Middle-Earth Is Not Queer | The Austin Freeman Interview
Why didn't the eagles fly Frodo to Mordor? Were Sam and Frodo gay? Was The Lord of the Rings intended to be a Christian work of literature? Dr. Austin Freeman is at The Babylon Bee to tell us what the theology of J.R.R. Tolkien was and also whether Amazon's The Rings of Power should be cast into the fires of Mt. Doom. Dr. Austin Freeman is a lecturer at Houston Christian University and a classical school teacher who holds a PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He has written a new book about the theology of J.R.R. Tolkien called Tolkien Dogmatics: https://www.amazon.com/Tolkien-Dogmatics-Theology-Mythology-Middle-earth/dp/1683596676 This is episode is brought to you by BetterHelp: http://betterhelp.com/babylonbee To watch the full interview, become a premium subscriber: https://babylonbee.com/plans?utm_source=PYT&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=description
We are here today with Austin Freeman, who is a lecturer at Houston Christian University, a classical school teacher, and you have a PhD in theology and systematic theology.
And thanks for coming in today.
But he's really fun.
So don't let that fool you.
And now it's time for another interview on the Babylon B podcast.
Yeah, so you're kind of a Tolkien buff.
You've taught classes on Tolkien and you wrote a giant book on Tolkien.
So we just had to bring you in and ask you, why didn't they just take the Eagles to Mordor?
Yeah, so I cover that in the first five pages of the book, actually.
No, that's a joke.
Anybody that wants to buy the book to Tolkien.
I told you this guy was fun.
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So they didn't take the Eagles to Mordor because as I do talk about in one of the chapters of the book, the Eagles are perhaps embodied angels, or at least were at one point embodied angels.
And as such, they have their own inherent dignity and their own dangers.
As we have learned from Tolkien in the various other writings, his letters and histories of Middle-earth, angels are able to fall in Middle-earth.
And so even spiritual beings like the Eagles might, in fact, have fallen prey to the ring itself.
And then you might have had an Eagle Sauron, which, now that we say it, actually sounds pretty awesome.
That would have been a great sequel, actually.
Maybe Rings of Power Season 2 will pick up on that.
Yeah.
But how would it even put the ring on?
Like a little talent.
Top of the talent, I guess.
Yeah.
I was thinking the tips of the feathers, but that probably wouldn't stay on very well.
I mean, I'm sure in some unpublished manuscript, Tolkien has thought about this.
That's the sort of things that he spent his time filling out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, he started reading that sequel.
He started writing that sequel to Lord of the Rings, and he didn't get very far.
Maybe that was going to be the villain.
It was the Eagle Sauron.
I was wondering if it was more like The Last Jedi.
Like, Gandalf is really disillusioned.
He was like, it's time for the fellowship to end.
Burn all the books, yeah.
Burns the Red Book of West March.
He's drinking blue milk for some reason.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, the other thing I think about is like that Sauron had a NASCOL.
What is the plan here?
Just to jump on an eagle and fly it straight over the mountains and nobody's going to notice?
Like a paratrooper, I guess.
So, yeah.
I always wondered, rather than flying the Eagles to Mordor, I always wondered, would it work?
Because the lava's coming down the volcano.
Could you just dip it in the lava at any point?
Or does it have to be in the actual pit?
Because they could have saved themselves a climb up the mountain.
Like the streams are coming down like it's a colour.
I mean, could have kept your finger.
I mean, I assume in terms of Tolkien's mythology, you have to, like, yeet it into the...
Yes, I think that is the technical term that he used.
Yeah, yeet was in the early manuscripts.
He actually wrote yeet.
Yeah, yeet and yachtin, I think is the old English.
It hath been yachten into the fires.
So you wrote a giant book, not giant, but it's Tolkien Dogmatics.
Moderately sized.
Moderately sized book.
So you've got 30 seconds.
Sell us on this book.
Tolkien Dogmatics is the only book currently available which is an exhaustive treatment of Tolkien's theology.
There are a lot of very good books that deal with theological themes in Middle-earth or spiritual readings of the Lord of the Rings, but there is no other book that deals with Tolkien as a theological thinker.
And Middle-earth obviously plays a very prominent part in that, but this is exploring his Old English lectures.
This is exploring his letters to his family, all of the other non-Middle-earth fiction that he produces, everything from his work as a professor at Oxford.
This is really sort of synthesizing Tolkien as an academic and a thinker and what he's got to say on every locus of systematic theology.
So you can use it as a handbook.
You can read it straight through.
If you want to know what Tolkien has to say about the fall, in that chapter, footnoted and referenced somewhere, is virtually everything that he has ever said about it.
So that's what the book is for.
I designed it to be used by classroom teachers and other people that are teaching courses on Tolkien.
I also designed it as a jumping off point for other people to do their own research.
The second reason that I made the book so exhaustive is because there are actually a lot of people that don't want to admit that Christianity plays an important role in Tolkien's thought world.
And my reckoning was if you can reconstruct a systematic theology based on the stuff that the guy has written, then maybe you should reconsider that thesis.
Yeah, I've read some tweets from some, you know, presumably not so smart people that say, you know, well, Tolkien was drawing from all these myths and he was really rebelling against his, you know, he wrote this in spite of his Catholic upbringing or to kind of rebel against it.
Your thoughts.
Yeah, it's actually much more complex than that.
It's not an either or.
