the Old Took

J.R.R. Tolkien was 130 years old today (Monday), the same age reached by his hobbit character the Old Took (Bilbo's grandfather). Bilbo himself passed it, so we'll honor him next year.

I toasted him with a leftover bottle of Swedish pear cider, the last in the stock of bottles I brought home from Galco's last July, in the Tolkien Society's online session. Shaun Gunner read aloud Bilbo's famous birthday speech, which I guess is traditional.

Afterwards the 160 or so of us who stuck around were distributed into breakout rooms, where I met a Canadian with an interesting theory I hadn't heard before: that when the Lord of the Nazgul says "Come not between the Nazgul and his prey" to Eowyn, he's trying to get her out of the way because he doesn't have Sauron's permission to kill her as he does for Theoden.

What permission would that be? I wondered. True that the Nazgul's will is enslaved by their Rings, and true also that Sauron is capable of giving them specific commands which they're bound to obey, as when they wheel and fly to Mount Doom as soon as Sauron realizes what his enemies' plan really is, but I can't imagine that Sauron gave his top general specific battlefield instructions to kill this person but not that person. The goal was to wage war on Sauron's behalf and do whatever would advance that cause. The Lord of the Nazgul had no will beyond what belonged to his master, but he was not an automaton and was able to use tactical judgment on how best to obey that will.

In any case he does attempt to kill Eowyn ("He raised his mace to kill"), but she and Merry hinder him.

Also brought to my attention today, via CFH, is this curious interview excerpt with Tolkien from 1962. If you can get through the extraordinarily supercilious interviewer and the inaudibility of Tolkien's voice, you will learn (or re-learn, because many of these are recorded elsewhere) a number of interesting things in only 6 1/2 minutes:

1. Tolkien refers to what in "On Fairy-stories" he called "the cauldron of story" as an author's "private stock." Which the interviewer naturally misunderstands.

2. Tolkien tries several times to convey his intention that his invented world is not an outline or prescription for what he thinks our society should be like. It's what he thought was suitable for the story he wanted to write. Again the interviewer has trouble grasping that an invented world need not be utopian.

2a. Nevertheless, Tolkien is trying to say something meaningful in his work. At the end, asked by the interviewer if he wants to remembered as a man who made something or who said something, he says, "I don't think you can distinguish. A made thing unless it says something won't be remembered."

3. Tolkien explains the obsession with detail in his work by calling himself "a meticulous sort of bloke." If this is not the only time he called himself by the word "bloke," I'd like to know it.

4. Tolkien says that "The Hobbit was originally an attempt to write something outside" his invented world. Considering the number of references to the Silmarillion in the drafts, which was actually cut down in the finished book, that aim didn't last long.

5. Tolkien pushes back against the interviewer's incredulity that the Silmarillion (the name isn't used, but that's what they're talking about) already existed before The Hobbit, and lays out his theory of sub-creation.

6. Tolkien rejects the interviewer's assumption that God in our world created for moral purposes and not aesthetic ones (Tolkien having drawn that distinction regarding the invented world). Tolkien says that surely there is "an aesthetic facet" in God's creation.

7. Tolkien says that, as a fallen creature, Sauron is "several stages down from Lucifer." That's clear enough once you know that Sauron's master was Melkor. He's the Lucifer of the story.

8. Tolkien defines the absence of organized religion in his story as "partly aesthetic, partly auctoral, and partly ... the history," by which last he means the internal history, as recounted in the Silmarillion.

9. Tolkien says the Ring isn't an allegory for the H-bomb because the idea of a weapon that would corrupt its user long predates the H-bomb.

10. Tolkien pushes back the date of the writing of his legendarium. "I began building the stories in which - of the Dark Lord when I was an undergraduate; they were already in an advanced stage during the First War." This suggests he had the storyline already in mind with his early fragmentary Earendel poems, long before The Book of Lost Tales.

Fascinating stuff, and I'd like to see, or read, the complete interview.