The World of J.R.R. Tolkien

Summary: Intro to the work and context of JRR Tolkien. 

When I tend to get too ambivalent with my current reading (both interested in the topic but not wanting to pick up the book), I often turn to lecture series like the Great Courses on random subjects to either distract me or to be in conversation with whatever I am currently reading. Picking up The World of JRR Tolkien is clearly an attempt at something completely different. (And an attempt to prepare for the Amazon series coming up soon.)

The World of JRR Tolkien is shorter than most Great Courses at only nine lectures and a bit over 4.5 hours. I listened to it in just a couple of days. I am not a Tolkien scholar, and while I did revisit the Lord of the Rings earlier this year, that was the first time I have read the books in about 20 years. And I have not previously read a biography of Tolkien or books about him. So this was mostly new material for me. I am very familiar with CS Lewis and the Inklings, so I am not entirely new, but almost nothing in this lecture series by Dimitra Fimi repetitive to what I have previously read or listened to.

The first lecture is about how Middle-earth is both medieval and modern and gives a general introduction to the series and Tolkien. The second lecture caught me off guard; it is about how Tolkien initially attempted to create a mythology for England that would draw together the country in ways not unlike what was intended for the Book of Common Prayer. That is not just audacious, but it is concerning from our 21st-century vantage point, given the ways shared memory, and a common mythology was misused with the Nazi regime and the Lost Cause mythology in the US.

Most of the middle lectures are more structural. There are discussions about Elves and how their common cultural understanding changes because of Tolkien. And how mythology (in the sense of origin story or story of shared meaning) works. Similarly, there is a whole lecture on the theological roots of Tolkien's writing, especially the concept of the fall and the “Eucatastrophe.” And there are lectures on Dragons and Hobbits, Tolkien's love of languages, and what it means for him to have created languages for the books.

Given my interests, I was also particularly interested in the last two lectures on Evil, Trauma, and War, and the use of Gender and Race in Middle-earth. I know there are books about how Tolkien's military service impacted his writing, but I have not read any of them. (A Hobbit, A Wardrobe and a Great War is one.) But the specific discussion of trauma and PTSD that Tolkien may have experienced and certainly would have observed and how he includes similar concepts in the characters of his stories was helpful.

Similarly, while I mused about Tolkien's conception of race and how the culture of racial superiority may have impacted him, Fimi both places Tolkien in context and explores how he participates in the culture of racial and gender hierarchy and pushes back against it. Eugenics was part of the culture of his yearly years of teaching at Oxford, but also the Lord of the Rings was not published until about a decade after World War II, and the Aryan nationalism and racism and the eugenics of the Nazis impacted the way that English thought regarded eugenics after the war. I had thought about how the villains were racialized, but I had not thought as much about how Elves were a type of perfect race tainted by mixing with humans (although they could marry and have children.)

Similarly, because I have not read any of the Silmarillion or other tales, her frequent reference to those stories and Tolkien's letters and other writings did help to round out my understanding of him as a whole person, not just regarding race and gender, but certainly regarding those two topics.

The Advisory Opinions podcast, a legal podcast that I rarely skip, tends to do random interviews in August when the legal world is often on vacation. Today, they brought on historian Bret Devereaux to talk about the ways that fantasy literature and movies are accurate and inaccurate to the real history of the Middle Ages. There was a significant discussion of Tolkien because he was so influential to fantasy literature overall. There was no overlap in content between Fimi's Great Courses content and Devereaux's content, so if you are interested in Tolkien, both are worth listening to.