Dr. Paul Monk on The Lord of The Rings

Transcript below ^_^

Dr. Paul Monk on The Lord of The Rings
Melbourne, 6 November 2025

[Nick Fabbri] (0:00 - 0:21)

Welcome back to Bloom after another long hiatus between episodes. My name is Nick Fabbri and I'll be your host for today. I'm lucky to be joined by my dear friend and long-time collaborator, Dr. Paul Monk. Paul is a writer and poet based in Melbourne, Australia. Welcome back to Bloom, Paul. It's a pleasure to have you here today.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (0:22 - 0:25)

Thanks, Nick. It's great to be on Bloom again with you.

[Nick Fabbri] (0:26 - 0:55)

In this episode, we'll be talking about the Lord of the Rings, a cultural phenomenon which has sold hundreds of millions of copies since its publication and which has been translated into over 50 languages globally. Written by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings has been an incredibly meaningful and important work for Paul personally. Our conversation today will explore why this is the case and reflect on the richness and beauty of the story, interspersed with some timeless readings from the story by Paul himself.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (0:55 - 10:50)

Perhaps the simplest way in to explaining the impact it's had on me is to share a piece that I was asked by the Melbourne Age to write 33 years ago on the centenary of Tolkien's birth in which I explained to public readership how the book had impacted on me and why it had impacted on a much wider range of people than myself. So, yeah, this is the piece as it was published in 1992. Once upon a time, when I was a young student, I asked the great scholar of English and comparative literature, George Steiner, in a letter about Virgil, Wittgenstein, and reading, what he made of the phenomenon of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The eminent man wrote back a generous letter, recommending readings from the dialogues of Plato, the letters of Van Gogh, and the Sibylline writings of Martin Heidegger, but dismissing The Lord of the Rings as, quote, portentous fairy floss, unquote. It had been the book of my childhood and youth. Indeed, nothing in my primary schooling had made a deeper impression, and this contemptuous reaction by a man whose own writings on language, meaning, and culture I had read avidly jolted me.

On mature reflection, I believe George Steiner had read too many serious and profound books to appreciate the uses of enchantment and a wonder that can be created in an innocent mind by the imaginative vistas, the sense of language, of being and time that make The Lord of the Rings a unique work of fantastical fiction. In many conversations over the years, asking and listening, I have sought to glean from different lovers of The Lord of the Rings what made the tale so satisfying. There are many appreciations of it, and of course they vary greatly in thoughtfulness.

Some are completely superficial, delighting only in the escapist fancifulness of elves, goblins, heroes, and magic rings. Others are absorbed by the romantic medievalism of Tolkien's world, what might be called the St. George for England colouration of The War of the Ring. The more sophisticated find echoes of Wagner and The Ring of the Nibelungs, or of Milton's Paradise Lost.

Yet others are captivated by the suspense and drama of The Ringbearer's quest. I call this the Thirty-Nine Steps view of the tale. Readers of the tale who speak with appreciation of Tolkien's evocation of the deeps of time, the ancientness of kingdoms and languages, and the denseness of being in artefacts, dwellings, forests, rivers, and mountains are the ones with whom I feel the greatest rapport.

I am a radical reader of The Lord of the Rings. At the risk of incurring snorts of scorn from those whose opinion of the book is closer to that of George Steiner than to my own, I would go so far as to say that in this age of fractured disciplines, religious confusion, and global ecological crisis, this book is one of the few that should be offered to children, indeed to all those childlike enough to immerse themselves in its deeply serious playfulness as an indirect guide for the perplexed. It is my belief that Tolkien achieved, perhaps beyond his conscious intent, with this work of highly idiosyncratic fantasy, something close to the critique of modern realism and return to the ground of being that his close contemporary Martin Heidegger attempted, notably in his unfinished trilogy Being and Time, 1927.

No other work of fantasy of which I am aware has this remarkable depth. And while I am modern realist enough to prefer the professional study of international politics to being off with the fairies, there is no doubt in my mind that Tolkien, that reading Tolkien, and initially having his tales read to me when still young, prepared me, as nothing else did, for an appreciation of language, time, poetry, phenomenology, and my religious heritage in adult life. The young fifth-grade teacher who introduced me to The Lord of the Rings in 1967 has my undying gratitude for these reasons.

The new, richly illustrated edition of The Lord of the Rings is surely the most aesthetically appealing presentation of the text since its creation in the early 1950s. Alan Lee's fifty illustrations capture engagingly many of the different moods and inventive moments in the tale. The eighth and ninth volumes of Christopher Tolkien's account of the coming to life of his father's fabulous literary progeny will be engaging to a different set of minds and eyes, I imagine, than the addition to the masterwork of half a hundred coloured pictures.

While I rather enjoy the latter, especially sharing them with the Tolkien lovers and little people in my own family, I personally find myself more fascinated by Christopher Tolkien's exploration of his father's studio and the emerging characters and plotlines in The Lord of the Rings, a tale which grew in the telling until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history which preceded it, as the famous opening lines of the author's foreword relate. Even more diverting are the letters of J. R.

R. Tolkien, collected and edited by Christopher Tolkien and Humphrey Carpenter. Uniquely, these letters allow us insights into how Tolkien regarded his own work and its place in his life.

The Tolkien family album, also a slender and attractive companion to the volume of letters, is worth adding to the Tolkien corner of the library in one's personal bag-end. Those who have an insatiable appetite for the detail of Tolkien's work, as against an appreciation of its meaning, may feel compelled to collect Robert Foster's Complete Guide to Middle-earth. I confess that I start to incline more to the impatience of George Steiner at this point, and feel that there are certainly numerous books and subjects which have a greater claim on our attention to detail than this sort of exhaustive taxonomy of fairy creatures.

That I should incline towards the impatience of George Steiner with regard to Robert Foster's book is because I believe that the tonic effects of a childlike reading of The Lord of the Rings ought to be a release of the adult mind to re-enter the real world, with a refreshed and enlivened sense of all those dimensions of existence that make being human peculiarly rich, terrifying, and uncanny. Foster's sort of book takes one off in a quite different, basically frivolous and trivialising direction. As a writer, as a teacher, as an uncle, I would prefer to see The Lord of the Rings as a foundation on which a child or student might begin to build an appreciation of song and poetry, of the abysms of history underlying current, startling, ill-understood realities, of the needs within the realm of being or gathering and preservation, memory, and the music of mnemonic forms, of the wonder of speech within a natural world, and of the melancholy and dignity inherent in mortality, ruin, and moral consciousness. Nor should Tolkien's pence to simple bucolic pleasures—the savouring of mushrooms, cold beer, hot baths, tobacco, long walks—be omitted from the list.

Learn now the lore of living creatures, the ancient of days Trebiad sang to the hobbits, Merian Pippin, who had strayed into his neck of the woods. Trebiad was an Ent, a name highly suggestive of the ancient Greek Enta, Latin Enta, beings, and thus with that concern with the being of beings which Aristotle long ago identified as the deepest perplexity confronting the human mind. Trebiad's Ent-ness embodies Tolkien's ontology, and never more so than in his saying to the hobbits, Elves began it, of course, waking trees up and teaching them to speak, and learning their tree-talk.

They always wished to talk to everything the old elves did. And in a passage with powerful resonance even now, more than when it was penned some forty years ago, he adds, I, I, there was all one wood once upon a time. These—those were the broad days.

Time was when I could walk and sing all day, and hear no more than the echo of my own voice in the hollow hills. The woods were like the woods of Lothlórien, only thicker, stronger, younger, and the smell of the air! I used to spend a week just breathing.

Tell a child after this of the rainforests and the atmosphere. Certainly there will be those, especially the politically and ideologically correct, who will scoff at or object to the reactionary as well as merely fanciful character of Tolkien's imaginative creation. Others—Steiner, I think, among them—find the eucatastrophic or happy ending of the nature of the Lord of the Rings fatuous in a world of stark tragedy and black absurdity that they take hours to be, not without reason.

It is precisely the book's capacity to liberate young minds from the strictures of such various realisms and open them to other hopes and possibilities that commends it to me. Learn those crafts and sciences necessary to a mastery in fragmentary part of the contemporary world, as human beings are making it, one might tell the young reader of Tolkien. But after reading the fable, perhaps you may see some point in integrating Homer and Thucydides, Dante and Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare, Dickens and Melville, and Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, if you are especially curious and mentally tough, into your world as homophober.

[Nick Fabbri] (10:51 - 10:59)

That was beautifully read, Paul, and beautifully written. You have wonderful voice artistry, I imagine, for all your nieces and nephews.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (10:59 - 11:12)

They used to say, well, one of them, my little nephew, he was only seven years old at the time, and I think it was when I was reading in the voice of Treebeard, as it was just then, Paul, how do you know the right voices for all the characters?

[Nick Fabbri] (11:14 - 11:45)

That's charming, isn't it? But it's poignant because in the article which you just read, you referenced your fifth grade teacher in 1967, Kathleen Gill, I believe her name is, reading it, and the different way in which reading, and I guess the oral transmission of language, of meaning, can have a different impact on the listener. And you've always said that you can recall passages which Miss Gill read to you back in 67 as if you were hearing them yesterday or this morning.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (11:45 - 12:22)

Yeah, that's absolutely true. And this was driven home to me most recently when I, as I say, was rereading the book for the first time in many years. And it struck me that in passage after passage, what I recalled as I read it was Kath reading the story rather than, for example, me reading it to my nephews 30 years after that, or me reading it to myself after grade five.

It was Kath. I would picture her at the front of the class reading the book and the impact that it obviously had on my mind right on the spot there. And it was true of so many passages.

[Nick Fabbri] (12:22 - 13:06)

It's amazing, isn't it? And it's poignant today, I suppose, in the way we've structured or designed this podcast or conversation is that we'll be lucky to be, we're fortunate rather, to be reading nine short passages, I suppose, as the spine for this conversation. So, and part of that is maybe to recreate the magic of you as a young boy, a young child, listening and receiving these vignettes from the story chronologically is, I think, as you were saying, they go all the way through and each sort of provide a jumping off point for different reflections about the significance of Lord of the Rings as a work of literature.

We'll be speaking today primarily about the books and Tolkien and the impact that they had on you, but also globally. Does that sound sort of...

[Dr. Paul Monk] (13:06 - 14:33)

Yes, yes. That's very much, I think, the approach I'd recommend. And since you say, you know, primarily about the books, let me make the point, although the films were, as cinema, a remarkable achievement.

Nevertheless, because it was cinema, they had to leave out a great deal, which enriches the book, right? The book moves at a slower pace. And reading engages the imagination.

You have to decode what the words are saying. And so each person takes away a different reading of the book. If, on the other hand, you're passively absorbing music and images on the screen, and it's all moving at a pretty rapid clip, that's a very different experience, right?

