Two Towers and only 2,500 copies of the Return of the King because they were worried that interest might have fallen off by then. So they said, we can't give you an advance so if there ever are any profits, you get 50%. Oh my gosh. The greatest author's contract in human history, right? Because of course there were and still are an enormous, a lot of profits coming from The Lord of the Rings. So they did it for art. Like, that was what they said. Rainer Unwin, who was the 10-year-old who'd read The Hobbit and told his dad to publish it, was by then taking over from Sir Stanley, and Rainer's like, we're doing this because we believe that it's a great work. Not because, you know, we think we're going to make any money off of it. I love that a publisher like that exists. or existed. Well, no, still exist because we're that kind of publishing house. And for our listeners who might be wondering, who is this Edmund Wilson who said such horrible things about Tolkien? This guy was just a snob. And this is the same guy who wrote, who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd? Like, I think he just hated anything that was popular. Yeah, and he's kind of the Mandarin gatekeeper of high modernism for a long time. He finished Scott Fitzgerald's last novel for him after Fitzgerald died prematurely. He was the one who finished The Last Tycoon. The Last Tycoon, yeah. I think the last couple of chapters of that are more his than Fitzgerald. And he wrote a book called Patriotic Gore that was about Civil War stuff, And he, like, obviously just has a complete blank spot where understanding Christianity would be anywhere because he's going on about the Battle Hymn of the Republic. And it's like, you know, where the line, she says, in the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the seas. Like, well, those lilies make no sense in there. Oh, my. Oh, my. Wow. Yeah, we don't want any images of purity or anything to be contrasted with the blood that's coming in the next, you know, stanza. But I know that Christianity has no understanding of that. We're right back to conventions again, not understanding the conventions. Yeah. So in the second half of the book, when you're talking about how to receive it, and this goes back to what you said about the personal anecdotes, you use yourself as the reader. This is how I have had an experience with Tolkien. And that was all so well done. You talked about your dad reading it to you as a boy and then holding on to that experience again when your parents got divorced. And so, like, to me, that was you going through on fairy stories, though. Like, you know, this was the escape. I never thought of it that way. That's amazing that you say that because I really never thought I was, like, structuring it that way. Well, I kept thinking about that, though. I was like, and this is the consolation. This is what Tolkien's describing, you know, that you were getting consoled. And I really appreciated that – how do I say this? You keep making the point that the consolation is not, and now we don't feel bad in this world. Yeah, that was the hardest part, actually, because I wanted to say that. Like, I thought that's what I was going to say when I started to write it. And then again, this is, I think, you know, you know how Hemingway is always rambling on about honest this and honest that, and like, especially when you know Hemingway is like personal history, you're like, Ernest, what are you talking about? But now I get it, right? Which is that if you're really honest with yourself, you can't say the easy thing there, which is, oh, it made me feel better. Because I didn't feel better. I don't feel better. But I can handle it because of, you know, the scene, talking about the chapter with my parents, it was, you know, it was the blizzard of 78. so people haven't read it yet and there was this the snow because of all the wind and stuff this weird snow formation behind my house where it was like 10 feet high pile of snow and then in the middle of it was almost like a basin that was scraped out and I dug a tunnel in there so I had this amazing snow fort that I named Nargothrond after Finrod you know cave fortress in The Lord of the Rings And on the night that my parents had their worst fight, I ran away in, like, you know, I don't know if it was sub-zero weather. It was very cold. And I went out and I sat in that snow fort. Like, you know, you're a kid. You're a 10-year-old kid. You sort of, like, don't understand how life can be like this. And the moon came out. It was a full moon. And there was this blue light everywhere. And the clouds were just, like, whipping past the moon. And it was so beautiful. And I don't think I would have understood that beauty in the same way, except that I'd been reading the Silmarillion obsessively. And, you know, what he keeps saying there, right, is that Morgoth could send this frigid, freezing cold down upon everyone to torment them. But from that, you got the beauty of snow and ice and wind and clouds. And it all just made a kind of very hard to articulate sense at that moment. It certainly didn't fix anything. It didn't make anything all better. It didn't make it not happen or make it go away. but you know I went back in the house and life continued and I had that that moment of and that you know I think you know beauty what he keeps showing is that beauty can come out of catastrophe and you know like the the evil people the orcs or whoever it is from Sauron knock the head off that king statue and throw it in a ditch and white flowers grow around it like a garland and the setting sun, which is only so dramatic because the whole cloud of