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

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast

Episode 313: The Tower and the Ruin with Dr. Michael Drout
Originally aired: January 27, 2026
Host(s): Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks
Guest: Dr. Michael Drout, Professor at Wheaton College, author of The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation

---

Overview

This episode features an in-depth interview with Dr. Michael Drout, renowned medievalist and Tolkien scholar, celebrating the release of his new book, The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Creation. Hosts Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks guide a lively discussion through Drout’s teaching, his perspectives on Tolkien, the creation and reception of the new book, and the enduring significance of Tolkien’s works. The conversation explores the intellectual tradition underpinning great literature, literary criticism, and the emotional experiences entwined with reading and writing.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing Dr. Drout & His Teaching Philosophy

• Drout’s Unique Teaching Style:

  • Started developing courses on Vikings and Old Norse because students gravitated toward these topics (06:42).
  • Teaches comprehensive courses covering medieval and Old Norse literature, including the challenging Njal's Saga, which is rarely tackled in undergraduate settings.
  • Noted that his classes have a multi-generational range, from 11 up to 87 years old (10:22), emphasizing accessibility for all learners.

• On Why the Old Norse is Hard:

  • Old Norse is more challenging than Anglo Saxon—less direct connection to modern English and more complex inflections (11:10).
  • Early exposure to these languages is invaluable for eventual mastery and true engagement with ancient texts.

2. The “Commonplace Quotes” Segment

• Thomas Banks: Shares a quote about Thomas Macauley from Arthur Bryant:

  “He had been so long buried in books that he had almost forgotten the earth around him.” (13:00)

• Angelina Stanford: Shares a quote from Drout’s lectures on why tradition matters in literary interpretation:

  “You don’t read ever just the words on the page, because the only way you know what the words mean is how they refer to other things and other words in a network of meaning spread throughout a culture.” — Dr. Michael Drout (15:21)

• Dr. Drout: Reflects on the idea of ruin and memory as central to Tolkien’s works:

  “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.” — Dr. Michael Drout (18:50)

3. The Tower and the Ruin – Creation, Reception, and Themes

• Writing and Reception:

  • Drout was surprised and humbled by the book’s popular and critical reception, especially noting it is rare for academic works to hit #1 on Amazon’s criticism charts (21:36).
  • The book’s cover and promotion were handled with unusual enthusiasm for academia, leading to “Spotted in the Wild” reactions from readers.

• Facing Academia’s Tolkien Bias:

  • 25 years ago, being a “Tolkien scholar” was career poison; now, post-Peter Jackson films, it’s a boon (36:13).
  • Popularity in culture forced academia to confront and eventually embrace Tolkien.

• On Literary Elitism and Realism:

  • Drout and hosts discuss the old academic prejudice that “realism” is the highest literary genre while fantasy is considered lesser (45:09).
  • Realism, Drout argues, is a convention, just like any other genre:

    “Realism is narrative art, and it's no more realistic than literature that follows a different set of conventions.” (45:09)

4. Structure and Aim of the Book

• Audience:

  • Written for intelligent readers who love Tolkien, not just academics.
  • Intentionally avoids academic jargon in favor of accessibility without dumbing down original insights (28:50).

• Method & Memoir:

  • Drout structures the book as a hybrid, using his own lived experience to model what it means to have a “literary experience” (61:28).
  • Emphasizes honest engagement with literature, inspired by both the strengths and flaws of New Criticism (17:37).

• Dividing the Book: Creation & Reception

  • The first half explores how Tolkien created Middle-Earth, and the second half investigates how readers receive and experience Tolkien’s work (61:28).
  • Drout describes Tolkien’s stylistic “grain,” a term borrowed from Roland Barthes:

    “It has a grain like wood grain… Tolkien’s work is… full of little things that might be thought of as imperfections that make it feel more true.” (61:28)

5. Patterns, Atmosphere, and Literary Conventions

• Tolkien’s Authentic Worlds:

  • The “heavy sentences” of Tolkien—described by Angelina—are unpacked as an intentional literary weight and density, a deliberate creation of history and atmosphere (65:43).
  • Drout compares Tolkien’s method to building a “house” rather than a “soundstage”—with unseen infrastructure (“pipes and electrical conduit”) that give a sense of solidity to the invented world (67:04).

• On Realism & Conventions

  • Realism is a literary convention like any other—what matters is the rules for narrative, not “realistic” details (45:09).
  • Quotes and discusses On Fairy Stories and how Tolkien’s work funnels Escape, Recovery, and Consolation.

6. Critical and Popular Reception of Tolkien

• Early Reviews – Myths and Surprises:

  • Contrary to legend, many initial reviews of The Lord of the Rings were positive, and only a vocal minority in academia dismissed it as lowbrow (72:01).
  • Shift in perception occurred with the rise of Tolkien fandom in youth and countercultures.

• Publishing History:

  • Tolkien's initial contract with Allen & Unwin was financially extraordinary—because they thought the work was important art, not because they foresaw its immense popularity (76:10).

7. Consolation, Grief, and Literary Experience in Tolkien

• Not Sentimental, Not Simple:

  • The bittersweet tone of Tolkien is central; stories of consolation are about bearing grief with hope, not escaping pain completely:

    “I thought that was what I was going to say when I started to write it. … I don’t feel better. But I can handle it.” (80:00) “What he keeps showing is that beauty can come out of catastrophe… the real hope in Lord of the Rings… They can't conquer forever.” (80:00–82:00)

  • Drout connects this theme to his own painful losses, underscoring the deeply personal yet universal resonance of Tolkien’s blend of melancholy and hope.

