Alan Sisto (3:06)

Location, location, location. Folks, join us as we take a brief break from the relationship disaster of Aldarian and Orendus to bring back a friend of the podcast who's written this year's must read book on Tolkien, the Tower and the ruin, Professor Michael D.C. drought.

Sara (3:22)

Now, Professor Drought is a professor of English at Wheaton College and an incredibly accomplished Tolkien scholar. He's co edited several volumes of the annual Tolkien Studies Journal and was the editor for the Absolutely Mahoosive JRR Tolkien Encyclopaedia Scholarship and Critical Assessment.

Alan Sisto (3:38)

Also known as a deadly weapon. If you whack somebody in the head.

Sara (3:40)

With it, you're not kidding. It's weighing down my bookshelves as we speak. He's also a genuine Beowulf expert. His book JRR Tolkien, Beowulf and the Critics is essential reading if you're interested in Tolkien's Beowulf scholarship in any way.

Alan Sisto (3:54)

In fact, that book won the Mythopoeiac Award for Scholarship and Inkling Studies as well. Professor Drought has also helped the fine folks over at Standing Stone Games with the Lord of the Rings online. You should check out the floor in Meduseld. And in what absolutely has to be his career highlight, being a keynote speaker for the 2022 Prancing Pony podcast moot, where we all got to hear him speak in old English. Highlight of the show, folks. But we are here with him today to his new book, the Tower and the Ruin. Folks, please welcome back to the Prancing Pony podcast, Dr. Michael D.C. drought.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (4:25)

Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here and it was a. It was a great moot. Don't laugh at that. I had an amazing time and I learned a lot at that the Marquette Library stuff and just the kind of all the people that were there and the general mood of it was great. It was a highlight. So there.

Alan Sisto (4:43)

Oh, well, that's very kind of you. Thank you. It was certainly the highlight of our events. But, you know, considering we've only had a couple of them, that's a relatively low bar. But we're never going to live up to the same expectations that we set three years ago. But that was fantastic, and I'm so very glad you were able to come because it was just absolutely great to hang out with you. We're going to get straight into this because I got to tell you, Sara and I have written a thousand questions, maybe, maybe fewer than that. So let's get straight into the first one. What was the genesis for writing this book? When was the moment when you thought to yourself, you know, I really ought to write a book about how Tolkien's works are qualitatively different from the rest of 20th century literature?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (5:18)

So I'd been kind of. I used to tell people all the time that I've had my. I've got a Tolkien book. It's 80% finished for eight years. And that was pretty much true because I was not happy with it. Like, I'd assembled a lot of stuff. I've done two audio courses on Tolkien stuff. Well, one is on fantasy in general, but half of it's on Tolkien and the other was entirely on Tolkien. And so there were ideas from there. And I thought, okay, I should write this up, you know, into. Into a book and assemble it. But. But I just. I was. I was just not seeing how it fit together. And it was sort of. Because I was following the sort of the mold that, you know, Tom Shippey pioneered it, but then he's already done it so well, there's not really a point in doing the same thing, which is like, here's a chapter on scholarship. Now there's a chapter on the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion, the minor works, you know, and. And I was just. It wasn't working. And then just out of, out of nowhere, I got a call to would I write an op ed for the New York Times about the. The Rings of Power before it came out? And I mean, you know, what. What you find out is that editors, they. They have an angle that they want you to go. But it was an angle that I was kind of comfortable with. I wrote an op ed that says that basically that Middle Earth is not a Marvel Cinematic Universe, that it's not just a sandbox. And if you don't recognize what is special about Middle Earth, what you create is not going to fit there. It's going to just be a backdrop, which is not how all of us who love it, feel about it. So I wrote that. And that, you know, got me thinking about, okay, well, what is special and different about Tolkien? And then this guy, Dan Gersel, as an editor from W.W. norton, emailed me, and it's like, well, you must have a Tolkien book in you. I told him that whole story. He's like, send me a proposal in two weeks. And so I had to just sit down there and think really hard, like, what do I actually want to say here? And it sort of evolved organically, like, as I was writing it also. But I was. I was basically like, did anyone never realize how weird it is that people reread this book 20, 30, 50 times? Yeah, that they reread them to their. They read them out loud to their children when there's, you know, lots of scary things and. And complicated things and. And they can't wait. They want the kid to get just barely old enough so they can read. Anyone else think that's odd? Like, I'm a literature professor. There's no other literature that acts that way. And so I started like, okay, well, well, what is it about it? And then kind of simultaneously, the other piece was that I was really frustrated within academia, within, you know, literary studies, is that I feel like that we do all this weird effort to, like, create an imaginary ideal reader or a political reader or a, you know, what is the horizon of expectations of this book? And I'm like, that's all just fake. That's just you. That's just you. That's what you feel about the book. And you're kind of disguising it or trying to make it generic. And that was the big, freeing bit that made it all suddenly fit together, which is like, you know what? I'm not faking anything. I'm the reader. And you might not agree with me, and that's fine, but at least you know what I really think about the book. And then the thing fell into place, and then it was easier to write. Wow.

Alan Sisto (8:51)

Oh, I love that. That's fantastic.

Sara (8:55)

Absolutely. So you've edited several Tolkien projects, including the JRR Tolkien Encyclopedia and several volumes of Tolkien studies.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (9:04)

And 2020, we just sent. We just sent volume 21 to the printer.

Alan Sisto (9:12)

Need to update your C.

Sara (9:17)

And perhaps. And you can sort of argue with this if you like, but you're perhaps best known for your studies of Tolkien's own scholarly work on Beowulf, and you've also written essays, you've contributed chapters for various books, you've spoken at countless conferences. But this is the first cover to cover book on Tolkien that you've written. So how did the process of writing a book differ from the essays and chapters and keynotes that you've given? Was it simply a matter of scale or was there also a qualitative difference?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (9:46)

There, There was a qualitative difference. One of the things was that it, it was while I was working on it, it was the only project I was working on. And I tend to be someone who juggles lots and lots of stuff. And the reason I hadn't done it is I hadn't felt I was ready. Like, I know that sounds weird, but I, I wanted, I put a lot of pressure on myself in a not particularly positive way of like, I need to make this one like what I've wanted it to be. Because I think, you know, everyone who writes stu know that after you finish you're like, oh no. Like that. I tried, I got some of what I wanted there. But you know, you have to, and you have to deal with publishers and you have to deal with what the market will take and all of that. And within academia there's like, when does this have to be submitted for so that you can apply for funding or whatever. So I was very lucky. I had a sabbatical lined up when I was going to start this. And so I started it like on the first day of the sabbatical and. And I just tried to just write and write and write and that made it different than like everything else I've done that's long has even, even like the books on tradition and stuff that are a continuous argument. A lot of that was like cobbling together stuff and I thought that's what I was going to do here. And then I didn't. And then I wrote everything pretty much from, from scratch. There's a few like paragraphs from other things that like, I just feel like I really couldn't improve much on the wording and they're minorly changed, but that was the difference, was trying to sustain a long argument. And the other benefit I had was that through Signum University there's this thing called an author circle where it's an amazing idea. Corey Olson, another one of his genius ideas. And so there's this group of people anywhere between eight and four in any given month who I would have a meeting with once a month. And I just really tried hard to give them a new chapter to talk about at that meeting and to get that, that feedback and to, to try to, to build up the, you know, the argument that didn't always work like the, the chapter on texts and textuality, heterotextuality. That took a couple months, but in general I was able to. To do that and to have that feedback. And it was also. I was also sending it off at the same time to a couple former students. You know, so many of these things, so many of these ideas come out in the middle of a discussion in class and you don't have time to write them down and you might not even. I would not even remember exactly. And then I would talk to, you know, to Laura, to Namiko, to Simone, to these students who had been my students, and they would remember or they even sometimes had their class notes and could say, yes. Well, when we talked about this, you said, I'm like, oh, that was way smarter back then. I'll use that.

Alan Sisto (12:44)

Yeah.

Sara (12:46)

Did you also have to deal with the Tolkien estate for the book?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (12:49)

Not at all. For this one.

Sara (12:50)

Oh, that's good.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (12:52)

No. And in fact, well, my dealings with the Tolkien estate at first were just nothing but positive. The Beowulf and the critics, Christopher and Kathleen Blackburn, were. Were just incredibly helpful. Then Christopher and I had a bit of a falling out, but then we were all reconciled about that. And he actually. Incredibly kind thing. Like one time, I guess he was leafing through his father's copy of WP Care's the Dark Ages, and there was this loose sheet of paper in it, and it was clearly notes preparatory to Beowulf and the critics. And he photocopied it and mailed it to me so that I could see that I was right about something. It was really, it was really great. But for this book, there was no, you know, there weren't any, like, permissions or anything because it's really just kind of old, old fashioned literary analysis. I'm not working off unpublished material or stuff that people haven't seen before. It's. It's just the books as they're published.

Alan Sisto (13:48)

Yeah, that had to help. Those of us who have studied Tolkien's works are often reminded by others, or sometimes even by ourselves, to be satisfied with the soup that is set before us and not desire to see the bones of the ox. There's the phrase we always hear out of which it has been boiled in the intro. You make a really compelling argument that part of the joy of reading Tolkien's work is the pleasure of finding things out. I can't agree more. I mean, the truth of the matter is that that's pretty much been the, the my entire journey as a Tolkien podcast, or at least the enjoyable part, it's basically, hey, guess what I learned two weeks ago when I wrote this. That's. That's what people hear every week. I wanted to find out from you, can you identify a moment where that pleasure of finding really stood out to you? What, what deep cut have you found that brought you the most pleasure?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (14:38)

So for me, it was. It was a lot of, like, pattern recognition, right? That was. The finding things out was like, ooh, there's a pattern there. And it actually turns out to be an important pattern. And I just hadn't seen it before. And it was actually when I was thinking about Gondor and Rohan and also thinking about, you know, because obviously there's. There's a. Tolkien is deliberately making a setup there of Gondor and Rohan, right? The oaths by Merry and Pippin to Theoden and Denethor are both so different and so similar that it's. And they're. They're like, you know, 20 pages away from each other or less. And, and so he's setting up this comparison. And that itself was. Was interesting. And then it started to. To click that there were other Gondor, Rohan ones. And then the weird one, though it actually, I think works really well, was Denethor and Eowyn. And you might say, like Denethor and Eowyn, like, you know, Denethor is among the most, especially among film people, the most despised characters. And Eowyn is, quite rightly, one of the most beloved. She has the best scene in the entire Lord of the Rings film or book, really, if you, if you want to push it. And, and yet. So, but, but how are they the same? And what jumped out at me is that though the word is never used is both of those characters were intending suicide. That's what, you know, Mary reads in Eowyn's eyes, right? And Denethor actually does commit suicide. And yet it's so different. And then I realized that that sort of sums up a lot of Rohan and Gondor together. Like when. And it's not just Eowyn then. It's Theoden and it's Eomer. Every time that they're in this hopeless situation, you know, we're Trapp trapped in the Hornburg. I'm not going to die like an old badger in a trap. It's not like, I think I'll set myself on fire.

Alan Sisto (16:33)

No, it's never that.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (16:34)

It's, let's go kill as many bad guys as.

Sara (16:37)

And go out in the blaze of glory and.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (16:39)

Right. And when Eowyn decides that she's going to, you know, she wants to end her life. She doesn't stab herself. She doesn't, you know, jump off a precipice or set herself on fire or murder her, try to murder her son or anything. She goes to war.

Alan Sisto (16:55)

Yeah. To find her death in battle. Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (16:58)

Yeah. And this is the Rohan. Like, it all kind of plays out there. And it's not that that Tolkien is saying Rohan is better than Gondor or Gondor is better than Rohan, but that the same kind of character qualities play out in. In a lot of different ways. I mean, when I teach, I always joke about that. That Rohan is the hereditary aristocracy in which no one follow.

Alan Sisto (17:25)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (17:26)

No one. They all just do whatever the heck they think is right. And the king never gets mad. He's sort of like, yeah, well, you know, since you weren't good at keeping the door, you can be an errand runner or whatever.

Alan Sisto (17:39)

Hawa's my favorite for that exact reason. Well, go on in.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (17:44)

I mean, I always wonder, like, and I didn't put this in the book, but my, like, question for my students is, what do you think the guy who finally opened up Eowyn's tent at Harrowdale thought when she wasn't there? Right. She's supposed to be ruling the kingdom and she's just gone. Now. What that applies to me is that she had to tell someone. The same way that Elfhelm seems to know. Elfhelm knows about Mary. He seems to know about Eowyn, too. And again, it's Rohan. Like, it's not about the orders, it's about the spirit of the orders.

Sara (18:16)

There's almost an expectation of people bending those rules.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (18:20)

You do what is. And as long. And you know, that's a perfectly workable system if everybody believes that they're doing what's best for like, in other words, Thetan trusts that Amer is doing what's best for him except when he's bewitched by Wormtongue. Right. And everyone in Rohan works that way. Now, I don't think you can build a giant stone city and keep it functioning if everybody just kind of freelances all the time, but you have other strengths to go with that. And, and you know, and I think the Numenoreans are incredibly impressive. Amazing. Faramir, you know, the pure Numenorean. And, and that's why it's such a tragedy that Denethor goes the way he does, because he's supposed to be. We're supposed to think this is Faramir. Grown up with some more wisdom. And instead it's, you know, what you get with Denethor.

Alan Sisto (19:09)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (19:10)

But so I think that to me, it was like those kind of little patterns that popped out that I hadn't been aware of before. That's what really kind of, kind of was the pleasure of finding things out. Especially when if I pushed on it, I got more rather than something you push on an idea and it's like, oh, we kind of ran out of the steam on that one. But this, the more I pushed on it, like, okay, let's look at how Amr reacts. Let's look at how, you know, Theoden is. Is treated. You know, Amur. Basically, when Theoden gets killed, Emer has some like, I think pre made poem that you said more not over much mighty was the fallen meat was his ending. You know, I'm saying just from the enjambment and all of that, that was a tradition. Amor did not make that up off the top of his head. But then when he sees Eowyn and he yells, death, death, death. Take us all.

Sara (19:59)

He wasn't expecting that.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (20:01)

But then again, he turns it against the bad guys, not against himself. He doesn't weep at that moment. You know, no time for that now. So I think that that, that was a fun one for me. That was like, this is all just making sense.

