The Art of Manliness - The Hobbit Virtues

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:12.040 Virtue ethics is an approach to life, a framework for developing character and making moral

00:00:16.440 decisions.

00:00:17.580 To learn about virtue ethics, you could read a philosophical treatise by Aristotle, or

00:00:22.200 you could read a fictional novel by J.R.R. Tolkien.

00:00:24.860 As my guest, Christopher Snyder, observes, the ideals of virtue ethics are well illustrated

00:00:30.100 in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, being vividly embodied in the characters of Middle

00:00:34.360 Earth.

00:00:35.220 Chris is a professor of European history, a medieval scholar, and the author of Hobbit Virtues,

00:00:40.440 rediscovering J.R.R. Tolkien's Ethics from The Lord of the Rings.

00:00:44.800 Today on the show, he shares the way Tolkien's fantasy stories provide real lessons in the

00:00:48.980 capacity of ordinary people to act heroically.

00:00:51.620 We discuss the courage of persistence, the importance of fellowship, and how it differs

00:00:56.160 from friendship, the role of merrymaking in the good life, and the value of chivalry.

00:01:00.740 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Hobbit Virtues.

00:01:16.780 All right, Chris Snyder, welcome to the show.

00:01:19.880 Thank you, Brett.

00:01:20.440 Thank you for having me.

00:01:21.340 I'm looking forward to our conversation.

00:01:23.300 So you are a professor of medieval history who also specializes in the work of J.R.R.

00:01:29.740 Tolkien.

00:01:30.480 How do you say Tolkien or Tolkien?

00:01:32.140 I'm always wondering how to, the best way to do that.

00:01:34.220 There's a bit of debate about it, and Tolkien himself talks about this, but Tolkien is, yeah,

00:01:40.560 Tolkien is good.

00:01:42.160 So J.R.R.

00:01:43.020 Tolkien.

00:01:43.580 I'm curious, did Tolkien lead you to medieval history or did medieval history lead you to

00:01:49.240 Tolkien?

00:01:49.780 Yeah, so most of the medievalists that I know became medievalists because of reading The

00:01:57.120 Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit or maybe C.S.

00:02:00.120 Lewis' fiction.

00:02:01.100 And I'm a little unusual in that regard.

00:02:03.420 I was reading Tolkien and Lewis, but I was reading their scholarship before I ever read

00:02:09.980 their fiction.

00:02:11.280 What drew me to the Middle Ages was the Arthurian legends.

00:02:14.820 And so in high school, I just got really hooked on the legends of King Arthur and the literature,

00:02:21.100 but also the sort of historical backdrop.

00:02:23.960 And so I read what Tolkien and Lewis said about Arthur before I read any of their fiction.

00:02:28.720 I think I didn't read The Hobbit until high school, probably, and Lord of the Rings until

00:02:33.840 college or even later.

00:02:34.920 And so it wasn't early in my career that I kind of decided to work on Tolkien, but the

00:02:40.760 more I learned about their academic careers at Oxford and Cambridge and Lewis' case as

00:02:46.200 well, the more they became like academic role models for me.

00:02:49.720 And so around early 2000s, around the time the movies, first movies were coming out, that's

00:02:55.220 when I decided to work on my first Tolkien book.

00:02:56.940 Well, that's something people forget about Lewis and Tolkien, is that not only do they

00:03:01.960 write fantastic fiction, timeless fiction that we're still reading today, but they were

00:03:06.760 serious academics.

00:03:08.020 Like Tolkien was a medievalist.

00:03:09.980 Can you tell us about his career as a medievalist?

00:03:12.940 Sure.

00:03:13.700 So Tolkien came to Oxford as an undergraduate to read classics or greats, which means basically

00:03:21.000 be a classics major.

00:03:22.360 And after his first year exams, he didn't do as well as he had hoped.

00:03:26.980 And he had a tutor who counseled him to maybe try this new degree called English.

00:03:32.640 Oxford didn't have an English degree until right before World War I.

00:03:36.780 So he did.

00:03:37.820 He moved over to English and started to specialize in the Germanic languages and in philology,

00:03:45.000 which is sort of the history of languages and the science.

00:03:48.440 It's a subfield of linguistics, basically, and you don't find it a whole lot anymore.

00:03:53.280 But it was really popular in the 19th century.

00:03:55.060 So Tolkien was a philologist who specialized in Old English literature like Beowulf and

00:04:03.740 Middle English literature like Sir Gowan and the Green Knight.

00:04:07.460 And what was his influence?

00:04:09.220 What were his contributions to the field?

00:04:10.720 Are they still lasting contributions?

00:04:13.280 Yeah, absolutely.

00:04:14.140 After he served at the front in World War I and was injured and almost died, he came back

00:04:20.500 to Oxford and as he was recovering, he got his first job working for the Oxford English

00:04:25.440 Dictionary.

00:04:26.080 And so if you pick up a copy of the OED and turn to the letter W and look up walrus and

00:04:33.920 some other W words, the definitions are in part courtesy of his work, Tolkien's work on

00:04:39.040 the dictionary, which is perfect work for a philologist to do.

00:04:43.320 And so he just, he was working there and then he started teaching a little bit at Oxford.

00:04:46.940 And then finally there was a job opening at Leeds University and he went there.

00:04:53.100 And soon after he arrived, he worked on Middle English vocabulary basically.

00:04:58.540 And he got eventually a professorship, what we would call full professor at Leeds.

00:05:03.400 And then another one opened up at Oxford.

00:05:05.820 And so he came back to Oxford as a full professor.

00:05:07.960 And he had written only a little bit of scholarship at the time, but he became really well known

00:05:14.780 as an expert on the poem on Beowulf and on Sir Gowen and the Green Knights.

00:05:19.480 So he wrote about those things and he also did his own editions and translations.

00:05:25.060 We don't have all of the Beowulf stuff.

00:05:26.600 We just have his prose translation, but we do have a lot of things that he wrote about those

00:05:31.360 poems.

00:05:31.940 And he wrote an essay called Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics.

00:05:36.480 And it is the most important scholarly essay on Beowulf.

00:05:41.860 And how did his academic career as a medievalist influence his own fiction?

00:05:47.420 Yeah.

00:05:48.220 So he had been in love with languages since he was a small child and had been inventing languages.

00:05:56.220 And like many British school children, especially if they go to better schools, they're given 0.93

00:06:03.280 classical education, Greek and Latin is available.

00:06:06.900 And he studied both.

