Original subtitles

As John Ronald Reuel Tolkien created his fantasy universe

called Middle-earth,

hardly anyone could have anticipated how successful

and influential it would become.

Without Tolkien,

there would be no J.K. Rowling, no George Martin or Game of Thrones,

no role-playing games, no Star Wars.

He even influenced The Beatles and Led Zeppelin.

He influenced so many, but what inspired him?

What is the true story of the rings?

This film is a quest for traces...

In the landscapes, the history

and the myths of his homeland England.

Everybody wants to discover

the one place that sparked

Tolkien's imagination.

Tolkien's fans really want

this Middle-earth mythology

to be real or to at least be inspired

by real things. There is a real desire.

Less known are Tolkien's personal encounters

with the history of the 20th century,

for example, as a soldier

in the First World War.

Tolkien was here between

the 25th and the 29th

of July 1916.

If we were to go back more than 100 years,

we would likely already be under heavy fire here.

His greatest journey took him

to Switzerland in 1911.

A very real,

even life-threatening adventure.

That was a near-death

sort of experience.

We could have had the end of Tolkien at that point.

We're very lucky that we didn't.

Tolkien's books are unique.

Fantasy and world literature.

Timeless. Profound. Immortal. Cult.

Brought to the world by a professor

while marking exam papers:

One page of this

particular paper was left blank, glorious,

nothing to read. So, I scribble on it. I can't think why.

"In a hole in the ground lived a Hobbit."

I am in fact a Hobbit myself,

in all but size.

I like gardens, trees

and unmechanised farmlands.

I smoke a pipe and enjoy eating.

I like and even dare

to wear ornamental waistcoats in these dull days.

I am fond of mushrooms.

I have a very simple sense of humour.

I go to bed late and get up late, when possible.

I do not travel much.

Well, he often said, I'm very much a Hobbit, you know?

Sometimes that's a bit of a joke with the waistcoats,

the pipe, you know. But it's...

They're based in a...

part of his life that was kind of idyllic,

that turn of the century, you know, late-Victorian England.

That sort of rural idyll.

Today, when many people think of Middle-earth,

they mostly imagine what Peter Jackson showed us

of New Zealand

in the Tolkien films.

Tolkien's rural idyll was the West Midlands,

"England's green and pleasant land,"

as he called his homeland in the heart of Britain.

Wow.

Can you believe this?

Can you believe this place?

It's supernatural.

So this is the doorway

to Saint Edward's Church.

In Stow-on-the-Wold.

We don't know for certain

that Tolkien ever came here,

so this is... it's only a theory

that maybe this was a kind of inspiration

for the West Gate of Moria,

it's called Durin's Doors.

Very famously, Durin's Doors are secret.

By the time of the Third Age, they are hidden away,

and they need a magic spell

for them to open.

The magic spell is "speak, friend,

and enter". Mellon,

in the Elvish language.

Ancient languages, names and their stories.

Tolkien was obsessed.

As a child, as a student and as a professor in Oxford,

he even used family trips for research purposes.

They would take weekends and drive out in the countryside

and look exactly for places like this.

So, Rollright Stones,

it's kind of a very strange, unusual name.

One of the theories, the one that I like,

is that it's actually an ancient British word

before the old English language comes here.

That's one of the things Tolkien is most interested in.

This layering of names,

the layering of time, of history

on places like these.

Not far from Oxford, near Dragon Hill,

is the Uffington White Horse,

a figure over 100 metres long,

carved into the chalk hillside.

A horse.

We're looking out towards Oxfordshire,

the land that was sort of closest

to Tolkien's heart.

But this carving

would have been carved thousands of years ago,

and every age probably gave it

a new legend, a new mythology.

And we know by the time of the Anglo Saxon kingdoms

that this was the heartland of a kingdom

called Mercia. And Mercia

"The men of the march",

is the inspiration for the kingdom of Rohan.

The people of Rohan, the men of Rohan

have Anglo Saxon names

and they call themselves "The men of the march".

And they speak in old English language

and they quote from Beowolf.

Tolkien, a linguist by profession,

gave a groundbreaking lecture on the Old English

heroic epic Beowulf.

Elements of it appear in Rohan,

the equestrian kingdom

in The Lord of the Rings.

In Rohan,

the symbol, the banner,

is a white horse on a green field.

This is no accident. So this is

the founding white horse

of the Kingdom of Rohan.

It is also the ancestor of Shadowfax,

the horse of King Théoden and eventually the horse of Gandalf.

Many of Tolkien's iconic characters

contain references and allusions.

Gandalf, for example,

one of the five great wizards of Middle-earth,

derives his name from the Old Icelandic saga "Edda".

Tolkien was fascinated by the old myths of Europe.

In the landscapes of the English Midlands,

traces of them are everywhere, overlapping with

millennia-old stories and history.

So, he could draw from his neighbourhood

to make

Middle-earth

come alive.

It's hard to travel through

the Cotswolds, this wooded area

surrounding Oxford,

without thinking of the Shire.

Whether you're talking about England

or you're talking about Tolkien,

kind of all roads lead here,

to Wayland's Smithy.

This place is also important

because it's one of the ancient places

that we know Tolkien visited.

Named about 1500 years ago

by Anglo-Saxon settlers

after the Germanic demigod Wayland,

it later became

"Wayland's Smithy."

It's highly likely Tolkien

had burial mounds

like this in mind

while writing his "legendarium."

One of the really curious theories was that

traditions across the British Isles about a

fairy folk who had lived

underground in mounds

may have originated with the real people

who had been here. The Celts.

