Taking Down Matt Walsh w/ Rev. Malcolm Guite | LOTR Extended Edition
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Well, folks, since I'm off for Passover today, I thought that you might enjoy the full interview that I did with Malcolm Gite. He's basically a hobbit who is an expert on Lord of the Rings, like a real expert on pretty much everything Lord of the Rings. It's an awesome interview. It's really enjoyable, and it's a nice break. ♪

Reverend Dr. Malcolm Gite, welcome to the show. Really appreciate your time. Thank you. Pleasure to be with you. I won't talk about talking to anyone. I'm an enthusiast. I would have been able to tell that even if you had not told me.

Which I think speaks for itself. So let's talk about the books. So I will be frank with you that I've only read sections of the books, which is rare for me since I've read a lot of books. And the reason for that is probably Tom Bombadil and the first 150 pages of Fellowship. Oh, really? Oh, I've just been doing a reading of a bit about Tom Bombadil. But all I can say, if you haven't read it all, is lucky you, you have a great pleasure in store.

whenever that rich and golden time arrives when you can get really absorbed in it well i'm definitely going to start reading it with my with my kids right now i have one who's 11 and one who's eight and that's oh yeah my my dad read the hobbit to me and then um then began the lord of the rings with me and i i carried carried it on but you know it's not only a glorious adventure but you think you're escaping you're getting away from the world but actually at a deep level you're being given just the kind of wisdom and insight and courage you need for when you go back into the world you

So let's talk about the films and the books. Obviously, the vast majority of people at this point are familiar with Lord of the Rings kind of in general popular culture, are familiar with it because of the films and the spinoffs. So what are people missing if they've only seen the films, which are really terrific? I think the films are great. The Lord of the Rings films are great. I wouldn't say the same about The Hobbit, but I definitely think the Lord of the Rings films are great, partly because the images they took, they used Alan Lee and...

I've forgotten his name, the other Ted Naismith's illustrations that went right back and used them. So what are they missing? Well, the first thing is Tolkien was a linguist. He was a philologist. He loved languages. He cherished words. And in some ways, you might say that the hidden hero of The Lord of the Rings is the English language itself.

It's so beautifully used. It has such a range of registers. But you can see his understanding of philology and etymology and things just from the beauty of the names that he makes up. All the names are just right. You know, they work really well. I mean, even Hobbit, when he gives you the sort of literary history of that word, linguistically, it's whole bit late. That's got the word whole in it. It's whole builders, you know. And, you

You know, Gandalf, there's something, Alf was the Anglo-Saxon word for elf. So there's sort of kinship in some ways, although they're distinct. So the first thing you'd be missing is the language itself. But the second thing you'd be missing, which is much more important in a way, is your own imagination, your internal imagery. In a way, when you open a book and you see all the little blank pages,

You know, you can open a chapter called Lothlorien and you can see all these little bits of ink and patterns arranged. That's not Lothlorien. That's just the Lothlorien starter kit. He gives you certain words about the trees, about how Frodo felt as they crossed the river into that realm. He'd crossed a bridge in time. But what he's doing is evoking something in you. And, you know, great as Peter Jackson is, he's giving you his personal Peter Jackson director's cut.

But your internal imagining of that book might be even better than Jackson. And even if it isn't, it's yours. I think, you know, when you imagine your Gandalf or your Elrond, or much, much more importantly, not only your Sam and your Frodo, but also the darker characters, your idea of who Saruman is or even Sauron himself, what you're doing is you're drawing on deeper, deeper images from inside yourself.

about good or evil, about a true path or a false one. And in a sense, it's much better to draw them up from within than to have them projected from without.

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So let's talk about sort of the setting of Lord of the Rings. It's a great show.

as far as when Tolkien was writing them, because obviously he's drawing from ancient mythology and he's creating his own languages, but he's also drawing a lot from contemporary politics. And so, yeah, well, I mean, he almost certainly started the first imaginings of that whole realm of Middle Earth and beyond it, you know, the lands beyond the Sundering Seas and so on.

