A Geek History of Time - Episode 12- Tolkien and the World Wars (Part 2)

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

In this episode, Ed elaborates on the links between Tolkien's experiences in the First World War and then gets into the weeds (or the trees, if you know your Silmarillion) about the history of Middle Earth. Damian makes a lot of "Eagles" puns. Like, a LOT of them.

I'm a Stalin of the Nazi Party, I'm a whole fair state type. One of us is a stand-up comment and you tell me to hear his latest gentleman, everyone. Rick. Um. But the problem. Oh my god. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha This is a geek history of time. Where we connect nursery to the real world. I'm Ed Blalock, I'm a father of a 16 month old son now.

In my, well now I guess I have to say mid 40s since I've had a birthday. And I have been a geek basically as long as I can remember and one of the hallmarks of my Geekery was That every Friday night and if not Friday night then Saturday night in high school was game night with my buddies and The biggest issue that always came up was which game are we going to play? By which I don't mean are we going to do settlers of Catan or, you know, Dominion, but I mean are we going to do D&D? Okay well if we're doing D&D who wants to DM? Well I don't want to DM, well I don't

either. Okay well we want to play Cyberpunk, it wants to run Cyberpunk, and you know usually we'd wind up playing rifts just because that was the one thing that one of us was really, you know happy about running. How about you? I'm Damien Harmony. I am, I'm say coasting toward my mid 40s. I am a father of a nine year old and a still six but almost seven year old. So apparently we're dating ourselves by how old are children are. Yeah. Which means if we do these out of sequence, this whole thing's fucked. Totally bone. Yeah. But we just got the decorations for my daughter's birthday.

Yeah. What's the theme? D&D theme. Heck yes. Yes. Right. Thank you. This bump is. Yes. She chose that. And so now I'm trying to figure out Yes. She chose that. And so now I'm trying to figure out how to get a square jello mold to make a gelatinous cube. And I'm also going to probably. It is so awesome. I'm probably going to be making an ice cream

castle cake with miniatures on it. Nice. So that's awesome. Yeah. I've been geeking for quite some time. I just realized when I saw a movie, what was it? I saw episode one of Star Wars and the first thought I had with Qui-Gon Gen was, that's the guy from Kroll. Yeah!

So that's... Oh my god, that is. Yeah, he was the blind... No, no, no, no, no. He was the slave who was manumitted at the end. Oh my god no he was the slave who was manumitted at the end oh my spoiler oh my god he was he wasn't the tallest one in the shot no he wasn't that was the which is rare yeah with him yeah so that's that there's my geek read holy cow right so what are you reading right now let's see right

now I just finished a graphic novel about professional wrestling, which was a lot more fun than I expected. It was kind of, for me, it skims across the pond, but... Yeah, well-widened and deep. Yeah, for everyone else, it's like, who the hell was Frank Goch? You know, like... Yeah, but you're enough of a nerd about it that it was... Okay, yeah.

Most definitely. So that's what I just finished reading. I'm getting back into the saga series. Okay. Yeah, you mentioned that one before. I got to pick it up. I need to get back into reading actual books. But right now I've just been kind of on a graphic novel kick.

All right. I'll be going to Rome this summer. And that means in preparation for that I'm going to read a book by Stephen Sailor called Murder on the Appian way. And I'm getting all my students to read it too because there's a lot of great descriptions of Rome because of the very cool. Gordy Honest Defender, it's a private investigator in Rome. It's pretty cool. What do you read? That's perfect. I am well right now I'm between books. My students and I just managed to make it through Fahrenheit 451 in my single orphan English class. And it was the first time in a very long while I had read it. And

I realized what a complete junkie I am for Bradbury's prose, which is interesting because I had forgotten. And I had to spend it was one of the most frustrating teaching experiences of my career so far was trying to get my students to understand. Look, he's speaking allegorically here. He's crying. You need to understand there's weeping involved. That's what this is like oh right, okay. And when he describes spoiler alert, when he describes the nuclear bombs falling on the city at the end, I had to explain to them this is a nuclear strike. And by the way, these are the details that he got wrong

because it was the 50s when he wrote this. And this was still a new thing, and we didn't understand quite entirely about fallout and this, that, and the other thing. Because, of course, the book ends with Montagg and the other living library, gentlemen, walking back toward the city, which has just been bombarded by age bombs.

Oh. Which, now we know, no move, not only the, move, move not only the other way, but move rapidly the other way as far as you can get, but the, the idea of residual radiation fall out and all that. Either was something he chose to ignore for literary effect, which I don't think so. Or it was just, it wasn't something that was part of the popular consciousness think so, or it wasn't something that was part of the popular consciousness about nuclear weapons when he was writing it. Well, I mean, we were watching videos about how a blanket would save you, so it's possible. As long as you didn't have open wounds on your skin, you were fine.

Yeah, you were okay. It's interesting that you mentioned. No, you really weren't. You really, really weren't. It's interesting that you mentioned a living library because I remember that same phrase or something similar to it in Soilent Green. Okay. Yeah.

The person he goes to for research. Oh, yeah. It's a really. Yeah, well applied, applied a different way. Because the living library that Montag and counters are hobos who used to be university professors and scholars who have been turned into outcast, essentially. So he's gotten something right. Yeah, well, yeah, that have been turned into outcast

by the society and the idea is they have all, because books are, the physical objects are burned, they have found a way to lock an entire book up in your memory and then bring it back out when you need it. And so they are a walking library. The leader of the group refers to themselves as just a bunch of dust jackets for books. Nice. And so in the wake of the hope at the end of the book is in the wake of the nuclear war,

they're going to be able to fix what the society had gotten wrong for generations up till that point. Okay. Cool. Well, what do you tell us about tonight? I am going to be finishing up my semi-rant about Tolkien. And my thesis is talking about the connections between the Lord of the Rings and the World Wars. Okay.

And Tolkien's formative experiences in World War I, and then the experience of living through World War II and the relationship between those things and what we see in the Lord of the Rings. And as you may recall from our last session, the idea of the senselessness of war was a big thing in his writing, which was a departure from the Germanic mythology and the Germanic culture that he was cribbing everything from. Right. And we had a side discussion about how, well, you know,

to us now today, some of the stuff kind of feels kind of fashy because of the Anglo-Saxonness of it all. Yes, yes. And he's kind of a victim of, you know, fashist jerkwads stealing from the same sources that he was trying to use to build a fairy story and mythology for England. And it should be noted that as we record this, there is right now a movie in theaters,

the Tolkien film, which is essentially building around the same thesis that I'm going from. And it's interesting to note that the movie has been disavowed by the estate of John Ronald Rool Tolkien. I was gonna ask you about that because And now this this is where I need to I need to fairly bring this point up is Tolkien hated the implication that the Lord of the Rings was about the world wars He vociferously argued against it. He also insisted that it was not an allegory. There was not an allegory involved

in it of a religious allegory because everybody, of course, Catholics are Minority in Britain. Yeah. They were, at the time he was writing, a minority that was looked at as being, well, they're kind of weird. Mm-hmm. Because let's be honest, guys, we kind of are. Not gonna lie. But there was this association with being a Catholic that, well, because he's a Catholic,

he's got to be writing about Catholicism. No, I'm not. He insisted, no, I'm not. I'm not. I'm genuinely not. This is not, I'm not trying to write a Christ allegory. That's not what I'm doing. This is a fairy tale.