• Personal Anecdotes as Universal Models:

  • Angelina points out that Drout’s stories of being read Tolkien as a child, reading to his children, and finally enduring personal grief all become models for how literature can console and shape us (79:02, 88:16).
  • The last chapter, built around a serendipitous rediscovery of the folk tale The Black Bull of Norway as referenced in On Fairy Stories, provides a moving articulation of true literary hope and what it means to endure (88:16).

8. Practical Advice for Reading Tolkien Aloud

• Tips for Parents and Teachers:
  • Don’t worry about young children understanding every plot or nuance; let the story “wash over them”—they will feel it even before understanding it (99:46).
  • Take time with read-alouds; children may not seem moved at first, but moments will deepen on repeated readings and as they age.
  • Drout’s whimsical advice: “If you're going to do voices, think it through, because you're stuck with it for a long time!” (99:46)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Literary Tradition:

  “Nothing makes sense separated from the tradition of reading. Reading itself makes no sense separated from the Tradition.”
  — Dr. Michael Drout (17:26)

• On Consolation & Hope:

  “He just hoped he could get to that place—not a place where there's no tears, but where the tears are not bitter.”
  — Dr. Michael Drout (85:38)

• On Literary Experience:

  “The personal anecdotes end up being sort of a model of how a person reads.... what you're supposed to have when you read is a literary experience.”
  — Angelina Stanford (61:28)

• On Tolkien’s Unique Achievement:

  “The thing that's special about Tolkien... is it has a grain, like wood grain… the little things that might be thought of as imperfections that make it feel more true.”
  — Dr. Michael Drout (61:28)

• On Writing for General Audiences:

  “I think there's a lot of smart people who care about language and literature and culture and feel alienated from the whole... jargon filled discourse. And it doesn't need to be that way.”
  — Dr. Michael Drout (28:50)

• On Escape, Recovery, and Consolation:

  “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... what you're supposed to have when you read is a literary experience.”
  — Angelina Stanford (61:28)

---

Timestamps for Major Segments

• [06:42] – Drout describes his Norse and Viking course: its origins, content, and appeal.
• [13:00] – “Commonplace Quotes” segment, with selections from history, Drout’s own lectures, and his book.
• [18:50] – Drout’s central thesis on ruins, longing, and loss in Tolkien.
• [28:50] – The intended audience for The Tower and the Ruin and its approachability.
• [36:13] – How Tolkien’s reputation in literary academia shifted drastically over recent decades.
• [45:09] – In-depth discussion of “realism” as a literary convention and Tolkien’s textual authenticity.
• [61:28] – Structural approach to the book; emphasis on literary “grain” and personal connection to reading.
• [67:04] – The solidity (“house vs. soundstage”) metaphor for Tolkien’s world-building.
• [72:01] – Fresh historical research on the early reviews of The Lord of the Rings (more positive than thought).
• [80:00–82:00] – Tolkien’s method of consolation in storytelling; the power of hope in grief.
• [88:16] – How a serendipitous moment with On Fairy Stories led to the finishing of the book’s final chapter.
• [99:46] – Practical tips for reading Tolkien aloud to children and the enduring power of orality.

---

Summary Takeaways

• Drout’s book bridges academic insight and literary passion, showing how Tolkien’s melancholy, rootedness in tradition, and formal patterns achieve their profound emotional effects.
• The conversation offers a vital corrective to the old hierarchy that favored realism over fantasy, demonstrating Tolkien’s “realness” through literary craftsmanship and moral vision.
• Drout’s vulnerability—sharing both intellectual process and personal grief—renders the theory of consolation both moving and practical. Hope, in Tolkien and in The Tower and the Ruin, is found not in denial of pain but in its endurance and transformation.
• On a practical note, every reader, young or old, can enter the world of Tolkien through being read to—absorption first, understanding later.

---

For Further Discussion

• The Tower and the Ruin is available wherever books are sold; audiobook narrated by Dr. Drout.
• Dr. Drout’s Viking & Old Norse courses (and future offerings) available via HouseOfHumaneLetters.com.
• Literary Life Podcast will revisit Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories in upcoming episodes—prompting listeners to (re)read in preparation for rich new discussions.

---

“Joy beyond the walls of this world, poignant as grief.”
— Tolkien (quoted with feeling multiple times in the episode)

---

End of Summary

Transcript

[A]

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 science, 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 Literature Temporary 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 not. You're disappointing me. You need to be more mysterious. Maybe I'll get you a cloak.

[B]

I don't think so. No.

[A]

Well, and with us today, I think.

[B]

I have enough oddities as it is.

[A]

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, professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where he teaches many things. Anglo Saxon, Chaucer, science fiction, Tolkien, et cetera, et cetera. 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.

[C]

Thanks for having me on.

[A]

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 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, 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 lectures, 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 to 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 seriously, just, it's a running joke.

[B]

It is like, you know, if, 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 this, the running commentary, it's true.

[A]

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, 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, I'm putting on the Anglo Saxon lectures and, 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 too. 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 you was trial by fire. You didn't even know.

[C]

I mean, you're supposed to, you know, like a controversy equals attention. So I don't know, maybe I failed in that.

