Speaker 1: In that way, we can kind of see what Tolkien
is doing as this great project to create a body
of stories for the English that has room for.
Speaker 2: Someone like him.
Speaker 1: So Tolkien begins this project, and what I want to
argue and lay out to you is that Tolkien's project
is a perfect test case, a proofcase, a demonstration, a
practical demonstration of how we as modern people can use
the themes that we've been talking about in Universal History
to tell stories and kind of reclaim a mythical, cosmic
vision of Christian storytelling.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Bejel Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello.
Speaker 1: My name is Richard Roland with Symbolic World Press. And
you may be wondering a couple of things, like, for instance,
where is Jonathan Pagot Well, the answer to that question
is that he's on the road and can't come to
the camera right now. You may also be wondering exactly
where I am. I don't have my normal background here
that you're probably used to seeing if you watch the
Universal History videos that Jonathan and I do together. Some
people refer to it as my Greek diner background, but
actually no, I'm in the new recording studio and it's
not finished yet. As you can see, I still have
well you know, it's got walls and that's about it.
But I'm really excited about what this studio is going
to allow me to do for Symbolic World. We're going
to be taping and betting walls and painting them and
installing studio lighting and there's to be.
Speaker 2: Awesome bookshelf back there.
Speaker 1: And that's the only way that you'll know I'm actually
an intellectual is if you can see the bookshelf behind
me when I talk. So in all seriousness, i am
here today Solow, not all nervous about it. Thank you
for asking, But I'm here today solo to talk about
a subject that's near and dear to my heart. And
then also a new course. It'll actually be our next
course for Symbolic World Courses, and I'm going to be
teaching it and it's going to be awesome. So, without
beating around the bush, the course is called Tolkien and
Universal History, and the tagline is a little it's a
little cheeky actually in ways that most people won't catch
catch because the tagline is the Symbolic World goes to
Middle Earth. But of course, if you know anything about
Anglo Saxon culture, Old Norse culture. If you know anything
about Jonathan's whole ideas of the symbolic world, right, you'll know,
of course that Middle Earth is our Earth, the earth
on which we live, this realm between heaven.
Speaker 2: And the world below.
Speaker 1: And you'll know that that is, of course the symbolic world,
the kind of cosmological project that Jonathan has been undertaking
on this channel for the last several years. So the
symbolic World goes to Middle Earth. Think of it as
a return to yourself, a return to your roots. And
in some ways I want to kind of pick up
the well. I can't pick up the mantle that doctor
Martin Shaw left because I'm not going to be able
to do it the way that he did it. But
I'm going to do it the way that I can
do it, and hopefully some of you will be on
board for that. So let me talk about this course
and introduce this idea, this ven diagram overlap of Tolkien
and his legendarium and universal history. I think that we
all know that Tolkien accomplished something in his lifetime and
in his storytelling endeavors that basically is unique. Nobody really
sent Tolkien's time has been able to do the things
that he did, and I'm not saying there aren't some
good ones out there. As a little kind of a
sneak preview, sometime later this year, I intend to do
a course on modern fantasy with Father Deacon Nicholas Kotar.
In fact, this course is sort of the the dipping
the toe in the water to see what the interest
level is for this kind of thing on the symbolic world.
But and when we do that, we're going to look
at fantasy after Tolkien and what's the good stuff, what's
the bad stuff? But I think one of the questions
that you'd have to ask is why have we really
struggled to put out anything with the same enduring quality
as The Lord of the Rings. Let me explain what
I mean by that. There's obviously there's other fantasy. I'm
a huge fan, for instance, of Jonathan Strange and Mister
Noral by Susannah Clark. That's a really delightful book that
you should all read if you haven't read, and so
definitely one that will becover in our course on modern fantasy. Obviously,
I'm a huge fan of the Narnia books and I'm
a huge fan of some other things that have come
out in the fantasy genre since Tolkien's time. There's also, obviously,
you could say books like Harry Potter, series like Harry Potter,
which I don't hate, so don't come at me, potter heads,
what do you call yourselves?
Speaker 2: Anyway?
Speaker 1: I don't hate Harry Potter, but it's not my favorite thing.
And obviously there are some fantasy series like The Wheel
of Time so on have been successful just in terms
of like selling books and making money for their authors.
Speaker 2: Right, obviously, you know JK.
Speaker 1: Rowling is fabulously wealthy. But the success of a book
is really measured by how long will it endure? What
is its enduring quality? Will people continue to read it
in one hundred years, in two hundred years, in five
hundred years. Well, I can't really predict what people will
be reading in five hundred years, or if people even
still know how to read in five hundred years for
that matter, but I feel pretty confidence saying that Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings will be read one hundred years
after its publication, and probably two hundred years after its publication. Narnia,
I think will continue to be read for you know,
one hundred years after its publication. Will it make it
the two three hundred year mark. I'm not sure. And
a lot of other things published in the last century,
things that you could say published since The Hobbit came out.