And who had

been so shy that they were only

vaguely known on the peripheries of

the incomers, civilisation.

A small people, perhaps, who could

vanish in the flash of an eye, you know?

And I'm sure that this is where Tolkien gets

the idea of the Hobbits from.

Tolkien is very clear that these real-life places

are not the same places

he describes in his legendarium.

But he wants to describe that feeling

of being there, close to something ancient,

knowing somehow

that many lives have passed through here,

that many stories have been told here.

And I think we do the same thing

when we follow in Tolkien's footsteps.

We want to imagine

what he imagined when he was here.

On the one hand, Tolkien creatively uses his environment,

historical sites, what he learnt

and what he experienced. But he was also shaped by

traumatic events from his childhood.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien,

was born in 1892

in the Orange Free State,

in what is now South Africa.

His father worked for an English bank there.

When Tolkien was three,

his mother returned to England with him and his brother, Hilary.

They would never see their father again,

he died shortly afterwards.

He talks about that in his late interviews, actually,

about that huge contrast between the landscape of

South Africa and what he sees in Birmingham.

He talks a lot about the rustic people

there as well and their accents.

Remember, Tolkien is a middle class child, right?

He's a sort of upper-middle-class child, really,

transposed into an environment where there are more rural people.

And the rural Hobbits are very much

a representation of that.

His mother settled with the two boys Hilary and Ronald

near Sarehole Mill,

then on the rural outskirts

of Birmingham.

For the children, it was a world full of wonder.

It was a kind of lost paradise.

There was an old mill that really

did grind corn with two millers,

a great big pond with swans on it,

a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers,

a few old-fashioned village houses

and, further away, a stream with another mill.

Any time you see Tolkien's own drawings,

his own depictions of what he thinks

Hobbiton looks like,

you always see a river

and a mill with its water wheel.

The central location of that mill in his drawings

links to the central location of this mill in his memories.

Ronald and Hilary created

early games and stories about witches and ogres.

They named the young miller,

who was always covered in flour, the "White Ogre"

and a farmer who once chased them, the "Black Ogre."

They intertwined their surroundings

with dangerous, child-eating creatures

drawn from popular English fairy tales.

Mabel Tolkien was a very educated woman

for the standards of the period,

She was up to date with children's books at the time.

This is just after the first golden age of children's literature.

So we know that Tolkien read Andrew Lang,

the Coloured Fairy Books.

He knew about the Arthurian legend

from her. He learnt languages from her,

the linguistic element is particularly important,

obviously, for Tolkien's later development, the fact that

he was being taught languages, but he was

getting interested in how languages work.

When Ronald was eight years old,

they moved away from this idyllic area

so he would not have to walk six kilometres

to Birmingham's King Edward's School.

Now he lived in the city!

Fascinated, he discovered Welsh words

on coal wagons destined for industry.

These words sparked his interest in developing artificial languages.

One of these, Sindarin,

was based on Welsh.

Another, Quenya, was inspired by Finnish.

Early in life, Ronald

and Hilary learnt that nothing stays the same.

Their hard lesson:

Things can always get worse.

Their father died before he could follow

the family to England, when Ronald was four.

At 12, Ronald also lost his mother.

The Tolkien brothers became orphans.

But it seems there is this trauma childhood.

So it's the trauma of losing a father, then losing a mother

to whom he was very, very close

and I think there is this melancholy

and this general tendency to

at times fall into swings of pessimism,

are definitely there throughout his life.

And yes, I suppose you see that

via characters such as Frodo, who is traumatised

and never quite recovers.

Frodo. Frodo Baggins, after all,

lives in Bag End in the Shire

with his foster father Bilbo.

Like Tolkien, he is an orphan

and knows his creator's pessimism well.

So, yes, I think I think there is a very

important part of this

inner melancholy, inner pessimism

feeding into Middle-earth.

And I think what that's what makes it enduring as well.

If we had a very linear

narrative in which everything gets resolved at the end,

I don't think we would have such an enduring story.

In many ways, life doesn't work like that very often.

The brothers were assigned a guardian:

Father Francis Morgan.

Ronald and Hilary remained close

all their lives.

His brother Hilary, two years younger...

didn't have that... He left school

as soon as he was able to

and went to work on his aunt's farm.

And later in life had his own farm.

I think there's a touch of Sam Gamgee about him,

and I think that, you know, that reflects that

there was an ongoing bond between the two.

This may be a key to Tolkien's ability

to empathise with people who are not like himself.

Under Father Francis' care,

Ronald met Edith Bratt, three years his senior.

When they grew close, Father Francis

forbade the minor from seeing Edith

until he turned 21.

His first great love

became a forbidden love.

His love for nature, however, was unbridled.

Ronald liked to climb trees

and was distraught

when one of these trees, an old willow

near the mill, was cut down and left to rot.

This tree would later reappear

in Tolkien's work as "Old Man Willow,"

a character who fights back against humans.

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien turns trees

into active beings. He goes beyond simply giving them

a mystical history, as Shakespeare

did in Macbeth.

Tolkien wanted more.

Their part in the story is due, I think,

to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays

with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming

of "Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill".

I longed to devise a setting in which

the trees might really march to war.

Thus, Tolkien created the Ents, tree shepherds.

Ancient beings

who could walk, speak

and, when absolutely necessary,

even go to war.

Few tasks are as pressing for humanity

as avoiding climate catastrophe,

making Tolkien's vision

of intelligent, speaking trees

with a clear purpose

all the more prescient.