00:06:08.740 And as we would think of at high school level, he was studying both.

00:06:11.800 That's why he chose classics.

00:06:13.780 But he really was falling in love with Old English and Norse and also Welsh and eventually

00:06:20.420 Finnish and those stories about elves and dwarves.

00:06:23.080 And so he started with the languages and then he started building a world around the languages.

00:06:30.500 That is, he would invent a language based on the principles of these other medieval languages.

00:06:35.220 And then he would build the world full of stories, characters and their stories based on those

00:06:40.380 languages.

00:06:41.340 And that's very important to know about Tolkien.

00:06:43.200 The language always comes first. 1.00

00:06:45.000 So yeah, for decades he was doing this kind of in private.

00:06:49.540 He published a few poems, but nothing really big until The Hobbit came out.

00:06:53.840 And The Hobbit wasn't really attached to Middle-earth at all.

00:06:56.940 It was entirely just a story about these creatures called hobbits that he made up for his children.

00:07:02.640 And only later did he decide to connect it to this world that he was building that we call

00:07:08.680 the Legendarium, which some of it was published in a work called The Silmarillion after he died.

00:07:13.620 But it's the world of Middle-earth. 0.96

00:07:15.600 And that was kind of very late in the game for him.

00:07:18.920 So you published a book called Hobbit Virtues, where you explore how Tolkien used his Hobbit

00:07:23.960 series to explore and transmit virtue ethics to his readers.

00:07:28.820 For those who aren't familiar with virtue ethics, what is it?

00:07:32.560 So this was my second Tolkien project, and it really just came about for two reasons.

00:07:38.800 One, I was working on a handout for my students for a class I teach, and it kind of wanted

00:07:45.160 to put down religious principles and ethics across different ancient cultures so that

00:07:50.400 they could see Chinese ethics from Confucius next to Aristotle's ethics, as an example.

00:07:57.200 So I'd been doing that.

00:07:58.900 And then you might remember there was an election in 2016, and a lot of people talking about the

00:08:03.820 election, and a lot of kind of angst in the country.

00:08:07.380 And it's like, I want to do something positive.

00:08:10.480 How can we bring people together?

00:08:12.000 And I thought, well, I think virtue ethics can do that, because regardless of your political,

00:08:17.140 religious, cultural beliefs, you know, usually you recognize certain things as virtues, as

00:08:23.520 ethical behavior.

00:08:24.960 And we respond as human beings, I think, very similar in most cases.

00:08:28.740 And that's what Aristotle wrote about in a work called The Nicomachean Ethics, and it

00:08:34.620 was a central work for him as a philosopher.

00:08:37.540 A lot of what he had learned from Plato, who had learned from Socrates, is in the ethics.

00:08:42.600 But it's also tied to another book he wrote called The Politics.

00:08:46.560 In other words, you can't have politics, political science, a good orderly regime, unless you have

00:08:52.380 ethics, which is an orderly soul, a person who has an ordered soul.

00:08:57.300 So, for example, I wrote my dissertation in part on tyrants and tyranny, and Plato and

00:09:02.740 Aristotle define tyrants as people with disordered souls.

00:09:06.800 So, if your soul is disordered, and you're given political power, then the state, the regime that

00:09:12.200 you found, will be disordered.

00:09:14.300 That's an example, kind of from the political side of it, why ethics are important.

00:09:18.820 But the other part of, I think, Aristotle's definition that's really important is saying

00:09:23.560 virtue and virtuous.

00:09:24.760 We tend to think of that in Christian terms, or even Victorian terms, right?

00:09:29.520 A virtuous young woman, right, is somebody who doesn't sin or appears to not sin.

00:09:35.060 And that's not at all how Aristotle uses the term.

00:09:38.320 Virtues are like skills.

00:09:41.200 And the best way to think of this is like an athlete who possesses certain skills, but

00:09:45.780 they have to practice for those skills to be better and to be habitually good at it.

00:09:52.320 So, Aristotle says virtues are excellences in different categories, and you have to be kind

00:09:59.460 of educated enough to identify what the excellence is, like where does bravery fit on a scale of

00:10:05.580 activity.

00:10:06.740 And then once you've identified that, then you just practice being brave.

00:10:11.060 And a virtuous person is just simply somebody who has habituated virtuous practice.

00:10:16.480 And what I love about virtue ethics is, okay, Aristotle really fleshed this out.

00:10:21.240 But as you pointed out, and I think C.S.

00:10:23.700 Lewis pointed this out in The Appolition of Man, this idea of virtue at this shared sense

00:10:28.860 of morality, what it means to live a flourishing good life, you can see it everywhere.

00:10:34.200 You can see it in ancient Chinese culture.

00:10:36.420 You can see it in Islam.

00:10:38.000 You can see it in Hinduism.

00:10:39.400 And what's interesting, if you look, the specifics are different because they're based on their

00:10:45.320 culture.

00:10:45.860 But if you look at the first principles, they're pretty much cut from the same cloth.

00:10:51.320 Confucianism, for example, is very similar to Aristotelian virtue ethics, where Confucianism

00:10:56.460 is all about using your practical wisdom to know what the right thing to do at the right

00:11:02.720 time for the right reason in any social circumstance you find yourself in.

00:11:06.540 That's how you be virtuous.

00:11:07.500 And Aristotle basically had the same definition.

00:11:11.900 Yeah, exactly.

00:11:12.520 In fact, I teach in our great book sequence, I teach Aristotle and Confucius back to back

00:11:18.480 because I think there's so many similarities in the way they talk about the gentleman, the

00:11:23.680 virtuous man.

00:11:24.520 I think that helps students to see, but students don't always see that, right?

00:11:28.820 So they may think, for example, oh, well, Christianity has a different virtue ethic than Islam does. 0.71

00:11:35.160 And so, again, I was developing a handout to show, oh, no, there are a lot of overlap.

00:11:41.100 There's more overlap than there is dissimilarity.

00:11:43.740 And that's exactly the point that C.S.

00:11:45.820 Lewis makes in The Abolition of Man.

00:11:48.380 He makes it in Mere Christianity as well. 0.92

00:11:50.880 But in Abolition of Man, there's an appendix he calls the Tao, and that is simply showing

00:11:56.840 examples of like the Ten Commandments and how they overlap with religious rules or guidelines

00:12:02.600 and other religions and world religions and philosophies.

00:12:05.800 So I include a bit of that in some of the appendices.

00:12:09.000 In my books, you'll be able to see those different traditions and just how much they overlap.