[A]

No, no, I'm, 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 or 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 Beowul, 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, I started getting your books, downloading your scholarly articles and I just, I just was so impressed with all of your work and I started thinking, oh, I, 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.

[C]

16 weeks total.

[A]

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.

[C]

So this, this class is, I started developing it back in maybe 2023 when I, in the past I taught a medieval lit class that was sort of 1/3 Old Norse and Vikings, 1/3 Anglo Saxon and 1/3 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 taking more and more time on the Vikings and Old Norse. So 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 NJL saga. So Niall, Saga is the, the by acclimation, the greatest of the sagas. It's also very long. It's got 400 named characters in it. By, by some counts, many of them have speaking lines. And it's supposedly impossible to teach. I, I checked. I started, you know, googling around syllabi and I found one other class in all of the US that year that taught Nyal saga. I think it was 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 at a deliberate pace through Niall's saga. And I've taught that course twice. And then when I got in touch with you guys and you were like, would be interested in teaching something? I'm like, well, Vikings and Old Norse. Obvious 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, 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, and then we, we go through some of the, the shorter sagas, Ravenkel Saga and the Thoughter, which are like the saga. They're saga mode stories, but they're not whole sagas. And then we, we spend the, the final third on Njal saga, do the whole thing. And that gives us skaldic poetry also because there's a lot of scholar 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.

[A]

Oh, the kids are having about kids. 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 all.

[C]

Saga is too Hard for undergrads. Oh, let's try it.

[A]

Let's try. I mean, you've got, you've got a quite. I don't know how I won't embarrass anybody. Say how 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, it's a life, it's the literary life.

[C]

And then someone in the class reached out to me with a, with a question and mentioned that their 11 year old is the one who insisted that they, they take the class too.

[A]

Yeah, I was going to say you.

[C]

Have a huge tone down the language of some Old Norse is. 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 it's, it's, that's, that's pretty exciting, actually.

[A]

It's extremely exciting. Yeah.

[C]

Someone gets interested in this at such an early age. They have the potential, you know, to really develop the language skills which are what, you know, Old Norse is hard. I, I won't. I. There's no getting around it. Like, Old Norse is way harder than Anglo Saxon. It's, it's less, it's less connected to modern English so that you don't have as much automatic vocabulary that that comes through and it's a bit more inflected and it's, it's inflected differently. So the things you think, you know, if you know Anglo Saxon and you're like, oh, 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 till 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, when they're 11, 12, 13, 15 is just, I mean, they're going to be so good if they, if they want to do that.

[A]

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. 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?

[B]

Yeah, certainly. I was recently reading a biography of the historian, essayist and poet Thomas McCauley 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.

[A]

What a way to go.

[B]

Yeah, it's either a warning or a life goal, depending on who you are.

[A]

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 Drop 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 this. 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? It. 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 Drought 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.

[C]

It makes me sound really smart. I like that.

[A]

Well, that was one of those moments where I thought, yeah, yeah, I can work with this guy. Yep.

[C]

I mean, it is, it is true, though. I mean, you know, you, you people say like, that was it, you know, the, for the new critics were one, like, tell me what the words on the page are. And 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, and they have connotations. And to just say, like, read the words on the page is, is, is deceiving yourself there. They would just be black and white dots on a page. If you didn't have the whole tradition of language and, and literature there, you wouldn't know what to make of it. I sometimes give my students, like in, in a class, depending on how things are going, I'll say, okay, let's try an experiment. I want you to describe to a Martian, a, a, 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 duffed 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, you know, 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 don't just say anything beyond that. And vast numbers of people feel like something get at their heart rate right there. Right? So, yeah, it's, I mean, what you said, we're. Nothing makes sense separated from the tradition of, of reading. Reading itself makes no sense separated from the Tradition.

[A]

Absolutely. Preach, preach. All right. I was like, down girl, down girl. That's not the topic of this. This podcast. We'll have to have another podcast just devoted to us yelling against the new critics. I would be totally for that.

[C]

And, and here's the thing. In many ways, when I wrote the Tower in the Ruin, I was trying to. To think like a new critic in terms of the best part of the new criticism. Part of it was when you put yourself in contact, engagement 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, and that's really. And we can talk about this later when we talked 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.

[A]

Yeah, exactly so. Exactly so. All right, so what is your commonplace quote?

[C]

So now, to be fair, I probably wouldn't have picked my own book except you told me to. So. Or this. Someone told me to. So here's. Here's my. My quote. A ruin preserves the memory of what has been. At the cost of making it impossible to 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.

[B]

That's a fine passage.

[A]

That's a fine. 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.

[C]

I've been completely astonished by how that's all played out. I didn't expect any of these, you know, 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, and loss and, 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've 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, in Seattle and Chicago and Tennessee and so that's, that's exciting too. But yeah, it's been, it's been a crazy ride. The past month has, has been not anything I expected or experienced before.

[A]

Yeah, I mean academics don't usually get, they don't usually hit number one on Amazon.

[C]

Yeah, that was, that was, I mean, to be fair, it's number one in the literary criticism category.

[A]

But still, I'm sure if you, if you scanned the other titles, it's. They're not academic.

[C]

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, at Wheaton. Unfortunately, right now I'm the only member. But we used to have a president before he retired, so I think, actually.

[B]

I think Mark Twain was the original president of that.

[C]

Yes, he's our honorary.

