Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - On Fairy Stories

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

Part 2 of our episodes on the foundations of the podcast; we talked about J. R. R. Tolkien's essay "On Fairy Stories".  We discuss his definition of what a fairy story is, why fantasy isn't just for children, and why Darius hates Joss Whedon so much.patreon.com/swordsandsocialismFollow the show @SwordsNSocPodEmail us at [e-mail]: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69 patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

🎵 Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism, a podcast about the politics and themes hiding in our genre fiction. As always, I am Darius and I have with me today my co-host, Ketho. How's it going, Ketho? Howdy. Today we are doing the second half of our little tentpole series here about sort of works that are foundational to us and the podcast and the way we think about things. that are foundational to us and the podcast and the way we think about things.

Last week was the ones who walk away from Omelas, and today is On Fairy Stories by J.R.R. Tolkien. So we are officially talking about the man himself for the first time, or something he wrote for the first time. Last week was sort of foundational for, I'd say, sort of the political side of the podcast we're doing, the way we think about politics and a little bit about sci-fi, because it was Le Guin, of course. Today is more, this conversation can be more sort of foundational about the way both of us, and I can say me particularly, have come to view fantasy stories, what they are, their role in society as a literary genre.

Also, you'll see in here things that to some degree influenced my own sort of personality and views because I was reading these works when I was really young. And you find maybe partly why I hate factories so much. You hated them first because of this. um you you hated him first because of this you only found uh and anarchism and generalized socialism later that also hates factories but for different reasons i mean kind of it's not entirely wrong well actually i guess depending on what strain you are some people on that in that spectrum love factories a little too much. Yeah. Um, yeah. Um, I, I, I would say you're correct though. And that like I was reading Tolkien and coming from a perspective of,

I like trees, trees are cool. I think nature is neat. I don't like it when they cut down trees to build buildings. That makes me feel bad. And then later on, I was like, Oh, there's a whole like political angle to this besides just trees are cool. Yeah. Also, I feel that history has vindicated us for climate change. So I'm right. You're wrong.

Deal with it. Yeah, people. Well, there are funny little news clipper clippings from like 1912 where they're like, there's a possibility that if you put enough carbon dioxide in the air it causes a greenhouse and you're like we've known for like 150 years again we're talking about a time again here from tolkien and his perspective where in his lifetime he watched the majority of a lot of england go from more rural to heavily industrialized and being covered in soot. So like he actually watched England to get covered in soot and watched trees get like a lot of its forests get cut down in his life.

Saw the first major in post-industrial war. And then, I mean, he was there for world. He was in world war one for anyone. I'm sure most people know by now, for those who didn't know, Tolkien was a soldier in World War One. He was at, on the Western front. He was, he got really sick while serving on the Western front.

He was in one of the battles, you know, like the Somme or something. And he got really sick and eventually got sent back to like a field hospital for a lot, for quite some time, because he got so sick like basically everybody did in world war one and like all but two of his friends that he went to school with got killed in world war one uh so i'd say that infected him pretty heavily um and then he got to watch world war ii happen uh which was also bad and then he got to watch World War II happen, which was also bad. And then he got to watch all the trees get cut down, which was bad. So you can see sort of where he gets some of his cantankerous opinions from. In this essay, getting to the point, it's called On Fairy Stories. It originally was a lecture that he gave at St. Andrews University in 1939.

So it was started as like as a lecture he was giving, but it was popular enough and he liked the content of it enough that he later on collected it in a written form, in a written essay. The essay is in essence, a multi-part thing. Part one is defining what a fairy story is. And he uses the idea of a fairy story somewhat unchangeably with the idea of fantasy. He does, he being a philologist, he's going to go on to explicitly define every term he's using so we don't get his language wrong. He wants to be very clear about that, that we're using the same definitions of words, but it's, you can take it now essentially as a defensive fantasy as a genre. So defining what is fantasy,

what is fairy? I mean, I would honestly argue that a lot of it is high fantasy too, specifically. Yes. Like his, his brand of, of fantasy that he would essentially become the new touchstone for,

I mean, not to say that there were no high fan that there was no high fantasy before Tolkien, but just that Tolkien is the one who essentially established the genre's tropes from then until now. Yeah, we would call what he's talking about high fantasy, because we somewhat sort of broadened the scope from what he would call fantasy, but that's unsurprising that people use a somewhat more broader definition than the man himself would use.

Again, as much as I respect him, the man was at heart an academic and a pedant. So we can't expect anything less. Pulls out a copy of Return of the King, looks at all of the appendices, and is like, hmm. Yeah. Again, that's what we expect.

So he's defining what is fairy, what is a fantasy story. And then he's going on to list what he considers to be integral parts of what makes up a fantasy story. And it launches in here a defense of fantasy as a serious genre. Because at the time, and I would argue even through the modern day, fantasy is often discounted as a genre for kids. It's like, especially you talk about like fairy stories, right? Just as something deeply unserious. Yeah, it's an unserious literary genre. They're fairy tales for kids. You know, if you want a story about wizards and dragons, that's something kids read.

It's not something that adults do. I would say that generally, actually, that opinion has lessened, especially in our modern era i think the rise of uh superhero movies and sort of nerd culture generally has given over to it being taken more seriously i would still argue that there is some prejudice there's specifically prejudice when you're talking about like literary critics literary academics who are of course the same people yeah for the most part yeah there's the people that you know still poo poo fantasy as like a serious literary genre but i would say that culturally the high fantasy is more accepted now than at any point in human history in human history which sort of circularly i think we can contribute a lot of that to the success of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy that came out at the beginning of the 2000s.

Seriously. And what a freaking lucky thing that was. and unaccounted for success of that adaption sort of springboarded the acceptance into the modern era of superhero movies, other fantasy stuff. And now you have adaptions of every fantasy work that has any popularity being made into an Amazon show that Amazon can then develop in such a way that fans of the books hate it, which...

I was about to say lord of the rings definitely like the movies definitely had that push and as far as high fantasy is concerned i would almost put like it i feel like it does have an impact on things like the marvel cinematic universe but i feel like a lot of that also comes off the coattails of as unfortunate as this is harry potter specifically because that's like the those are the ones that got the first big movies the low fantasy stuff that became like synonymous with massive cinematic success yeah i think all of it sort of contributes generally to the idea of like nerd culture being more accepted oh yeah i mean you can throw in things there that have all this is sort of a

rising tide for all things high fantasy superheroes superheroes, Dungeons and Dragons, which is, again, just high fantasy. And you know what I mean? It's all general things. But this sort of battle about the seriousness of fantasy as a genre, Tolkien was waging it back in 1939, because at the time, much like now, all the critics considered it specifically a thing for children, that it had no merit for adults to read, and that if you were an adult reading fantasy, you were being childish. And he specifically launches a pretty solid rebuttal of that argument in this essay. Yeah, that was definitely something that, and I think we brought this up in the Earthsea episode a long time ago, but Le Guin was starting, was born and was starting

to read stuff a little bit after this was, like she was reading things at about the same time that this stuff was being written. And she used to hide like fantasy and science fiction stuff that she was reading behind in that classic, like, oh, I've got a big fancy textbook right here i'll put this in the middle she actually did that because it's it's it's again it's something that you were kind of looked down on especially if you consider the fact that liquid was in like an academic family it's like that that's sort of especially in academia and especially at the time there's because like it has gained more popularity even now, even in academia, you have some people that are like open supporters and like actually contribute even contribute to the genre. I had I had I had a couple different professors for my fiction writing stuff. One of them was a like essentially a James Joyce scholar.