I'm trying to create an English mythology, and while I'm doing it, I'm creating a bunch of fictitious languages and because I'm a linguist and The thing is I think it's it's Important to note that his authorial intent Was was not was explicitly not to write an allegory of the world wars and it was explicitly not to write an allegory of the World Wars, and it was explicitly not to write a Christian allegory, or an apology or anything like that. But, and I got to engage in a little bit of, you know, humanity's professor arrogance here and say, well, you know, he might not have meant that, but it's really hard.

Sure. Not to see those influences because, yeah, you know, the advice as somebody who has repeatedly tried and failed to write a novel or short stories, whatever, you know, the advice you always get is right about what you know, right. And the thing is whether you set out to write about what you know. Right. And the thing is, whether you set out to write about what you know or not, you always wind up writing about what you know, you kind of can't do otherwise. Right, I mean, that's why my deep space nine erotic

fanfiction keeps coming back to certain themes about the idea. Well, yeah, because that's what you know. No matter how much I try. No matter how hard you try to get away from that that you know, right, I can't be shipping Dino and Odo and it just it can't get yeah And that that doesn't work. No, I got to say from my limited exposure to the series. That's that's Your paint yourself into a corner with that one. I clearly have I'm getting right as bar Yeah, actually oddly enough. I don't understand how you haven't scoured yourself with brain bleach

But fine you do know you that in the idea that they literally ship I need us. Oh, yeah And Idaho. Yeah, it is Roman fanfiction. Yeah, and he literally takes him by boat to Dito He ships him to Dito Okay Sir yes, I say good day. Okay. Good to know. So, let me get that out of the way. Sure. Let me just circle back around to what you were saying. Yeah. So, there's no way that a Brit could write any story that expansive and not have it be influenced by the groundbreaking world that was World War One Have it I mean you have entire neighborhoods getting lost

Yeah, well like we talked about when when Tolkien went away off to the war he He received a commission because he was from the middle class. Right. And he was from straight and circumstances, but he was from a gentlemanly background. And he had a university degree at that point. And so he was an officer. That's just the way that worked. And it's one of the interesting things about the way the books get written. Well, anyway, before the war, he had a very close circle of friends from his time in university. And he was the only one of them to come home. Speaking about whole neighborhoods being decimated. So there's not way. And and thinking about his experience as an

officer. And in the last episode I mentioned that it was his job as a lieutenant, he was the one blowing the whistle for his men to go up and over into no man's land. You know, and this is the song we're talking about. So 50,000 dead in one day. Yeah, I mean on the British side alone. Yeah, murderous murderous casualties Just you know, and so there's no way he could have gotten out of that without being affected and There's no way that couldn't somehow shape the kind of story he was gonna tell and released and You know there there may not have been released and you know there there may not have been consciously and there wasn't really consciously

a one-for-one parallel that you know they didn't have to machine guns machine guns or the dragon right right right you know but there yeah there didn't have to be because it's just going to be the kind of stories going to tell and the themes that are going to be involved, there's no way to avoid it. It's like cooking with salt water. Like you will have food that is salty. No matter what, no matter how much sugar you pour into it, no matter what. Like if you're using salt water, then you're going to have salty food. That's how it's going to be. And it's the same thing. If you lived through the war,

then some of your stories will be about that. I don't know if you've changed how you play D&D, but since I've been a parent, I've changed how I play D&D. First off, my characters are progressively getting older and fatter. And, but also, none of them are orphans anymore. They all have families.

Which I'm telling you, you know, I straight up tell the damn, feel free to fuck with the family thing. But my character has a family because I'm going against trope. And maybe I'm going against trope because I really like being a dad. I don't know. But like again, it's infecting the experience of parenthood. Right. Changes your outlook in fundamental ways that you can't realize until you're there. Yeah.

Like, you know, the value of sleep. Yes, yes. I cannot tell you how much right now I would be willing to pay cashy money Just cold hard cash just to be able to sleep a Full uninterrupted eight hours the worst part is just you buy that time. Yeah, you'd still wake up through it Not right now, not tonight. Maybe not. I know what you're saying and you're not wrong, which makes me want a wee break now thinking about it.

You're not wrong. But right now, I'm operating tonight as we record, I'm operating on 4.5 hours sleep from last night. So no, no tonight. I don't know. I've gone, but so we're getting off the subject to quote Cobra Bubbles. So, Tolkien is not writing an allegory,

even though he's writing an allegory. He's not writing with that mind, even though he's writing with that mind. Yeah, even though he's writing with that, riddling his subconscious. Right. He's not intentionally writing it and he got writing with that, riddling his subconscious. Right. He's not intentionally writing it and he got heated with literary critics

and fellow writers who brought up those parallels. He was like, okay, no, look, and he had arguments for all of it. He would say, no, look, that is not what that's supposed to be. This is taken from this source and the mythology and all that. And everybody for the rest of his life, and I almost feel bad for him about this, it's kind of like, yeah, okay. And they nodded politely and let him go on with it. Like, yeah, okay, pat him on the head. But he started writing the Lord of the Rings in 1937.

And part of his argument was that he especially hated the implication that it was about World War II. When people tried to talk about his experiences in the Great War, he wasn't quite as heated about it. But when they tried to say it was World War II, he said, no, I started writing it in 37. Yeah. And the start of the first World War was just as terrifying as the start of the second. The experience of the start of the beginning of the war was just as shocking and just as bad to him as it started the second one and because the book really got huge in the 50s into the 60s everybody wanted to draw the parallel

between the one ring and nuclear weapons oh okay and that one was one of his, one of his berserk buttons. Uh, because he, he dismissed it completely. Uh, because he said if, if the ring had been an allegory for a nuclear weapon, then, uh, the allied peoples would have used it. Hmm. And the ending would have been much darker and uglier and infinitely worse for it. Oh wow. Because he was, as I mentioned in the last one, his experience as the First World War, made him a truly dedicated pacifist.

And the idea of nuclear weapons was deeply shocking and abhorrent to him on every level. But it does have to be said that when the ring is dropped into Mountain Doom, it essentially flattens all of Mordor. Yeah. The shock wave winds up causing a massive volcanic eruption that leads to the destruction of the mountain, the mountain collapses. Right.