In Peter Jackson's film,

The Two Towers,

the Ents become living beings

who have had enough.

Come, my friends.

The Ents are going to war.

It is likely

that we go to our doom.

The last march of the Ents!

That nature rebels is unsurprising,

especially when we look at depictions of the "Black Country,"

an industrial region north of Birmingham.

It really was a dark and grim region.

Nature despoiled

the lives of the workers there, you know,

they would not have been healthy. They would not have been long lived.

So I think that that's a primal

influence on Tolkien and his idea of

what's right and wrong in the world.

And I don't think it trivialises things

to point out that

if you translate the Black Country into Elvish,

you get Mordor.

The backdrop of the Black Country

seems like a model for the dark places

in Middle-earth

that embody evil.

The worlds of Sauron and Saruman.

The Lord of the Rings is undoubtedly critical

of industrialisation. Saruman serves as a champion

of industry.

Mordor, with its dark wasteland

choked by smoke resembles a massive industrial site.

A land that is no longer green.

A land covered in clouds of smoke,

in which red lights flicker.

It looks like a huge, giant smelting works.

I'm from Saarland,

I live next door to Mordor. I know what it looks like!

Just look at the Dillinger Hütte.

Saruman, once a "good" wizard like Gandalf,

joins forces with Sauron in Lord of the Rings,

producing orcs in his Isengard forges

and preparing for war

against Middle-earth's peaceful peoples.

Tolkien's expansive knowledge, which would make

his Middle-earth so rich and complex,

began forming during his time

at King Edward's School.

He delivered lectures to his peers

in Old English, Greek and Gothic.

Alongside three close friends, he founded

a debating club,

TCBS,

or the Tea Club Barrovian Society,

creating a lifelong bond.

The group consisted of Wiseman, Smith,

Gilson and Tolkien,

four young men

determined to renew

the world morally.

Idealism was common

for 19- and 20-year-olds who saw the world before them

and were likely bound for

the universities of either Cambridge or Oxford,

with careers ahead of them,

expecting to make a difference.

They belonged to the elite.

This included membership in the school's cadet corps.

For now, they only wore uniforms for group photos.

But within a few years, World War I

would become a grim reality for the cadets.

At this time, they were still writing poems and essays...

Young Tolkien made an impression

with his vast knowledge,

commenting on the Finnish national epic,

the Kalevala,

and comparing the Icelandic sagas

of the Völsungs to Homer's Odyssey.

In the decades that followed,

all this

would find its way into his immense body of work

on Middle-earth.

It all began in 1937 with The Hobbit.

One of the illustrations shows Hobbiton,

complete with a mill and the landscape of his childhood.

The title page also references

another major influence on his work.

Only in his later years

did Tolkien write letters to his sons,

revealing how much the single major journey

of his youth influenced him.

Tolkien's journey in the summer of 1911

took him to the Swiss Alps.

This was a time when the Swiss Alps would have been

the frontier of

experience for someone from England of his class.

And also, this was a time

when the romantic ethos

was very important. So the sense that

mountains were a place

where you went to experience something that

was sublime rather than pretty or beautiful.

They gave him a sense of awe,

of the immensity

of the natural world within which

we are tiny and vulnerable figures.

Tolkien was in Switzerland in 1911, in the summer.

He travelled for about a month

on foot through the mountains,

Bernese Oberland and the Valais.

It was a very mixed group,

with many women and even children,

a rather colourful troupe

with funny hats and skirts.

It's hard to imagine today

that people would go hiking like that.

They were flatland tourists

and for the first time in his life,

19-year-old Ronald saw

real mountains.

About eight years ago, I travelled to

the Lauterbrunnen Valley. Then I came across information

that Tolkien had been there

and was inspired by it for Rivendell.

I then stumbled upon Tolkien's letters

and it was,

how should I say, really a "wow' moment

for me because I saw

how profoundly this trip influenced Tolkien.

The Hobbit Bilbo's journey

from Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains,

including the glissade down the slithering stones

into the pine woods,

is based on my adventures in 1911.

The annus mirabilis of sunshine.

The similarity between

the Lauterbrunnen Valley

and Tolkien's drawing of Rivendell,

the seat of the Elven realm in Middle-earth, is striking.

There is also the river Lautwasser,

known in English as Loudwater,

which flows through Rivendell

and is called Bruinen in Elvish.

A connection to the place name Lauterbrunnen

has also been suggested.

It is interesting because it shows

how Tolkien thought

as a philologist.

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien brings much of

the real magical beauty of the Lauterbrunnen Valley

into his fantasy world.

He found his friends

sitting in a porch on the side of the house looking east.

Shadows had fallen in the valley below,

but there was still a light on the faces

of the mountains far above.

The air was warm.

The sound of running and falling water was loud

and the evening was filled with a faint scent

of trees and flowers,

as if summer still lingered in Elrond's gardens.

In a similarly idyllic mountainous world,

Tolkien gathers the main characters in The Lord of the Rings,

the Fellowship.

At Elrond's house, the Half-Elven Lord

of Rivendell,

representatives of all the free peoples come together.

From there, men, Hobbits,

a dwarf, an elf

and the wizard Gandalf set out

together to defeat evil.

They must first cross

the Misty Mountains.

In reality, Tolkien had experienced

only one mountain range of such magnitude:

the Swiss Alps.

The first part of his journey is described,

many years later,

in letters to his sons in great detail.