[B]

He famously 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.

[C]

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 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, cemetery. But she. The first time I sent it, I got back in all caps. Just one. You are standing on her grave. Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. So.

[A]

And now 80 of our listeners have just turned off the podcast.

[C]

Right? Exactly. Like, how could he not like Jane Austen?

[A]

Sorry, monster, have we invited on this show?

[C]

But in that ranking of British, I wrote two books about Jane Austen that I came in ahead of. So I was, okay, this is.

[A]

But that is an accomplishment. The day nights are 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 topic audiobook of the week by a Kirkus Review.

[C]

Yeah, I had no idea that was coming. Like, suddenly my publisher emails me yesterday, say, congratulations. I'm like, I didn't even know I had entered the contest. But they were published.

[A]

You've entered all the contests.

[C]

They were very nice. And the. That's good because it was a real challenge doing the audiobook. Getting to do the audiobook and then actually doing it. And again, in both cases, though, both the book and the audio, I had an incredible editor for the book and I had an incredible producer, sound engineer for the audio that, that, you know, made me sound much better than I. And I actually am. So that was a, that was a real surprise and a real, you know, just a really exciting.

[A]

Yesterday I, I listened to the audiobook and really, really. And I should make clear you're. You're the narrator for the audiobook. 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. And 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, I feel pretty safe saying that's what. Exactly what you want them to do.

[C]

That is 100% what I, what I wanted. You know, that's the, that's the thing is I'm, you know, I'm just trying. Mostly I feel like that a lot of what I do is just pointing things out, you know, and, 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, we should look at that also and check out this thing over here. And, and maybe, you know, you can show what the, the pattern is or, or how they're, how they're connected. But. Yeah, exactly. I want people to go back and, and reread it. You know, I'm hoping that when people, like, 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, 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. 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 then 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. Why that? You know, they don't, they don't like it because it's uncomfortable in a way. You know, the good guys suddenly aren't acting so good. And I hope I gave them a reason. Like, this is why Tolkien did this. And I think this is why you should 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's a normal. Like, that's, you know, when you see knights and, and, you know, like, of course, that's like, they, 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 that. In the 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. 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 a sappy. I mean, geez, you know, one of the main, a couple of the main characters die. There's, you know, sadness at the end of the book. But there is 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 bothered them or what they didn't explain, didn't understand and what I could try to explain.

[A]

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 I, in my opinion it was not, quote unquote. 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? Like there's so many academic articles that you're like, did you try to make this as obscure and undecipherable as possible?

[C]

My whole career, I mean, you said you downloaded and you read some articles and books and even my most like, I don't know, out there stuff except for I would say how tradition works because unfortunately it's, it's. Its origin was my dissertation and I was not able to clean all the dissertation out of it. There's still, it still smells kind of dissertation. But the. I've always thought that you. I don't want to write for just my fellow professors. One, I don't like them very much and, and I don't really care that much about their opinions. But, but more than that, I think, you know, the people that I most admire as, 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, the 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. You know, 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, 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. Like, I mean, I kind of want to have that role because I think there's a lot of smart, you know, I'm married to an engineer, you know, I, there's a lot of smart people who are, are care about language and literature and, 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. You can, if you can explain particle physics to normal people, you should be able to explain literature. And so, yeah, that's where I'm coming from there. My audience is intelligent people, but you know, people who, who like, love Tolkien. And so if that's a Venn diagram, right, 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, it's a circle within a circle rather than an intersection.

[B]

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 a book written by an academic for the general intelligent reader rather than for academic peers, though they could enjoy it as well.

[C]

And I mean, I think that you saw that I make actual original contributions. It's not, it's not just, I mean, that's why some of it's hard because, you know, you can't really ex. Like I, I, it's funny though, because one of the, I gave my first, had my book first book signing last, last week up in Peterborough, New Hampshire at a place called Toadstool Books. And the, the owner of the story is a Wheaton alum and invited me up and he was saying, I did read the whole thing, but I found chapter two with all those names kind of tough. I'm okay, you know, chapter two, I can see that as being tough, which is funny because then when Kirkus Reviews put a, an audio sample, that's what they chose. Oh, wow. So I don't know. You know, what some people find difficult, others. Right. You know, others don't. But I did not water anything down like that. And I would say my editor at Norton was amazing. Dan, Dan Gersel. 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.

[A]

Ah, okay.

[C]

I can live with that.

[A]

Yeah, I Can see that.

[C]

I'm also. I'm incredibly proud that I published a book that has both footnotes and endnotes. You know, that's. That's what I was. My goal, really.

[A]

I love footnotes. So I. And I appreciate that the footnotes were in the audiobook. I don't. I feel very gypped when that gets left out.

[C]

That was like. So one of the things about the audiobook, I learned. I was really mad at Mike Drought for the way he wrote without thinking of the audiobook because his. His long, parenthetical comments in the. You know, 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, you know.

[A]

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 like, 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.

[C]

Good. That's. That's. 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 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, you. Sometimes you have to summarize. And I tried also not to make like I. You notice there is no plot summary of the Lord of the Rings.

[A]

That's right.

[C]

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, like, there was at one point, I found myself, like, 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.

[B]

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.

[C]

Oh, 100%. Yeah, 100%.

[B]

And the reason I'm thinking of a, it's kind of a famous incident amongst Tolkien is such as yourself. I know when the BBC had their famous end of 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.