You know, the movies then add to that with, you know, the Tower of Dalgolder exploding from the base outward. Sure. You know, but in the books, it's very clear that, okay, no, you drop the ring into the mountain, the mountain blows up. Yeah. So, you know. I get why people would say that, but I also completely side with him on this,

because of course you're going to have a giant explosion of all that is evil when you've destroyed the evil token. The evil Mugafan. Yeah. And that would, that just makes sense. Yeah, narratively. Yeah. I understand. I understand. Yeah. Cambellian kind of standpoint. Yeah. that's the way that has to work. And it is very fairy tale because if it was an allegory at that time, or if it was even a fictional fantasy world at that time, there would be a sense of like, oh no, evil

still here. You know, it would have been kind of like that piece that got under the carpet. And. No, no, mom, dad, it's a piece of evil. Don't touch it. Right. I just love that we both can reference time-end

as without these things. Like seamlessly without even, yeah. But like. It was in the toaster oven, if I remember correctly. Oh, that's right, it was. Yeah. And Sean Conner was the fire captain. Yes. In the last second, if I had to say Sean Conner,

it was the fire captain. And that was supposed to be the happy ending. Yeah, it was a weird one. Yeah. But like, like, dude. Also true. But so like, you know, you don't have to destroy the tower if you're not writing a fairy tale.

But if you're writing a fairy tale, you have to undo all that is evil. That's true. Yeah. From a Freudian kind of union. You've defeated. I'm not sure if it's Freud or Jung or both of them. I think it's Jung, because it's archetypical. Yeah, okay. But it's for either young or both of them. I think it's young because it's archetypical.

Yeah, okay. But it's a level of... It's almost like in video games, after you kill a guy or in D&D, after you kill a guy, his corpse isn't just sitting there. It disappears. It ceases to be part of the terrain. Narratively. Yes, you've undone.

Unless you have a DM who really wants to make a point of being gritty about. So you march back into the dungeon over the corpses of all the works that you've slain over the last couple of times. It's slick. It's kind of slick and really starting to smell bad. Everybody make a con check. So there are other parallels to his lived experience that were informed, at the very least, by the First World War, that I think are also important to point out.

Let's look at who our heroes are. Frodo, Mary. Where are you holding up a finger when you say Frodo? That seems insensitive. Nice. Well played. Thank you. Well played. What in my ring finger? That's true. But is it his ring finger in the in the book? It's never explicitly stated which finger it is. Okay. Because it seemed to me in the movies they were doing index and that reminds me of Roman Signet rings. That's a good point. Yeah. See the first thing I always think of even having

seen all of the Peter Jackson movies. The first thing I think of as we've mentioned in a previous that's the road is going. Yeah. I want to say on his right hand that Gollum winds up biting off. Okay. Spoiler alert. Sorry. The book's been out since the 50s. Come on. Catch up. Um, and if not, you've seen Harry Potter. It's the same story. Wait. Okay. Well, there's parallels. I'll give you a, I'll get wait. Okay. crap. It's gonna be, gonna need to be another episode. I don't have time to go into it right now.

It's the same as Star Wars, if you haven't. Yeah, well, yes, Joseph Campbell, ladies and gentlemen, Reed Joseph Campbell. And, because everyone else did. Because everybody else did. So, but Frodo, Mary and Pippin, are bourgeois gentry. Okay. They are landowners.

All three of them are coming from upper middle class, more than Yomon, but not like the hobbits don't have nobles, but they're clearly a leisure class. Yeah, they are guys who don't dig into mud for living. Right. They all three of them come from well-to-do families. That's right. The the baggains is are a an established very respectable Right. It's a bourgeois family the brandy bucks

Similarly are actually the most Lordly it's gonna say don't they don't they own the hall they they own they own brandy buck haul Yeah, by the way if I can convince my wife to go with it when we when we buy a house I'm going to name it. I want to name it brandy buck haul just because that's awesome So still can't really say I never name this place. Yeah Something to think about I got to find some phrase in Mando Something I'm not yeah, well, okay, yeah, good point so I got to find some phrase in Mando. Um... Something in Latin. Or not. Yeah, well, okay.

Yeah, good point. So... And then the TOOC family are a legendary, you know, family, the bullroder... They were like the tallest... They were... they were known as being the biggest and bullroder took was known for having defeated, if I'm remembering the lore correctly, Stephen Colbert could get this

But I believe bullroder took was the one who defeated the goblin chieftain golf in bowl and knocked his head into a rabbit hole Golf in bowl nice. Yeah, I like that a lot. I knew you Mom, but I remembered that star. I'm like yeah, David So even Tolkien was't immune to your sickness. You know, I have a comedy friend who pointed this out on stage once. People get angry at puns make no sense, because you're basically angry that you're intelligent. True. Yeah. Well, you know, I remember reading somewhere and I don't know if somebody was actually just saying this is a joke, but it sends to me that the center of your brain responsible for getting a pun,

like the center of your brain that's responsible for doing math, is located close to the pain center of your brain. So there's a little bit of neuronal shadow going on there, So that's the reason when you hear one, you're like, oh, God. So could be. I don't know. I find it believable. So the three of these guys, Frodo, Mary, and Pippin, Frodo, Mary, and Pippin are upper class tweets.

OK. OK. There are upper middle class tweets. They're the guys that would go to boarding schools like the one that Tolkien attended, they represent his class. Mm-hmm. And Frodo is the primary ring bearer.

Right. Mary and Pippin wind up over the course of the story attaching themselves to different noble figures from the world of men. Right. You know, and when they come back to the Shire they were referred to by the locals later on in their lives as lordly, and nobody ever meant anything bad by it, they meant it as a term of, you know, look what a couple of classy, respectable, you know, stand-up guys, these two young hobbits are. And by comparison, Sam

Wise Gamji is a worker. Is a guardman. Yeah. And he's the working class hero. And one of the things that Tolkien wrote back to his friends and his wife, Edith, about was how much admiration and respect he developed for the men under his command, who were from this because it was Britain. Sadified society. It was much more stratified society than we're used to. I mean, the stratification was much more formal.

Yeah. Be a better way of putting it. We have a stratified society, but the stratification is not formalized in the same way. The bricks didn't lie to themselves about it. Yeah, that's a bleak way of talking. Yes. And so, and it's interesting to note

that of the ring bearers, Bill Bo, who also again comes from that same bourgeois, and his younger kind of class, yeah. Barters, Bilbo, who also again comes from that same bourgeois, and then Frodo, and then Sam, very briefly, is a ring bearer. And Sam is the one of them who is not in any way corrupted by the ring. And I always thought that was just a matter of like the length of time he had it. That's one possible argument, but then if you kind of, you know, think about it for a moment, there's also an element of it that, you know, Sam doesn't want the whole time there on this journey,

the whole time from the time they leave the share until they get to Mordor, until they get home. Boromir of course winds up getting, he never even puts the thing on. Right. And just having it there is enough for him to be tempted. To kind of gall him out. Yeah. Yeah. And but he's a man and men are men are men are men are fallible men are tempted by power or men are ambitious and all that kind of stuff. And so okay, so there's Boramir. Okay, also keep in mind Boramir is from an even higher social class.

