Transcript
Speaker: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Queer Lodgings, the queer -led podcast about everything Tolkien. I'm Alicia, and I'm here with my usual co -hosts, Grace. Hello. And Leah. Hi. Thank you for joining us today. Let's huddle close around our small campfire against the lingering spring chill as we bolster ourselves before embarking on our latest adventure. Today we'll be discussing some of the criticism which has been leveled at us over the past eight months.
Speaker: It's been eight months. Cheese. Wow.
Speaker: So one of the common critiques that we see, having launched a podcast that puts the word queer in the same breath as Tolkien, nevermind that it's a Tolkien quote, is that Tolkien would hate this podcast. To assess this claim, let's turn to the words from an unpublished letter referenced in Carpenter's biography of Tolkien, in which he referred to his fans and their activities as, quote, a deplorable cultist.
Speaker: Case closed, I guess. He'd hate all of this fuss. Our podcast included. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Queer Lodging so you can find us on Apple, Google, Spotify, and stream episodes. Yeah, this is Tolkien we're talking about. You didn't think it was going to be that easy, did you?
Speaker: Well, it's been a good run, you guys. I guess we're shutting it down now. Not quite a year.
Speaker: So no, we're going to go ahead and we're going to dig into some of these criticisms and critiques and all of that and build up some of the refutations or more complex contexts to some of the things that we get hit with and lambasted with on all the delightful parts of the internet. Indeed. So what Tolkien would like or would have wanted is kind of a tricksy thing to nail down with any certainty.
Speaker: The man is dead and has been for decades, so there are multiple social and political movements he never lived to see and comment on, and the vast majority of us were not close personal friends of his or his family. We just don't have the insight into his personal life outside of the slice of Tolkien's working documents and letters that the estate has released and authorized biographies.
Speaker: Not to immediately burrow into deep critical theory, but we are all constructing a version of Tolkien when we discuss him and his works. In writing back to Tolkien, gender sexuality and race in high fantasy, Dallas John Baker says, there is now more than one Tolkien. At the very least, there are four JRR Tolkien's. There is the Tolkien of history, the actual person who lived and wrote and died. Then there is the subject of the numerous biographies based on that actual person.
Speaker: There's the Tolkien as imagined by the perhaps millions of people who have enjoyed his novels or the film adaptations. And finally, there's the Tolkien as constructed in the scholarly research about his writing. This Tolkien is a contested figure, precisely because he is a discursive figure, a figure that emerges from text. The meanings of text or discourse are dependent on the subjective position of the reader. Text is open to interpretation and changeable and often
Speaker: if not always, ambiguous. In her MythCon50 guest of honor speech, The Arch and the Keystone, which is fantastic, please go read it, Berlin Flieger expands that claim to a near infinite number of Tolkien's. Quote, when we look at Tolkien, we are likely to see ourselves and thus to find in his work what we want to see. Everyone has their own private Tolkien, more Tolkien's than you can shake a stick at.
Speaker: But what makes all of these multiple tokens possible?
Speaker: Well, let's read your response theory, which we'll come back to. I promise, feel free to take this as a threat that it is. But also the sheer number of contradictions Tolkien seems to embody in the remarkable body of work he left behind. Thanks to Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien, we have a surprisingly complete record of Tolkien's creative process and the thoughts that drove it. And unsurprisingly, given that Middle Earth was crafted over a period of nearly 70 years,
Speaker: there are some contradictions in evolution and Tolkien's thought. Going back to Flieger's MythCon address, we have pasted labels on him, called him a medievalist, a modernist, a postmodernist, a royalist, a fascist, a misogynist, a feminist, a racist, an egalitarian, a realist, a romantic, an optimist, a pessimist. He's variously characterized as homophobic and homosocial in both his work and life. His fiction has been interpreted as Boethian,
Speaker: Manchian, Augustinian, and Aquinian. He has been typed as a radical and as a conservative, a Christian apologist, and a pagan, a Catholic who believed in fairyland, a monarchist who exalted little people, a Tory whose political views lean towards anarchy,
Speaker: That is true. He's a bitch. He's a lover. He's a child. He's a mother. He will not be shamed. I have never considered, however, whether he's a goddess on his knees. We'll get to that one later.
Speaker: The fact that all these labels can find a fit only adds to the confusion. It is possible to cherry -pick Tolkien's quotes to support nearly any argument, and people do all the time in an effort to prove themselves right and others wrong about Tolkien's authorial intent. Letters is a very attractive vehicle for this.
Speaker: Often this search for the correct authorial intent leads over to making assumptions about the character of Baker's first version of Tolkien, the actual historical man. These are assumptions of just that, impossible to prove and merely accomplish the construction of a new version of Tolkien, one whose beliefs align with their own.
Speaker: However, we love dwelling in the liminality of these contradictions. That's often where the fun happens. Welcome to our new series, Tolkien Would Hate This Podcast, where we really dig into assertions made by people who have built up their idealized version of Tolkien as a uniquely American version of a Christian conservative hero and their arguments against us, a group of queer non -Christian people reading and enjoying his works.
Speaker: spoiler alert for this entire series is more complicated than you think. It's always more complicated than you think. So one of the first things we kind of want to touch on in
Speaker: the criticisms launched against us kind of has to do with, unfortunately, with us as fans and our fellow fans, really. The fact is, Tolkien had kind of a lot of complicated feelings about his fans. He basically, he kind of went in a couple of different ways. He had some very negative feelings about fans. He had some fairly positive feelings about them.