[C]

Ulysses. Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Like anybody actually read that? I don't, I don't buy that for a second. Okay, you've read it, but you were pleased. But you're so the exception makes me look the smart.

[B]

If I remember that was like kind of a scandal because like they were embarrassed to release the, 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 low brow and is that prejudice sort of dissipating today, do you think?

[C]

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.

[A]

Right.

[C]

So, yeah, Tom Shippy's book, J.R.R. tolkien, author of the Century, he leads with the Waterstones poll, the BBC poll, you know, and how scandalized the, the literary establishment was. Like, how could you put the, the Lord of the Rings on it? And there was, there was a massive change that happened aft 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, my friend in my dissertation, it was scheduled to defend it in the spring of 97. I had a couple 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 to tone that down, you know, quite a, 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, in Canada at the University of Western Ontario. And I'm, I'm. The dissertation was on Tolkien in the context of a few Victorian writers, Charles Kingsley, the Water Babies. And I forget who, who else? And, and I'm Looking at this, 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, you know, he was. And so I finally, I 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 had 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, you know, 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, they 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, because it's popular. And now I think that's almost like the, the dominant mode. But it's also because it became part of the popular culture. And we, you know, I mean, to those of us who love Tolkien like, it's, oh, 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 or. But in terms of where someone could be on television and make a Lord of the Rings joke, like Stephen Colbert or, you know, and Jay Leno at the time, right. 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 in, you know, 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 at 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, was just reading Ulysses over the course of a semester.

[B]

That's, I mean, I think even in the time, probably since I've graduated college, certainly in the last, you know, 40 years, the academic space occupied by scholarship for high modernism, Joyce and Eliot and Virginia Woolf and William Butler Gates, it seems that that space space has diminished somewhat, I think.

[C]

Absolutely.

[B]

It doesn't have the dominant perch. It did you know, a half a century ago, or maybe more than half.

[C]

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 I mean those sort of touchstones from the high modernism, middle, you know, early to middle part of the 20th century. Sometimes they haven't heard of those books.

[B]

I know that's just so. That's insane. But yeah, that really has been a change.

[C]

But they haven't been replaced with. And we did a survey across the department. The only book that made 80% was Frederick Douglass's Autobiography of. Of books, which actually is very good.

[B]

That's interesting.

[C]

And in fact, I 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. Was teaching it. He teaches. It's funny because he teaches it in children's lit, even though it's not children's lit per se, but because it's like that's something that every middle schooler or high schooler reads. So, you know, he's teaching it that way. And I'm just. 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. 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.

[B]

That's amazing.

[C]

So, you know, there's. But the point being that like the, 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. It's a. You know, I think that she out Faulkner's Faulkner, which is a cool thing to do.

[A]

But.

[C]

But now that's even out. Like, you know, there's. There's no. It's just a. It's just kind of a mix of. It's not even. I don't know what. What it is that the canon is. Now, 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. 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.

[A]

I love it. You know, so part. 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 long standing, 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. It was worth it. It was worth it. 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.

[C]

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. 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. 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. You know, it's not. I mean, I don't know how you say it's more realistic, except that your sense of realism is brand names and, you know, the kinds of material that the clothing is made of or the, you know, the cut of it or any of those Details. And you can find those things in Jane Austen in the Brontes. You know, I sat through a long talk one time that was on the different kinds of windows in the Bronte's 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, 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 to 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 have sash windows instead of case. And, and, and nobody thinks the Brontes are realism, right? Like, you know, they have ghosts and giant liver colored dogs and you know, so, so, you know, I just, I don't, I just reject that idea entirely. And I would say also to, you know, I would say Tolkien is more textually realistic if you want to, you know, go that way then 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 I, 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 of. And it was horrible. It was just awful. I look back at it, I'm like, I even, I can't stand to read this sentence, you know, again. And, and that's because that turns out to be not what, 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, like, 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 ticks and they end up sticking him in a chicken coop because he smells bad. And like nobody wants that. I mean, you know, people like oh wow, that's so cool and interesting that these Latin American writers developed this, you know. Or you could say like Borges is involved there more has, is more like Tolkien in the textualization of stuff. But I, I just don't, I don't think that like realism equals good. It's just realism equals realism. And it's, it's just another name for things, you know, like 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. The complexities of. Of all the different variations.

[B]

Yeah. It's a weird example of how in. In the vocabulary of literary criticism, sometimes words that should be descriptive merely become laudatory or pejorative. Realistic, I would say, is. Yeah, maybe. Certainly in a stage of the history of literary criticism was one such word.

[C]

And I think it's funny, too, when you look back on it. Right. We have in art, there's Soviet realism. Yeah. You look back at those pictures, nothing could be more like fake, you know, like, oh, they're strapping young men holding a sheaf of grain with, you know, and it's like socialist realism. And it was propaganda. Sure. Totally fake. But somehow people thought that was more realistic. I don't even know if it is more realistic than, like, art deco, which was going on at the same time. Right. They're just different.

[A]

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. But I should point out, wow, that's.

[C]

Funny, because I got a ton of criticism that I didn't talk enough about On Fairy Stories, really.

[A]

Like, it didn't have its own chapter, but it was. It was everywhere.

[C]

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.

[A]

Right.

[C]

But Giuseppe Pizzini, his book, which. It's funny because we end, 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. That, you know, 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 like the philosophical and religious point of view.