The other one was a young adult fantasy old english nerd so she wrote like beowulf retellings and shit like that so it's it's becoming more prominent than it ever has been but it's still still not still not really there yet yeah the other people i would give a shout out to specifically for really trying to bring that sort of luster of academia to fantasy is anyone that does anything into Tolkien. It's probably heard of Dr. Corey Olson, who's known colloquially as the Tolkien professor. has actually created an entire university where you can take classes specifically on sort of the literary aspects of fantasy and science fiction. Corey Olsen has his own podcast and a bunch of other stuff, like actual accredited classes and stuff you can take.

There are other, a growing number of academics who have taken it upon themselves to do very official, serious lectures and books about Tolkien specifically and fantasy generally. You've got... I might want to bring this up later, but the kind of desire or need for anything to be accepted as, like, academic and that giving it legitimacy is something that I kind of want to touch on at some

point i don't necessarily want to get into it now because it would it would take a yeah i mean yeah we might actually have to do that separately the one i was trying to think of was an author named verlin flieger who has written a number of of the sort of academic books focused on like the themes within tolkien books like a question of time splintered light other things like that if people you know if if anyone like me listens to the prancing pony podcast you're going to be within Tolkien, books like A Question of Time, Splintered Light, other things like that. If people, you know, if anyone like me listens to the Prancing Pony podcast, you're going to be familiar with all of that sort of more academic side of Tolkien scholarship. But again, this is a reaction to a lot of this comes as a reaction to the fact that for a long time, it was fantasy was, again, looked down upon as unserious, unliterary.

And that's what Tolkien's writing, partly talking about here against in 1939. He starts with the, what is a fairy story? In classic sort of academic fashion, he starts off by saying what it isn't to try and work his way down to a definition. Not supernatural, you know, it's um not beast stories it's not like just having a story with talking animals to him doesn't count as fantasy sorry yeah so to him to him red i don't i'm actually trying to think if he would consider redwall fantasy well yeah because they're they're a lot more anthropomorphized than than like the tortoise and the hare yeah because he's he's specifically talking about like the like briar rabbit right and like the tortoise and the hare yeah because he's he's specifically talking about like the like briar rabbit right and like the tortoise and the hare that sort of thing or

like more folklore beast stories you know he mentions like the story of like the monkey who leaves his heart like that or says he leaves his heart back in a tree that sort of thing he in this essay numerous points is essentially slagging off other authors saying their works suck i think anyone who anyone who's only read lord of the rings and i think we've said this about leguin where like when you read like her listen to her interviews or read her non like non-book writing you really get a sense for her personality the same thing applies to tolkien where if you've only read lord of the rings you haven't read like his letters or any of his lectures. You find out that the man had an incredibly scathing opinion of many things and was not scared to share.

And it's written in a way that only pre-1950s writers can write. that only pre-1950s writers can write. It's just like a very, it's a very almost pedantic, flowery, pre-modernist way of putting all this stuff. It's like, screw Hemingway. This is the way we're like, I'm going to write as much as I can.

And he does it in such like sophisticated, verb like language that you almost just it's like the sort of critique that if you got a critique from someone like him back in like 1940s 1950s it's like the equivalent of just being absolutely just slapped down just slaughtered like it's the most disrespectful thing yeah it's it's but like to us we're reading it we're like that doesn't seem so bad then you look at it again you're like oh he was basically saying this dude sucks ass the like i i think of there's only a handful of other like examples i can even think of obviously his his letter to the nazis is a very very funny one very concise for him too

let's get for him that's concise if you want one from him specifically where you want to hear how scathing he can be, there is, I'd have to look up which letter it was, but it's one of his letters. And it's about one of the first proposed movie adaptions of the Lord of the Rings known as like the Zimmerman transcript or the Zimmerman telegram or whatever.

And Tolkien goes through this proposed transcript for the first Lord of the Rings movie. And boy, does he hate it. Does he hate just about every part of it? And he essentially goes through it piece by piece and dissembles why he hates all the parts he hates. Oh, buddy. I don't think that Zimmerman ever actually got to critique himself, which is probably for the best. Tolkien sent it back to his editors or whatever, his literary editors. And I think they just went back to the guy and said, no, thank you, because he sure didn't like it. Oh, no. But yeah, there's just something super, super cool and sophisticated and terrifying about someone telling you off in the most verbose way possible. There were some letters we had to read from in one of my history classes in college from Lincoln that were pretty scathing in a similar way. There was one from Andrew Jackson that might've been the most scathing

thing I've ever read in my life. When someone in South Carolina was like, actually, our city's not going to be paying the tax that you told us we have to pay. And he was just like, listen here, you fuckboy. He was just absolutely drilling into them. And it's the same thing. It's this ultra verbose. Well, I think I can give an example right here. I found one pretty here at the beginning. He's talking about a specific, like specific example. He's talking about, um, in the preface to the lilac fairy book here, first, the tales of tiresome contemporary authors. They always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple blossoms. These fairies must be funny or frail. They must try to preach and succeed. He's talking about the trend of making elves,

like fairies, these little diminutive things that, you know, can like hide in plants and behind leaves. No, we, what we would call like pixies or sprites. He goes on, but the business began, as I have said, long before the 19th century and long ago achieved tiresomeness. Certainly the tiresomeness of trying to be funny and failing. Drayton's Nymphidia is considered as a fairy story, a story about fairies, one of the worst ever written. He writes a bit from the book and then continues. The night pig Wigan rides on a frisky earwig and sends his love, Queen Mab, a bracelet of Emmet's eyes,

making an assignation of cowslip flower. But the tale that is told amid all this prettiness is a dull story of intrigue and sly go-betweens. The gallant knight and angry husband fall in the mire, and their wrath is stilled by a drought of the waters of Leth. It would have been better if the Leth had swallowed the entire affair. Oberyn, Mab, and Pigwigan may have been diminutive elves or fairies, as Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot are not but the good and evil story of Arthur's court is a fairy story rather

than this tiresome tale of Oberon oh my god Oberon I just love that it's a takedown of a incredibly of any like ancient not ancient of any like 1800s fairy stories like that's a pretty well-known

one um yeah like yeah pig wiggin and oberon and such you know what's really funny is the only reason i noticed it at first is he said queen mab and queen mab is a uh is a demon in shin I, yes, I am. I am. Yeah. Well, I mean, everyone, everyone in the, uh, SMT fandom calls themselves gay, but I mean, it says right here, like in the couple lines says Drayton's and infomedia is one of the worst ever written worst stories ever written. And then down here, it would have been better if the, if the leaf let they had swallowed the entire affair. Reminder to everyone that the River Lethe

is something that if you get dunked in it, you forget everything you ever knew. Yeah, you forget everything. And it would have been better if the entire story had been dunked in the river of forgetfulness. Yeah. So what he's comparing there, though,