While he was a young man on the Western Front, I mean, he and C.S. Lewis were both young officers on the Western Front. The attrition rate was absolutely terrible. We're incredibly lucky that both of them survived. And indeed, of course, Lewis was wounded. Now, one of the things that happened after that, if you look at some of the other writers who came out of that, the great war poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen,

They felt that the very idea of noble heroism, of chivalry, of the noble warrior had been blown to bits on the Western Front. You know,

Wilfred Owen came and wrote a very famous poem called Dulce et decorum est, which is a Latin thing, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, it is sweet and proper to die for your country. And he wrote a pretty savagely ironic poem about that. And you can forgive him for doing so, given the kind of industrialization of carnage. But, and this is a really significant but, and that course became the mainstream of, you know, modernist culture, the Siegfried Sassoons and the Wilfred Owens of this world. But

Lewis and Tolkien saw just as much hideous action on the Western Front, but they came out and wrote stories in which it was still possible to have heroic courage. It was still possible for there, even in the midst of appalling odds and all the rest of it, for there to be courage.

human nobility, courage, but also compassion, comradeship. Do you know what I mean? So they salvaged. I think they were salvaging something. And for all the appalling, you know, for all that was regrettable about that war, they still felt something human and heroic could come out of it. Now, in order to do that, they had to almost, well, Tolkien had to invent a whole other realm. But of course, you see images. If you read, I mean, I think probably it's quite well captured in the films as well. But if you read

When they're going through the dead marshes and there's all these ponds and pools and there's bodies kind of almost and the gases from the corpses lighting fires and everything, that is straight out of, that is Tolkien, if you like to use a modern word, processing his war memories. So it's not that he shies back from, you know, what Owen called war and the pity of war, but he doesn't allow the pity and the empathy to completely overwhelm

overrule the sense that there was and there still is heroic virtue and courage. And I think that's one of the most important things that came out of it. Obviously, he started in the war and then he was carrying on thinking these things through. The Hobbit came out in the 30s in the interwar years. And of course, unbelievably for that generation who'd already been through one world war,

Another one started brewing on the horizon. Now, both Tolkien and Lewis and some of their other friends were not going to be called up into the Second World War in a direct way.

although in fact they did their thing. I mean, Lewis famously did these Christian broadcasts and Lewis was taken out. When we think about the Battle of Britain, the last of the few, the last of the ones that has just died, it was 105. But Lewis was out there, you know, speaking to them. So I think some of what was going on there went into their thinking. And indeed, since the Lord of the Rings didn't come out till the 50s, you know, the post-war things. But here's a really important thing. They're not writing some kind of one-to-one story

political allegory. So a classic example of this is when the Lord of the Rings came out and there's the idea of there's this one ring, but we can't use it, we can't use the enemy's weapon, it would change who we are. Not unnaturally, people thought this was a political allegory about the nuclear bomb and about, you know, how do we defend civilization without becoming uncivilized ourselves? Now, that's always a good question. I mean, Socrates asked that question, how do you defend civilization? But...

Tolkien had a laugh about this because he had already figured out the whole network of how the story of the Ring works before we even knew about nuclear weapons. But here's a great thing, if you want to think about how to read this in the different political circumstances we're in. So when Lewis reviewed The Lord of the Rings when it came out, he said a beautiful thing. He said, this is not allegory, but it's great myth written at such a deep level

This is exactly Lewis's phase. He's continuously suggestive of incipient allegories. So the story is so primal that when you read it, almost the story is wiser than you are. It's wiser than Tolkien is. He trusts the story. So the story keeps telling you certain things.

it keeps suggesting ideas to you about how things are now. Now, I'm not a political animal, I have to say, so I don't particularly want to stray onto the extraordinary minefield of American or even my own politics. I'm pretty old-fashioned, sort of. I'm happy to live in a constitutional monarchy because I'm a constitutional monarch. But here's a thing that Tolkien does in these stories, and this does come out in the film, so you get this. He often has, if you like, kind of,

connected but antithetical pairings of characters. And what he's doing is he's exploring the way a thing could be done well and the way the same thing could be abused, the way a person could flourish or the way a person could be corrupted in themselves. So if you think about it, how do you be the kind advising wizard who actually has more power than the people he's advising but doesn't want to exploit them? Well, Gandalf is an example of that.

But Saruman is the counter example. And you kind of know that Gandalf could degrade into Saruman if he's not careful. There are various points where Gandalf could have had the ring and he says, no, no, no. But you think about it the same, the brothers Boromir and Faramir. In the end, what is kingship? What is good and just rule? You have, I mean, the two persons who are contending for the kingship of Middle-earth are Aragorn, Strider and Sauron.