Speaker: One of the things that he says, especially about American fans, is that he found all of us distasteful. He says, many young Americans are involved in the stories in a way that I'm not. He calls the fans, especially American fans, the deplorable cultists. This is a pretty famous quote of his. The fact is that he was probably a great deal more popular in the sense of fandom over here on this side of the Atlantic than
Speaker: Maybe he was over in his own native England, at least in the sense that we might be able to recognize it today in terms of. People clamoring to come out with unauthorized versions to sell people sort of passing them in between each other.
Speaker: books falling apart for ages. But other things that he says about the Americans, one that I really love, a quote from a letter to W .H. Auden concerning a particular fan group that was formed in America, the Token Society. You may have heard of it. Yes, I have heard about the Token Society. Real lunatics don't join them, I think, but such things fill me too with alarm and despondency.
Speaker: Thanks, Tolkien. We're big fans. And that Tolkien society that he's referencing is the one that Bowden was at the inaugural meeting of in Brooklyn, New York, I believe.
Speaker: and he did actually write a letter to the head of that Tolkien society. That's not the same Tolkien society as the famous one based in the UK these days. I believe, and Alicia can correct me on this if I am going in the wrong direction here, but I believe that that Tolkien society, initially headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, merged with the mythopoeic society in 1972.
Speaker: It did. That is why the Mythopoeic Society can state that we are the oldest Tolkien -related fan group in North America.
Speaker: That's very cool. Because we ate the older men. History is fun. We consumed them. Another choice quote that Hiza has about us deplorable Americans is another one from letter 328. Quote, the horrors of the American scene I will pass over, though they have given me great distress and labor.
Speaker: They, meaning the fans, I think, arise in a entirely different mental climate and soil, polluted and impoverished to a degree only parallel by the lunatic destruction of the physical lands which Americans inhabit. Oof. Coming out with the colonization accusations there, Tolkien. I'm not holding back at all about what he thinks about the psychological landscape of Americans.
Speaker: Yeah, I would read they in that sentence as Americans and not just the fans. I think he's just shitting all over America in general, which is rich from a Brit. Yeah. When you're talking about colonization. Yeah, it's kind of like on the one hand, like fair point there talks, but also my dude.
Speaker: There's also an element that I am looking at here that as he's talking about the the destruction of the physical lands which Americans inhabit like this is a Tolkien who is well aware of how America is behaving before like the Clean Water Act and things like that before some of our better environmental policies were enacted and environmental policies which are frequently under attack and being rolled back in today's day and age so
Speaker: I imagine he would be displeased by some of our efforts there. I imagine so too. And yeah, that's a really great point. One point of note regarding Tolkien's relationship with his American fans is that he was, at least by the mid 1960s, frequently awoken at two or three o 'clock in the morning by the phone ringing with American callers on the other end who had
Speaker: rather neglected to calculate the time difference. And so he remarked on the frustration of those occurrences to his American friend, Clyde S. Kilby of Wheaton College and the Mythopoeic Society, who helped him organize the Silmarillion notes throughout the summer of 1966. Kilby published a lot of his impressions and experiences with Tolkien in a slim volume called Tolkien and the Silmarillion following Tolkien's death.
Speaker: Tolkien eventually had to unlist his number despite the frustration that this caused him, and he remarks on that in letters. And he also remarked to Kilby that too many people and journalistic features made him feel like, quote, a gargoyle to be gaped at. Oof, pretty harsh. So for all of his curmudgeonliness about particularly American fans, amongst which we, of course, count ourselves
Speaker: He did also have some fairly positive sort of neutral things to say about some of the fandom here. In letter 328, he expressed a great deal of appreciation for a fellow Oxford Don who, quote, placed his works in the rank of, quote, literature, thus gaining him intelligent and well -equipped readers.
Speaker: he sort of thought that by folks who read literature would be from a soil in which the fungus growth of cults is likely to arise, which I kind of have to be kind of like, my dude, have you been in academia? What are you talking about? I read that second sentence is unlike those fucking Americans, those guys.
Speaker: It's not a soil in which the fungus growth of cults is likely to arise. Like here in Maryield, England, yes. In Maryield, Oxford, yes. Sure. But then of course, you know, he would go back and forth on different opinions and have faceted views of the same idea from from time to time.
Speaker: Carpenter, who both wrote his authorized biography and also is the editor of Letters, framed Tolkien as idiosyncratic in his introduction to Letters. And Kilby, who we referenced a minute ago, very much acknowledged Tolkien's contradictions, referring to this as his contrasistency or a kind of consistent inconsistency.
Speaker: Kilby contextualized Tolkien's behavior in regards to guests and inquiries, revealed during the first of his many visits by saying, After his sober greeting at the door, I found him immediately friendly as we sat down. Tolkien was the most genial man with a steady twinkle in his eyes and a great curiosity, the sort of person one instinctively likes. The main reason, which was forcing him to shut out visitors, was not his antipathy to them, but rather the knowledge that his natural friendliness and love of talking with almost anybody who happened along,
Speaker: would seduce him into spending time with visitors while his work languished. At one point, Kilby describes Tolkien's expressions as a genial face suddenly shifting into an expression of blazing criticism soon followed by a repentant warmth. In short, Tolkien's opinions and behaviours were often multifaceted rather than rigid and could shift through a multitude of approaches swiftly. He was very human.
Speaker: And someone that George RR Martin needs to take notes from apparently. So the reason that we're kind of covering some of these feelings about the fans is again, we are unabashedly part of the deplorable cultist.