Oh wow. He is the son of the steward of Gondor. He is a ruler of men. Right. So that connection of power seeking power is a thing. Right. And all Sam Gamgee ever wants to do. Like over the course of the whole book, he's in it because he's loyal to Mr. Frodo. Mm-hmm. In a very paternalistic kind of description of that kind of relationship. It's a, in Rome, they had this idea of if you were a freedman or if you were even a client of a dominoes or a patronus,

then you were loyal to that household. And there was a word for that and it was familiar. Yeah. You were a part of his, not family, his family. They didn't have a word for family that was equivalent. They had gins and they had a few other words. But that was lineage. This was, you are a member of his household. And it reminds me of like the mafia's, he's with us. Yeah. Or he's with me.

Well very much. Yeah. So that kind of loyalty would be the loyalty that you would see in a freed slave Mm-hmm or that you would see in a client who knew where his bread was buttered And it wasn't just for you know, well, this is practical these people protect me And I just you know go out and do things for them. It was a loyalty to that house Yeah, so I've seen antecedents of this. Yeah, well, yeah.

And it also comes from the feudal ideal as viewed by the people on the top of the ladder. Right. You know, that well, you know, the people, you know, we're, if we rule properly, that people will love us. And, you know, and yeah, whatever the reverse of no bless oblige would be that you know and he's he's the idea part of his character is the idealized loyal loyal servant loyal right the man servant yeah and so anyway but but all he really wants through the entire story is he wants to go home to green-growing things which is a theme that he brings up repeatedly he wants to go home to green growing things, which is a theme that he brings up repeatedly.

He wants to go back to the garden, he wants to go back to look after his dad, the gaffer, and he wants to go back to the girl he left behind who he never had the guts to say anything to before he left home. Yeah, I see how this is nothing like World War One. Nothing at all. No, not at all. And so, but because that's all he wants. Right.

He doesn't want to, he doesn't have any goals to restore the kingdom of men. He doesn't have any goals. Oh, what's Frodo's goal then? Well Frodo is motivated by, and this is where we segue into talking about how Tolkien insisted it wasn't a Catholic allegory. And he didn't mean for it to be won. There is an interesting division of the

role of Christ figure in the Lord of the Rings. Sam is in the end in very many ways. Sam Wise Gamji winds up being the ultimate Christian. In that he does not seek power, he does not seek glory, he does what he does out of loyalty, love for the people who are close to him, a love of his home and his people. And he is entirely selfless. Okay. Frodo is motivated by a similar kind of sense of duty. Okay. And Frodo is the one who winds up being scourged.

Frodo winds up getting tortured by the orcs in Mordor. And the only point at which the point at which it becomes notable that Frodo departs from a Christ figure kind of narrative is that he fails at the end. That he has his moment above the crack of doom. He says, no, I choose not to do it where he's been overwhelmed by the power of the ring, by the power of Sauron. He's in the heart of the evil place. Yeah, he succumbs like many of us would. Yeah, he and in that moment, of course, he deviates from the Christ story, because up until that point,

he takes on a burden that is not his, if you would take this burden away from me, by your will be done, he says, I will take the ring into mortar, though I do not know the way Okay, cuz you know, so he picks that up when They're there all the trials and everything that happened along the way and

He he remains true to his quest up until the very end Despite the consistent temptation either to just run away, ditch it all into home, and the constant temptation to put the ring on, use the ring, do something with the ring, hand the ring off to somebody else. And he remains true to that. And then again, a very important allegorical point in the Orc fortress, when they get into Mordor, they get captured. Right. And he is flogged.

He is tortured and beaten. And we don't really get the details because Tolkien was a Victorian and didn't go into all the horrible, you know, lash for lash for lash. But we know he's hideously tortured, beaten almost to the point of death by the Orcs when Sam shows up and rescues him and they continue on their way to get to Mount Doom. And that's the point at which Sam becomes the ring bearer because Frodo literally can't walk. So he takes the weight of the ring himself. Frodo becomes the burden. Yes, in a way. And so between the two of them, there's this interesting

kind of nature of neither one of them is entirely a Christ figure and it both of them are idealized Christian figures. Okay. And there are a lot of points that you can look at and say on Sub-Sum-Ka some some conscious level the gospel was poking at the back of Tolkien's brain as he was writing about it. So you know and at the end of it they Sam winds up you know being a one to carry the ring the very last stretch hands it off to Frodo, and in the end, it is Gollum who winds up biting Frodo's finger off and then falling into the crack of doom. And there is a very pointed fairy tale kind of lesson

about the consuming power of evil. Mm-hmm. There. Yeah, it consumes itself. It consumes itself. Yeah. Which is also the law of tachysis from Dragonlance, for those of us who are later kinds of nerds. Sure.

Good redeems its own as law of paladin. The law of tachysis is that evil consumes its own creation on that. And so this is a thematic thing within any kind of Judeo-creative. If you look at the world through any kind of Judeo-Christian lens, that's going to be a thing that comes up. I'm also looking at it through that World War I that he keeps denying lens, and I'm seeing that human nature will not save us. The goodness of humanity will not save us.

Yes, him and the Romantics after the war. Right. Yeah, or, yeah, I want to say to the room, no. I don't remember which movement I'm thinking of, but not all of them after the war. Basically come back to look, science and rationality, got us into all this technology, got us into all this. You know, World War I was the first mechanized war

which talked about that in the last episode. And again, the theme of the conflicting forces is that Sauron, remember when he started out as, and I don't have his name in front of me right now, but Sauron started out as an angel in the service to the god of crafting. Right. And his, his, he sure with an M or an H. Uh, Mayron. Yeah.

Or something like Mayron. And, and so he, he fell because he got seduced by the desire to dominate and, and impose order on reality. Well, what everybody wanted to do, all of the imperial powers wanted to enforce order on the world, and they wanted to impose their order, and they got into this conflict because they're competing orders. Competing orders.

Competing orders wound up running into each other, full steam, and all of the clever technological tricks and all of the machines and all of the stuff that they were supposed to use to make the work shorter, wound up actually turning it into the bloodiest, ugliest, most destructive conflict the world had seen up to that point. And then it ends in 14, or ends in 18, I should say.

And then 20 years later, the whole thing happens all over again. Well, it's back up just to hear though. So it ends in 18. Yeah Everybody's starving So again fairy tale because he destroys the evil in the book but in 18 the world keeps chugging along and everyone's starving. And then the flu looks around and goes, it's cute that you tried that. Well, it's a little bit of a start in 17. Yeah, but it's a flu.

The flu was part of the reason the war ended. I mean, if we really want to be honest. Really? Well, because it wound up, it sucked resources away from everybody who was otherwise going to be continuing fighting, because the epidemic of, it started in 17. And it was notable in that most of the time when there's a flu outbreak, the people that are most at risk are the very young and the very old.