So Tolkien, as a 20th century Catholic, he's more doing a both and sort of a take.
And he believes that there is what's called a preparatio evangelica, a preparation for the gospel that God has seeded into all the different cultures of the world.
And so as C.S. Lewis, his close friend, says, when you talk about Christianity and other religions, it's not that Christianity is true and these religions are false.
It's that when Christianity and these religions differ, Christianity is to be believed.
And so that leaves quite a large scope to adopt the things that are appealing to you from these other works and these other mythologies that were very impactful for Tolkien on an aesthetic level.
And so you see, for instance, to those people that want to say that Tolkien writes these myths in spite of his Catholicism, recently published was his reworking of the legend of Sigurd and Gutrun, which is an Icelandic and Germanic myth.
And he changes it.
He could have kept it pagan.
He could have just reworked it and stayed with the original story.
But he inserts this messianic prophecy into the myth, saying that this kingly figure will arise and will crush the dragon and will save the world.
And he didn't have to do that, right?
He could have just kept the myth the way it was, but he's the one that's inserting the Christian themes into the work, which to me is pretty conclusive demonstration that it's not something that he is forced into.
So we're going to read you a headline, a recent headline, and see your reaction to it.
No, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings isn't Christian.
This is a headline by some guy named Jonathan Poletti.
And then the byline says, the religion sure likes to say otherwise.
And so I read through, I kind of browsed through this article, and his main point seemed to be, there's no religion in Middle-earth.
It's about improving the world with no appeal to any god or gods.
And then he says that Christianity trying to claim Middle-earth is just more colonizing.
That seems to be his argument.
And I remember reading books in high school, when the movies came out, it was like, here's how Lord of the Rings is Christian, and here's how to read it.
Aragorn is Jesus.
And so I think there's a, well, let's just get your thoughts to that headline first.
Um, so.
So the idea that Lord of the Rings is colonizing is an interesting claim because Tolkien himself was anti-imperialist.
So in something that's probably not able to...
I think they're saying that Christianity is colonizing Middle Earth.
Yeah, so Tolkien himself was a very patriotic man, but he also disliked the sort of monoculture taking over every part of the world.
That's Mordor.
That's not Gondor, right?
So the idea that the Christians are colonizing Middle-earth when Tolkien himself is inscribing these anti-colonial themes into the book.
I mean, if they are doing that, they're going to have a very hard time.
As a Christian myself, the idea that Christians as a sort of monolithic entity are ever going to agree on the interpretation of a single text, I mean, that's pretty funny in itself.
But yeah, it just demonstrates a lack of awareness of things which are outside the sort of high school corpus.
You read The Hobbit, you read The Lord of the Rings, and you think you're an expert on Tolkien.
And that's not really the way it is.
I mean, Tolkien's scholarship, there are four or five journals of Tolkien studies.
You can't just read one book by the Bronte sisters and say that you're an expert on British Romanticism.
You can't just read on the surface and expect to have your opinion validated because there's a lot of things called secondary sources that you have to read.
There's a lot of primary sources that this guy has not referenced, seemingly.
I mean, Tolkien in his letters says the Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally Christian and Catholic work.
And he explains why he takes the religion out of the books.
And it has nothing to do with his theology.
It has nothing to do with him trying to prevent Christianity from seeping in.
It's in fact that he believes Christianity comes in more effectively at the fundamental metaphysical level than at the explicit preaching level.
I mean, for Tolkien, that's basically why Christian movies are so bad.
Because you start off with this sermon that you want to preach to people, and then you package it in this sort of slapdash artistic veneer, and people realize that it's inauthentic.
What happens is, if you're a Christian artist, you make art, and because you are a certain sort of person, the art reflects your values, it reflects your ethics, it reflects your metaphysics.
And that's what happens with Tolkien.
He says the Lord of the Rings is a story, but it is a Christian story because it comes from his mind.
And he describes his mind as a sort of a compost heap, a leaf mold, and he's piling all sorts of things from all over the place into it.
And it's all sort of mingling and coming together, and out comes Middle-earth.
You can't separate Middle-earth from anything else in Tolkien's life.
You can't separate it from his study of languages.
You can't separate it from his Catholicism.
You can't even separate it from the bedtime stories that he tells to his kids.
So if Tolkien is doing anything in Middle-earth, he's giving expression to the entirety of his thought world, or pretty close to it.
And if you know anything about Tolkien as a man who went to or tried to go to Mass and confession every morning before work, the idea that he's somehow being forced into a cultural Catholicism and really is trying to go back to paganism is silly.
To the contrary, we have a one-star review of your book from Dina.
And she says, nah.
Tolkien said himself that the saga was just a story and was not meant to represent anything.
Reach harder.
So I took Dina's advice to heart and I've already taken that to the publishers and I feel like a second edition is going to be needed to unpack all of the, yeah, I mean, these people, they're touching on something which Tolkien does say.
He says the Lord of the Rings is a story.
It's not an allegory.
It's not meant to represent anything.
It has no particular message other than what the themes of the book are.
So in that sense, Dina, you're right.
But Tolkien also says that the Lord of the Rings is meant to teach something.
He says it is meant to teach Christian values.
He says that he puts Christianity into the book, but at a level that is not allegorical, right?
This is not, either it's an allegory or it's not Christian, right?
This is not the Chronicles of Narnia.
Tolkien is doing something different.
There is no one-to-one correspondence.
Dina, yes, you're right.
