Lore'd to Death
Join me, your host, as I dig deep into the lore of your favourite games, movies, and more to find answers to the questions that you didn't know you had!
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Lore'd to Death
Tolkien's Influence on Modern Media w/ Lore of the Rings Podcast
This week we talk to the wanderer of Middle Earth, Aaron, the host of the Lore of the Rings podcast to talk about Tolkien's influence on modern fantasy, sci-fi, board games, and everything in between. We go deep into what makes the heroes journey, how Gary Gygax got a cease and desist for using the term Hobbit in early versions of Dungeons and Dragons, and the relationship between the themes of escapism and recovery.
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In this episode, we talk about everything Lord of the Rings and its influence on culture in general. Everything from Harry Potter to Star Trek, even towards Dungeons and Dragons. Everything that we ingest has been influenced by Tolkien in one way or another. So join me in this episode where we explore those influences that Tolkien has had, and talk a little bit too much about Dune and Arcane. My name is Brett, welcome to the Lord to Death podcast. We are here with the lovely guest today from the lore of the Rings podcast, Aaron. Aaron, if you want to introduce yourself. Yes, hello everybody. This is Aaron, the Middle Earth wanderer from the lore of the Rings podcast. I like to explore J.R .R. Tolkien, his world and his works. From Middle Earth, everything from Lord of the Rings to the Hobbit to the Silmarillion and more. So if that is something that's interesting to you, then hopefully you'll hear something that peaks your interest today. And you'll keep listening to Lord to Death and also pop on over to the lore of the Rings and come wander Middle Earth with me as well. Absolutely, and I've listened to your show for quite a bit at this point, and something that really caught me, I mean, I say lately. A really good string of episodes that I'm really enjoying is you going through the Fellowship books, kind of. I say chapter by chapter, it's kind of like page by page or a few page by page and just the insight that's on those episodes. It's stuff that I wouldn't have necessarily thought of or picked up or inferred from the book because when you read a book front to back, it's easy to kind of forget what happened 100 or 200 pages ago. And in those episodes, I find you just kind of there's a lot of insight stacked into those episodes and I really, really appreciate them personally. I think they're great. Yeah, thank you. That's good feedback. And my intention in doing the Fellowship, and I'm currently doing that right now about not even halfway through the Fellowship, and it's been about a year. But my intention was to do chapter by chapter. And then I was like, oh, there's and when you read Tolkien really slowly, maybe this is the case with any book. I don't know, but especially with Tolkien and myself, when I read Tolkien really slowly, all of a sudden, these things just start to pop up off the page. Right. And so I was like, well, let me do a chapter by chapter breakdown. Oh, no, there's too much in a chapter. I'll I'll chunk it out every 10 pages or so. No, there's too much every 10 pages. Let's go down to about every four to six pages. I think there's enough to talk about there. And that's kind of has felt like a good rhythm for me. But but yeah, like you say, I'm definitely trying to help people who have never read the books or maybe they've read them and they just kind of breezed through them. But let's maybe find let's let's take a moment to not be hasty, as Treebeard might say, and and just slowly look through Middle Earth and just kind of wander along the road and see what pops up as we go as we go through the chapters. I try not to bring in a lot of academic stuff or a lot of background noise or secondary thoughts. I tried I try really let's just kind of let's just open up the book and see what we find on the pages that that are there. And and it's been a real treasure trove. It's been a fun experience. Yeah, no doubt. And it's a really good point of like just breezing through books because I tend to do that when I read books. I am you know, I would call myself a quick reader and I tend to just the way that I read is I kind of look at a paragraph and I just kind of absorb the important information. I don't necessarily go line by line. And I don't know if that's because I have ADHD and I can't just I just can't look at each word and each line. That's typically how I ingest books and it usually happens pretty quickly. And I do find that sometimes I can lose a lot of information along the way or again, it's just breezing past something and not necessarily recognizing the importance of even just one line. One line can be so important, especially in Tolkien's works. One sentence can be everything or even one line of dialogue can be so impactful. And that's why I really like that series is because you kind of get all of the impact from each line. And I think it's I like that it's in a shorter, more digestible format. If it was an hour of reading each chapter, if I had to listen to an entire hour long about Tom Bombadil, I think I might scream. But yeah, yeah, I agree with you there. And I think if you do add up all the episodes or Tom Bombadil is there, maybe it's about an hour or so. But yeah, I try to shoot for about 15, 20 minutes, give give give a listener sort of a shot of Tolkien, a little bit of wandering in the Middle Earth. And then let's go deep. But then you can go kind of move on throughout your day. I love the podcast that are like two hours explanations of history of Middle Earth versus Silmarillion versus Unfinished Tales. And let's compare that like I love listening to those sorts of things. But I feel like I am able to speak to the person who has maybe seen the films and not read the books and trying to maybe read those books for the first time or experienced Tolkien's written word for the first time. And I can kind of speak to that level of like, OK, this is you saw this in the movies, but this is kind of how it plays out in the books. And here's why it's different. And here's why it's cool in the books. And the movies are still awesome. But there's extra layer of richness and depth when you really engage with the books in that way. Yeah, I absolutely agree. So one thing that I like to start off when I have a guest is I ask the same question every time or at least a variation of the same question. And I feel like I know the answer for you, but I'll let you speak for yourself. And the question is how important is the quality of lore or the quality of how much thought is put into what you consume, whether that's a game, a book, a movie, even, you know, how important is it that the world is well thought out? Yeah, this is a great question. And as you anticipated, I'm going to say it is extremely important for me. Of course. And it goes beyond just world building. And it's and it goes beyond just I'll say it this way. Tolkien once wrote an essay called on fairy stories in which he sort of outlined his philosophy or his principles on how do you make a good story? And in his in his mind, a good story does more than just help us to merely suspend our disbelief. Right. Like when we engage with fantasy or a video game or a good movie or a book, we have to suspend our disbelief and take upon us the beliefs of this new world. But Tolkien said, no, that's that's like base level of what a story