Speaker 2: Let's say that's the kind of the beginning.
Speaker 1: It's not the first work of Christian fantasy literature, but
it's a helpful kind of mark for the first time
somebody realized this was going to be really commercially successful.
Not that The Hobbit sold a lot of copies by
modern standards, but it was basically a best seller by
the standards of its time. All this to say, when
I say that people have struggled to imitate Tolkien, what
I mean is that when people write, when people write books,
tell stories, and they try to do it in the
same that Tolkien did it, everybody sort of feels like, oh,
there's some kind of a formula that Tolkien laid out.
It's got to have the elves, it's got to have
the dwarves, it's got to have the halflings, it's got
to have the you know, things like that, things.
Speaker 2: Of that nature.
Speaker 1: But what ends up happening is that his imitators, and
I'm very sorry to say. Sometimes it feels like, especially
his more overtly Christian imitators, fall apart. And here is
a serious challenge to things that I've said and things
that other people have said.
Speaker 2: I mean, for instance, on the Amman.
Speaker 1: Sul podcast, which I was the co host of for
several years, which is that the key to understanding Tolkien's
Middle Earth is his deep Catholicism. Now I still believe
that's true, but if that were the only thing going on,
obviously the idea would be that that, well, you could
have a lot more of the sort of thing going on.
So I think that one of the missing keys here
is the connection between Tolkien and what he's doing and
universal his So I want to read a little excerpt
to you from something Tolkien fans are already aware of.
It's called the Letter to Milton Waldman, or, if you're
a nerd, letter one thirty one. So Tolkien's letters were collected,
they were numbered, So letter one hundred and thirty one
is the famous Milton Waldman Letter, which something in its
original something like ten thousand words. I mean, it's basically
a short novel and it's kind of a pitch or
a sketch for the mythology, the thing that Tolkien is doing,
the thing that we now refer to as his legendarium.
By the way, the other day I had a conversation
with John hears Over on his channel which is now
called Heavy Things Lightly. I kind of like, though, why
are we talking about Rabbit's title, But in any case,
that's what he's renamed the show too. And if you
were there at the Symbolic World summit, oh my goodness,
almost a year ago. Now, if you were there at
the Symbolic World summit, you'll know that he roasted basically
everybody who's presenting there at the summit, including you know,
Jonathan Pagoe and Father's d de Youong and so on.
And then he had a roast for me and he
forgot it. But apparently his roast, which I've been trying
to get him out of him ever since, was something
about people who use words like legendarium and just assume.
Speaker 2: That everybody knows what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: So the term legendarium is a term that we use
kind of in Tolkien circles, people who are fans, people
who are scholars of Tolkien's writings to refer to Tolkien's
works around Arta, around Middle Earth as a whole, So
he kind of gives a sketch for the Legendarium in
this letter, and this is what he says. I had
a mind to make a body of more or less
connected legend ranging from the large and cosmogonic to the
level of romantic fairy story. The larger founded on the
lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendor
from the vast backcloths, which I could dedicate simply to England,
to my country. I would draw some of the great
tales in fullness and leave many only play. In this
scheme and sketched the cycles should be linked to a
majestic hole, and yet leave scope for other minds and
hands wielding paint and music and drama. So this is
Tolkien's kind of original conception when he starts working on
a legendarian, or at least this is how he is
remembering it when he's writing this letter in nineteen fifty one.
Tolkien's recollections, if you study him closely, you'll see are
not always one hundred percent accurate, as most of our
ours aren't, Or at least you know he may get
the spirit of something, but you know, doesn't quite nail
all the facts because it's been several years and he's
going off of memory.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: He goes right after this to say, my crest has
long since fallen. In other words, he feels like he
was probably biting off more than he could chew in
those days, and now he's he's really just hoping to
get the Silmarilian published.
Speaker 2: That's the context for this letter.
Speaker 1: So this idea, though right, does not focus on where
Tolkien feels like he succeeded or failed, but rather on
what the what the initial play was, what the initial
goal was, to build a body of connected legend. You've
got cosmic stories and then also what he calls romantic
fairy stories. So a romance story is like an adventure story,
and a fairy story has well technically for our purposes today,
it has fairies in it, or elves as Tolkien later
calls them. The larger founded on the lesser in contact
with the earth, and the lesser drawing splendor from the
vast back class. And by the way, usually we think
it would be the other way around. You would start
with the larger stories, like the big cosmic stuff. Usually
the first time anybody sits down to imitate Tolkien, the
first thing they do is try to rewrite their own
version of of you know, Tolkien's creation story the I
know Lindele And actually what Tolkien is saying is that
the larger stuff, the larger cosmic stuff, is actually founded
on the lesser in contact with the earth. But then
that the lesser draws splendor from the vast backcloths. Exactly
what he meant by this, the lesser in contact with
the earth is something that we will be exploring in
this new course. He says, I would draw some from
the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed
in the scheme and sketched. And of course the whole
thing is supposed to be dedicated quite simply, as he says,
to my country, to England. Now why would he say
this in this particular way. People who are aware or
have read, you know, the rest of this letter will
know that one of the things that Tolkien does in
this letter and in some of the other places that
he writes, is that he is critical of the Arthurian legends.