It might be Dinah.
Is that how you pronounce that?
I don't know.
From D-I-N-A.
How would you pronounce D-I-N-A?
I don't know.
Dina, if you're listening, you can message us back and tell us the correct pronunciation.
Tolkien would know.
He would, and he would know the etymological source.
So it kind of seems like you're talking about there's two dangers here.
There's people that focus on the pagan inspiration of these pagan mythologies of Norse stuff, Norse gods and their origin myths and things like that.
And focusing on that and saying it's not Christian at all.
Stop looking for Christianity.
There's also an opposite danger of making it all about Jesus is Aragorn, the ring is sin, making all these direct one-to-one.
Because I think in the introduction to Lord of the Rings, isn't he very, he like demolishes, like he's getting these fan letters saying, oh, it's all about World War II, right?
And he goes, no, if anybody's, you know, no one's the Germans, no one's the Americans, like it's not these one-to-one allegories.
What is the minds of Moria in your life that you have to face right now?
Well, so somebody did in his letters, which to the audience, if you've never picked up a copy of the letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, do it right now.
In the letters, he has somebody that says, oh, Moria is like Mount Moriah, where Abraham sacrifices Isaac.
And then Gandalf sacrifices himself with the Baurock.
So clearly that's what you're talking about, right?
Tolkien, to quote Dinah, says, nah.
He says, reach harder.
Yeah, reach harder.
Hey, what is this meme?
I don't know.
Yeah, we have a meme to show you.
And the only reason I found this is because I was reading your book and the bottom panel popped out at me as something you mentioned.
So the meme is like the brain meme for our audio listeners.
So we've got small brain guy.
Small brain guy, it says the Hobbit.
And it says, this is based on Norse mythology.
And then the Lord of the Rings, the synapses are starting to fire.
And it says, hmm, the world is the same, but the themes are more Christian.
Signs of intelligence.
And then the brain starts to explode.
He says, wait, there's a creator deity?
Well, I doubt that it's literally dot dot dot.
And that's when you're reading the Cimarillion.
You're starting to read about Eru and all the angels and stuff.
At the very bottom, this is very obscure to most of us, probably.
It's the Athrabeth, Finrod, and Adbreth.
And it says, Finrod is the first elf to accept Christ.
Is this meme accurate, and can you explain it?
Can confirm, yes.
So the Athrobeth Finrod.
Andreth, that the conversation of Finrod and Andreth is a complete work.
It's basically like a philosophical dialogue between Finrod, who, those of you guys that are familiar with Rings of Power, that's the brother that Galadriel is so upset about that has been murdered.
Also, for those of you guys that are fans of the movies, the ring that Aragorn wears, the one with the green stone that Wormtongue remarks on, that sort of establishes to Saruman that this is Aragorn.
This is a ring that Finrod gave Aragorn's agenda.
We should clarify, it's one of the things Galadriel's mad about.
Yes.
She's mad about a lot of things in the Rings of Power.
But yeah, so this is that Finrod, Galadriel's brother, and this is an old human woman, Andreth.
And they have this conversation about the fall and whether human beings were originally meant to be mortal or immortal.
And from the elvish perspective, humans are supposed to die.
Like, that's just the natural course of things.
And Andreth says, no, in our legends, we had a message from the Creator telling us that we were made by him and that we were his children and to follow him and obey him and that we would grow in obedience.
And then a tempter came in and he was disguised as an angel of light and he told us to worship him instead of the creator God.
And so we did.
And then we're cast out and cursed with death.
And it's just, it's Genesis.
And Tolkien had some hesitancies about it because he already thought that maybe this is hedging too close towards putting the primary world into his secondary world, which I'll talk about in a second.
But contrary to that, it always seemed that he had some intention of putting the conversation of Finrod and Andreth as the final bit of the Silmarillion.
So for those of you that don't know, the Silmarillion was never published in a final form in Tolkien's lifetime.
It was published posthumously by his son.
And a lot of the things that Tolkien had intended to be in the Silmarillion did not make it into that.
And a lot of the things that he didn't intend to be in the Silmarillion did.
So the Finrod and Andreth document was something that Tolkien felt was important enough to put into basically his primary life's work.
And the conclusion that Finrod comes to is the conclusion of Genesis, that human beings were cursed by death, that they are meant to go off and live an eternal life with God, and that if this death is to be overcome, it will have to be overcome by God incarnating himself as a human being in Middle-earth and defeating Satan.
So, yes.
Finrod is the first elf to accept Christ.
Wow.
Meme approved.
That's awesome.
Okay.
Hey, so did you watch Rings of Power?
I did watch Rings of Power.
Let's get some thoughts from a Tolkien scholar on Rings of Power.
On a scale of one to ten, how badly do you want to throw it in the fires of Mount Doom?
I don't want to throw it in the fires of Mount Doom, but I do want to get into that writer's room and have some conversations.
You could just dip it in the lava and throw it down.
You don't have to throw it all.
So like a five, maybe?
Yeah, I mean, it's very uneven.
Like, I really liked some of the episodes.
I thought it was great to see this dream of the wave washing over Numenor.
I thought seeing Numenor was really fun.
I thought those episodes were the best.
So as a Tolkien scholar, you're like that, what is it, Leonardo DiCaprio meme.
You're like, poor, like, I recognize that.
I get that.
Yeah.
So there were parts of it that I really appreciated.