[A]

Ah, you know, I feel like I should say this too. I listened and a lot of our listeners listened to your. The Modern Scholar series you did on Tolkien in the west, which are fantastic lectures, but you don't, 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.

[C]

Not, not for. Not lack of wanting to. So what happened? The way this book came about, I used to, I've been telling this, like, 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. I wrote. 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, and, and extemporize around them. Now, I will say they were very like 10 point font one. 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 have 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. There's a lot of back and forth. And, you know, I gave them what they wanted, but it was okay because it was what I wanted to say anyway. You know, one of the things I said was, I haven't seen. I'm not one of the people who's seen like, the previews of the Rings of Power. And they're like, that's better. Just, you know, you know, Write what. What you, you know, what you would make as an argument because our audience won't have seen the Rings of Power either because of when we're going to run this. So I wrote this thing. It was called, you know, they titled it Don't Make Tolkien a Cinematic Universe. And the next day, I got an email from Dan Gersel, who was an editor at W.W. norton, and he said, I read your article. I liked it. You must have a Tolkien book in you. And I, 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 a what. What you're going to do, and we'll, we'll talk more. Now, this was, you know, we'll. We'll get to this, I'm sure, later, but I. This was in the, you know, the, the first few months after my. My son had passed away, and I was, you know, kind of, well, still kind of a mess, and. And I went and looked at that old book that, you know, the, 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 on the Lord of the Rings, you have a chapter on the Silmarillion, you do the minor works or the scholarship, and then, you know, you wrap up. 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, of the, 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. 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. 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, so that's why, you know, it's. People say it's like a memoir and I appreciate that, but the. 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 layer. So I'm just. I'm just gonna, you know, say that. And I'm. And. 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. And I had a. I had a sabbatical coming up, and I started writing. And it was. It was. It was a struggle. It was. 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 a. 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 at the. 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 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. I was so lucky. And I was also, like, 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 in, like, 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 like, 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.

[B]

Oh, my gosh.

[A]

I'm sure that killed.

[C]

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 the print. So instead all of that, I had all these bad luck with editors. Dan got promoted to be editor in chief of Norton, like, while the book was still in. In production.

[A]

So nice. You had some good luck this time.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. I was just 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 re record 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.

[A]

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. 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 done actually two series on CS 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. 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. Right. So the first half is how Tolkien created this world, and then the second half is how we receive it.

[C]

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, 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, to. 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, the plan was something else and it evolved over, over time. And I, I wanted to point out that a lot of the things that, that it was, it's actual the course of development and composition that gives it the characteristics that, that it has. And, you know, it's, it's. I, 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, 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 could have something that's all full of, you know, what we call figuring in like hobbyist carpentry and figured, you know, wood is 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 post modernism 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, the, the humanness of the, the first group. And, and he says because they had their voice has a green. 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 gonna put Bruce Springsteen, you know, in an opera thing, but there's something about it that gives this sense of authenticity and, and emotion. And I think that Tolkien's work is. It's all the little. 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, somebody. The generic fantasy that's. That's being written now. I mean, I think that you could say, like, 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 clear complexity, but it lacks something that. That Tolkien has. I think it lacks grain.

[A]

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 and experiment. The. The atmosphere. He has a medieval atmosphere. And my husband likes to tease me sometimes because I can have very, very untechnically 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 is 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 realized that that's an almost ridiculous thing to say, but that was.

[B]

That's an interesting distinction.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

I've never thought of this before.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

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.

[C]

I mean, that. That makes sense to me. I didn't. I didn't. 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. It has dignity, it has, you know, 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. And he's talking about WP Care. Not. Not the Neil Ripley care of the catalog of Anglo Saxon manuscripts, but the WP Care, the great Victorian polymath scholar who was a absolutely great scholar and, you know, read everything. It seems one of those, like, the last people who'd read, like, everything that was published ever written in the Middle Ages. And, you know, and had an opinion about it. There's not many like that. Lewis was like that, too. More so than Tolkien. Lewis read everything.

[A]

That's right. And. Oh. 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. 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?

[C]

Yes, I think that's right. And I don't think he sound stages 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. When he used it, it was just like, you know, I. I need a metaphor. Cat's Queen Brutiel sounds good. Because cats can see in the dark, right? 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 have always have a few students who really have so thoroughly read the Silmarillion, and they have. 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 in the. You know, by the time he gets to 1949, when he's. When he's finishing off the narrative, he knows he's got something good. Like he knows the Lord of the Rings is good. It's fascinating, too, that Alan and Unwin published it because they thought it was important art and most. And that's why you also get those initial reviews from people like Edmund Wilson and Edwin Muir. Right. 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, you know, the, the popular phenomenon that Tolkien gets put down for being middle or low brow in the, in the initial, you know, 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, he was comparing it to something that's trying to, to be literary art. But it's, 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, What I was trying to, 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 as. That he just in, in. 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. He ended up with seeming inconsistencies and, you know, what some people would think of as flaws that actually contribute to making it feel not like a stage set. Right. Like, you know, what's the difference? In a Sage 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, and you can sense it. You can feel it.

[A]

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 around. I'm thinking it would have killed you to put water in there. Continuity, you could have some weight or, 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 put. 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.

[B]

I wanted to ask you, you had mentioned Edwin Muir and Edmund Wilson. Edmund Wilson especially had a pretty notoriously damning review.

[C]

Those awful orcs.