Tolkien began his journey here

in Interlaken,

then continued to Lauterbrunnen,

from there up to Mürren

and into the far end of the Lauterbrunnen Valley,

crossing the Kleine Scheidegg to Grindelwald,

then over the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen,

before presumably hiking through the Aare Gorge

to the Grimsel Pass

and then over into the Valais.

Colin Brooks-Smith, a fellow traveller,

also wrote memoirs of the journey

and he particularly mentions

the second part of the trip.

There are also guest books from two huts

where we know for sure that Tolkien stayed

because he signed them.

One of these huts

is still only accessible on foot today.

It takes several hours to hike

to the Hotel Obersteinberg in the Bernese Oberland,

with an ascent of more than 600 metres

from the valley floor.

Difficulty level today: moderate.

Tolkien travelled mostly on foot, as he himself wrote,

across many high passes,

over a month-long period.

It was truly an enormous journey,

covering perhaps 300 kilometres.

On 5th August 1911,

he reached the Hotel Obersteinberg.

So, here,

we have Tolkien's signature.

That's quite something,

to see the real signature.

The book's a bit worse for wear.

It's ancient.

Yes.

Among the 12 companions were six women,

including Tolkien's aunt.

The young widow had invited her nephew

on the Alpine adventure.

Jane Neave, his mother's sister, was a huge influence,

partly because she was like his mother,

very, very intelligent.

She was a warden of St Andrews University

at a time when women in academia were a rarity.

She's a very important character.

It has been argued that because she led

the 1911 holiday trek

through the Swiss Alps,

that she may have inspired aspects of Gandalf,

and who knows?

I've even heard people

aware of this say,

"Well, in essence,

Gandalf is a feminine character."

Gandalf, the wizard,

inspired by a woman?

It's possible, though in Tolkien's time,

the character became a man.

As always with his work,

Gandalf likely had many influences.

The Germanic god Odin,

the Eastern European folklore figure Rübezahl,

mountain spirits like one depicted on a postcard

Tolkien kept by the artist Josef Madeler

and even his Aunt Jane,

all combined with Tolkien's imagination

to create Gandalf!

Gandalf is many things at once.

Gandalf is also Christ.

The Balrog burns him, but he returns.

Gandalf undergoes a resurrection,

transforming from Gandalf the Grey

to Gandalf the White.

This is clearly

a reference to Christ.

One of Tolkien's major influences is the Bible,

which, given

his deep Catholic faith, is unsurprising

but often overlooked.

In Switzerland, Tolkien experienced

creation's grandeur.

Wherever one looks, there are views

reminiscent of Middle-earth scenery.

Here, he saw the three famous peaks

of the Bernese Alps:

Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau.

The next likely stop on his journey

was the Aare Gorge,

which evokes the entrance to the underground realms

of Moria, the Dwarven kingdom.

It was already a tourist attraction back then,

with a path

through the gorge

that was well-developed,

though not quite like today.

There was also

an interesting bridge

crossing the gorge,

which was quite daring at the time.

It's been suggested

that it might have inspired

the Bridge of Khazad-dûm

in Moria.

Moria is a major setting

in The Lord of the Rings.

Underground halls where battles rage

between dwarves and orcs,

between the Fellowship and evil forces.

When Tolkien was in Switzerland,

the Lötschberg Tunnel was being built

and the breakthrough happened in the spring of that year.

Many workers died

during its construction,

buried within the tunnel.

This sense of horror may have also inspired

Tolkien's depiction of Moria.

For the English, mountains and gorges

weren't just new but also

introduced the dangers of the alpine world.

On the evening of 21st August 1911,

the group encountered a fierce thunderstorm.

Surrounded by snow-covered peaks,

an experience that left a lasting impression.

In The Hobbit,

written over 20 years later,

this "thunder battle"

feels vividly real.

More terrible still are thunder and lightning

in the mountains at night,

when storms come up from East and West

and make war.

The lightning splinters on the peaks

and rocks shiver

and great crashes split the air

and go rolling and tumbling into every cave

and hollow.

In The Hobbit, it's perhaps most striking

when the group encounters the tempest,

they experience these stone battles,

thunder battles of stone giants,

or imagine that

this is the case.

It's left open

to the reader's imagination

whether these were actual giants

or that it merely

sounded like it.

A few days later, the group found themselves in immediate danger.

Large rocks broke off from a cliff face.

The woman in front of Tolkien saved herself by jumping forward.

A boulder crashed just ahead of Tolkien

and plummeted into the abyss.

In a letter written decades later, he mentioned

that his "unmanly knees" were trembling.

It's the elemental force

of storms, lightning,

rockslides and avalanches.

All of it a direct confrontation with nature's raw power.

It translates well

because he adopts

the Hobbit's perspective.

These are really characters

who are non-heroic

and physically small,

naturally struggling with snowdrifts and such.

The man who later described himself

as "a Hobbit" was,

like the companions in his books, nearly lost in the mountains.

It's only later on that I think it really sinks in

that that was a near death sort of experience.

We could have had the end of J.R.R. Tolkien

at that particular point and we were very lucky that we didn't.

The profound impact of the experiences on his journey

through the Bernese Oberland and the Valais is evident

in a watercolour painting he created

just a few years later.

When Tolkien was in the Valais,

there were several major forest fires.

Articles vividly describe

the fire horns sounding,

church bells ringing

and masses being held

at 2:00 a.m.

We might see impressions of these fires

in his painting "Fantasy Landscape."

These existentially threatening experiences

contributed to his Swiss journey

taking on an increasingly surreal, mythic quality.