Mordor is over everything else, right? So everything that Sauron has done to make things ugly and terrible and then Frodo sees the setting sun hit that and the crown of flowers and he says, look Sam, the king has a crown again. They cannot conquer forever. and I think it's you know it's it is just deeply true I kept coming back I didn't put this in the book because it didn't fit anywhere I kept rereading that passage and even saying it out loud during everything that happened in the COVID and post-COVID era I just kept saying they can't conquer forever they can conquer now but they will not be able to conquer forever and um you know that's the, to me, that's the real hope in, in the Lord of the Rings. Even if it's not, you know, that, that the ring gets thrown into the volcano and evil is taken out of the world. It's just that they can't, they can't conquer forever. The star, you can put the, you can have Mount Doom belch out all the clouds in, you know, and block everything and the wind blows and there's that star. And it's still there and it's not going away. No matter what happens down here, the Arendelle star is still up there. I think that that was a really powerful vision. There's a letter, there's some material we published in Tolkien Studies a few years ago. Robert Murray was a friend of the Tolkien family who converted to Catholicism and then became a priest based on the influence of the Tolkienians. and an American grad student was writing to him to get information, you know, writing a dissertation on the Silmarillion or something, and he wrote back and he said, what you don't understand is that Mr. Tolkien was a very depressed individual all the time. And, you know, so turning him into this guru, turning him into, you know, that's, and that's what I try to say in the book where I really do think that he just hoped he could get to that place, not a place where there's no tears, but where the tears are not bitter, right? When the tears are blessed and without bitterness. And I mean, I think he succeeded. I don't know if that helps. You know, I didn't know him. He died when I was five years old. But I hope it helped. Like, I hope he knew that he had that he'd done that. I mean, the man had not had an easy life. Right. And I didn't talk about it to a whole great extent because it's not a biographical book. It's a history. I thought you did a really good job with that in the book. And I have long felt that myself. And you do bring that out in the book that, you know, even though Tolkien believes very deeply personally, theologically in a eucatastrophe in the gospel, but also in his works, because he talks about this on a fairy story, he believes that the stories work with the eucatastrophe, right, the unexpected surprise, the turn that's going to lift it up. That doesn't mean he believes in a world of sentimental happy endings, and this is not Pollyanna and, you know. The hero of The Lord of the Rings ends up mutilated permanently, you know, permanently post-traumatic stress syndrome, wherever you want to describe shell shock, you want to describe Frodo, and can't even live on in safe, happy retirement for more than a year. Or, you know, what, two years, close to two years. Like, that's not a sentimental ending. You know, that's why I got so upset with Edmund Muir, where he's like, well, you know, Lorien remains in its timeless felicity. Well, except that they explicitly said that Lorien doesn't. Except that that's gone. The magic of the Elven Rings is gone. The elves have to leave. Bilbo and Frodo are going off to die. Though, you know, other people, and there's some letter that people interpret, meaning that Frodo would have stayed alive in the Blessed Land long enough for Sam to come see him at the end of Sam's life. I can't push myself, like, you know, to say, to overread it that much. But maybe. Tolkien got a little, you know, I mean, also, I remember reading it to my daughter, and she's like, Shadowfax is on the boat. And I'm like, it doesn't actually say that, but okay. I mean, because I don't know, do you think Gandalf just let the horse go? He's going to go on the boat, like, bye, Shadowfax, wander off to Rohan. So she interpreted that Shadowfax had to go on the boat, too. Yeah, so you talk about your dad reading it to you. You talk about you reading it to your own children. And then in the last chapter, which I was totally crying through the last chapter, the last chapter is amazing and painful and beautiful. And also you used your own experiences to transcend yourself, though, because I think it really speaks to like and you do connect it to on fairy stories explicitly in the last chapter. And it does. That was that was a complete piece of luck, a total piece of luck. And I mean it like in, so I had been struggling on that last chapter. I rewrote it so many times. I was very unhappy with it. I'm approaching my deadline. I knew I wanted the last word in the book to be hope, but I did not know how I was going to get there. And I didn't even know what the hope, how I was going to say the word. I just knew I wanted the last word to be, to be hope. And I was, I just didn't know where to go. and I picked up on Fairy Stories to check a reference to something we were publishing in Tolkien Studies. And I flipped it open to the, it opened up, it's like the copy that's up there somewhere. And I opened up to the last page and there's that thing from the Black Bull of Norway. And I realized, one, I didn't even know what that story was. I'd read Fairy Stories, you know, on Fairy Stories like 10 times. I never had bothered to go and read the Black Bull of Norway. Nor had I until you brought it