So it leaves vivid impressions. And I would freely say that I thought Howard Shaw's music for the three movies was a terrific achievement. I really love that music.

But for me, the book will always trump the movies. And reading the book to my nephews and nieces when they were little was an unforgettable experience. It enabled me in a sense to give back what had been given to me.

And I should pay tribute to Kath in passing. She was a very young schoolteacher at that time. I think she was almost a freshly minted one out of Teachers College.

[Nick Fabbri] (14:33 - 14:34)

So 20 years old, roughly, I would say.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (14:34 - 15:35)

Yeah, very young. 2021. And she just happened to love children's stories.

She hadn't even had any children of her own at that point. And in that one year, in 1967, I was 10 years old that year, she read us The Wind in the Willows, which is just a wonderful story from the Edwardian era. So that was written and published when Tolkien himself was still a very young person.

Four of the Narnia stories, you know, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I think the other one was The Last Battle. And these were finely crafted tales and engaging to young minds.

Then she read The Hobbit. But then she read The Lord of the Rings. And it left the others completely in the shade.

You know, I remember that she read the others, but The Lord of the Rings was a profound experience.

[Nick Fabbri] (15:36 - 15:58)

And these are not just everyday fairy tales or, you know, they're sort of interesting stories for young children. They're so rich in meaning and symbolism. I mean, which you might not necessarily appreciate being a youngster, but they do have an effect on you in the way in which they attune your, I don't know, your psyche, your being for a deeper understanding of the world in which you live.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (15:59 - 18:34)

Oh, absolutely, they do. And whether you're a child or an adult with a mind still open to magic, shall we say, all right, what The Lord of the Rings, almost uniquely, it seems to me, can do is to take you from a down-home experience of life where practical reality and interpersonal relationships on a small scale and unpretentious approaches to work and ageing and all the usual things in life and food, you know, that's your way of life.

That's pretty much the shot as Tolkien depicted it. Hobbits like quiet lives. They don't really approve of people having what they call adventures.

I think it's a bit dubious. And so the key characters, the four Hobbits that play such an outsized role in the story, grow up that way, you know, they're like, you know, boys who are slowly maturing into men and they live a very settled way of life. And then this changes, and primarily in perhaps the scene that I'll read first, where Gandalf, who has featured in the life of Bilbo Baggins since The Hobbit, and has become a mentor to his nephew Frodo, who has taken over the old home, Bag End.

Gandalf goes away for some years and Frodo, having known Gandalf, having grown up as Bilbo's nephew, has a sense of the outside world, but he's never been out there. Bilbo has left him the house and he's left him property and he's left him this ring, which he's told is a magic ring, you know, and it makes you disappear if you put it on. But that's about all he knows, you know, and then Gandalf comes back from five journeys.

And so the lead into this is, first of all, to get a sense of what a vague awareness of the outside world does to the young person's mind, so Frodo's mind in Gandalf's absence. And I'll read that first. And then Gandalf comes back unexpectedly after nine years, taps on Frodo's study window, and he comes in, stays the night, and he tells him, listen, and Frodo Baggins, this ring, this is a very, very significant thing, and you're in all sorts of trouble.

And of course, suddenly, this down-home lifestyle, this simple world of Hobbitry, is thrown into the mix of that outside world. The outside world is coming right in, right? And so you're listening to this as a child, right, and you can imagine the impact that this has.

It's like, well, here I am in primary school, and life is like that.

[Nick Fabbri] (18:34 - 18:42)

Well, you were in eastern Melbourne, in Ringwood, I believe. I was in a semi-rural, conservative, Catholic area of Melbourne.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (18:42 - 18:54)

Yeah, in fact, I was in Ngunnawading, Mitchum Ngunnawading as a child, and Ringwood later as a secondary school student. But Paris life in those days, as I experienced it and remember it vividly, was really rather Hobbit-like.

[Nick Fabbri] (18:54 - 19:00)

Like the Shire, yeah. Yeah, it really was. And we're here on the edge of the earth, you know, on the edge of the world, in the southern tip of Australia, you know?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (19:01 - 19:49)

Yeah, it's true. And the more I grew up and studied the outside world, the more I started to think, Australia is so much like the Shire. You know, it's comfortable, it's relatively conservative, and people just get on with ordinary practical things.

But I was a student of world history, of international relations. I was finally an intelligence analyst, and I travelled widely. And when I married early in the 21st century, very late in my life, I was nearly 50, my wife Claudia listened to me reading the passages I'm about to share, and not having read the novel herself, immediately started calling me Frodo Baggins.

And I'll come back to that in a moment after I've read this passage, right?

[Nick Fabbri] (19:49 - 20:37)

Before we do, I just wanted to jump in and ask a little bit about, on the subject of, you know, today we'll be discussing the books and the texts rather than the films. Because obviously, Tolkien, you know, wrote these for a particular reason. He didn't make films or music out of the story, out of the legend and myth that he was seeking to create.

He built a whole world out of language. And I think it's worth, you know, just which will suffuse all the nine passages you'll read, talking a little bit about Tolkien as a man, as a writer, and someone who loved language, as a professor at Oxford of early modern English or early English or mediaeval languages. Anglo-Saxon, Norse legends, Icelandic, you know.

And this is the medium, this is the world in which he dwelt, which was a world of language.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (20:38 - 22:47)

Language, story, poetry, memory, exactly. Many of, you know, our listeners may have seen the more recent film, Tolkien, which came out well after the trilogy of Jackson's films, and which depicts the young Tolkien as a boy, as a student, and finally as a young academic. And it ends with him writing the famous opening sentence of The Hobbit, in a hole in the ground.

They lived a Hobbit, right? What that film omits is that Tolkien had, throughout the late 1910s and throughout the 1920s and early 30s, been busily at work inventing Elvish languages, and then making up legends, myths to go with the languages, and writing stories, some of which were published and some which weren't until long after he had died. And his son went through his archive and published Christopher.

But the fundamental point I think you're making, and which I heartily endorse, is that when you read Tolkien, you are reading the work of somebody who is steeped in the English language, in the origins of words, the multiple meanings of words, the miscomprehension of words where people speak different languages, or where English is their common language, but in neither instance their native language, traditions of poetry in different cultures among hobbits, elves, men, and an appreciation of the beauty of words themselves. And that, I think, is one of the reasons, you might call it a deep background reason, why the novel is so enchanting. People don't quite realise that.

But there are very few novels, at least, particularly what you might call popular industry novels of the 20th century, which tend to be, in all too many cases, much more formulaic. And so they lack that rich linguistic resonance that is just Tolkien's bread and butter.

[Nick Fabbri] (22:48 - 23:00)

It's a very deep and human hinterland, which is sort of underpinning literally every word in the text. So without further ado, let's jump into the first scene, which you described or foreshadowed before.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (23:01 - 25:21)

Yes, so we have Frodo living his life in the shire in Gandalf's absence, and we pick up where it says, Frodo began to feel restless, and the old paths seemed too well-trodden. He looked at maps and wondered what lay beyond their edges. Maps made in the shire showed mostly white spaces beyond its borders.

He took to wandering further afield, and more often by himself, and Merry and his other friends watched him anxiously. Often he was seen walking and talking with the strange wayfarers that began at this time to appear in the shire. There were rumours of strange things happening in the world outside, and as Gandalf had not at that time appeared or sent any message for several years, Frodo gathered all the news he could.

Elves, who seldom walked in the shire, could now be seen passing westward through the woods in the evening, passing and not returning. But they were leaving Middle-earth and were no longer concerned with its troubles. There were, however, dwarves on the road in unusual numbers.

The ancient east-west road ran through the shire to its end at the Grey Havens, and dwarves had always used it on their way to their mines in the Blue Mountains. They were the hobbits' chief source of news from distant parts. If they wanted any, as a rule, dwarves said little and hobbits asked no more.

But now Frodo often met strange dwarves of far countries seeking refuge in the west. They were troubled, and some spoke in whispers of the Enemy and of the land of Mordor. That name the hobbits only knew in legends of the dark past, like a shadow in the background of their memories.

But it was ominous and disquieting. It seemed that the evil power in Mirkwood had been driven out by the White Council only to reappear in greater strength in the old strongholds of Mordor. The Dark Tower had been rebuilt, it was said.

From there the power was spreading far and wide, and away far east and south there were wars and growing fear. Orcs were multiplying again in the mountains. Trolls were abroad, no longer dull-witted but cunning and armed with dreadful weapons.

And there were murmured hints of creatures more terrible than all of these, but they had no name. Little of all this, of course, reached the ears of ordinary hobbits. I've always loved that sentence.

[Nick Fabbri] (25:22 - 25:25)

Why is that? Little of all this reached the ears of young hobbits?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (25:25 - 25:41)

Of ordinary hobbits. And because, as I was saying earlier, the Shire is this quiet, remote, conservative corner of the world, right? Where generation after generation they live quietly in much the same way, and they till the earth and they eat their meals and raise their children.

[Nick Fabbri] (25:42 - 26:14)

But it's just like rural England or pastoral parts of England or the British Isles, and you hear rumblings of troubles far off in Europe or in Russia or something. Or even us here in Australia, in Melbourne, as you were saying before, we hear mutterings of troubles in the Middle East or over in Europe as well. And it's the way in which, as you said before, the shadow of the past, the sense of history writ large coming back to haunt the present, almost rippling across the peaceful shores of the Shire, you know?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (26:15 - 27:12)

Yeah. And you'll probably recall from the film how there's a group of hobbits gathering around a table in a pub, and they're talking a bit about this. But they say, you know, well, if you keep your heads down, trouble will stay away, right?

They somehow think whatever's going on in the outside world, that's in the outside world, right? It doesn't really affect us. Because none of them realise that there's things brewing in the outside world that will indeed intrude, come what may, and they're only vaguely aware of them.

But Frodo, of course, as we'll find in the next passage, is to discover that not only is there an outside world and where ominous things are happening, but he has the One Ring, which the Dark Lord wants more than anything else, and which if he gets it, will allow him to dominate the entire world. And Frodo's thinking, what, what, what? And of course, if you're listening to this as a child, you inevitably just think, whoa!

It's what the movie makers would call a plot point.

[Nick Fabbri] (27:13 - 27:49)

Indeed, yeah. And that idea of history or events being thrust onto your doorstep, as literally happens with Gandalf presenting Frodo with the One Ring and saying, this is a big problem, but we need to resolve this, is resonant of that. I think it's a line from the text, but indeed in the film as well, where Frodo says, I wish it need not have happened in my time.

Said Frodo. So do I, said Gandalf, and so do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

Right? So it's a sense of, okay, well.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (27:49 - 27:53)

And already that time is getting very dark. Yeah, indeed.