Speaker: In saying that Tolkien would hate this podcast, that alone might give you a little bit of ammunition. But we have to say that he also has some things to say about more problematic and sort of gatekeeping fans who show up, which we endeavor not to be.
Speaker: In letter 229, he was remarking on Ake Omak's intro to the Swedish translation of Lord the Rings, which asserts that there is an intended comparison to Stalin, just to give some context.
Speaker: quote, I utterly repudiate any such reading, which angers me. The situation was conceived long before the Russia evolution. Such allegory is entirely foreign to my thought. And of course, we have discussed before Tolkien's feelings about allegory, and this is a very strong thread in his
Speaker: opinions about some fans who either make particular assertions or declare certain things about his work to portray one thing or another. He goes on, Olmarks is a very vain man, as I discovered in our correspondence.
Speaker: preferring to his own fancy to facts and very ready to pretend to knowledge which he does not possess. He does not hesitate to attribute to me sentiments and beliefs which I repudiate.
Speaker: So this quote stands out to me a lot that Tolkien, above many, many things, really dislikes fans, sort of declaring him to believe things which he does not, and declaring that he intended certain things to come forth in his work that he absolutely did not. This is pretty strong language for him, right? He also very keenly in this cares a lot about the details
Speaker: not just that allegory is foreign to his thought here, but he goes on in this to talk about how this couldn't possibly be an allegory for Stalin because he wrote it before Stalin was an international figure and it just bothered him that people were being that stupid as to think this. Exactly, exactly.
Speaker: He really dislikes it when people make assertions, particularly not just about his work, but about his own beliefs and his own person and what he thinks and what he feels. In letter 177, this is talking about the radio adaptation and Auden's talk on the book that was kind of accompanying that adaptation. Well, he agreed with the critic's view of the radio adaptation, which was largely kind of mixed.
Speaker: But I was annoyed that after confessing that none of them had read the book, they should turn their attention to it and me, including surmise on my religion. And if there's one thing that you want to do in order to piss Tolkien off, is to turn your attention to him and surmise on his religion.
Speaker: We did have a very exciting first week or two of the podcast where a group of folks were doing that on the basis of not liking the word queer in conjunction with Tolkien in our podcast name and coming out as a... It was literally a fucking chapter title.
Speaker: Yeah. And a lot of these folks that we were, you know, just liberally wielding the block hammer on and just kind of keeping a tally were coming out of a Catholic tradition. And we did have one person reach out to us directly and apologize on behalf of those folks and apologizing on behalf of all Christianity, which I thought was a very sweet but bold
Speaker: attempt there. But apologizing for people taking such a reductive and like demanding view of what Tolkien obviously must have wanted and how that should be weaponized against other fans and everything. That was just something that struck me in reading this particular letter, letter 177. Tolkien was not particularly keen on people making
Speaker: decisions about what they thought he should believe due to his religion and then acting in accordance with that sort of missionized idea. Yeah, I mean like Tolkien even had problems with the Catholic Church. I'm sure this is something we're going to cover later because he was a pre -Vatican II Catholic and fought against it very hard. So I don't think that it's fair
Speaker: to say that Tolkien is necessarily a mainline Catholic, Tolkien had his very specific beliefs and he stuck to them no matter what. This is specifically a Tridentine Catholic, yes.
Speaker: I don't know that much about Catholics. One would have to pull in our Tolkien Wica. Yeah. So the reason that we're kind of going a little bit more in depth into Tolkien's sentiments and thoughts about different fans and how they approach him and what they decide to think about him and what they declare he actually thinks.
Speaker: The reason that we're doing that is because that's been a pretty big part of some of the criticism that's been launched against us.
Speaker: The fact is, there are a lot of deplorable fans in the deplorable cultists who are truly pretty monstrous and toxic. Like, no matter how deplorable we might be, quote unquote, there are absolutely some folks who are worse. And some of them are very, very toxic and very, very vocal. And they are either unknowingly or inadvertently or
Speaker: more likely deliberately part of the internet hate machine, which if you have listened to American id and previous episodes of this podcast, we've touched on.
Speaker: So the fact is, we really don't know what Togen would think of many, many things. Barring necromancy or a seance, we just don't know. We absolutely know, though, that he would be fucking livid at fascists using his work to lure people into ideologies of hate, violence, and genocidal destruction. And unfortunately,
Speaker: a lot of those people are a part of the deplorable cultists. So not to get too heavy about it, but
Speaker: Yeah, I do want to bring up that although we are doing this as a response to criticism we have received, we are not doing it in dialogue with those people in particular. We do not want to platform them. And I honestly don't give a fuck what they think. But I do think that some of their criticisms lead to interesting avenues of query, right? Yeah.
Speaker: I really dislike that a lot of them seem to think that they have a direct line to Tolkien, which again, if they're doing necromancy or mediumship, like, you know, get in touch with us, maybe we'll, maybe we can have Tolkien dial into the podcast and, you know, tell us what he really thinks.
Speaker: It is always truly exciting for me when there's a hot take on the internet that is in direct contradiction to something that's actually published of what Tolkien said or stated that he believed and that's treated as definitive as opposed to complicated.
Speaker: One of the common complaints that we and many other fans and scholars receive is that Tolkien is rolling over in his grave at our bizarre and incorrect readings of his work. We've already covered at length why it's difficult to nail down who Tolkien really was and what he thought due to his many stated contradictions, but now it's time to deliver on my earlier threat. Let's dive into reader response theory and authorial intent.
Speaker: Authorial intent is largely what critics are relying on when stating that our interpretations are inherently wrong because we are not properly interpreting what the author encoded in their work. This is usually combined with that critic's what I'm going to call pet Tolkien, often a very limited cis -het white conservative Christian male worldview, which matches their own construction of what constitutes normativity.