And there were parts of it, like the orc armor has inspirations from like the Mongols, like the way that the Mongols armed themselves.
And I'm like, okay, well, somebody knows enough to know that that was part of Tolkien's inspiration for the orcs.
But then, I mean, I don't want to spoil things for people that haven't watched it, but then they make some really, in my mind, silly decisions in the last couple episodes.
We're like, I'm fine with the slow pace.
I'm fine with the bad writing.
I kind of understand where you're going.
I can be sympathetic.
And then they just decide in the last two episodes to make it into this sort of like hackney.
I don't know.
I don't want to be too insulting to the writers.
You're getting a little emotional.
need a moment?
I mean, there's just some very silly decisions and some decisions that seem very clearly to be motivated more by cash grab and identifying the market than telling a good story and making good art.
But I'm very sympathetic to Rings of Power because they're in a really tight spot.
Legally, they cannot use the material from the Silmarillion.
They can only use what's in the appendices to the Lord of the Rings because that's the only thing that they have the rights to.
But they also can't contradict anything that's in the Silmarillion because that is a sure way of getting people up in arms.
So they have to tell a story that walks this line between the things that are sort of hinted at and the things that they can't say explicitly.
And so you have two decisions, right?
You can decide to tell a completely new story that fills out the edges of the map that Tolkien hasn't really touched on.
Or you can try to tell a story that sort of works on guesses and half surmises and sort of in the shadows of the major characters that we already know.
So they choose Galadriel and they choose Elrond and some of these other folks because that's got name recognition, right?
get that.
But then you're straightjacketed as well because the really good meat of the story is...
More like gay jacketed.
Yes.
Because it's wilt garbage.
Yes.
So they say.
I get it.
I get it, Kyle.
Thank you.
I'm really glad I watched Rings of Power because I learned that the reason that ships floats is because they're not rocks and they look up, they don't look down.
Agree or disagree.
Profound.
Do you agree with that?
I'm not a physicist.
I couldn't comment.
It's outside my expertise.
What did you feel about?
It seemed like the major driving plot point of the first season of Rings of Power was that the elves are all like, they're like Teslas that need to be plugged back into the light, and the only way they can get plugged in is Mithril.
Were you okay with that?
Because I thought that was atrocious, personally.
Yeah, it's just really weird.
I mean, the metaphysics of light and the relationship of light and being is something that Tolkien would be very sympathetic to because that's just straight out of medieval theology and Catholic theology.
So that's fine.
Like the elves have cut themselves off from their source of life.
The elves that we see in Rings of Power are the Noldor.
They are the exiles who have chosen to leave paradise to follow their revenge quest.
So in that sense, yeah, they are going to start to decline and decay.
But Mithril is some sort of magic metal that solves this problem doesn't really make much sense to me.
Okay.
So five.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, those probably balances out in the middle.
Rings of Power.
Woke garbage.
Confirmed.
So there seems to be Tolkien's kind of in the news lately, obviously because of the Rings of Power show, but also because of politics.
So the new Italian prime minister, I think her name is Georgia Maloney, Maloney.
Yeah, say it like this.
Giorgia Maloney.
Yeah.
She was very vocal about how she holds the Lord of the Rings as a sacred text.
And then there was a bunch of news articles when she got elected prime minister about how it's like fascist adjacent to be a fan of Lord of the Rings and Tolkien.
And I think I read something recently.
I think this is on Not the Bee, but I think Tolkien's part of a watch list now.
They have a task force called Prevent where they try to like – It's in the UK.
It's in the UK, and they try to stamp out radical extremism before it starts.
And I think it was meant for Islamic terrorism.
But they have a watch group or a watch list of C.S. Lewis, George Orwell, Thomas Hobbes, Hedmund Burke, John Locke.
It's like if you're reading these kind of books, you might be a right-wing extremist.
Any of the people that are questioning totalitarianism, putting George Orwell on a watch list is just ironic.
So what are your thoughts on that?
Are we all fascist adjacent bigots because we like Tolkien or what?
So, again, I understand why they would think that.
In the UK right now, so I live there.
I did my master's degree there.
You can't actually say that you're English.
What?
Because that's racist.
You can't say you're English?
No.
So you can say that you're Scottish.
You can say that you're Irish.
You can say that you're Welsh.
But if you're English, you have to say that you're British.
Because if you say you're English, then you're associated with colonialism and with the empire.
So Tolkien obviously very much categorizes himself as English and not as British.
And he is a nationalist.
Now, what he means by nationalist is something very different than Adolph would have meant by nationalists, and it's something very different than Donald Trump would mean by nationalist, right?
He wants to be a patriot to his country and he wants to celebrate his country's culture.
But very explicitly, he also says that he wants all of the other countries to celebrate their culture.
So he wants to make England great again.
Photoshop J.R. Tolkien in a mega hat.
Yeah.
Flash up.
It'd be a mega hat.
That's what I said.
Mega.
It's a better acronym.
Yeah, so the idea that Tolkien is very much for England specifically and not for the United Kingdom, I think because of Britain's current cultural context, that makes a lot of people uneasy.
But it's not Tolkien's fault, right?
It's the fault of the people who have co-opted the language that Tolkien was using back in the 40s, 50s, 60s and meant something completely different by it.
I mean, there's a thing called the Little England movement.
It happens particularly between the wars, between World War I and World War II.
And you have this renewed sense of patriotic nationalism and of English culture and the value of small village life, much like the Shire.