[Nick Fabbri] (27:54 - 28:28)

You know, but it's, it's, it's a concern. It's, you know, when you're watching the film, it's this beautiful picture of, well, literally some green idyllic part of New Zealand, happy village life going on. And then, you know, the storm clouds sort of gather on the horizon and Gandalf calls the hobbits to seriousness and saying, you know, you may not care about events beyond the Shire, but those events care about you.

Yeah. It's, uh, it's sort of resonant with that line by Trotsky and I oughtn't to quote Trotsky, but he says, uh, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you, you know?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (28:29 - 29:25)

Well, that's, that's what, uh, certainly Frodo experiences in the first instance. And these young friends who, um, you'll get caught up in the adventure, um, without any knowledge of the outside world, but simply because, well, they're Frodo's friends and he's in danger and they said, we're going to come with you. Right.

And it's a boy's own adventure quite literally. Right. Um, in a great English tradition, it must be said, and however much on ideological grounds, people may scoff at that these days, um, I think the, the, uh, appeal of it as story, um, and of this story, this variation on it in particular is testified to by the fact that scores of millions of people all over the world love this story.

Yeah. Um, and, and this is the kernel of it, that these, these simple down home people who get caught up through no fault of their own in this huge upheaval that's going on. Right.

[Nick Fabbri] (29:25 - 29:32)

Yeah. Which has its roots in millennia back in terms of the dynamics, the different cultures and peoples and politics.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (29:32 - 31:37)

And, um, so we'll just pick up, uh, here, you know, Gandalf's dropping the bomb, so to speak. Um, and, uh, perhaps begin where Gandalf has come back and he's coming, he stayed the night and then they get up the next morning. Frodo says to Gandalf, for last night, you started to tell me strange things about this ring of mine.

Perhaps you better finish that story. And, uh, pardon me. Uh, he says last night, you began to tell me strange things about my ring, Gandalf.

He said, and then you stopped because you said that such things were best left until daylight. Don't you think you had better finish now? You say the ring is dangerous, far more dangerous than I guess.

In what way? In many ways, answered the wizard. It is far more powerful than ever dared to think at first.

So powerful that in the end it would utterly overcome anyone of mortal race who possessed it. It would possess him. In Eregion, long ago, many Elven rings were made.

Magic rings, as you call them. And they were of course of various kinds, some more potent and some less. The lesser rings were only essays in the craft before it was full grown.

And to the Elven smiths they were betrifles, yet still to my mind dangerous for mortals. But the great rings, the rings of power, they were perilous. A mortal Frodo who keeps one of the great rings does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life.

He merely continues until at last every minute is a weariness. And if he uses the rings to make himself invisible, he fades. He becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the dark power that rules the rings.

Yes, sooner or later, later if he is strong or well-meaning to begin with, but neither strength nor good purpose will last, sooner or later the dark power will devour him. How terrifying, said Frodo. There was another long silence.

The sound of Sam Gamgee cutting the lawn came in from the garden.

[Nick Fabbri] (31:38 - 31:43)

And then of course in the film Gandalf whacks him over the head and drags him inside.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (31:44 - 31:51)

In the book he doesn't whack him over the head, but he does haul him inside. And it's a very fetching scene.

[Nick Fabbri] (31:51 - 32:07)

I should confess I haven't actually read the books to the listeners who aren't already aware. I've only seen the films, which is an interesting maybe mirror image for the different generations where you grew up on the staple of the literary texts. I've only ever watched the films and never got through the works.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (32:08 - 32:56)

Well, I hardly recommend reading it. It reminds me actually of a remark by the late Peter Green, a great classical scholar, in his introduction to his own translation of the Odyssey of Homer, that he didn't do this translation until his 90s, but he says, I'm glad actually that I waited because I was able to bring my best to it. And in the interim read many other translations and reread it many times and taught it.

And he said, I hope I produced a version that people will enjoy. I venture to hope that some of you will in fact be prompted by my translation to want to read the original Greek. And I urge you to do so, to learn the ancient Greek.

I promise you, you will not be disappointed. So I feel that way about the Lord of the Rings.

[Nick Fabbri] (32:57 - 33:04)

Every time you revisit it, you take on a different layer of meaning or from different perspectives of life history.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (33:04 - 35:55)

I've gone from being a 10-year-old primary school boy in the Shire, in a manner of speaking, to being, if I may say so, one of the wise. I'm nearly 70. I'm very widely read and widely travelled.

And I write on serious affairs as well as writing poetry of my own. That's a life journey of what's close to 70 years now. Well, 60 years since then.

But before we pass on, I really must share, of course, this climactic passage, having skipped a few pages, where Gandalf shows Frodo, having put the ring in the fire, that it has writing on it, which proves it is the one ring. And the drama really starts to arc up. He says, Hold it up, says Gandalf, and look closely.

As Frodo did so, he now saw fine lines, finer than the finest pen strokes, running along the ring, outside and inside, lines of fire that seemed to form the letters of a flowing script. They shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth. I cannot read the fiery letters, said Frodo in a quavering voice.

No, said Gandalf, but I can. The letters are elvish of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Mordor, which I will not utter here. But this, in the common tongue, is what is said, close enough.

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them. It is only two lines of a verse long known in elven lore. Three rings for the elven kings under the sky.

Seven for the dwarf lords in their halls of stone. Nine for mortal men doomed to die. One for the dark lord on his dark throne, in the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them, in the land of Mordor where the shadows lie. He paused, and then said slowly, in a deep voice, This is the master ring, the one ring to rule them all. This is the one ring that he lost many ages ago, to the great weakening of his power.

He greatly desires it, but he must not get it. Frodo sat silent and motionless. Fear seemed to stretch out a vast hand like a dark cloud rising in the east and looming up to engulf him.

This ring, he stammered, how on earth did it come to me? Ah, said Gandalf, that is a very long story. The beginnings lie back in the black years which only the lore masters now remember.

If I were to tell you all that tale, we should still be sitting here when spring had passed into winter.

[Nick Fabbri] (35:56 - 36:40)

It's stunning, isn't it? And one thing that jumps out at me is the contrast or juxtaposition between the sort of almost sacred simplicity and gentleness of the hobbits in their lifestyle, and the depths of this almost dark and ominous history, and the power that is congealed in the one ring. Why would such an intensely powerful and heavy and almost grave symbol of power and the history of Middle-earth find its way into the hands of the hobbit?

Why does that come on? So what is Tolkien trying to say in highlighting the hobbit's importance in the story?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (36:41 - 37:50)

Well, I think he comes at that, so to speak, from two directions. One is that the fact that this can happen, albeit in a fable, is indicative of the fact that whether we know it or not, we are all caught up in large-scale events, that time and history are the context in which we are born and which we grow up and which we live. And whether we choose to ignore that, whether we remain oblivious to it, whether it's ever introduced to it, is neither here nor there.

It can sweep over us in the same way that a volcano can erupt or an earthquake can occur, and our ignorance of geology doesn't help us. In fact, to the contrary. But the second is, as his whole story shows, that such simple people, if they have integrity and doggedness, character, can make a surprising difference in the large affairs of the world.

They're not irrelevant, they're not trivial. And the experience of grappling with these sombre, deep realities is itself character-forming.

[Nick Fabbri] (37:52 - 38:38)

Beautiful. And in terms of this idea, as you said before, about story and learning the deeper dynamics, histories, cultural contours that bear upon your present context, I think the second passage you were looking to read was from the chapter featuring Tom Bombadil, a character who is a sort of earth spirit who is omitted from the films. Some people say to the disbenefit of the films, because you lose quite a lot, but he's a character who, in this scene you're about to read, tells the Hobbits stories about the world.

He fills in the blank parts of the map, so to speak, over thousands of years, in a similar way to how Elrond, the elf, is able to have a memory which goes back to the early times.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (38:38 - 44:25)

Yes. I empathise with those who regret that Bombadil was left out of the movies. But when you're making a film, you simply cannot put in everything.

And a great deal was left out. And I confess, when I first saw each of the films on their release, I was disappointed because I was very aware of what had been left out, because I'm steeped in the book. But I thought, you've got to be fair to Peter Jackson and his team.

They tried to do a good job. They love the book, but they're making a film. So go back and watch it as cinema and assess it as cinema, not as simply a mock-up of a book.

And in each case, I was much more appreciative when I looked at it that way. And one of the nephews to whom I read this book close to 30 years ago, he and his partner have asked me recently, can they watch the films with me? So come over on a Sunday afternoon, watch The Fellowship of the Ring, come back another day and watch The Two Towers and so on.

Pardon me. They're now in their 30s. They're not kids anymore.

And it's very touching that it has that place in his life that he wants to share it. But to go back to Bombadil, the beauty of Bombadil is that he's, in a sense, the antithesis of the Hobbits. So whereas the Hobbits, by and large, and even Frodo until this dramatic passage you've just read, think of themselves as living in this quiet corner of the world, and they're quite content with that.

And they're barely aware of the outside world. Their maps show mostly wide spaces beyond the borders of the Shire. Bombadil, on the other hand, has lived through the entire history of the world.

And he can tell stories going all the way back. And so when the Hobbits, the four of them who have left the Shire, get caught up in the old forest and monstered by old man Willow, Bombadil comes along and rescues them, takes them back to his place, and puts them up for a few nights and tells them stories. And it's the nature of these stories, which is not ominous in the way that Gandalf's news about the Ring is.

That's contemporary. That's now. That's on your finger or in your hands, and it's coming to get you kind of thing.

That's Gandalf's news. Bombadil's just saying, yeah, we live in this extraordinary world and things come and go and change. And that too made a profound impression on me.

It's thinking, wow, so I live in this little quiet parish out in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne and we go to mass on Sundays, but the world is big and it's old and it's fascinating. I want more of that, even as a child. So I went to get some of it.

I'll pick it up from here. So it's sort of in midstream. He's been telling them stories around the fire in his place at night.

And it says, as they listened, they began to understand the lives of the forest apart from themselves, indeed to feel themselves as the strangers where all other things were at home. Moving constantly in and out of his talk was old man Willow, and Frodo learned now enough to content him, indeed more than enough, for it was not comfortable law. Tom's words laid bare the hearts of trees and their thoughts, which were often dark and strange and filled with a hatred of things that go free upon the earth, gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning, destroyers and usurpers.

It was not called the old forest without reason, for it was indeed ancient, a survivor of vast forgotten woods, and in it they lived yet, ageing no quicker than the hills, the fathers of the fathers of trees, remembering times when they were lords. The countless years had filled them with pride and rooted wisdom and with malice, but none were more dangerous than the great Willow. His heart was rotten, but his strength was green, and he was cunning and a master of winds, and his song and thought ran through the woods on both sides of the river.