Alan Sisto (20:16)

And the more you press, the more sense it even makes and the more connections. Fantastic.

Sara (20:19)

Absolutely love that. So you write that one of the central arguments of your book is that all the little oddities in Tolkien's writings, the contradictions, the inconsistencies, even the gaps, are in a way, the secret source. And we've made similar arguments that these lend such a sense of real history, of groundedness to the story. But you take that a step further and say this wasn't something Tolkien did necessarily on purpose, that it's a result of, as you put it, the long and tortuous composition history of his writing. So could you give us an example or two of these contradictions or gaps that you believe to have been unintentional?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (21:01)

Yes. And I want to say here, because I talked about that, I got to have the big honor of giving a talk at Oxford, my first Oxford lecture a couple weeks ago. And one of the questions I got from a very prominent C.S. lewis scholar is, if you're right, doesn't that turn Tolkien into not being as great a writer? Like if these things that were so important were an accident? So I'm going to pre answer by saying no, because we Give credit to the result. We give credit to the person for the result that they produced, whether they were conscious or unconscious of it. And second of all, I think he did recognize it in the revision and in the later stages, but it was not intentional in the beginning. And my favorite example of this is with Aragorn in the Prancing Pony in Breeze, right? So they're talking, they've met Strider, and they're trying to decide whether they're going to go with him or not, you know, out into the wild and what could happen. And he tells the hobbits about the Black Riders. He said, they will come on you in the wild, in some dark place where there is no help. Do you wish them to find you? They are terrible. The hobbits looked at him and saw with surprise that his face was drawn as if with pain and his hands clenched the arms of his chair. The room was very quiet and still, and the light seemed to have grown dim. For a while he sat with unseeing eyes as if walking in distant memory or listening to sounds in the night far away. That does not fit Aragorn's character or his experiences. And I have no idea why the word night is capitalized in that passage. And Tolkien left it capitalized. And I can't tell you why, except that it is capitalized when Tom Bombadil talks about the. The knight. That was before. Like before the Dark Lord made night terrible. But. But anyway, that doesn't fit Aragorn. Who it does fit is Trotter. And Trotter was Aragorn's predecessor. Trotter was a wild hobbit, a ranger who. Meaning he ranged around, right, who wore wooden shoes and at least one marginal note might have even had wooden feet because he had been tortured by Sauron. That was the Tolkien's idea there. Trotter stays Trotter for a large number of revisions. He was that kind of character. And Tolkien had always planned a big reveal about Trotter, but when he got to the big reveal, he realized that it didn't. You know, he's actually Peregrine Buffin. It was like, dun, dun. What does that mean? And Tolkien realized he would have to go back and like, set up Peregrine Boffin. And it was just wasn't gonna work. And that's. At some point there, he clicked in. No, he's an exiled king of men. And then things come together. But that is the old Trotter who had been captured and tortured by Sauron and Sauron's minions. And that's why he's having a PTSD episode there. And unseeing eyes and clutching the arms of his chair and shivering. It doesn't fit. But of course, when we read that, we don't know that because we just met Aragorn. So it completely fits. It makes the scene better, it makes the character work. It only becomes a gap or a contradiction when we never see Aragorn be afraid of anything except maybe when he says, like, oh, the memory of Moria is very evil.

Alan Sisto (24:36)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (24:37)

And that's about it. I mean, Aragorn can go do the path of the dead. He can confront, you know, anything. And so that kind of little mini contradiction there, which is an artifact of the composition, history because it was a different character at that point. Right. Creates that little subtle gap that and I think reminds you of real history, like of history texts, medieval histories that are cobbled together by. I had a letter here and I had a fragmentary thing here and I put this other bit and it's not, it's not something like, you know, way in your face, like, here's a bunch of documents you assembled into a story or something. It's, it's much more at like, this is a real readable 20th century novel with all the effective communication techniques of that, but yet there's this subtlety. And what I wish I had come up with when I was writing the book instead of last week was that it was would be to call it the grain of the text. Like grain in wood.

Alan Sisto (25:45)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (25:45)

Roland Barth has an essay from like the late 1960s of the grain of the Voice where he kind of argues that an opera singer who's got just a flawless tone is not as interesting to listen to as one that has some individuality. And that's what he means by grain of the voice. Well, I would say the grain of the text here is like plastic has no grain, but wood does. Even if that means that there's some imperfections and knots and things that don't work, we actually, we love that about it. We celebrate that. And I think that's what distinguishes Tolkien's work from his, his imitators, the people who, you know, write solid fantasy. But it doesn't feel Tolkien.

Sara (26:31)

I absolutely love that metaphor.

Alan Sisto (26:33)

I was gonna say I do as well. That's sort of the, the organic.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (26:37)

Yeah. It would have been nice if I put it in the book.

Sara (26:40)

There's always going to be another conference though, right?

Alan Sisto (26:43)

That's right.

Sara (26:44)

You can throw that out there. I have to ask a follow up question to that. Then. So were there times where you found Tolkien did do these things intentionally? And how did that impact your argument?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (26:56)

So, yes, I think there. There are. One of the better examples is at the beginning of the Council of Elrond where the Council starts off kind of interestingly, like, you jump right in with Glowin, gives you the. The story of what's going on there, and then Elrond kind of gets everything under control. I love Shippy's description of. It's like a department meeting. You know, it's like, here's the agenda. Here's what we'll be doing. But then Tolkien has in there this. This little line, like, of what was said that day. I'm not going to report it here because the content of it is in Elrond's lore books.

Alan Sisto (27:34)

Yeah. So you can go somewhere else for it. You know, even though it doesn't exist.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (27:38)

It'S not a transcription either. Right. And he said Elrond spoke, like, all morning. And we get like, one paragraph of the. The whole reason. And I think that's absolutely. There's. There's multiple texts here. Right. There's the. There's the text we're reading now. There's. It's written down here. And he also says, like, you know, as was said. So there's. There's this implication that there's all this stuff that's being left out.

Alan Sisto (28:02)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (28:02)

Of the. Of the story and. And other things that are. That are put in. The other one with. That was. And this was probably the. The germ of the whole thing. I realized that Bilbo's birthday speech is in italics. And I. I mean, I've been reading, you know, editing and proofreading the year's work in Tolkien studies for almost 20 years, and I haven't seen anyone mention it. And I've read all the articles we've published and all the ones that we rejected for 20 years, and I've never seen a mention of it. And I'm like, how can this not be? And I went and looked, and the italics were there with the underlines is what he would use from, like, the second draft. Like, at that stage in the text. The big takeaway was Bilbo saying, I'm going off to get married. That's how early. And yet he put it in italics instead of quotes. And the only things that are in italics are. Well, there's a lot of things, but they all have the same kind of quality that they are external texts put in. They're poems. They're the ring inscription they're the. The thing on Snowmane's grave, Gandalf's letter, Isildur's scroll. And so why would that be written that way? And then I realized, oh, Bilbo took that speech with him to Rivendell in his pocket and he's just putting it right in. And it even fits like, you know, later. Bilbo, right, who's a little bit vain about. He's. He's vain about his poetry and his writing rather than about his heroism. And so he's like, oh, well, you know, this was the biggest thing that ever happened in the Shire. And I have the document right here, and I will work it into the text. And I realized that that had to be on purpose, right? And that's before the development of the Red Book of West March frame narrative or anything. And that Tolkien, at that point must have had some idea of that. This is, you know, this is a compilation of stuff as well as, you know, a narrative that I'm. That I'm writing. Because it doesn't. It just doesn't make any sense otherwise that. That text. And I was talking to someone about this and they're like, well, you know, newspapers used to print speeches like the President's speech or even, like, you know, a local. And they used to always print it in italics. And I'm like, okay, well, that actually supports the idea more because Tolkien used to. That. Seeing it in a newspaper or something like. Something like that. So that's interesting. That's when I think it was. It was on purpose, the. That creating that we would have called grain or texture of the text at a. At a conscious, like, high level. I think it also happens, you know, at a very, you know, only. Only registers on you unconsciously low level of vocabulary and style. That happens because he didn't revise every part of it the same amount.

Sara (30:52)

So. Oh, that's fascinating.

Alan Sisto (30:54)

That really is like. I mean, and it's not just the italics. It's. Anytime anybody else is being quoted, it's. It's using quote marks and it's in line with the text. This is like a poem. It's inset.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (31:06)

It's mixed in. Right? It actually has. In Roman type.

Alan Sisto (31:09)

Right.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (31:09)

Odo Proudfoot, reeling out proud.

Alan Sisto (31:11)

I mean, italics.

Sara (31:13)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (31:14)

I don't know half as many of you, so. And I think that that's wild. That's. You know, there's so many little subtleties. I mean, we've probably been reading the Lord of the Rings close to the same amount of time pretty much, and probably Close to the same number of times, too. And yet I'm still spotting stuff. Yeah. There. And I think I'm a fairly attentive reader, so it's got to be that there's just a lot of stuff, a lot of nuances and subtleties that Tolkien put into the text, which is why.

Sara (31:43)

It rewards rereading and rereading and rereading unlike so many other books.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (31:48)

I think that's absolutely right. And I think, again, that's a weird phenomenon. There's not a lot of books. I mean, I don't know what else gets reread as much as the Lord of the Rings, Goodnight moon maybe, or Dr. Seuss, you know, little kids books, but there's very few. The one text that I keep hearing people say that I reread it once a year or once every two years is Little Women. For some reason there's, there's some people who feel like that, that.

Sara (32:15)

Interesting, interesting choice.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (32:17)

I don't. I don't know why. I've only actually read it once. So.

Sara (32:20)

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I've read it a few times, but it wouldn't be my choice for an every year read. That's interesting.

Alan Sisto (32:27)

Interesting. Every once in a while, someone makes something that feels bigger. Not another Hollywood reboot, but a story built on courage, faith and meaning. Now, the Daily Wire did that with their new seven part series, the Pendragon Cycle, Rise of the Merlin. Based on a book series by Stephen R. Loughead, it's a retelling of the classic King Arthur legend. The first official trailer just dropped and you should go check it out on DailyWire.com in this world, while pagan gods fall silent and empires collapse, one man's vision ignites a civilization's rebirth. Merlin becomes the bridge between myth and history and shapes the destiny of kings. The Pendragon Cycle, Rise of the Merlin premieres exclusively on Daily Wire + January 22, 2026. Go watch the full trailer now@dailywire.com time.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (33:27)

It's always vanishing. The commute, the errands, the work functions, the meetings. Selling your car. Unless you sell your car with Carvana. Get a real offer in minutes, get it picked up from your door.

Sara (33:39)

Get paid on the spot so fast you'll wonder what the catch is.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (33:43)

There isn't one. We just respect you and your time. Oh, you're still here. Move along now. Enjoy your day. Sell your car today. Pickup fees may apply.

Alan Sisto (33:57)

Monster energy. Everybody knows White Monster Zero Ultra. That's the og it kicked off this whole zero sugar energy drink thing. But Ultra is a whole lineup now. You've got Strawberry Dream Games, Blue Hawaiian Sunrise, and Vice Guava. And they all bring the Monster Energy Punch. So if you've been living in the white can branch out.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (34:18)

Ultra's got a flavor for every vibe.

Alan Sisto (34:21)

And every single one is zero Sugar. Tap the banner to learn more. As soon we'll get back to more about the Tower in the Ruin. But before we do, I do want to take a minute to thank the amazing community that has grown up around this show. After all, thankfully there is a lot more talk going on at the Prancing Pony podcast than just us.

Sara (34:42)

Yep, no, the PPP really does have a warm and welcoming listener community. If you've got questions or you just want to talk about how much you love Middle Earth, be sure to check out our Common room on Facebook and across all social media. On Facebook, just look for the Prancing Pony podcast. And yeah, there's a page. But you're going to want to join the group for that great fan community.

Alan Sisto (35:02)

Now on every social media platform other than Facebook. We're just at Prancing Pony Pod and you can find our subreddit at R Pranciponypod. And please check out my Daily show, today's Tolkien Times, on YouTube and on your favorite podcast apps. Get your daily Middle Earth fix with everything from Middle Earth map Mondays to third age Thursdays. Be sure to watch or listen at YouTube.com prancingponypod and now we've got more questions for Mike.

Sara (35:27)

Okay, so here we go. In discussing the origins of Tolkien's legendarium, you walk the reader through some Old English, which is to be expected.

Alan Sisto (35:36)

I'd be disappointed, frankly, if you didn't.

Sara (35:38)

Absolutely. But there's also some Latin, and you even point out the Old Norse parallel, thankfully not followed by Tolkien, of a frostbitten toe as the morning star. Not sure how I'd have felt about that, but it seems like the reason you walked us through all those sources was to draw us to the conclusion that you reach, which is that the true origin of Tolkien's creative works is the act of inventive synthesis. So could you first summarize what you mean by inventive synthesis and then give us an example or two from Tolkien?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (36:12)

I can try. So in medieval scholarship, there's just a lot of things that have been lost since then, and they're weird and difficult things to have been lost, because what gets lost is actually the stuff that everybody knows, so they don't bother to explain it. And then 500 years passes and nobody understands what was being talked about. And the example I like to use for my students is imagine that, say 2,000 years from now, somebody is trying to understand our culture. And they have only a few fragments. And one of them is a Tom Clancy novel. And their conclusion is that Americans in the 20th century Worshiped geometrical objects because they keep saying, the Pentagon told us to do this. The Pentagon sent out orders and, and you can imagine constructing a whole kind of crazy, wrong, but internally consistent mythology where maybe there was an AI computer inside this geometrical object and we did whatever the Pentagon said.