up. and yet he ends with this but the big thing was he said and she turned right, that's the last line so she has a lament seven years I serve for thee the glassy hill I clomb for thee, the bloody shirt I rung for thee, and wilt not now I woken and turned to me, and he turned and so I went and like, oh what does this mean I started, I had this like nagging feeling that this was important that I understand this. And I went and read it, and what had been floating around in my head, and, you know, it's hard to talk about, but, like, the worst moment was when my wife, my daughter, and I win our tears. I watched it happen. Like, it actually fell on, you know, my son's face. And I remember thinking, like, he should wake up. Like, that's how the story's supposed to work. Right? There's supposed to be some kind of like magic in it that you're, you know, the tears of the people that love you are supposed to bring you back. And it didn't. And he didn't turn. And when the word turn like just clicked and I read that story and I'm like, that's how I'm ending the book. That's how that's how it, you know, it goes. Because on fairy stories, because it's a fairy story, there is that eucatastrophe. Right. So everything about that story, just for people who haven't read The Black Bull of Norway, because it's not the most common story ever, it's a washerwoman's daughter. A black magical bull shows up. She has to follow it, and she doesn't follow some rule, so she ends up having to do all these horrible tasks. She ends up in a valley with sides of glass that she can't get out of. She has to serve with a smith for seven years. then he gives her iron shoes which in at least some versions of the story are nailed to her feet so she can climb out of this valley of glass then she finds a witch the witch has the black bull now been turned back into a prince but he's asleep she gets three chances to wake him up with her singing in two of them nothing happens the third one she's trying again but this time the witch had spilled the sleeping potion and as readers we're all like oh here it goes you know the third time and then he wakes up and turns to her and everything is good after all that suffering. And it just, that was like when that last chapter came together, and it was 100% luck. I would not have looked at the end of On Fairy Stories if I hadn't had to check a quote for Tolkien Studies to find that. So, you know, I don't know. I felt like that something was saying this is what you need to look at. And then it made sense. and even then there was a lot of cutting and revising because I had thought as I said in that I thought I was going to say and it gives us consolation and makes us feel better and then I did it wrong another way like I tell you writing is like I'm just making mistakes and eventually something falls out which is that I said you know and nothing can and I was going to try to end on that but no that's not really true either and then it just clicked like oh you know what Asking a book to make up for the death of your child, that's a big ask. You know, that's maybe like a little too much to ask out of any book, you know, except like the Bible. And I was asking too much of it. But I was, there was, there's something. And I think that something is this feeling that you can bear the grief and the loss if it has some kind of shape. If you can understand it and conceptualize it in some way. And then, you know, you can have some hope. You know, I think about that line from On Fairy Stories, right? Joy beyond the walls of the world. That's what hope is, I think. you know and again I could have dove into all the stuff in Morgoth's ring where Tolkien has this debate where they delineate the different kinds of hope and someone on Reddit before I stopped reading Reddit things about Tower and the Ruin because they were just making me mental terrible idea I did not do that yes exactly it's like reading YouTube comments nothing good can come out but I was saying like drought doesn't understand the two types of hope and I'm like yes I do but it wasn't relevant, you know, in this case. A big disquisition on Estelle versus whatever the other word for hope is, is not the point. So, I mean, he had thought deeply about these things. But also that there was a simple answer, which was the one he gave to Lewis, right? Which is like in, Lewis says, mythology are lies breathed through silver. And, you know, Tolkien's like, well, in the gospel, though, it's true. And then the wind blows by and converts Lewis to Christianity. I mean, the way the story is, it's a great story. I imagine that it was a little more complicated at the time. Well, it's like Lewis says in The Great Divorce, when you're living your life forward, nothing makes sense, but at the end you look back and then everything seems to be. Yeah, and I would say that I have learned that writing a book like this one, it's like that. Like so many things that other people point. I got a comment on, I think it was a comment on Twitter, of all things, where someone, but I think it was from, like, your group, where someone says it was, the book was teaching them about being, how to write, like, to be a better writer. And what's funny is my editor kept pushing that. It's like, you're really telling, you know, you're telling people how to write fantasy well. And I'm like, I don't see it, but okay. And it's only after the fact that, oh, okay, I guess. Because I was just trying to understand it, not, you know, trying to tell you how to do it. Yeah, because you were coming at it from this is how he created a masterful story. And if you had come from it the other way, here's how to