A key moment

in shaping the landscapes

of Middle-earth.

The second guestbook Tolkien signed

is still accessible only with a mountain guide.

The ascent to the Bertol Hut

is a memorable climb.

Colin Brook-Smith, a travel companion,

mentioned that the whole group

had no mountaineering experience.

The Swiss guides essentially

pulled them up this final part.

The Bertol Hut stands at

3311 metres above sea level.

On 25th August 1911,

it was the group's destination.

Back then,

the ascent took seven hours.

The mountain landscape has changed dramatically since.

We're seeing

far more rockfalls due to permafrost melting and so on.

The Alps are changing, as is the entire world.

In the last two years,

the pace of change has accelerated dramatically.

I never thought I'd see the Alps without glaciers.

But it's happening

and we'll see it soon.

In 1911, the glaciers

nearly reached the hut.

This could be exactly from the time when Tolkien's group was here.

Yes.

But do you see

- the difference with the glacier? - Yes.

Here is a copy

of the old Bertol Hut guestbook

with Tolkien's original signature.

Do you know Tolkien?

Now I do.

From the Bertol Hut, you can see the Matterhorn

on the horizon.

It's quite possible that Tolkien had the Matterhorn in mind

when he described Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings,

the mountain where the battle

between good and evil is decided.

Of course, there are other traces...

During my research,

I also found Mont Miné.

This mountain is particularly fascinating.

Its shape strongly resembles

a sketch by Tolkien

of Mount Doom,

a rather steep volcano.

This sketch in one of his original manuscripts

shows that the Swiss journey stayed with Tolkien for decades.

Really, any mountain scene

that you encounter in The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings,

you can bet that the Swiss Alps

have got in there deep

into the bones of that passage.

And yeah, it made a permanent mark on Tolkien

and he's able to draw on that as a resource.

Because Tolkien says that in his own letters too.

"I wish I could see those Swiss Alps once more."

Peter Jackson's film The Fellowship of the Ring

captures how Tolkien channels this longing

through his character Bilbo Baggins.

I want to see mountains again,

mountains, Gandalf,

and then find somewhere quiet where I can

finish my book.

Some of it remains speculation.

Not every mountain, path

or glacier from the Alps

is directly transposed into Middle-earth,

despite fans' wishes.

Still, the trip to Switzerland,

after his childhood experiences in England,

represented the second major source of experience

Tolkien would draw upon.

A lot of writers do that.

They've been somewhere. They go, oh, well, I remember that.

I can now just describe that shop

and, you know, and that's my perfect setting

because I don't have to think it through.

I've got everything there.

But I think in the Swiss Alps

there's an element of the sublime there,

the overpowering vastness of nature

which he takes from. So he's not just taking the physical description

he takes the emotional description from it as well.

After the Alpine tour,

Tolkien began his studies at Oxford.

Initially, he studied Classics,

Greek and Roman literature, and Latin.

Soon, he switched to philology.

His mother's early influence on his love for languages

would become his professional focus.

Medieval literature, Norse sagas,

Arthurian legend, Beowulf, the Edda

and the Song of Roland.

Tolkien absorbed all of it.

Together with his close friends from school,

the "TCBS,"

he pursued his artistic endeavours.

But Great Britain's entry into World War I

in August 1914

would disrupt the young men's plans.

Many enlisted immediately.

Tolkien hesitated.

He was an orphan with no money. He wasn't a wealthy heir.

He needed a job, which required completing his degree at Oxford.

He stayed there and he was called a coward.

He even received the white feather,

a symbol handed out, often by women,

to shame men who hadn't

immediately volunteered for the front.

It was a form of public humiliation, a way

to pressure men into enlisting

by means of group pressure.

With the threat of combat looming,

Tolkien focused on poetry

and his Elvish languages,

a creative surge without the epic scale

of his later novels.

During a visit to his Aunt Jane's farm,

he produced watercolours and sketches.

Influenced by his Swiss journey

and the outbreak of war, Tolkien developed

a unique artistic style.

Tolkien applied his principle of "sub-creation"

both literarily and artistically.

We worked with the National Library

to find visual equivalents to his work,

but the experts concluded

that Tolkien's art was so singular

that no real comparisons

could be made.

Almost all his university friends were now at the front.

The societal pressure mounted on those who hesitated,

like Tolkien.

In 1916, he enlisted for military service.

Before heading to war,

Tolkien had one private matter to settle:

seeing his "forbidden" love,

Edith, again.

When they met, Tolkien was 16

and Edith 19.

Father Francis

found out

about their relationship and forbade it.

Ronald, who was dependent on him

both financially and for his education,

abided by this prohibition.

On the evening of his 21st birthday,

Ronald wrote a letter to Edith

and re-established contact with her.

In the meantime, she had moved away

and was engaged to another man

but she agreed to meet Tolkien.

Edith broke off her engagement and married Ronald.

By then, he was 24

and an officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers.

His marching orders were imminent.

Their honeymoon was brief,

but Tolkien had a specific destination in mind.

The romantic outing led them to a gorge

on the southwest coast of England.

Ronald wanted to show Edith a natural wonder:

Cox's Cave.

Ronald and Edith had just been married

and they knew

that it wasn't going to be long

before he had to go off and fight the war.

And you can imagine

one last happy moment before he goes off to war,

maybe never to come back.

These caves will seem familiar to Tolkien readers.

The grottos beneath "Helm's Deep,"

the refuge of dwarves and men in The Lord of the Rings,

bear a striking resemblance to Cox's Cave.