Sara (37:14)

Don't speak too soon.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (37:15)

I know. Honestly, so. So like we, we have that in medieval literature. We have words that we just don't know. And those things are like, Tolkien was really attracted to them. Like he, he wanted to know, but the thing that he did differently, which is if sometimes you just can't know, right? There's just no other information. And the, my favorite example of this is in Beowulf where after Grendel's mother. So they thought, they think they have the monster problem solved. Everybody has a party and goes to bed and then. And Beowulf goes off and doesn't even sleep in the hall with the, you know, the Danes, they go off to like the guest quarters or something. And then Grendel's mother comes and kills one of Hrothgar's men and takes off. So the next morning, Beowulf walks in totally unaware, not expecting any problems, like, so, did you sleep well last night? Hrothgar is like, oh, don't even ask. Sorrow is renewed. Ashara is dead, Erminloff's older brother. And then the story just continues. Who the heck is Erminloff? Why do we care that this dead guy is his older brother? That's the only. We were also told that he's like my right hand man and everything. But the only thing about that Ash Hera ever did is be Ermin Loft's older brother. Who is Ermin Loft? We have no idea. The name shows up nowhere. Not just. Not in Beowulf, but in all of Northern literature. You just. There is, there is nothing you can do with Ermen Loft, no matter how good a scholar you are, no matter how much you can trace things to Indo European roots, the story's gone. The difference with Tolkien is he would use. He didn't use that particular one, but he would use it to make something up. More importantly, he would try to make something up that would harmonize all the loose pieces. So I'll give you Another example is that Snorri Sturluson says that among the supernatural creatures in the world, there are light elves, dark elves, and dwarves. So Jacob Grimm comes along, you know, the greatest scholar of the 19th century, and he says, oh, well, that's just wrong. There's. There's no dark elves. Dark elves are just dwarves. They're just. It's a mistake. And Tolkien must have felt like, okay, now Snorri is writing around 1200, and he's, he's many hundreds of years closer to this. Maybe he knew what he was talking about. But then what does Tolkien do? Well, he creates this character, aol, a dark elf. And we learn that dark elf is like an insult or a description, but within the Elvish community. Right. Like, so if you, if you manage to go see the two trees, you're a light elf and a Kaliquendi, and otherwise you're a dark elf, a Moriquendi. But even more, this one elf only comes out at night. He wears black armor, and he hangs out with dwarves all the time. Exactly. And so if you take the whole Ale story, you can understand how Snorri Sturluson would have said there are light elves, dark elves, and dwarves, because they're three different things. Right. And so Tolkien filled in that gap of dark elves. And I love the way he did it, like, in multiple ways. Right. There's dark elves because they call them that. And then this guy comes out at night dressed in black and literally a dark elf.

Alan Sisto (40:38)

Right.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (40:39)

And it all. It. And then. And then pushes even further. Like, personality wise, he's a pretty dark elf.

Alan Sisto (40:44)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (40:44)

Also. So, like, that's, that's the kind of. That's what I mean by inventive synthesis of, like, trying to take all the, the pieces and not. Not. It's like, it's like when people write historical fiction, I think, and historical fiction hadn't really evolved when Tolkien was getting started. I mean, it's. It's there, but it's not. I don't know how much he knew of it. You know where the rule is, you can't break any known facts. Yeah, right. You can, but you can fill in anything else you want. Like, Abraham Lincoln could be a zombie hunter, as long as it doesn't contradict the other stuff that he was known to be. To be doing. And that's sort of what Tolkien. That's what I mean by inventive synthesis. Then it's like, does any of this contradict the surviving evidence for these words and names? And the reason, by the way, Tolkien I think does this in his fiction is that his original intent was to have the whole legendarium interface with the actual, like, legendary and literary history of the North. And it's just later that he kind of gives up on that because the stories had developed their own momentum, and I don't think he wanted to have them limited all the time to just that evidence.

Alan Sisto (41:55)

Yeah, well, connected to that, actually, is the great job you did at driving a stake through the argument that Tolkien wanted to write a mythology for England, which is a very common argument popular amongst Tolkien readers and even a few scholars still today, even though it's not exactly what he said. Instead, you claim that Tolkien's motivation was to write in modern English works that, quote, would produce in their readers some of the same effects that the works of medieval literature produced in contemporary readers who read them in their original languages. So, talking about modern readers, 20th century readers or 21st century readers now, but who are capable of and would then read that medieval literature in its original language, like Beowulf, for instance. So what are those effects? What are some of the effects that Tolkien is trying to create in his readers that somebody like you, who can read Old English might experience when you read Beowulf or somebody who reads old Norse, being able to read story Sturluson?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (42:54)

And honestly, it's anybody who reads it, it's. It's more powerful in the original language. But if you read a good, clean, like a translation that attempts to be accurate rather than just to smooth everything, you will get some of the same sense. It's just not as, not as, you know, not as intense. And it's the sense that this text is a ruin. That's the metaphor I'm trying to use there. Right? It's like. And we're looking at a ruin is a really. It turned out I didn't expect it to be like, I picked the name of the book because I. I liked sort of like the way Tower and Ruin sounded together. I hadn't worked it out all to that, you know, degree yet. But in fact, like, when you look at a ruin, you get this, this, this melancholy feeling because it's both beautiful and it's destroyed in part, and there's. It marks loss. And you get the same thing with the text. Like, there are. There are. It's almost a heartbreaking feeling when you can't figure out when you don't know who Ermen Loft is and you know that there's not a living soul and probably hasn't been for a thousand years. Who knows who Erminloff is, but everybody else did at the time. And you just get that a lot. You get this. It's a sense of loss, but it also gives it a special. A special beauty. I mean, I remember the first time that I. That I was able to read the poem the Wanderer from Anglo Saxon, which I did quote some passages when you suddenly get this sense of how old it really is. And so it's both just remarkable that I'm still able to make a connection with my mind with someone who died a thousand years ago. And at the same time I have to be aware it's impossible to cross that gulf. I don't understand. Like when he's talking about what seemed. The poet's talking about what seems to be some kind of fealty ceremony, when he says he clasps and kisses his lord and lays his head on his knee. I have a description. I have some guesses. I don't have what I know must have been the resonance for the person at that time. And so I get part of the whole part of this poem that's so beautiful is that the narrator of the poem is remembering this time of warmth and happiness. He's alone on a ship somewhere, but he's falling asleep and he's dreaming. And then he wakes up and what he thought was the laughter of men was the seabirds crying as they dive in the water and bathe their feathers. And he's even more alone than he was before he had the dream. And that is. That's what I think is part of that feeling when Tolkien says there's something in the air of the Kalevala or of Beowulf. That and the problem. And nobody laughs at this joke, but I'll tell it anyway. The problem with ineffable things is that they're hard to describe. So thank you. I'm now one for five on that one.

Alan Sisto (45:51)

That's actually brilliant. I love that I laughed out loud when I read it in the text. Text about the ineffability of things.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (45:57)

Got stony silence at Oxford.

Alan Sisto (46:01)

I am stunned. That's great. That's better than most of our jokes. But then again, most people don't laugh at those either.

Sara (46:06)

I'm gonna say that is such a low bar, Alan.

Alan Sisto (46:08)

It's practically on the floor. Thank you, Sarah. I appreciate it.

Sara (46:11)

You're welcome. That's what I'm here for.

Alan Sisto (46:14)

Oh, man.

Sara (46:15)

Okay. Anyway, back to sensible things. Like another question for you. Frame narratives. These are something that long time readers of Tolkien have encountered and you make some interesting observations. About frame narratives of his, that work and those that don't. Your pet unicorn, Clarence, for example. How did Tolkien's experience creating frame narratives develop over time? And what would you say was its best example?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (46:42)

So my thoughts about frame narratives actually started with a conversation with Verland Flieger years ago. We were like doing Q and A at the end of a conference and we both ended up agreeing, like, agreeing too much with each other. Like, it wasn't a very good dynamic argument that Tolkien's problem was he liked writing the frame more than he liked writing the story half the time. And he would make more and more elaborate and complicated and double layered frames and not get around to actually putting the picture in the frame there. And so, you know, that he was successful when somebody like yanked the, you know, yanked the frame out of his hand and say, finish the picture. And, you know, so we had said that I'd said at that point, like, well, the Hobbit, you know, that doesn't have really a frame. That's just the Hobbit. Well, that's wrong. The Hobbit has a couple frames. Actually. One of them is incredibly subtle, which is that if you don't translate the runes on the first edition dust jacket and I mean, of course all of us do that. You know, obviously it was Doug Anderson who pointed that out. And he pointed out in exactly like kind of that tone, like, well, of course it's on the runes on the dust jacket of the first edition.

Alan Sisto (47:54)

So everybody knows, of course.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (47:57)

But, you know, if you're going to be a scholar, you got to, got to cope with that where it says, you know, that this is the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, compiled by Professor Tolkien. And then the other frame narrative is simply the supposed intrusive narrator that everybody claims to hate. When Tolkien, I noticed he never said he hated the narrator. He just said that he disliked where he talked down to children. And that's always assumed to be the narrator, but he never explicitly like, disavows his narrator. And really what I try to, what I, what popped in my head, what I realized is that that narrator is an adult telling a story to a child. Yeah. And that's why they say things like, I don't suppose you would do half as well as Bilbo in this circumstance. Or the goblins know the tunnels the same way, you know, the way to the post office. And that that frame, though, then allows for. It enables all the other parts of the things about the Hobbit that we like. Right. Like the, the kind of Sweetness in the story. The. The. The first part of it being you're like, what's up with the troll's talking purse? How does that work? And it's never mentioned again. You.

Alan Sisto (49:10)

I love that.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (49:13)

You would hate to lose that. Right?

Alan Sisto (49:15)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (49:15)

But that is enabled by that. That narrator. Because there's no requirement to be, like, perfectly naturalistic or anything else. You can have stuff like that or, you know, prophecies or. Well, of course, the moon letters were. It just happened to be the exact moon that. That you needed to read. The moon letters and so forth. Those things all, like, combine to give you the feel of the Hobbit. And so I think that, like, the more subtle and unobtrusive the frame is for Tolkien, the better. And that's why I think, like, the one I used examples, I think of a failure is the notion club papers. That's, you know, the abortive. So, you know, he stopped writing the Lord of the Rings for a year and wrote something else. That was where he and Lewis had that conversation about, you know, we need to write basically science fiction. And Lewis will take. I'll take space travel, you take time travel. And it's this. I mean, first of all, it's the most boring possible frame that anyone could come up with, which is the minutes of a meeting. You know, it's the minutes of this meeting of this group of Oxford friends that gather around. I love that they're thought of as gathering around in the 1980s or. Sorry, yes, that's written in the 1980s and then rediscovered in the 2000s. But they sound a lot like they're from the 40s.

Sara (50:35)

They do.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (50:36)

And there's this great footnote where it says, well, the fact that he used a fountain pen instead of a typewriter means he couldn't possibly be in the 80s or 90s. And I'm like, substitute dot matrix printer. And, you know, pretty good, professor. But that frame. There's that frame. And then inside that frame, there's the stuff that those characters are actually doing, the stories they're reporting. Like, oh, I had this dream, or I had this vision of this. And then inside that is the fall of Numenor.

Alan Sisto (51:04)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (51:04)

And it just gets in the way. And you could tell that as Tolkien got to the end, all he was interested in was the fall of Numenor, of course. So it's like, ditch the frame. Write the wave story.

Alan Sisto (51:15)

Write the story. Yeah. Excellent.

Sara (51:17)

So before we even get into the fact that the Council of Elrond is by far my favorite chapter in the Fellowship of the Ring, if not the entire Lord of the Rings. Actually, as a fellow educator, I absolutely loved your suggestions for teaching this chapter in your chapter three on heterotextuality. And so, of course, I went back and reread your chapter in Leslie Donovan's book, Approaches to Teaching Tolkien, the Council of Elrond, all those poems and the famous effing Elves teaching the hard parts of Tolkien.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (51:48)

They tried to censor that title.

Sara (51:50)

I bet they did.

Alan Sisto (51:51)

They tried to censor that title, which is already censored.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (51:53)

MLA tried to take out the Effing Elves. I had to fight. Luckily, Leslie Donovan was totally on my side, but the copy editor was like, well, you know, that meant that represents a vulgarity. Can't we just make the title. And they made it the most boring thing possible, but it isn't one.

Sara (52:08)

No, I mean, anyway, that, of course, was published 10 years ago. Have you made. Oh, I'm sorry, but have you made any changes to your approach to teaching Tolkien since that time?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (52:22)

So that exercise that you're talking about where one of my students calls it Jerry Springer Goes to Middle Earth, I don't know if my students now will know what Jerry Springer Goes to Middle Earth would be, but the idea is you assign a character to a whole bunch of students. It can actually be up to like 17 to 20 because you bring in people who aren't actually at the council, but who are what we would call stakeholders of Middle Earth. So that includes Gollum and Sauron and Saruman and Denethor and others. And you tell the students, you're not supposed to act, though you can, and many do, which I love, but you need to represent that character's point of view. And the idea is just the reason the Council of Elrond is so important is because you cannot understand the sort of geopolitics of Middle Earth, much less the magic rules around the Ring. Without that chapter, like, you don't get what Saruman is about. And so that's why I do it that way. And it's worked pretty well over the. I mean, I've been doing that since at least 2003 or 4. And some of the characters have come and go, come in and gone. And I've tried some other bits. Like I've, you know, sometimes the Lord of the Eagles is there, which allows either a student to do a horrible eagle screech or to look at Gandalf and say, you are too heavy.

Alan Sisto (53:51)

I am not your taxi.

Sara (53:56)

The Eagles of Manwe are not a.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (53:58)

Middle Earth taxi service by the way that's brought up in the VeggieTales parody of the Lord of the Rings.

Sara (54:05)

Yes, I love the veggietales.

Alan Sisto (54:07)

That's a great one.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (54:08)

Walk yourself. So I think that I haven't changed that teaching thing much except to be. To actually kind of take more and more of a backseat and not have to guide it so much because I find that if I just wait, the students will fill things in and they really are sharp about it. I mentioned in the book and see, I'll manage to offend all sides or maybe neither, I don't know. But back in 2008, we're reading this like right before the election in November of 2008 and I did the, you know, and I called on the different people and I'm like, saruman, now you want the one Ring. But, but what would you offer to Middle Earth if we decided to give you the ring? Just total deadpan. The kid goes, hope and change. Whoa. I wasn't expecting that. Especially like I'm at a Mazat Massachusetts liberal arts school. Like, you know, there wasn't. But it was, it was very effectively done. Well then of course, maybe it's less surprising that when I did sort of the same, the same thing last this past year and I said, well, what about you, Saruman? You know what, you have the ring. What are you going to do for Middle Earth? And the student goes, you know, some people say that I would build much better dark towers than any dark towers that are out there. In fact, I think that I would build the best dark towers that could ever be built.