The swine flu epidemic of 17 was killing people in their prime. By the hunting of many hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. They killed about a hundred million. And basically it was like, Oh, cute. War you had there. He killed 10 million. Yeah, it was practically. It was practically another playground break. It was massively destructive. And so interestingly, at the end of the Lord of the Rings, Eriegorn, son of Eriegorn, I just really want to get back to that flu thing. Yeah. That flu is gone. The goodness of man, the industrious of man, will not save us. Okay.

They'll take us right up to the precipice and then fail. Okay. The thing that'll save us is the thing that's going to destroy itself. And the flu ultimately, you could write the historical literary critique around that that I would totally read. Ha ha ha. I'm sure the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien would,

like, send people with flamethrowers to your house. That's all right. But, but yeah, no, it's interesting. I think it's interesting. Name this place, Shaya Spestis. There you go, yeah, perfect. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it's, again, it's the self-consuming

nature of destruction that ended it. And it's the self-consuming nature of, like you said, the flu had an impact on the war ending. And so did revolutions. And so did, like it was all breaking down. And so people were just like. Well, because historically speaking, you know, one of the things, it was, well, all of the industrialized

nations of the world had been flinging their young men and all of their industrial might at one another for four years. Yeah. Now, you know, you look at history and you look at, you know, we talk about the 30 years where we talk about the 100 years where we talk about None of those were continuous conflict. Yeah, like the 100 years where I just got done telling my kids about the 100 years where a couple of weeks ago And I in my history class and the thing is the 100 years war is called that because there wasn't really a Definitive we are now no longer at war. Yeah, treaty between the beginning of it and the end of it but there were 30 year long stretches

where they weren't really at war there was rating hostility, hostility, the English would get a bunch of nobles together and go right we're going to raid France and go and they burn some crap, steal some cattle to destroy some stuff, burn a castle or two, and then head back to Calais and back to England. And the French would look for...

Kill their own Jews. Yeah. Well, everybody did that. During the plague, that happened like everywhere, unfortunately. But yeah. But also, yeah. The French would kill their own peasants. Yes, you know regularly

And they'd look across the channel at England and you know your mother was a hamster your father smells of elderberries That was really all they could do right because they were fighting their own civil war But anyway, I'm getting off the topic So the hundred years we called the hundred years war and it's like oh man my god that must have been so epic Mm-hmm, and it says like, oh man, my God, that must have been so epic. And no, no, it really wasn't. It was just these two groups of people, these two nations really hated each other and spent a lot of time beating the daylights out of each other over the course of a century

and fought back and forth over who was going to rule both countries. So you know, and then you have the 30 years war, which was more destructive, more intensive, more consistently, intensively destructive for technological reasons. But still, there were at the very least every year when the rain started to fall in the autumn, everybody would pack up and go home, because the roads turned to mud and there was no way to travel. And they'd wait until spring came along and the roads dried out, and then they'd go off to kill one another again. And so, yes, it lasted 30 years, but there was only about five months out of each year where there was really active

campaigning going on most of the time with a couple of notable exceptions. But with World War One, they were constantly fighting. Yes. For four years with every resource they had. Aimed at it, yeah. Aimed at the conflict and sitting across from one another in the trenches. 100 yards away. 100 yards less than that in a lot of places, just staring at each other, you know,

lobbing shells, lobbing gas, lobbing all, you know, and it didn't let up. And so it was immensely destructive to all of their economies. And one of the things, and I'm trying to remember, I've been listening to other episodes that we've already recorded that we haven't put up on the website yet. And I don't remember where it was that this thought occurred to me, but we were talking, oh, we were talking about the Confederacy. And the Confederacy was doomed.

Like historically, we can look at it and say they were doomed from the start, because they just didn't have the material base that the North did. Like if you look at it as, okay, look, we know with the benefit of hindsight, we know that it was really gonna be the first modern war as we would call it today. And they didn't have the material to maintain a war effort

as long as the North did. Right. Well, the... Imagine if everybody did. Yeah, Lord. But the thing is, it's a truism that the Germans have the same issue. The Germans are really, really, really scary, historically, in the short term. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But in the stretch, they always flag, and that's what wound up happening during the war. That's what led to the revolutions that happened

at 18 or 19. I'm trying to remember when the Russian revolution started. Well, the Russian revolution is 17. I'm talking about in Germany, the elimination, what was after, they're upheaval. That happens after the elimination, what was after the, their upheaval. That happens after the war. That's after the war.

But they were decimated. I mean, economically, they were completely shattered. They didn't have the supplies to keep it going. Yeah, they just didn't have the resources to keep it going. And so, yeah, it was only four years, but they were completely shattered and exhausted. And, you know, then, then they got hit with the treaty forci at the end of it. And what's interesting is, in the Lord of the Rings, Erragorn, who becomes King of the United, the now United Kingdom of Arnor and God

or the Kingdom of Men in the North and the South. The League of Nations. Sort of. He's also the son of Erathorn, right? Yeah. Yeah. And he winds up pardoning the human servants of Sauron. Really?

Yes. He says, look, you've been under the sway of this evil force. That include Wormtong, what is his name? Grima. Wormtong. Well, we're gonna get into Grima Wormtong because you've seen the movies.

Yeah, but I also, I remember him and Soron going Shireward. Sorry, I'm on. Soron going Shireward. Yes. Yeah. Okay. The scouring of the shire, I'm gonna get into in a moment. But he pardons the human saying you were under the sweat.

Which is, I think could be viewed as a part of its fairy tale. It's, you know, the king pardons everybody, I think could be viewed as a part of its fairy tale. You know, the King, part of everybody, everybody lives happily ever after. But there's also the fact that after World War One, no, no, this war was all your fault. You're going to pay us back every penny that we had to spend defeating you.

Right. And we're going to keep you under our heel, forever if we could get away with it, but at the very least long enough to make sure that you never have the strength to do anything like this ever again. Right. Yeah, no, if you're gonna do that,

do it like a mob boss, because the way they tried to do it failed. Yeah, well this is a problem when you have democratic revenge. Yes. Yes, the good point. Your decency interferes with your ruthlessness. Yeah. And at the very end of the War of the Ring, one of the things that separates Lord of the Rings from other stories like it is that very explicitly, at the end of the story, the fairy tale kingdom loses its magic.