His grey, thirsty spirit drew power out of the earth and spread like the fine root-threads in the ground and invisible twig-fingers in the air, till it had under its dominion nearly all the trees of the forest from the hedge to the downs. Suddenly Tom's talk left the woods and went leaping up the young stream over bubbling waterfalls, over pebbles and worn rocks, and among small flowers in close grass and wet crannies, wandering at last up onto the downs. They heard of the great barrows and the green mounds, and the stone rings upon the hills and in the hollows among the hills.

Sheep were bleeding in flocks. Green walls and white walls rose. There were fortresses on the heights.

Kings of little kingdoms fought together, and the young sun shone like fire on the red metal of their new and greedy swords. There was victory and defeat, and towers fell, fortresses were burned, and flames went up into the sky. Gold was piled on the buyers of dead kings and queens, and mounds covered them, and the stone doors were shut, and the grass grew over all.

Sheep walked for a while, biting the grass, but soon the hills were empty again. I could go on, but you get the idea. So this is him telling stories that they'd never heard before about a wide world, an old world, a world of wonder and danger and of history.

And again, as I said from the beginning this afternoon, I remember listening to Kath Gill reading this all those years ago, and I was just totally transfixed. So that these words, even when I read them now, what's present to me as a feeling is her reading of this story and my hearing it for the first time.

[Nick Fabbri] (44:25 - 44:44)

What do you think it touched within you when you were sitting there and listening and absorbing these images, these words, this universe, really? I mean, I'm sure not every person in that classroom had the same impact on, you know? I mean, what resonated within you?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (44:45 - 46:20)

I would say that the primary feeling was that I felt as though I was one of the hobbits. Right, I mean, as a child, my world was simple, and I was hearing this as they were hearing it, you know? But I think, you know, to draw out that point you make about other members of the class, I mean, I've never been in a position to appal and find out what did everybody think.

It would be interesting to know. I did meet, many years later, a fellow who had been in that class, and we hadn't seen each other in a long time, and almost the first thing we talked about was remembering the Lord of the Rings. And he said, oh, listening to that story transformed my life.

He said that. And he said a very different career to mine. But one thing that I can say, which was to a certain degree not true of most of the class, possibly not of any of the others, is I'd been a very precocious reader.

I'd been reading books of history and science for some years before that, you know? And so I suppose I had some sense of a wider world. In fact, that very year, I was reading my father's old year 11 history textbook, Mediaeval and Modern Science, which was full of maps of the changing states in the world, the rise and fall of empires and so on.

So at the age of 10, I already had some sense of that. And this novel brought it to life and made me feel like a participant observer.

[Nick Fabbri] (46:20 - 47:41)

In a sense, you know, the myth, language and poetry of the Lord of the Rings, of story, can be transposed into the real world. It's a way to actually make sense of, orient yourself, I guess, in geopolitics, in society, in your own daily experience. It lends it all a sort of mystery, a majesty, you know, which may be in a poetry, which perhaps isn't there in the actual, you know, quotidian day-to-day life that we're leading.

The other thing that stands out for me, you know, listening to you and the parallel with the Tom Bombadil part of the Lord of the Rings, is the way in which Tolkien perhaps was trying to say something about the importance of storytelling, not just in Anglo-Saxon culture, but in human culture generally, right? It's a beautiful image of Cath Gill sitting around with her young charges, you know, all 10, 11 years old, and having these flames being sort of lit within them, within their minds and their beings, you know, each in different ways, right? It might mean something else to another person.

But of course, in a parallel sense, that's happening to the hobbits with Tom Bombadil, where they're sitting around learning from him as well, the transmission of knowledge, of inspiration.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (47:42 - 48:13)

Yeah, I think it's part of the genius of Tolkien, that he puts the hobbits as simple, but, you know, solid, like, little beings full of character, right? Into the centre of the story. So, ordinary readers can identify with the hobbits and see the wider world and all the larger-than-life figures through the hobbit's eyes.

Whereas if all you saw were these larger-than-life figures, you couldn't relate to the world in quite the same way.

[Nick Fabbri] (48:13 - 48:20)

If the book was told through the story of the men or something, and you were Aragorn or Boromir or something.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (48:20 - 48:49)

Yeah. Or among the elves, you know? I mean, as you know, I thought, more or less from the start, not, I want to be Frodo Baggins, but I want to be Elrond.

And we'll come to Elrond in a moment. And because I had already, as I said a moment ago, been a precocious reader of history and of the science of archaeology and palaeontology and so on. At 10?

At 10, yeah.

[Nick Fabbri] (48:50 - 48:55)

Didn't you read, is it Isaac Deutsch's book of Stalin or the biography of Stalin?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (48:55 - 48:56)

That was the next year.

[Nick Fabbri] (48:57 - 48:58)

I'll come back to that in a moment.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (48:58 - 49:00)

But a serious reading for a young person.

[Nick Fabbri] (49:00 - 49:01)

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (49:01 - 49:01)

It's outrageous.

[Nick Fabbri] (49:02 - 49:08)

I was probably reading the Famous Five or The Day My Bum Went Psycho. Remember those, Andy Griffiths?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (49:08 - 50:12)

Yes, yes, yes, of course. I mean, my mother gave me a book when I was in grade three, so two years before The Lord of the Rings was read to us, called A Pageant of History, which had in it biographies of all the monarchs of England, essays about the origins of the British constitution, about the Bible, about Dante, about Hannibal and Caesar. And I read all that when I was in grade three.

And she gave me how and why books on the sciences. And I always remember coming home to her one day and saying, of the boy who sat next to me in class, I said, Dale's really stupid. And she said, why is he stupid?

I said, well, he doesn't even know what a palaeontologist is, Mum. So, yeah, I was, as Claudia perceived when I, you know, met her many years afterwards, and perhaps an unusual hobbit. And that's why she started calling me Frodo Baggins, and she still calls me Frodo Baggins.

Claudia, your wife. Yeah, yeah. She's Venezuelan, for those listening and wondering.

[Nick Fabbri] (50:13 - 50:14)

Venezuelana.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (50:14 - 50:14)

Yes.

[Nick Fabbri] (50:15 - 50:25)

Well, they're in, I mean, there's all kinds of troubles happening in Venezuela at the moment, with Trump sort of massing his forces as a Sauron-like figure, probably, on the horizon with Nicolas Maduro. But anyway.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (50:25 - 51:31)

Yes, yes, we could readily digress. But that is one illustration of many which we could cite of the wide world beyond the shores or borders of the Shire. And, you know, without diverting to discuss it in any detail, I mean, it's just the stuff I write about routinely.

And it often seems to me that there are many Australians, even now, who take the attitude attributed by talking to the hobbits, which is that if we just keep our heads down, don't offend anybody, trouble won't come to us. And well, good luck with that one. But to come back to Elrond, that sense of an old world, a complex world, a world of a horizon full of kingdoms and and out of dark forests and so forth, that Bombadil evokes, then gets enlarged and linked up in a way, in fact, quite directly with Gandalf's dramatic news about the Ring, when you get to Elrond's address to the council.

At Rivendell. At Rivendell, right. So those unacquainted with the story, if they're still listening to us…

[Nick Fabbri] (51:32 - 51:34)

It's been an hour already.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (51:34 - 55:09)

Yes, they may not realise who Elrond is. But the history to which Gandalf briefly adverted saying, oh, that's a long story, you know, Elrond, as we'll see, has lived through that whole story. And long ago, thousands of years before the present story, when Sauron was at the height of his power, he invaded the West and overran it and the elves were defeated.

And Elrond retreated, as Tolkien tells us, with the remnant of the Noldor, the high elves, and founded the refuge of Rivendell. And by the time this story comes, he's been there for about four and a half thousand years. And it's a place of refuge.

It's a place where the heirs of the lost kingdom of Arnor find refuge, that's where Aragorn is. And it's a house of wisdom and music and so on. And when I first, you know, listened to this account of Elrond and of Rivendell, I thought, oh, wow, you know.

And for years, I thought, that's what I want. That's what I want. But this passage is where Frodo, of course, encounters that for the first time.

So again, you're sitting as a 10-year-old boy listening to the following passage being read. And Tolkien enables you to see with wide eyes or listen with wide eyes as Elrond tells his story about all of their history, right? And I mean, I'm only reading part of this, but he fills in the background to the ring, you know.

And he says, then through all the years that followed, he traced the ring. But since that history is elsewhere recounted, even as Elrond himself set it down in his books of lore, it is not here recalled, for it is a long tale full of deeds great and terrible. And briefly though Elrond spoke, the sun rode up the sky, and the morning was passing ere he ceased.

Of Númenor he spoke, its glory and its fall, and the return of the kings of men to Middle-earth, out of the deeps of the sea, borne upon the wings of storm. Then Elendil the Tall and his mighty sons Isildur and Anárion became great lords, and the north realm they made in Arnor, and the south realm in Gondor, above the mouths of Anduin. But Sauron of Mordor assailed them, and they made the last alliance of elves and men, and the hosts of Gil-galad and Elendil were mustered in Arnor.

Thereupon Elrond paused a while and sighed. I remember well the splendour of their banners, he said. It recalled to me the glory of the Elder Days and the hosts of Beleriand.

So many great princes and captains were assembled, and yet not so many, nor so fair, as when Thangorodrim was broken, and the elves deemed that evil was ended forever. And it was not so. You remember, said Frodo, speaking his thought aloud in his astonishment.

But I thought, he stammered as Elrond turned toward him, I thought that the full of Gil-galad was a long age ago. So it was indeed, answered Elrond gravely, but my memory reaches back to the Elder Days. Erandil was my sire, who was born in Gondolin before its fall, and my mother was Elwing, daughter of Dior, son of Luthien of Doriath.

I have seen three ages in the west of the world, and many defeats, and many fruitless victories. And I just remember thinking, wow, I mean, you remember, right there with Frodo. And as somebody who'd already started reading history, you know, of ancient Greece and Rome and stuff like that, I thought, okay, that's what I want to be.

I want to be that kind of guy.

[Nick Fabbri] (55:09 - 55:16)

To have that understanding, that depth of perspective. Yeah. Most omniscience, right?

Or a personal understanding of.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (55:17 - 56:08)

Yeah, yeah. Very much, you know, when Gaelic refers to law that only the wise know, right, that could be sniffed at by people who think, oh, the pretentiousness of elites. There's quite a bit of that mood around in our time.

But what he's saying is, you know, there are people who have devoted their lives to actually trying to understand what is going on, why it's going on, where it goes back to, how to think it through. And what I saw in Gandalf and in Elrond was that. And, uh, and so for example, when I left secondary school and started law and a natural conventional, you might say Shylock path would have been to pursue the law, find a, you know, a mate, have kids, build a house.

[Nick Fabbri] (56:08 - 56:13)

A partner. Mate sounds like you're in a, you know, a zoo or something. Yeah.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (56:13 - 56:14)

Well we are pretty much.

[Nick Fabbri] (56:16 - 56:20)

Sort of just to get on with your trade and, and. Yeah.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (56:20 - 56:23)

And be a common citizen of the settled society, right?