Alan Sisto (55:38)

Darkest hours ever.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (55:39)

And this. Right? And the students in the class are just like, it was five minutes of. I couldn't get anything else because they're. But that I think it shows like, it shows how absolutely relevant everything in Connected is, right? Especially Saruman, unfortunately. But so many of the other, you know, the other aspects of, you know, who's who to trust with the. You can't trust anyone with the ring. Well, why don't we use it against, you know, the Boromir's. Totally, totally reasonable question.

Alan Sisto (56:07)

Valid question, right?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (56:10)

So, yeah, but I, and I do think that the council, I mean, as I said in the book, when I was in fifth grade, my best friend and I, we somehow talked our teacher into letting us like skip out of regular assignments, sit in this back corner of the room and write an adapted play of something from the Lord of the Rings. And of course we could have chosen anything we wanted. So we chose the Council meeting the Council meeting. Of course you did, because it worked pretty well. And I will say the student in the class who got tapped to be Gandalf because he was the tallest guy in our class, he went on to a very distinguished career in law enforcement. He's retired right now. I ran into him on Facebook. He found me, and the first thing he did was type in Ashnaz der Bataluk. I still know it.

Sara (57:00)

Oh, brilliant.

Alan Sisto (57:02)

I love it.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (57:02)

Like, the least nerdy, you know, the least nerdy person in the world. But he knows the ring inscription in the Black speech.

Sara (57:10)

I just love the fact that you were a total nerd from as early as fifth grade.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (57:13)

Oh, it was long before that.

Alan Sisto (57:15)

He was an experienced nerd by then, I'm sure.

Sara (57:18)

Fantastic.

Alan Sisto (57:19)

Now, in that same chapter, you talk about this concept as heterotextuality, which means that Tolkien's story feels like it's made up of all these different texts and layers, Right? And I love how you describe the layering of text and the impression of a vast interconnected archive. How does this idea change the way that readers experience the story compared to books that. Well, same text, right? That have one text from one author, which is going to be most books. So how does this change the way readers experience the story?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (57:53)

Well, we're used to the idea of multivocality, right? That one author will write multiple characters and that they will have different voices and different styles, if you want to. Kind of like the Locust classicist for modernist lit would be As I Lay Dying by Faulkner, where every chapter has a character's name, and then you get that point of view of that character and totally their thought processes. But you could take Game of Thrones, there's 72 chapters, and each one of them is labeled with one of eight characters names, and they are stylistically distinct. You can use my lexomic computer methods and actually sort them perfectly by character. So give Martin credit for being consistent there. What's different about Tolkien is that although he can do multi vocality, which is like, that's what Shippy celebrates about the Council of Elrond. Like, the reason you never get lost in that is because every speaker has a distinct style. So that you know when it's no longer glowin, but it's the messenger from Mordor or King Dain, and that's a totally normal part of 20th century literature. It's what we celebrate authors for. Like, you know, why do we. Why is the Color Purple thought to be. Because she can get those two different voices going. And they. And. And. And weirdly both of those are Alice Walker, but neither of them are Alice Walker in. In the book.

Alan Sisto (59:20)

Right.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (59:21)

What I think Tolkien gives you the impression is not so much of different voices, but actually different pieces of text that have been put together. And that's why I. And I. I still actually don't believe this is true. But two years ago, when I first searched for it, Google told me that I coined heterotextuality. It's too obvious. That's. That's a nice, flattering thing. And it's probably the AI Actually wasn't the AI two years ago, but still, it's not possible because it's just such an obvious, you know, textuality, sexuality, whatever. It's. It's too obvious. But it does seem to be something that nobody really cares about, because why would you care to produce the impression that your text is made up of other. Of other texts? And I came up. I found some examples. There's a book called House of Leaves that's a. A horror novel that's entirely like, there's no story unless you make the story out of all the different texts that are thrown together there. There's a really sad but terrific young adult book from the 70s by Robert Cormier called I Am the Cheese that's a mixture of, like, transcribed psychiatrist conversations and then a regular narrative. So it's not like nobody's ever done it before. But what Tolkien does is, again, does it so subtly. And so there's just these little bits, like I said, little bits of friction or little contrasts or gaps. And the biggest thing is that the changes in style don't match up so much to changes in speaker or focalizing character. In other words, you'll see these different textual bits in the chapters that are focused on Frodo. Like the. Well, actually, that's not a bad idea. I was going to say the. The birthday speech, but that's not a perfect example because that chapter is really focused on Bilbo. But, you know, you. You can. You can find, like, these. These little differences or confusions or that there's a poem pasted in there, or Sam is speaking words in a language that he doesn't speak. Right. Which I'm perfectly fine with that. Like, that is totally motivated within the story. My problem is how does he report it and write it down afterwards? Yeah.

Alan Sisto (61:34)

How does he know how to speak?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (61:35)

How did he remember what he said and how did he spell it?

Alan Sisto (61:37)

Right?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (61:38)

And instead you think, oh, well, that's what, you know. Findigil, the king's writer would have Been. That's the kind of stuff that is added in medieval manuscripts. Like the Venerable Bead says, well, you know, the poet Cadmon said this wonderful poem, which I'm giving you a paraphrase in Latin, even though poetry doesn't go well from language to language. And some other guy basically said, oh, I know that poem, and wrote it in Old English in the interlinear space and the margin. And that's the impression we get from the Lord of the Rings. Like the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, where it trails off like, you know, there were many others who are not named because it was an enormous battle and no one knows everything that happened. And you're like, wait, you're the omnipotent author God.

Alan Sisto (62:21)

Right?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (62:21)

How come you don't know what. What happened? And in fact, why did we end this with a poem that's made many years afterwards? Who wrote that? Because.

Alan Sisto (62:30)

Right.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (62:30)

Frodo leaves for the Gray Havens in a year and a half. Right. Or to the maximum two years.

Alan Sisto (62:36)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (62:36)

From. From there. So it can't be like a maker many years later. Well, who put that poem and all of those things then? I think they contribute. And I think the sense is again, that even though it's about fantasy and it's got dragons and Nazguls and all kinds of obvious fantasy tropes, it gives a sense of being true in a different way. Not true in terms of realism, but true in terms of textuality. And I think that we actually, if I have an insight here at all, is that we actually judge a lot of things based on their textuality and don't know. We do. I think this is even more the case now in our very Internet screen mediated area where we will, even without even finishing reading something like, oh, that's just copypasta. Right, Right. We have developed great senses for when things are heterotextual. Now we just didn't have a word for it. And I think it can be used for art, which is what I think Tolkien does with it.

Alan Sisto (63:35)

That is fascinating. You mentioned broken references and traditional reference, which are ways Tolkien hints at stories or cultural details that readers might not fully know. Sounds a little bit like textual ruins, which is a phrase that we use all the time trying to.

Sara (63:52)

I use it all the time.

Alan Sisto (63:53)

Every time we use it. How do these techniques work differently, though, in Tolkien's books compared to the old medieval stories where they're actually broken references? Like you said that the guy's younger brother, you know.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (64:05)

Yeah. Ermin Loft's older brother is like A perfect example of a broken reference. Or when Chaucer says something about Wade's Boat. And we know there was something about Wade's boat because Mr. Spath, in his 1598 edition of the Canterbury Tales, has a note that says, on the matter of Wade's boat, since it is very fantastical and also well known, I leave it aside. No, no, I want to. I want to. I said I want to dig him up and beat him with his own femur. Like, we want to know what you knew there. You. Right, so those are. Those are broken references, and they are things that, again, everybody knew at one time, and then.

Alan Sisto (64:48)

And because they knew it, they didn't write it down.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (64:50)

Yeah, why would you bother? It's like, think of. If you're writing a novel now, are you going to stop? And, you know, would you say, well, you know, the President, that's the leader of the United. Like, you wouldn't do those. Those things.

Alan Sisto (65:00)

So.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (65:01)

So those are broken. You know, broken references are part of medieval literature. I can't be. I can't say that Tolkien invented the idea of a pseudo reference, which is to deliberately, like, put in something there that has no referent. Right. Doesn't connect to anything out there. It just. It's, you know, so the HP Lovecraft does it with the Necronomicon or the King in Yellow or the Pnakotic Transcripts or whatever where he just made up works. Frank Herbert does it for, like, every epigraph in Dune. It's a quote from a book that doesn't exist. You know, blah, blah, blah, Tleilaxu God book this. You know, the Manual of Muad'dib and stuff like that. So that you've got broken references which just happened through time. You've got pseudo references that are just made up for the sake of giving that same sense. Like. Right. It's a science fiction trick. Like everybody.

Alan Sisto (66:00)

Asimov does it in foundation with the Galactic. The Encyclopedia Galactic.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (66:05)

Yeah. And. And you know everybody. Oh, like Star wars, you know, you fought in the Clone wars. Or it's a Karelian space, you know, it'll make the.

Alan Sisto (66:12)

Yeah, that's right. The spice run in the spice.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (66:15)

The kessel spice run in less than 3 parsecs. Or.

Alan Sisto (66:18)

What's a parsec?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (66:19)

What's a. Yeah, and that's. And that's. You know, science fiction writers really developed how to use that, the defamiliarization there, and have everyone treat it like everybody knows.

Alan Sisto (66:28)

Familiarization. I like that.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (66:30)

That's shippy. Has a shippy has a book that a lot of people who should read, they would really enjoy it. It's about science fiction rather than fantasy. It's called Hard Reading. And he works through some of these ideas really, really well.

Alan Sisto (66:42)

New thing for my list.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (66:44)

It's really good too. Like, he can tell that he loves science fiction and he knew a lot of the people of like the late 20th century Science fiction scene, that he knew them personally from going to conventions. And, and so it, it's really good. I mean, you know, I, I, my, like my love for Tom Shippy stuff is like embarrassingly bad because I never disagree with him about anything but fun.

Sara (67:05)

Boyish.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (67:06)

Yeah, a little. Little much, you know.

Sara (67:08)

Ah, that's okay.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (67:09)

You have the broken references done by time. You have pseudo references. Now. The thing about Tolkien is that all but two of the seemingly pseudo references are actually just broken because they're references to the Silmarillion, right? So he actually had this archive and all these stories, right? And when he has Elrond say to Frodo, you know, if you take this quest, you'll be as respected as Hador and Hurin and Turin and Baron himself at that stage in the narrative, Baron is the only one we've ever heard of.

Alan Sisto (67:45)

Right.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (67:45)

But those characters all existed.

Alan Sisto (67:47)

Yeah, it's not a broken reference in Tolkien's mind. He knows what he's saying.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (67:51)

And in fact, he intended at one point to publish the Silmarillion first so everyone would understand the references. And I think he went through a period of kind of despair when he first realized that he couldn't do that because he's like, I can't go back and rewrite every one of these things. And that's when I think, and Verlin. I got this idea from Verlin Flieger that. But after 51 and the whole when he couldn't get Collins to agree, he just decided that it's going to be just the Lord of the Rings and it's going to work the way it works. And that's where I think that it becomes intentional. And it's around that time frame that you've gotten the cats of Queen Beruthiel, the staffs of the five wizards, when only three are ever named. And those are the two completely pseudo references. Of course, then he makes them non pseudo by making up stories for both of them.

Alan Sisto (68:43)

Even the Beruthiel. What? He kind of makes it up whole cloth in the middle of an interview, doesn't he? That's a great story. But you're like, you know, the Only one that I don't really know is this Queen Beruthiel. And then he just proceeds to make up the story about her.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (68:55)

But she had seven white and one black cat.

Alan Sisto (68:58)

Yeah, she was a black Numenorean. And then he sent her off on the boat with all her cats, which is the best ending ever, I gotta say.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (69:05)

That was off to see with you with your cat. They give the same kind of, like the texture of something old. And the key is that they. They hang together because they were references to something real, which is something that doesn't often happen with a whole bunch of pseudo references. That's where you end up with, like, weird contradictions in Star wars or something, because they were just throwaway lines, you know? Or my favorite one is Galaxy Quest, Greb Thar's Hammer and the Sons of War Van, which was actually written in the script in pencil with a note. We'll add something good later.

Alan Sisto (69:41)

Oh, I love it. That's. That's so Galaxy Quest.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (69:44)

Yeah. And then it just stuck. Right.

Alan Sisto (69:46)

Oh, man.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (69:47)

So there's this. There's this sense that it's. That it all hangs together, but that it's also broken. And that's, I think, is the ruin thing. Like where you see an archway or stairs, but there's no upstairs to go to, or, you know, a collapsed doorway. And. And that gives us that. That feel. The other thing that Tolkien did, and this is, I think, it, like. I mean, he never explicitly stated it, so it's hard to make it be a contribution to, like, oral traditional studies. But it should be. And he should get the credit for it rather than me. But we have this idea in oral tradition that, like, there's phrases that are called a traditional referent with a T. And I'm sorry that reference and referent are the same. I did not make them up. So a referent is when, like, say in. In Homer, they say Hector of the Glancing Helm or Blameless Aegisthus. Right. For us as readers now, that's just like this stock tagline. Right. It's always like. Even to the point where Blameless Aegisthus, the line. The logic of the whole sanction is it's. It's all the fault of Blameless Aegisthus. And that's what you can have happen, because it's just become like another way of saying the person's name.

Alan Sisto (70:58)

It's just his name. Right, Exactly. It's not. It's not actually making a statement anymore.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (71:02)

Yeah. Originally it wasn't like, the reason that you were saying Hector of the Glancing Helm was that everybody in the audience knew that he had this particularly shiny helmet or gray eyed Athena. That was the particular factor because you could recognize the gray eyes when she was in disguise or something. And we don't know what most of the things are, but once they start getting repeated in their own form, then they become like this marker that just says I'm traditional. And people can copy it and say it's traditional. And I think we see that in a number of places in Tolkien where it's almost like it's in the early stages of a tradition. So Hador and Hurin and Turin and Baron himself. It's metrical, it's got alliteration, it's got rhyme, right? Or Goldberry river woman's daughter. I mean, it even fits a nice line of Tom Bombadil's, you know, daughter of the river. River woman's daughter. Elrond, half Elven. So what he managed to do is give the impression that there's been stories being told about these people for hundreds or thousands of years. And so when our narrators, when, when Frodo or Sam or Bilbo or Vindagil, the king's writer, write about them, they use the phrasing and the terminology that everybody knew. I just think that's an amazing accomplishment. Right to.