00:12:13.280 And I know C.S. Lewis was very explicit about his desire to re-educate people about this

00:12:20.440 shared moral language of virtue ethics.

00:12:23.180 That's what The Abolition of Man is all about, is that we've lost this shared moral language,

00:12:27.580 and as a consequence, we have this disorder in our culture.

00:12:31.820 Did Tolkien have the same sort of goal as C.S.

00:12:35.220 Lewis of reviving a virtue ethic in modern life?

00:12:38.760 That's a really good question, because Tolkien was a man who had parts of his life and his

00:12:47.080 soul that he didn't kind of share with the whole world, whereas Lewis wrote and shared

00:12:52.280 everything from so many different angles and different fields that he ventured into.

00:12:57.120 And Tolkien, as a devout Catholic, was uncomfortable, for example, talking about theology in scholarly

00:13:03.220 way or in authoritative way.

00:13:05.440 He would say, no, leave that to the priests and the theologians.

00:13:07.820 And so Lewis was doing stuff that sometimes made him uncomfortable, not that he disagreed

00:13:13.280 with Lewis, he just thought, well, Lewis, you're not an expert on that stuff.

00:13:16.880 You know, stick to medieval literature, that's what you're an expert on.

00:13:20.280 But when I started this project, I had two things kind of that I had identified.

00:13:25.720 The first that I had for a long time that I've been teaching The Hobbit, and that is a

00:13:30.500 Hobbit philosophy.

00:13:32.060 Is there a Hobbit philosophy, or is there a philosophy that Tolkien gives us that's connected,

00:13:36.500 the Hobbit, and I thought, oh, yeah, there absolutely is.

00:13:40.020 And it's in the most serious part of the book, The Death of Thorin Oakenshield, when Bilbo

00:13:45.120 is brought to Thorin's bedside.

00:13:48.540 The dying king says to forgive me, and Bilbo speaks very seriously and solemnly to him.

00:13:55.400 And then Thorin says, there's more good in you than you know, child of the kindly West.

00:14:00.040 And if more people enjoyed good food and good cheer and fellowship and so on, and books,

00:14:05.820 then the world would be a merrier place.

00:14:08.400 And to me, that's a virtue, that's a philosophy, rather.

00:14:12.960 And in that speech, Thorin also says, there's wisdom and courage in you, blended in good measure.

00:14:22.080 And the other thing that defines Aristotle's virtue ethics is they're not extremes.

00:14:26.540 They're a point on a scale, and they're usually somewhere in the middle or not too far to the

00:14:33.480 extremes of two things.

00:14:35.280 Like, for example, bravery, the extremes would be cowardice on one end and foolhardiness on

00:14:41.380 the other.

00:14:42.280 So bravery is obviously closer to probably foolhardiness than it is to cowardice, but it's on that scale.

00:14:48.620 What Aristotle is known for is the golden mean, right?

00:14:52.120 Where is that kind of moderate position?

00:14:54.660 That's the best position to be in.

00:14:56.000 And so I think Thorin is saying that to Bilbo, that you're not the wisest person in the world,

00:15:00.640 you're not the bravest person in the world, but for a little person, you've been able

00:15:05.040 to display these virtues.

00:15:06.940 And so I think he's saying that, you know, oh, yeah, there's Aristotelian virtue in Bilbo.

00:15:12.980 And then the other thing I saw in Tolkien eventually is in one of his letters, I saw him say that

00:15:18.980 he was using fiction to teach virtue ethics, in essence, that he would embody virtuous behavior

00:15:25.260 in characters.

00:15:27.360 So it's not allegory, which is something different, but having characters represent certain virtues

00:15:34.220 or maybe multiple virtues is something that really interested him using literature for sort

00:15:39.480 of moral teaching purposes.

00:15:40.860 And a lot of modern academics would be uncomfortable with that, but not Lewis and Tolkien.

00:15:45.520 They would absolutely be comfortable and understood that most ancient medieval and Renaissance

00:15:50.260 literature did exactly that.

00:15:52.820 But what makes Tolkien different from other maybe fiction writers who had the aim to teach

00:15:57.240 virtue is that he wanted to tell a good story first, right?

00:16:00.620 You got to tell the good story because if you don't, it's going to be ham-fisted and everyone's

00:16:04.060 going to roll their eyes.

00:16:04.860 You're like, oh my gosh, you're just, you're really trying to preach to me here, but you

00:16:09.200 can read the Hobbit series and you're not hitting the face with the virtue stuff.

00:16:14.500 It's there, but you're so captured with a story that the focus is on that.

00:16:19.340 And then the virtue ethics as a consequence gets transmitted into you indirectly.

00:16:27.740 Yeah, it isn't heavy handed.

00:16:29.400 And so a lot of people who come from a faith tradition would say, read The Lord of the Rings

00:16:35.660 especially, and say, this is a religious work.

00:16:39.400 Well, what makes you say that?

00:16:40.960 If you're looking at organized religion and things like churches and liturgy, ritual, and

00:16:46.640 so on, there are almost no examples of that in The Lord of the Rings.

00:16:51.240 That's obviously not because Tolkien was an atheist.

00:16:54.180 He was a developed Catholic.

00:16:55.720 But he wanted to write literature that was a mythology that didn't directly compete with

00:16:59.860 Christian mythology, that has stories told within a purely Christian context, like the

00:17:04.500 Arthurian legends, at least the medieval ones that he was familiar with, were sort of overtly

00:17:09.660 Christian stories, like the quest for the Holy Grail.

00:17:12.320 So he wanted to do something different.

00:17:14.720 And so he gives us this world that's almost a pre-Christian pagan world, where the pagans understand 0.98

00:17:22.340 the concepts, some of them theological, and some of them virtue-based, that are in organized

00:17:29.000 religions, and especially in Christianity.

00:17:31.340 It's kind of like wanting to have your cake and eat it too.

00:17:34.120 Lewis and Tolkien both loved pagan cultures, and they were both devout Christians, at least

00:17:39.980 Lewis was eventually.

00:17:41.520 So how do you kind of stay true to your principles and also your first loves?

00:17:46.480 And I think they both found out very effective ways to do that.

00:17:49.280 So you start off Hobbit Virtues, talking about how the hobbits were gardeners, and that Tolkien

00:17:54.100 himself was also an avid gardener, and he appreciated the gardens in England.

00:17:58.900 How is garden keeping a good metaphor for what it means to live a life guided by virtue ethics?