And he's picking up on that because we remember Tolkien is a war veteran and a survivor of the trauma of the trenches.
And so he loves his home.
That's all it is.
We can't condemn somebody for loving their home unless you're a globalist.
Hey, here's a classic comic.
Tolkien versus Lewis, allegories.
Professor Tolkien, is it true that you wrote your novels as an allegory for the First World War?
And Tolkien says, no, never.
Ask me that again and I will call the police.
And then we have C.S. Lewis, and he's thinking while he's writing a book.
And he says, if even one person reading this does not understand that the big lion is Jesus, I will set myself on fire.
And he did, actually.
Set himself on fire?
Yes.
That's how he died.
He set himself.
Oh, okay.
Because someone didn't get it.
Oh, interesting.
Wow.
Historically accurate.
Totally 100%.
What do you think about the hatred that Tolkien had for allegory?
Like the passionate, fiery hatred he had for allegory.
I think there was a story that he got Lewis to toss his first draft of Narnia in the garbage.
And then later on he went back for it.
But he criticized it so harshly that Lewis felt bad about it.
It's overblown, in my opinion.
Tolkien's hatred for allegory is overblown, and Tolkien's hatred of Narnia actually is overblown.
Really?
Yeah.
So Holly Ordway, who's one of my colleagues at Houston Christian, she has a book called Tolkien's Modern Reading.
And in one of her chapters in the book, she explores exactly what Tolkien said, the criticisms that he leveled against Narnia, and basically comes to the conclusion that, yes, he had some problems with it, but not nearly to the extent that people think that he hated it and despised it.
I mean, he bought the books for his kids and for other people.
So if he's giving them his gifts, then clearly he doesn't have too much of a problem with it.
Tolkien's issue is, for one thing, maybe a bit of jealousy that Lewis is able to write a lot more quickly than he is.
But the mishmash of cultures from different areas, the Norse with the Greek and the Roman and the Christian, and Santa Claus comes in.
It didn't make sense to him.
He thought it was distasteful.
But on an aesthetic level, not really on a theological level.
Michael Ward.
I always find it kind of weird that Santa Claus just pops in.
Yeah, well, have you read Michael Ward's Planet Narnia?
No.
Okay, so Michael Ward is another one of my colleagues at Houston Christian.
He also teaches at Oxford.
And his doctoral thesis was basically that each of the seven books in Narnia represents the idea of a different medieval planet.
And the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the reason why Santa Claus is in there is because the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is coded to Jupiter, which is the planet of kingship and jollity and mirth and merriment and feasting.
So clearly, Christmas Day.
And Lewis never let this out of the box.
He never said this, but Michael Ward makes a very strong, in my opinion, persuasive case.
We should have that guy on.
Yeah.
He lives in Oxford, so it'd be more difficult.
Well, you'll do then.
Yeah.
So the idea that Tolkien hated Narnia, I think, is more of a myth that arises.
But the idea of Tolkien's hatred of allegory is just as much of a myth.
I mean, think about Plato in the Republic, and he condemns all of the musicians and the actors and poets and drives them out of the city.
And yet in the Republic, he has like three or four different myths that he writes.
It's the same thing with Tolkien.
He said, I cordially dislike allegory in all of its forms.
And then he writes Leaf by Nickel, which is an allegory, and one of his greatest works.
In Beowulf, The Monsters and the Critics, his most famous lecture, Change the Face of Beowulf Studies, starts off with an allegory of a man building a tower.
So it's not that Tolkien has some sort of allergic reaction to allegory whenever he sees it.
He just doesn't see that it fits in one particular sense.
And the sense is this.
He doesn't like binding readers to a one-to-one correspondence in their interpretation.
Tolkien is heavily influenced by another Christian author, George MacDonald, who Lewis also takes as his sort of patron.
And in George MacDonald, his philosophy of fantasy, he's also got an essay called On Fairy Stories, just like Tolkien does.
MacDonald says, the way that you keep the impact in your fairy tales is you don't confine things to one single meaning, because the way God has designed the world, there's this huge, rich depth of meaning to everything.
When C.S. Lewis makes Aslan into a lion, it's not just randomly chosen.
Lions have a meaning in our subconscious that other things like tigers or chickens don't have.
And God intended it that way.
And so if you really want to draw on the power of myth and story, what you do is you leverage as much of that inbuilt, divinely crafted, hidden subconscious meaning as you can.
And so rather than having something function on one level, right, the ring equals nuclear power, you let it have a varied number of applications, and then it can draw on that power of myth that God has sort of designed the world to work with.
That's why he doesn't like allegories.
Not because it is bad.
It's because he thinks it's too limiting.
Fact-checked.
Yeah.
Is that story true about Narnia being tossed in the garbage?
I never heard that.
Because I think Diana Gleier told that to us, didn't she?
She would know.
Did she lie to us?
We need to fact-check her.
I am going to bow to Diana Gleyer on the C.S. Lewis anecdotes.
Go Google it.
We'll figure it out.
Hey, do we have, remember, the Tolkien Society where we went through all those lecture names?
Oh, yeah.
We don't have them pulled up.
I didn't prep that.
Yeah.
Yeah, there were all these woke lectures from the Tolkien Society.
I don't know, it was about a year ago that we looked through, and it was insane.
Is that the state of Tolkien scholarship right now?
That is the state of the Tolkien Society right now.
Tolkien Society.