should be able to do. Like a really good story needs to enchant you. Right. It needs to feel like you have been absorbed into this world. Right. And that everything in this world feels like it fits. It has this inner consistency of reality within this world itself. And he even gives this example of you can't just say, here's a fantasy world and the sun is green. Like, what does that mean? You have to think through the implications of well, if the sun is green, then do we look at water and the water still blue is the sky blue? Like our leaves doing, you know, the whole chlorophyll sort of process. Are they still green? Like, what does it mean to have a green sun in a world? Right. You have to think through those things, think through that inner consistency of reality. And so when you say how important is the quality of lore for me? Like, I think it's very, very important because it's those sorts of really painstakingly thought out details, micro details that also rhyme and have reason with the macro details and everything in between that really make an enchanting story. And so for me, clearly, I'm biased. I mean, I'm a I'm a Tolkien podcaster, so I'm biased. But for me, it's like, I just love what Tolkien did with Middle Earth because it fits the inner consistency of reality. There's such depth and and thought there. And it's gotten to the point, Brett, where I'm sorry to admit this, but when I go and try to read other fantasy, it's just not the same. And there's a voice in my head that's like, you could be reading more about Middle Earth, you know, you know, it's just like, I read, I read Dune. I read the first Dune and the second Dune, you know, after I watched, you know, the movies and I was like, this is this is neat. And it was cool. And yes, I was entertained, but I don't have any desire to go back and read Dune again. Now, contrast that with a show that a friend just just told me told me about on Netflix called Arkane, right? Oh, yeah, coming out of League of Legends. Yeah, I know nothing about League of Legends. I didn't even know it existed. And until until my friend told me about the show. But I started engaging with this show and I was like, oh, my goodness, I am absorbed. I am an enchanted because the storytelling of what they did in that show was just so rich. The storytelling was amazing. But then you also couple that with just the beautiful imagery and then the deep themes like the universal human themes that they're wrestling with in that show. And it's like beautiful storytelling, deep human themes, beautiful artistry visuals like trifecta, man, I'm sold. I'm in. And and for me, that that's amazing. Now, if I were a League of Legends guy and I knew some of the lore behind that, maybe I'd be like, well, you know, Viya is actually this way or whatever. What? No, you know, I have no clue. And I will tell you as someone who played League of Legends incessantly from when it came out, like literally when it was launched, I had friends who were in like the Alpha basically and who got me into it. I played it all throughout high school. I played it through a good chunk of college. I'm big into League of Legends. I haven't played it in, you know, I've tried a couple of times here and there, but I haven't played it for the better part of like, you know, seven years or so. But having all the background knowledge and Vi being my favorite character personally, I have this is really terrible. I have a Vi mousepad. It's like that I've had forever. I love Viya as a character. Jinx was my main for 80 carry. So it's like, you know, those being the two main characters for the show, I was stoked and I couldn't tell if I was just biased and saying it was one of the best animated shows after seeing season one. But I got my wife to watch it. Well, she wasn't my wife. She was my fiance at that point, but I got her to watch it and she was like, this is amazing. She's like, this is awesome. Like I want more of this. I'm like, okay, so it's not just me. It's not just because I like League of Legends. And I think that's what it's so universal in a way. It's yeah, it's really great and we could talk forever about Arcane. But yeah, I just wanted to really quickly pick up. You mentioned Dune how you read the first two last year. So after seeing the first movie, I read the first Dune book and then let it go. And I was like, I'll read the other ones eventually. And then I actually read all through God Emperor. So the first four books last year. And I will say that is one of the few series that I will reread along with Lord of the Rings because I feel like every time. So I've read the first Dune book three times now. And that's a commitment. It yeah, it's it's, you know, the longest one. And yeah, I read it once way back in the day and then I read it once after watching the first movie and then after the second movie. And I will say it gets better with every read. And I understand not wanting to go back. It is a daunting prospect and it is very no pun intended dry. Like it is a very dry book and I will say this for all of the books except for God Emperor. Nothing happens until the second half. It's all set up. But that's what I love about it is that it's looking and you had the Green Sun analogy where everything that is thought out about Arrakis or even the other planets, you go to any other planet and everything is so well thought out down to the ecology down to the little mouse that jumps through the desert. Like what's its role? It has a huge role. And that's what I love about the Dune franchise. And that's what I love about Lord of the Rings is that every time that I read it, I think I've read I have had to have read Fellowship probably six or seven times by this point. And then, you know, numbers dwindle as the books go. But that's what I love about them, too, is they are just so rich. And every time that I read through them or listen to someone talk about them, I feel like I learned something new and I feel like I've kind of come out with a different version of that book. And that's what I really love about it. And that's what I love about Tolkien in general is that he evokes that feeling and it's incredible. Yeah, I think Tolkien was just a master of being able to do that. And I think he probably even surprised himself at how people engaged with his stories to give to give Dune a fair shake. I will say I did enjoy reading reading the book. It was great anytime where I bought a I bought a version that has a glossary in the back. And so anytime where it's like, oh, here's a new phrase and I'll I flip back and I go I read the glossary. And it's like, OK, well, there's like three new ideas that I don't know. So let me go read those definitions as well. And it's like, I actually really do love reading books like that. Where it's like, oh, there is a lot of depth to this world that I don't know. And I'm glad that I have my hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy that I can flip back here and get the get the cheat code of what's going on in this world. So I will say Dune is pretty cool in that respect. And so I don't I don't want to mean to say that I hate Dune or I don't like it. Oh, no, I understand. But I understand. And one more note on Dune before we move on, just because it's it's an obsession of mine is I found the best way to read. And what I would recommend to anyone who's reading it for the first time is to actually just leave the glossary till the end, because there are so many things in Dune that are unexplained. And even if you go through the glossary, you'll