write a masterful story, it wouldn't have worked. I mean, and Richard Feynman says that about physics. He's like the people who discover something are not usually the best people at explaining it. Because they had to fight their way through this thicket to discover it. And it's the other people who come along later, like, well, obviously, drought says this and this. Like, well, another example is for the New York Times article. My editor there, this guy, Ezekiel Queku, he's like, you know, well, what I loved about your book was that you showed how Tolkien's own sort of broken life created this beauty. And, you know, the same thing for you. And I'm like, what? And he's like, oh, you don't see that, do you? I'm like, what beauty are you talking about? And so that that became like how that article got kind of hashed out back and forth. I was not and I'm not willing to say, you know, like that. Well, you know, because terrible things happen to me, I was able to write a good book because I'll be honest, the trade is not worth it. I would undo that trade in a second. I would, you know, like wouldn't even be a thought. But my wife kept saying that, too. Like, as I work in this, you're like, you couldn't have written this book if we hadn't lost our son. I don't like thinking about this way because I feel like that, you know, I don't know. I feel like it's like making a trade, and I don't want to make that trade. Of course. But it wasn't something I had a choice in anyway, so. Right. And I'm sure that Tolkien would have traded to not have World War I and World War II. Yeah, I think exactly. He could have brought his mother back. You know, he would have been happy not to ever rape the Lord of the Rings or anything else. If he could have had his friends not, you know, die in the first few weeks that they were there. Yeah, absolutely. I think the other thing, and you mentioned the patterns chapter. One of the things I've heard from people who like that chapter is talking about the health sickness pattern. Because it's interesting how many people wrote to me talking about their own experience with chronic illness. and that they turn to the Lord of the Rings, and it's helpful. And I think that the reason for that is that Tolkien, it's not really written that he had a chronic illness, but he had to. French fever wasn't curable until certain antibiotics were invented in 1928. That would have been 14 years with it, right? Or, sorry, 12 years. I mean, you know, that's a long time to have a high-powered Lyme disease. And it's not clear that, of course, that he ever got those antibiotics anyway. So every time the man got a cold, he ended up with pneumonia. And, you know, so he did deal with that. You know, I think in the footnote I gave the crazy list. If you just go through the letters and look under health, all the times they mentioned all the things he went through. He had like a, you know, he was a sufferer of chronic illness and he understood that pattern that you see with Frodo, with Sam. I mean, with Frodo, and then, you know, I think that he breaks the pattern in Cirith Ungol and then restores it in the field of Cormelan. Well, we have taken up a lot of your time. Oh, wow. This is an easy conversation, so I didn't even realize. I know, right? It's just like, whoa, wow. My dogs are going to be like, hello, we want to walk. I do want to ask you a practical thing. So you talk about your dad reading it to you. You talk about you reading it to your kids. We have an audience of people who are very devoted to reading out loud to their kids. Do you have like some just practical tips? So, you know, if somebody's listening right now, she's like, I've got a six-year-old. How do I read Lord of the Rings? Am I worried for nothing? Because I guess I get the sense sometimes when people say, oh, I don't know if my kid could follow the Lord of the Rings at that age. I think maybe they're expecting the wrong thing. Like they think, well, he's never going to be able to keep track of all these backstories and characters. And I always think, but he shouldn't even try. No, it doesn't matter, right? It'll just wash over you. What's your practical advice for somebody who wants to read this? Well, the first thing is if you're going to do voices, think it through because you're stuck with it for a long time, whatever that voice is. I know like my son had no patience for Treebeard. I mean, he loved Treebeard as a character, but anytime I would start to, I will read Treebeard very soon. He's like, oh, not Treebeard again. And he would roll over and pretend to go to sleep. But I don't know if they, you know, I don't know if they totally understood it, but they felt it. Right. And the interesting thing for me was that the first time I read The Death of Thorin, I'm like crying my eyes out and my kids, you know, when they were five, they were sort of like, okay, whatever. Read it again, like when they're seven and it was like, it was a tough night putting them to bed. Thorin and Thorin have to die. So, I think that, I don't think you can go wrong in part because Tolkien wrote it for oral delivery, not because he expected you to be reading it to your kids, but because he was reading it out loud to his friends, the Inklings. And so it is written to be read aloud. You always know who's speaking. You always know when someone finishes and another person picks up and things change. It's a lot of landscape description that puts you in the position of the hobbits. And I don't know. I don't think that there's anything to worry about. Maybe six is too young. You know, I read, like I said, five and then seven. Seven, they definitely got it. Five, they