A handful of podcasts have stayed in my rotation from the moment I first heard them. One of those is Weird Studies with hosts Phil Martel and J.F. Ford.
I don’t listen to every show; in fact I estimate I might skip half or more. I’m not interested in the Tarot, or the X-Files, or analyses of films I haven’t seen. But when it’s a topic that interests me, even obliquely, I’m in. Martel and Ford are college professors and possesses not only a very high level of erudition and insight, but also a fine dialogue with one another. They have a level of glib I admire and a playfulness and earnestness I enjoy. I’ve listened to some dynamite shows on George Miller’s Mad Max movies, Algernon Blackwood, Blade Runner, and more.
So you can imagine my level of excitement when they dropped an episode on The Fellowship of the Ring.
This did not disappoint. Tolkien does not leap to mind when you hear the term “weird” … until you think of things like Old Man Willow, and trees full of anger, which is very much out of Blackwood’s “The Willows.” Or the Elves themselves, whose lives as immortals unbounded by time as we know it is utterly alien to men, or hobbits.
Here’s three cool things the hosts discussed I wanted to point out.
The Lord of the Rings is a postapocalyptic story. Of course it is! It’s so obvious I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. Probably because I tend to associate postapocalyptic with Thundarr the Barbarian, Mad Max or World War Z. But how else would you describe a fallen world that is Arda marred, damaged irrevocably by Morgoth, and suffered the drowning of Numenor by a vengeful Iluvatar? And whose characters stride through ruins of greater civilizations, and great Elven kingdoms that have been destroyed in war and whose remnants are steadily leaving for Valinor via the Gray Havens? One word might be, postapocalyptic.
It is deeply anti-modern and modern at the same time. By modern I mean of the literary movement. LOTR is a post WWI novel and of a time when old certitudes were stripped away by the devastation of the Great War. Its author was aware of everything that had come before him, and his choice to write with deliberate archaisms is a form of irony, a modernist technique. Tolkien was not some atavistic throwback but in tune with the times and a reader of the news and of “modern” fantasy of his era. Yet it’s also deeply unironic, intensely engaged with the world, and moral to its core. And anti-postmodern.
The Lord of the Rings is applicable to every reader, and challenges you. Reading it is perilous, because it offers moral clarity and forces you to consider tough choices. Can you exhibit pity, and mercy, on your enemies, because you cannot see all ends? Would you have the will to cast a (metaphorical) One Ring into the fire? For example on the use of AI, which grants greater power but requires environmental degradation, and has well documented deleterious impacts on learning and human flourishing?
What is your ring?
***
I disagreed with a couple of the hosts’ points. I’ve read enough Tolkien, and enough about Tolkien, to have my own views. Which is what anyone should strive for who truly loves a subject enough to return to it again and again. They assert for example that the work is not nostalgic, I argue that it very much is, though I think we are operating off two different definitions of nostalgia. They also assert that Aragorn is not rooted, unlike Bilbo or Boromir, but I note he is descended from Elendil and the Kings of Numenor and of the Faithful, and therefore rooted (at least in bloodline) very deeply.
Regardless this is the type of dialogue I yearn from when I’m reading something like LOTR. There is a dynamite soliloquy with about seven minutes to go prompted by a reading of Galadriel’s gift to Gimli that left one of the hosts choked up; the book does the same to me.
Listen to the episode here. I can’t wait for forthcoming parts on The Two Towers and The Return of the King.
I’m also in the midst of reading The Tower and the Ruin by Michael D.C. Drout which has also been great. More on that later.
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