Unknown Host (4:13)

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Ben Shapiro (5:14)

So let's talk about sort of the setting of Lord of the Rings as far as when Tolkien was writing them, because obviously he's drawing from ancient mythology and he's creating his own languages, but he's also drawing a lot from contemporary politics. And so.

Malcolm Guite (5:28)

Yeah, well, I mean, he almost certainly started the first imaginings of that whole realm of Middle Earth and beyond it, you know, the lands beyond the sundering seas and so on, while he was a young man on the Western Front. I mean, he and C.S. lewis were both young officers on the Western Front. The attrition rate was absolutely terrible. We're incredibly lucky that both of them survived. And indeed, of course, Lewis was wounded. Now, one of the things that happened after that, if you look at some of the other writers who came out of that, the great war poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, they felt that the very idea of noble heroism, of chivalry, of the noble warrior, had been blown to bits on the Western Front. You know, Wilfred Owen came and wrote a very famous poem called Dulce et decorum est, which is a Latin thing. Dulce et decorum est pro patri amore. It is sweet and properly die for your country. And he wrote a pretty savagely ironic poem about that. And you can forgive him for doing so, given the kind of industrialization of carnage. But. And this is a really significant but. And that course became the mainstream of, you know, modern modernist culture. The Siegfried Sassoons and the Wilfred Owens of this world. But Lewis and Tolkien saw just as much hideous action on the Western Front. But they came out and wrote stories in which it was still possible to have heroic courage. It was still possible for there, even in the midst of appalling odds and all the rest of it, for there to be human nobility, courage, but also compassion, comradeship, do you know what I mean? So they salvaged, I think they were salvaging something. And for all the appalling, you know, for all that was regrettable about that war, they still felt something human and heroic could come out of it. Now, in order to do that, they had to almost. Well, Tolkien had to invent a whole other realm. But of course you see images if you read. I mean, I think probably it's quite well captured in the films as well. But if, if you read when they're going through the dead marshes and there's all these ponds and pools and there's bodies kind of almost, and they're like the gases from the corpses lighting fires or anything that is straight out of that, is Tolkien, if you like to use a modern word, processing his war memories. So it's not that he shies back from, you know, what Owen called war and the pity of war, but he doesn't allow the pity and the empathy to completely overrule the sense that there was and there still is heroic virtue and courage. And I think that's one of the most important things that came out of it. Obviously he started in the war and then he was carrying on thinking these things through. The Hobbit came out in the 30s, in the interwar years. And of course, unbelievably for that generation who'd already been through one world war, another one started brewing on the horizon. Now, both Tolkien and Lewis and some of their other friends were not going to be called up into the Second World War in a direct way, although in fact they did their thing. I mean, Lewis famously did these Christian broadcasts and Lewis was taken out, when we think about the Battle of Britain, the last of the few, the last of the ones that has just died, it was 105. But Lewis was out there, you know, speaking to them. So I think some of what was going on there went into their thinking and indeed, since the Lord of the Rings come out till the 50s, you know, the post war things. But here's a really important thing. They're not Writing some kind of one to one political allegory. So a classic example of this is when the Lord of the Rings came out and there's the idea of there's this one ring, but we can't use it. We can't use the enemy's weapon, you know, change you out, not unnaturally. People thought this was a political allegory about the nuclear bomb and about, you know, how do we defend civilization without becoming uncivilized ourselves? Now that's always a good question. I mean, Socrates asked that question, how do you defend civilization? But Tolkien had a laugh about this because he had already figured out the whole network of how the story of the ring works before we even knew about nuclear weapons. But here's a great thing if you want to think about how to read this in the different political circumstances wherein. So when Lewis reviewed the Lord of the Rings, when it came out, he said a beautiful thing. He said this is not allegory, but it's, it's great myth written at such a deep level that it is con. This is exactly Lewis's phrase. It is continuously suggestive of incipient allegories. So the story is so primal that when you read it almost the story is wiser than you are, it's wiser than talking. He trusts the story. So the story keeps telling you certain things. It keeps suggesting ideas to you about how things are. Now, now I'm, I'm not a political animal, I have to say, so I don't particularly want to stray on extraordinary minefield of American or even my own politics. I'm pretty old fashioned, sort of. I'm happy to live in a constitutional monarchy because I'm a constitutional monarch. But here's a thing that, that talking does in these stories and this does come out in the films, you get this. He often has, if you like, kind of connected but antithetical pairings of characters. And what he's doing is he's exploring the way a thing could be done well and the way the same thing could be abused. The way a person could flourish or the way a person could be corrupted in themselves. So if you think about it, how do you be the kind advising wizard who actually has more power than the people he's advising but doesn't want to exploit them? Well, Gandalf is an example of that. But Saruman is the counterexample. And you kind of know that Gandalf could degrade into Saruman if he's not careful. There are various points where Gandalf could have had the Ring. And he says, no, no, no, you know, so but you think about it the same the brothers Boromir and Faramir in the end, what is kingship? What is good and just rule you have? I mean, the two persons who are contending for the kingship of Middle Earth are Aragorn, Strider and Sauron. One is living in an indifferent in a highly defended castle and the other has taken on the appearance of a wandering vagabond and walked along and his comrades and has shared the sufferings with the people. Those are two different pictures of leadership now. And even, I mean, you can take it further if you think about Frodo and Gollum, you know, what is a good Hobbit? And how am I to Hobbit? And even in their Hobbititude as it were, become corrupted. And yet, you know, there's a little bit of the good side, you know, the smear, goal, dare, goal, you know, thing. And there's something in. I mean there's a kind of bonding between those two characters. And of course, you know, probably one of the most deep, I think moral lessons, I mean lessons makes it sound too explicit in that whole book is when Frodo, who's frightened, says it's a pity Bilbo didn't stab Gollum while he had a ch. And Gandalf says pity. It was pity that stayed his hand. The pity of Bilbil may come to rule the fault of many. And of course, in the end, Frodo gets as far. It's not plot spoiler for anyone who hasn't seen it but Frodo gets as far as he can and almost against his own will without, you know, for different motivations. But in the grand plot, you know, Gollum steps in and still has a part to play. So there's something extraordinary going on there. Now, Tolkien doesn't stop in the middle of his narrative and wag his finger at you and say now I'm teaching this lesson. And if you as a parent did. Did that when you're reading, that would be terrible. Just give them the story and let the story tell you. And I'm still. I. I fell in love with this story when my dad started to read it to me. And then, you know, he sent me off to a boarding school in England so he couldn't keep reading. So. And I hated this boarding school. I was very homesick. But I opened the Lord of the Rings and suddenly I was in Lothlorien or Rivendell. You know, I could be there and I So I was about 16 when I went like full fanboy, totally into it. Right Now I am 67, so I've had 51 years hearing Tolkien tell me this story over and over again. And at 67, I'm still drawing from it. I'm still finding stuff in it. I'm still being now that's what great art is. You know, there's I've read a bunch of sword and sorcery books, but there's only so much swashbuckling and beheading monsters you can take. You know, you need something deeper. And there's way more deeper stuff.