is he considers like Arthurian legend to be significantly more fairy, more fan, because you'll have to understand, obviously, a lot of times I'm saying fairy. You can transpose in here the word fantasy. Much more fairy than any of those stories of pixies or sprites like riding on beetles because to him our theory and legend has the qualities of what a fairy story should have there is you know there's

there's morality there is um imagining a world beyond our own there is like there is hope you know there is abstraction there for you to have the freedom. And a number of things that he will go on and list later is necessary to fairy stories, such as escape, recovery, consolation, eucatastrophe, and all those sorts of things. So yeah, that's sort of where he's drawing these distinctions between your little, like, I'm a little pixie that flits between the flowers and some of these sort of mythological stories. between the flowers and like some of this these sort of mythological stories he openly says that he draws significantly more from like norse sagas than he would from any sort of like continental

european like folk tale like he specifically has problems with the brothers grim oh yeah he brings that up repeatedly uh because to him the brothersimm ruined the fairy tales by watering them down. That's the thing that just makes me laugh because nowadays we look back at the Brothers Grimm and go, oh, that's so dark. You're like next to like, like, are they the ones who did? They did. Yeah, they did all your whatever. Just if you're thinking of it, it's a Brothers Grimm. Yeah, it's like like 85% of your Disney fairy tales. 80 like 85 of your of like your classic disney stories are adapted stories either from the

brother's grim or from like hans christian anderson or something it's like oh my god that the girl in cinderella chops her toes off it's so bloody and gory and then you actually look at whatever the original one was and it's like they got their heads lopped off for insolence. And you're like – Yeah, and Tolkien specifically says that he doesn't – he was upset with the fact that the Brothers Grimm were tailoring their rendition of these stories specifically for children. Yes. That they should not have done so. It was like these were made by adults for adults for everyone really.

Yeah, he makes some good – if we're on this sort of bet here, he makes a lot of comparisons in here when people are talking about more serious things like mathematics or science or history that you can teach children mathematics and science and history without destroying the integrity of those fields. And that's how he feels about fantasy stories, that you can tell fantasy stories to children

without inherently removing what makes them fantasy, just like those other things, they are meant for adults as well. Using the man himself, The Hobbit is a great story to read to your kids. Yeah, The Hobbit is a great story for children, but he made sure not to remove all the parts that you know he considers it like integral to a fantasy story bad things still happen in the hobbit

like it's not rounded corners or anything like a good chunk of the of the adventuring party dies at the battle of the like the battle of five armies, like Thorin dies and it's explicit. Like there's bad things that happen here, but that's sort of the way he's viewing it is that it's for children, the way you can do history or mathematics for children in that there's a way to do it properly in a way to do it. That is demeaning and reductive. And that's how he feels clearly about most fantasy up to this point is that it's been demeaning and reductive. And that's how he feels clearly about most fantasy up to this point,

is that it's been demeaning and reductive. He also, along with talking about what fantasy should and shouldn't be, he is also defining it by holding it up against other genres that exist. And one of the ones he talks about a lot is drama. This is probably the most scathing part of the entire essay, in my opinion. Yeah. So let's we can we can talk let's let's talk about drama and now it's important to note when he talks about drama he's talking about stage plays theater that's theater specifically i know that's like the word that it traditionally means but nowadays it's more of a genre yeah drama now is like a type of story that you can

tell in a bunch of different ways he's referencing it again in a very tolkien-esque way he's being very specific meaning drama being stage plays or stories that are meant for stage play yeah it's about to say there's plenty of fantasy stories that coincide with the concept of genre drama but yeah like you can say there is, yeah, there, there is drama the way we think of it in Lord of the Rings, but he's talking about a drama. Yeah. It's certainly not a comedy.

He's here referencing drama, the concept stage play, big D drama. It's not his thing yeah um well i think he respects it as as a thing he just essentially is wishes it would stick to what it is and not try and dip its toes into fantasy it's stemming from him talking about the fact that he thinks england doesn't seem to be that well suited to accepting fantasy because it's an island that has been steeped in shakespeare for a long time uh he doesn't slag off shakespeare directly just that shakespeare specifically

wrote dramas uh and so therefore the island and their culture has sort of become like steeped in the idea that that's how things have to be. Yeah, it's he's he's kind of correct, I think, because even especially in England, there's a big deal around people who like in acting people who have done Shakespeare. Like they're they're a lot more prominent in England than I think almost anywhere else in terms of like Western theater is concerned. Because like you can come to America, sure, and do theater. But like the biggest thing here is Broadway. And that's really freaking difficult to get to. And a lot of times it's just money. Like people who end up on Broadway a lot of times like already had money to fund themselves being able to put a production on

broadway so you end up in that kind of like very small like tight-knit group of actors and actresses that are popular in a in a way and they're and they're and here like the big thing is movie actors like those are the ones that like hollywood style that that's like the most prominent kind of acting here but over in england like a lot of the biggest movie actors started in shakespearean productions people like and you kind of also like you kind of have you you kind of had to have done stage acting to become a big movie star in the UK. I mean, you think of your big British actors, most of them by and large went through stage plays at some point.

Yeah. Ian McKellen. Yeah. Unless they, unless they jumped ship from England early on and went to Hollywood and just moved to Los Angeles, you didn't, you didn't end up in that situation unless you were a stage theater actor like Ian McKellen, like Sir Patrick Stewart, like, you know, like. Even like, even like, even like Keira Knightley did stage plays. Yes. Even modern, even more modern, like younger actors from England. If they didn't move to Hollywood right away,

they were definitely doing theater. Did Beneswetch Cumberlitch do any stage? I don't know about Benetrain cumberchoochoo so you can look that up while you're looking that up i'm gonna go right into your i'm actually gonna read a section uh from tolkien's sort of uh his specific words here about about drama oh what do you know the very first thing listed here is theater. He was involved in numerous Shakespearean works at school and made his acting debut as Titania, Queen of the Fairies, in A Midsummer Night's Dream when he was 12. Wow, what a surprise he had to do theater. Again, we're talking about the fact that this is clearly like an ingrained part of British culture, is theater, and what tolkien he graduated he graduated with an ma in classical acting um and initially started his roles in theater in 2001 only became popular now in uh television

like later on in his career that's all right so there's my question everyone does stage plays yes again we're talking stage plays equate that that to Tolkien using the word drama, because he's always dealing with a capital D, meaning like stage plays and stuff. In human art, fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature. In a painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy. The hands tend to outrun the mind, even overthrow it. Silliness or morbidity are frequently results. It is a misfortune that drama, an art fundamentally distinct from literature, should so commonly be considered together with it or as a branch of it. Among these misfortunes, we may reckon the depreciation of fantasy, for in part, at least this depreciation is due to

the natural desire of critics to cry up the forms of literature or imagination that they themselves innately or training prefer. And criticism in a country that has produced so great a drama and possesses the works of William Shakespeare tends to be far too dramatic. That's such a good line. But drama is naturally hostile to fantasy fantasy even of the simplest kind hardly ever succeeds in drama when that is presented as it should be visibly and audibly acted fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited counterfeited men dressed up as talking animals may achieve buffoonery and or mimic, but they do not achieve fantasy. This is, I think, well illustrated by the failure of the bastard form pantomime.