Speaker: Aside from Tolkien's many state of contradictions in his work and evolution of his ideas over time, authorial intent is very hard to discern if you are not the author. Sometimes even if you are the author, in letter 163 to W .H. Auden, Tolkien says that he finds
Speaker: Lord of the Rings interpretations, quite amusing. Even those that I might make myself, which are mostly post -scriptum, I had very little particular conscious intellectual intention in mind at any point. Which is just delightful.
Speaker: Reader response theory seeks to throw out authorial intent entirely, which is what is meant by death of the author. Instead of the author imbuing a text with meaning, it is the reader and the active reading that gives the text its meaning. My personal beliefs about where meaning comes from in a text sort of splits the difference between these two models, but we're not here for unpopular theoretical opinions with Alicia Todd. Another episode.
Speaker: episode we're never getting to because no one's interested except me. Since the objections that we get are largely intent based, let's look at that a little.
Speaker: Everything we have access to that allows us to attempt to understand Tolkien's authorial intent is itself a text. This is problematic because text does not have an objective meaning in the way you may have been taught in high school. What? I know. Shocking. Shocking. There's also more than three states of matter.
Speaker: Anything we read, hear, or see is filtered through our own individual thoughts and experiences. Our brains are primed to make order out of chaos and find patterns, and we pick out pieces from what we consume to form narratives that make sense to us.
Speaker: We read in Tolkien's statements of authorial intent what we desire to be there as far as the text will allow us to, which is why making any definitive statements about his authorial intent is so hazardous, even setting aside how often he is to contradict himself. It is impossible to know what Tolkien the historical man was thinking without imposing our own worldview upon him as we're reading his text, both his texts about his authorial intent as well as the stories.
Speaker: Yeah, which again is kind of why we kind of bring up a bit of why we get so pissed off with those gatekeeping sort of fans who say that they have the final authority on what Tolkien thought and what he intended because
Speaker: Tolkien didn't even know what he thought or intended half the time. And much like Tolkien, it pisses me off that these people kind of make these assertions. And I don't recognize the hazards of doing so. One of the hazards in cherry picking from letters, which is itself already a selected and edited text, which already has a lens of
Speaker: those who were making the selection. There's already a selection bias in what's included. When one simply cherry picks, one perhaps doesn't recognize the connections between various letters and how Tolkien's opinion is performed differently to different audiences in nuanced ways.
Speaker: that's just one of the things like if you're only reading the letters in this very limited form, you're not even engaging fully with the text and so trying to clobber someone with them who's read more than three letters is maybe not making you look great. So Robin Reed,
Speaker: says in a paper in dialogue with Verlyn Flieger's MythCon address, quote, I do not consider that the goal of scholarship is to figure out the right answer, presumably what the author intends, or to achieve some falsely universal truth that dismisses other interpretations as wrong or failures.
Speaker: Leager keeps space open for conflicting readings, saying, quote, Tolkien scholars and critics find in Tolkien's work what they are looking for. I'm not saying they're wrong. I'm saying they're right. What they see is there, even when they're seeing contradictory things. And that is really the heart of the issue. No matter what critical lens you're using with Tolkien, it's not often either or, but both and.
Speaker: Well, we touched on letter 163 a moment ago, discussing how Tolkien saw his own ideas about his work as being a type of interpretation. Let's go back there, because he later discusses other people's interactions with the story.
Speaker: With the exception of deliberately disparaging reviews or simplistic allegorical readings, which he understandably takes negatively, Tolkien expresses a neutral stance on alternative readings, stating that, quote, what appreciative readers have got out of the world or seen in it has seemed fair enough, even when I do not agree with it.
Speaker: Please note that this is a letter to a friend of his who is a queer man validating his fans readings, even when he doesn't agree with them.
Speaker: cordially disliking allegory is well known. We've already talked about it a little bit. It's going to the fact that he actually wrote about it in the foreword to Lord of the Rings. But I think a lot of people give undue weight to the first sentence of that passage and leave the part about applicability behind. Tolkien's dislike of allegory is often weaponized in debate against anyone reading symbolism or subtext into his work, usually because it's seen as a incorrect reading.
Speaker: But in Tolkien's own words, quote, I much prefer history true or faint with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but one resides in the freedom of the reader and the other in the purposed domination of the author. Hmm. Yeah.
Speaker: This reads to me as an author who is happy for readers to seek their own meanings within his work and that this is a point he's remarkably consistent on as far as Tolkien and consistency goes. He expresses distaste for analysis of his work where the critics supposed to know what Lord of the Rings was intended to represent
Speaker: particularly when that was ahistorical to his lens in writing or an intentional allegory was imposed. Readings that performed analysis didn't appear to draw the same ire for him, even if he at times thought that that analysis might diminish the mystery and magic of a work.
Speaker: Indeed Tolkien engaged at length with fans and scholars discussing their various readings, see the entire last half of letters. He often disagreed with or was disagreeable in his assessment, but the times he actually expressed anger were when people were limiting or dismissive of this work or were trying to use it to further movements like fascism.
Speaker: Like we said, as we quoted before about him taking O marks to task and taking a great deal of ire with the assertion that it was intended to be a comparison to the USSR into Stalin.
Speaker: Like, he's very, very consistent about these things. And he's also very consistent about leaving a lot of space open to his readers and leaving space open as an author and specifically intending his work to be a conversation between the reader and the author.