[B]

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, like, any major critical names in that first wave of critics responding to. Who respond to the book who give him a positive notice, or was it kind of just critically trod upon for a long time?

[C]

No. Well, that we. I thought it was, and. And certainly Shippy and others helped to give the impression that everybody hated, you know, 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?

[B]

That's interesting.

[C]

Yeah, it's. Most of them are positive. They're not mostly by people that you. That you recognize, but they turned out to be like people who were sort of big in the British literary establishment in the.

[B]

Throw some names at me if I could.

[C]

If you could indulge me, because if I can run in the other room and grab it, I can. I can't do it.

[B]

Off top of that, we can pause for a second. Yeah, okay.

[C]

Okay. So the. 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. Who get quoted all the time for the things that they said that, like, it lacks.

[B]

I'm sorry, is that. Is that Alfred Duggan?

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Okay, I know the name. Yeah.

[C]

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. The Lord of the Rings. But he also had a lot of positive things to say, especially in the first. The first two book 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, Luis 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. Point. Tolkien's inventiveness of that of. Is of that order which, because it challenges the credulity of us ordinary mortals, we call genius.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

Derek A. Traversy 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 of. So. So rich and fantastic in nature that his book is conceived, 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.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[C]

That's a good line.

[B]

That's a really good line. Yeah. Wow, that's really interesting because, yeah, 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.

[C]

Yeah, it turns out not so much not the case, you know, And I think that the impression and probably a lot of the critical dislike came when it became such a youth culture book. Okay, Aim with the hippies.

[B]

Led Zeppelin and the hippies.

[C]

Exactly. And then, you know, that. Because it wasn't. 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 told Tolkien, look, we cannot give you an advance on this. We think we're actually going to lose money. And. And they printed 3,000 copies of the Fellowship and of the Two towers and only 2500 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%.

[B]

Oh, my gosh.

[C]

Greatest author's contract in human history. Right? Because of course, there. There were and still are. An enormous, A lot of profits coming from, from the Lord of the Rings. So they did it for art. Like that was what they said. Rainer Unwin, who was the, 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 it.

[A]

I love that a publisher like that exists or existed. Well, no, still exists 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, I think he just hated anything that was popular.

[B]

Yeah, he was kind of the Mandarin gatekeeper of high modernism for a long time. And he, I mean, he's, you know, he, he finished Scott Fitzgerald's last novel for him after Fitzgerald died prematurely. He was the one who finished the Last Tycoon.

[C]

The Last Tycoon.

[B]

I think the last couple chapters of that are more his than Fitzgerald.

[C]

And he, 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. And I'm like, oh, my, oh my. Well, 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. No, not, not that Christianity has no understanding of that.

[A]

Exactly. We're right back to conventions again, not understanding the, the conventions.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So in the second half of the book, when you're talking about how to receive it, and, and this goes back to what you said about the personal anecdotes. You know, 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.

[C]

I never thought of it that way. That's, that's amazing that you say that, because I really Never thought I was like structuring it that way.

[A]

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, 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.

[C]

Yeah, that's, 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, and then again, this is, I think, you know, you know how Hemingway is always rambling on about honest this and honest that. And, and like, especially when you know Hemingway's like personal history. You're like, ernest, what are you talking about? But now I get it, right, which is that if you really honest with yourself, you don't, 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 this, the chapter with my parents, it was, you know, 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, had this weird snow formation behind my house where it was like 10ft 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's, 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's 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 just sort of like don't understand how the 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, 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, you know, Morgoth could, 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 like, very hard to articulate sense at that. 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, 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, The. 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. 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 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, 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 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 that 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. You know, no matter what happens down here, the Arendelle star is still up there. So, you know, I think that that was a really. You know, it's. It's a powerful vision. And there's. There's a letter. There's some material we published in Tolkien Studies a few years ago. Robert Murray was a. A friend of the Tolkien family who converted to Catholicism and then became a priest based on the influence of the Tolkiens. And 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, what you don't understand is that 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, that's. And, and, 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, And, I mean, I think he succeeded. I don't know if that helps. You know, I, I didn't know him. You know, 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 when you, When. I mean, the man had not had an easy life.

[A]

Right.

[C]

Even though I didn't talk about it to a whole, you know, great extent, because it's not a biographical book, it's a history.

[A]

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 EU catastrophe 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, 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.

[C]

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, 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, that's where I got so upset with Edmund Muir, where he's like, well, you know, Lorian remains in its timeless felicity. Well, except that they explicitly said that Lorian doesn't like. 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 I, you know, other people. And there's some letter that people interpret meaning that 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. I can't push myself like, you know, to say, to overread it that. 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 Glandalf just let the horse go? He's going to go on the boat. Like, bye, Shadowfax wander off to Rohan. So she interpreted the shadow. That shadow Facts had to go on the boat too.

[A]

But yes. 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 it. Because I think it really speaks to like, like. And you do connect it to. On fairy stories explicitly in the last chapter. And it does.

[C]

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. And I. I opened up to the last page and there's that thing on the. 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.

[A]

Nor had I until you brought it up.

[C]

And. And yet he ends with this. But the big thing was, you know, he said the end. She turned right. That's the last line. So it's.

[B]

She.

[C]

She has a lament, you know. Seven years I serve for the.

[A]

The.