But there's quite a lot of Tolkien scholarship that does not fall into that umbrella.
And I mean, we have people at the highest rungs of Tolkien scholarship and Tolkien fandom that don't subscribe to that sort of thing.
And much like there is in the Anglican Communion or any other places, there's sort of fractures that are starting to form based on ideological positions.
And I talk about this in the introduction to the book.
There's more or less two kinds of Tolkien fans.
There are the people who have English majors or are teaching in English departments, and then there are the pastors and the youth ministers and the regular folks who think it's a great story.
We're the regular folks.
That's us, regular folks.
We're the simple ones.
Well, that is the theme of Lord of the Rings, after all, is that the person you want to be is the regular folks.
That's true.
I'm Fatty Bolger.
I'm trying to remember the titles of those talks, but it was like queerness in Middle Earth.
Dude, there was one that was an intersectional study of blah, you know, blah, blah, blah.
There was the normative.
They kept putting the normative word in there.
One of them was like about marriage normative, but I don't remember what the marriage, like animo-normative, like.
But I mean, if you're part of academia, this is how people write papers now in mainstream academia.
Like, that's how you get published.
That's how you get your name recognized.
That's the mainstream of, especially in English.
Especially in English, that's the way people write.
So you can't really blame them for doing the things that come naturally.
But.
Or can you?
Well, maybe they're right.
Maybe Tolkien was trying to get queer stuff in Lord of the Rings.
This is the one.
Something mighty queer.
Destabilizing cis hetero amateonormativity in the works of Tolkien.
Gondor in transition, a brief introduction to transgender realities in The Lord of the Rings.
And the Losoth, Indigenity, Identity, and Anti-racism.
Yep.
So yeah, are they?
What's your take on the Tolkien Society then?
Like, are they just making stuff up just to sell papers?
I mean, if you want to put it bluntly, yeah.
So the foundational issue is about what you're doing when you're interpreting a text.
And most people who are professional literary critics who are part of academia in that circle have a very, very different view of what happens when you're reading than somebody like Tolkien would, or than somebody like I would.
So the word authority, the root is author, right?
You have the authority because you are the maker.
And so for me, the author is still more or less the one who's in charge of what they mean when they're saying something.
And I know that that's a radical statement to make nowadays.
Like the death of the author thing now.
Right.
So the death of the author isn't all bad.
There are good things that we can take from that.
And we do need to acknowledge the role that the interpretive community plays and the role that society plays in forming the meaning of a text.
But where we've gotten now is that people in the Tolkien Society that are writing these sorts of papers, they're deliberately choosing to ignore what the author meant in order to make their own case for something else.
And so now they're using Tolkien for their own means and for their own ends rather than attempting to understand Tolkien.
Now, again, if you're clear about that in the outset, then there's academic freedom, right?
Make your argument, support it with evidence, let people be persuaded.
But what's happening is there's at the same time a hostility towards actually trying to understand what Tolkien himself would have meant because it disagrees with their ideological starting point.
For example, a PhD on Tolkien at University of Glasgow said this about your book.
This is a Tom Emmanuel.
PhD student.
Oh, well, it says PhD on Tolkien in quotes.
I don't know where that came from, but I guess maybe it's in his Twitter bio that he's working on.
He says, I fundamentally disagree with his entire epistemological, hermeneutical, methodological project.
So, you know, getting off on the right foot.
Talking about you, I guess.
Yeah, I mean, I saw this on Twitter and I actually thanked him for engaging with the book.
I mean, it's most academic books never see actual engagement with their ideas, critical or otherwise.
So the fact that it's only been out since November and we've already got people that want to live tweet how much they disagree with it.
I mean, I'm not mad at that.
Again, I've put that out there.
It's an academic argument.
I support it very, very well with primary text citations.
And so if Tom wants to talk about the book, if other people want to criticize the book, they have to go and do the work.
They can't just say, oh, well, this is wrong.
Show me how it's wrong.
Yeah, when I picked up your book, a quarter of it is all the footnotes.
It's just like every line has a number, another line, another line, another line.
You go to the back and it's like 40, 50 footnotes for this one chapter.
It's very well sourced.
So that idea is interesting to me that someone would pick it up and be like, oh, he doesn't know what he's talking about.
He doesn't know Tolkien.
And it's like, well, actually, there's 50 quotes here from Tolkien on this topic.
It's very interesting.
I mean, as a historical argument, it's preposterous to me to think that a man who is born when most of the United Kingdom does not have electricity in its houses,
who is raised by a priest in an oratory, who goes daily to Mass, who all of his children are educated in religious schools, who works almost exclusively in his professional life on religious texts in Old and Middle English, who writes out prayers in Elvish,
who criticizes members of his family for disagreeing with the Catholic doctrine on marriage and that divorce is not permissible, would somehow, some way, actually be a modern 21st century American progressive.
Like, just be genuine.
Just be genuine in your interpretation and say that Tolkien was wrong.
Just say that he was wrong.
Don't try to make him into some sort of secret advocate for your cause.
Just say, you know, I really like his books, but I don't agree with his theology and I don't agree with his positions.
That's okay.
That's fine.
There's plenty of people.
I like their books.
I disagree with their positions.
But we've gotten to this place in academia and politics is so saturated academia right now that you can't actually have a person that you were a fan of that you disagree with.
We've lost that distinction.
Yeah.
So they have to make Tolkien agree with them so they can continue to enjoy Tolkien.