Speaker: And sometimes the thing he might say in conversation is that he thought that was an idiotic statement, but you know. But it was still a conversation. Yes. And he didn't shut down conversation due to lack of agreement unless it was in these very like ways where people were trying to impose this is what Tolkien meant and he felt the need to correct them. Yeah. Or they were using it to further fascism and genocide.
Speaker: The whole thing he wrote about allegory versus applicability in the foreword is in conversation with someone who is insisting that the one ring is the atom bomb, essentially. Yeah. That's where that whole thing even came from. Yeah.
Speaker: Now, in an effort to defend Tolkien's legacy from alternative greetings, some people fall into a trap of doing the type of pigeonholing of Tolkien's work that he fought so hard against by saying, this can't possibly mean that. Oh, wait.
Speaker: Tim! Oh, yeah, summoning the token white man to read, read, launch some criticisms at us. This can't possibly mean that. Token was a Catholic. You have to be a Catholic to understand the text's true meaning.
Speaker: By saying that, you are not only making an assumption about Tolkien's authorial intent, indeed a signing intent where he's also expressed there just might not be any. You are also tiptoeing down the road to allegory. Sure not C .S. Lewis Jesus Lion level allegory, but is in the same neighborhood.
Speaker: Tolkien sought for applicability over allegory, and that applicability is both what lets people read Frodo as gay, Polly, and Ace, and also what keeps Lord of the Rings and the public consciousness. If the only way to get meaning from it was to be an Edwardian era Catholic Brit, no one would still be reading this book, and we wouldn't be here right now.
Speaker: We wouldn't be making this podcast. I think that for all of his, all of his words about the deplorable cultists, I think that he's actually a lot more, a lot more generous to the cultists than a lot of people give him credit for.
Speaker: Yeah, so that brings us to the next piece of topics that we're going to unpack a little bit. And that's around the idea of not just interpretation, which we just went through, but adaptation. Well, Tim, we're going to need you back for this. Just introduce us.
Speaker: Tokina hated adaptations. Yeah, exactly. Obviously, universally so easy to tell all of this. But of course, it's a lot more nuanced than just disliking aspects of an adaptation or having strong opinions about how something should be done. And sometimes having strong opinions that aren't
Speaker: founded in a background toward that type of adaptation. So there's a few different quotes that we've pulled from letters here and we're going to use those to go through some of his views toward adaptation as he himself actually stated as opposed to how, you know,
Speaker: Reddit would like to tell me they are. So let's kind of start in sort of one of the more famous statements that he sort of says about adaptation in the infamous letter 131. He
Speaker: not only describes about his first sort of vague intent about creating a mythology for England, of course, but he goes on further to say, quote, I would draw some of the great tales in fullness and leave many only placed in the scheme and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole and yet leave scope for other minds and hands wielding paint and music and drama.
Speaker: A lot of people have sort of taken this quote almost as a kind of permission from Tolkien to lean further into his world and look at what those sketches and little tidbits in his scheme might actually look like and might be developed not by Tolkien but by themselves.
Speaker: So I feel like this quote is both kind of an important one and also sort of leaves out some of his maybe more personal sort of considerations. But I think it's a really important one to place in the context of his general feelings about adapting his work in particular because
Speaker: I feel like it sort of grounds it in this spaciousness, in this openness. And going back to his talking about his work kind of being more like a conversation between an author and a reader, I feel like this supports that, you know. I think he wanted to build a world that other people could live within. Yeah.
Speaker: And one thing that I want to highlight in this quote, he talks about wielding paint and music and drama. He talks about adaptation beyond the sort of reflexive way that a lot of fans are inclined to first think of now, which is specifically live action film adaptation. There is
Speaker: a great deal more of there's film and television, there's animated styles, there are musicals, there's art, there is fiction, there is scholarship and all of that which digs into some of the different pieces and different versions of what he wrote and some of Christopher's work and all that that has continued in Christopher's hands.
Speaker: as being part of what we now have as an understanding of Middle Earth. And in fact, the Silmarillion itself falls into all of this because it wasn't published in his lifetime.
Speaker: That's a really important point about the summer land. That was a very carefully chosen and dare I say an adaptation of Tolkien's massive number of drafts that Christopher did his very best to coalesce and showcase some of the best, I think, and the most developed bits that he had. There were also radio dramas and things like that within Tolkien's lifetime, which
Speaker: is a piece that I often see overlooked by people who are spouting off some quick opinions about Tolkien and adaptation. They tend to not have an awareness that Tolkien did both share opinions and also write for some of these adaptations as well and was actively engaged in this process himself and then looking to other experts within those fields to make them come alive.
Speaker: Yeah. Oh, I want to like very quickly tangent about Christopher Tolkien for a second. Yeah. Well, sure. Mentioning the Christopher Tolkien as a scholar, I think is very important because like we often position him as an editor and yes, he was an editor of his father's text, but he's who gave us the history of Middle Earth, which is a scholarly work as is unfinished tales and tales from the perilous realm. Like all of those are.
Speaker: scholarly and other than the fact that it's tied to Christopher Tolkien's name, it doesn't really have a lot to do with anything other than the fact that one of the things that are lobbed in our general direction is that we take this in a scholarly way and that has somehow seemed
Speaker: as inferior to other ways of interacting with Tolkien's work to some of the people who give us criticism online, and yet they deify Christopher Tolkien, who's doing the same damn thing.
Speaker: Yeah, accusing us of being elitist or intellectual bourgeois. And it's kind of like, my dude, have you read things? And also what you're doing to Christopher. He, above any of us here, was 1000 % interacting with his father's work as a scholar.