The destruction of the Ring is an epochal event that leads to magic fading away. The elves all pack up on the ships and head back west to rejoin the Vailar in the undying lands. The ring bearers are like the only non-elves given the honor of getting to do that. Catholic allegory they go straight to heaven, which, you know, Tolkien would argue, no, no, no, that's not what I meant, but it's inescapable. And so as much as like we said, I mean, we've, we've, at this point, I feel like we're kind of beating a dead horse with it, but as much as he didn't intend

these these he did consciously write the story to draw these parallel. Right. He didn't you know, he didn't have one to one Similes one more metaphors in his head when he was writing him. It's still Similes, one of the metaphors in his head when he was riding him, it's still, they're inextricable. It's really, really hard to get away with, well no, it's just a fairy tale and there's nothing, there's nothing there. You know, as much as he didn't want to own up to it or he didn't, he didn't want, he, I think he didn't want his work reduced to that. Okay. He wanted the story to be the story, but scholars being what they are, literary critics,

being what they are, people being what they are. Well, okay, this echoes this other thing, you know. Well, and any fiction is a snapshot in time of the time in which it was written. Like, anything about the past is about now, and anything about the future is about now. Like, those are facts. Yeah. So, yeah. And one of the things that I want to get back momentarily to talking about Sam. One of the things that was the hardest thing for Tolkien about his military service was he developed this very close relationship with the men he was commanding and he really loved and respected the men he was commanding. And he had to be the one to blow the whistle to send him up into No Man's Land. Right.

And part of his characterization of Sam, I think is born out of that. The idealization of this character, part of it is just class stereotypes. Sure. We have to cop to that being a thing, but I think really, really part of it is a sign of how much he cherished those men and the people like them. And in some ways he's apologizing to them. in some ways he's apologizing to them. Yes. Yeah. And then his love, all his life of nature, his love of the natural world in the pastoral kind

of environment that is the shire is clearly recurring theme. Saruman winds up coming a cropper, not from an invading army of the men of the West or of the writers of Rohan, but the ent, the trees literally get revenge by destroying all of his works, ripping everything up, diverting a river into flood, all of his underground pits, and all the places where he's been breeding his orcs. So nature literally gets its revenge on him. Well, or, or and, nature grows back.

I mean, this is also Eric Maria Romark. Yeah. I mean, he's big on how, I mean, nature's constantly reclaiming No Man's Land. Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, it's true. There's stuff like that. True. Yeah. True.

And Eric wrote his book in 28, I want to say. No. The movie came out in 20. The movie came out in 32. Yeah. But yeah, I think he might have written his book right around 28 or something. Yeah. A little before or a little after.

Yeah. So that would have been something that Tolkien likely would have read. Probably. Yeah. It's certainly likely that he did. Or it was at least in the circles. Yeah. It was in the air at the very least.

But Tolkien carried a really powerful distrust, like many survivors of the Great War did. This is when we see a rebirth of mysticism, and the occult becomes a widespread thing amongst the guys that come back from the war. That's true also in World War II, one of the guys who, the guy who started the Wicken religion, hate to break it to y'all, it started in the 60s. But the guy who started it as a son.

Modern incarnation of it. Yes, yes. The one that everybody buys crystals for now. Yeah, the that guy was a frogman. Really? Yeah, and did underwater demo and like, and bushing things against the Germans in World War II. Holy cow. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So there you go. Yeah. And So there you go, and Crowley. Alistair Crowley, interwar period is a big deal. Because the church didn't save us traditional Judeo-Christian religion, kind of was responsible for getting us into this mess.

Certainly keeping us there. And of course, Tolkien being a devout Catholic would not buy into that, but his distrust of modernity, and his distrust of the automatic belief that, well, you know, technology is, if so, facto a good thing. Right.

Would have, would have been a big part of what it carried out of his time in the trenches. Eeeh, you see, here's the problem though. This is where you can loop him back into being kind of proto-fashy because one of the myths that Hitler was really big on selling was the German folk Good farming people The reason for Lebensraum is because they need a more farmland There is this at the same time as he's gearing up the machines and modernizing. I mean he used IBM to kill people

Yeah, but at the same time if you look at a lot of his early propaganda posters, he's a knight, there are farming folk, all kinds of... Yeah, well, the thing is, here's the... Here's the... What I'm gonna argue here. He... I'm saying that he didn't start it, but that whole thing was easily co-opted by... Oh, oh yeah, it was.

Yes, certainly. Yeah, well, and, and, you know, and let's look within our own history, a gerarianism of any kind, which is interesting, because that's the part of the theme of the other episode I've got for recording tonight. But a gerarianism is something that gets picked up by everybody. At some point throughout history, some idealization of land some idealization of you know back to nature back to our roots

As people back to you know the simple virtuous farmer You know all that kind of stuff. There was that commercial for Chevy about three years ago. Yeah, super bowl 2016. Yeah Yes 2016, you know before the election. Yeah, there's there's the farmer. Yeah. Yes. 2016, you know, before the election, there's the farmer. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And, you know, I think we could spend a lot of time talking about that, but I do see what you're saying.

Yeah. I think that was a widespread beyond the fascists picking that up and running with it. It was a widespread thing everywhere. I mean, everybody, it all, everybody who came back from the front, carried with them some level of cynicism about the pre-war idealization of, technologies are gonna save us all, rationality, all the stuff, you know, and the knee jerk assumption, again, that technology was, you know,

Prima-Facia, not Ipsa Effect, Prima-Facia, a good thing. Like, technological advancement is just automatically... It's progress. It's progress. It's progress. And you know, these guys had seen progress literally murder their friends in waves. Yeah. And so.

With the goal of doing that, by the way. Yeah. Here's progress for war, poison gas. Yeah. That way war will end. Yeah. No, no. No, it really won't.

It's made it worse. You know. Yeah. And so, No, no, no it really won't just made it worse, you know, yeah, and so So that that level of distrust is part of the underpinning of What becomes the mythology that he's creating with Lord of the Rings and when Frodo and Sam and Mary and

Pippin get back to the Shire, and I'm gonna try to wrap this up by using the ending of the series, the scouring of the Shire. When they get back to the Shire, they have defeated the evil. They have been given acolyds and titles and they are heroes of the world. They've played in saving it. And they get home the ends show up they rip up all of his works. They can't actually destroy the tower because it's built out of some magical ancient you know godlike stone. Did they try attacking it in pairs? Because I hear when the ends go marching two by two. Two by two. Hurrah. Hurrah. Nice. No. Okay. No.

So in the movies, Sarman winds up getting betrayed by Wormtuh, okay and and stabbed in the back. Oh, yeah, and there's and there's a wonderful behind the scene story of the filming of the Have you heard this story about how Chris Christmasly scary motherfucking? Yeah, yeah, it's Chris really is possibly one of one of the most terrifying Individuals in the world because I mean he's been Sarumanon yeah he's been Saramon he was Dracula yeah a Lot mm-hmm like repeatedly in the in the 60s 70s for hammer and he's been He's been he's been a wizard. I mean like count Ducu. Yeah, well. Yeah

I'm not counting count Ducu because that was because that was after Well, that that was after, well, that was after Sarmon, was that before Sarmon? It was before. It was before Sarmon. Sarmon's a bigger deal to me. I got it, you know,

but so, yeah, but in real life, it turns out he was with the OSS. Right. You know, and no, no, that's not the sound someone makes when you stab them in the back. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well then, Christopher, you do that.