He's just shitting on mimes. a specific cultural tradition that they do around Christmas, even to this day, where like adults get dressed up in costumes and do acting like for other adults and for children. It's like a Christmas tradition in the UK is doing panto like to this day. And so Tolkien back then is like, yeah, panto sucks. You should stop doing it. You can take this and actually stretch it. Like if you think about what the most prominent musicals the most prominent there's well i mean honestly there's only one exception i think in terms of popular fantasy becoming musical or stage adapted and succeeding in a relative way without being satirical cats well cats is not i mean cats is i was i was gonna say i was gonna the only one

that springs to my mind is wicked but like but but the thing is is wicked is still technically set in oz which is technically from a low fantasy book yeah the wizard of oz is is why we i would argue is low fantasy yeah because you have a character from earth ending up in Oz. And I mean, he would also be like, it's also probably dream. Yeah. He would argue, he would argue that it's almost discounted because it's heavily implied that Dorothy was dreaming the whole time, which he, which he clearly earlier in the essay says is a cop out. He does. He's like, this is stuff. Don't call it fantasy.

It's a dream stuff. Doesn't matter. Well, so I think I can do a sidebar here. The reason that doesn't count, I think we should mention is because to him, fantasy specifically requires a new world that is logically consistent within itself. And it requires what we would call the suspension of disbelief. It fantasy itself to be fantasy requires this sub-creation

of a new world that you are immersed in and that anything that happens in it, you believe to be true within the confines of the world that's created. A dream sequence inherently does not do that because it is by definition a fake thing you thought of while sleeping or unconscious or whatever it is inherent it's an antithesis to the idea of the trueness of fantasy that he thinks fantasy requires yeah internal consistency internal consistency he talks about it in the question of like a child will ask is this story true and the answer is yes it is true within itself yeah like it is within itself true whereas a dream is not a dream is not that a dream is just a thing you had and then was gone and you kind of knew the whole time it wasn't real sorry sidebar i felt we should get that before we go back to him

talking about like odds or whatever uh one of the um i think important should get that before we go back to him talking about like oz or whatever one of the um i think important quotes that that works on that that kind of puts it into his own things is there is one proviso proviso i don't know i'm english proviso proviso if there is any satire present in the tale one thing must not be made fun of the magic itself um that in the story be taken seriously neither laughed at nor explained away it's like in in dream stuff you know the magic is that it's a dream so it's happening just magic blah blah but in the in the toy in terms of like fantasy it takes itself internally seriously to an extent, and it follows its own rules within its space. Yeah.

Do you mind if I have a slight tangent here? Because this is something I've talked about on Twitter quite a lot that actually matters a lot to me. I am in strong concordance with the professor on this. I despise, and I think a lot of the people agree. I think what people would call sort of the, the Joss Whedon effect, which is you do something, but there's always an implicit like wink at the camera, specifically in movies.

There's an implicit wink at the camera that isn't this all a bit silly. You know what I'm talking about yeah that there's a there's a weed the the jossification there's a reason there's a reason that that controversial statement that his best thing was firefly because it doesn't do that as much yeah so like it's the idea that your fiction and you see this particularly in superhero movies is there's always a sort of wink and a nudge where they'll do something cool and they'll look at the camera and be like, yeah, I did that. Isn't that crazy? Isn't this superhero shit crazy? And it drives me insane. I hate it. I hate it so much. and it drives me insane. I hate it. I hate it so much. I am entirely on the professor's side here that one of the things that I think makes fiction generally and sort of fantasy more specifically good is that it does take itself seriously. Is that this says, yes, this is a story i am telling you and these are the rules of the world in which i have created and now we are going to tell you a story within these bounds yeah even even even authors like terry pratchett respect it yeah so terry pratchett is is

satirizing fantasy, but crucially... The world takes itself seriously. Yeah, crucially, the people in Discworld, even when Rincewind is like, oh, this sucks, it is a bit silly, he still understands that that is technically consistent with the world in which he lives. Yeah, it's like the only reason

that the hydrophobes staring at water through a lens, like floating through pure malice is hilarious to us is that it's taken entirely at face value in the setting. It's like there's no questioning it. It's just something that Rincewind is like, oh, they're hydrophobes. And you're like, what the fuck? That literally to the quote you read just a minute ago from tolkien in this essay within the setting there can be satire but what you can't satirize is the magic the magic is is this is itself in a way you're not satirizing the fact that the wizards are using magic to float you're

satirizing the way in which the magic is being applied, right? That the fact that they're hydrophobes because they just hate water and they repelled from it. I'm still laughing about it. It's the funniest fucking thing. It's not the fact that the magic exists that is being satirized. Yeah. It is the application and reaction to that sort of thing. Whereas if you look at a Marvel film, you often have them essentially joking about the fact that they can do the

things that they do. Like, oh yeah, I can punch a hole through space time. Isn't that weird? And like, instead of them just accepting it as normal reality a lot of times because clearly like honestly one of the let's get a this may be controversial i'm

just gonna go out on a limb and say low fantasy is really not your jive low fantasy does this a lot you're right it's not but i would actually weirdly i think one of the franchises within even within the marvel umbrella that doesn't do this you're right. It's not, but I would actually, weirdly, I think one of the franchises within, even within the Marvel umbrella that doesn't do this are the X-Men films. To some extent, because they take it at face value that, that mutants exist. Yeah.

There isn't a lot of humor around the fact that nightcrawler is a blue or like mystique or whoever, like the, it's the blue furry twink. Yeah is a blue... Or like Mystique or whoever. It's a blue furry twink. Yeah, but they're not like... Wolverine isn't looking at himself and going, yeah, isn't it crazy I can regenerate my limbs? Like there's other stuff going on

and you can critique the actual quality of the X-Men movies all you want. Especially from directors who shall not be named for other legal reasons. But they don't actually do that wink and a nod type nonsense at the existence of the premise. You know what I mean? And that is a personal bone I have to pick where I am entirely on the professor's side here that my biggest problem with a lot of our modern fiction and superhero fantasy stuff and even I mean some sci fi and some other runs where there is too much. It's the being self-aware. You shouldn't be self-aware.