go from rabbit hole rabbit hole. And then all of a sudden you're two chapters in and you've read the entire glossary because it just bounces you back through all these terms and you just end up. And it's not that you end up spoiling yourself because so many of these terms mean nothing. They're just a nothing burger of this is going to come up one time in the book. They're going to mention the butlery and jihad exactly one or two times. You're never going to know what it means until three books later. And it's the other my best advice to anyone reading it is to just try not to ask yourself questions. I I'm really bad for if I see something in a book that I don't understand. I'm going to try to do my best to understand it before moving forward. And I had to stop myself with Dune because I ran into so many roadblocks where I was encountering a phrase or something that I didn't understand. And then there was just no information about it. It was just it was a dead road. It's just world building. It's just another thing, just the tiniest little drop in the sand that's adding to this vast world that was created. And that's something that I really loved about it personally. It was it forced me to read in a different way. And that's good. I that's good. And I do like books, works that force you to think about things differently. And I really love that you say like, try not to ask too many questions because I want to circle this back around to something that Tolkien said. I mentioned his essay on fairy stories earlier. I'm going to quote a paragraph from that essay and it's a little bit long, but stick with me because because it comes back to your idea of let's not ask too many questions when we're engaging with the world, at least at the beginning. So so Tolkien said this. Who would report it? Oh, that's so nice. It's such a way with words he has. It's everything that he writes is its own like beautiful mystical little story. Yeah, it's it's beautiful. And I just love this idea because we love to engage in these worlds of Middle Earth or Arrakis or I don't know what the world of the arcane is. Whatever that world is League of Legends, we love to engage in these fantasy worlds or these fairy worlds. But like Tolkien said, like sometimes it makes dumb the traveler who would come back and report it in our world and what Tolkien would call the primary world. You know, some things just need to live in the land of of peril in the perilous realm. And and sometimes we just need to experience them in that world and not try to ask too many questions. You know, I think a great analogy here would be like the the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, right? The Chronicles of Narnia, where you have these children, they literally go into this completely other world through a through a passageway. And then when they come back to our world, it's like they were never gone. Right. They like they've had this beautiful experience in the world of fairy in the perilous realm. And it's changed them. It's given them wisdom and experience. But when they come back to their own world, it's like they can't they can't talk about it with anybody, right? Because it's just so so strange. No one would understand it. No one would understand. Yeah. Yeah. So I feel lucky that, you know, we get to have conversations in our world, you know, you and me and and, you know, we get to talk with different listeners in our podcast and different creators all around where we get to say, Hey, I wandered in this perilous realm called Middle Earth and I want to talk about a few things and you wandered in Rackus and let's talk about a few things. I just it's a beautiful experience. I think what what Tolkien and what are these other imaginative creators have been able to provide for us? Yeah, absolutely. And that's an amazing I say an amazing quote. It's an amazing paragraph. It's yeah. It was long. It was long. Yeah. But it's it's it's really great. And I actually really love that. I love that idea of, you know, some things should just remain their own thing. It's it's okay to have a little bit of mystery. It's okay to just let things be let things exist as they are. I like that a lot. And I think I was going to try to find a way to segue that into the topic, the main topic of why we're here today. And you know what? I can't think of anything. So we're just going to go cold turkey. The main reason why we we have gathered here at the roundtable today is to talk about Tolkien's influences on fantasy and on maybe just literature in general or I mean culture as we know it today. Yeah. I don't think that when he was writing the Hobbit or writing Lord of the Ring, like I don't think that while he was writing these things, he thought that he was going to change the very fabric of storytelling as we know it or influence so many different things in our world and be a core figure for dozens of years, hundreds of years going forward. But yeah. Nevertheless, he created this world and poured an unimaginable amount of time into making it what it is. And that has invariably influenced so much that we experienced today. And so what we wanted to talk about was kind of where Tolkien's influences extended, where they where we see them, what kind of little breadcrumbs we see in modern fantasy, high fantasy, or even outside of fantasy. And I figure I do you have anything to say on that first and foremost? Yeah, yeah, I do. How do you how do you quantify Tolkien's impact on fantasy, storytelling and culture? Like, I don't think you can, you know, like it's really hard. You know, and I come back to a few different things and I'm like, I don't know if we would I don't know if we would have Star Wars or Star Trek or Harry Potter. Or maybe we would have Dune. I don't know. That was still pretty early. But I don't know if we would have the same level of stories told to us in such an engaging way if it were not for for Tolkien. And maybe that's a bold statement. And, you know, I'm certainly not entirely in agreement with what I just said there. But when you look at something like on fairy stories, this essay that I just read from Tolkien on, and he has this other idea of. We talk about fairy stories or fantasy as if they were something for children, right? And it's like, no, they're not for children, right? Fantasy stories contain an element of truth. And there is a truth and a universal human truth that you find there that you are wrestling with in abstract figures and abstract terms, right? You take you take a small person who's very comfortable in this hobbit hole. And you remove him and you suddenly plop him into a dragon's layer, right? And it's like, that's a compelling story. But what are the dragons in your life? Right? What are the smogs in your life that if you just confronted them in a clever way in a bilbo ish way, not like Thorin did or Gandalf or anybody else. But if you if you confront them in the way that Bilbo did, is there a treasure on the other side of confronting that dragon? Right? And so it's like these stories that we say fantasy stories are not just for children. They're for humans, right? Adults and children. And I think that was one of the things that where Tolkien was really able to redefine the idea of fantasy science fiction, what he would call fairy stories to this much broader concept of, no, these are abstract hero tales that all people need, not just children. And it's funny that you bring up or I say funny. It's interesting that you bring up the idea of it's not just a children's story because when