00:18:05.840 Yeah, so I kind of came up with that notion because I know gardening appears a lot in The Hobbit

00:18:12.380 and The Lord of the Rings.

00:18:13.140 And Samwise, Gamgee, is such a central character, some would argue the hero of The Lord of the

00:18:20.320 Rings.

00:18:21.020 And he is, don't forget, his occupation is gardener.

00:18:24.740 He is Frodo's gardener, just like his father had been Bilbo's gardener.

00:18:29.680 So, you know, it was kind of there already.

00:18:31.740 And then when I started writing, all of a sudden, Voltaire came out.

00:18:35.040 Like the last line, or nearly the last line in Candide is a novel searching for a philosophy

00:18:42.140 of life, and they keep coming up with bad ones.

00:18:46.180 And finally, Candide says, you just need to tend your own garden. 0.68

00:18:51.480 And that is a really profound statement if you think of it in terms of virtue ethics, right?

00:18:58.080 We need to take care of ourselves.

00:19:00.080 Like Plato and Aristotle wrote about the inner regime, we need to tend our own gardens.

00:19:05.560 We need to make sure that we are grounded, that we're examining our behaviors, we're asking

00:19:12.120 questions about how we treat other people.

00:19:15.160 And that's very down-to-earth stuff.

00:19:17.900 And so I kept finding these little connections, often literary connections, to gardening.

00:19:23.060 That the hobbits were small people who lived underground and esteemed gardeners. 0.90

00:19:31.300 That humility is tied to humus, which is the earth in Latin, right?

00:19:36.100 They're literally down-to-earth in their size and their living habits, but they're also down-to-earth

00:19:42.780 in that they don't think too much of themselves.

00:19:45.200 They have kind of a natural humility.

00:19:46.960 And so Frodo and Samwise are maybe the best examples of it in their quests.

00:19:52.980 But just a general characteristic, I think, of the hobbits is that they're humble people.

00:19:57.900 And that Tolkien really was fond of the common English village, especially the Midlands, where

00:20:05.460 his family was from.

00:20:06.780 He loved the kind of middle-class values and the small-town values of that English society.

00:20:14.800 Even though he pokes fun at it a little bit in The Hobbit, he still really feels comfortable there.

00:20:20.820 Much more comfortable than you would say in a posh aristocratic circle in Britain.

00:20:25.820 Yeah, Tolkien even said that he based the hobbits off of soldiers that he met in World War I.

00:20:32.880 Not the officers, but just kind of like the common, everyday...

00:20:35.640 Samwise, for sure.

00:20:36.560 Yeah, Samwise, for sure.

00:20:37.900 Yeah, he's thinking back to when he was an officer.

00:20:40.780 So if you were an Oxford student and you went off to war, you would usually get some training

00:20:45.980 and then be commissioned as an officer.

00:20:48.840 And those people were often infantry and artillery and were killed at an enormous rate.

00:20:56.080 A disastrous wiping out of that generation of young men, including the Dons, including 1.00

00:21:01.340 the younger Tudors and Dons at Oxford.

00:21:04.060 And so Tolkien and Lewis both narrowly escaped World War I with their lives.

00:21:10.280 And Tolkien's time in the trenches are very important to him.

00:21:13.980 In his time there, he said, he just didn't get on with the other officers.

00:21:19.760 He didn't kind of enjoy their jokes and their outlook on life, which you get, for example,

00:21:26.000 in a lot of the war poetry that comes out of World War I.

00:21:28.760 And the famous poems of Wilford Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, the more celebrated kind of authors

00:21:34.500 of the day, were more dark and cynical about war.

00:21:39.880 Tolkien wasn't that way at all.

00:21:41.320 He really associated with the enlisted man and especially the Batman, which is the name

00:21:48.440 for the servant that is given to the officers in the British Army.

00:21:52.680 That's a very British thing, right?

00:21:55.060 To have a servant, he had a lot of fondness for his own Batman.

00:21:59.560 And so he says that Samwise was very much based on his Batman.

00:22:04.500 What does it say about Tolkien that he made these humble creatures who loved a garden, loved

00:22:10.060 to drink good drink.

00:22:11.860 They just wanted to relax, enjoy good food.

00:22:15.120 They weren't ostentatious.

00:22:17.100 But the hobbits were the heroes.

00:22:19.820 What was Tolkien trying to convey there?

00:22:22.720 Yeah.

00:22:23.340 So if you look at the lifestyle of Lewis and Tolkien, neither of them liked to travel much.

00:22:30.120 Neither of them ever came to America, where at least by the 1950s, both of them were celebrities,

00:22:36.720 right?

00:22:37.260 By a couple of years into the publication of Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was really kind

00:22:41.740 of a cult hero.

00:22:42.640 And in the 60s, he was very much so.

00:22:45.580 And Lewis was on the cover of Time magazine in the 1940s.

00:22:49.240 So they would have been treated like real celebrities in America.

00:22:53.820 They never came to America.

00:22:55.800 Tolkien traveled to France before the war and after the war, didn't really want to go back.

00:23:02.760 And he traveled to Ireland a little bit.

00:23:04.700 But other than that, he never left home.

00:23:06.880 Lewis and his wife Joy went to Greece on a vacation.

00:23:10.660 But again, other than that, he never really traveled.

00:23:12.780 They had what they needed here in Oxford, right?

00:23:15.920 They had their fellowship, a fellowship of scholars.

00:23:19.820 They had great students.

00:23:21.540 They had great pubs with great beer.

00:23:24.120 They had food that they liked.

00:23:26.160 Neither of them liked French food.

00:23:27.480 They didn't like continental food.

00:23:29.100 They liked simple English food.

00:23:31.020 And they had the countryside.

00:23:32.700 And they were both great walkers.

00:23:34.820 They both loved country walks.

00:23:36.480 And so they really felt like they didn't have to leave.

00:23:40.140 And that's, I think, who you get in The Hobbits, right?

00:23:42.620 That's why it's so hard for Gandalf to get Bilbo out the front door and onto this quest.

00:23:48.240 It's because he's typical, you know, probably of Tolkien and his friends that they just didn't like to travel a whole lot.

00:23:54.600 And they had prejudices about people in the greater world outside.

00:23:59.280 And Bilbo has to overcome those prejudices through travel.

00:24:02.840 But he has to come back home.

00:24:06.120 And so the most simple formula in this kind of a fairy tale is the same formula you see in Sword in the Stone by T.H. White, the Arthurian story.

00:24:16.980 It's a formula you see in almost every Harry Potter book.

