226. The Lord of the Rings

[@frankknudsen842]

I think if you can't see the comparisons of the genius of the work and the characters of the time ,their appearance, their world and actions ,I think some folks may need to lose up and broaden your expanses. Absolutely wonderful.

[@kimechammaalcoull9373]

I loved this. For me, in sync and as well as all you have mentioned, LOTR is about love and death and grief and the inevitable sacrifices we must give for that love and life and, in the end, about what survives beyond losing everything. That’s why, as we get older, I think we come to more consciously understand when we re read it, what we unconsciously felt before we knew what life would bring. In this way, it is a sacred text beyond religion that bleeds with inevitability of death, the ask for courage without promise of reward, and the immortality of Love beyond even our existence. I always read it when I need to go Home to the very heart of things, when I need beauty, when I need love, when I need to know someone understands the true grief of life, as it feels like the deepest witness to what life is really like. In this way, it is no fantasy. Sigh…So hard to find words (which is why I’m glad Tolkien did)…Thank you for talking about it so deeply and carefully. I so appreciate you both.🙏🏻

[@blogbalkanstories4805]

That was very enlightening - and by a strange coincidence inspiring for a piece for my blog I'm working on. It will be - partly - about a historical queen who was exiled, and died fighting to regain her lost kingdom. (Queen Katarina of Bosnia). To have Aragorn's story spelled out so clearly really made it click. So thank you for that.

[@RishTheMan]

Finally!!! One of the greatest works of World Literature.

[@shamsam4]

It really is.

[@chellybub]

Watermelons. I heard someone once say, green on the outside, red on the inside with little black hearts. Wow! Cool episode though. Tolkien was a cool dude 😎

[@steventrotter4958]

Bingo and Trotter Meet the Gnomes is a lost The Kinks album I'm sure

[@TheArquivopop]

Hahahahaha brilliant comment!!

[@heidinayak6317]

Saruman the White loses his whiteness when he turns evil - he shows off to Gandalf that his white robes now shimmer with many colours. Then when Gandalf is resurrected, he becomes Gandalf the White to replace Saruman, who can no longer claim to be 'the White'. So im not sure of Dominics analysis on this point. That said, each wizard has their own colour, including 100% good guy Radagast the Brown, so its probably not right to make the wizards colours into a race thing at all.

[@chappellroseholt5740]

Agreed.

[@shamsam4]

The Scouring of the Shire is my favorite bit of the whole corpus; maybe excepting the Ringwraiths chasing the boys through the Shire.

[@andyabram4195]

Incredibly insightful well done

[@Zersetzor]

How cruel of you to end on that quote, leaving me teary-eyed.

[@worcestermark]

The pub closing thing at around 36 mins could specifically refer to Bourneville and the Quakers forbidding pubs. The stranglehold on licensing would continue in a lesser form in Birmingham right in to the 1980s.

[@catherinebridle9414]

Brilliant! Thank you!

[@jimb9063]

Thanks gents. Hadn't spotted the Stanley Baldwin similarity, but North/South Arnor/Gondor very analogous with West/East Rome/Constantinople. I guess in 1453 there were no Winged Hussars or Mounted Monners from the Marches available to save the day.

[@daydays12]

The 25th of March is the beginning of Spring.....Spring and renewal have always been important to humanity.

[@yinoveryang4246]

So was Christianity. And who knows, maybe will be again.

[@henrybayliss458]

Ur analysis of the scouring of the Shire is misleading . The returning hibbits have a magic trumpet that when blown brings the down trodden hobbits to fight with the invading louts & the corrupted hobbits & they kick them out of the shire - so it's a much more positive finale to the story & Sam gamgee former gardener has a magic box of fertiliser so the trees & gardrns grow back in double quick time & Aragorn & Arwen live hundreds if miles away so the Shire very quickly gets back to its old ways of beer drinking & pipe weed smoking . 41:37

[@sawahtb]

I didn't grow up in England or anywhere near the Midlands, although my DNA ancestry turns out to be mostly West Midlands, a touch of Wales and Scotland. The first time I read The Hobbit I was very young probably a teenager, my family home was way out in the country and I understood the Shire very well. I liked the book as a good story and adventure, and when I got around to the Lord of the Rings I felt much more deeply that the ring carrier, Frodo, was the most admirable but that Sam was the hero. I was a girl not a boy but I wanted to be like Frodo and Sam. I have a strong attachment to the tale without all of the intellectual analysis.