Alan Sisto (72:29)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (72:29)

Every time when I was studying this stuff with Professor Foley back at the University of Missouri, he would always point out that the thing a traditional referent does is it brings in, like, the entire traditional character of that person, like all the stories about Hector of the Glancing Helm by saying that tagline. But I never understood anything beyond that. Like, how did it get started? Why would it work that way? Until I was, like, reading through Tolkien and starting to notice those little, you know, the little. They're almost rhymes or their repetitions of sounds around people's names. And you can completely see. And then you go to the, to the appendix, and it says that Amir's name, you know, eventually became known as Amur Aedi, right? Amur the Blessed or Amur that the happy and successful. And there's a nice Anglo Saxon, you know, formula. Oh, it's King. Who's the king? Aomer Adi. You know, that's the. That's the guy. I, I think is the best king of Rohan. So I think that that's a. That's an amazing. I mean, it's an accomplishment. The problem is, it's an accomplishment that nobody thought there was any reason to try to do it, but Tolkien did it and did it Better than anyone even comes close.

Alan Sisto (73:42)

And to me, a lot of that points back to something he wrote about in the preface or the introduction when he says that he prefers. Opposed to allegory, he prefers history, real or feigned. So he has feigned this history because he wants to read a history. He wants that. That's what he craves to enjoy, and he wants us to enjoy that.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (74:03)

And he'd rather have a fake history. Yeah. Right. And what does that even mean? What is a fake history? And that's like. That's what he wrote. That's what it is.

Alan Sisto (74:10)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (74:10)

Historical fiction form of history.

Sara (74:12)

Right.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (74:13)

I think about, like, one of the. The mysteries that. That Shippy talks about is why the heck, in sort of the middle of, you know, now, now he knows he can publish the Silmarillion. He just needs to write the Silmarillion. I know I'm going to go through and rewrite the entire story as historical annals, which is like 180 degrees the opposite of what everybody wanted, which was another Lord of the Rings close story, close narrative story. Why would he do that? And I think you have the answer is like, he preferred history.

Alan Sisto (74:44)

He loves it. And that's one of the things we love about him too.

Sara (74:47)

Absolutely. So the concept of what you call least knowledgeable character focalization, that is fascinating. And we've often talked about this on the podcast. I think we got the idea from you in the first place. But maybe you can tell us a little bit about how it helps readers learn about Middle Earth alongside the characters and perhaps more central to your argument why it's so effective in maintaining emotional engagement.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (75:11)

So I came up with the least knowledgeable character thing because I was just going along with what everybody said, that the Lord of the Rings is focalized through the Hobbits. And, you know, one of the things Tom Shippy talks about is that that's one of the things that makes it so appealing, is that we are seeing Middle Earth not necessarily from the eyes of the characters to whom it's familiar, but to these little Hobbits who've never been outside the Shire and everything's new and exciting for them. And it also mediates it because that you have to explain things for. For the Hobbits. And then I was like, I don't know, I was rereading something and I'm like, wait a second, there's no Hobbit in this chapter. The point of view is from Gimli. Right? Like, that doesn't even. Wouldn't even make sense in terms of you know who the narrators of the Lord of the Rings would be. Like, nobody thinks of Gimli sat down in a tower in Minas Tirith and wrote out his, his memoir, Mars or whatever. I mean, I'm not saying he couldn't, but they would have been in runes and I think he would do other things. And I was like, wow, that's a lot of point of view of Gimli. Like, it, it's, it's a, it's a lot. All the Three Hunter stuff, some of it is generic from all their point of view, but a lot of it's from Gimli. And then it just sort of clicked. Oh. Because Legolas is however many thousand years old and Aragorn's been there before, so Gimli is the one. And then I started looking for it and it's, it's pretty solidly consistent. My favorite one being that when all the hobbits are asleep, we get the point of view of a fox. Yeah, it's the talking fox. I. I hate the talking fox.

Alan Sisto (76:53)

Really? Oh, yeah. We got to, we got to do three rounds on the talking fox in one of these days, Mike. Not today, though.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (76:58)

I'm. I. Now I've been talked into by Marcellus, Bules and others that the talking fox is actually really important to the, to the sort of transition between the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and between Bilbo's kind of happier, cute, you know, thing, so that we should think of it as Bilbo, you know, imputing this to the fox. Because the whole point is like a bunch of Hobbits all out sleeping together. I've never seen such a thing. I wonder what's up? And he never found out. But, but anyway, like that. Tolkien tends to push that focalization. And remember, it's a third person narrative. You don't have to. You can tell it from whatever point of view, but he stays very consistent because I think that is a way to avoid the dreaded Chapter two, the Treatise of Tedium, in which I tell you about the physics, chemistry, geology, biology, politics. Lots more politics, social customs, dress and food of my imaginary world, which you will all forget by the time you reach the end of the chapter if you've stayed awake. This is just like Bad Fantasy 101.

Alan Sisto (78:06)

But why doesn't Aragorn tell us his tax code? Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (78:10)

Yeah. Exactly. What is Aragorn's tax policy? And like, you know, and how many like. No, thank you. The brilliance of like and science fiction has done this more than fantasy. Usually because fantasy always sort of tends to assume sort of the same generic Northwestern European medieval world. But, you know, science fiction. How do you do this? And there's. You can defamiliarize everybody. You could just say, like, you know, oh, well, we're picking up the orb of, you know, Snarvar or whatever and have to go on the. And everyone can act like, oh, of course. That's what we're doing.

Alan Sisto (78:40)

Yeah, well, it's crap. Thor's hammer.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (78:42)

Yeah, yeah. Like, sort of like the Peter Jackson Council of Elrond where everybody knows who everyone is even though they've never seen each other before. Like, oh, wow, that's, you know, must be. That must be Aragorn.

Alan Sisto (78:52)

And here's Legolas again.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (78:53)

Hey, Boromir, nice of you to show up, but. And I'm not. I mean, I'm not. I know why Jackson had to do that. Like, yeah, you know, there's just.

Alan Sisto (79:01)

Otherwise you'd have a movie called the Council of Elrond.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (79:03)

Yes, exactly. There would be constriction. I would be okay with that movie.

Alan Sisto (79:06)

Yes, I would, too. But I don't think it would have had the commercial success.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (79:11)

They wouldn't have tried to match the ring with a warhammer or a war ax. That's the only thing. But, but so, like, the least knowledgeable character allows you to sneak in all kinds of explanation, right? Because your character, the. The focal character is kind of like, well, what is that? Like, you know, why. Why are we doing this? Frodo can say, well, who's Saruman? And then Gandalf answers him in the very, like, science fiction way. Oh, he's the head of my order. Never says what the order is. Doesn't say that Saruman's actually a wizard, you know, doesn't. Just gives you the information. But. But you get the information that you as a reader need and you do it at the same time that the character gets it. So it's naturalized. It's. It's smoothed over. You don't have to have that awkward, you know, that awkward moment when someone opens up a book and reads out loud, you know, the land was formed here. Or my favorite is William Gibson's Neuromancer, where, like, Chapter two is he plugs into the Matrix and he accidentally went into, like, a child's textbook that says the Matrix developed out of blah, blah. I mean, it's just a flat out didactic lecture for, you know, a page and a half. And, and Tolkien, you know, he has to do some of that in Shadow of the Past. But one of the tricks, right, is he makes Frodo drag it out of Gandalf. And so you as a reader actually want more, not less. Like, you know, Gandalf's like, I'm not going to tell you about how the rings were forged. Like, why not? Yeah, I would like to know.

Alan Sisto (80:40)

I want to.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (80:41)

This, this is relevant information. Gandalf, right? And then, and then in the Council of Elrond, it's all done through speech and the, the drama of people's, you know, different registers and them arguing and, and, you know, reporting Gandalf, reporting Saruman's speech and, you know, Radagast speech or all of those things. So I think that that is. It's just part of his artistry was to. To get that information to you in such a natural way. And I'm not saying that, like, you know, that he invented it. Again, like, science fiction writers have been doing that for 100 years now. But he does it so well that it's unobtrusive that you don't. And then I think there's also it. It aligns you as a reader with a particular character, which enables the emotional engagement much more than if you're back here being instructed by someone. He said, you are learning as, as. As Frodo or Sam does. Like, what. What is this thing? Like, we go to Weathertop. Why is this here? Yeah, the men of the west built. And you still don't know, really. You just know the men of the west built it, but not why. It's, you know, it takes even longer for they find. Much longer. Yeah, yeah. And you have to dig through the appendices to really figure out why Weathertop got burned down. I think probably because Tolkien hadn't realized there was a Palantir there when he wrote the original. You know, the palantirs are a kind of late development tube and suddenly they're everywhere.

Sara (82:12)

So one of my favorite instances of this is actually Yoreth, particularly that scene where she's talking to her kinswoman and telling her all about what's going on right now and then has to stop because things are happening. But it's just that moment where we learn what Yorith knows because her kinswoman doesn't know about.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (82:32)

That was one of the other things. I just couldn't figure out a way to work into the book. But Yorath and a little line by Faramir are, I think, Tolkien's. And I didn't make either of these up. Like, these are other two scholars. One is Simon Cook and I can't remember who I got the Ioreth from thing. But they're. That Yorith is telling you what the story of the Lord of the Rings is going to be remembered as by normal people in not even a thousand years. In a hundred years. In a hundred years it's going to be Frodo went with his Esquire and fought with Sauron and set his tower on fire.

Alan Sisto (83:09)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (83:09)

Right. And that's. And Tolkien's putting that right there like that is. You know. And it's not malicious. She's not stupid. She's the only one who knew about the Kings foil. I love yarn. Right. She's. She's a voice of. I think it's the line that is it. Is it either. I don't remember if it's Elrond or Celeborn and he says like old women are worth listening to.

Alan Sisto (83:29)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (83:30)

Which is a. Which is true and a great. A great line.

Sara (83:32)

And doesn't Gandalf say something similar when the Doctor tries to dismiss Yoreth?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (83:38)

Yeah, I'll find some man of more wisdom and less learning.

Alan Sisto (83:42)

Yeah, it's Celeborn. Boromir is talking about. Oh, I've been in Rohan, you know, I passed through the Gap. Long journey, blah, blah, blah. I'm. I'm sure that I shall find a way through on and Fangorn if need be. That I need. Say no more, said Kelleborn. But do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years. For oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (84:03)

Yeah, it's a great. It's a great line. And Yorith is a good. You know, kind of. She's, she's joking or, you know, she says like, oh, he burned down the tower. That's how everybody's going to remember it.

Alan Sisto (84:12)

Yeah. It may be hyperbolic. It may not be an extra news.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (84:15)

Well, and then if you, if you go to the. The Essay of the Rings of Power and the Third Age in the Silmarillion, go back and reread what it says happened, it doesn't tell the truth of the whole story. No, it does not. Frodo went to Mordor and threw the ring in.

Sara (84:31)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (84:31)

Yeah. There's a little Golem left out of that. And then the other side of it is when this. There's a Simon Cook convinced me and I think this is right, there's a thing, a time known in old Norse legend called the Piece of Frothy if you took the name Frothy and translated into Anglo Saxon, it would be Frodo. So the piece of Frodo, when it is said that the world was so peaceful and prosperous that you could leave a gold ring lying by the side of the highway and come back a year later and pick it up.

Alan Sisto (85:03)

Wow. The Faramir reference.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (85:05)

I think the. Right. The Faramir. And I think that the overall message there. Right. Is this is how things get scrambled in history. Faramir said a line about that. Right. The person remembering or hearing this later knows there's something important about a gold ring and knows the line. And he knows there was a time of peace. So he assumes that that's due to Frodo, which is fine, except he makes Frodo into the king. That it was King Frodo and it was his peace and everything was so wealthy and successful then that you could leave a ring by the side of the road. When the true story is what we've just read. And I. I just love that. I love when Tolkien, you know, starts thinking through. Because isn't the gimmick. Right. The gimmick is like, we're reading the truth. Yeah. In the Memoirs of the Hobbits. But even then there's some. Some problems. You know, Like, I don't know if you want to me to talk about this but, like, how do. How does anybody know what Gollum was thinking about or feeling in the famous and beautiful scene of the stairs of Cirith Ungall?

Alan Sisto (86:13)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (86:13)

And this is a place where Tom Hillman and I actually the rare place we disagree. And I think probably his. I have to say, like, his interpretation is. Is probably much more reasonable that it's Sam told Frodo what happened. Right. Like that he woke up, saw Gollum touching him and then Frodo infers what went on. I would just point out that if that's the case, Frodo is basically unconsciously blaming Sam for everything that happens with. For Gollum going, you know, actually betraying. And I don't know if that's so. So my take was that that scene just couldn't be written from the point of view of the least knowledgeable character.

Alan Sisto (86:54)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (86:54)

Because that would give away that Gollum was planning on betraying them. Like, you couldn't have Gollum's actual thoughts.

Alan Sisto (87:03)

No.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (87:03)

And not have it be like, why he was shaking his head. Why was he. You know, what was he torn between doing there? And I think that's the place where Tolkien just has to break it. And, you know, because he needed that scene, right? I mean, he said he wept when he wrote it. Like Gollum and you, you can't have either of the hobbits be awake for it or it doesn't make sense. And you can't even say like, I think definitely what Gollum saw because that puts us too much in Gollum. So it was as if he, you know, felt and as if he was. And, and I think that that's, that's again that that level of, of, of artistry and attention to, to detail of, of making it, you know, of making what we read and experience and see through our, through our mind's eye be just like, you know, always aimed so, so perfectly to, to get it to, to resonate. Make us feel as if, you know, when we need to feel that we're there and then when we need to feel that we're far away and hearing about it from the distant past. I think it's. I, I just, I. The more I've worked on this and the more I studied Tolkien, the more amazed by his artistry I became. Rather than the opposite of like, oh well, you know, this was. He made a mistake here or he revised this a lot of times and forgot to change that. I became more convinced that he was a really remarkably talented artist at very subtle things that we don't teach in creative writing workshops or don't explore in literary study because they're so complex and subtle. Ford Blue Cruise Hands free. Highway driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel wheel allowing you to relax and reconnect while also staying in control. Enjoy the drive in blue cruise enabled vehicles like the F150 Explorer and Mustang Mach E. Available feature on equipped vehicles. Terms apply. Does not replace safe driving. See Ford.com BlueCruise for more details. Jack Daniels is proudly served in fine.