What's very commonly called the matter of Britain, which we've
spoken about here on the symbolic world, and in fact,
over on the Grey Tales podcast, which is a new
podcast I'm doing here on YouTube with father Andrew Stephen Damk.
We're actually right in the middle of a series on
the Grail. If you're a longtime Universal History listener, you'll
be familiar with most of the content, although there is
some new stuff.
Speaker 2: So why is Tolkien critical?
Speaker 1: In fact, Tolkien says something that's like a little shocking
and scandalous, and certainly like you know, later readers of Tolkien,
especially readers who are of a kind of like a
neopagan or you know, an atheist, or you know, just
want to make the story into a secular story. People
of that kind of bent will take things that Tolkien
said about the Arthurian legends and how they are sort
of fatally Christian right, and they'll say, oh, look, see
Tolkien didn't want religion, he didn't want Christianity. He wasn't
really I've seen people go so far as I say,
and this is absolutely not true, and it is easily
false afiable, But I've seen people go so far as
to say that Tolkien wasn't really a Christian, he was
just kind of culturally Catholic, but he was actually really
kind of like a secret pagan or a cryptopagan. Well,
as I said, this is easily falsifiable. Nothing could be
further from the truth. And in fact, I think that
it needs to be remembered that to have been a
Roman Catholic in England when Tolkien lived, especially when he
was young, was not a culturally easy or simple thing.
And here, I think is where we can kind of
understand what he means when he talks about, you know,
his sort of problems with the Arthurian legends, although he
will actually try to rewrite them and incorporate them into
Middle Earth. That's also something we'll talk about in the course.
But the Arthurian legends, and especially the legend concerning Joseph
of Arimathea, which is a late addition to the matter
of Britain, but is a very important part of of
later retellings. This legend that Joseph of Arimathea came to
that he came to the island of Britain with the
infant Christ right and you know, left the roundtable there,
among other things, maybe brought the Holy Grail there later on.
And anyway, this set of legends was a very important
part of the English Reformation because essentially what Elizabeth's court
theologians did is they used it as basically proof when
they were talking to the ambassadors from Rome. They used it,
cited it as an example to say that actually, there
have been Christians in Britain longer than there's been Christians
in Rome. And therefore, you know that the Roman the
British Church or the English Church was something that was
that was kind of separate from you know, and had
its own claims to apostolic succession that didn't have anything.
Speaker 2: To do with Rome or the authority of the Pope.
Speaker 1: So the Arthurian material in Britain when Tolkien was growing up,
and of course noticed by the way that Tolkien says
England not Britain. I don't want to get into this
right now. It's a whole thing, but it's funny because
Tolkien certainly wasn't anti Celtic. He really feels this deep
affinity with Welsh culture and language, and in fact, one
of his invented languages, which are going to spend quite
a bit of time talking about in the course, one
of his invented languages is based heavily upon the phonology
of medieval Welsh, but in any case, he says England,
not Britain. In Tolkien's life lifetime, the Arthurian material had
become very very closely associated with the Church of England
and Tolkien as a Roman Catholic. And it should be
said he was the son of a woman who had
converted to Roman Catholicism and then been essentially abandoned by
her family after doing so. And so when his father died,
she you know, died very quickly after. And Tolkien, through
the rest of his life always considered his mother to
have been a martyr for the faith. This is how
he thought about her. And so there seems to have
been kind of maybe some difficulty there, some distance that
Tolkien felt between himself and the Arthurian stories that I
think has something to do with also the distance that
he felt from the distance that he felt from, you know,
the Church of England, and the ways that English legends
had been kind of used to sort of bolster the
claims of the Church of England in the early modern
period against the Roman Catholic Church. Is this is something
I haven't really actually talked about a lot, but Tolkien
does write about it in his letters, and we'll get
into a little bit of this in the course, but
you can also kind of read between the lines and
some of his interactions with Lewis. There's always this gulf
between them because that Lewis couldn't cross, and that King
always felt and this is what he said, he always
felt like there was something that was really keeping Lewis
from entering wholeheartedly into the Middle Ages and wholeheartedly into
the kind of storytelling that Tolkien liked. Now, I want
to just hasten to say that Lewis was an extremely
generous friend, but this does seem to have been kind
of a gulf that existed between them. So in that
way we can kind of see what Tolkien is doing
as this great project to create a body of stories
for the English that has room for someone like him.