[@kiyoaki1985]

10:10 "Tevildo, prince of Cats" is an obvious reference to Tybalt from Shakespeare, but I think he ultimately disliked the Shakespearean tradition and took it out

[@worldwidewendall6181]

Worth pointing out that Tolkien had seen Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen"...might have got a few ideas from old Herr W....

[@martindice5424]

The allegories of LOTR are profoundly ironic given Tolkien’s famous aversion to allegory.

[@joannemoore3976]

I suppose old Tolky would say it's applicability rather than allegory. It's hard to argue Leaf by Niggle isn't allegorical though 🙂

[@lukeombati7435]

On your defence of his descriptions of the servants of Mordor, I am glad you brought it up. Its a weak defence. I noted the descriptions when I read the book in 1997 and shrugged it off then as I did today. I preferred then as I do now to focus on the story. This is one of your more brilliant episodes and I have recommended it to many of my friends who have read the book.

[@Sean-p3o]

Not just the Nazgûl Sauron would have seen them coming from far off

[@richardyates7280]

Frodo is a Christ-like figure: the journey up Mount Doom is like the carrying of the Cross up to Calvary. But Frodo is not Christ: he fails. The destruction of the ring is the (providential?) result of Frodo's act of mercy in sparing Gollum's life.

[@TroyJamesMonger]

Fiiiiiine, I guess I'll read 'em. What vivid context :]

[@j0nnyism]

The true hero of the book is actually samwise. He never gives up he carry’s Frodo And the ring to mount doom and is incorruptible. Tolkien knew that our success in WW2 was entirely dependent on the bravery of the ordinary people. Sam represents those people and Tolkien’s love and respect for them

[@chappellroseholt5740]

Good afternoon from the beautiful SF Bay Area two years later, I didn't know about you then. I could sit and talk with you for hours. I have never heard anyone else talk about the loss of the Scouring of the Shire. It is the very heart of the story and Peter Jackson, who said he never liked it and didn't want to include, utterly missed it. If the Hobbits returned from their terrible/wonderful adventure and didn't learn anything what good was it at all? They had to take their place in the world as fully engaged and capable grownups. That's it. Each one of us has to learn this. Jackson's childish view is they come home and no one has learned anything and they stay naive and comic. It makes me furious. Don't even get me started on the second half of the Two Towers or My Friend Flicka Meets Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid! I am currently working on an essay opining about these movies for my Substack. Love/hate relationship.

[@gentlebreeze6414]

You chaps love Tolkein and his tales. You don't have to apologise for that to any blue stocking.

[@itswilbur3747]

I've read/heard it a few times, that Tolkien thought that the English had no Mythology and set out to create one. What were his thoughts on things like King Arthur and Gerald of Monmouth's Mythhistory and also Cetic Myth & Legend? Did he regard those as "Of Britain" and wanted to do an Anglo-Saxon Mythology specifically?

[@agumperz]

Reading LOTR as an adult, the theme that leaps out is death and rebirth. Rebirth is the primary mechanism for character development. It happens to aragorn, gandalf and of course frodo. Sometimes more than once. The deaths aren't always literal, Sometimes they are figurative, like aragorn passing through the realm of the dead, but once you recognize it you see the device all over the books. The barrow wight symbolically kills the hobbits who are then resurrected by Tom bombadil for example.

[@mcolville]

There is one very oblique reference to Christ. Aragorn, near the end, says the world cannot be healed except perhaps by someone yet to come.