Alan Sisto (89:15)

Establishments, questionable joints and everywhere in between. So no matter where you go in every bar, you'll always know someone by name.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (89:26)

Jack Jack and Coke. Shot of Jack.

Sara (89:29)

Jack Daniels, please.

Alan Sisto (89:30)

Right away.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (89:31)

That's what makes Jack Jack. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org Jack Daniels and old number seven are registered trademarks.

Alan Sisto (89:38)

Tennessee Whiskey 40 alcohol by volume.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (89:40)

Jack Daniel Distillery. Lynchburg, Tennessee, Tennessee. Extra value meals are back.

Alan Sisto (89:44)

That means 10 tender juicy McNuggets and.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (89:47)

Medium fries and a drink are just $8 only at McDonald's for limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery.

Sara (90:04)

Now. We told you about the amazing PPP community after our earlier break. If you're a part of that community. And you want to enjoy something even more special, come and join the Fellowship of the podcast on Patreon. You get to be in the best discord community around, one that includes host hangouts and even live episode recordings.

Alan Sisto (90:21)

And your support there is what enables me to work full time doing all of these shows. The ppp, today's Tolkien Times, the Rings of Power app up when it eventually comes back, and my streaming show, the PPP plays. And when you join, you also get episode postscripts, ad free episodes, free merch, and more. And I just want to take a second to just, just throw in there. I know we say the same words all the time. Just want you to know how much I mean them. This is a tough time. I know for a lot of folks who are still in the middle of that government shutdown, economy is what it is. People are struggling to buy groceries and pay rent, and you're all still supporting the show. So thank you. And I want you to know we never take that for granted.

Sara (90:57)

Absolutely. Now, you can join our Questions after Nightfall episodes or even appear as a guest in the North Wing when you join our Patreon. So go to patreon.com prancingponypod to show your support and join the Fellowship of the Podcast.

Alan Sisto (91:10)

And of course, you can always help us out by rating and reviewing on Apple podcasts and Spotify. And the best thing you can do, honestly, is recommend us to your friends. You do that on Spotify, do it on social media, whatever it takes. Share the show with your friends. Let's get right back in, because I'll tell you what, we've got a gazillion more questions, but we don't have a gazillion more hours. So we're just going to start with one that we've always advocated on the show for reading the Lord of the Rings out loud, listening to the musicality of the text, the subtle alliteration in the prose, and more. Just, there's so much that comes alive when you read it out loud. You talked about how it makes the story feel more real and exciting. I want to know, like, from an actual expert's perspective, how does that work? How does hearing the story or reading it aloud change the way that people experience it compared to what most people do with most books, which is just.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (92:01)

Read silently, reading aloud, actually, it creates. It creates another or a different kind of a frame narrative again. Right? It's. And it's a. It's a much deeper frame. Like it's something that Humans have been doing with, with each other for, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, rather than, you know, the what, the maybe 2000 that we've been reading stuff out loud to each other. It's, it's just, it. There's some deeper connection there, and I think that can happen with any reading aloud. But Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings for oral delivery. A lot of it because he was reading it out loud to the other members of the Inklings because, you know, he was sending things off to Christopher as air grams, but also to the Inklings. And a lot of it is just. What I've realized is technique. And I've learned. I learned a lot about it from another experience. So recorded the audiobook for the Tower and the Ruin.

Alan Sisto (92:57)

Oh, I cannot wait.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (93:00)

At the same time. Now, it was interesting when first of all, I didn't expect a scholarly book that someone would want to, you know, that the recorded books would want to pick up the, the rights to that. And they did. So that was amazing. But then I said, and I'd like to do the recording. This is a voice phone conversation. And there was a long pause.

Sara (93:18)

Oh, boy.

Alan Sisto (93:19)

Publishers don't like authors doing the publishers.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (93:21)

The guy on the other side says, you have to understand that most authors are not very good at reading their own work. And I said, well, I've done 13 audio courses and I've done 40 hours of this. And they're like, doesn't matter. It's different to read than it is to speak. I was kind of insistent. So, like, you're gonna have to send us an audition tape. So I did an audition tape. Now I happen to choose a short passage where I had both Old English and Elvish to read, just emphasizing that they would have to hire someone to do the Old English and the Elvish if they didn't hire me. And so they. And they did. I recorded it in August. It was one of the more difficult things I've ever done.

Alan Sisto (94:07)

Yeah. Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (94:08)

Like it took 32 hours in the studio to do a 300 page book. It's not 32 hours long. And recording and, and the level of detail that the audio engineer, producer. I mean, if I missed an S on an end of a word, we had to go back. We could only do a maximum of four hours a day for vocal consistency. People don't like to hear your voice get tired or be messed up. So I learned a lot. And what I learned is that I don't write very well for audio. Like, you know what, you're very amusing Long parenthetical expression in audio is a flipping disaster. There were so many of those. I mean, I now don't want to use them ever again because of that. Of that experience. Well, Tolkien is a genius at the things he doesn't do, the things that he doesn't make impossible. I mean, we kept doing bedtime reading with my daughter and I until she was 14 and it was only Jane Eyre that killed it. Terrible mistake on my part. But we had always done a lot of bedtime reading the house and worked on it. And I can tell you, you can just tell the difference immediately between someone who is writing for oral delivery and who's thinking of it that way. Because I can. I'll take Dune. I love Dune. I don't know if Dune is the book you would pick to read to an 11 year old daughter, but she wanted it. I read Dune out loud to her. What would happen in Dune is that you would read an entire gigantic paragraph of speech and then when you got to the end, you'd realize, oh no, that was not Gurney Halleck, that was Duncan Idaho. And don't think she didn't make me go back and do the paragraph again in the right voice.

Alan Sisto (96:01)

Oh, that's great. Demanding.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (96:04)

Listen, you never have the slightest doubt who is speaking in Tolkien. The turn taking the use of, you know, it's a little said cried description. They're flawless. And you always know where you're oriented in space and time. And that's really one of the most amazing things in an oral. Because in an oral tale you can't back up.

Alan Sisto (96:28)

No.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (96:28)

Right. You can't eye flick back to see what was going on here. And I also think that's why it's more powerful orally because let's face it, sometimes we get skimmy when we're reading silently to ourselves, particularly for things like poems or.

Alan Sisto (96:45)

That's what I was about to say.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (96:46)

Landscape description.

Alan Sisto (96:48)

Right.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (96:48)

And those are actually the things that create the strongest effect.

Alan Sisto (96:52)

Yes.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (96:52)

And it's just our natural laziness as, as, you know, as readers that will I skip or you know, charge through those? Well, when you have to read them out loud, you realize. And you also realize, and I'm sure you guys have done this, just how much of the Lord of the Rings is landscape description? Yeah, that never gets more boring.

Alan Sisto (97:11)

Never.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (97:12)

Like how does he do that?

Sara (97:13)

Beautiful.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (97:14)

Because it's not like all purple prose, you know, there's not like these very elaborate metaphors and it's just straight up description of the. And a lot of it's of the geography. You know, the actual lay of the land, the, the road went down behind two hills and curved and. Or like the woody end that where the elves have their thing. It's a full page of description. The actual stuff that happens is a full page. Like it's. And you don't mind because it creates it so well. And I think that that's one of the areas. To me, it's actually the real deep reason behind why the eco criticism people love the Lord of the Rings so much. Because ideologically it's not all on one side or the other. I mean, the hobbits chop down all the trees that menace the, that menace the fence. They didn't even do anything yet. And there's never, he's never said, oh, those evil, bad, you know, environmentally destructive hobbits. Old Man Willow is evil. You know, some huorns are dangerous, nevertheless they shall have need of wood, says Aula to Yavana. And there's no like, answer to that. Right. Doesn't say, well then, then I'll stomp them flat or whatever. Right. But the reason everybody totally understands that Tolkien is, you know, ecologist, environmentalist is the love with which he describes the world. The detail and just the, the sense of just valuing and loving every part of it. Which I think is why the slag heaps in front of Mordor are so totally horrifying.

Alan Sisto (98:49)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (98:50)

Because that's the first time he's ever described even a swamp. Maybe the Dead Marshes. So the Dead Marshes. That, that, that. But I mean even like the, you know, swampy area near the Willow Tree is, is beautiful weathertop and, and how scary things are or the Troll Fells. It's, it's all like landscape that you, you feel that you've seen. I have to say, I just. When I was in England two weeks ago, I led a tour for this company called Scholarly Sojourns and it was called Imagining Middle Earth. So we went to some places that were Tolkien biography linked. We spent a couple days in Oxford. We were up in Harrogate to see the Harrogate Spa area and the Holderness Peninsula. We were in Whitby because they went on holiday in Whitby. But we also went to some places that just whether. And I think John Gar thinks Tolkien actually did see these places. But it's not like absolutely confirmed. Malham Cove and Gordale Scar. These two just incredibly one, one really feels like that it would be the Moria Gate and one really feels like it would be Helm's Deep. Keep would be built there in the Yorkshire Dales. And we went some places in the Ribble Valley. You see these places and you right away know what a great landscape describer he was, because it just fits. Yeah. Like the York parts of the Yorkshire Dales, like that's Hobbiton, you know, the, the smooth rolling parts, not these spiky rocky parts and you know, the Cotswolds or anything. So I think that that's, you know, a big part of reading aloud is just it puts you in the, the place.

Alan Sisto (100:25)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (100:26)

I mean, think about even the battle of the Pelnor Fields. There's not a lot of like chopping and limbs coming off and blood spurting or whatever. It's, it's much, much more of an oral tale sense rather than a movie being turned into to prose.

Sara (100:40)

Yeah, I agree. So one of the reasons that readers seem to love the Lord of the Rings is what Tolkien and on fairy stories calls the consolation or the joy of the happy ending. But some of his most moving work in the Silmarillion, for example, contains no such consolation. And as you point out in the chapter on emotions, you say, and I'm quoting here, only a few paragraphs after Beren is reunited with Luthien, they are both permanently dead. As soon as the war of wrath is won, Maedhros and Maglor steal and then lose the Silmarils. Akalabeth means the downfall. Now we could add more to the list of unrelenting loss, obviously, but as you point out, just because the Turin could for sure, just because the silver Radion is filled with those things doesn't mean it's only filled with those things. You identify things like bravery, defiance, heroism, self sacrifice, love, stronger than death. And then most of all, you write, there is beauty. Now there's my question. Why most of all, beauty above those other things that are also glorious?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (101:45)

This is a hard question. It's a really, really good question. And it's, it's. I've been thinking about this a lot actually in the past few weeks. My experience with the Silmarillion is, I think, unusual just because of age and experiences and things that happened. So I, you know, I got the Silmarillion as a, as a Christmas gift in Christmas 1977. Right. And I was living in Massachusetts and that February was the infamous blizzard of 78 when we were snowed in and like really snowed it. Like we had to cross country ski to the grocery store. We were snowed in for 10 days. My dad couldn't get home for three days he was a doctor at emergency room far away and eventually got brought home on a National Guard truck. Wow. So that was my experience of reading the Silmarillion in. In that when it really felt like angband was. Was almost real, you know, because the first few days were really cool and exciting and then it got cabin fevery and scary and difficult. And so my relationship with the Silmarillion has been very like. I. I love the Silmarillion. I reread the Silmarillion almost as much as I read the Lord of the Rings. But I think that what I get out of it is the beauty in. In sadness and beauty out of catastrophe and, and tragedy because I. I don't know if any of the other things are left in, in the end that it's so unrelenting. Right. That every victory falls apart. I mean, Hurin is personally responsible for the destruction of what, three elf kingdoms? Yeah, just poor. And I love Hurin. Like this scene where Hurin, you know, fights the Orc guard and keeps yelling, day will come Again. Like that's the. Any Anybody like, looks Morgeth in the face and mocks him like he's the best.

Alan Sisto (103:37)

He is.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (103:38)

But. But I don't know, can you take like defiance or heroism? I mean, you can certainly take it in any bit, but in the overall story, it all sort of goes for nothing. But to me, what, what comes out of it is, is the beauty of the, the images, the positive ones as well. Like, you know, I, I think I quoted the, the description of Eldamar. That's what I hope heaven looks like. You know, with the beaches of. Of scattered with pearls and pale crystal and the living arch of rock carved with the light from the Calceria flowing through it. Like, like how does someone even have that vision that, that he had there? And you know, the, the beauty of, of Gondolin or. I love Finrod. Finrod was my favorite character there. And what does Finrod say is like, tells his sister I'm not going to have anything to leave to an heir because I'm gonna have to fulfill an oath someday and doesn't try to change it.

Alan Sisto (104:29)

No.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (104:29)

Right. That's what I love. It's like I made an oath and I'm gonna have to fulfill it. So, you know, that's, that's where we are. So I mean, what I was trying to get at in, in the Silmarillion, though, is that I think it really ends up. Up being unrelenting.

Alan Sisto (104:41)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (104:42)

Sadness. The positive I can take from that is the beauty that that comes out of it. But I totally like your question. Really gets at, you know, why not Defiance, resistance, heroism, and. I don't know. I don't have a good answer to that.

Sara (104:57)

It's your personal response, right?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (104:59)

It's my. It's. Yeah, that's. That's one where it's. I mean, they're all really my response, but that's like. That's one where I can see. Oh, actually, there's plenty of legitimate responses that are different to mine there. That just. Yeah, that's how I, you know, like I said in the. I love, absolutely love the Silmarillion. I go back to it, some of the passages, the. The battle of Fingon, when he loses. It's so. It's so powerful. And then. And then, obviously, fingolfin. Oh, you know, oh, I think I'll go fight the devil today. Oh, and I wanted him, too. That's the best part, right? The best part is not that he goes and, like, I'm gonna fight the devil one on one, but, oh, yeah, he can't walk anymore. Eat without pain. Because of me. Yeah. You know, I have my. My one Tolkien tattoo is the. The coat of arms of Finglefin.

Sara (105:49)

Oh.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (105:50)

Also because that was on the front of the 77 in Silmarilla, the heraldry. But that's. That's my one.

Alan Sisto (105:56)

I love that choice. You introduce us to a very interesting concept, the German word Heimweh. And now my high school German teacher is scolding me in death, rolling in his grave at me for my pronunciation.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (106:08)

That's recorded it in my most widely watched lecture and kept pronouncing it heim way.