Speaker 2: I mean, the.
Speaker 1: Situation when Tolkien was at Oxford was that the Catholics
had to sit down at the bottom of the you know,
if you're in the dining hall, like they would put
the Catholics and the Jews at the far table at
the end of the hall, right, and so Tolkien, you know,
definitely experienced discrimination, and he definitely experienced you know, quite
a bit of difficulty during his life, just owing to
owing to the kind of the latent prejudice against Roman
Catholics that was still going on in England at the time.
So Tolkien begins this project, and what I want to
kind of argue and lay out to you is that
Tolkien's project is a perfect test case, a proof case,
a demonstration, a practical demonstration of how we as modern
people can use the themes that we've been talking about
in universal history to tell stories and kind of reclaim
a mythical, cosmic vision of Christian storytelling. There have been
a lot of really great Christian There was a lot
of great Christian literature written in the nineteenth in the
twentieth century, a lot of great Catholic literature literature, a
lot of great Orthodox literature, a lot of great Protestant literature.
But most of it was what we would now consider
to be literary fiction, which is kind of a snobby
term and I don't really care for it personally, But basically,
these are realistic stories about realistic people and kind of
realistic situations, or you know, at least ostensibly realistic situations.
But what Tolkien did is he took the fairy tale.
He took the fairy tale and the sort of the
genre of Christian fairy tale and what we would maybe
now call Christian fantasy. Although you know, it really begins
with a guy named George MacDonald who we have a
book Symbolic World Press as a book about him and
other Christian fantasy authors coming out later this year. It's
called Finding the Golden Key Recovery Essays Towards Recovering the
Sacramental Imagination. Nice long, cashy title, and it's going to
be really beautiful. We've got the art done for it
by Hugh Rose and the essays are all in and
we're just in the final stage of editing and layout,
so I hope to have a good announcement on that
book soon. But in any case, George McDonald kind of
begins that genre of storytelling, you know, as a as
a Christian mode you could say, of storytelling. He's the
grandfather sometimes people call them the grandfather of the Inklings.
Speaker 2: McDonald's works probably don't.
Speaker 1: Quite rise to the level of fair fantasy the way
that we think about it today, where it's like this
totally you know, it's like it's an other world with
distinct races and cultures, and you know, the level of
world building that Tolkien does, which basically becomes the gold
standard for fantasy from that point forward. Is really does
begin with Tolkien. And what I want to kind of
argue is that he does this as an attempt to
create a work of universal history. This concept, this concept
that I just read to you from the Waldman letter,
is sometimes called Tolkien ever called it this, by the way,
but some of his biographers and Tolkien' scholars have called
it his idea of a mythology for England. I don't
totally like that nomenclature for a couple of reasons, which
we'll talk about in the course.
Speaker 2: But what I want to basically.
Speaker 1: Just suggest is that the idea of it being a
universal history for England is maybe a better idea and
takes into account the scope and the kinds of stories
that Tolkien was trying to tell better than the idea
of it being a mythology. So I'll explain more about that,
I'll try to justify that in the course, but that's
the basic idea. I think that Tolkien shows us the
way that we can use universal history to recover a
Christian mythic storytelling. So one of the main things that
Tolkien is doing is, of course, is that he's trying to.
Speaker 2: Well, one of the.
Speaker 1: Things he's doing is he's trying to rehabilitate the elves,
He's trying to rehabilitate the fairies. He's trying to rehabilitate
these kind of ambiguous figures that are there in the
back of the English consciousness and the British consciousness, who
are sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes helpful, always dangerous right,
and certainly occupy this ambiguous place in legend. And Tolkien
knows this, and Tolkien tries to rehabilitate them while also
retaining their sense of danger. And in some respects he's
been too successful, because, as everybody knows, elves are extremely dangerous,
and Tolkien's elves are so beautiful and great and wonderful
that people often forget that elves are extremely dangerous, and
so in subsequent stories imitating them, you know, the elves
are you know, much more positive figures very often. But
it's it's one of the things that I love about Tolkien,
and you get this in Lewis as well, is the
idea that something could be beautiful and dangerous, right, but
We talked about this, I think a little bit in
the Beowolf course, But there is at the beginning of
the Beowolf poem, or towards the beginning of the Beowolf poem,
there's a list of the evil creatures, the monsters descended
from the line of Kane.
Speaker 2: Some of them are orcs and elves.