I hate it when it comes to fantasy. Well, you shouldn't you shouldn't have your characters be self-aware about the setting you the writer can be self-aware yeah you the writer but yeah that's kind of integral to something like the color of magic yes but it is characters themselves being self-aware of the ludicrousness of the fundamental rules of the world that they live in and that's it's so funny because that is kind of like a hallmark of low fantasy because if you think about it it's almost always fish out of water like like the way that 99 of low fantasy works is you take someone from the normal world

and you stick them uh yeah a kid in king arthur's court yeah oh man we're gonna go watch some isekai anime now and we can shit on this entire concept. Which is fine because Isekai anime is stupid and overdone for the most part. Also, I think the problem here is though is that's why Tolkien draws the definition where he does. Because he would not – he personally would not define what we call low fantasy as fantasy. Yeah, no. No, he doesn't. It's like – what would you expect that

creative fiction i don't know he just called he just yeah he just call it fiction or he'd define it under one of the other labels like a fish out of water story or a super net he called supernatural or a beast story or something you know what i mean he would put it under one of these other various one of the more interesting quotes from the story from this essay i think that that's really interesting is his assertion that it's not the fairies that are supernatural humans are supernatural that's a fundamental building block to him is that i'll take right now, nowhere in this essay, does he explicitly admit that elves do not exist? No,

he never does. He will never. And when you get Tolkien to the fact, I don't think in any of his work, will you ever get him to explicitly say elves are not real? Because I think that's like, it's an antithesis to the way he views fantasy. Well,

that like elves inherently must exist. Well, you said to me that that snippet of his that I don't know if this is jumping ahead of the gun, but where he talks about willing suspension of disbelief and how he and how he understands that. And that fantasy is, for the most part part something that's supposed to completely engross you to the point where you believe what's happening on the page is happening he calls it something other than willing suspension of disbelief but he says that that's what most people's term for it yeah yeah he calls it something before we move on to that i want to read one more quote from him where he's just shitting on drama because i think i think they're fun it's a little it's a little bit of the it's a little bit after talking about pantomime and a little bit into the

next one where he talks about our our boy willie shakespeare well not shakespeare himself but shakespeare's uh works i once saw a so-called children's pantomime the straight story of puss in boots boots or with even the metamorphosis of the ogre into a mouse. Had this been mechanically successful, it either would have terrified the spectators or else have been just a turn of high-class conjuring. As it was, it was done through some ingenuity of lighting. Disbelief had not so much to be suspended

as hanged, drawn, and quartered. In Macbeth, when it is read, I find the witches tolerable. They have a narrative function and some hint of dark significance, though they are vulgarized, poor things of their kind. They are almost intolerable in the play. They would be quite intolerable if I were not fortified by some memory of them as they were in the story as read. I am told that I should feel differently if I had in mind the period with its witch hunts and witch trials. But that is to say, if I regarded the witches as possible, indeed likely in the primary world, they ceased to be fantasy. And this argument concedes the point.

So here, first off, just talked about suspension of disbelief he's saying that in a stage play you can't do like the ogre turning into a mouse because there's no way to do it in a way that's believable if it was believable you'd be terrified well this is a that's a huge like that's a huge caveat for why this is kind of a little tangent but like for why like stage presentations are the way they are and why some of the best stage presentations turned films or vice versa are animated um it's the same it's the same idea where it's like you're when you're watching a play you know it's a play and they're not trying to make it realistic it's not like a film you know it's not a movie that's trying to replicate reality in a gritty tangible way it's a

a caricature almost of reality where it's just intentionally self-aware it's self-aware and and because of that you don't really question it when all of a sudden someone on stage bursts out into song you don't question that because it's part of the sphere of belief that you're holding for this which like he said it does make you essentially have to hang draw and quarter your your belief yeah so you have to you have to do that and it's the same thing with why it translates so well into animated film as opposed to live action film is the same shtick where you have it's immersive yeah you're more willing to accept the fact that a crab is singing to you if it's animated and not

real which is why these live action disney films are all bullshit, but like why anyone with half an eyeball should be able to tell you that they're awkward as fuck. Because the and it goes into here in that second paragraph he's talking about Macbeth and the witches. When he says, I can't stand them because they're so like out of

place. He can handle them when reading it, but watching it on stage is awful. And he said people's advice to him to be able to tolerate it better is to remember that at the time people thought witches were real. And he's like, that's conceding my point, that in order for it to work, you have to believe in the verisimilitude. That's conceding the point that this isn't fantasy. It's like, in order for you to get the full impact of the story, you have to literally, in real life, believe that witches exist. What he calls the primary world. You have to believe that witches exist in order for the play to not be bad. Yeah. It's like, as soon as you start thinking about it in terms of fantasy, it's like, well, I don't really believe any of this anymore.

Macbeth is indeed a work of a playwright who ought, at least on this occasion, to have written a story if he had the skill or patience for that art. So he's saying that Shakespeare should have just written a book. If he had the patience to write a book. To write a book as opposed to making it a stage play. That's a giant middle finger to Willie. I mean, he's obviously read probably every single Shakespeare play ever conceived by man. Of course. He's read them all.

And I think he respects Shakespeare. He doesn't say Shakespeare isn't good at what he does. He's saying what shakespeare should not have done was tried to do fantasy yeah well he's i mean in a way he's arguing and other people are arguing especially that he didn't do fantasy yeah exactly and that's the way that people like it is if you don't perceive it as fantasy is if you perceive it as dramatic reality you know as dramatic realism then it then it becomes good tolerable i do hate the fact that he's crapping on my favorite shakespeare play but it's okay it's okay drama is even though it uses a similar material words verse plot and art it is

an art fundamentally different from narrative art thus Thus, if you prefer drama to literature, as many literary critics plainly do, which, by the way, these are often in parentheses for emphasis, or form your critical theories primarily from dramatic critics or even from drama, you are apt to misunderstand pure storymaking and to constrain it to the limitations of stage plays. You are, for instance, likely to prefer characters, even the basest and dullest, to things. Very little about trees as trees can be gotten into a play. I think he makes a really excellent point, but it's also a point that is, I think, directly correlated to why it's become more acceptable in academic circles now like we've if you think about early 1900s in the 1800s the big thing as far as the most widely accepted most expensive most it the their version of our blockbusters were like wagner operas you know yeah it's like so so plays were still one of the biggest forms of entertainment at the time

like they were that was mass entertainment it was mass entertainment was wagner and it's like if you could afford it but like um or again, Shakespeare plays if you couldn't afford vodka. Yeah, because then you do Shakespeare plays like open to the public. You go to the Globe Theater and sit in the pit and throw peaches at people or whatever. So like it's like he's probably correct that a lot of literary critics at the time were people who were taught and who enjoyed theater, drama, and opera. And nowadays, I think more literary critics are actual fans of literature. Because we're looking at like the post Hemingway world at this point, where suddenly, you know, fiction was a big deal, not fiction, but like literature was a big deal, obviously early like literature was a big deal obviously early on but a lot of the biggest stuff was like what do we talk about today paradise lost you know things

like they were effectively poems which were derived from the dramatic form like shakespeare wrote poetry and his plays were in iambic pentameter for the most part so it's like these these things are super important to to that sphere but now that we've reached a point of academia where the biggest names in in literary fiction of the day not even technically of the day but like the ones that have influenced intellectual academic literature the most are people like will Faulkner and James Joyce. And, you know, whoever was the real Grapes of Wrath. Like modernist literature post Hemingway is the thing in academic literature.

It's literature, not drama. Literature, not drama. And because of that, it's kind of opened the way for people to start realizing that fantasy, science fiction, especially. Science fiction was actually, I feel like has been more accepted more quickly than fantasy. Yes. Because you, I mean, you have big names of science fiction. Like, I mean, I've got Ray Bradbury right over here. Ray Bradbury is like the darling of science fiction for academic literature. I think that sci-fi becoming accepted faster.