00:24:20.220 It's there and back again.

00:24:22.840 That's it.

00:24:23.740 You leave home.

00:24:24.860 It's uncomfortable.

00:24:26.140 You go do something.

00:24:27.260 And then you come back again.

00:24:28.420 And when you come back, you're either a changed person or you appreciate home more.

00:24:33.300 And so the last words in The Lord of the Rings, of course, is Samwise saying, I'm back.

00:24:39.960 That's it.

00:24:40.880 It's that simple.

00:24:42.740 So yeah, Tolkien wasn't a fan of travel or adventure just for travel or adventure's sake.

00:24:49.420 The Hobbits went on the adventure because there was a reason to.

00:24:52.180 They got called to it and they needed to do something.

00:24:54.960 And then they stepped up to the challenge.

00:24:57.340 But again, you had to come back home.

00:24:59.380 That was the most important thing for Tolkien.

00:25:01.340 Yeah.

00:25:01.640 I mean, Frodo and Sam certainly weren't warriors.

00:25:04.180 Really, neither were Merry or Pippet.

00:25:05.980 So they were kind of forced into those roles by their commitment to this quest.

00:25:11.300 So it's the reluctant hero I think we see and admire in Tolkien.

00:25:15.380 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:25:19.960 And now back to the show.

00:25:21.460 So Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings and in The Hobbit makes courage a primary virtue that

00:25:28.020 he explores.

00:25:29.220 What's Tolkien's theory of courage?

00:25:31.000 I think in The Hobbit, the courage that we see is the courage of the small person.

00:25:38.100 And so we're kind of used to that now in American culture.

00:25:41.400 We have lots of children who do great things and small people who do great things.

00:25:45.360 But if you think about it, in the early 20th century, there's not a lot of great literature

00:25:48.860 written about heroic quests by small people.

00:25:53.480 And so Bilbo is this person who's not trained as a warrior.

00:25:57.580 He really doesn't even have a training.

00:25:59.620 He doesn't have a job.

00:26:00.700 He's just kind of English gentry who's inherited property. 0.96

00:26:05.000 And he just putters around in the garden and smokes his pipe and eats and just really

00:26:10.500 doesn't do anything.

00:26:12.100 But yet there's something inside him.

00:26:13.400 And Gandalf says, we just need to bring it out of you.

00:26:15.860 You need to prove to yourself that it's in you.

00:26:18.300 And so I'm going to kick you out the door.

00:26:19.840 I'm going to put you on this quest.

00:26:20.920 And it's going to be good for you and amusing for me, which is a great line.

00:26:25.220 So Bilbo keeps being put in these situations with the trolls and with Gollum and with the

00:26:32.020 spiders and then Smaug in which he displays increasing amounts of courage.

00:26:37.660 He fidgets, you know, he faints, he does all these things.

00:26:42.100 But eventually he becomes a person who's courageous enough to crawl towards a dragon.

00:26:48.400 And so of all the great courageous moments for Bilbo, Tolkien says that's the big moment

00:26:53.540 that he knows there is a horrendous evil power on the other end of this tunnel and he has

00:27:00.000 to keep crawling towards it.

00:27:02.340 Now think about, you know, men in the trenches, men who are going over the top and into no man's

00:27:07.560 land as soldiers in World War I, you know, that's little people in a big story, right?

00:27:13.260 Facing a big evil.

00:27:15.360 And so I think you can relate to that if you are someone with military experience or wartime

00:27:20.560 experience, you can relate to that feeling that Bilbo has.

00:27:23.160 Only he doesn't have the military training, the physical training.

00:27:26.520 So that's why it's even greater for him because he's a small person without those physical

00:27:30.960 characteristics.

00:27:31.960 He just needs to figure out a way to stay alive.

00:27:36.260 And he does.

00:27:37.120 And he uses his wits to do it.

00:27:38.720 Yeah.

00:27:39.040 And you mentioned that essay that he wrote about Beowulf, the monsters and the critics.

00:27:44.040 And he talked about this idea that the early Northern literature is a creed of unyielding

00:27:51.240 will.

00:27:52.220 It's fighting and continue to fight even though you're not on the side that wins.

00:27:57.260 You see that in the Lord of the Rings.

00:27:59.740 There's all these moments when you think, boy, it's over for these people. 0.95

00:28:04.000 They're goners. 0.84

00:28:05.080 But they still keep going and they still keep fighting.

00:28:08.560 I think Tolkien really admired that.

00:28:11.140 Yeah.

00:28:11.560 This, you know, keep calm and carry on.

00:28:13.500 That's become a kind of a popular phrase.

00:28:15.920 Resurrected in the last couple of decades when you think of the Brits, you know, stiff upper

00:28:20.020 lip and all of that.

00:28:20.840 So Tolkien did believe that there was something inherent to the makeup of an English person.

00:28:28.660 And this goes back to when they were, you know, gardeners themselves back in pagan Anglo-Saxon

00:28:35.540 times.

00:28:35.960 There must have been something in them that gave them this ability to keep moving forward.

00:28:41.840 And sometimes there are warriors in Anglo-Saxon or Norsepics that, you know, have the ability

00:28:46.960 to fight and they just keep fighting even though they know they're going to lose the battle.

00:28:51.440 And sometimes he's critical of that.

00:28:53.100 There's an Anglo-Saxon term called overmode, which is similar to hubris or overwhelming pride

00:28:58.900 that makes you want to just keep fighting for your own personal glory, even though your

00:29:03.500 side is going to lose.

00:29:05.060 The Song of Roland is another example in medieval literature of this.

00:29:08.320 But the hobbits aren't really like that.

00:29:10.220 The hobbits don't have glory.

00:29:12.600 They don't have these great heroic figures in their culture.

00:29:17.020 And yet something makes Frodo and Sam especially keep moving up the mountain, right, of Mount

00:29:24.680 Doom, keep pushing through with the weight of the ring and this responsibility on them and

00:29:31.240 no food and run out of water and what makes them keep moving.

00:29:36.480 And Tolkien really thought that was something about the English character.

00:29:39.100 Well, you talk about the elves in Middle-earth kind of represent this Tolkien tenacity.

00:29:46.400 You talk about the elves fighting the long defeat.

00:29:49.200 Like the elves knew that their time was over in Middle-earth.

00:29:52.580 And so they were leaving and it was going to be the age of man. 0.96

00:29:54.880 But they kept, they nonetheless kept doing what they could do no matter what.

00:29:59.860 Yeah.