Gimli even raves about it:

Then, Legolas,

gems and crystals

and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls,

and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like,

translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel.

There are columns of white and saffron

and dawn-rose, Legolas.

Gimli, a dwarf,

and Legolas, an elf,

are two of the companions who form the Fellowship of the Ring

alongside the Hobbit Frodo.

It's really a warm moment, a really special moment in the story

and in both of their characters.

They agree that if they survive this war,

they will visit these places together.

And you can imagine Ronald

and Edith making themselves a similar promise.

If we survive this,

we'll come back here.

Tolkien didn't know if he would ever see Edith again.

On 4th June 1916,

he crossed over to France,

to the war.

He later described the crossing:

"It felt like death."

Photographs, military records

and maps allow us

to accurately reconstruct

Tolkien's time at the front.

Tolkien arrived by train

from the north to Amiens,

then continued to Albert.

From Albert,

his first posting was at Boiselle,

where he encountered the front

for the first time.

From battalion records,

we can trace the area

of the Somme where Tolkien

was stationed during these months.

The Somme region

remains a surreal landscape today,

with war scars everywhere.

The troops faced each other here for months.

Tolkien and his friends from the TCBS

were in this war.

Three of them here, in northern France.

We're standing at the Lochnagar Crater,

the result of one of many mines detonated

on the morning of July 1st,

which started the Battle of the Somme.

At 7:28 a.m.,

27 tonnes of explosives

went off here.

Finally,

July 1st

went down in history

as one of the bloodiest days of the Somme.

One of the many, many people

who died on that first day

was Robert Quilter Gilson, called Rob,

one of Tolkien's closest friends.

Nearly 20,000 British soldiers

died on the first day of the battle alone

and around 40,000 were wounded.

Almost all

of Tolkien's "lost generation" perished.

Tolkien became his battalion's signals officer.

So he was in charge of communications

for, say, 700 or 800 men

in the Battle of the Somme.

It would mean

that Tolkien's chances of survival were higher

than other officers of his rank.

At the "Musée Somme" in Albert,

the traces of the war can be seen.

Tolkien and his friends experienced it as an apocalypse.

Geoffrey was at an outpost

at night

and wrote an intensely emotional letter.

He didn't expect

to survive the night

and essentially entrusted

Tolkien with a mission.

He wrote to Tolkien

in the letter's final lines,

"Say the things I may no longer

be able to say:

carry it out."

Tolkien would carry out

that mission in his works,

creating a legacy of the four friends

of the "Tea Club Barrovian Society"

from their school days in Birmingham.

Their friendship and the war at the Somme

were immortalized in the fantasy world

of Middle-earth.

You can especially see it

in Tolkien's landscape descriptions, for example,

in the chapter "The Siege of Gondor."

The orcs dig trenches.

They entrench themselves.

The English original

even uses the word "trenches",

the same word for military dugouts.

In this chapter,

the narrative tone

becomes very modern.

It mentions comrades

and even furlough for Pippin,

reflecting how these experiences,

even subconsciously, resurfaced in Tolkien's writing.

Perhaps a lot of things

fight their way back to the surface when writing.

Many years later, Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher

that his monumental work began with scribbled notes

in army barracks,

and even in the trenches.

In late October 1916,

he described the devastated battlefield

as miles and miles of seething mud...

an experience that scorches itself into the mind.

A similar scene appears in The Lord of the Rings

with the depiction of Mordor's

no-man's-land:

The gasping pools

were choked with ash and crawling muds,

sickly white and grey,

great cones of earth, fire-blasted and poison-stained,

stood like an obscene graveyard

in endless rows.

A land defiled,

diseased beyond all healing.

On 15th September 1916,

the first tank in history,

the British "Mark I,"

was deployed at the Somme.

The war was becoming industrialised.

Soldiers turned into killing machines,

numbed by the noise and chaos.

Sleepless, hungry,

with one goal drilled into them:

to kill.

We know,

at least from literature,

that the biggest shock

of World War I was the realisation

that this was not a heroic

or chivalric struggle,

red blood on bright sand, or the like.

I think

that sentiment is visible even in Isengard.

In Isengard, the evil wizard

Saruman manufactures orcs,

creatures bred solely for war,

for killing.

In Peter Jackson's iconic films,

they are a manifestation of pure evil,

drooling and ruthless.

We could say, the orcs,

to some extent, reflect war propaganda

in which enemies, like the Germans,

were depicted as "Huns".

Dehumanised,

semi-ape-like,

bloodthirsty creatures

who ravage the conquered lands.

So, are the orcs a depiction of the Germans,

the enemy?

Or do they represent

a generation slaughtered

at the Somme,

killing and being killed,

cannon fodder on both sides

of the front?

But within the orcs themselves,

and Tolkien was quite clear on this,

he says, you really do get glimpses,

so let's not just dismiss them

as the sort of characters that

are just really there for cannon fodder

for people to kill, which

is what they become, unfortunately, in Peter Jackson's films.

But in the books they, for example,

they made complaints about, you know,

orders from on high. They're very scared.

They sit there and say, well, I'm not going down there.

You go down there.

"In war, we were all orcs,"

Tolkien would later write.

He transformed his experiences into something symbolic.

If you read the Battalion War Diaries,

you see it's a litany

of how many soldiers died

on each given day from shell fire,

from enemy attack, poison gas, of course.

Memories of poison gas

stayed in Tolkien's mind,

fumbling to get your gas helmet on to try to protect yourself.