We almost touch on a little bit later in this essay when Tolkien talks about sci-fi a little bit because sci-fi doesn't inherently stand, in his view, doesn't stand inherently opposed to modern society not also inherently and also and also wasn't especially at the time tolkien was writing and also sci-fi was did not have that same dare i say like taint of being associated as childish i so so sci-fi got into more academic circles faster because it did not have that taint of fairy tales. Yeah, I would honestly argue this is kind of funny to think about because I know that Tolkien would hate what I'm about to say fundamentally, the words I'm about to use. Clearly, he fundamentally hated a lot of opinions, so we're're probably safe but like my well yeah he's also dead um whoa gotcha but like like i think that fantasy as a genre probably matured faster than science fiction he would he would have an

exception with the word matured is what i'm i'm yeah like i don't really mean grew up or anything i i think fantasy had its first snap back from being told as children's stories moment yeah with tolkien like soup like one of them being token and it's like i don't think science fiction did the same thing but i think think he's like, I think it took a lot longer for it to get to the point where it actually was more substance than it was initially, but it was. Something he would consider literature. Yeah. But, but he, but it was more readily accepted by academia because of the points he's

describing, despite the fact that I think early science fiction has less to offer than early fantasy in terms of early science fiction. What talked about is like jules verne it's like cool stuff like around the world in 80 days journey to the center of the earth like the man on the moon like war of the worlds or the worlds um yeah like this was this was a couple years after war of the worlds like this essay um. The time travel one? Yeah, the one with the Eloi and the Morlocks. So it's like, bizarrely, it was more accepted more readily

because of the things that I think Tolkien suggests here where it doesn't inherently reject. It's not really setting up a world outside of the primary one. And then it's not inherently doing full sub creation because sci-fi on its base is projecting an altered version of our, of our world. It's not projecting a world that is distinct from ours. And it eventually took until things like,

I don't know, what's that one uh either either things like dune or things like i would say um i can't remember the name of it foundation like isaac is one um that i think it actually started to reach that point or and then eventually you get things like ray bradbury who while not distancing themselves from the real world used it less as a direct attachment to say like it's not it's not like the jules verd or hg wells where you just take someone from the real world and send them forward a couple thousand years and suddenly um it's or down a few thousand feet it's like i feel like i don't know like like science fiction i think took longer to mature

in the same way that fantasy did despite the fact that fantasy was less readily accepted and you know it took a while before you got things like philip k dick it took a while before you got things like ursula le guin like ursula le guin it took a while to get got things like Ursula Le Guin like Ursula Le Guin it took a while to get there like um despite the fact that fantasy had these moments early on it just because of the inherently more speculative aspects of it the less attached to the world directly that it is it it was less readily accepted so it's like i don't know there's a there's a thing where even in academia they try and make a distinction between science fiction and fantasy for sci-fi stories that aren't considered literary to a degree like it took a while for dune

to be accepted as a more literary thing um in the same way that with like lord of the rings and some people still class so people some people will still classify dune as science fantasy instead of science fiction um and there's a layer of which is wild wild to me they're delegitimizing it by calling it fantasy. Yeah. And it's like, okay, that's really bizarre. What makes it that much different than reading? I mean, other than the fact that, you know, something like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is set in the quote unquote real world.

It's like, how much of a difference really is there in terms of the things that are being discussed? Like the ideas being presented are very similar if on distinct levels. And if on, you know, like they're, they're all diving into political and literary themes that are more complex than the title, you know, science fantasy or science fiction would necessarily imply. It's like what yeah i mean there's a reason we specifically are covering these two genres on this podcast because there's like there's overlap and interweaving between the two and the ways they like work together and play

yeah and and and because i think of the de-emphasis of fantasy in literary circles people don't think about the inherent messaging the inherent like views being expressed present there because they they like a lot of times it'll get dismissed out of hand as something that just oh it's just fun escapist whatever yeah oh so tolkien has a lot to say about escapism uh yeah in this essay he um that's honestly one of the most brilliant lines of the entire essay is his the one about the prisoner yeah i'm gonna pull it up so well to get there the back half of this essay he talks about three things that he thinks are necessary for any fantasy story to be a proper fantasy story. There's three big things, recovery, escape, and consolation. Recovery, in his mind in short, is the idea of like you're thrown into struggle,

but then have a chance, like a reprieve from it. It happens to characters within the story, for for his own examples um within lord of the rings the time they spend in lothlorien that's recovery the time they spent in um in rivendell that's recovery it's where like you're put through trials and then the places of fairy so like even within the world of lord of the rings rivendell and Lothlorien are places of fairy because that's where the elves live. Those are places of what, you know, if you use D&D terms, that's the fae, right? Even in terms of the setting itself, those places are especially unique and almost represent a sort of fairy tale for that world. Yeah, the elves themselves are fairy tales

largely to the men of Middle-earth. Because it's been so long since they've been there. And that, again, is hearkening back to what we talked about before, the fact that the world has to be internally consistent within itself. So recovery, in his mind, is something that your characters in the story do. It's like they recover in Livendale, they recover in Lothlorien. You know, characters, you know, recover.

Secondarily, it's also a thing that you as the reader do, where like you in your own life are going through troubles and reading the fantasy story, sort of the meta side of it, is you reading a fantasy story, is you can achieve some sense of recovery for yourself by immersing yourself in a fantasy story. The way Frodo takes time out of his quest

to hang out in Lothlorien, you can take time out of your stressful life to read Lord of the Rings. Talking about the sort of the structure of the narrative here, that's what fantasy offers is this recovery. The next point, which is how we jumped onto this, is he believes in the idea of escape, which is where, how we jumped onto this is he believes

in the idea of escape, um, which we referenced before as escapism. So start right here. Do you mind if I just read this section? And this happens in one of the episodes where I've just read the most directly from what we're reading, but I feel like with Tolkien, a lot of times it's important just to read his words directly because it's hard to get the same sort of emphasis the way he does when he writes it. Or maybe it's just because I'm a fan boy and I want to read his words. Whatever. Wait, you can't read.

I'm sorry. What I'm actually doing is listening to someone. I'm actually doing a text-to-speech. And then I'm listening. I'm actually parroting a text-to-speech. Sorry. You know what? I broke our verisimilitude. Ah! I broke the frame narrative of course both the corpse of jr hulkin and matt colville's still being alive will have come to the light for breaking my verisimilitude um as i have claimed

that escape is one of the main functions of fairy stories. And since I do not disprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which escape is now so often used, a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling real life, escape is evidently as a rule very practical and may even be heroic. In real life, it is difficult to blame it unless it fails. In criticisms, it would seem to be the worse, the better it succeeds. Evidently, we are faced by a misuse of words and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or, if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls. The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in

this way, the critics have chosen the wrong word, and what is more, they are confusing, When using escape in this way, the critics have chosen the wrong word. And what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter. That is a very important two sentences there. Why should a man be scorned if finding himself in prison tries to get out and go home? Or if when he cannot do so so he thinks about other topics than jailers and prison walls escapism is good actually he's like well i mean again the the assertion that escapism is bad would it essentially be admitting that the modern world is good, which is something that Tolkien vehemently rejects. So one might even say he sometimes goes a bit far

because approaching this from a left-wing perspective, it is easy to kind of look at it as the reject modernity bit. Actually, I think that bit comes a little bit later when he talks about factories. Yeah, Yes. But I actually sort of take this conversely as a positive message for leftism, because I think we often, specifically those of us that are on Twitter a lot, get sort of caught in cycles of doomerism. We get caught in cycles of everything sucks and all you're allowed to talk about is the immediate struggle, right? Like all

you're allowed to talk about is what's going bad and what's wrong right now. This also is going to go back to our previous episode about Omelas, because I think this plays into the idea that we do need to be in some cases utopian. Because if we find ourselves in prison, as we would argue that we do under capitalism, why should we not spend time thinking about the better world that is out there outside these prison walls? Why should we only talk about the jailers and walls of capital? Why should we be dissuaded from occasionally spending time being utopian? Because to me, utopia in this instance is the world that exists outside the walls of the prison. So I take this as more of a positive message for something we should not poo poo people for doing.