00:30:00.380 So the elves are very different.

00:30:01.740 The hobbits have characteristics.

00:30:03.420 The dwarves have different characteristics.

00:30:04.960 And the elves are the elder children.

00:30:10.840 So they were created first as tall, beautiful, strong, wise.

00:30:16.380 You know, they have all of these kind of natural characteristics that the hobbits don't have. 1.00

00:30:22.280 And yet they're cursed with long life.

00:30:25.240 They live for a long, long time and they see other people die and they see Middle-earth change 0.88

00:30:30.860 and they know that Middle-earth is eventually going to die and they love it so much.

00:30:35.980 So fighting the long defeat means that you're fighting these battles, these great wars.

00:30:42.400 And if you don't die in battle, you will continue to live.

00:30:46.500 But if you stay in Middle-earth, you will get to watch Middle-earth die.

00:30:50.260 That's the long defeat and that's the kind of dark pessimism side of Tolkien that some people

00:30:57.260 don't, you know, don't really kind of see, I think, is that there is a lot of darkness

00:31:01.620 in, especially in the latter parts of The Lord of the Rings.

00:31:06.460 Is there a scene from any of the books from Tolkien that really exemplify his ideal of courage,

00:31:11.520 you think?

00:31:11.820 Well, again, in The Hobbit, I would say that Bilbo crawling through the tunnel facing Smaug

00:31:18.440 and Bilbo's fighting the spiders.

00:31:22.380 Again, without any training, he has this little sword.

00:31:25.260 So those are kind of his moments.

00:31:27.600 In The Lord of the Rings, Samwise trying to rescue Frodo, who's been stabbed by Shelob and

00:31:34.640 trying to get Frodo's body back, fighting orcs, you know, turning into this kind of vision

00:31:39.960 of the brave Samwise that he was daydreaming about.

00:31:43.620 I mean, that's definitely a great moment of courage for Sam.

00:31:46.960 No, my favorite scene with Sam is when he puts Frodo on his back and carries him up.

00:31:51.920 And Sean Austin, he does such a great job portraying that scene.

00:31:56.380 Like, it's better in the movie than in the book, I think.

00:31:59.400 Yeah, I think so, too.

00:32:00.720 There are some moments like that.

00:32:02.300 I think Boromir's death and his conversation with Aragorn in the movie, that is all original

00:32:08.840 dialogue.

00:32:09.960 Most of it written by Fran Walsh, who I got to meet and talk to her about just how great

00:32:14.920 that speech is that Boromir gives and then Aragorn's response to it.

00:32:20.180 I think that's better than the way Tolkien does it in the book, which is basically another

00:32:24.260 version of the death of Roland from The Song of Roland.

00:32:27.820 But it's changed a little bit in the movie.

00:32:29.080 It brings a tear to my eyes almost every time to see Sam put Frodo on his back.

00:32:35.240 And then the other moment in the movie that's not in the book that really, really makes me

00:32:40.380 tear up is when Aragorn's coronation, when he comes to greet the hobbits and they kneel

00:32:46.940 to him and he looks pained and says, my friends, you kneel to no one.

00:32:54.780 And then he kneels to them and everybody there follows the king, kneeling to the hobbits. 0.83

00:33:03.100 That just shows you why Aragorn is just the best king, right?

00:33:07.280 That's an act of humility.

00:33:08.980 Oh, yeah.

00:33:09.640 I'm getting teary-eyed just thinking about it.

00:33:11.060 Come, Mr. Frodo.

00:33:11.940 Oh, man, I'm just thinking about it.

00:33:13.240 Oh.

00:33:14.220 So Lord of the Rings, the first book's called The Fellowship of the Ring.

00:33:17.040 And this idea of fellowship is really important to Tolkien.

00:33:20.640 What did he mean by fellowship and how does it differ from friendship?

00:33:24.440 I think friendship, he explores sort of, you know, individual friendships.

00:33:29.020 I think that Sam and Frodo is one of the greatest.

00:33:33.420 It's a real love, a philos.

00:33:35.620 And so is, in a different way, the friendship between Gimli and Legolas, I think is really interesting.

00:33:42.800 But fellowship is a little different.

00:33:44.040 Fellowship is a gathering of enough people that you can kind of entertain each other,

00:33:50.100 never be bored, you know, with that group of people and feel comfortable around one another

00:33:56.520 enough that you can both encourage each other and you can criticize each other as writers

00:34:03.900 and artists, you know, you can criticize each other's work.

00:34:07.680 Of course, that's exactly what we get in The Inklings.

00:34:10.280 But that was not the first of Tolkien's fellowships.

00:34:13.360 Tolkien had a fellowship of friends at King Edward's School before university when he was in Birmingham.

00:34:20.160 His high school friends, as we would say, are very close.

00:34:23.320 And they call themselves the TCBS, the Tea Club and Barovian Society that met in these tea rooms and had this kind of banter that you see a bit of in The Inklings later.

00:34:35.280 Well, all except for two of the major TCBS members died in the First World War.

00:34:41.980 And that left a lasting imprint on Tolkien in a lot of ways.

00:34:45.520 But one thing was that he missed that fellowship.

00:34:48.780 And so he tried to start clubs at Leeds and at Oxford.

00:34:53.100 But it wasn't until Lewis and Tolkien joined a student club that already existed called The Inklings that it really fit their temperaments.

00:35:01.320 And so the students graduated, left Oxford, they kept the name and invited more and more of their friends on Tuesday mornings, usually at the Eagle and Child pub, and Thursday evenings, usually in C.S. Lewis's rooms in Maudlin College.

00:35:16.920 And they sometimes just drank and told stories and jokes.

00:35:20.400 And sometimes they had very serious discussions.

00:35:23.220 And sometimes they read work to each other, work that eventually became The Lord of the Rings, for example.

00:35:29.060 All right, so the fellowship, you get together with people for a purpose, right?

00:35:32.960 For the fellowship of the ring, the purpose was we got to get this ring back to Mordor.

00:35:37.140 And for Tolkien, his fellowships are like, I want to be around a group of people where we can support and criticize our work and become better writers.

00:35:47.160 Yeah, and that we like the same type of literature and history, I think, as well.

00:35:51.640 And that was important, certainly for The Inklings, because they mostly were a Christian group, but in a lot of ways they had different temperaments and different interests.

00:36:02.680 But the thing they had in common most was that they appreciated traditional forms of storytelling, right?