I was growing up, you hear of the Lord of the Rings and that's more of like, you know, a young adult, adult novel series is kind of what, you know, it was taught to me as. But then you have the Hobbit, which is marketed as a children's story. But I'm reading it and I'm like, for what children is this for? And I remember reading it as a kid and there's just so many things that I just could not explain. It gave me such like a feeling of despair at times. And I'm like, this is not a children's book. What is it can be accessible for children for sure. But I definitely feel like I appreciate the Hobbit more as an adult because there's so many themes in there. Like you said, it's, you know, find your smile. It's like, what what is that to you? What is the treasure on the other side? And I think that's a really great point. And I guess Tolkien is kind of like our own personal therapist in that way of teaching us to confront what is on the other side of the what is on the other side of the mountain. But yeah, I think that's a really good point that these are universal human stories and not just it's not just a children's story. It's not just an adult story. It's not ever just one thing. And I think that's something that's really beautiful about Tolkien's work is that it is it is very universal. It's I think it can apply to anyone and no matter where you are in your life, you're probably going to read it a little differently. I think that's great. Yeah, absolutely. So I think that's just one essence in which Tolkien's work has changed culture for us. And I think another one goes back to what we were talking about before, which is just the depth of lore in the world building. Like Tolkien was able to give us a world that we were invited into and we mortal men and women. We were the strange creatures in this world of Middle Earth. Like you have elves, you have dwarves, you have hobbits. You've got wizards who are sort of like semi divine immortal beings. You've got orcs and trolls and dragons, all these other things like we are so small in this great big world of Middle Earth. And I think Tolkien was just he broke the pattern, right? And he said, look, here is this amazing world. And I'm going to tell it through a mortal man's eyes because I am a mortal man. But this world, it exists independent of our perception of it. And I think that just the whole idea of world building, lore crafting this whole place where we can be absorbed into a story. I think Tolkien really broke the mold and redefined that as well for story, the story tellers to come in future generations. Yeah, absolutely. And so that kind of brings up in like the depth of lore and the depth of the story telling. There were two points that I thought of and I don't know if you have any more insight on this. I figured you might. I couldn't find any concrete answers as to whether or not he did because I was trying to think of what are the firsts that Tolkien did or what are the things that he pioneered in the genre, not just high fantasy, but just, you know, novel writing in general. And two things that I thought of were I cannot recall or I've never encountered books before like the Lord of the Rings that had maps in like the covers. And I don't know if he was the first one to do that. I don't believe he was, but at least I think he was the one to pioneer that or bring that idea forward. It's like because his stories are so in depth and, you know, the journey that, you know, in the Lord of the Rings that Frodo takes going from the Shire all the way to Mount Doom. Like it's such a long journey and they go through so many different areas that you almost need a map. You need a map to be able to follow along. And there are countless other stories that I've read that followed that same thing. One of my favorite series, the Aragon or the Inheritance series. That was one of my favorites growing up. They had a map of the world in every single one of their books. And I've read countless other books that have the map in their book. And so I was wondering, like, I don't know if he pioneered that, but I feel like he definitely brought it into at least the modern mainstream. Yeah. And that's, I really love your example and I want to hear your second one, but let me just talk to talk to the map real quick. There was a point where like young teenage Aaron, because Lord of the Rings had a map, if I would like peruse fantasy books in the library and they didn't have a map, I'd be like, that's not a fantasy book. Yeah. So it's like, yeah, there certainly is a standard there. And and I don't know if if Tolkien necessarily was the first to do it. I know his publishers asked him for a map and he and his son Christopher were actually like painstakingly drawing these maps themselves by hand. But, you know, at the time, so the publisher asked for it. So I don't know if that was something that was completely foreign to them, but at least they recognized in need of, oh, this world is very expansive. This world is very detailed. These names are very difficult to track and you have multiple names for the same place and same place, different places are named really similarly. So we need a map, right? Yep. I need a map. So I think in like with many things with Tolkien, it's hard to say like he invented it, but I think it's pretty we could be pretty confident to say he redefined it. Right. Yes. Like he took what was there before broke the mold and and it's really hard to break the molds that Tolkien provided in his in his publications. Yeah. And I think that's a totally fair statement that, you know, who knows who's the first to have done a lot of those things. But yeah, it's one of those things among the dozens of things that he did that really reinvented the idea or brought it into the mainstream. And the second one, and you know, I feel like he could have been the first one to have done this was creating a language or multiple languages for a series. It's like that is one point that will never cease to amaze me is that like there were multiple dialects written and created specifically for this world. And I tried looking it up and I didn't get a concrete answer as to, you know, has someone done this before and, you know, people have done it since for sure. But I definitely think regardless of whether he was the first to do it, I think, you know, we wouldn't we probably wouldn't have Klingon as a language. Exactly. For right. I love I so love that you brought this up because when you were like, what were the first to talk? We did like, boom, language was like one of the first things that came to my mind. And if if I may, I will I would invite you to maybe rephrase how you talk about that because we in modern fantasy. Let's let's take Harry Potter. Oh, Klingon, you brought Klingon up. Yeah, let's take that as an example. We're in Star Trek, which is a on screen visual medium. We have a movie. We want a race of foreign, not men, not human. We want them to have their own language and culture. Fantastic. So I think it was what it was like two, three or four guys, like a whole team of of, I don't know, linguists is the word. Yeah. They came up with this full language of Klingon and and it makes sense. Right. And it's awesome. And they did that because they had a story to tell. Right. Story came first, language came second. Tolkien is the complete inverse of that. For Tolkien, he once said that creating new languages came to him as naturally as breathing. He remembered doing this when he was a child, like toddler size child. And so he has these languages