Yeah, because the opposite implies acceptance of reality as is, you know. It's that you can only focus on the oppression that we're currently under and if you talk about anything else it's a waste of time well yeah yeah it's it's it's focus on reality focus on what's really happening focus on and this funny enough this ties into i think almost this is a major critique for from any like big science fiction or fantasy author. I mean, like, like you said before,

the Gwyn does this too. Like, this is something that she herself has brought up in terms of, you know, utopianism and, you know, including that in her stories as a method of envisioning a better reality than the one we're in.

And it's like, why, why restrict yourself to realistic fiction, which must necessarily be limited to what is now to how things must, to how things are. And instead of what things might could maybe could be, obviously she's being a bit more direct in her utopian. Well, I mean, could be obviously she's being a bit more direct in her utopian well i mean i take this as a rejection of the people that talk about being like realistic socialists right like the idea

because to me that reeks of like little incremental changes and electoralism and like stuff like that you know what i mean like you have to be realistic. Or the people that end up strongly defending capitalist states that just happen to be not American. Yeah. States that don't even call themselves. Dara, states that may or may not be actually existing examples of certain political ideologies. I think that's a trap for, of being realistic. We have to be realistic with what we can achieve. Why? Why should I be? It's a super, it's a super bastardized way of looking at the sort of, you know, socialism, utopian or scientific when that's not what utopian or scientific means in the terms of that like

original like i mean the minute any the minute anyone tells you their their socialism is scientific they're lying and you should run away from them as fast as possible i mean it's just like because like that's those aren't even the things that people talk mean when they say like the way you're using it now is what people mean when they say scientific or versus utopian where people are just like oh you just it's not realistic and like that's not even even and look i don't even like angles and angles wasn't saying that that's not what he was putting there it's like angles was i mean he was trying to give it scientific legitimacy which is again something that I mentioned earlier on in this that is entirely unnecessary where being accepted by academia gives you like a weird stamp of approval that – but all it is is a stamp of approval from the institutions that currently exist.

And if you're anti-capitalist, you shouldn't be looking for acceptance within any of the current systems. You should be looking for – you should be building things outside of them. So trying to set up your ideology in a way that is consistent with current institutions is wrong. And so like I think Tolkien here is making a point. He's talking directly about fantasy that you shouldn't be looked down upon for wanting to escape from your dreary life. And, you know, pulling that out further, we shouldn't be poo-pooed for you know imagining utopia just be you know like and being forced to accept various capitalist states with red flags

it's it's like do we there's there's just so much to it um it's like that stamp of approval doesn't mean anything in the long run it's like whether or not fantasy gets the stamp of approval from academia doesn't make fantasy any more or less what it already is you know what i mean all it is is a stamp it's just you know oh yes this group has accepted it i guess that means it's legitimate now it's like no like nothing has changed it's the same stuff it's just been given a weird rubber stamp that people care about yeah and you're right it goes the same way for trying to claim that something is a science as though that is really that big of a deal given that all that means is that it has to follow what the current institution of science is oh this is

better because it follows this arbitrary set of standards that they came up with in the enlightenment yeah well i don't give a shit about it's like because there's there's i don't care if my policies or my beliefs follow the set of systems that descartes was talking about because it's because it's like sure yeah the scientific method is super useful but the scientific method still gets warped you know to meet the needs of whoever's using it it's not like it's some infallible thing and and but we we use the word science as something that is like this is immutable this is true this is the enlightenment the enlightenment and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

And I'm just like, holy shit, that's not what that means at all. Do you have any idea how many things get disproven all the time? It's like we move on to a new accepted theory when the last one gets disproven. That's the whole point. You're supposed to disprove this shit, not use it as a method to make your ideas more legitimate. It's like freaking Freud. It's like, ah, yes, I will call this a XYZ psychology. I'll make it sound good. reinforcing the things i believe by finding evidence out there that backs up what i believe but uh uh yes it's it's very scientific it's like no it's not you dumb ass nothing you've ever said is scientific it's all fucking made up as opposed instead of uh trying to get institutional legitimacy for our views we should be simply dismantling those institutions instead. Ah, bye-bye!

Get out of here! Shut up, Freud! Yeah. Stop talking from beyond the grave. I mean, I do wish he was around to still just prescribe me cocaine or something. That'd be pretty tight. To be like, hmm, actually, the reason

that you feel the way you do is that you didn't suck enough milk as a baby. So now you're fixated on the tits. You know what? All I'm saying is. Sorry, you're now orally fixated. Maybe we would be a little bit better off if the result, if like the treatment to a lot of our, you know, depression was just like orgasms and cocaine. I don't know.

Maybe we should go back and give that bro it's diagnosis uh his prognosis is uh hedonism there you go look maybe he had one good idea well no his one his one good idea was that everyone's bored bisexual that's his good idea i mean no arguments here so arguments here. So moving on to wrap up our little Tolkien talk here, there's two more things. I think two more things I want to bring up here. Don't quote me. Maybe it's more than two. The first up is the third thing after escape.

Well, part of escape he talks about is this. This is where he gets into talking about sci-fi. He's talking about escaping from the world we currently live in, which he then goes on a bit of a rant about how much he hates streetlights and cars and factories and robots. It's that Twitter reaction where it's like, well, it's just like me. It's me for real.

Like I read this and go, damn,'s just like me it's it's me for real like i don't i read this and go damn he just like me uh because he goes in here he's he's arguing about first about sort of the inexorable march of technology oh this is here to stay well whenever someone says something's here to stay it means it's going to be obsolete pretty quick oh thank goodness he didn't live to see the 21st century oh he'd hate it so much he would hate the modern world guys listen this new phone is definitely new and not just an excuse for you to buy something again yeah so he talks about the fact that like you're talking about technology to use the streetlights as an example to him streetlights are transient. They're new now, but in like a couple of years, we'll have done something new.