And if you imagine

the already devastated landscape,

with shell craters everywhere,

tree stumps

covering the ground like skeletons,

and then everything covered with water,

then that brings you close to the Lord of the Rings descriptions

of the Dead Marshes.

Rain, flooded trenches,

corpses in shell craters,

the ghastly war scenery of the Somme

is mirrored in Middle-earth's landscapes,

such as the "Dead Marshes."

Peter Jackson captures this hauntingly

in his film The Two Towers.

There are dead things!

Dead faces in the water!

All dead.

All rotten. Elves and men and orcs.

A great battle long ago.

The dead marshes.

Yes, yes, that is the name.

Death makes no distinctions.

Britons, French, Germans,

all remained in the no-man's-land

between positions.

They became part

of the earth,

as Gollum describes.

The graves were swallowed.

One notices

that in Tolkien's work

loss, death and mourning

are recurring themes.

In The Lord of the Rings, for example, when Boromir dies,

it's crucial

for the companions to bury him.

There's a line about how

they can't leave him

among his enemies.

And I think that for someone

who witnessed

such scenes here firsthand,

it clearly influenced his work.

Tolkien and his close school friends

wanted to change the world.

They were companions on a mission,

full of hope.

They spurred each other on.

But the war changed everything.

It's unclear whether it was intentional

or unconscious

that Tolkien's four Hobbits

come from the same region

and bond on their journey,

getting closer.

They survive it all, in The Lord of The Rings,

and perhaps there we also see

a homage or a wish

for survival, for these four friends,

these four young men who shared

this terrible experience.

In real life, there are no happy endings.

His friend Geoffrey Bache Smith died in December.

Far from the front, he was hit by shrapnel,

a shell filled with metal bullets,

and succumbed to his injuries on 3 December.

Rob Gilson had already been killed on the first day of the battle.

Tolkien was deeply shaken

by the news of Rob's death.

He wrote

a very impactful phrase, saying simply,

"Something has gone crack".

Something is broken,

irretrievably destroyed.

Can no longer be repaired, can no longer be patched up.

Something is broken.

One has indeed personally

to come under the shadow of war

to feel fully its oppression.

By 1918,

all but one

of my close friends were dead.

As always with Tolkien,

there is another place that could have inspired him

for the Dead Marshes.

He visited it on his trip to Switzerland in 1911.

We're at the Grimsel Pass.

I find it interesting that Tolkien passed through here,

crossing the Bernese Alps,

the mountain range

which inspired the Misty Mountains.

It's also interesting, this lake behind me,

it's called the Lake of the Dead.

These are the kinds of things that fascinated Tolkien so much.

And we see that again in the swamps of the dead.

It has this name

about death, because a battle

took place there a long time ago.

And it was the same with the Lake of the Dead.

During the Revolutionary Wars

of 1799,

Napoleon's general

Charles-Etienne Gudin

defeated enemy troops here,

leaving the pass strewn with bodies.

They sunk in the lake.

However, this Lake of the Dead

is very clear and blue,

unlike the marshes. For that reason,

I'd think more

of Flanders Fields,

the no-man's-land.

What Frodo and Sam experience in the Dead Marshes,

explained by Gollum,

stems not from one specific place

in Switzerland

or on the Western Front.

Tolkien's method

is to combine experiences,

making them applicable this way.

Tolkien's legacy is a rich,

varied world built on

certain principles.

There's a connection between his invented ages

and us because it takes place

in a world reminiscent of ours.

He spoke of "applicability",

the freedom of readers

to interpret as they choose.

Tolkien himself escaped the battlefield

by contracting trench fever,

a severe illness with feverish attacks.

After six months at the front,

he returned to England to recover.

For the first time, he spent Christmas

with his wife Edith.

In hospitals and sanatoriums

like this one in Harrogate,

Tolkien began writing

his first stories,

that would later be published

after his death as The Book of Lost Tales,

preserved partially

in Edith's hand.

After the horror of the Somme,

Tolkien's formerly romantic, poetic tone

became darker,

seen, for example,

in The Fall of Gondolin.

In the Fall of Gondolin, the Elven city of Gondolin

is attacked by a force of

what Tolkien calls monsters or dragons,

but he describes them as being

engineered creations

made of metals.

They roll over things.

They roll over barriers and crush them.

They launch fire like flamethrowers.

Obviously like medieval dragons too.

But this is Tolkien fusing

the mythological with the modern.

"Iron dragons", driven by a chain

like the tanks of the First World War,

attack the elven city

of Gondolin on behalf of the villain Morgoth.

In their belly are orc warriors.

The bitter experience of the First World War

arrived directly in Tolkien's Middle-earth.

After the war, Tolkien earned his living

as a scientist and lecturer.

Edith and he had four children.

A typical professor's life,

at first glance.

But after work,

he wrote several versions of the "Silmarillion",

a legendary prequel

to his later bestselling novels.

He lived multiple lives at the same time.

Professor by day,

writer and painter by night.

He raised his young children

and maintained his friendships.

When you think this is a man who survived

the First World War, he showed

absolutely extraordinary resilience.

Orphaned twice before 12, with no family reference points,

having lost his friends during the First World War,

he built a family, a career and a body of work.

It's quite staggering when you think about it.

Edith, his childhood love, remained by his side until her death.

Unlike Tolkien's mother Mabel

or his aunt Jane,

she had no academic ambitions.

You know, when you are in a very

male-dominated Oxford, in academia,

where

you know, the Dons have, their... you know,

the academics have their community

and they get together and they talk and they have

all these intellectual sort of discussions.