[Nick Fabbri] (56:23 - 56:29)

But something in you strove for understanding, um, knowledge and wisdom, right? Yeah.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (56:29 - 56:33)

I wanted to be kind of Elrond. I wanted to understand how did society get this way? Yeah.

[Nick Fabbri] (56:33 - 57:00)

But when, so when, when Kath is reading you this, it's not just setting off a, uh, a beautiful, you know, imaginative fire and a sense of wonder within you, but also a kind of a sense of becoming it's almost put you in confirmed within you the journey that your deepest part of your soul wanted to, to walk down. And I find that really amazing to be able to, um, instil that in a young person at just 10 years old or 11 years old, almost like the beginning of a building's Roman or something like that.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (57:00 - 58:01)

Well, it is, I mean, certainly it's part of the buildings Roman, you know, the story of my education and I intend to write a memoir next year and, and the first volume, um, as I see it will be called Dreaming of Elrond, right? And, um, uh, but it's worth, uh, going briefly back to a point I, uh, adverted to earlier, which is that the very year after Katharine read the Lord of the Rings, not only did I then borrow it from the local library and read it for myself, but I read, as you remarked a moment ago, Isaac Deutsch's biography of Stalin. And, uh, without going into, you know, the ins and outs of the stuff I was reading at the time, I've always thought that's where the two connected up because having listened to, and then read the Lord of the Rings, it was very easy to think, sound the dark Lord, Stalin, dark tower, Kremlin, KGB, black writers.

Um, yeah, there's a symmetry there, right? And this was the Cold War world. Black and white sense, right?

Again, of the Cold War.

[Nick Fabbri] (58:01 - 58:01)

Yeah.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (58:02 - 58:47)

And in fact, many years later, 50, uh, well, 40 years after the story being read to me, I was in Brussels for a conference on China and democracy. And, uh, I'd read a book on the plane over to Europe, um, uh, called, uh, spies and moles in the Cold War, something like that. And I discovered in the process of reading the book that the author lived in Brussels.

He was a retired CIA counterintelligence specialist. And I thought, what a coincidence. I hadn't realised this.

So when I got to Brussels, I looked him up and I called him and we caught up for an afternoon and talked about the Cold War and espionage and so on. And he had read the Lord of the Rings in the 1950s when it was first published. And, and he said, what a wonderful story for the Cold War.

[Nick Fabbri] (58:48 - 59:23)

Yeah. It's just a funny image I had before when you were saying, I want to become Elrond. I thought of you when you were 15 years of age at high school, going to the careers counsellor and saying, I'd like to be Elrond.

But where does that map onto in terms of the practise of actually having to have a profession and a place in the world, right? Yes. Does that mean you become an academic?

Does it make you, as you did and your friend in Brussels did, go into the world of spycraft and understanding and intelligence? Like, what did it actually look like for you practically to try to live out this, you know, this dream of Elrond?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (59:23 - 1:05:25)

Yeah. Uh, well, that's what I'll write about in my memoir. Okay.

I'll stay tuned, dear listener. And in order to keep going on, on the Tolkien journey, we might return to it because the next page I'd like to share, um, builds further on this sense that, uh, okay, there's a big world outside the Shire. It's a dangerous world.

It's getting more dangerous. There's a long history behind this. The Ring is at the centre of it, you know?

And so they decided that they would send, uh, you know, the nine walkers off to try and get the Ring to the Crack of Doom and destroy it. Right. But along the way, they've got to get through the Misty Mountains and, uh.

The Fellowship do. The Fellowship do. Yeah.

And, uh, they, um, here we go. Um, just turning to the dramatic passage where, what happens as readers, of course, will recall, or viewers of the film, is they, they have to go through the mines of Moriah, the ruins of an ancient dwarf kingdom under the mountains. And, uh.

Because they can't get over the top. They can't get over the top. They try to go over the pass and they just get thwarted by, um, uh, by storms.

Sent by Saruman. Um, well, they suspect so, yeah. Um.

A foul voice in the air. But what they discover when they get deep into the mines of Moriah, um, what's, uh, the dwarves call Khazad-Dum, is that the, uh, the dark spirit of the underworld, a Balrog, is still there. And it comes after them.

And it falls to Gandalf to try and protect the others from this Balrog. And the scene is, is very dramatic. But not only is it intrinsically dramatic in itself, but of course this, this brings to life far more than any talk by Gandalf to Frodo, or talk by Bumble about the history, or talk by Elrond about the history of the ring.

Right here is the darkness that's in the outside world. And it's, and it's challenging Gandalf himself with Frodo and the others hanging back thinking, oh gosh, what are we going to do? Right.

Um, and, uh, and Gandalf emerges, of course, as the, uh, champion that he is. Well, don't give it away. Um, where are we?

Another page or so. Here we go. Um, so, uh, the Balrog appears before the whole group, just as they, they think they're about to escape from the mines.

And, uh, Legolas cries out, aye, aye, a Balrog, a Balrog has come. Gimli, who's the dwarf, stared with wide eyes. Durin's bane, he cried, and letting his axe fall, he covered his face.

A Balrog, muttered Gandalf, now I understand. He faltered and leaned heavily on his staff. What an evil fortune, and I'm already weary.

The dark figures, streaming with fire, raced towards them. The orcs yelled and poured over the stone gangways. Then Boromir raised his horn and blew.

Loud the challenge rang, and bellowed like the shout of many throats under the cavernous roof. For a moment the orcs quailed, and the fiery shadow altered. Then the echoes died as suddenly as a flame blown out by a dark wind, and the enemy advanced again.

Over the bridge, cried Gandalf, recalling his strength. Fly, this is a foe beyond any of you. I must hold the narrow way.

Fly! Argon and Boromir did not heed the command, but still held their ground, side by side, behind Gandalf at the far end of the bridge. The others halted just within the doorway at the hall's end and turned, unable to leave their leader to face the enemy alone.

The Balrog reached the bridge. Gandalf stood in the middle of the span, leaning on the staff in his left hand, but in his other hand Glamdring gleamed cold and white. His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings.

It raised the whip, and the thongs whined and cracked. Fire came from its nostrils, but Gandalf stood firm. You cannot pass, he said.

The orcs stood still, and a dead silence fell. I am a servant of the secret fire, wielder of the flame of Aenor. You cannot pass.

The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udrun. Go back to the shadow. You cannot pass.

The Balrog made no answer. The fire in it seemed to die, but the darkness grew. It stepped forward slowly onto the bridge, and suddenly it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall.

But still Gandalf could be seen, glimmering in the gloom. He seemed small, and altogether alone, grey and bent, like a wizened tree before the onset of a storm. From out of the shadow a red sword leapt flaming.

Glamdring glittered white in answer. There was a ringing crash and a stab of white fire. The Balrog fell back, and its sword flew up in molten fragments.

The wizard swayed on the bridge, stepped back apace, and then again stood still. You cannot pass, he said. With a bound the Balrog leapt full upon the bridge, its whip whirled and hissed.

He cannot stand alone, cried Aragorn suddenly, and ran back along the bridge. Elendil, he shouted. I am with you, Gandalf.

Gondor, cried Boromir, and leapt after him. That moment Gandalf lifted his staff, and crying aloud he smote the bridge before him. The staff broke asunder and fell from his hand.

A blinding sheet of white flame sprang up. The bridge cracked. Right at the Balrog's feet it broke, and the stone upon which it stood crashed into the gulf, while the rest remained poised, quivering like a tongue of rock thrust out into emptiness.

With a terrible cry the Balrog fell forward, and its shadow plunged down and vanished. But even as it fell it swung its whip, and the thongs lashed and curled about the wizard's knees, dragging him to the brink. He staggered and fell, grasped vainly at the stone, and slid into the abyss.

Fly, you fools, he cried, and was gone. Stunning and well read. That was really beautiful.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:05:26 - 1:05:55)

So rich in imagery, you know. And the voices again. What in that moment is represented?

Is it that sort of Tolkien Catholic sense of good and evil? Is that what is at the pointy end of that image of, you know, Gandalf and the world of Middle-earth against the dark forces of… Well, I mean, the Balrog is sort of even beyond Sauron, isn't it?

It taps into the deeper mythology and history of Middle-earth.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:05:55 - 1:06:20)

Yeah, it goes back to the first age. It was a servant of Morgoth, right, as Sauron was. And yes, I think, I mean, Tolkien had a lively sense not only of Catholic teaching, which he, you know, he clearly believed in.

He was a devout Catholic. Not just what we would call these days a cultural Catholic. I think he really believed these things.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:06:22 - 1:06:28)

I used to pray at the Oratory in Oxford, and I was there about a year and a half ago.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:06:29 - 1:08:06)

So for him, religious practises were not something that is just sort of pro forma, and you do them, but indifferently. It's just habit or something. No, he practised his beliefs.

And he believed that the, as it were, warp and weft of the world had to do with the question of the divine and the diabolical. And all the great religions in their different ways wrestle with those questions. But his was Catholic.

But it was also English. And he was steeped in Norse sagas and legends from Iceland to old Germany and Norway. And you made a remark before about how the very idea of story seems to come through when Bombella talks to the Hobbits.

Tolkien, in fact, well before he wrote The Lord of the Rings, or even The Hobbit, wrote a tale called The Cottage of Lost Play, which was never published until it became part of his son Christopher's large edition of his father's papers. And it's clear that therefore from a very early age, he felt that the telling of stories, the listening to stories, the making of stories was a very important part of human experience. Indeed, yeah.

Cross cultures. Yes. And over decades, he worked densely with this in what he taught, in what he wrote privately, in how he saw the world.

And fortuitously, in the late 1930s and 1940s, this is what produced the phenomenon sui generis of The Lord of the Rings.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:08:06 - 1:08:45)

Right, right. But the sense in which storytelling, like fables, like biblical stories, like myths, can be ways in which to impart upon everyday people senses of good and evil, right? And you see that crystallised right there in the image of Gandalf the Grey, a symbol of light and goodness and righteousness, godliness even, or the divine, combating this demonic figure from the depths of the earth, this chthonic kind of demon, the Balrog.

And of course, in the film, the Balrog is rendered with the devil's horns, and he's quite like the devil, really.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:08:45 - 1:10:47)

And of course, Gandalf is a kind of Christ-like figure. He's clearly not presented as Jesus, as the Son of God. It's not an allegory, as Tolkien says.

This is a story of his own. Nevertheless, he falls into the pit after taking down the Balrog. And as we subsequently learn in the book, he has this fight in the underworld with the Balrog.

Finally, he casts the Balrog down, but then himself passes away, only to be brought back. Sort of reincarnated. Right, it's a kind of resurrection, right?