popping around in his brain, and he was so gifted with languages that his professional career was to be a philologist, which I'm not very familiar with that term, but because I'm a Tolkien guy, I've looked it up. But a philologist is an academic who studies the history and evolution of language. Okay, I was going to ask because that is an ology that I have never heard of. Yes, yeah. Pretty esoteric, I would guess. And so, like, okay, well, this is a word. Well, what are the words that had to evolve to make that word happen? And this is the meaning of this word in this culture at this time. But how did that meaning evolve over time at different places and with different cultures and all of these things? And so Tolkien, I mean, he had certain languages that he loved, particularly like the Northern European languages that he just loved. And for him, it was like the aesthetic. It was just pleasing to his ear. It sounded so beautiful for him to hear these languages. And that was the inspiration behind a lot of his other languages that he would create later on. But he would cat all of these languages popping around in his brain. And he realized a crucial component of language. He realized this from an academic perspective, which is language evolves with the culture that is evolving over time and is represented in the stories that that culture tells. All right? So you look at an ancient work like Beowulf, right? Beowulf is a story that's wrapped in language that has evolved over time, right? And Tolkien gave us one of the best, like, key translations of Beowulf. Like, he broke the record for that, too. Wow. As a young, like, post-grad student, he worked on the Oxford English Dictionary. So it's like people would write him letters and be like, did you know you used this word wrong? And he's like, no, don't tell me that. I wrote the dictionary. You don't get to tell me. I'll tell you how you used it wrong. Yeah, exactly. And so he had this idea in his brain of cultures evolve with language, languages evolve with culture. It's all wrapped up with story. I have these languages in my mind. What is the story or the culture that goes along with these languages? Right. And then he starts kind of thinking about these different stories. And it's and I'm simplifying things. Obviously, he had stories coming along as well. But what he actually said later on was like, he really hoped that he could create a narrative and a world and a culture that would give place for his languages, particularly Elvish, right? And so I think at last count, there's like 16 or 17 languages that Tolkien created. And some are more complete than others. Some you could have a fairly decent conversation in and some are just sort of like grammatically grammatic phrases. I didn't know there were that many. I thought there was maybe a handful at best. Wow. Yeah, there's there's so many, so many of them. And and when you read a book like The Fellowship of the Ring and there's different words for the same place, it's because those words come from different languages and those languages come from different cultures that have a history and a lore and this whole culture around them that has evolved over time. So, you know, when you're when you're J.K. Rowling and you're like, what would it be like if teenagers had wands and there was the Secret Society of Wizards? Maybe I should write a story about that. Like, oh, and they need kind of their own little language. So I'm going to create like parcel tongue and that's a bad language. You know, so like, you know, story then elements of the story sort of come. Talking completely inverted that whole pattern, right, which was I have languages. Languages don't exist without story. What is the story of my languages? And that's where you get the whole Middle Earth legendarium. That's incredible. I actually did not know that the language came first. That's so that's really interesting then. So it's he didn't create the language for the story. He created the story for the language. Yeah, he did. But like I said, we're being really simplistic here because there would certainly be other points where it's like, OK, well, now I have this story. Well, I need a language for this people. Yeah, like I need a language for dwarves now. Right. And so he would go back and forth there. But for him, one of the one of the primary motivations and he actually wrote down what his motivations were for writing this whole thing. One of them was to give a story for his languages. Wow. And that's incredible. And I think that's definitely I wonder how many other things like we have Game of Thrones with Dothraki. We have Star Trek with Klingon, like I've mentioned before. We have countless other things like being a linguist is it's a job past just examining existing languages like linguists exist now for like TV and film where there's people who have a job that is just I'm going to create a language for the show. And you know, within a short period of time, they'll just create a whole new language because it just needs to exist in context for this thing. And I wonder if we would even have that to the extent that we have it. I'm sure someone would have done it like, you know, someone's going to do everything eventually. But without Tolkien, I wonder. I wonder what the. I wonder what that would look like without him. You know what I mean? I wonder if those jobs would exist in the capacity that they exist without him doing that with Lord of the Rings. I wonder if Klingon would have really existed like in Star Trek as it is without Tolkien. I wonder if I can certainly say I know George R. Martin has stated several times that Tolkien was a huge influence on Game of Thrones. So likely we probably wouldn't have had any sort of Dothraki or anything without. I mean, we wouldn't have had Game of Thrones without Tolkien, right? So there's so many things just even in that respect, you could go anywhere with any language that was created for any book, basically, and say it was probably because of Tolkien, you know, like he did it. And so other people realized that that was an option. And I think the fact that, again, because he's so mainstream, because everything that he did was brought into the mainstream in the way that it was, I think it really opened up a lot of doors for people that made them realize, oh, I can do this. I can use this as a device, whether, you know, for good or bad. Right, right. So you've mentioned several times now, Harry Potter. And yeah, I remember reading I don't remember exactly where I read this. So this is going to be off the top of my dome a little bit. But I remember reading that J.K. Rowling has mentioned that Gandalf was an inspiration for Dumbledore, which I mean, you know, tall, bearded, enigmatic man. Yeah, I can see that being the case. And then the themes for, you know, death and immortality surrounding Voldemort. I've heard that that was an influence from like directly from Sauron, basically, you know, defeated one time and then managed to just kind of skulk in the shadows and come back through, you know, unearthly means. I've heard that that's yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of direct parallels from even Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings. And it's another one of those things that like Harry Potter being the phenomenon that it is being, you know, one of the best-selling book series and especially for children and young adults. It's it's such a colossal thing that I again don't think would have existed in the capacity that it exists