Speaker: So speaking of that radio adaptation, there were other numerous adaptations that were floated by him. And we know his opinions on a number of them, as expressed in the letters. But we also know, thanks to these letters, that he was willing to compromise on a lot of these adaptations if he was offered enough money.
Speaker: Tolkien was a pretty pragmatic and pretty practical family man. He wanted to make sure his kids were fed. He wanted to make sure that his wife and his children were kept in comfort. And so he didn't put his art on a pedestal and make it untouchable. And he also was not unwilling to consider
Speaker: consider making some adjustments and some changes if the price was right, which I think really shows how much of an artist a token really was, you know. I love the exact quote, which is art or cash. Yeah. So much.
Speaker: And I also love that he's communicating to his family, specifically Christopher and Faith, and he mentions Stanley Unwin, his publisher. So he's reached this conclusion in conjunction with trusted advisors and people who understand the various industries with which he's engaging. And he says, Stanley and I have agreed on our policy, art or cash, either very profitable terms, indeed, or absolute author's veto on objectionable features or alterations.
Speaker: then goes on in that letter to make some assessments about the American movie pitch that he'd just gotten, which he thought was nice and art style, more Rackham than Disney. He really had a hate on for Disney stuff. But the storyline was bad. He went into excessive detail on that. And he was gonna go for it anyway.
Speaker: Yeah, there were a couple of points in time where he sort of acknowledged that basically he was going to go for things anyway, even if he thought that they were poorly done or he disliked them. So in letter 146, he starts talking about some book jackets that he disliked. But the premise that he approaches this from is essentially that perfect is the enemy of good.
Speaker: not to allow his opinions to delay anything, he's willing to abide the things that he's not wholly thrilled by, that he's pragmatic, willing to cede control for enough money, and to allow a project to go forward on the merits presented, even if not all of his desires for it were realized.
Speaker: Then in letter 277, we have a similar example. Tolkien lambasted the covers of the US paperback editions, which had been very hastily drawn by someone who wasn't given a chance to even read the books. He made some comments on that as well. They look like a fever dream. Yeah, they're psychedelic and kind of kind of amazing in their own way, but they are very, very much not Lord of the Rings related.
Speaker: I love them for the complexities of the story, but I only love them because I understand the context. Otherwise, they would seem very strange to me. But the person who illustrated them had to get the story of what happened in Lord of the Rings through a phone call with someone that she knew who had read the books.
Speaker: Barbara Remington is the artist and she had to have this relayed via telephone and then do these paintings very quickly because of the pirated paperbacks that were available. So those covers are literally a game of telephone and so I am
Speaker: deeply amused by them and also like Tolkien is legitimate in his concerns and criticisms here. There's some weird shit. So he lambats the covers of those paperback editions. But he also acknowledges that his perspective, even though unfavorable, is not the only one which may be of importance to book sales. And he goes through and says that he wrote to his American publishers expressing with moderation
Speaker: moderation. My distaste for the cover for the Valentin edition of The Hobbit. It was a short, hasty note by hand, without a copy, but it was to this effect. I think the cover ugly, but I recognize that a main object of a paperback cover is to attract purchasers, and I suppose that you are better judges of what is attractive in the USA than I am. I therefore will not enter into a debate about taste, meaning, though I did not say so, horrible colors and foul lettering, but I must ask about the vignette.
Speaker: What has it got to do with the story? Where is this place? Why a lion? And emus? And what is the thing in the foreground with pink bulbs? I do not understand how anyone who had read the tale, I hope you are one, would think such a picture would please the author.
Speaker: It's like during that game of telephone, they were like, he's friends with C .S. Lewis, just stick a line on. Throw an emu in there. Why the hell not? There's probably an emu in there somewhere.
Speaker: And I think that the pink bulbs are supposed to be apples or something? Oranges? Yeah, the profula trees, obviously. Many options within Raider Response. But no, on the subject of the tension between Tolkien's tastes and preferences going up against his pragmatism,
Speaker: In terms of sustaining fan interest in the work, I want to take us back to letter 13, where he says, it might be advisable rather than lose the American interest to let the Americans do what seems good to them as long as it was possible, I should like to add, to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney Studios for all whose work I have a heartfelt loathing. I bet he fucking regretted that a couple of years later when he was getting calls at two in the morning.
Speaker: Before he unlisted his phone number. Yeah, man, it's like, man, he's really like takes every opportunity to get a nice dig at the Americans, man. Speaking of Americans, he says in letter 198, this is a letter concerning an American filmmaker who had inquired about the possibility of making a cartoon of Lord of the Rings.
Speaker: As far as I'm concerned personally, I should welcome the idea of an animated motion picture with all the risk of vulgarization, and that is quite apart from the glint of money, though on the brink of retirement that is not an unpleasant possibility.
Speaker: I think I should find vocalization less painful than the silification achieved by the BBC. So not only is he getting some digs at the BBC radio adaptation, he's also freely admitting that on the brink of retirement, the possibility of being able to retire very comfortably from selling rights to an American filmmaker to a possibly
Speaker: possibly vulgar cartoon of Lord of the Rings. That might make things go down kind of easy actually. Yeah like we've discussed him not liking Disney a fair amount at this point. His problem with Disney stems from him going to watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarves with I believe it was C .S. Lewis.