Speaker 1: And so what Tolkien does is he tries to actually
draw a distinction between those two things and says, hey,
all these guys got lumped together, and you're not wrong
to think they're related in some way, But there is
a sort of good a good fairy or a good elf,
or at least one that has goals and desires that
are not totally or should not be totally abhorrent to
human beings. So this is one of the things that
he does, and the way that he basically does it
is to take these elements from the pagan mythologies and
the sort of the pre Christian mythologies, and then also
the kind of like the surviving folk you could say,
like for surviving folk religion or surviving folk beliefs about fairies, dwarfs, elves, ogres,
et cetera, and tries to take those things and kind
of synthesize them into a philological framework. Now I'll come
back to the idea of the framework in a moment,
but I think that this is a particularly sort of
universal history move right. One of the things that universal
history is always trying to do is to say, how
can I take my pre Christian past, How can I
take my pagan ancestors, How can I take the things
that came before me which are not totally compatible with
the Holy scriptures and weave them into the Christian story
in a way that's still faithful. And people who don't
like this sort of thing will accuse it of being
you know, syncretism for instance, that's not totally But also
the thing that I want to sort of say to
you is that that's a natural Christian impulse actually is
to take the good things, take the good things at
same basil in his addressed to young men on the
proper use of Greek poetry, right, this idea of being
the bee right looking for the honey, taking the good
things that are there in the stories of our ancestors
and bringing them into bringing them into the Christian world.
So Tolkien does that, and he tries to weave them
into a framework that is still compatible with his sense
of what Christianity is, and he.
Speaker 2: Will try to accomplish this.
Speaker 1: Oh, and I should also mention that one of the
other things that Tolkien does that is really vital actually
for modern Christians is that he doesn't just rehabilitate the elves,
he rehabilitates the gods.
Speaker 2: Right. Tolkien's valor.
Speaker 1: Are a way probably one of the easiest ways for
modern Christians. I mean, if you like these sort of
stories for modern Christians to understand the whole idea of
principalities and powers and how it could be that God
would use something like an angel or a saint to
rule over the world. So Tolkien takes the elves, he
takes the gods, he takes these these sort of old
world ideas that really are part of Christianity but have
been kind of forgotten by the modern world, and he
uses his stories to kind of weave them back.
Speaker 2: Into the framework.
Speaker 1: And he accomplishes this through several kinds of let's call
them medieval media or genres. Right, And so the first
is the genre of the of the chronicle. So there
are some famous chronicles in the Middle Ages. Chronicles are
one of the main genres that literary people are interested
in during the Middle Ages. Of Some famous examples that
you probably heard of are things like the Anglo Saxon
Chronicle or the Russian Primary Chronicle, both of which I
have talked about in various places, including on this channel.
And Tolkien actually takes this and he makes a series
of chronicles, some of them actually written in Anglo Saxon,
not just in Anglo Saxon, but in the Immersian dialect
of Anglo Saxon. It actually writes these chronicles in Anglo
Saxon for his invented history. I won't say his invented world,
because one of the really surprising things is that Tolkien
obviously intends this is what he says right up front,
obviously intends that his entire story is set in our world,
and that it is a sort of pre Christian history
of Northern Europe. And the startling thing and I still
remember how upsetting and discombobulating it was when I learned
this and realized this for the first time. The startling
thing is that Tolkien never abandoned that idea, and in fact,
there are references, very small, hidden, veiled references when Tolkien
says that The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally
Catholic work.
Speaker 2: He means, down at.
Speaker 1: The foundations, right, You've got to dig to get there.
But there are references even to the incarnation in the
Lord of the Rings, and there's at least one, maybe more.
You can look for it. Tell me if you find it. Otherwise,
come to the course and I'll tell.
Speaker 2: You all right.
Speaker 1: So he does this through his annals or chronicles. He
does this through the writing of epic poetry. Tolkien, of course,
knew that real men tell long form narrative poems, that
that's the best kind of storytelling, and anything that anything
less than that is a compromise. And Tolkien spent most
of his early years of the Legendarium trying to write
these long form epic poems. Alas never finished any of them.
We're probably better off that he didn't, because if he had,
he probably wouldn't have written The Lord of the Rings,
and then most of us just would not have heard
of him. Long Form narrative poetry doesn't sell super well,
it's not you know, it's just not. You know, maybe
it's making a comeback. You know, we're getting like two
Odyssey movies now, and so maybe it's making a comeback.
Speaker 2: Maybe we will get to we'll get to see.
Speaker 1: And celebrate the revival of long form epic poetry, long
form narrative poetry.
Speaker 2: And if we do, I am here for it. All
of my training has prepared me for this moment.