00:36:09.340 So epic, poetry, the romances of the 19th century, like William Morris's works, and fairy tales, and some periods of history, they all liked that stuff.

00:36:21.520 They did not like modernist writers, for example, T.S. Eliot, who Lewis at least did not like at all.

00:36:29.160 And so there were people that would kind of be excluded because they were writing a type of literature that the Inklings wouldn't like.

00:36:34.860 So you do have to have enough in common, usually cultural tastes.

00:36:39.740 It wasn't for them so much politics, because they never really talked a lot of politics.

00:36:44.540 Almost all of them were kind of conservatives culturally, but politically they just didn't really talk much about politics.

00:36:51.480 But I think most fellowships do form around that kind of first thing that you share in common.

00:36:57.600 Maybe that is politics, or maybe that is religion, or maybe it's an interest in a certain type of music or literature.

00:37:03.540 So the hobbits, we talked about this earlier, they like to enjoy themselves, they like to eat good food, they like to drink, they like to laugh and dance, smoke a pipe.

00:37:12.520 And Tolkien himself, he said, I'm in fact a hobbit in all but size.

00:37:17.840 Tolkien like gardens and trees and unmechanized farmlands.

00:37:21.620 He says that I'm fond of mushrooms out of a field.

00:37:24.480 He says I have a very simple sense of humor.

00:37:26.820 I go to bed late and get up late when possible.

00:37:29.520 I do not travel much.

00:37:30.520 So this idea of merrymaking and just enjoying life, how is that virtuous?

00:37:36.820 What role does that play in living a virtuous life?

00:37:40.440 Well, I'm not a good singer, but a lot of people who sing tell me how healthy it is to do so.

00:37:48.540 And I think singing and laughing and dancing do have these kind of biological pluses to them.

00:37:56.440 I think they do raise the endorphins and all of that.

00:38:00.460 But I think that there are some studies that would suggest that those things are actually kind of good for you physically, as well as the fellowship or the spiritual side of what you're doing.

00:38:11.240 And then comes the food and drink.

00:38:12.940 And that is maybe the more controversial part of Hobbit Virtues, my book, is that I'm trying to make a defense for living well by eating and drinking well.

00:38:22.120 Now, C.S. Lewis and Jarrett Tolkien did not abstain.

00:38:25.080 They were not teetotalers.

00:38:26.620 They liked beer and they liked to smoke pipes.

00:38:30.040 And, you know, I don't know if they were around today whether they would still be smoking pipes, but they would certainly still be drinking beer.

00:38:37.240 And so I don't think they saw anything wrong with that.

00:38:40.040 And, you know, I give some examples in the book about the history of Christianity and Judaism and other religions where there are times of the year in certain places in which it's not just okay to drink, but in some cases even to overindulge.

00:38:53.040 For example, the Catholic Church and the Middle Ages and the Renaissance felt that at certain times of year it was good to have a Mardi Gras, right, to kind of get the humors out, the bad humors out of you by having this kind of good time.

00:39:05.800 And so they let people blow off steam, as we would say.

00:39:08.640 So there's a little bit of that.

00:39:09.660 But I don't think it's complete overindulgence.

00:39:12.280 I think it's just appreciating the taste of beer, the taste of food, but also that those things you can appreciate better in fellowship, right, you know, as opposed to drinking alone, right, is one thing.

00:39:26.160 But if you're having that same glass or two of wine with someone you love, with a fellowship, then it takes on other meanings.

00:39:34.420 And I don't know if that's physically better for you, but I think that Tolkien and Lewis think that it's entirely appropriate.

00:39:42.440 I think they see Jesus behaving that way in the Gospels, and they would think it's fine if not virtuous behavior.

00:39:51.640 So another thing that Tolkien talks about is, it's a theme, is this idea of mercy being a virtue.

00:40:00.060 Nietzsche famously derided mercy.

00:40:02.620 He did.

00:40:02.840 The Karate Kid, the sensei there, Sensei Kreese, says that mercy is for the weak.

00:40:09.580 Tolkien has a different take on mercy.

00:40:11.160 What was his take on it?

00:40:13.080 Yeah, it's really interesting that you went to Karate Kid, because I remember seeing that movie when I was young, and then went back to the reboot to the series.

00:40:21.700 And I love it.

00:40:22.660 You know, I love most of it, not all of it, but I love a lot of it, because it is a spiritual journey for a lot of the characters there.

00:40:29.620 And Daniel, the original Karate Kid, he's trying to stick to Mr. Miyagi's virtues.

00:40:36.340 And mercy is a virtue that he was taught by his sensei.

00:40:40.280 And so he thinks that the Cobra Kai way is wrong because it's no mercy.

00:40:44.560 And so Johnny has to kind of learn that from Daniel, and then Daniel learned some other things from Johnny.

00:40:50.720 I think that's what made that last season of that good.

00:40:53.560 But mercy is not a virtue that you see early in the Greco-Roman tradition.

00:40:59.560 Again, the heroes are people who seek individual glory, and that's often military glory and political power.

00:41:08.580 Those classical virtues are challenged by the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth.

00:41:14.760 He, on the Sermon on the Mount, challenges these notions by saying, no, it's the humble, it's the peacemakers, the merciful.

00:41:24.460 Those are the exalted ones.

00:41:28.060 And, you know, I think that's his maybe most revolutionary sermon.

00:41:32.060 And part of his philosophy is that you have to reverse these things.

00:41:35.900 And from that moment on, then it becomes a struggle between, in the Roman world, these classical heroic virtues and the Christian principles,

00:41:45.540 which says that the slave has got a soul that is just as important as the emperor's soul, right?

00:41:51.360 To God, they're just both beautiful souls, right?

00:41:54.920 And so, really, I love the Middle Ages because it's kind of trying to work this out, and it really does take mercy seriously.

00:42:02.900 Knightly codes develop that say that you have to fight in a certain way, usually one-on-one.

00:42:10.140 And if your enemy falls, then you have to offer him mercy and not take advantage of his disadvantaged position, that you don't fight women and children and priests, non-combatants.

00:42:24.700 Those were all laws that were instituted in church law that were some of the first international laws of the Middle Ages.

00:42:31.800 That's what makes the Middle Ages, I think, so great. 0.99

00:42:34.540 And C.S. Lewis has a wonderful essay called The Necessity of Chivalry, in which he argues that we need more chivalry today, because what we get today are wolves and sheep.

00:42:47.560 We have people who are—he doesn't really like pacifism, and he says they're just sheep.

00:42:53.260 They're too docile.