without Tolkien and the themes that he wrote about and the things that he has. Because again, there are a lot of things that are just kind of direct parallels, even in just just Harry Potter. Yeah, there absolutely is. And and part of this is let me give a spoiler alert here. And this is for anybody who loves stories and the mystery of story and not necessarily analyzing why stories move us so emotionally. So if you don't want that curtain pulled away from your eyes, let's skip ahead a few minutes. But there was a work called A Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell in the early, was it 1920s, 1930s, 40s, that timeframe, where he essentially outlined what we know today as the hero's journey. Right. And in simple terms, the hero's journey is hero lives in some state of relative comfort. There is some call to adventure. A mentor arrives. Hero takes steps towards the call to adventure, has failures, has wins, gets friends along the way and has some ultimate sort of challenge that they overcome. They learn wisdom, they change, transform, they go back to their world of comfort. And because they are changed, they then bring wisdom and truth and their learnings to that world. And that that changes as well. Right. And so you can begin to layer on top. You know, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter. You know, there's a pattern here. Right. We have orphans. Bilbo doesn't have any parents, of course, he's 50 years old. Frodo is an orphan. He's taken in by Bilbo. Luke Skywalker, orphaned, Harry Potter orphaned. Right. Yeah. Wow. I didn't realize I never put that one together. But yeah, every single one of them. Right. Right. And they all sort of live in this idealic state to some extent. Right. Luke is a farmer. He's in connection with his planet. Right. And he lives by his daily sustenance. Bilbo and Frodo, they live in this very agrarian society where it's very connected to the soil and the dirt and Harry Potter. Like, sure, his circumstances aren't great, but, you know, he lives in a closet under the stairs and he's got a little bit of space for him. But it's the beautiful, it's like beautiful London where everything is tidy and orderly. And he's still sort of this servant class type person where he's got to make breakfast. And then you layer on top of that, like, OK, so some sort of a mentor has to show up, right? Or some call to adventure. All of a sudden, Uncle Owen and Apparu, they've been dead. I want to learn the ways of the Jedi. You know, oh, shoot, this ring that I inherited, it's a Horcrux for Sauron. And I actually really hate calling it a Horcrux. But for shorthand, this is the evil thing. What am I going to do? You know, oh, you're a wizard, Harry. Like, we all can see those moments of that call to adventure. And then almost immediately or right before then, a mentor has shown up, right? Obi-Wan Kenobi comes. You must come with me and learn the ways of the Force and Dumbledore is there. And you've got Gandalf and allies. Like, you can layer on top of these things this hero's journey. And to me, it's like, I really love knowing that because when I watch movies, I can I can see it. Right? You know, I just watched like The Fall Guy, right? The Fall Guy. Fun movie. Very fun. Ryan Gosling. And you can see the hero's journey playing out in a different way. It's not quite, doesn't have quite the same roots as, you know, the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars type pattern. But you look for this pattern and you can see it. And so what what what becomes fun for me are the creative twists or the different little bits of lore and world building that come along with this thing, with this with this hero's journey. But to me, I think Tolkien really did. If Tolkien, let's see, if Lord of the Rings were like a musical instrument, I think Tolkien created a piano and he said, no, a piano has white keys. It's got black keys there. They have this different distance from like, these are the rules of a piano. And everybody else has come along and they said, I love your rules. I'm going to create a totally brand new musical thing with the exact same notes. Right? But there's infinite amounts of stories that you could tell with the exact same notes that Tolkien like articulated in a masterful, masterful way. Yeah. And that's a really good point. All of those things I never realized how many of them start with run to young boy gets approached by kind of creepy enigmatic old man who takes them under their wing to get rid of the MacGuffin artifact that they have for some reason. There's always one. And they have to destroy it by one, you know, you know, that artifact is taking them on this journey. And they have to go to this one specific place or do this one specific thing to be able to get rid of it. And that and only that can stop the evil thing. Right. And yeah, ties into themes of like good versus evil. Yeah, ties into like the theme of death versus like, is it should we accept death? Should we try to overcome death? You know, it plays into themes of friendship. Who are my allies along the way? And and and failure, right? I had a challenge and I didn't overcome it. What did I learn from that for my next challenge? And it's and it's like that. I just you see that pattern everywhere and you begin to look at the different themes. And then you begin to see how Tolkien what Tolkien meant when he was like, no, a fairy story has to have truth. Right. It has to have principles that apply in our lives told in an abstract way. And to me, it's just beautiful. It's just beautiful. This is why I love engaging with fantasy. You know, whether it's Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or the Arcane, like it's it's it's fun. It's really fun. And I think the difference would like the differences between all these stories are so that they're so vastly different. Like you wouldn't think of Harry Potter and Star Wars as the same thing or Lord of the Rings and Fall Guy is the same, you know, as following the same sort of formula. But but it's true. Like you said, it's the keys have been laid out. The groundwork has been established and everything can kind of trickle off of that. And again, I'm going to say this several times. But whether or not Tolkien was the one to have invented that is one thing, right? You know, someone before him came up with that groundwork or someone else did it before. But it's it's it's the bringing of that into the mainstream. And the the absolute impact that the way that Tolkien wrote it or the way that Tolkien interpreted that hero's journey that made it into this like crazy thing. And we were talking about the hero's journey. And I immediately got thinking about right now, I've been playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. I'm involved in two campaigns currently, I'm going to do my my own campaign soon. I mean, I'm just running Curse of Strahd, I'm not doing my own my own invented campaign. But it's a campaign nonetheless, been playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. And I remember like way way back in the day, like going and looking up the influences for Dungeons and Dragons, Gary Gary Geigex is that the guy like back when he made it, he was very dirty, like he literally ripped off Lord of the Rings to the point where I might be wrong about this. I should probably look it up right now. I'm pretty sure the Tolkien estate had a cease and desist basically against where he was like, he was using the words halfling. Hobbit. Yeah, Hobbit. Hobbit ended up changing to