Yes.
Otherwise it's problematic and toxic and not brave and stunning.
That's what's going on with J.K. Rowling right now.
It's like, oh, she's a TERF.
So there's that guy that's taking her book and like rebinding it.
So it takes her name off the cover.
Or, you know, Hogwarts Legacy that just came out prominently features a transgender character just to sort of say, what do you think about that, Rowling?
Yeah.
Yeah, but they're still boycotting the game because she has something to do with it.
I don't know.
I actually am playing the game right now, and I accidentally skipped the scene with the transgender character because I don't like to watch cutscenes.
And I'm like, oh, I guess I missed it.
Hey, good for you.
Yeah.
Based.
All right.
Accidentally based.
So just to be clear on the whole, you know, we talked about Tolkien not being a big fan of allegory.
Maybe hate's a strong word, but not being a big fan.
And like when people read Lord of the Rings, I think we have a tendency, like I think you're talking about the progressives that try to make Tolkien agree with them.
We also have the same danger of reading Tolkien from our perspective, too, of just making everything Christian.
Aragorn's Jesus, Gandalf is a prophet.
But reading through your book, what's the careful way to do that?
Looking at Frodo, looking at aspects of Sam and Frodo, looking at Gandalf.
Is there a way to look at those characters from a Christian lens?
Is there a way to do that carefully?
Because you kind of seem to be saying that he intended it to be that way.
Well, so somebody wrote a letter.
The first person that was sort of doing academic work, like doctoral level work, on Tolkien was doing it while he was still alive.
And he proposed and wrote to Tolkien that the munus triplex, the threefold office of Christ of prophet, priest, and king, was present with Aragorn as the king and Gandalf as the prophet and Frodo as the priest.
And Tolkien wrote back, he said, well, I didn't intend that, but it makes sense.
I can see that in there now.
Wow.
So for Tolkien, he's very conscious of the subconscious elements in a writer's task.
And in one of the chapters of my book, the chapter on Revelation, Tolkien does, at the end of his life, believe his work to have been inspired in some way.
Like, not in the sense that it's scripture or some sort of angelic revelation, but in the sense that God is using him in a special way to deliver a particular message.
You call it artistic inspiration in a strong sense.
And so Tolkien would have been very happy to say that there were plenty of Christian things in the Lord of the Rings that he did not intend, but which are nevertheless valid.
And that's one of the examples.
Now, there are other things that he intended more.
So we see the development of Galadriel as a character.
Galadriel is the most complicated character in Tolkien's fiction.
And she has the most complicated manuscript history.
Tolkien never settled finally on what Galadriel's story was.
But what we see is after the publication of Lord of the Rings, which is her debut, he starts conforming her deliberately more and more towards the figure of Mary.
So he starts off in the original draft, Galadriel is a rebel.
She leaves with the Noldor.
She exiles herself to Middle-earth because she wants to have a kingdom.
She's ambitious.
She wants to rule.
And eventually she gets chastened into the figure that we see in Lord of the Rings.
But as Tolkien moves on, he becomes more conscious of the underlying mechanics of his world.
He starts to distance her from that.
And by the end of his life, he said, no, Galadriel left for Middle-earth in a pure motive.
She had no stain.
Unstained is the word that he uses, which is exactly the language that we can talk about Mary in if you're Catholic.
And Tolkien, I think, would make a distinction between allegory and applicability.
So there are lots and lots of things in The Lord of the Rings that he does, I think, intend to have a Christian application.
But he's also very conscious that the Lord of the Rings is set in a time before Christ has become incarnate and in a time before God has revealed himself to Abraham.
So it's basically between Genesis 1 and Genesis 11, right?
Thereabouts at the time.
Sometime in the past 6,000 years.
Yeah.
So the world as it existed in Genesis 1 through 11, you can talk about, right?
Sauron can be a demon because demons are pre-creational.
You can have angels.
You can have human beings who have already fallen, all that sort of stuff.
But you can't have the name Yahweh.
You can't have a Mosaic code.
You can't have an institutionalized religion because the only authorized institutional religion starts with Moses.
It's very interesting for Tolkien as a Roman Catholic.
Every appearance of institutional religion or temple worship or priests in Middle-earth is always evil.
And not just evil, it's satanic.
Because for Tolkien, real authorized worship of God only comes when God reveals the way that he wants to be worshipped.
And anybody else that's doing that is not serving God.
They're serving literally the devil.
So there is a careful way of mapping out Tolkien's logic.
If you start with this point that Middle-earth is the real world at this particular point in history, then if you're good with theology and if you understand a little bit of the artist's craft and the way that you create a story, then you can work it out.
Like there are some things that may or may not have been meant, but Tolkien would accept.
There are some things that he does intend and tells us that he intends.
And there are some things like Mount Moriah and Abraham that he just says, no, that's silly.
And I mean, I recognize that not everybody has the time or the energy to do that.
And that's another reason why I wrote the book, to kind of say, this is a guided tour through what I think he's doing deliberately and what he's not.
So the flood killed the ints.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's what I said.
The difference between allegory and applicability is an interesting one because I find that good myth and average myth, like you look at like the modern, you know, Marvel cinematic universe, you look at Harry Potter, like these are our culture's myths that we tell now.
And everybody sees themselves themselves in the role of the heroes, you know, and you can always apply your own situation.
And that's why millennials are always comparing themselves to Harry Potter and their enemies to Voldemort.