Alan Sisto (106:13)

Ah, brilliant.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (106:15)

W. Yeah, I heard from some Germans, and I'm of German ancestry, too.

Sara (106:20)

So they were just disappointed in you, then?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (106:23)

They were very disappointed in me.

Alan Sisto (106:24)

I'm not angry with you, Mike. I'm just really, really disappointed. Can you give our listeners an understanding of that word and how it differs from, like, the similar English synonyms, like sorrow, nostalgia, or loss? And then maybe a single example of how Tolkien creates this emotion in his readers?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (106:44)

So what I originally started doing in that section of the book is I was going to try to rehabilitate the notion of nostalgia. Not in, like, some schmaltzy, you know, sense, but on just the sense like that we actually do feel a kind of loss and pain for things that are gone in the past. And what I realized is that, unfortunately, within literary studies, that's impossible right now. I would have spent the whole book Kind of whack a moling down all the, The. Oh, you know, nostalgia is. It's. It's retrogressive. It's desire for political hegemony. It's all so. Which I think all is wrong, but fine, you know, that's what everybody believes. And then I had this stroke of luck where I noticed, or I remembered that nostalgia is actually a translation into Greek of a German word that was the original. And then researching it, I found out that was actually a diagnosed sickness you could die from Heimwehr. And it was supposedly something that was particularly common among the Swiss who had gone from Switzerland and were working as sailors, chambermaids, waiters, laborers in other countries that suddenly they would get sick with Heimwerk and they would die unless you got them back home to Switzerland and you knew it was Heimweh. If they got better when they were brought home, if they died anyway, then they weren't sick with heimweh. I love 17th century medicine. It's like, so. And there's a whole treatise on it. And the author is like, so. The best way to treat it is to bring the person home. If you can't do that, then you can try mercury or bleeding or purging.

Sara (108:29)

No wonder they died.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (108:32)

Yes, exactly. Exactly. But it was thought to be such a powerful emotion for the loss of home, being separated from home, that it could kill you. And I decided I would just. And that's what nostalgia got translated into, to make it medical. Right. It's, you know, grief for. For our home is the idea here. And. And so I just went back to the original because it's that pain for the lost home. And really where it clicked for me, I don't know. I watched this video that there was a. I think his name was Franz Hofmeester. He had photograph videoed his daughter, like every Friday from when she was born until she was like 14 years old, and run it all together in one film. And she. It's not, it's not like, you know, she's not always in the same place, but it's always her. And you see her face grow and change, and it's like, it's such a perfect visual of love. Like, you know, you can just tell the absolute love that he has for his daughter and all of us who raised children, how we feel about that, but also the loss, because you see that little kid is gone and you've actually seen her transform into something else. And that's, that's, that's the pain that we all feel. For our lost home. And it doesn't matter if you had, like, if you. I hope that people didn't. But if you had a horrible childhood or were an abusive situation or whatever, you still have pain for the state of being a child and for. Of seeing things that way. And you still have pain when you move away from happy events, not if you don't have to be miserable for that, that you still have the loss that you can't get back to. And I just felt like that was very much like, what, again, what the ruin marks. And so I, I wanted to. I, I felt that that was like this dominant motif, a completely dominant motif in the Silmarillion. I think that's like, really all the emotions, the Silmarillion keep coming back to that. And that makes sense, right? The elves have lost paradise and it was their own fault. That's the, The. That's the. That's the whole thing about Heimwehr, right? It. You often, you blame yourself, or at least you just, you know, you couldn't help it. You grew. So. So, you know, it just makes. It makes it that much, much worse. And I felt that that was the, you know, the dominant emotion of the Silmarillion and the genius of the Lord of the Rings was that Tolkien was able to transform that sort of purely sad sadness into something else. And I'm just thinking of the line where tears that were blessed without bitterness.

Alan Sisto (111:12)

Oh, yes. At the end of the Gray Havens. Yeah, right.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (111:15)

And I think I honestly, I really believe this. I think that's what Tolkien wanted to reach in his own life, like, just to get to that point. He wasn't asking for, you know, could I have permanent joy and happiness or whatever. Can I just get to the point where it's. It's not bitter anymore? And for someone who survived everything, he survived World War I and the loss before that, the loss of parents and the, you know, alienation that he felt by being discriminated against for being Catholic and all of those things. And all he wanted was just, could I have the sadness? But without the bitterness.

Alan Sisto (111:53)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (111:53)

And I think that's the magic of the Lord of the Rings with all the sadness and sorrow and loss. I mean, that's the thing. It's, you know, say, happy ending. The protagonist can't even enjoy his retirement. He's in so much pain, he has to leave every person he loves and cares about and go somewhere, somewhere else, a happy ending. You know? Oh, every. You know, the good guys get rewarded and the bet, like, what book did you read.

Alan Sisto (112:18)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (112:19)

But on the other hand, we do feel something. We don't feel negative about the end of the Lord of the Rings at all. Because I think when Sam says, well, I'm back and his little baby daughter is put on his lap, you get what blessed and without bitterness is. He's still, he's heartbroken about missing Frodo.

Alan Sisto (112:40)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (112:41)

But it's now it's integrated. It's all part of him and part of how things have to be. And of course, Tolkien could be very tough minded, but he was also a softie. He lets Build a Pony live. He then throws in an appendix that, oh, Sam probably could go over this over, you know, across the sea one last time, you know, and I love that about him.

Alan Sisto (113:02)

Yeah. Because I mean, he even talked about the idea of, you know, Frodo and Bilbo being able to enjoy their, you know, some time together there. You know, Bilbo would have been old and would have died pretty quickly, but Frodo would have just faded away right away. He, the implication is very strong that he would have been alive when Sam got over there, there. And it's the same.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (113:22)

So. Because Frodo wasn't at the end of his normal life at all.

Alan Sisto (113:26)

No, not even close.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (113:27)

And he's not that much older than Sam. No, either. So.

Alan Sisto (113:30)

Yeah.

Sara (113:30)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (113:31)

My daughter. What my daughter loved was that she inferred, though it wasn't ever explicitly stated, that Shadowfax got to go on the boat.

Alan Sisto (113:38)

And Gandalf confirms that in one of his letters.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (113:40)

In one of the letters, yes. I love it. She was like, I said, well, you know, sweetie, I'm not sure. And she's like, shadow Facts is on the boat.

Alan Sisto (113:47)

She's right. I love that. That's fantastic.

Sara (113:50)

That's a good headcanon, if nothing else. You mention that even the most heroic characters in the story like Frodo and Galadriel, they face serious moral challenges and they pay a high price for their actions. How do you think this idea of sacrifice and cost actually shape the overall message of the Lord of the Rings?

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (114:10)

I think that's part of the reason that I don't see the book as having this, you know, easy peasy, happy ending. All the, you know, the good boys get rewarded and the bad boys are all dead and everybody's happy. I, I think it's, I think what you see is almost the exact opposite of that is that people make the right decisions and still pay a huge price for them. And, and this is probably my most controversial, like, I don't know if you want to call it a take or interpretation of the Lord of the Rings part, which is that I've been saying for 20 something years that Frodo uses the Ring to dominate Gollum. Not just the threat of the Ring, not just, you know, the implication, but actually uses the power of the Ring to dominate Gollum. And I've been arguing that. People have been arguing back. And then when I was doing the book, I found in either Treason of Isengard or I think it's in Treason of Isengard. There's a little note where Tolkien wrote like the story foreseen from Moria and he says that Frodo uses the Ring to. So, so, so this shouldn't, that part shouldn't be controversial. But I think this is my take on it that I think is. But it shows this idea of a cost for everything. Frodo has like three possible choices and he hasn't even thought about the using the Ring choice. Right. When they, when they encounter Gollum, they can kill Gollum in cold blood. Yeah. Tolkien puts his thumb on the scale on that in all kinds of ways. The voice that Frodo hears, that it's a, it's not actually what the conversation with Gandalf was, but it's. No, it's like a paraphrase more applicable to this situation. Right. Fearing for your own safety. So, you know they're not going to kill Gollum in cold blood. They also can't let go because he'll kill them in their sleep and take the Ring and that's the end of Middle Earth. So what do you do now? I think, George R.R. martin, you, you'd cut Gollum's throat in three seconds and move on. Like, that's just how that, you know, and most fantasy honestly would work that way. Or you'd have some kind of cheesy deus ex machina come in. Or, you know, you could use the Elven rope or whatever, but Tolkien rules that out. So what does Frodo do? The one thing he's been told he must not ever do, which is use the Ring, but he has no choice. Yeah, using the Ring to dominate Gollum is the moral choice out of those three. You can't, you can't just like be, you know, like the kind of pacifist. Well, I'll just see what happens and, and let Gollum go and, and everyone else will be destroyed. So, so he does the right thing. And from that moment on is when the suffering begins. The weight of the Ring has not been mentioned to that point. The, the presence of the eye. It was on Amon hen, but it wasn't, you know, the, the, the beating down on him.

Alan Sisto (116:54)

Right.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (116:54)

That's when Frodo stops being the leader of the quest and Sam really ends up having to take. Take the initiative almost all the time. It's when Frodo becomes depressed, it becomes, it becomes sad and, and he did the right thing. That's how hardcore Tolkien is. Because I think, you know what I, what I say in the book is that the overall, like, if there's a message. I don't like messages anyway. But if there is one, if there's a more. If there's a morality like implicit in the Lord of the Rings, it's that it is always wrong to dominate other wills to force them to do what you want. The fantasy part is right. That everyone just wants to do what Aragorn tells him to do. So you know, that's great and that would be a distraction otherwise. But every other. Cagor never forces anyone. Aragorn sees the scared Rohan boys and goes okay, go retake care, Andros. Yeah, don't be ashamed. Go like. He's not. You can't run a military that way. When the people who get scared can just walk off. But, but he does. Because the point is that forcing people to do things against their will is fundamentally wrong. Now tell me how you organize a complex society based on that principle. Right. It's not possible. That's why it's fantasy or another way of putting it. And this is the other reason is I think that it's one of the strangest things about Tolkien is the most right wing people and the most left wing people I know both love Tolkien and think Tolkien's entirely on their side.

Alan Sisto (118:20)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (118:21)

It's like the line in the Dire Straits song. Two men say they're Jesus. At least one of them must be wrong.

Alan Sisto (118:26)

That is a cry. I don't think I've ever thought about that song in correlation to that truth. But you're right.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (118:32)

So you can't take that message and this is how we should organize society. But you can take that message and think about this is the ideal for us to behave and also know it's not like God IRU doesn't come down and punish Frodo for doing that. The valor don't. It's that you disfigure your own soul. You do something that's actually against your natural. The natural way you, you. I know there's plenty of people in the world who want to boss, abuse, and dominate other people. What Tolkien is saying is that your natural soul doesn't want to do that.

Alan Sisto (119:06)

Right.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (119:06)

And it takes harm when you. When you do that. And instead it wants to. I mean, think about the place that everybody longs for in the Lord of the Rings. It's the Shire.

Alan Sisto (119:19)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (119:19)

People prancing. What do people dress up as? Hobbits? I mean, come on. Okay, I want Elrond's library. But I otherwise completely understand, you know, it's not Minas Tirith. It's not even Lothlorian. As beautiful as that is, it's the Shire. And what happens in the Shire? Everybody just magically cooperates.

Alan Sisto (119:39)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (119:39)

No hobbit has ever killed another hobbit on purpose. In the Shire, the sheriffs are for the straying of beasts, not of men. The harshest thing that ever happens is people make jokes at the pub about each other.

Alan Sisto (119:51)

That's about it.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (119:52)

That's what we long for. Like, Tolkien had a true insight there. That is, we can't find it in our fallen world, or we can't. We can't grasp it, we can't acquire it. We can seek it. It. And sometimes for moments at things, Honestly, at things like moots and pot and. And. And, you know, group gatherings of people who really love the same thing. You can find it briefly or you get a glimpse of it. And so that's. Yeah, so sacrifice, like, that's. Frodo sacrifices everything in the end. He even says to Sam, all the things that I might have had, had or might have had, I leave to you. He has nothing. He even says, when the Ring is gone, it is. It is gone. And everything is dark and empty. Sometimes things are saved. Someone has to give them up in order to save them. It is such a clear, sad, but clear vision. And I think that's why everybody thinks Tolkien's on their side. Because, like Treebeard, he's not on anybody's side. If you're going to the point of give me a practical political program based on Tolkien. Also, how can you be a monarchist and a green at the same time? And yet, if there's anybody who was, it was him.

Sara (121:04)

He also described himself as an anarchist.

Alan Sisto (121:06)

But not the bombs and whiskers kind.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (121:08)

Right. And all of his societies are hereditary monarchists.

Alan Sisto (121:12)

Right, Exactly.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (121:13)

Even the Shire with the Thane and the.

Alan Sisto (121:15)

You know, with Thane. Peregrine.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (121:17)

Yeah, but I don't think these things are contradictions. I think that they are more expressions of the deeper. That the real flaw, sin, whatever you want to make it is. Is Morgoth's of desiring to. Morgoth desiring to actually, like, almost eat and consume others. Sauron's desiring to dominate others. And that that's what's fundamentally wrong. And that is the lesson that absolutely no one in any position of political power ever wants to hear.

Alan Sisto (121:43)

Well, that is true.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (121:45)

Even as little as, like, the department chair or the homeowner association, no one wants to hear that.

Alan Sisto (121:51)

Yeah, the HOA board definitely doesn't want to hear that. Yeah. All right, so one last question, and this. This actually ties back a little bit to the question we asked earlier about most of all, beauty. You point out that Tolkien briefly but very, very purposefully extends the depth of this story by pointing out that it comes to us from a tradition. You point out the line, it is sung, and you write this. The memory of Hurin's deeds is understood as having been preserved for a very long time. And that is part of the hero's triumph. The very fact that it is sung means that Hurin's battlefield prophecy was true. Day did come again.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (122:32)

He won.

Alan Sisto (122:33)

He did. And this kind of comes back to your question about beauty, or the previous question that you answered about beauty. That the sad story exists is a sufficient triumph and reason for hope. And hope ties into that beauty so well. Because if I were to rank the reasons that people tell me, because one of the things we do is we ask people, you know, what is it you love about Tolkien? What is it that keeps bringing you back? Why do you keep reading it year after year? Hope would be far and away the number one reason it gives them hope. Now, I don't have a super deep question here. I just found this to be so moving, I couldn't not bring it up.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (123:08)

Not very far into the book, I decided the last word in the book was going to be hope.