[C]

The glassy hill I climb for thee the bloody shirt I wrong for thee and wilt not now 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 I'll, you know, it's hard to talk about, but like, that the worst moment was when my wife, my daughter and I, when our tears, I watched it happen. Like, they 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 EU catastrophe, right? Like, so everything about that story. So just to. For people who haven't read the Black Bull of Norway, because, you know, it's not the most common story ever, it's a washer woman'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 at least some version 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's now been turned back into a prince, but he's asleep. And she gets three chances to wake him up with her singing. And 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. Is good after all that suffering. And it just. That was like when. When that last chapter came together and it was 100% luck. I would not have looked at the end of Von Ferry stories if I hadn't had to check a quote for. 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. And then it Then it made sense. And even then there was a lot of cutting and revising because I had thought, as I said in. In that I thought I was going to say, and it gives us. Us consolation. It makes us feel better. And then I, Then I did it wrong another way. Like, I'm telling writing, it's 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 and like. But no, it's not really true either. And then I, 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, this feeling that you, you can bear the, the grief and the loss if it has some kind of shape, if it, if, if you can understand it and conceptualize it in some way, and, and then, you know, you can have some, Some hope. You know, I think about that. The line from on Fairy stories, right? Joy beyond the walls of the world. That's. That's what hope is, I think. You know, and again, I could have dove into the. All the stuff in Morgot's Ring where Tolkien has this, this debate where they delineate the different kinds of hope. And someone on Reddit, before I stopped reading Reddit things about the tower in the ruin because they were just making me mental.

[A]

Terrible idea. Do not do that.

[C]

Yes, exactly. It's like reading YouTube comments like, nothing good can come up. And, and. But I, you know, was saying like, oh, well, 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, in this case, a big disquisition on Estelle versus whatever the other word for hope is is not the, the point. So, I mean, he had thought deeply about these things, but also that there's. 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, you know, 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, but.

[A]

Well, it's like Lewis Says in the Great Divorce, you know, when you're living your life forward, nothing makes sense, but at the end, you look back, and then everything seems.

[C]

Yeah. And I would say that. 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. I got a. A comment on. I think it was a comment on Twitter, of all things, where someone. But I think it was from, like, the. The. Your group, where someone says it was. The book was teaching them about being. How to. How to write, like, to be a better writer. And what's funny is my editor kept pushing that. It's like you 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 I go, oh, okay. I guess because I was just trying to understand it, not, you know, trying to tell you how to do it.

[A]

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, this here's how to write a masterful story. It wouldn't have worked.

[C]

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 Kweku, he. 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. 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 am not willing to say, you know, like, that. Well, you know, because terrible things happened to me. I was able to write a good book. Because I'll be honest, the trade's 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, like, you couldn't have written this book if you. If we hadn't lost our son. I don't like thinking about this way Because I feel like that, you know, that. I don't know, I feel, I feel like it's like making a trade and I don't want to make that trade. Of course, it wasn't something I had a choice in anyway, so.

[A]

Right. And I'm sure that Tolkien would have traded to not have World War I and World War II.

[C]

Yeah, I think exactly. He could have brought his mother back. You know, he would have been happy not to ever rape Lord of the Rings or anything else if he could have had his friends not 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, 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, or, sorry, 12. 12 years. I mean, you know, that's a long time to have, 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, 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. Mentions, all the things he went through. He had a, like a, you know, he was a sufferer of chronic illness and he understood that pattern that you see with, with Frodo, with Sam, with. 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 Cormoran.

[A]

Well, we have taken up a lot of your time, but I. Oh, wow.

[C]

This is an easy conversation. So it is an easy.

[A]

I know, right? It's just like, whoa, wow, this is. This.

[C]

My dogs are going to be like, like, hello, we want to walk.

[A]

I do want to ask you a practical thing. So you talk about your dad reading it to 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 some just practical tips so you know, 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. It doesn't matter, right? It'll just wash over you. What's your practical advice for somebody who wants to read this?

[C]

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. He's like, oh, not Treebeard again. He would roll over and pretend to go to sleep. But I don't know if they, you know, I don't know that they totally understood it it, but they felt it, right? And the interesting thing for me was that the first time I read the, 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 they, that was like, it was a tough night, putting them to bed. Why did Thor 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, of landscape description that puts you in the position of the, the hobbits. And I, 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 could, we got, I got invited to talk at the conferences or conventions and they would like, you know, Mitchell really liked the little, the little Figures that people create. And Reese loved looking at the costumes that people sewed and. And, you know, when they showed up and did it like a costume show. So. But yeah, in terms of reading it out loud, the. The practical thing is just to take your time. Don't try to push through each chapter. And, you know, I. I think they probably fell asleep various times. And, you know, you have, you know, when you have young children, that's not a bad thing either when they fall asleep early because it was soothing or whatever. I can. I mean, the. 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 be like. It went over for over a year that when 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, you know, 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.

[A]

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. Drought's book the Tower and the Ruin. So if you share this episode on Facebook or Instagram with the hashtag litlife Tolkien 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 [e-mail] TheLiteraryLife you can sign up for Dr. Jout'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.

[C]

Thank you. Well, it's been a pleasure.

[A]

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 episodes. 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 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 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 Drought. Thanks to Norton Publishing for a 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 [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com 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 podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[B]

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 Vale 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 Vale was hoary on the hill, Age beyond age on British land aeons on aeons. 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 as children of some second birth, like a strange people left on earth after a judgment day.