got some of it. And it's also, you know, it's like it's something that Daddy was working on. You know, so they were, and we got invited to talk at conferences or conventions, and they would like, you know, Mitchell really liked the little figures that people create. And Reese loved looking at the costumes that people sewed. And, you know, when they showed up and did like a costume show. So, but, yeah, in terms of reading it out loud, the practical thing is just to take your time. Don't try to push through each chapter. And, you know, I think they probably fell asleep various times. And, you know, you have, when you have young children, that's not a bad thing either. That's right. when they fall asleep early because it was soothing or whatever. I mean, my daughter was not like that, and that's actually why I started doing the whole project of reading the Anglo-Saxon poetic records out loud in Anglo-Saxon, because whatever you tried to read her, she would sit up and ask questions about. And I'd gotten, like, so I read the VCR instruction manual one night to try to put her to sleep, and so I started reading to her in Old English because she couldn't ask questions about that and would just fall asleep. And it went over for over a year. It was my turn to read. My wife and I would alternate nights. It was my turn to read, and I would read first Beowulf and then the entire Anglo-Saxon poetic record. So she heard all of that. So, of course, did she become a linguist, a scholar, a writer? No, she majored in art history and works in finance. But, you know, she has that, I think, would still be there. the rhythms of the language would be in there somewhere. No, I love that. I love that sentence. They might not understand it, but they felt it. I think that's a good thing to end on. So, guys, we have actually something exciting that Norton is doing with us. We're going to give away some copies of Dr. Drouse's book, The Tower and the Ruin. So if you share this episode on Facebook or Instagram with the hashtag LitLifeTolkien, all one word, you will be entered to win one of five copies of this book that we will be giving away. So listen and share. You can join our Patreon and read the book with a bunch of other people who are totally geeking out about it over at patreon.com, the backslash, the literary life. You can sign up for Dr. Jow's class at www.houseofhumaneletters.com. Again, Mike, thank you so much for being here. This has been such a fun conversation, and congratulations again. Thank you. Well, it's been a pleasure. You heard us talk in this episode a lot about Tolkien's essay on fairy stories. We've done an episode on that essay a few years ago, and you can find it on our website, theliterary.life. But We are also going to be rebroadcasting that episode in May as part of our Best Of series. And we're going to revisit it. So it'll be a back-to-back two-week episode. One week in May, we will rebroadcast the On Fairy Stories episode. And in the next week, we're going to revisit it with none other than Jen Rogers, who you heard us talk about in this episode, Dr. Drought's student, and now a teacher at House of Humane Letters. So be sure to mark that on your calendars and read the essay, which is available online and join us for that discussion. Next week we're going to have a best of episode of our favorite poems. That's a lot of fun. Join us for that. Cindy will be on that episode. And then we're going to start our series on Don Juan by Moliere. Join our newsletter and look for an announcement there about when we're going to do our read along. We have a ton of fun with our Lit Life players acting out various things together and we're going to do Don Juan. That should be a ton of fun, and you'll want to join in on that. You can also still join Mike Drought's class at HouseOfHumanEletters.com. Click on the mini class tab, and you'll find out all the information about his Viking class. You can also find it on the year-long classes tab. It's a semester-long class, so we put it in both places. Thanks for joining us for this, what I think was a fantastic conversation. And thanks again to Michael Drout. Thanks to Norton Publishing for giving us those five copies to give away of the book. Stick around to the end of this episode. Mr. Banks is going to have a special poem picked out for us. And until next time, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast, brought to you by our loyal Patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumanEletters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with Cindy at MorningTimeForMoms.com. Join the conversation at our member-only Patreon forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com backslash the literary life to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review and check out our sister podcast, The New Mason Jar and The Well-Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Fink. A selection from The Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton. Before the gods that made the gods had seen their sunrise pass, the white horse of the white horse veil was cut out of the grass. Before the gods that made the gods had drunk at dawn their fill, the white horse of the white horse veil was hoary on the hill. Age beyond age on British land, eons on eons gone, was peace and war in western hills, and the white horse looked on. For the white horse knew England When there was none to know He saw the first oar break or bend He saw heaven fall and the world end O God, how long ago For the end of the world was long ago And all we dwell today Is children of some second birth Like a strange people left on earth After a judgment day