Alan Sisto (123:13)

It is so good.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (123:14)

I didn't know how it was going to get there, but I had decided that in advance like, that that was going to be the last word. And I think it is. I think that, you know, that's going to mean different things to different people. And there's. You'll notice I did not ever try to put a definition of it because I. I think it's one of those things that the. The more you try to define it, the less you understand about it. But we find hope in these. In these moments, and mostly just because you're hearing about it. If Morgoth had won.

Alan Sisto (123:44)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (123:45)

You wouldn't have heard.

Alan Sisto (123:46)

You wouldn't be Hearing about it, you.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (123:46)

Know, you wouldn't have heard. And, and so, and, and that's like. That's both. That to tie it to the ruin motif. Right. That's the thing. It's still there.

Alan Sisto (123:56)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (123:56)

Right. Henry VIII could, you know, dissolve the monasteries, pension off all the monks and lock the doors. And then eventually people would come and steal the lead off the roof and the whole thing would fall down. The stones of Whitby are still there. Yeah, they're still there. And in fact, some of them will, as far as for reasonable amounts, mounts always be there because nobody's going to bother to haul them away somewhere. Where else like this is. This is also my theory for, like, why I would like for our family to have a memorial mound. Because what the history of archaeology tells me is that once you pile a bunch of dirt somewhere, no one moves it.

Alan Sisto (124:34)

No, no.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (124:34)

Right. You build stuff on it or whatever, but you're not going to pile the dirt somewhere else. There always be if you want to be remembered. Right, right. Pile up a big pile of dirt and grow grass and stuff on top of it. But I mean, I'm kind of. I'm serious about that, too, which is that. That it's funny because I think that we. We know this when we're children and then we forget it for a while and then we have to come back to relearning that. Just how ephemeral and impermanent we are and how. You know, one place I disagree with Tolkien where he. Where he says, you know, it's about the. The fear of death. I don't know if that's for everybody like, that it's the fear of personal death. It's more the fear of the deaths of those that you love and of the world around us and how fragile it all is and the ruin and the story that's a thousand years old and that we still at least know Ermen Loft's name. If we don't know anything else, that's.

Alan Sisto (125:33)

A victory for Ermen Lof. Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (125:35)

More than most will ever get. So the ruin is both, like, it's so frustrating. Fragile. Like, look, this was a beautiful. Why would someone knock down a beautiful church or a beautiful monastery? But it's still there.

Alan Sisto (125:48)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (125:48)

And it is endured. It's weathered. It's, it's, it's, you know, you can't get rid of it entirely. And that, you know, that's the other. The line that I kept coming back to during the sort of horrible years of COVID and Post Covid is they Cannot conquer forever, can I?

Sara (126:08)

I finish this little section off by just reading the last two sentences of your book because I think the listeners would really appreciate this, because this is beautiful. It's beautiful prose. You say in Tolkien's works, we find beauty rising out of catastrophe. A light springs from the shadows. A single star gleams high above the cloud rack. And we see a path toward a place not free of sorrow, but in which tears are blessed without bitterness. Because beyond the circles of the world, there is more than memory. We find hope. I cannot tell you how touching.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (126:49)

Sounds so much better in your voice.

Alan Sisto (126:51)

She could probably narrate your audiobook for.

Sara (126:53)

You, just reading those lines when I read your conclusion for the first time, because your conclusion is very affecting for all the personal details that you shared there in that conclusion.

Alan Sisto (127:04)

Yeah.

Sara (127:05)

But those last sentences encapsulate for me the reason why I keep going back to Tolkien, and I find myself tearing up reading those two sentences because it's beautiful prose, Mike. It's gorgeous.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (127:21)

Thank you. I. I was able to just, like, open up my. My heart up and let it just flop onto the page there. I mean, I won't say I didn't rewrite any. It a lot of times, but it really also just kind of came.

Alan Sisto (127:33)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (127:34)

As I. As I was trying to figure out, you know, what I was gonna, like, I knew. I knew when I started that the book. I knew this in. In 2022, obviously, I knew earlier than that, like, in 2020, that when. If I ever did write the Tolkien book, it was also going to be about my dad, because, you know, he gave me this gift of. He was, you know, he was a physician, and he was not like, the most humanistic y person, but he read the Lord of the Rings out loud to me so many times, and it was such a gift. And so I wanted to talk about that. I want to talk about my dad, and I wanted to talk about my son who, you know, passed away in June of 2022 of fentanyl overdose when he was 18. And obviously, that, you know, changed how I saw everything in. In the book. And I kind of had a facile idea of the conclusion as I was working through the whole thing, which is like. Yeah, my argument is that Tolkien's book, it's different. It's an experience rather than just reading a book. That's why we go back and do it again. That's why we want to pass it on to our children. And here are the reasons I tried to show, you know, at the beginning was like, how did it come to be that way? Well, it was, it was the origins and frame narratives and, and, and, and, you know, textuality. And then I tried to show, like, what are those actual effects? Whether they're emotional thematic patterns, whatever. But at the end, I was hoping, I was really hoping that I was going to be able to say it's a consolation, right? Which I think Tolkien would have been perfectly happy to have created, you know, and would say that's what he talks about, you know, fairy stories about escape. And if you're in prison, escape's a good thing. You know, call someone an escapist when they're locked up unjustly, that's a, that's the best thing you could be.

Alan Sisto (129:17)

That's a valid thing to do.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (129:19)

And so I wanted to say that it was a consolation. And I couldn't bring myself to write that I wrote the words. And I'm like, I don't believe this is the first time in this book that I'm writing something that I don't believe what I'm saying that I'm writing it because it seems like what I should be saying. And I put it aside for a little while and I just tried to think, well, but no, what's really going on? And I don't think it's. Like I said in there, I don't think it's a consolation. I think it. Because consolation to me means that your grief goes away in some way. Like when you console a crying child, they stop crying because you've made them feel better. That's not what I think the Lord of the Rings does. It takes the formless, horrible grief and sorrow that every person, Like, I don't claim any special knowledge about this because of family tragedy, because every person experiences this just by living and, you know, going through, through life. But, but what it does is that that's just such a, it's a, just a mass of swirling emotions and impressions and poorly thought out ideas and everything. And then like the Lord of the Rings, you get a shape for it and it makes sense in some ways. I mean, not, not like, you know, oh, I understand how the whole universe works now, but just like, I can sort of see what I'm talking about, you know, I can see what, what I'm, what I'm feeling. And then you get, and really, what else could you possibly hope for more is you just get the hope that there will be something better. I mean, you can do the whole. I decided to avoid the whole, like, taxonomy of hope that Tolkien does in the Athrobeth and stuff. I mean, I think one of the things you'll notice about the. You know, about the book is I wasn't constantly quoting fairy stories and, you know, trying to explain Tolkien in terms of Tolkien just because I think other people have done that way better than. Than I ever could. And so instead I was just, like, trying to, you know, again, interpret it for. For me. But whatever kind of hope that. That you want, we know what it feels like. And I think that we. We. We get this idea from the. From the Lord of the Rings in particular. In. In contrast to maybe the silmarillion that you like, we don't necessarily live in the world. I said this at the Prancing Pony moot, I think. Right. Which is that. Or maybe it. Maybe it was somewhere else. No, I think it was. There was. Battle of Malden was the theme.

Alan Sisto (131:57)

Battle of Malden.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (131:58)

Yeah. So I said that, you know what the EU catastrophe is? They say the heart must be stronger, the spirit firmer, the. You know, our hearts fiercer. Yes. And then they win. Yeah. And in the regular world, that. That doesn't often happen. That's why we create things like sports, to make it happen.

Sara (132:18)

Right.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (132:19)

You know, we.

Alan Sisto (132:20)

We.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (132:20)

But it doesn't happen that much. Like I used to say when I was coaching youth sports, that the reason we do this is to try to give each kid a chance at some point to be the hero of their own story.

Alan Sisto (132:30)

Yes.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (132:30)

Before they turn 10 years old. Because if they get that, they're gonna mostly be a pretty comfortable in their own skin person. If they've gotten just. If you've just been able to shape one moment where they can be the hero, it all falls together. So. So I think that, like, that's the world that we don't have, but Tolkien gives us. Makes it so real that we. And maybe it's a delusion, but I don't know. But that we can go through the things that aren't you. Catastrophes, because there might be one at some point. And. And then the moments of joy do come. Right. I don't want to end totally negative. Like, we have, you know, we. We. We have. We have children, and there are. There are marriages, and there. They have triumphs, and. And just. Even just good things like your lost pet turns out to be not lost. That was a pretty big one just a few days ago when I thought Percy had run away, and instead he was just behind the shed, chewing on things he shouldn't chew on. Oh, but by my heart, you know, despair and Then I turn around, and he looks up and he's got mud all over his mouth. And I'm like, I love you so much. But. So, like, we have that, you know. But what Tolkien's work does is, I think it just. It makes it believably true, believably possible because of those little. Of those moments of when Sam sees the star or the old king's head and they cannot conquer forever. And I mean. Or, you know, the one that I didn't put in, I shouldn't figure out when Aragorn is basically, like, realizing what a high hill he still has to climb after even having become the king of Gondor. Aren't. You know, everything's broken. People are dead. We have a population crisis. There's still lots of Orcs and enemies out there. The. The White Tree is dead.

Alan Sisto (134:21)

Yeah.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (134:21)

And then Gandalf's like, yeah. And that's, like. That's not usually put in there as one of the great, like, moments, but.

Sara (134:28)

I think it is.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (134:29)

Oh, yeah. I think it's one of those ones that only works if you. It only works after you've read Aragorn and Arwen, I think. And then go back and you kind of realize, wow, that was a. That was unexpected. You know that. Because everyone was just assuming the White Tree's dead. Like, we're just gonna have to go through. We're gonna have to go through a. A. Yet another. Worse than the last fallen kingdom that just does the best it can and everything, and then maybe not. And I. I love that moment, you know, Turn, look, turn where everything. Look away from the green world and turn. Where everything seems barren and gray.

Alan Sisto (135:07)

Yeah.

Sara (135:07)

Mike, thank you so much for coming in to talk to us today. And thank you so much for giving us so much insight into how you read the Lord of the Rings. It's been absolutely fascinating.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (135:18)

Thank you. It's been an honor to be here.

Alan Sisto (135:20)

It really has been so good to have you here. Such a pleasure to have you on the show again. We appreciate your time. We hope you'll come back soon, if not for any other reason than the fact that I've got eight more questions.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (135:30)

Yes, we'll have to work that out. Or at a moot or something like that.

Alan Sisto (135:35)

Sounds good. Well, folks, that does wrap it up for another episode of the Prancing Pony podcast, but join us again in two weeks. We're off for the Thanksgiving holiday next weekend as we return to Tolkien Second Age, Rom Com, Aldarian and Arendus.

Sara (135:46)

Oh, my gosh, I can hardly Wait, from the Sublime to the Ridiculous part eight.

Alan Sisto (135:51)

Yeah, exactly.

Sara (135:52)

Alan and I want to thank the members of Team PPP Editor Jordan, Radio Rannells Barleyman, Becca Davis, Social Media Manager Casey Hilsey, Event and Patreon community coordinator Katie McKenna, graphic artist Megan Collins, Video editor Yonatan Lacens, and website guru Phil Dean.

Alan Sisto (136:10)

Please take a minute to check out theprancingponypodcast.com that's where you'll find our show notes, our outtakes, and our Prancing Pony ponderings. Now, we are still in the process of changing vendors for our merch at the moment, but our online storefront should be back soon. There as well, you can get all sorts of cool PPP merch, including the incredible chapter art that Megan's been doing for us since the start of season seven.

Sara (136:29)

Now, we're all about the books here at the Prancing Pony Podcast, so be sure to also visit our library page. We try to make sure that any book we've mentioned on the show is linked there for you to purchase. We do get a small amount of compensation when you make your purchase, so thank you in advance for that.

Alan Sisto (136:44)

Indeed. And we also want to thank our patrons at the Kir Dan's contribution tier here. I'll start with Demay in Alaska, Chad in Texas, Lance in New Jersey, Joseph in Michigan, Kathy from North Carolina, Brian in the uk, Jerry from Washington, Irwin from the Netherlands, Ben in Minnesota, Anthony in Texas, Zaksu in Illinois, Joshua in Massachusetts, Lucy in Texas, Erica in Texas, Vivian in California, and James in Massachusetts.

Sara (137:07)

There's also Ann in Kentucky, Sean in New Jersey, Mason in California, Maureen from Massachusetts, Olivia in London, Robert in Arizona, Nick in Wisconsin, Lewis in South Carolina, Thomas in Germany, Craig in California, Kevin in Massachusetts, Brace in California, Joe in Maryland, Scott in California, Jeffrey in Michigan, and Paul in Colorado. Thank you all so very much for your support indeed.

Alan Sisto (137:33)

Thank you.

Sara (137:34)

Now, make sure you don't miss any episodes of the Prancing Pony Podcast. Subscribe now through Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app.

Alan Sisto (137:43)

And one last thing. As always, don't forget to send your thoughts, comments, and most of all, your favorite quotes from the Tower and the Ruin to barliman@theprancingponypodcast.com Now, Barlaman does have.

Sara (137:53)

A lot of mail to sort through though, so we'll try to get to you just as soon as we're able.

Alan Sisto (137:57)

As always, though, this has been far too short a time to spend among such excellent and admirable listeners. But until next time, how wow.

Sara (138:05)

Farewell, folks.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (138:21)

Experience the sequel everyone's been waiting for.

Sara (138:23)

With Sideline 2 intercepted.

Alan Sisto (138:25)

Join Drayton and Dallas as they navigate.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout (138:27)

The challenges of college life while trying to trying to stay true to themselves and each other. Catch all the drama and watch Sideline 2 Intercepted, starring Noah Beck and Sienna Agudong for free on Tubi this Thanksgiving. As a Raider scavenging a derelict world, you settle into an underground settlement. But now you must return to the surface, where Arkansas machines roam. If you're brave enough, who knows what you might find? Arc Raiders, a multiplayer extraction adventure video game. Buy now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC. Rated T for teenager.