00:42:55.240 And then we get the killers, who have no mercy.

00:42:57.980 And what we need is more Lancelots, who have the physical abilities of an Achilles, so they can do just as well on a battlefield, but they're trained, they're training themselves to refrain from unnecessary violence, to restrain themselves so that they do not attack non-combatants.

00:43:21.160 They offer mercy to fallen opponents.

00:43:23.080 That's part of the chivalric code in the Arthurian legends that then becomes a cultural code.

00:43:29.160 Not that every real-life knight lived up to that, for sure, but at least it's a measuring stick that's out there that is not in the classical virtue world.

00:43:39.680 And it's not really, I would say, in the modern world either.

00:43:43.360 Is there a scene in the Lord of the Rings series that really shows this idea of mercy?

00:43:48.220 Yeah, I mean, the great acts of mercy towards Gollum.

00:43:55.300 First in The Hobbit, in which Tolkien didn't originally write it this way, so he had to tinker with this episode.

00:44:02.820 But when Bilbo has the ring and he turns invisible and he has the sword, Gollum is in the tunnel in between him and his freedom.

00:44:11.960 And he could have killed Gollum and says, yeah, that's what I need to do. 0.99

00:44:16.740 I just need to poke his eyes out, kill this miserable creature. 1.00

00:44:20.500 And then he starts to imagine Gollum's life. 0.99

00:44:24.260 So he has empathy for Gollum because he imagines what it would be like living for, you know, hundreds of years in this, you know, sunless, dark cave.

00:44:35.080 And because he has empathy, he decides to jump over Gollum and run instead of killing him.

00:44:42.340 And Tolkien eventually kind of says, oh, that works out really well with what I'm trying to do in the Lord of the Rings.

00:44:47.800 And a lot of my friends, especially Christian friends, will say that that's the key to the whole Lord of the Rings, that everything would have changed if Bilbo would have killed Gollum.

00:44:58.780 Because he would have obtained the ring in an act of violence.

00:45:02.220 He would have simply become a dark lord.

00:45:03.860 And then Frodo just echoes these acts of mercy towards Gollum and several points in the book.

00:45:12.440 He has opportunity to kill Gollum and he doesn't.

00:45:15.180 And Sam in the book is a little more like wanting to kill Gollum than he is in the movies.

00:45:20.820 And so that's the one kind of failure with Sam.

00:45:23.800 It's that he can't empathize with Gollum the way Frodo can.

00:45:27.760 And Peter Jackson's interpretation of that is it's because Frodo had the ring for that long.

00:45:33.140 And so he understood addiction to this kind of power that Gollum had.

00:45:38.080 And that empathy led to these acts of mercy.

00:45:41.520 And it's beautiful and it's wonderful.

00:45:43.000 And it gets us all the way up to the crack of doom, right?

00:45:46.780 And you think, oh, yeah, that's an easy answer.

00:45:49.300 And then Frodo refuses to destroy the ring.

00:45:53.320 And you're thinking, oh, you got that close and you can't do it.

00:45:57.000 And that's that darkness in Tolkien, right?

00:45:59.160 That says, no, even our best champions can't ultimately do at the last minute the right thing all the time.

00:46:06.380 And in the face of evil, Frodo becomes selfish and gives in.

00:46:11.060 And so Gollum jumps up and bites his finger and they fall into the crack.

00:46:15.260 And that's how the ring is destroyed.

00:46:17.180 So Tolkien is obviously saying there that it's not Frodo's action at that point.

00:46:22.160 It's what this offscreen power does with Frodo and Gollum's actions that creates the eucatastrophe, the happy ending of The Lord of the Rings.

00:46:31.620 Well, yeah, and there's that famous scene between Frodo and Gandalf where they're having a conversation where Frodo's like, it's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum when he had the chance.

00:46:40.300 And then Gandalf, the wise, he's saying, it's a pity that stayed Bilbo's hand.

00:46:45.980 And then he goes on, he says, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.

00:46:51.140 And that's the scene, right?

00:46:52.280 Like Bilbo's pity in The Hobbit is what saved the day at the end of the Lord of the Rings series.

00:46:58.600 And because Gandalf senses that Gollum is going to have some role to play in this and that he needs to keep Gollum alive.

00:47:06.640 He can't kill Gollum because he's got some role in all of this because Gandalf has these kind of angelic abilities even before he's Gandalf the White.

00:47:15.600 He kind of senses this.

00:47:17.240 And yeah, he's absolutely right.

00:47:18.300 None of this would have been a happy ending had it not happened exactly this way.

00:47:23.620 But it is also Tolkien's really theological point there that we need grace, that human action, sort of a humanism is not enough.

00:47:34.380 At the end, in the face of the greatest evil, we need help.

00:47:38.600 Well, Chris, this has been a great conversation.

00:47:40.380 Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

00:47:42.780 Well, so they can read Hobbit Virtues, which came out a couple of years ago.

00:47:49.080 Hobbit Virtues, Rediscovering Virtue Ethics through the work of J.R.R. Tolkien.

00:47:52.980 Or they can read my first Tolkien book, which came out in a revised edition just this past year, called The Making of Middle-Earth.

00:48:00.700 And that's a more comprehensive book in which I talk a lot about history and archaeology of the ancient and medieval worlds and how understanding that better helps us understand Tolkien better.

00:48:11.660 So those are two to start with and basically read anything by Tom Shippey on Tolkien.

00:48:17.880 He's probably our greatest living Tolkien scholar.

00:48:20.780 There are a lot of people, a lot more people now doing really good books on Tolkien than there were, say, 10, 15 years ago.

00:48:28.380 Well, Chris Snyder, thanks for your time.

00:48:29.300 It's been a pleasure.

00:48:30.580 Thanks, Brett.

00:48:31.900 My guest name is Chris Snyder.

00:48:33.280 He's the author of the book Hobbit Virtues.

00:48:35.000 It's available on Amazon.com.

00:48:36.560 Check out our show notes at aom.is slash Hobbit Virtues, where you can find links to resources,

00:48:40.480 where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:48:49.040 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AWIM podcast.

00:48:52.020 Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives.

00:48:56.000 And while you're there, sign up for our newsletter.

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00:49:08.640 It helps out a lot.

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00:49:15.560 As always, thank you for the continued support.

00:49:17.840 Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to listen to the AWIM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

00:49:23.260 Thank you.

00:49:29.940 Bye.

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The Art of Manliness - December 13, 2023

The Hobbit Virtues

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