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JRR Tolkien was a professor at the University of Oxford for most of his life, specialising
in the history of the English language, and the languages which fed into it such as Anglo
Saxon. He was a devout Catholic, brought up particularly by his mother and when she died
he was under the guardianship of a Catholic priest living in a flat with his brother in
Birmingham and he went on to go to Mass daily for the rest of his life really. He used to
cycle off in Oxford sometimes with his sons early in the morning.
The origin of The Hobbit is probably some marking of exam scripts in about 1932 to gain
some extra money. He was getting... Tolkien was getting very bored, so he found himself
writing the first lines of the novel on the exam scrip, "In a hole in the ground there
lived a hobbit..." And in the years following, he developed the story into a fairy tale romance
adventure about Bilbo Baggins, the respectable middle-class bourgeois hobbit who lives in
a round hobbit hole, who is contracted by some dwarves to go to regain their treasure
from a greedy dragon who has it in is hoard. And it's the journey there and back again
which is told in the novel.
There are always deeper intentions with Tolkien. The story has very much the voice of the parent,
but I believe it's a story about dwarves, which means it's a story about our human love
of objects, of money, of stuff, and how we should learn to treat the goods of the earth properly.
Dwarves dig underground. They mine jewels and then they become obsessed by them, just
like the dragon. And they don't want to share their gold with anybody. When they actually
get there and Bilbo enables them to get the hoard, they want to keep it for themselves
even though it's a human being -- Bard - that actually with his arrow killed the dragon
that's enabled them to get their hoard back. And they want to keep it all for themselves,
but Bilbo - the burglar - as they call him, that's what they want him to do is to steal
the gold, he actually takes the Arkenstone - their great heraldic ancestral stone - and
he gives it to the men and the elves who've come to share the booty as a way of trying
to make peace between them. In a sense he uses 'gift' to try and provoke a reciprocal
generosity. And at first the dwarves are really angry about this. And eventually they do see
the point of it. And when he dies, I'll just quote from the novel what Thorin, the head
of the dwarves, says to Bilbo when he dies. He says, "I go now to the Halls of Waiting.
Since I leave now all gold and silver and go where it is of little worth, I wish to
depart in friendship. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold,
it would be a merrier world."
So he realises their capacity to hoard everything rather than share it and distribute it, and
for Tolkien this would have had a political resonance as well, influenced by Catholic
social teaching from the early part of the century which was seeking a third way between
the extremes of capitalist individualism and socialist denial of the individual. They sought
something called Distributism, where money and goods were to be distributed as widely
as possible in society. And you can see that really underpinning the novel, in a children's book version.
I think fantasies become important right now, not so much because people wish to escape,
though I'm sure they sometimes do, and fantasy does offer imaginative escape, but it gives
you a critical distance from the world as it is. And at the moment our politics is all
very, very similar. It seems as if we can do nothing about the appalling problems that
beset us, or as if there is no other way of thinking about them. And fantasy and science
fiction which goes with it, imagine difference, different worlds, different peoples. So they
take us away from thinking that everything has to be the way it is and make us imagine
a different way of doing things, so that we can actually return to the real.
The Hobbit is subtitled: 'There and Back Again', so we go away into another world and then
we return, and we see our own world as if we were Martians or as if we were Hobbits.
And it can now seem strange, and it should enable us to want to change it. I think too,
that novels like Harry Potter obviously offer a kind of liberation idea for children. It
sort of empowers them to feel that they can actually do magic, they can actually intervene
so it has its own particular qualities. But Tolkien goes on being important too, because
we imagine a different relationship with the natural world, a relationship that's much
more like the one you can see here in the Chapter House in Southwell Minster, where
we have some of the earliest naturalistic leaf carving in Britain, and it's painted
with love as if it were alive, as if it were doubly real, as if it almost had a life of
its own. And that's what nature is like in Tolkien, it's not a dead nature, it's a nature
that can sometimes be very frightening, like the spiders that try to entrap the Hobbit
and his dwarf friends. But very often it's a world that has to be treated with respect,
with reverence and to cooperate with. And so the Hobbit and the dwarves are rescued
by eagles, warned by a thrush... And it's absolutely true, I think, that fantasy fills
a spiritual hole, that where organised religion is becoming less part of the cultural imaginary,
people need it and they look to these texts for it. And it is ironic that they look to
CS Lewis and Tolkien, and even JK Rowling because they are looking to Christian writers
who are offering imaginative conceptions of a whole world, not just a narrow world of
religious doctrines, but a world that is suffused with meaning. Because if you're logical and
you're an atheist, the world cannot sustain that kind of meaning. It would be illogical
to think it does. You can really only have the real if you have the supernatural to undergird
it, the metaphysical, if you like.
I think Tolkien would be quite surprised to see how popular his works remain. He did encourage
other people to continue his work. He said he was writing a mythology for England, and
that other people should continue it and extend it. And obviously the recent film trilogies
represent that. I think he would have thought they were too epic in scale and not, not faithful
enough to the very hand-made quality of his world. Now, yes, they did reproduce in loving
care many of the objects for Edoras, the home of the Rohirrim, the Shire and so on, but
without the kind of film aesthetic that went with it. It's not a dogma film, where there
is a hand-held camera and the human mediation is there. They're very much Hollywood type
budgets, Hollywood type approach to characterisation and so on, and I think he would have found
that problematic. But who am I to say? I do not know. You would have to ask those closer to him.
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