And he comes back as Gandalf the White, as he says at one point, perhaps I am Saruman, Saruman as he should have been. I am now the most powerful wizard, and I am the enemy of Sauron, sent back to contest with him until the task is accomplished. So there's something, you know, a Catholic or a Christian will readily think of that as a kind of parallel to Jesus and the resurrection and so on.

But there are many stories, many myths of heroes, of deaths of heroes, of gods and so on, coming back and so on. Humanity has many of these stories. Why?

Because as Joseph Campbell says, this is the hero's journey, right? And Tolkien takes us on that journey, but crucially and almost uniquely, he takes us primarily through the experience of the hobbits on that journey, right? And this, as I said earlier, is a distinctive feature, whereby you don't have, you know, common people, the adventurous four or the famous five or whatever, who just are the story, really.

Or just the larger than life characters, you know, who in a manner from Ivanhoe to James Bond, are warriors that do all this stuff and you just look on in awe. It's got both, because the hobbits are everyman, right? And the larger than life figures exist and interact, right?

But the hobbits are a crucial ingredient, a kind of yeast in the whole thing.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:10:47 - 1:11:15)

But it's a Christian message ultimately, isn't it? You know, the idea that the meek shall inherit the earth and a Christian idea. Well, it's not just a Christian idea, but the Tolkien Catholic sense that there is that goodness and sacredness in every individual person, right?

Who's not a king or a ruler or some sort of potentate or a powerful rich person. You actually shine a light on, yeah, the dignity of each individual human soul.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:11:15 - 1:12:23)

Yes. And, you know, and in fact, this is a natural step into the next passage. I did intend to read in full the passage about Treebeard, but given time constraints, I'll skip that, given we read a snippet of it earlier.

Because when Sam and Frodo get to almost the last gasp, they're in Mordor, they're on the stairs of Cirith Ungol. But they fall into a conversation sitting there on the stairs of Cirith Ungol about the whole idea of story. And this is one of the most ingenious parts of the book, I think, if I can just find it quickly.

And I just, we talked about Sam in particular, among the hobbits, being such an endearing character who grows and grows throughout the story, right? And here he is sitting with his master, you know, with Frodo, not as a slave, but as a servant, you know, and he refers to Frodo as master.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:12:23 - 1:12:24)

He does.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:12:25 - 1:14:39)

Mr. Frodo. So I pick it up at a point where Frodo says, I don't like anything here at all. Uh, said Frodo, step or stone, breath or bone, earth, air and water, all seem accursed, but so our path is laid.

Yes, that's so, said Sam, and we shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo. Adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk in the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting, and life was a bit dull, kind of sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it, with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind.

Folk seem to have just landed in them, usually. Their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't.

And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on, not all to a good end, mind you, at least not to what folk inside a story, and not outside it, call a good end. You know, coming home and finding things all right, they're not quite the same, like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in. I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into. I wonder, said Frodo, but I don't know.

And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know or guess what kind of tale it is, happy ending or sad ending, but the people in it don't know, and you don't want them to.

No, sir, of course not. Beren, now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past to happiness and into grief and beyond it.

And the Silmaril went on and came to Arendelle. And why, sir, I never thought of that before. You've got some of the light of it in that starglass the lady gave you.

Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still. It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?

I could read more, but you can't.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:14:39 - 1:15:05)

Yeah, it's beautiful. It's a sense in which, you know, the life you're leading is part of your own story, if you looked at it from a different perspective, or in the meta sense here, the perspective of Tolkien, the author, you know, bringing them into being, but also in the way in which your story is actually connected to the shadow of the past. It's almost an extension of all that has gone before you, and in a way, predetermined and informed so much of what makes up your own life, you know?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:15:05 - 1:15:22)

Yeah, yeah. You begin to see, and we've seen this grow in the passages we've read, that the world which you took for granted as so simple and straightforward and homely is full of stuff that takes on meaning the more you open your eyes.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:15:22 - 1:15:22)

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:15:24 - 1:15:44)

And that, I think, is just beautifully crafted, because you see right there on the spot, Sam realising, wow, we're not only in a story, and it's a challenging story, but it's a certain kind of story. And if that story is to appeal to people in the future, then the people in it have to stick at it. They have to get through it.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:15:45 - 1:16:05)

Yeah. It's a positivist vision, and it's almost an endorsement of an idea of agency and freedom of choice and self-determination, combined with that sense of predetermination because of immovable historical facts and dynamics, right?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:16:05 - 1:16:25)

Yes, yes. And then, of course, he realises that Frodo was given this thing by Galadriel in which has a little of the light of the Silmarillion. And it suddenly dawns on him, we are now part of a story that goes back to the Elder Days.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:16:25 - 1:16:25)

Indeed.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:16:25 - 1:16:32)

So at Rivendell, you hear Orroth saying, I remember back to the Elder Days, and Frodo saying, wow. And now they realise they're in that same story.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:16:32 - 1:17:53)

Yeah. It's a beautiful discovery and a realisation, and it's so affirming as well. I mean, you think about our lives, and sometimes, I think, in the 21st century, we can feel atomised and that the bonds of culture and society and history are perhaps looser on us than they were in decades and generations past.

I've called them before the sterile acolytes of modernity, and almost like a rootless global cosmopolitanism. But then you think about it, back to Tolkien and the way in which language connects you to a deeper past. We're speaking the English language.

We're connected in a way to the British Isles, to the history and the lore of those peoples, as are many other Australians who speak different languages here. I don't just turn up in the late 1990s as I did. I am connected to the story of migration to this country.

I owe my existence to hospitals and schooling and education, other people's lives as well. There's a sense of your almost insignificance as a person. It's actually dependent on so much more that's come before you.

If only you'd look and seek to understand.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:17:53 - 1:18:09)

To understand yourself, this is what Sam is realising. You look back and you realise Nicholas Fabbri is of Italian stock. Genetically, that means something.

That takes him back in a particular human direction. To Rome, you know.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:18:11 - 1:18:24)

My family name is Fabbri, which is from the Latin faber fabris masculine, which means engineer or craftsman. So perhaps millennia ago, we were all blacksmiths and tradesmen and things like that.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:18:24 - 1:19:10)

I don't know about millennia ago, because the name Fabbri probably wouldn't have come down that long. But in any case, the thing is that it's only by stopping to reflect on those things, genetics, language, family, ancestry, country, that meaning for you arises. If you take all of that or your immediate environs for granted, and you just get on with the obvious and the immediate, you might have a perfectly sound life.

But many people, I think, when they do that, realise at the moments that they pause or when they get exhausted, or if something goes wrong, like a marriage breakup or something, they can feel terribly empty because they don't have a deeply rooted sense of who they are.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:19:12 - 1:19:30)

I think it might be fitting to read an excerpt from the Treebeard section, because that idea of rootedness is something that's, I think, a very pregnant notion in that particular scene as well, where the ents are talking about the sense of place in which they take their being from.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:19:31 - 1:20:47)

Well, the passage I was going to read, and which I read an excerpt from earlier, is just about Treebeard recalling that there used to be this one great forest in the old days, and human settlement has gradually stripped it back, so there's only remnants of it left. And that's always been a favourite passage. There are many other passages in the chapter where he talks about trees and the forest and time, and he obviously lives with this very expansive sense of time that he famously says to the hobbits, hmm, you are hasty folk.

That anything that's worth saying takes a long time to say. And that slows you down, right? You listen to that and you think, wow, you know?

And so then you're better equipped imaginatively if you go, even on a school expedition to a forest or a geological site, to just be with the reality of what is there. The rocks are old, and when you get in geology you realise, wow, I mean, all these layers aren't random. They tell you the history of the earth.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:20:48 - 1:20:49)

For hundreds and millions of years.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:20:49 - 1:20:51)

Billions, even.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:20:51 - 1:21:18)

And also there's been an effort also in the geography and place names of here in Melbourne to surface and kind of normalise indigenous place names and indigenous history as well. Because unless things are known about and talked about, then that sense of 60,000 years of prehistory before Europeans' settlement and colonisation is lost. That's disorienting as well, because we didn't just appear here 237 years ago.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:21:18 - 1:21:20)

Well, we did, but other humans didn't.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:21:20 - 1:21:20)

Well, indeed.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:21:23 - 1:23:48)

There's so much to unpack. Just quickly, before I get to that, what I call the famous passage, you know, about the antiquity of the forest, it's when Pippin first sees, or Pippin and Mary first see Treebeard, and they realise this is a living being. We thought it was a tree, right?

Because they flee into Fangorn Forest, right? Yeah, they flee from the battle between the Orcs and the men of Rowan, and they go some distance, and this is where I perhaps pick it up, where Pippin's saying to Mary, you know, this shaggy old forest looks so different in the sunlight. I almost felt I liked the place.

And then the voice says, almost felt you liked the forest. That's good. That's uncommonly kind of you, said a strange voice.

Turn around and let me have a look at your faces. I almost feel that I dislike you both, but do not let us be hasty. Turn around.

A large knob-knuckled hand was laid on each of their shoulders, and they were twisted round gently but irresistibly. Then two great arms lifted them up. They found that they were looking at a most extraordinary face.

It belonged to a large man-like, almost troll-like figure, at least fourteen feet high, very sturdy, with a tall head and hardly any neck. Whether it was clad in stuff like green and grey bark, or whether that was its hide was difficult to say. At any rate, the arms, at a short distance from the trunk, were not wrinkled, but covered with a brown, smooth skin.

The large feet each had seven toes. The lower part of the long face was covered with a sweeping grey beard, bushy, almost twiggy at the roots, thin and mossy at the ends. But at the moment the hobbits noted little but the eyes.

These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating. They were brown, shot with a light green, sorry, with a green light. Often afterwards Pippin tried to describe his first impression of them.

One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking. But their surface was sparkling with the present, like sun, shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. Beautiful, isn't it?

[Nick Fabbri] (1:23:50 - 1:23:54)

And that really, to me, I think evokes Tolkien's love of nature and trees in particular.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:23:55 - 1:24:26)

Oh yeah, yeah. And his close appreciation. There's not some throwaway piece of rhetoric about, you know, ecology, but these living things, you know.

And of course Treebeard takes them through the forest and they get to see, through his eyes as it were, the great variety of trees that there are. The different ages, even the different characters of the trees. And Treebeard's whole way of life is literally rooted in treeishness.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:24:27 - 1:25:04)

And it's such a contrast to, I think, what Tolkien grappled with emerging from the Edwardian era, the late Victorian era, into the, you know, materialism of the 20th century, the mechanisation of the 20th century, its unnaturalness in a way. And, you know, again, the rootlessness of, the growing rootlessness of society. It's a kind of a conservative Tory attitude to the world of localism, of stewardship for your local area, you know, and the built, you know, the traditions and histories of your place.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:25:04 - 1:26:09)

Yes, yes. But when you say a conservative Tory, so yes, he was conservative, no two ways about it, but in a charming, deeply humane way. And what he enables us to get through the figures of the Hobbits is something of his appreciation of the British commoner.