Speaker: and what he found objectionable about it was one he thought the animation style was vulgar and two he whatever that means yeah i don't know i believe it's the same way that he characterized samwise gamgee though so uh yeah
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. The other problem he had with it was that Full King was a big believer in not sanitizing folktale for children. And he refers to it as Disneyfication, where they have taken a folktale and sanitized it and made it like what we would consider now kid friendly. And he thought that it wasn't necessary and that it was an affront to the folktale that it was based on. That's where a lot of his objection comes from there.
Speaker: Yeah. And I'm assuming that's what he was worried what was going to happen to his work is that, you know, someone adapts the Hobbit as a cartoon and then strips out Bilbo becoming valorous at the end of it, right? Because there's that weird tonal shift or like simplifying it too much. Yeah. He's like, they took out the witch dancing to death in red hot shoes. They're definitely going to take out Smaug or something like that and make it sanitized and clean and friendly for little kitties.
Speaker: Joke is half on him. The animated Return of the King definitely did stuff like that, but they did leave a four -minute musical ode to where there's a whip, there's a way, and the orcs be. You win some, you lose some. Yeah, token made that a point there, so, you know. That song is a hilarious delight. Thank you so much, Romeo, for that. It is a banger.
Speaker: So Tolkien was struggling with all of this, partly because he thought that his work was... Hang on. You have so many opinions. Hi. Can the opinions be outside? I too think his work is unstable for dramatization. We're going to stand up again. Snow White is vulgar. She's like, I'll show you vulgar.
Speaker: Fuck the BBC. Fuck the BBC. Silly. So Tolkien also struggled with the idea of adaptations and everything because he's on record as saying that he felt that his work was unsuitable for dramatization. That's in letter 175. He heavily criticized the BBC radio adaptations, including ones that he contributed to in letters 175 and 177.
Speaker: and disappeared of anyone considering his work or any work a test of literary taste, even when it was his own friends and supporters who made that claim. He just didn't think that that was appropriate or sustainable gatekeeping measure to make, ever.
Speaker: for any work. Then in letter 201, he's talking about the potential for the film adaptation. And he talks a little bit about abridgment and all that. So he goes into saying an abridgment by selection with some good picture work would be pleasant and perhaps worth a good deal in publicity. So he's again thinking both of the longevity of the work here and the commercial viability of the work.
Speaker: But the present script is rather a compression with the resultant overcrowding and confusion, blurring of climaxes and general degradation, a pullback towards more convenient fairy stories. People gallop around on eagles, the least provocation. Lorian becomes a fairy castle with delicate minarets and all that sort of thing. But I'm quite prepared to play ball if they are open to advice and if you decide that the thing is genuine and worthwhile.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's important to note that this is kind of the infamous Zimmerman script and adaptation that Tolkien received a copy of and discussed at length in numerous letters. And he had a lot of opinions about this script.
Speaker: I have a lot of opinions about this script. Yeah. Like Eden says, people gallop about on Eagles and it becomes, it's a very, very silly script and it's very, very poorly done. But I really liked that last sentence of, I am quite prepared to play ball if they're open to advice. And he's kind of like, you know, if people are really committed to this and their hearts are kind of in the right place and they're sort of willing to listen and get some genuine feedback, let's play ball. Let's do this.
Speaker: I think it's funny that Tolkien was apparently willing to work with somebody who was writing a movie completely different from his book and just like swapping in names essentially. Yeah.
Speaker: They were actually getting some of those names wrong too. And there are people still mad about the Peter Jackson movies because they weren't faithful enough to the material because there's no cool pompadill. Yeah. Yeah. Like Tolkien doesn't need you to be upset about that because I feel like
Speaker: If PJ gave Tolkien enough money, he would have been happy. Yeah, I think I'm more upset about some of the things in Return of the King than Tolkien would have been. Very likely. I'm probably shittier and grumpier about them than our dear conventionally professor was.
Speaker: Yes. Do you want to, do you want to phone him real quick? I know you got on a Ouija board and see what he feels about Denethor and his, his whole arc in, oh gosh, PJ's trilogy.
Speaker: So discussing the Zimmerman script a little bit further, I feel like it's important for us to consider his real unhappiness with the script was not a barrier to it actually really developing and to it being made, which is something that we have heard a lot being lobbed at us in
Speaker: are varying degrees of support or excitement over certain adaptations that will not be named here right now. In letter 207, he continues talking about the Zimmerman script.
Speaker: He says, I feel very unhappy about the extreme silliness and incompetence of Z and his complete lack of respect for the original. It seems willfully wrong without discernible technical reasons at nearly every point. But I need, and shall soon need very much indeed, money. And I am conscious of your rights and interests so that I shall endeavor to restrain myself and avoid all avoidable offense.
Speaker: I will send you my remarks, and of course nothing will go to Ackerman except through you, yada yada yada." Basically, he's sort of, again, he's a very practical and pragmatic man, and no matter how grumpy he is about things and how he feels that this particular adaptation is silly and disrespectful and completely, almost willfully wrong,
Speaker: Money is a great thing for a professor with a fairly large family and not a very large salary.
Speaker: So for all of his grumpiness, I feel like he doesn't really need people in the current age anyway to insist that he would put a stop to any disrespectful adaptation or anything that is too silly or too bad basically to be made and that he would be insisting on stopping anything being produced that deeply offended him because
Speaker: Clearly, if he got some of the Bezos money that the Tolkien estate did, were he still alive? Or at least he would be pretty silent about some of the things that he would not like. It would soothe some stings, I think. I think that he would keep his thoughts to himself with several million dollars in his pocket.
Speaker: He exhibits being able to balance those competing factors, both his artistic desire and, as I say, not just the monetary aspect, which he's very upfront about, but also wanting these adaptations and ways for people to engage with the work and the story to continue.