[@heidinayak6317]

It is important to note that in the Scouring of the Shire, the arch-villain is 'Sharkey', who turns out to be Saruman, come to mess things up in the Shire after his own stronghold was destroyed. The hobbits do then overthrow and cast him out and start the long clean up.

[@heidinayak6317]

There is some mention in the Lord of the Rings of the Valar, i.e. the Gods of the Silmarillion. They are obscure references and it always seems to be the Elves who are aware of the Valar, but its there.

[@minechaftgamer288]

Custer, Jesus, LOTR, what a channel

[@chriscottrell1446]

'his vision of the ideal form of government is 6 3 7' (at 39:29) - what does this mean ?

[@zak3744]

Not "6 3 7", but "637" as in the year. 637 AD: Anglo-Saxon warrior kingships, the Heptarchy, Arthurian legend, all that jazz. 🙂

[@j0nnyism]

I wonder if the dangers of the ring reflected Tolkien’s concerns over the RAF attacking civilian targets?

[@davidwright7193]

13 Dwaves it is very important that it was 13 Dwarves, not 12. Had there been 12 of them they wouldn’t have been any need for Bilbo.

[@barbararice6650]

Mordor kicked like an anthill with troops moving around to face the offensive is straight out of the first world war, with marching regiments colliding into each other and NCOs demanding service numbers 😑 Tolkien was a keen observer of detail and a great travel writer 😕

[@richardyates7280]

Tolkien can use Norse myth because, as one of the Church Father's said, there are seeds of the Gospel in pagan culture.

[@daydays12]

Christian imperialism...stealing other's cultures

[@matthabir4837]

'Sensitivity readers'... Gawd, send that asteroid.... Amen.

[@JC-KeepSmiling]

Not another F..kin elf 😆🤣

[@mig539]

🔥🔥

[@robertalpy]

The eagles are Americans... They always show up after the worst of the wars and save the fellowship at the last moment but never are around for the worst of it. Kind of like Americans in both world wars. Crucial to the survival of the good guys but always more than fasionably late.

[@NoScOpzZNeEdeD]

Everyone should play LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth 1 or 2. You’re welcome

[@vincentvancoch7603]

😊

[@ginojaco]

Oh gents... a superb channel and a pretty good video, but you fell into the wokist net with this one... there is no way that Tolkien would ever have considered a 'black' hobbit, that's projecting and you know it full well. This isn't 'racist' it's just stating the bleeding obvious. That apart, keep up the good work. 👍

[@jimb9063]

I think it was Lenny being from the West Midlands which made him appropriate.

[@ginojaco]

@@jimb9063Indeed, his voice is spot on for it. But the reality is that in the 'British mythology' Tolkien created, hobbits certainly weren't black, so it was poor & politically motivated casting. Suggest casting white actors to play roles in an 'African' mythology and its ridiculousness becomes obvious. 👍

[@jimb9063]

@@ginojaco Yes I don't disagree there might be other motivations involved as well which I don't personally find helpful in most other circumstances. Don't think it would've even ruined the LOTR story as far as Hobbits were concerned for me anyway, even if it isn't exactly correct, and while I've not seen the Rings of Power, they aren't Hobbits exactly, and from what I've heard it's one of the more trivial complaints.

[@CL-we8tn]

Lord no, can't do two episodes. Apologies.

[@user-bo1sl7gs9x]

Why do Lib women hate lord of the rings

[@joejohnson6327]

@@user-bo1sl7gs9x Because they aren't little boys?

[@daydays12]

@@user-bo1sl7gs9x It's obvious.

[@FireflyOnTheMoon]

God created light on 25th March? lol

[@unappreciatedtreehouse821]

I did enjoy The Hobbit as a child. As an adult I find Tolkien the repetitive, juvenile and protacted. Any criticism of the Allied bombing campaign of German or Japanese cities during WWII is completely naive.

[@Sean-p3o]

There was a lot of controversy about the bombing of cities and the mass killing of civilians And whether it was actually effective and the sheer cost to aircrews