How you apparently know, it actually goes. Well, and he even, like, there's video of him doing it. Yeah. Yeah, because your lungs, and it lets out a gasp, a gasp, because you're pushing, and you're like, Oh my lord. So. So. This all makes sense, and I don't like that it does. You have firsthand experience with this, dear lord. Yeah, so, you know, it's also interesting to know,

talking about the EOSS that kind of related of, you know, people that you wouldn't think to look at them were, you know, terrifying scary individuals. Dr. Ruth Westheimer was a sniper with the Israeli resistance. I believe it. Yeah. I believe it. Yeah. So anyway, I just went to yeah, I had to get that one out there. But Scotty from Star Trek. Oh, well, yeah. Just a finger on D-Day. Stone Cold Badass, yeah.

Canadian. Canadian, yeah. I was in a pulp game that my buddy ran. And the whole point of it was, and it was a weird war two game. Yeah, yeah. And we had to find Scotty's finger. That was in Mcuffin.

That's brilliant. It was awesome. So, but back to the thread. Yeah. So they get back to the shire and in the books, Gandalf asks the Ents where Saruman and they say, yeah, we can't find him. Right. We don't care about where he is. We want to undo the damage that he's done and fix all this and get the rivers running clear again. And he's not on our radar anymore. We don't care about that.

So this isn't Wilhelm going into exile at all? No, not in the least. No. He hadn't thought of that parallel, but, huh. So anyway, he flees. And nobody knows where he's gone. Nobody really cares anymore because at that point, okay, we've dealt with Sauraman. He was always the secondary threat. We got to focus on Sauraman. Right. And so then at the end of the book, they've defeated Sauron. They go home. And they find that the Shire has been turned into

basically a gigantic strip mining operation. A whole bunch of the trees have been cut down. There's a gigantic sandy pit where, you know, a farmland and everything you used to be, and there is a dictatorship in place where, you know, we never really find out how the sharia is actually governed. It's even like our Thomas Collective. It comes across as being either an autonomous collective or some kind of weird semi-futil anarcho thing. It was never living near each other. It was total capitalism. Yeah, it was never never really gotten

into, but when they get back, it's really clear that there are a group of goblin men who have shown up these, you know, funny looking thugs who are working for somebody named Sharky. And there are hobbits who have been co-opted into acting as their quizzlings and their low-ranking enforcers. And the newly arriving, you know, lordly hobbits who've just saved the world, basically organize and uprising, where the rest of the Hobbits first shame many of the quizzling Hobbits into walking away, and then, you know, quietly off, off, off, off, seen, pretty sure several of them get the tar kicked out of them by their neighbors or like, you always were a bad one you know right and then the the thugs the goblin men

show up and the hobbits have built a barricade and they've done all the stuff they're being led now we're being led now by Mary and Pipitman right lords are back yeah and when when they get thumped, their leader gets dragged out and Sharky turns out to be Saruman. And he's called Sharky because the Orchish term for Old Man is Sharku. And so his name, so the guy is speaking orcish because they're not quite fully orcs and they're not quite fully men, they're monstrous. They're adivo. Yeah, nice. And so, you know, in the end, they wind up having this very cathartic moment where they wind up, you know, basically, I don't remember whether it's Mary or Pippin off the top of my head, but one of them draws his sword to cut him down.

And Frodo, as the perfect Christian, and as a Christ figure, tells him, no, we're not going to kill him. We're going to let him go. He has lost his power because it's very clear now they've dragged him out into the sunlight and he's this bent, wisdom-dold man, embittered and twisted and he no longer has the majesty of being, because originally he was an angel. Him and Gandalf were Maya. They were angels. Well, he has essentially been stripped of his grace.

He has been stripped of his divinity. He's now just a bent twisted, bitter old man. Okay. And let him go. The most fitting punishment is to let him live with his failing. Live with what he is, which even as I'm sitting here talking to you, the Garden of Gethsemane, when Judas betrays Christ, the Sanhedrin show up with the Roman soldiers to arrest Jesus.

Uh-huh. Peter draws a sword and cuts one of them and Christ stops him. They buy the sword, they buy the sword. Yeah. So still trying not to write an allegory in wow steps right in the one. So there's yeah. And then and it is then that with a desperate whale of of utter utter loss, bereftment, rage, betrayal. It is at that point in the books that Wormtongh pounces on him and kills him. Why? Because in the end, as they are, as they are leaving, Saruman continues to berate him and belittle him and treat him like the dirt

on the bottom of the shoe. Basically, I don't know what he says to him, but he says, calls him a curb, something. In Sultan finally one last time, and that's the point at which he snaps. Because it's been, it's finally finally he's no longer the great. He's no longer the the the powerful wizard. He's just a bent was an old man and he's still ragging on it. You know, still still treating him like like nothing. And so he that is the point in the books when,

sorry, I'm on lines up dying. And so we see in the end, the ultimate victory, finally, in the very, very end, we see the ultimate victory of the pastoral, gentry kind of, if everybody here gets along, we have this beneficent, not at all feudal, but at post-futal, you know, kind of relationship between the gentry and everybody else,

and this coalition of well-meaning pastoralists winds up defeating the power-hungry evil you know fall and angel right of technology and then you know we have a time jump and at the very end of the book Frodo and Bilbo who's so ancient he's basically all the time asleep. Get on the ship and they head out with Gandalf and so forth. And so that's our ending. And so it's very, very powerful. It's very hard to overlook that kind of interpretation of it. And I think in the end, I think the ultimate message

that Tolkien lines up writing, whether he meant to or not, is one of kind of pastoralist Christian allegory. I think he and Chesterton would have gotten along quite well. Hi there Geek Nation. Something happened strangely with our audio, so it cut off a part of the discussion from Ed after the Chesterton comment, but essentially he was talking a lot about how you have the triumph of nature over machinery and things like that. So hopefully this little segue helps to bridge the gap with what's missing. The war lived through the interwar period and then it all happened all over again. And he started the book in 37, but by the time he got done with the book the second world war was in full swing

Right at very a thing might have been over by then by the time he finished but um He he had to witness all of that. Mm-hmm and on a Christian level on a naturalist pastoralist idealized, you know, rolling green hills of England level, and just on a level of somebody who had been through all of that and come out the other side and then had to watch the world go mad and tear itself apart again and then watch his sons have to go off and fight in this outbreak of insanity.

It really does sound like Saramon was the second world war come to the shot. It in a way, yeah. And so, you know, the parallels are there. And there's been, I'm not, when I'm saying what I'm saying, I'm not expressing anything that hasn't been said by much more scholarly individuals than me. A lot of times over.

But I think, especially in light of the way, his stories have become now such a mainstream part of our shared popular culture. Sure. You know, they've now gone beyond just being a nerd thing to being something that, you know, everybody knows about. Right.

And I think it's important to see that and to think about the allegories, mm-hmm. Even though the allegories weren't intentional, even though he didn't set out to write that. That almost makes that more important. Yeah. Like, look how important this is to the unconscious of that time.