Speaker 1: So in any case, epic poems. In fact, there is
some indication that the Silmarillion. So if, by the way,
if you're like a normal person and you don't know
a lot about Tolkien and you've just joined us, and
you're like, what the heck is this guy talking about? Welcome, Welcome,
see my published works, I guess to seriously come to
the course. This course will be approachable, by the way, like,
if you're not a super Tolkien nerd, this course will
be approachable for you. I'm going to lay everything out
and actually it'll be in some ways easier if you're
not a super Tolkiy nerd, because then you won't have
as many preconceptions that will need to work through. So okay,
So there is some indication though that the sil Marillion.
So the sil Million tells the story of basically the
history of Tolkien's world about you know, seven thousand Ishu
years before the events of the Lord of the Rings.
It is, as some people have said, certainly as I
have often said, is basically the Lord of the Rings
equivalent of the Old Testament. And it's basically it's a
series of long chapters, and each chapter is kind of
a self contained story that's been part of a larger whole.
But there is some indication that those chapters that are
in the modern sill Marillion, the published Silm Mirillion, which
by the way, is published after Tolkien's death, there's some
indication that those chapters were actually intended just to be
the prose summary, and that each chapter would cover a
different long form narrative, like a long form epic poem. Well,
Tolkien never finished all of those. He didn't even finish
half of them. But the ones that we do have
that are in various states of incompletion are quite fascinating,
and we will be looking at them. And the thing
that I want to look at is what makes a chronicle,
what makes an epic poem? And then how does Tolkien
try to use that as actually a way of doing
what now we call world building. We have this idea
that when Tolkien was sitting down or let's say, like
when most of us sit down to like do world
building or like you know, I mean, I'm guessing you know,
of the thousands of people watching this video, at least
eighty percent of you have like the secret unfinished fantasy
novel or the or the D and D world or
something like that. And most of the time when people
sit down to do world building, they start out with
basically just sort of saying, Okay, I'm going to basically
write a series of Wikipedia articles on my world, or
just like write out the history of the world from
the beginning. Or I'm going to design this race and
then I'm going to design that race, or I'm going
to design you know, the thing that's really in vogue
right now are like, you know, magic systems that basically
work like science and have you know, like scientific you know,
levels of accuracy and precision to them. So anyway, that's
not how Tolkien worked at all. The way that Tolkien
worked was by sort of mimetic storytelling. He would read
stories that he liked, medieval stories that he liked, ancient
stories that he liked, things like the Tale of Kalervo,
the Brittonic Lays, the obviously the the the sagas of
the Icelanders, Beowulf, things like that. He would read stories
that he liked, and then what he would do, the
way that he would work and the way that he
would sort of build his world is he would sit
down and he would try to write a story like
that story, but in his own world, and along the
way he would sometimes tweak or fix or completely reverse
or flip things about the story that maybe he didn't
like or he thought he could tell them better. One
of the things you need to be a successful author
is a fair amount of hubris. So the other thing
that Tolkien does that's really key to understanding, and I
would say it's probably the lynchpint understanding. The connection between
his legendarium and the whole concept of universal history is
his retelling of culture founding epics or culture founding narratives.
And these have to do with culture founding heroes, people
like shield shaving. If you were in our Beowulf class,
people like you know, you can go to ancient mythology
and find figures like Orpheus, figures like Apollo, figures like Horace,
who are you know, sort of culture heroes, people who
sort of bring the the bring the wisdom of the gods,
or bring the knowledge of agriculture, or bring you know,
bring these things to humanity so that humanity can survive
and thrive and grow into a culture. Sometimes these are,
you know, the first kings of your dynasty, the people
who found your laws, the people who taught you, you know, agriculture,
the people who gave you writing, the people who gave
you you know, like the king Numa, one of the
one of the sort of the good Roman kings before
the Romans got rid of other kings. Right, the thing
that he gives the Roman people, according to the legend,
is piety, coinage, and laws. That's why, by the way,
things that have to do with coins are called referred
to as that. The whole field is referred to as numismatics.
So these attempts, I will say, you know, we're only
partially successful.
Speaker 2: So the.
Speaker 1: Lay of Lathian, which is Tolkien's longest unfinished epic poem,
the Silmarillion, you know, things like this were never published
in Tolkien's lifetime, but what they did do is build
a foundation on which The Lord of the Rings was
later written. And I think that it's fair to say
the Lord of the Rings will will prove to be
proved to have been the most successful work of the
twentieth century. So when people read The Lord of the
Rings and nowadays, I mean you can look things up
on Wikipedia, or you just have that one friend that
you text whenever you have a Tolkien question, right, you know,
if you have those kinds of relationships and relationships in
your life, or just like you know, you watch the
movies with your dad growing up and you kind of
explain things to you you just take it for granted
that there's a lot of background information that you know.
But actually most of Tolkien's, most of The Lord of
the Rings, like the background references are built on things
that are not really explained, or you have to go
look at an appendix in the back of the book
to get the whole story. But the story works. I mean, honestly,
the Lord of the Rings would be you know if
I don't honestly, I don't know how it got published.