I mean, there were many people then, I'm not sure to what extent this is still the case, but certainly in his day, there were many people whose families had lived in the same village for centuries. You know, they had, they were just like Hobbits in that sense, right? And because of his love of the language and how it had changed over many centuries, he had this deeply raw sense of slow change over time, of continuity, you know, and change within continuity.

And that's what you find in his characterisation of Elrond and Bombadil of Treebeard. And the Hobbits are present-day people being introduced by Tolkien to that.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:26:09 - 1:26:29)

Yeah. And his sense of rootedness in that British tradition goes so far back because he was a scholar of Beowulf, which I think was one of the first, you know, sagas or work of story in the very early or proto-English language. Is that right?

It's sort of, he was a scholar of obviously early mediaeval language.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:26:29 - 1:27:52)

Yes, yes. And he did his own translation of Beowulf and he lectured on it. He wrote about, you know, Beowulf, you know, the tale and the critics.

But more generally, you know, he tapped into the whole non-Latin world. You know, you might say the world east of the Rhine and north of the Danube and its legends, Scandinavian legends, Icelandic legends. Where did English come from?

Well, it came from there. And when the Vikings raided, they came from there. And when the Danes conquered half of England, they came from there.

Right. And it's all of that that he steeped in. And by the way, there's a charming book published a couple of years ago now.

I think it's called Lost Realms. And it's written by a British historian inspired by Tolkien's work and by the Lord of the Rings in particular, to reconstruct insofar as it can be done, many of the evanescent little kingdoms that existed in post Roman Britain, Celtic kingdoms, Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that rose and fell on the margins of the larger ones, out of which England as we think of it, and eventually Norman England slowly grew.

It's fascinating.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:27:53 - 1:28:06)

Yeah, but the fractals of language and the traditions which filter up in the modern day over the last centuries to those small hobbits, as we mentioned today, those imprints are probably still there, such was the rootedness of these peoples.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:28:06 - 1:31:23)

Absolutely, they are. I mean, if you get down into the roots of the way people actually speak, you know, you realise that we say that there's one language, English, we associate it and we're taught it as what you might call, you know, Kentish English or the Queen's English. But all over England, right up to the present, people speak English in many, many different dialects.

And if you go up into Northumbria, or, you know, if you go to Liverpool or York or whatever, they speak a different English, you know. And it won't do to say, though the naive might instinctively feel this, that those other people don't speak correctly. You know, there's a wonderful song, of course, in My Fair Lady, while Henry Higgins sings, why can't the English teach their children how to speak, right?

And he's implying that there's one correct way to speak English. But there's not, there's really no linguistic conventions, right? And language changes over time.

And English as he understood it was very much an evolved language. You know, but shall I then? Yes.

Read this other passage, right? So, I'm going to pick it up. This is where Merriam-Pippen is saying, well, so what, what are ants, you know?

And, and Treebeard answers, we are tree herds, we old ants. Few enough of us are left now. Sheep get like shepherd, and shepherds like sheep, it is said, but slowly, and neither have long in the world.

It is quicker and closer with trees and ants, and they walk down the ages together. For ants are more like elves, less interested in themselves than men are, and better at getting inside other things. And yet again ants are more like men, more changeable than elves are, and quicker at taking the colour of the outside, you might say, or better than both, for they are steadier and keep their minds on things longer.

Some of my kin look just like trees now, and need something great around them, and they speak only in whispers. But some of my trees are limb-light, and many can talk to me. Elves began it, of course, waking trees up and teaching them to speak, and learning their tree-talk.

They always wished to talk to everything the old elves did. But then the great darkness came, and they passed away over the sea, or fled into far valleys and hid themselves, and made songs about days that would never come again, never again. Ay, ay, there was all one wood once upon a time from here to the mountains of Lulun, and this was just the east end.

Those were the broad days. Time was when I could walk and sing all day, and hear no more than the echo of my own voice in the hollow hills. The woods were like the woods of Lothlorien, only thicker, stronger, younger.

And the smell of the air, I used to spend a week just breathing.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:31:25 - 1:31:27)

There's a real romanticism there, isn't there?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:31:27 - 1:32:27)

Yeah, yeah. I've always loved that passage. And again, it's one of many, as I've said, of several passages.

I can still feel the impact on me from all those years ago, of Kath reading it, and I can feel the impression it made on my brain, on my nervous system. It's like, wow, this is a whole new way of feeling about the world. I lived in a place which was actually called Forest Hill, and if you stood at a relatively high point, like the local railway station, it looked as if there was nothing but forest.

You didn't see acres of houses, you saw all these trees. But that was a bit of an illusion, because in fact there were houses and roads. But I didn't experience Forest Hill as a forest, I experienced it as a suburb where there were trees.

And I never experienced trees the way Tolkien describes them, as living beings that you would just commune with, or be with, or be awestruck by.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:32:28 - 1:33:01)

Indeed. But that's that naturalistic appreciation of the world, of nature as being not something necessarily to be mastered and controlled and utilised for commercial ends, or for the comfort solely of man. There is an intrinsic value in nature in itself which is worth conserving, which of course, throughout the 20th century, as we said before, with the rise of modernity and the spread of capitalism and development around the world, much of the biosphere has been destroyed.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:33:01 - 1:33:58)

It has, but it's worth remembering, and I'm not sure how aware of this even Tolkien was, that this isn't simply a phenomenon of the contemporary world. There's a very good study recently by Edith Hall called Epic of the Earth, which is a re-reading of the Iliad, in order to discern what were the implicit attitudes of Bronze Age warriors, or Homer as an 8th century BC poet, to the natural world. And the main point she makes is that the Mediterranean basin, beginning of the Bronze Age, was still thickly forested.

Deforestation proceeded apace in the Bronze Age because wood was used for everything. It was used for fuel, it was used for building houses, it was used for building ships, it was used for funeral pyres, it was used prodigally. And she shows us how wood is used prodigally in the Iliad.

Right.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:33:59 - 1:34:03)

Without a sense of it being finite and irreplaceable.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:34:03 - 1:34:44)

Yeah, that's right. It was just there and you used it. In the same way, of course, people in that era, and through the Iron Age, you know, the Roman era or even before then, the Assyrians, used to go hunting lions and so forth.

And there used to be lions right through the Middle East and even in Europe. There aren't, haven't been for thousands of years now because human beings killed them off. Mark Elvin, as I pointed out in reviewing Edith Hall's book, wrote a book called The Retreat of the Elephants about 20 years ago, which was an environmental history of China.

And he begins basically by saying, if you go back to the beginning of the Bronze Age, there were hippopotami and elephants in China, all the way from Yunnan to Siberia.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:34:45 - 1:34:45)

Amazing.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:34:45 - 1:35:07)

There are none anymore. Human beings used them as the Romans and others did in war. They took over their grazing lands to make farms.

They killed them off as pests. They hunted them down for their tusks, right. Or for their trunks as a delicacy for food.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:35:07 - 1:35:10)

It's an ancient impulse in human beings.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:35:10 - 1:35:48)

Once we became weaponised, we, our species, and this is true around the world, our species emerged from the last glacial maximum. Survivors, toolmakers, predators. And in the 9,000 years that have since elapsed, we have taken over the planet.

We have invented and invented more and more potent tools, right. And we have become the apex predator on the planet. There's nothing that can stand in our path when we set our minds against it.

We treat the world as if it's there simply for our use and benefit.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:35:49 - 1:35:59)

And the image of that in The Lord of the Rings is, of course, Saruman at Isengard and the orcs tearing down the forest, which enrages the Ents. And they go and destroy it, isn't it? Yes, yes.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:36:00 - 1:39:30)

Of many passages, it would be fun to share if we had all day. That's one of them. We go to Wartor to hew the stone and break the door.

This is the tribute, and the Ents arouse. But in order to sort of bring some closure to this delightful discussion, I thought I might read two more passages. One is Gandalf, the revived Gandalf confronting the Witch King of Angmar, the Lord of the Rings of the Nazgul, at the gate of Minas Tirith, where the forces of Mordor have used this huge ram to break the gate of Minas Tirith, Grond of the Underworld.

And in under the arch, as the gates tumble, comes the Lord of the Nazgul, the Black Rider, Supremo. Seemingly triumphant. Seemingly triumphant.

And all that stands between him and the sack of Minas Tirith is Gandalf on Shatterfax. And what we know if we're reading the book is that the men of Minas Tirith have been hoping against hope that the riders of Roan would come to their rescue. But the siege had gone on and there were no riders of Roan.

And many of the defenders were dead or they were fleeing deep into the city, you know, giving up. As you can see in the film, it's sort of dramatically enacted. And so it reads as follows.

Then the Black Captain rose in his stirrups and cried aloud in a dreadful voice, speaking in some forgotten tongue words of power and terror to rend both heart and stone. Thrice he cried. Thrice the great ram boomed.

And suddenly, upon the last stroke, the Gate of Gondor broke. As if stricken by some blasting spell, it burst asunder. There was a flash of searing lightning, and the doors tumbled in riven fragments to the ground.

In rode the Lord of the Nazgul. A great black shape against the fires beyond, he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgul under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.

All save one. There, waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, said Gandalf upon Shadowfax. Shadowfax, who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Wrathdeinen.

"'You cannot enter here,' said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. "'Go back to the abyss prepared for you. Go back.

Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your master. Go!' The black rider flung back his hood, and behold he had a kingly crown, and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fire shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark.

From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter. "'Old fool!' he said. "'Old fool!

This is my hour. Do you not know death when you see it? Die now, and curse in vain!' And with that he lifted high his sword, and flames ran down the blade.

Gandalf did not move, and in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the city, a cock crowed, shrill and clear, he crowed, wrecking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn. And as if in answer, it came from far away another note. "'Horns!

Horns! Horns!' In Darkmendoluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the north, wildly blowing.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:39:31 - 1:39:41)

Rowan had come at last.'" That's stunning, and then that's the famous scene where they sort of pour down the hills and with the life behind them.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:39:42 - 1:40:06)

It's fantastic, isn't it? And so I thought I might conclude, as I indicated at the start, with a single paragraph, really, of Sam, after the whole adventure is over, and he's seen Frodo and Gandalf and Galadriel and all the others sail across into the west, he comes back to Hobbiton, to his home, and to his wife, Rosie Cotton, and their daughter, Elnor.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:40:06 - 1:40:07)

Who he'd hoped to marry.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:40:08 - 1:40:09)

He has married by then.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:40:09 - 1:40:13)

Yeah. Well, indeed, throughout the story here. I think he mentioned it.

He said, I'd love to marry Rosie or something.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:40:14 - 1:40:16)

And just have a simple garden, right?