Fairy stories, at any rate, have many more permanent and fundamental things to talk about. Lightning, for example. The escapist is not so subservient to the whims of evanescent fashion as these opponents so his point is that like a fairy stories to him are presenting more fundamental and permanent topics as opposed to a story that's about technology which in two years could be completely obsolete and useless that's after that he gets into his little i'd call his little bit of a screed about hating technology i I heard a clerk at Oxenfur declared that he welcomed the proximity of mass production robot factories

and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic because it brought his university into contact with real life. He then goes to argue that this is really stupid. In any case, real life in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. The notion that motor cars are more alive than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious. That they are more real than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startlingly alive

is a factory chimney compared to an elm tree? Poor obsolete thing. Insubstantial dream of an escapist. Yeah, he then goes, you know, know he says that to him it's absurd that like a train station is any more real than by frost guarded by heimdall and i think his point here he's not trying to say that like real as in that you can go and touch it it's real in a much more intellectual and insubstantial way. It's more fundamental to the human psychology than a train station. Well, yeah, because like humans have created these stories for millennia. Like it's, it's arguable that they always have.

Yeah. He would argue that. I mean, taking pot shot at engineers. From the wildness of my heart, I cannot exclude the question whether railway engineers, if they had been brought up on more fantasy, might not have done better with all their abundant means than they commonly do. Oops. Suck it, engineers. So he goes on a bit where he just hates modern life. It's very silly. And the fact that we consider it more real, he finds. And he doesn't mention it, but how he wants to go off and be a hobbit and smoke tobacco.

Oh, yeah. I mean, that's pretty clear. He thinks the hobbit way of doing things is the most eminently nice. So, again, this is him defending the idea of escapism. The other main concept in here that I want to bring up, because I'll talk about it a lot when we actually get into his other works, is the idea of consolation. And this is where he coins a term called eucatastrophe.

It's obviously the idea that things are going horribly, but then at the end, it suddenly turns and you end up with a happy ending. He's very insistent that a fairy story up with a happy ending. He's in very insistent that a fart, a fairy story must have a happy ending. It's very important to him that they do. And so, but yeah, yeah,

not everyone agrees clearly, but that's his take. But that's why he believes in this. You catastrophe, the idea that like out of a bad situation you have to like do a little there's got to be something at the end that makes it good famous you catastrophes from lord of the rings would be gandalf showing up with erkenbrand and the soldiers at helm's deep uh the riders of rohan appearing over the hill at dawn to save gondor gandalf coming back to life

yeah but gandalf doesn't actually come back to life at like a singular moment. But the idea that he comes back is sort of a bigger eucatastrophe. Like along with the writers of Rohan showing up at the Battle of Pelennor Fields would be Aragorn and all the real human soldiers and the fighters of Dol Amroth, not the magic ghost army, which does not exist at the Battle of Pelennor Fields, just to be clear. Them showing up to save Gondor. That's a you catastrophe. It's hope unlooked for that appears and saves the day.

Now, some people, I think, tend to conflate that with the idea of like a deus ex machina, because some people seem to think of the eagles as like a deus ex machina, just like a convenient thing coming in to save the day out of nowhere. I will not get into that now because this episode will run way over time. That is a conversation for a whole episode in and of itself. Don't get me started about the Eagles. If you yell at me about the Eagles on Twitter, I will be very mad. Yeah, anyone who is like the even though

it's the deus ex machina is what you're talking about not the the whole the eagles kind of dropped it out of the board or um they just haven't just haven't read the books they just have not it's not even logically consistent within the world no that's why it's stupid it's legitimately just not it is the mark of a good fairy story, of the higher and more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give a man or a child that hears it when the turn comes a catch of breath, a beat and lifting of heart, near to or indeed often accompanied by tears, as keen as given by any form of literary art having that particular quality. That's what he says a fairy story needs,

is to be brought to like tears of joy at the end by the way the conflict has been resolved. Now, would modern fantasy authors argue that every fantasy needs to have a happy ending no no no brick okay go call up george rr martin and if he ever gives anyone an ending yeah we can't even include him because there is no end there is no ending there is no ending maybe it would end happily you don't know because you wouldn't say his story is really ending until the books are completed like a lot of bad things have happened in Game of Thrones, but so long as at the end, something good, like it came out good at the end,

then I would still argue that the series conforms to sort of fantasy standards. That's true. He says bad things can happen within the story. You just have to have hope at the end. And hope is a very, very important concept to Tolkien, which will be an entire episode in and of itself is his concept of hope. I hope you guys like those kind of episodes because you're going to get them eventually. But I think that sort of gets the end. His sort of conclusions are ones we've already talked about before. Eucatastrophe is important. Also in the end, he does sort of get into a basis where a lot of his thoughts come from, which is from his Christianity, from his

Catholicism. He believes that eucatastrophe is inherently a Christian concept. He believes that the birth of Christ is a eucatastrophe and that Christ's resurrection is a eucatastrophe, and that that's part of creation. You can't talk about Tolkien without somewhat involving his religious faith, because it does inform a lot of the way he views stories to be appropriate, right? I just don't think it's necessarily important to this specific episode to talk about that, because that's a whole, again, a much longer conversation. But he does in this essay, when talking about eucatastrophe, he does talk about like Evangelion, right? Like the idea of that sort of thing and you know not the one that starts

with a cruel angel's thesis uh well that's where the that's where that title came from clearly where they get it from if you haven't i mean if you want to talk about like christian and religious themes oh buddy speaking of which i think we're at the end of the episode unless you have any final thoughts uh not particularly no um again this essay it's a little end of the episode, unless you have any final thoughts. Not particularly. No. Again, this essay, it's a little out of the place. It's used as a definition of what fantasy is, what it should be. And then his defense of why it's important. I hope I got that. We got that across.

You understand that why this is impactful to me and how it sort of informs the way we view stories when we're analyzing them. Not necessarily is this fantasy or not, but like partly why I wanted to start this podcast was a reaffirmation of the importance of these stories to adults. Like that's kind of why we're here is because I read stories. I'm like, these have messages that we can take that aren't just for children. You know, we appreciate you all for listening. I actually can't tell you what we're going to talk about next. Cause I don't know.

That'll be a surprise for everyone. Surprise. Talking about Evangelion. Brings me to other, an important and related point we now officially have a Patreon we sure do

if you would like to join our Patreon you can, it is patreon.com slash swords and socialism if you go there we currently only have a single tier it is $3 if you sign up for it you you will be entitled to one to two bonus episodes per month, where we talk about the themes and politics of non-book stuff.

Things such as Neon Genesis Evangelion, or Knights of the Old Republic 2. That's a big one. Or, you know, movies, video games, other things that are related to, to, to fantasy and science fiction, but just necessarily aren't books. So video games, movies, that sort of stuff. Well, one to two bonus episodes a month where they're going to be a little bit less researched, mostly just going to be us sort of shooting off about those things. Evangelion will take some research, obviously, because I'm not a super brain genius that has all that memorized. Just the theme song.

So if you're interested, if you like what we do here, if you think we're interesting at all, you can sign up for the Patreon. It's $3. It'll help with a little bit of the hosting fees for the platform and stuff. And help me out to buy coffee since I do all the audio editing

and I need coffee to do that because listening to yourself talk sucks. Yeah, I'm a lazy bum. So we appreciate you all for listening. You all are great. Thank you for being fans. If you want to reach us, you can on Twitter. our handles are going to be in the description as always, and we will see you next time for something. Bye. bro are you fucking real man come on Thank you.