Unknown Host (14:17)

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Ben Shapiro (15:20)

About the stuff that didn't make it into the movies. Obviously, Tom Bombadil did not. But the biggest one that people talk about is the end of the Return of the King actually gets sliced out of the movie completely.

Unknown Host (15:31)

The movie ends.

Malcolm Guite (15:32)

Yeah. The Scouring of the Shire, right?

Ben Shapiro (15:34)

The Scouring of the Shire is not in the movie at all. So for folks who have, who have not read the books, what is the Scouring of the Shire? Should it have been in the movie? What do you make of the creative decision there?

Malcolm Guite (15:43)

You got a very slight hint of it in the movie in Galadriel's Mirror, when I forget whether in the movie, whether it's either Sam or Frodo, looks in and sees all kinds of bad things going on in the Shire. And in the book it's Sam who looks in the mirror as well, which doesn't happen in the movie. And he suddenly sees that bad things are happening at home and they're cutting the bad thing of. One of the worst things you can possibly do from the Tolkien worldview is cut down trees unnecessarily. And Sam sees these people unnecessarily felling the trees on the Bywater road and instinctively wants to run home and sort it out. But then he realizes, no, his duty is here. And he has a great saying. He says, I'll go home by the long road or not at all. So anyway, just to tell you what happens in the book, Saruman and his odious, traitorous advisor, Grima Wormtongue escape from Orthanc where they'd been holed up. And really, just as an act of spite, Saruman goes to the Shire and manages to set himself up as some sort of proto ruler and starts wantonly destroying. You know, he basically kind of quasi industrializes it. He introduces, you know, but he also takes away the sort of freedoms of the Hobbits who obviously all there's. The Hobbits obviously live in a sort of fairly agrarian way. It's kind of like three acres and a cow, you know, so he's trying to turn them into workers. And he has a set of things called gathering and sharing. And I mean, again, I don't think he's doing direct political allegory, but I think this may have been Tolkien's feeling about what was going on in communism and particularly what Stalin was doing with the kulaks, with the peasants. And again, very presently for modern politics, as you know, you know, Ukraine was originally and could still be, you know, the breadbasket of Europe, but there was a point at which, whether it was the Germans or the Russians, it doesn't matter which particular ODS set of people it was, were just basically starving. The very people that produced the food. And there's a bit of that going on. So what happens is, even though they're outnumbered, the four Hobbits who you'd think would be entitled to a break after having just saved the whole of Middle Earth, have to come back. But in a way, they're more than. They're more than enough, you know, I won't say man enough. They're more than hobbit enough for the job by the time they get back and they. They. There's a horn blown and various. So the Shire has a kind of uprising against a kind of, if you like, a kind of horrible piece of centralized economic planning by, by, by. By Saruman. And Saruman, in the end, is very justly stabbed by the person whom he has used as a traitor anyway and so on. And he's nicknamed Sharkey. And it happens in Bagshot Ray. So then that's nicknamed Sharkey's End. So there's a recovery and a restoration. Now, scouring is a really interesting word. I mean, I have a private theory about why it's called the Scouring of the Shire. There's a very great poem by G.K. chesterton called the Ballad of the White Horse, which was about how King Alfred fought off the Danes and created the kingdom of Wessex. And effectively what became England is really Alfred the Great. And Alfred the Great believed that Christians were the best people to look after not only Christian things, but pagan things as well. He actually, so in, in this, there's a final book of the Ballad of the White Horse. It's called the Scouring of the White Horse, and it's about cleaning off all the mold and grime that has grown over this beautiful ancient chalk carving on the H. And so, so there are some political things there, but I, I think we should be very wary. I mean, I