[Nick Fabbri] (1:40:16 - 1:40:17)

What a beautiful life.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:40:17 - 1:40:47)

And of course he has, but he's a much more substantial person than he was when he left the Shire, right? This is what the hero's journey is all about, again, to evoke Joseph Campbell. But the beauty of this is the simplicity.

So he doesn't become a hero in armour, towering above others, lording it above him, becoming king. He goes back to his simple abode, his garden, his wife and child, and it's home. And that's a really Tolkienian thing as well.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:40:47 - 1:40:49)

Cincinnatus with the plough, you know?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:40:50 - 1:42:42)

Well, yes, although, again, you see, Cincinnatus was, let's say, a great commoner. You might say a weak tradition, but Sam remains a completely unassuming character. This is just Samwise Gamgee.

And Tolkien tells in the appendices about a bit of the life of the Hobbits after the story ends. But I think the beauty of this is that whereas there's been this colossal war and desperate strife and heroes dying or winning glory, Sam has been a little unassuming, but in the end, crucial figure in that whole story. And at the end, does he feel, you know, I'm great?

No, he's Samwise Gamgee and he comes back to Rosie and Nello. And then I think this is just a lovely note on which the story ends. At last the three companions, and he's talking about Marian Pippin and Sam, turned away, and never again looking back, they rode slowly homewards, and they spoke no word to one another until they came back to the shire, but each had great comfort in his friends on the long grey road.

At last they rode over the dams and took the east road, and then Marian Pippin rode on to Buckland, and already there was singing again as they went. But Sam turned to Bywater, and so came back up the hill as they was ending once more. And he went on, and there was yellow light and fire within, and the evening meal was ready.

And he was expected, and Rose drew him in and set him in his chair and put little Eleanor upon his lap. He drew a deep breath. Well, I'm back, he said.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:42:43 - 1:42:52)

Beautiful, isn't it? And so much has happened in his own life and story, which the hobbits in the shire are probably unaware, right? But he has changed so much inside, right?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:42:52 - 1:42:56)

He's changed, and people around him are at least aware.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:42:56 - 1:43:06)

Yeah, but they could never really know. It's the same in so many wartime stories, if you return home and no one can really relate to understand. That's right, yeah.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:43:06 - 1:43:51)

Yeah, a thought came unbidden to me then that, you know, I talked about writing a memoir, which I plan to do next year. And even that, in some ways, is rooted in the impact of Tolkien on me. Because Bilbo is his adventure, and then he writes his book.

And we know that after The Lord of the Rings is over, Sam and Merry and Pippin, and to some extent Frodo, get involved in writing down. So what did we experience here, right? So the very idea of writing a memoir, to say nothing of the fact that the opening volume is to be called Dreaming of Elrond, is indicative of that enduring influence on me.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:43:52 - 1:44:21)

Yeah, but the sense in which you are Samwise Gamgee, I'm sitting back and saying, I'm back. You know, after nearly 60 years on from when it was first read to you in 1967, as a youngster, you can look back on your journey, your hero's journey, your story of The Lord of the Rings, whichever character you figured as, and just think, wow, I've done all these things. I've been, you know, all across Middle Earth, you know, met all kinds of people, you know.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:44:22 - 1:46:31)

It's traversed so much territory. You remarked, it brings to mind an instance, which I'm sure I've described to you, a journey I was on a few years ago, when I visited Poland as the guest of the Polish government. And one of the many meetings I had was with the Undersecretary of State for East Asia.

So the agenda was to talk about China, Japan, Korea, etc. He walks in, he sits down opposite me with three staff on either side of him. And he opens up to my astonishment by saying, Dr. Monk, I understand that you're a member of the Rationalist Society of Australia and that you've lost your faith. And I immediately replied, no, I didn't lose my faith. I put it exactly where it belongs. Now, that, of course, is open to interpretation.

What did I mean by exactly where it belongs? Well, here's one way to frame that. I grew up, as I said earlier, in a Catholic family, in a Catholic parish, in a shire-like atmosphere of orderliness and simplicity and unpretentiousness.

And I still have fond memories of all of that. I never repudiated that. But I did end up learning, as Frodo does first, and the other hobbits on the journey about the outside world, and in some considerable depth.

I studied at university for many years, and I worked in intelligence, and I've travelled the world, and I write about world affairs. And I remember when I first went aboard on fieldwork for the PhD, I was exalted, and a way of thinking about this is, I wasn't fleeing in peril, into danger. I wasn't Frodo in that sense.

But there's a sense in which I was crossing the Brandywine for the first time. And I remember flying out of Sydney on my way to Honolulu and thinking, yes, yes, I'm going out into the wide world. And I went right around the world on that first trip.

I visited 11 countries in eight and a half months. People you met, you talked, you learned. Oh, yeah.

And I spent months in US archives. I visited Central America. I visited the Philippines, Japan.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:46:31 - 1:46:31)

Magical.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:46:32 - 1:47:31)

Yeah, it was extraordinary. Without the threat of ringwraiths following you, you know? Well, that's right.

I mean, I was delving into the Cold War, which was still very much happening. And I was doing field research in places like El Salvador and the Philippines, which were in the middle of civil wars with communist insurgents. And I was investigating the relationship between the CIA and death squads in such countries.

Dark stuff. Yeah. So, I mean, this was the real world as compared with the fable.

But you might say that morally, humanly, my whole approach to why am I trying to find out this stuff? How do I think about this? How does it strike me?

I would say for all the serious learning that I'd done was shaped, as I said, that moral and personal level very much by talking.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:47:32 - 1:48:36)

And yet so much of, I guess, the Lord of the Rings' popularity in recent times and over recent decades, even before the film, has been from Christian conservative demographics who use Tolkien stories as a sort of Christian allegory or just a way to sort of articulate Christian belief. Whereas you obviously, despite your name being monk, you are an atheist, right? And you're a rationalist and you've never sort of been moved by, from a place of belief, the Christian story.

So, I've never really understood, and we've known each other for nearly 14 years now, why you're such an avid lover of Tolkien and the story and the myth and the symbolism and the archetypes of good and evil, of the goodness of the Hobbits, for instance. And yet you don't sort of allow yourself to be swept into it. At least allow yourself to be swept into the mystery of faith.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:48:37 - 1:49:30)

And the answer is actually disarmingly simple, and that is that, and Joseph Campbell, of course, was all about this, so I didn't read his work until much more recently, but that the Christian story, along with many other myths and religious teachings or philosophies, doesn't transcend the actual world. It is an attempt to explain the mystery and the challenge of being alive. And I decided very early on, it's that actual mystery and challenge that I want to access.

So, I want to understand the religions and the myths, but not as a believer, as if they're literally true, as Campbell says. No, they are an indication of what happens inside us and between us. They're not something that is over above us, like a crystalline structure in much worship and abidement.

That's where dogmatism goes astray, right?

[Nick Fabbri] (1:49:31 - 1:50:24)

And yet I still think we asked the question at the outset, when we were talking about how popular The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit have been as works of fiction, and indeed the films, we asked the simple question, why? And I think it is a feeling of transcendence when we read the books and the stories, we immerse ourselves in the films, and we like to, perhaps symbolically or metaphorically, imagine ourselves living our lives on that grander mythic scale where every day we're fighting for good over evil, and maybe for evil over good. But Christianity has that transcendent sense as well to it.

And it's like, my life means something more than, I guess, the physical finite earth, right? There's divine truth.

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:50:24 - 1:52:14)

Well, that's where the story, the language of the Christian story takes you, or takes one. I took Tolkien, and he was a believer, you know? He was a believer.

But his work, you're used to it, allegories, The Lord of the Rings is not, as he pointedly states, an allegory of Christian belief. It is rather geared to the history of things that happened, which is why he talks about these stories being grounded in things written down by the hobbits after the story's over, and the Red Book of Westmarch, and so on, right? And I think that's the key to it.

For any given one of us, we do try tacitly, most people, to be honest, pretty raggedly, to see us as living a story of some kind, right? And we make up stories that we think explain what's going on. Great storytellers, serious historians, enlarged that for us.

I think Tolkien was a great storyteller. I have set out to become, I have become, you might say, an historian, you know, think about international relations, and a poet, in the interest of being able not simply to exist as if passively in accepting doctrines or a particular authoritative story, but to generate story. And my beloved partner in life, Claudia, long ago said to me, I think very perceptively, do you realise that we are living a story that has not yet been written?

Now you get an idea of what a great story can be by reading books like Lord of the Rings, but you have to live your story. And that means being free and open to seeing things that you didn't set out to find, you didn't expect them, and then rising to the chances you encounter.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:52:15 - 1:53:14)

As a hero on an adventure. And the final reflection or vignette or image I'd like to end on, which I personally experienced actually over in Oxford last year, was at the cemetery called Wolvercote Cemetery in the north of Oxford. And hidden amongst all the ageing tombstones, philosophers like Isaiah Berlin are buried there.

There's a really charming gravestone inscribed J.R.R. Tolkien and Edith Tolkien, his wife. And underneath each of the names is Beren and Luthien. And do you want to speak to maybe that sense of transcendence and maybe ultimate purpose of the love that Tolkien shared with his wife, Edith, and the way in which he created this story in a way for her, when you think about her as being the elven princess Luthien, the most beautiful and immortal elf of all?

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:53:14 - 1:55:30)

Yes, it's very touching that he had those names inscribed on their tombs, because the legend of Beren and Luthien is one of the earliest of the fables that he wrote to give, as it were, substance to his invention of elvish languages. He's fascinated by language itself. And having immersed himself in Icelandic and Norse and old English, Anglo-Saxon, he decides he'd like to invent a language.

And he does. The languages he invents, the elven languages, are real languages. So there are people who speak and write them.

Sort of Tolkien tragics, you might say. That's never particularly grabbed me. I prefer to work in the English language.

I write my own poetry in that language and prose. But it is romantic. And in fact, this constitutes, if you like, a kind of bridge, if not a bridge of cousin doom, from this conversation to the one we plan to do next about poetry.

Because he generates, through his love for Edith, this idea of a myth of these two fabled characters falling in love across cultural and racial barriers, because one was an elf and one was a man, of having to persuade her very sceptical father that he was a fit companion for his immortal daughter, of going on a very dangerous adventure together, of suffering all sorts of things in the course of that adventure, but nevertheless ending up together in the blessed realm at the end of the day. And I have, as we'll explore in the next conversation, I put together a body of poetry recently for a particular woman, as you know, and I've expressed the hope that this body of work will mark us out forever as a pair of lovers, distinctive lovers, not cliched ones. I think that that probably is also something else that ultimately grew out of my love for Tolkien and of his primal myth of Beren and Lúthien.

[Nick Fabbri] (1:55:30 - 1:55:33)

Beautiful. Thank you for your time today, Paul. It's been an absolute pleasure.