I mean, if somebody brought that manuscript to me, I mean,
of course I would probably dig it.
Speaker 2: But but I I you know, if I was.
Speaker 1: An editor at a publisher and I was looking at
the manuscript, like nobody is gonna follow any of this.
Speaker 2: Nobody has any idea what's going on.
Speaker 1: They are all these names. You know, how are people
gonna keep up with this? You know, how are people
gonna remember the difference between Sauron and Saarruman, for instance,
and all this different stuff? And yet the Lord of
the Rings is successful. And the reason that it is
successful is that it feels as though it belongs to us,
and it feels as though it's a real place. It
feels it has all these different things down to the naming.
We're going to spend a whole week of this course
looking at Tolkien's linguistics and not just said as linguistics,
because Tolkien wasn't just a you know, sometimes was called
a con lingers, like somebody who makes up languages for
fun or for profit. There are you know, con lings
constructed languages made for a lot of major film and
movie franchises.
Speaker 2: Now, it's kind of like the it thing.
Speaker 1: It's it's very basically people don't even notice it anymore
because you take it for granted. But nobody's languages work
well as Tolkien's.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: I have a friend who likes to say, maybe he's
watching this. He likes to say that Tolkien's New York's
sound like New York. What he means by that is,
if you say I'm going to New York, you don't
hear I'm going to the new place that's named after
the old place that used to be called York.
Speaker 2: You just hear, oh, he's going to New York. Right.
Speaker 1: It has the name now means something. It holds something together.
And in fact, even if people are new to the
English language, they'll know where that is. All of Tolkien's
place names hold together in this beautiful, convincing way, and
as do his personal names, and that's a big part
of why The Lord of the Rings I think works.
So these are some of the things that we are
going to talk about, and that's where the course is
gonna well, it's almost where the course is going to end,
because what we're going to do is look at how
Tolkien uses the novel. And I mean, you can argue
about whether or not you think The Lord of the
Rings is really a novel. It's probably, you know, it
just depends on how specific you want to be with
that definition. There's certain people get really persnickety about exactly
what a novel is. Let's say he uses the modern
storytelling genre of the novel. This is as opposed to
a chronicle or an epic poem, or even like a
sort of a fairy tale style of writing. But he
uses a sort of more modern novel approach to the
Lord of the Rings and it is ultimately massively successful.
And I think this is a really important it's a
really important lesson for us. If we want to do
this kind of Christian mythic storytelling, is we need to
figure out how we're going to use modern genres to
tell ancient stories. I think that Jonathan's I can talk
about Jonathan because he's not here. I think that Jonathan's
God's Dog series is actually an amazing example of another
great way to do this. And in fact, I would
say that something like God's Dog has more in common
with Tolkien's approach than something like The Wheel of Time.
And if you don't know what I mean by that,
come to the course, because this is one of the
things we'll be talking about. So that is where the
course is going to end. We're going to look at
how Tolkien used his universal history approach to then write
the great novel of the twentieth century. We're also going
to look at how some other modern Christian writers. One
of the series that we're going to look at will
be God's Dog by Jonathan Pago. In fact, I'm going
to just do my own analysis of it, which is
going to be really, really fun, But we're going to
look at We're going to look at how that approach
is actually similar to Tolkien's approach. And the thing that
I'm going to kind of pause it is that if
we're going to build these stories and tell these stories
and try to do what Tolkien did, which maybe you
don't care about. Maybe you're just along for the ride,
and that's fine too. But I once heard Malcolm Guite say,
poet inkling scholar. I once heard Malcolm Guite say that
the only honest response to a work of art is
another work of art. And he was quoting somebody else
who I can't remember, so I'm just going to attribute
the quote to him. I think that it's really important
that we start telling stories and we start making media novels,
comic books, graphic novels, films, etc.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Audio dramas, Boy, was there ever a better time for
like some awesome audio dramas? Right, And they don't even
take that much overhead to make so somebody get on that.
That's why I work with Jonathan, That's why I'm working
with Symbolic World Press, because I really believe that telling
these stories right now is the thing that we need
to be doing. And I think that Tolkien shows us
the approach, and I think that God's Dog is a
good example of how you can do that same thing
without it making it look like you're aping Tolkien.
Speaker 2: And we're going to have two other modern examples.
Speaker 1: I will not say who they are right now, but
arrangements are being made, so we're gonna have two other
modern examples from modern Christian fantasy authors who I think
are taking Tolkien's approach without just sort of aping him.
And sometimes they're not deliberately trying to imitate Tolkien, they're
just also kind of old world people with a philological mindset.
So that's the pitch, that's the idea. And it's difficult
to say why this is so important to me. Obviously,
anybody who knows me, knows about me, knows that Tolkien
is something that's really near and dear to my heart.