One is living in a highly defended castle, and the other has taken on the appearance of a wandering vagabond and walked along and is comrades and has shared the sufferings with the people. Those are two different pictures of leadership. Now, and even, I mean, you can take it further. If you think about Frodo and Gollum, you know, what is a good hobbit and how am I to hobbit? And even in their hobbititude, as it were, become corrupted. And yet, you know,

There's a little bit of the good side, you know, the smear goal, dare goal, you know, thing. And there's something in, I mean, there's a kind of bonding between those two characters. And of course, you know, probably one of the most deep, I think, moral lessons. I mean, lessons makes it sound too explicit in that whole book.

is when Frodo, who's frightened, says, it's a pity Bilbo didn't stab Gollum while he had a chance. And Gandalf says, pity? It was pity that stayed his hand. The pity of Bilbo may come to rule the fault of many. And of course, in the end, Frodo gets as far, it's not plot spoiler for anyone who hasn't seen it, but Frodo gets as far as

as he can and almost against his own will without, you know, for different motivations. But in the grand plot, you know, Gollum steps in and still has a part to play. So there's something extraordinary going on there. Now, Tolkien doesn't stop in the middle of his narrative and wag his finger at you and say, now I'm teaching you this lesson. And if you as a parent did that when you were reading, that would be terrible. Just give them the story. Yeah.

and let the story tell you. And I'm still, I fell in love with this story when my dad started to read it to me. And then, you know, he sent me off to a boarding school in England so he couldn't keep reading. So I hated this boarding school. I was very homesick. But I opened The Lord of the Rings and suddenly I was in Lothlorien or Rivendell, you know, I could be there. And so I was about 16 when I went like full fanboy totally into it, right? Now I am 67 now.

So I've had 51 years hearing Tolkien tell me this story over and over again. And at 67, I'm still drawing from it. I'm still finding stuff in it. I'm still being... Now, that's what great art is, you know.

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Let's talk for a second about the stuff that didn't make it into the movies. Obviously, Tom Bombadil did not, but the biggest one that people talk about is the end of The Return of the King actually gets sliced out of the movie completely. Yeah, the scouring of the Shire. Right, the scouring of the Shire is not in the movie at all. So for folks who have not read the book, what is the scouring of the Shire? Should it have been in the movie? Why?

What do you make of the creative decision there? You got a very slight hint of it in the movie, in Galadriel's mirror, when I forget whether in the movie, whether it's either Sam or Frodo, looks in and sees all kinds of bad things going on in the Shire. And in the book, it's Sam who looks in the mirror as well, which doesn't happen in the movie. And he suddenly sees that bad things are happening at home.

And they're cutting the bad thing of one of the worst things you can possibly do from the Tolkien worldview is cut down trees unnecessarily. And Sam sees these people unnecessarily felling the trees on the Bywater Road. And instinctively wants to run home and sort it out. But then he realizes, no, his duty is here. And he has a great saying, he says, I'll go home by the long road or not at all. So anyway, just to tell you what happens in the book.

Saruman and his odious, traitorous advisor Grima Wormtongue escaped from Orthanc, where they'd been holed up.

And really, just as an act of spite, Saruman goes to the Shire and manages to set himself up as some sort of proto-ruler and starts wantonly destroying. You know, he basically kind of quasi-industrializes it. He introduces, you know, but he also takes away the sort of freedoms of the hobbits who are obviously all

There's the hobbits obviously live in a sort of fairly agrarian way. It's kind of like three acres and a cow, you know. So he's trying to turn them into workers and he has a set of things called gathering and sharing. And I mean, again, I don't think he's doing direct political allegory, but I think this may have been Tolkien's feeling about what was going on in communism and particularly what Stalin was doing with the kulaks, with the peasants. And again, very presently for modern politics, as you know,

Ukraine was originally and could still be the breadbasket of Europe. But there was a point at which, whether it was the Germans or the Russians, it doesn't matter which particular odious set of people it was, were just basically...

starving the very people that produce the food. And there's a bit of that going on. So what happens is, even though they're outnumbered, the four hobbits, who you'd think would be entitled to a break after having just saved the whole of Middle-earth, have to come back. But in a way, they're more than, I won't say man enough, they're more than hobbit enough for the job by the time they get back. And there's a horn blown and various... So the Shire has a kind of...

uprising against a kind of, if you like, a kind of horrible piece of centralized economic planning by Saruman. And Saruman in the end is very justly stabbed by the person whom he has used as a traitor anyway and so on. And he's nicknamed Sharky and it happens in Bagshot Row. So then that's nicknamed Sharky's End. So there's a recovery and a restoration.