And anybody in the world can look at themselves and put themselves in that story and draw inspiration from these things.
And the bad guy is this bad guy.
And that is what makes myth so applicable, especially Tolkien, who just wrote these rich myths that drew on thousands of years of human myth.
But yeah, that is interesting, that it does narrow a lot when you look at Nardia and you go, oh, Aslan is Jesus.
And he actually tells the kids in one book, like, hey, I'm Jesus.
I have a different name in your world and you're going to have to know it.
Yeah, exactly.
He invites them to walk forward and accept himself as Lord and Savior.
If you'd like to come down the aisle.
So, yeah, but myth is more applicable to a wider range of people.
And I think because, you know, I'm just rambling now, but what you were saying before about how, you know, C.S. Lewis said this too in Mere Christianity, that Christians don't reject every religion as wholesale false.
We say that we all agree on these common things, but where we differ is what differentiates our religion, and ours is right and yours is wrong.
Whereas atheists or agnostics will look at it and go, 98% of humans have been wrong about religion through all of history or whatever.
So, yeah, I don't know.
Comment on that or don't, or we'll move on to the next question.
Yeah, the idea of modern mythology is an interesting one.
I mean, the study of myth starts in the 1800s with the Victorians.
The Brothers Graham were kind of the first generation of mythographers.
And it develops from there.
And everybody's trying to figure out what a myth is.
What is the definition of a myth?
And the answer is nobody knows.
It's the same thing as a religion.
You can't actually define what a religion is because there's always going to be some sort of exception.
But there is a family resemblance to sort of common themes where you can say this is a myth or this is not.
And I think what Tolkien understands is in some sense a myth has to be polyphonic.
There've got to be multiple different voices providing slightly different perspectives on the same things.
So that's why in Tolkien's story, he doesn't just have this one single omniscient narrator who's telling all the way it is.
He's got different manuscript traditions from elves or humans or dwarves that are all sort of swirling around this historical event, but giving different and sometimes competing interpretations of it.
And that's what gives the authenticity to Tolkien as actually creating a mythology.
And that's, to me, what makes like the new Star Wars films seem very hollow or the Marvel films seem very shallow.
Is there isn't a lot of subtext in the Marvel films.
There seems, even despite the fact that they want to sort of humanize their heroes and villains, there does seem to be an authorized version of the story that doesn't transform very much, that doesn't have a communal aspect to it.
And that's very different in the comics, right?
If anybody that knows about comic book canon, you know, there's not one story of Spider-Man.
There's lots of different stories.
There's lots of different slightly tweaked origin stories.
So myth arises from a community and not from a single author.
And as such, the applicability is going to be very wide because different people with different voices and different concerns are all going to find in this story some symbol of the ultimate things that they're trying to talk about.
That was a good answer to a bad question.
So were Frodo and Sam gay?
No.
All right.
Well, that's about all the discussion is necessary.
We have like seven quotes, so we would like to go through on this topic of whether Frodo and Sam were, or whether it was queerness or Tolkien, whatever.
Yeah, let's continue.
You know, like, so like, this is one from the Cimmerillion.
I said the Valar can take on male and female forms.
Yeah, the Valar, they can clothe themselves, they take upon the form some of male and some of female for the difference of temper they had from the beginning and is bodied forth in the choice of each.
Which demonstrates exactly the opposite of the thing that they're trying to prove there.
He's saying that gender is essential to the soul and not the body.
The difference of temper.
But they choose.
The difference of temper they had from their beginning.
And so their male physical body as angels is shown in the temperament of their soul.
They choose to be male or female based on what their soul is like.
But they're angels, right?
So they're non-physical creatures.
Tolkien is very clear elsewhere, and I bet it's not cited in the thing, that the male or female aspect of the human being is essential.
Like in the Aristotelian sense of it, it is part of your essence.
You can't change it.
Now, for the Valar, yeah, maybe they can choose to be male or female, but they're always matching up with what their soul is.
So if you're advocating for some sort of transgender movement, you can say, okay, well, my soul may be male, but it's trapped in a female body, or vice versa.
For Tolkien, he's saying the male-souled Valar always manifests in a male body, and the female-souled Valar always manifests in a female body.
So there's never a mismatch.
It proves, if anything, the opposite of what the article is trying to say.
Based and Tolkien pilled.
Yeah.
It's from The Two Towers.
And if somebody can blow that up a little bit.
Frodo's face was peaceful.
The marks of fear and care had left it, but it looked old, old and beautiful.
Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way to himself.
He shook his head as if finding words useless and murmured, I love him.
He's like that, and sometimes it shines through somehow.
But I love him, whether or no.
I mean, he says he loves him.
Eh?
Well, when I say goodbye to my mom on the phone, I guess my dad better watch out because clearly there's only one sort of love.
But it's an interesting, it's an interesting point, though, because I think anytime you read this, and it is even jarring to me, and that's just me being in this culture that's highly sexualized or whatever, and we don't allow male friendship anymore.
And you read one male character saying that he loves another male character, and you're like, eh?
Eh?
Yeah, I mean, so they'll answer that.
It's almost as if it's almost as if coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
I'm always reminded of that C.S. Lewis quote where he's like, the fact that you can't envision a type of male friendship that isn't sexual just proves that you've never had a real friend.
It's very sad.
Almost every other language that I can name, there are two different forms for the word no.
To know a thing and to know a person.
And English only has the one.
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