It's funny because this is an idea that's been simmering
in the back of my mind for a couple of
years now, and we never really covered it on the
Ammon School podcast because the am and Szool podcast was
about other things and we were doing the Silmarillion read
through and so on.
Speaker 2: So this will be new material.
Speaker 1: And I guess that's the last thing to kind of
address is if you've just listened to me talk about
Tolkien for hundreds of hours on the Ammon School podcast
and you can't possibly imagine doing it anymore. I get it,
you know, go with God, don't worry about it. But
this will be new material. This will be some stuff
that we never got into. In some ways, it'll be
going deeper and in other ways. My goal is going
to be to actually kind of approach Tolkien's writings from
a completely different angle of attack, and actually from a
in a way that I think will help us even
refine in our discussions. It will help us refine our
understanding of what universal history itself is by looking at
this very potent recent example, which also somehow is the
work of a single person, which is which is the
only non universal history thing about what Tolkien does, by
the way, and that's why that's why it's not universal history, right.
Tolkien himself knew that other people would have to sort
of get.
Speaker 2: Involved in the telling.
Speaker 1: And if although you know arguably Conserfer Tolkien, you know
is is definitely involved in the telling and the presentation
of the materials. But he knew that other people would
have to get involved in the telling. The thing about
universal history is that it doesn't have any single author
right the voice. It is the expression of a people
who have come to know God and look for their
place in the story of his people and his redemptive
work on our behalf. So all that to say, the
course will be starting next month, So our first class
will be on the twenty fourth of February, and then
we'll be going for five weeks after that. And I
should say at the end, this is a horrible, horrible idea,
because there's no way I have the time for this.
But I want to do something kind of special at
the end, which is I want to give you all
a writing assignment. Now I can't promise I'm going to read.
It depends on how many people we have said up
for the course. I can't promise I'm going to read
and you will get a grade because it's not a Well,
let me put it this way. I'm going to read
everybody's stuff. I'm not going to grade it, but I
will try to give some feedback. But it's going to
be a short writing ascent. We'll have to keep it
short so I can read them all. But I'm going
to give you all a sort of memetic writing assignment
in the probably about the middle of the course, and
then you have a couple of weeks to complete it.
And I'm doing this for two reasons. One is that
some people have really said they would like Symbolic World
Courses to be a little more interactive. I totally get that.
We're kind of much like my recording studio. This is
an ongoing project right We're kind of learning and growing,
and hopefully someday we'll have the time and the budget
to go back and even redo some of our stuff,
like the Dante courses with some assignments built into it,
so if you wanted to use it for your homeschool
or you wanted to use it for your own education,
there you could do something like that. So I'm thinking
on those things. I have actually insane, crazy ideas that
I'm not even allowed to talk about in public. About this,
but the Symbolic World Course is something that I really
really love and it is really important to me. So
bear with us. We're going to keep making it better.
But the other reason, again is this idea that well, okay,
let me tell you something is a little personal. We
were at where the Symbolic World Summit last year, right,
and there's a little trailer out back where the presenters
could kind of get some coffee and like, you know,
take a nap between things. It was just a whirlwind
couple of days. So I'm sitting back there on like
the second or third day of the conference with doctor
Martin Shaw, who of course has been on this channel
quite a bit and just finished in an incredible course
for us on Christian wonder Tales over on Symbolic World Courses.
And he turned to me and he said, I won't
try to do his Devin accent, but he turned to
me and he said, you know, Richard, you're a good preacher,
but you're not a storyteller yet. And of course you
know it's like, oh, dagger in my chest. Well, now
that I know actually what Martin means by being a storyteller,
I'm not really offended by that. And certainly, his presence
in the Symbolic World community has really encouraged a lot
of us, myself included, to tell more stories. I've been
since that course finished, you know, I've been. I've taken
some of the stories in that course, and I've tried
to tell them with my kids. And you need to
drum on the table a little bit. So we're working
on all of this, and so I think that if
we're going to do a course like this, there's got
to be some kind of a storytelling assignment. So it'll
be short, it'll have to be something short, but maybe
it'll be a launching platform for the rest of you
to kind of go into your life and go into
your community and start telling stories. It's got to be
remembered that people like Tolkien. Tolkien told all of his
stories for his kids, for his family, for his wife,
for his best friends, and it was only because something
beautiful came out of that that there was something that
was good enough to be published. So that's my hope
is that you'll go into your communities and do that,
and I really hope that I.
Speaker 2: Will see you there.
Speaker 1: You can sign up for the courses, just go to
the Symbolic world dot Com slash courses and we'll also
put a link in the double dooo down below until
I see you next and I hope to see you
in the course. Until I see you next time, God
be with you and Happy Groundhog Day.