Speaker: There's one more quote that I want to pull out, and it's the canon of narrative art quote from letter 210. And it is something that is frequently thrown at really any adaptation that people don't feel is appropriately respectful or the right way of adapting Tolkien.
Speaker: And the specific quote is, the canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different, and the failure of poor films is often precisely an exaggeration and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter, owning to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.
Speaker: Now, obviously that's Tolkien's idea around what is good adaptation and what isn't, and he's coming at that from the lens of the original author rather than someone who has a keen sense of how to convey information visually as opposed to linguistically. Those are different strengths.
Speaker: But that quote is so often just lobbed out in order to make the idea that if there's any deviation from a source text, even if the source text doesn't contain all of the elements that we would need to see to understand it in whole, that this is a departure from what Tolkien wanted and therefore shouldn't exist. And that is definitively not what he says at any point.
Speaker: even when he's being an absolute curmudgeon and sometimes rightly so about the adaptations and the suggestions of storylines and treatments and what have you. Yeah. So what's our kind of big takeaway from talking about his feelings, about his fans, about adaptation and interpretation here? I think ending on adaptation is a good one because I think a lot of this ties into the ongoing applicability of Tolkien's work.
Speaker: And that I feel like he would want that to happen because he wants money. He wants his family to succeed from his work. That is like he definitely has a fiscal interest in his work remaining ongoingly applicable and being adapted. And that's one of the main ways in which something continues to be applicable. You have to readapt it for a new generation. Absolutely.
Speaker: But he also really just wanted to create a world where other people can live. And we're all doing that all the time, every time we read it, every time we write a paper about how
Speaker: Sam and Frodo are totally banging or whatever. Yeah, every time we turn on our microphones and we sit here and talk about Celebrimbor who gets basically isn't even mentioned in Lord of the Rings at all and how he and Sauron are absolutely fucking every time we come together and talk about Tolkien, it's like we're living in that world that he created and
Speaker: I feel like that above all would make him pretty happy. And I really think that he probably wouldn't hate this podcast quite as much as a lot of people perhaps would like him to.
Speaker: Every time that someone is engaging in creating a transformative work, writing something that takes place in Middle Earth, or creating fan art, or people who are working on licensed adaptations and working to bring those to stage and screen, we didn't really go into, there's a Lord of the Rings musical. Actually, I think there have been a couple of them licensed and unlicensed over various points in time.
Speaker: Every time we're bringing this into a new medium and we're having more discussions about Middle Earth and Lord of the Rings and the legendarium, it's keeping it alive. It's keeping it alive in other hearts and minds, and we get to continue engaging with it because it isn't static and stagnant. And it's okay if some of those ways that we engage
Speaker: are not what Tolkien himself might have envisioned. He died in 1973 and it is 2023. There's been a few decades in there where our understandings and perceptions and the ways that we engage have continued to move alongside all of these pieces of adaptation and the ways of understanding Tolkien and his legendarium.
Speaker: And I think it's important to remember that someone having a different reading of Lord of the Rings than you personally do does not mean that they're incorrect. And it also does not mean that they are gatekeeping. What is gatekeeping behavior is telling somebody that their reading of Lord of the Rings is incorrect.
Speaker: Yeah, simply having contradictory readings is not excluding those. I have contradictory readings of the text within myself all the time. We can hold this theory at the same time that we're holding this theory over here and have both of these different
Speaker: headcanons or lenses of interpretation or, you know, six of them at a time. And that's great. I engage with the books differently than I do with movies and television shows and musical adaptations and all of that. They can all coexist. Only when someone says that that's not the right way to be a fan, you can't like Tolkien that way, that it's a problem.
Speaker: Asterisk caveat fascism. That one is a no. That one's a big no -no. Yeah. Token will come back from the dead and haunt you forever.
Speaker: If you continue to use his works to further agendas of hate and bigotry and genocidal violence, he will come back and haunt you and fuck you up forever. I promise.
Speaker: As much as I don't like putting words in his mouth, I do think you're correct. I don't have to put words in his mouth. You thought Hitler was a ruddy little ignoramus. Yeah, again, I'm breaking out my Ouija board right now. He says, he says, yes, we're correct. We're absolutely correct. He says, I'm gonna fuck you up right now if you say so.
Speaker: It's very Tolkienian language. Yes, I think that's a direct quote. That's a direct quote from the letter 450, I think. On that note,
Speaker: That's going to take us through the first couple of pieces of this series, the interpretations and adaptations. Next, we're going to be talking about the queer aspect of all of this. So you can find us on Apple, Spotify, Google, or stream episodes directly on Zencaster. It's zencaster .com slash queerlodgingsatulcanpodcast with dashes between all of those.
Speaker: I want to interject. We have a website now. Yay! Well, that should be in our episode notes. I should have made our episode notes. My bad. You can also find us at QueerLogings .com. Yay! You can leave us a rating on your podcast catcher of choice. You can like us and share us and subscribe to us on Facebook and Twitter.
Speaker: Facebook slash queer lodgings, Twitter at queer underscore lodgings. You can also email us with feedback and suggestions for future episodes, any encounters with the deplorable cultists that you perhaps have had as well. We are at queer lodgings podcast at gmail .com. So thanks, everybody. Bye bye.
Speaker: Okay, no wait, now I have a special request. Now you have to do it like European Lore guy. I don't think I can do that terribly. This can't possibly mean that. This can't possibly mean that. Tolkien was a Catholic and you have to be a Catholic to understand the text's true meaning.
Speaker: That'll be the end tag for the episode.