notice quite a lot of commentators on my, you know, I have a YouTube where I read bits of the Lord of the Rings occasionally and other poems, and I noticed quite a lot of political commentary on that, which I mostly stay out of. But one of the few cases where we know of a direct political statement at some, you know, cost to himself in from talking comes in the 1930s, was 38 or something like that when somebody decided it'd be great to have a German translation of the Hobbit, right? So whoever the Nazi apparatchik that was dealing with, you know, the licensing of books in that fascist state writes this letter to Tolkien, literally trying to double check that he's fully Aryan because he has a German name and they just want to know. And talking. He writes a private letter to his publisher saying he's absolutely outraged by this. But then he writes, I took this out because I thought it might be amusing to you. So he, he writes this letter back to this hapless Nancy apparatchik who says, you're asking if I am Irish. That is Aryan. He says, I'm not Aryan by extraction. I'm Not Indo, Iranian, my ancestors did spoke no Hindustani, Persian or Gypsy. And then he comes to the point. But if I am to understand that you are inquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only say reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. So. Which is kind of like up yours. And he, he completely refused to have his, his book translated into German. He wrote us a letter to his son Christopher. It's great. He. In which he says he calls Hitler that ruddy little ignoramus. And what he hated about him, this is before was that Tolkien loved the Teutonic legends, he loved the great Germanic people legends, he loved the language, he loved all that Nordic stuff and the stuff that Wagner had written about and so on. And he saw Hitler as taking a kind of comic book version of that and perverting it further. And he thought Hitler was tainting these beautiful Nordic pagan legends that he wanted to draw on. And so what he did with them in the Lord of the Rings is a little bit better than what Hitler did with them in the Reichstag.

Ben Shapiro (21:58)

So my colleague Matt Walsh had been very critical of the movies mainly along the lines of they're too long. And what I'm taking away from you is that they're definitely not long enough.

Unknown Host (22:06)

Oh, no.

Malcolm Guite (22:07)

Like the first one where you're just going around Hobbiton. I love that long. Like I could have watched a whole movie of that. So they do get a bit longer as he goes along. I don't think. I don't think the, the, the movies are too long. I mean, I could have done with more. Tom Bombadil is a whole other subject and very important. But on, by contrast, I think he totally misunderstood what the Hobbit was. The Hobbit is a little children's story and it could have been one great movie. So I don't know if you remember in the movie, this is in the book as well. In the movie the Lord of the Rings, when, When Gandalf is trying to figure out what effect, if anything, the Ring has been having on Bilbo, he asks him how he feels. And Bilbo says in the book and the film, he says, I. I feel a bit thin and stretched out like butter that's been spread over too much bread. Which of course exactly what the effect of the Ring would be. So I saw a great meme one time where, where it's a. It's a scene that. There's that scene in the film and Bilbo is saying to Gandalf I feel sort of thin and stretched out like a simple children's tale that's been spread thinly over three epic movies.

Ben Shapiro (23:18)

Yes, it's been a pleasure to have you here, especially to rebut my friend Matt Walsh.

Malcolm Guite (23:23)

Yeah, no, no, Matt, not long enough. But then you know the book you have a great pleasure in store for you, Ben, if your busy schedule ever allows it. Use reading to your children as an excuse to get deep, deep into that book.

Ben Shapiro (23:36)

Well, I now know my plan for Friday night, so I really appreciate it, sir. Thank you for the time.

Malcolm Guite (23:40)

Okay, great. Thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Unknown Host (23:43)

Well, folks, hope you enjoyed that. We will also be releasing the full critical drinker interview about Lord of the Rings as well. So if you're looking for more of that kind of content, just let us know.