Yeah. That it, a man who deliberately didn't set out to do it, did it. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what I have to say about it. Okay. I mean we could go into a whole other episode or two about Catholicism as a thing, but what in the Lord of the Rings And to take a lot more than two episodes for Catholicism as a thing that would be forever. I think there's a bunch of other podcasts Yeah, there's a lot a lot of other podcasts that handle that. But what are you taking away from this at this point?

Now that we're done. Yeah. Well, a couple things. I was 17. Yeah. And I was in a play. It was called the picnic. It was is directed written and directed by a man named Dan Monaco I say this in case he ends up hearing this at some time. Okay. I was in that play. Now I was 17 so I'm 41 now if you do your math that's 24 years ago. Yeah. So 24 years ago puts us in the mid 1990s. Yeah.

I was in that play given two lines that I said 12 times. Help me. Okay. That was it. And uh. Okay. And the reason I said a lot is because in the play my entire job was to be brought out in rags tied to a post and beaten in the stomach 82 times per play by a man who was in fatigues and a black shirt that was kind of

skin tight. Okay. There were two people sitting in front of us who were trying to have a picnic complaining about the noises I was making. A king comes by and he has an entourage and he talks about how fit he is and the entourage takes pictures and they say, and he says, isn't the king fit? Oh, very fit. And then they see me getting beaten. He says, why that can't happen? They should stop that. The guys having a picnic, oh, they do it all the time.

It's terrible. It's just the worst. Could you do something about it, you're a king, absolutely, I shall make a proclamation. And they put a proclamation in my mouth. And it hangs in front of my stomach. And the guy comes out and beats it until it disintegrates. So now I've got a bit in my mouth

that I end up spitting out to say help me again. And the king's like, right, we've done our job. But you two need to make sure that it carries on, ignoring entirely the result, and he gives them blue helmets to wear. Wow. I didn't know I was an allegory for Bosnia, because I was 17. And I had friends who came and saw it, and they're like, oh my god. This is brilliant. This is you know really good allegory Yeah, and at the end I'm dead dragged off stage and then the guy very very soundlessly very dispassionally grabs the guys in the blue helmets who by the way argue the whole time as to how to protect me

Don't lift a finger He grabs them and chains them to each other around the thing. And as he's rearing back to swing, the lights go out and you hear one of them shout the other one's name and that's the end of the play. The thesis of the play was inaction as its own death. Right? You know, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Very Samuel Beckett meets John Paul Sart. Yeah, well. Yeah, it was a great play. Yeah. I liked it a lot. And volicious. Yeah.

And delicious. Yes. But some anvils need to be dropped. Yeah. I didn't realize I was in an allegory at the time, because I was 17. Yeah. So I totally get how a man could utterly deceive himself into thinking that he was not doing allegories. That's not

what I do. I'm an author, I'm writing a fairy tale. That's why I set out to do. And I mean, fairy tales are for kids. Anyway, he's kind of trying to recapture innocence lost. I mean, there's all kinds of things. He's 100% a product of when he was. Yeah, there's no arguing. There's no arguing. Yeah. So, I like that about his efforts, despite his efforts, he's still ended up writing a good, good series of fiction about the world wars. I like that. There's something about Saramon coming

back to the Shire and him having to do that work all over again which kind of gets to the bleakness of it, gets to the evil never sleeps. Aspect of it. Yeah. Even when you think you've beaten it, it will crop up without constant evil never sleeps, aspect of it. Yeah. Even when you think you've beaten it, it will crop up without constant vigilance. And of course, that tickles me where I edge. It will, yeah. So those are the wood.

Yeah, those are the things I took from it. It reminded me of that and how, you know, very often things are allegory without you realizing it. And that's totally okay. Yeah. And even if they're not intended to be allegory without you realizing it and that's totally okay. Yeah, and and even if they're not intended to be allegory even if the allegory winds up being something that you apply after the fact. Right. So the parallels to nuclear weapons. For example, our allegories that that are kind of ex post facto.

Yes. Like, well, we have this thing, and we have this other thing that, like, when he was coming up with this concept, this had not happened yet. Yeah, it did not happen. But now, after the fact, we can look at Bikini Aital. Right. And, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And we can see the parallel to, you know, this massively powerful event happening. And if anybody makes a movie with it, they're gonna have that in mind. Yeah. So I believe it was a Hegel. Well, this is dialectics said that truth is sublimated as it rolls along, right?

You're a lot more up on German philosophers than I am, so I'm going to have to take a word forward. Okay, I think it's him. I always pictured his idea of sublimation of the meaning words. Words carry with them the meanings that they originally had, but also new meanings. And they morphed together. I always pictured as like you've got different colors of Plato,h and you roll a ball and then you roll it over them. Now you see the red inside the brown and in the brown inside the blue. You won't be able to separate them

out ever again. No, that makes sense. Yeah, you've wrecked it. Well, the same thing applies to symbols. Yes, and that's what I'm saying. Yeah, it's with this literature. So it didn't used to be about atomic weapons. It is now.

Yeah. It didn't, you know, he set out with it not being about the world wars. It is. Yeah. And now it's all those things. Yeah. And I mean, if we look at Peter Jackson's version of it, I bet you people could now draw parallels between the Hobbit and say, I don't know,

the hunt for Bin Laden. You probably could. Yeah, you probably could. I think I would be interested to see where the parallels get drawn in that, but I see what you mean. You'd see aspects. Yeah know and that's fine. Yeah. That's absolutely fine.

Yeah. So anyway, that's what I got from it. Yeah, it was bleak and sad. So here's hoping that our next podcast won't be. Do people have a way of finding you online? They do. I can be found on Twitter at EH Blalock, where I tend to do an awful lot of retweeting.

I'm not, I haven't gotten down to figuring out how to say anything and 140 characters very, very well. As anybody who's listened to this podcast long enough will be able to tell. How about you? I'm on Twitter at atda harmony. There's two Hs in the middle there. And we're also at geek history time on Twitter.

You'll find me very often yelling at people in power. Lately, it's a local school district and former board members. Yeah. Also in my spare time it's the president. And then there's some nerdy things. And you are very copious spare time. Yes. As a teacher and a grip. And yeah. Way out of you. Yeah. And also we have a website geeky3time.com. Yes. So please go to that. We could use the hits hits please subscribe to us. We're on iTunes. We're on Stitcher. We're on Spotify Yeah, please subscribe hit that like button give us five star ratings if you think we deserve it if you don't don't touch anything

Well, you know, for start rating. I'll take a four star. I won't Okay, I'm starting nothing. All right But in all honesty, you know rate us review us please subscribe you know, rate us, review us, please subscribe. You know, and if you want to contact us on Twitter to let us know what you think of the podcast, if you have any kind of criticism, well, constructive criticism, anything we can be doing better, anything, any ideas you might have for something we might talk about, please, please provide us with those.

We'd love to hear what you guys want to hear about. Yeah. So I'm Ed Blaylock. I'm Damien Harmony. And until next time, keep rolling 20s.