Now, scouring is a really interesting word. I mean, I have a private theory about why it's called the scouring of the Shire. There's a very great poem by G.K. Chesterton called The Ballad of the White Horse, which was about how King Alfred fought off the Danes and created the Kingdom of Wessex and effectively what became England. It's really Alfred the Great. And Alfred the Great believed that Christians were the best people to look after not only Christian things, but pagan things as well.

He actually, so in this, there's a final book of the Ballad of the White Horse, it's called The Scouring of the White Horse. And it's about cleaning off all the mold and grime that has grown over this beautiful ancient chalk carving on the hill.

And so there are some political things there. But I think we should be very wary. I mean, I know just quite a lot of commentators on my, you know, I have a YouTube where I read bits of the Lord of the Rings occasionally and other poems. And I know just quite a lot of political commentary on that, which I mostly stay out of. But one of the few cases where we know of a direct political statement at some cost to himself is

from Tolkien comes in the 1930s, it was 38 or something like that, when somebody decided it'd be great to have a German translation of The Hobbit, right? So whoever the Nazi apparatchik that was dealing with, you know, the licensing of books in that state, writes this letter to Tolkien, literally trying to double check that he's fully Aryan.

because he has a German name and they just want to know. And talking, he writes a private letter to his publisher saying he's absolutely outraged by this. But then he writes, I took this out because I thought it might be amusing to you. So he writes this letter back to this hapless Nancy Aparachik, who says, you're asking if I am Irish, i.e. Aryan.

He says, "I'm not Aryan by extraction, I'm not Indo-Iranian, my ancestors spoke no Hindustani, Persian or Gypsy." And then he comes to the point, "But if I am to understand that you are inquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people."

So it's just kind of like, up yours. And he completely refused to have his book translated into German. He wrote a letter to his son, Christopher, which is great, in which he says he calls Hitler that ruddy little ignoramus. And what he hated about him, this is before anything, was that

Tolkien loved the Teutonic legends. He loved the great Germanic people legends. He loved the language. He loved all that Nordic stuff and the stuff that Wagner had written about and so on. And he saw Hitler as taking a kind of comic book version of that and perverting it further. And he thought Hitler was tainting these beautiful Nordic pagan legends that he wanted to draw on. And so what he did with them in The Lord of the Rings is a little bit better than what...

what Hitler did with them in the Reichstag. So my, my colleague, Matt Walsh had been very critical of the movies, mainly along the lines of they're too long. And what I'm taking away from you is that they're definitely not long enough. Oh no. Like the first one where you're just going around Hobbiton. I love that long. Like I could have watched the whole movie of that. So no, they do get a bit longer as he goes along. Um,

I don't think the movies are too long. I mean, I could have done with more. Tom Bombadil is a whole other subject. But by contrast, I think he totally misunderstood what The Hobbit was. The Hobbit is a little children's story and it could have been one great movie. So I don't know if you remember in the movie, this is in the book as well, in the movie The Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf is trying to figure out what effect, if anything, the ring has been having on Bilbo.

He asks him how he feels. And Bilbo says in the book and the film, he says, I feel a bit thin and stretched out like butter that's been spread over too much bread, which, of course, is exactly what the effect of the ring would be. So I saw a great meme one time where it's a scene, there's that scene in the film. And Bilbo is saying to Gandalf, I feel sort of thin and stretched out.

like a simple children's tale that's been spread thinly over three epic movies.

Yes. It's been a pleasure to have you here, especially to rebut my friend, Matt Walsh. Yeah, no, no, Matt, not long enough. But then, you know, the book, you have a great pleasure in store for you, Ben, if your busy schedule ever allows it. Use reading to your children as an excuse to get deep, deep into that book. Well, I now know my plan for Friday night. So I really appreciate it, sir. Thank you for the time. Thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Well, folks, hope you enjoyed that. We will also be releasing the full Critical Drinker interview about Lord of the Rings as well. So if you're looking for more of that kind of content, just let us know.