halfling. Ent ended up being changed to Triant. Balrog got changed to Balor, among other things, like there's so many things that like they just ripped off and they that they will openly admit not earlier in their career, but later in their career that the creators of Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, it was just Lord of the Rings. It was a way for us to bring Lord of the Rings to a tabletop and bring Lord of the Rings to a medium where we can engage in the story in a different way and create our own stories basically in Middle Earth to or in Arda, wherever you want to be in that world. That's that was their medium of interacting with Lord of the Rings. And so if you think about how monumental Dungeons and Dragons has been massive that machine is from, you know, the satanic panic of the 70s and 80s to what it is now being connected with Hasbro and just being in everyone's faces with the Dungeons and Dragons movie with the Baldur's Gate games Baldur's Gate 3 was massive for Dungeons and Dragons. Stranger things. Stranger things 100%. And you just think of that massive monster and that was literally created from a couple of guys who were just so stoked about reading Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit and the Simerillian that they just wanted to role play that in their own way. So they made a tabletop game that allowed people to literally just role play being a Hobbit being sent on a journey. And all if you look at all of these, all of the pre what's the word I'm looking for the modules like the pre planned modules that are out for campaigns. If you look at all of them, they all follow the hero's journey every single one of them. You're in a little party. There's some sort of MacGuffin artifact. You have to defeat the the enemy who is being kept alive by this artifact or by something whether they're a Lich or whether they're a vampire or whatever it is. Some unnatural way. Yeah. Some unnatural way and you have to destroy that thing to be able to destroy them. And you know, of course, they're quasi immortal basically. But it all all of that like everything Dungeons and Dragons, it all comes back and again, probably wouldn't have existed in the capacity that it did without Lord of the Rings, which it's incredible. Yeah, I really love that you brought that up because I literally just a couple of weeks ago released an episode with Clint Shryer from the Claim to Game podcast. And this was our whole conversation, which was what was Tolkien's influence on TT RPGs, right? Table top. Amazing. And yeah, so that's that's number 197 if anybody wants to go back and give that a listen. And he was sort of at the same opinion. I'm not a huge Dungeons and Dragons guy myself. Like, I've done one one shot campaign, and I'm not necessarily against it. I I don't have the time to be writing two campaigns. I had it once. But but like, I think Tolkien, at one point, he wrote in a letter, he said, I had this like, I wanted to create this world where this you had this whole big sweeping legendarium, but that there would be there would be these holes within the grand scheme of things that, quote, other hands and minds would fill with paint and art and drama and stories, right? And so maybe I'm taking a really broad interpretation of what Tolkien is talking about there. But I think anytime somebody sits down to a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and they're creating a fantasy story with their friends, I think in some way they are those other hearts, those other minds and hands that are expanding the fantasy world that Tolkien provided for us. Yeah. And I 100% agree. As soon as I thought about the connection to Tolkien, I'm like, oh, yeah, all of this is us just role playing Middle Earth. That's that's all that's ever been. It's all it's ever going to be no matter what setting it is. It doesn't matter what it is. And it's just it's another one of those things that I think less people would probably think of, especially Dungeons and Dragons as being some, well, I guess maybe that's I was going to say, I think less people would think of Dungeons and Dragons being as influenced by Tolkien because if you if you look at it, it's just another high fantasy world, which I mean, all high fantasy in, you know, modern high fantasy, you can say directly comes from Tolkien and probably wouldn't exist without him. But it's one of those things I didn't think of until recently that it was just so much like how much of it was just, I mean, you can say ripped off how much of it was directly taken from Tolkien and the works. And I think it's such a beautiful medium to engage in that, even if you don't understand or don't realize that you are engaging with Lord of the Rings or Tolkien or anything in that capacity while you're playing it, you're able to engage it in a different way. That's not just reading or just watching a movie. And I think it's I think that is probably my favorite medium to engage with Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's legacy is probably through Dungeons and Dragons because it's it's just different. It's interactive. It's it's it's always great. Yeah. Yeah. So we're coming up on time here, I believe. So is there anything else, any major takeaways, anything else that you wanted to bring up that maybe we didn't talk about? Well, you know, you were just talking about Dungeons and Dragons and engaging with Fantasy World in that way. And we're all exploring Middle Earth when we play those games. And there's one final idea here from from Tolkien that I want to borrow or kind of want to talk about just a little bit. And that is the idea of escapism and recovery. And I think it's important that you have those two ideas together, escapism and recovery. Because Tolkien sort of said these fairy stories, these fantasy stories that we engage with, whether it's in a book or a movie or a TTRPG, they are a way for us to escape the realities of our current life. Right. And that is such a uniquely human thing to do is to take our capacity for imagination and literally take ourselves out of where we live this world and put our conscious self in a completely made up, make believe, imaginative world. And to treat it with seriousness and think through what would life be like in this world. I'm escaping from mine, but I'm going to another. And it's not just because I'm trying to escape or be a hermit or isolationist from my own world. I'm not trying to like avoid the problems of my life. But I'm going to put my creativity, my imagination, my consciousness into another world. I'm going to escape into that other world. But I'm going to learn things there. I'm going to find truth and wisdom. I'm going to experience friendship, whether we're rolling a 20D, a D20, whether I'm rolling a D20 and I don't get the result that I want and I get so frustrated or, oh, my gosh, my arrow actually hit the orc in the eye. You know, it's like we have those moments of joy with friends and and we find we're dealing with universal themes. Is it moral to kill seven people and split your soul into horcruxes? Like I think all of us would say no, right? Probably not. Sometimes we need the stories, right, to illustrate that. And we take these truths and these wisdom, these themes that we learn in our fantasy worlds, the experiences that we gain there, and we bring them back into our life. And that's that's the recovery portion of that, which is now I can look at my life with a different lens, with a refreshed focus, because of the things that I learned and experienced, the failures that I had, the successes that I had, the friends that I had, while I was, quote unquote, escaping into into a fantasy world. So escapism and recovery coming back into our life. And I think that is one of the reasons why Tolkien has had such staying power and influence on our culture, not just nerd culture, but the culture, wider culture is because he provided such an amazing place for us to escape to and then find truth and wisdom and then recover that and bring that back into our into our own lives and become wiser, better, smarter people because of that. Yeah. And honestly, so well put, I don't think I could have put it any better. And I don't think I could possibly think of a way to end out an episode other than on those absolutely beautiful words. Really poignant. I thought that was really nice. I and I agree. It's I had this thought partway through you saying that and I just taught myself from laughing because you said it's such a human thing to want to escape and escape to another world, something that isn't we can take our collective imagination and just shoot it somewhere else. And I have my cat sitting behind me and he's sitting there cleaning his toes. And I was thinking, yeah, I wonder what he's thinking. And it's certainly not thinking about killing orcs somewhere. He's thinking about where his next meal is coming from. Exactly. You know, how he's going to go eat something. So yeah, I think that's so it's again, very poignant how it's such a human thing to want to just escape not for a bad reason necessarily, but just to throw yourself into something and immerse yourself in something so totally that you almost believe that you're in this other world. And I think it's such a genuine joy and we should all be thankful that we can do that, that we can just shoot ourselves into these other worlds that we can just lose ourselves in a good book or lose ourselves in a good movie. And we have people like Tolkien to thank for that, especially, you know, your entire podcast is based around his works. And I think it is such a privilege that there is enough that you can do that. There's such a depth to the works that he's created that you've able you've been able to run a show for nearly three years and more to come. And more to come on the works and the joined experience that we've all had with Tolkien's work. And it brings so many people together in such a meaningful way that maybe most people don't think about on a day to day. But if you stop and think about why we're listening to these things or why we're talking about these things, you and I talking about this right now, it's because we both have a love for this thing that was created way past our lifetime ago. And it's going to stay and I bet you anything that the next generation is still going to be talking about Lord of the Rings because it's just going to stay forever. Yeah, yeah, it absolutely will. And your thoughts remind me of that line that I read from Tolkien earlier from On Fairy Stories, the very end of it, you know, where he says, all I can ask is that you, knowing these things, will receive my withered leaves as a token that my hand at least once held a little of the gold. You know, and Tolkien was like, my hand held gold, but when I tried to bring it back, it's withered leaves. And I'm sitting here thinking, wow, if these are your withered leaves, then what was the gold? What was the gold? What treasure were you withholding from us? Exactly, yes. Well, not necessarily withholding, but like what was it that you were just not able to communicate Yeah, absolutely. where we have your withered leaves and we just we are so enamored and enchanted by these withered leaves. Like, what would it be like to just peer into Tolkien's imagination and to see these withered leaves when he saw that when he was holding it as it was gold? Like, absolutely. That's a beautiful mystery to me. Like many people that I think of, I would love to just not even have a conversation with these people, but like actually mind meld with them for just a moment to just get a glimpse of my mind to your mind. Yeah, just get a glimpse of like what they thought, how they came up with this, what exactly was the notion going through their mind when they were writing all of this or creating all of this? Yes. It's something that I think, you know, we all think about from time to time, who would we have, you know, if you could have dinner with one person, who would it be? And but for me, it's all, how can I get into that person's brain? How can I exactly? How can I see the gold that was there when they just call it withered leaves? Yeah, absolutely. So where can we find you, Aaron? Where can we find you in your show? Thank you. So the show is called Lord of the Rings. It's anywhere where you find podcasts. The easiest place is you can find the show's website at ringspodcast.com. And if you just want to find your favorite podcast player, you can go to ringspodcast.com slash follow and pick your podcast player and come wander Middle Earth with me. The conversation that we had today, Brett, I try to have conversations just like this. Sometimes it's just me talking about the works. But these sorts of explorations of gilded withered leaves, shall we say, are what really inspire me. That's yeah. And I think that's what we all strive for. And you do a really great job over at your podcast. So please go check out Aaron at the Lord of the Rings podcast. I've had a great time exploring the most recent episodes. And I think that a lot of my audience probably will too. So take a look over there. We'll have a link in the show notes. And Aaron, thank you so much for coming on. It was an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Yes. Yes. Thank you, Brett. Thank you for wandering Middle Earth with me today. Absolutely. And I just wanted to say again, thank you so much to Aaron of the Lord of the Rings podcast for coming on and being a guest on Lord to Death. It was a really great conversation. And I'm really glad that we were able to have it. So if Laura, the ring sounds like it's something that's interesting to you, then please go check it out. I will have all of the links in the show notes. And once again, thank you so much for coming on. As for myself, you can find us online at Lord to Death on your favorite social media apps, Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're also on YouTube. So if you head over there and hit subscribe, I would really, really appreciate it. If you have any questions or suggestions for topics, please send me a message wherever you can find me or at Lord to Death at gmail.com. If you're using the Spotify app, there's a comment section attached to the episode where you can submit any questions or topics. If you're on YouTube, then please leave me a comment. I would absolutely love to hear from you. And if you'd like to be a guest on the show, please send me an email, send me a message wherever you can find me. I'm very open to collaborating and I would love to collaborate with some more people this year. So if you have something interesting to talk about, whether you have a podcast of your own or you just want to have a chat, please let me know. And I would love to figure something out. And remember, we're all wanderers in one way or another. You may not be as short as Frodo Baggins or as wise as Gandalf the Gray, but you do have your own adventure. So savor the adventure that you have. And if nothing else, make sure that it's a good story. And I will lure you to death in the next one. See ya.