And the wives are mostly at home, not in contact with anyone else.

So there was a point where

things became strained and difficult.

But again, these were difficulties that they went past

and continued being together, very happy until the end.

At times, I feel for poor Edith, just thinking, gosh, yeah,

must have been tough.

Some aspects of Middle-earth

now seem outdated,

at first glance,

particularly the lack of women

among main characters in the novels.

If you look at what kind of characters they are,

a character like Luthien,

who has to save the man.

Galadriel who has done

all sorts of things, including acts of war,

in her long life.

If you look at Eowyn,

the only character who manages

to overcome the Nazgul King,

the Witch King, to kill him.

So you can see great respect

for the opposite sex

that Tolkien brings into his work.

Tolkien honours strong women.

He even indirectly memorialises

his aunt Jane Neave,

who took him to Switzerland.

He names Bilbo Baggins' place of residence

after her farm in the English Midlands,

Bag End.

The professional aunt

is a fairly recent development, perhaps.

But I was fortunate in having an early example:

one of the first women to take a science degree.

She is now 90,

but only a few years ago

went botanising in Switzerland.

Even before "The Hobbit",

his first bestseller,

Tolkien had already mapped out numerous elements

of his legendarium in detail.

Over the years, the maps became more extensive

and he kept adding new sheets

in the margins for new locations.

The end result was the largest

fantasy universe ever conceived:

Middle-earth.

Initially, he "only" wanted

to look for the mythological roots of England.

What was before the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons,

Arthur and the knights of the Middle Ages?

The Nibelungenlied for Germany, the Kalevala for Finland,

the Edda, of course, the great stories for Iceland.

The Irish, the Welsh, they all have stories.

But the English were a bit thin on the ground.

But that wasn't really

a serious nationalistic background

in that sense, it was based on

the fact that he believed,

perhaps a little ambitiously,

that he could fill a gap that no other writer

had ever been able to fill before.

The first book in this fantasy universe

was a children's book, "The Hobbit",

in which Bilbo Baggins

defeats evil and returns home

to Hobbiton with a ring in his pocket.

On the cover, his drawing

of Hobbiton in the Shire.

A place full of trees

and, of course, a mill -

the symbols of his happy childhood.

At first glance, Tolkien's work

seems apolitical.

Although the 1930s, when he was writing,

were a decade of crises and wars.

Hitler came to power

in Germany in 1933.

In the Soviet Union, Stalin and his terror reigned.

A look at Tolkien's manuscripts

from different years shows

how an iconic villain takes on traits

of these contemporary events.

Sauron, the dark lord of the Lord of the Rings,

he began as a rather gothic,

slightly vampiric character in the Silmarillion.

In 1936 to 1937,

Tolkien redefines him as the primal enemy,

the dark Lord

and a totalitarian.

But he does that just at the time

when Stalin was perpetrating

the huge Soviet purges.

And when

the danger of totalitarianism in Europe

was becoming absolutely apparent.

It distressed him. I think that his writing was a way

of expressing all of these things.

While The Hobbit was a success in England,

the German licence publisher

Rütten and Loening

set a condition before publication.

Tolkien must provide what is known as

"proof of Aryanism".

I will under no circumstances

allow you to translate it.

So he practically takes apart

the letter from Germany

in a really very sympathetic

and very sarcastic way as a linguist

and shows you that you are talking absolute nonsense with your demands

and also tells you

that he very much regrets that, as far as he knows,

no one in his family is of Jewish blood,

and that he very much regrets not having any part

of this truly gifted and wonderful people.

Anyway, I have in this war

a burning private grudge

against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler.

Ruining, perverting, misapplying

and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit.

The political abuse

by the Nazis repelled him.

Because he was fascinated by the myths of northern

and north-western Europe -

as an ancient cultural asset of Europe.

The German composer Richard Wagner

also drew on these myths.

When asked whether he borrowed

from Wagner's opera cycle

"The Ring of the Nibelung" for his Ring,

Tolkien counters with his British humour:

"Both rings are round,

but that's it for the similarity".

Which is not quite true.

He knew, Ok, I have to distance myself,

otherwise I'll be in hot water.

And that does happen to some extent.

But that element,

for example, that the ring

consumes the owner, so to speak,

that he becomes obsessed with it.

That's Wagner,

you don't have that in the other rings.

The other rings, they make you invisible,

they give you a lot of gold or something.

But this element, that it gives them power

but they give themselves up, that's Wagnerian.

Like many in Tolkien's work,

Gollum, this schizophrenic being

possessed by the Ring,

is a very complex creation.

One that Tolkien was particularly proud of.

Gollum was once a Hobbit called Smeagol.

He killed his cousin Deagol

because of the Ring.

For me, Gollum is definitely

one of the best characters in the book.

The Smeagol character who

seems almost very human.

It's desire, it's greed over the Ring.

But that's what thwarts him. And then you have

the Gollum character, which just

becomes so under the thrall of

of the Ring that it's just...

That competing Jekyll and Hyde, you know,

that type of character there.

But Gollum is there really also to display

to Frodo and to Bilbo

what might happen to them.

He's probably a Hobbit.

He should actually be like Frodo

and Sam and Merry and Pippin.

And then you see

what someone can become in the worst case scenario.

And of course, if you make the analogy

that every story is always fundamentally human

and the Hobbits are just representations

of human values or behaviour,

then of course it's frightening to see

that we can fall so low.

We can fall so low. We could be as terrible

as some kind of Gollum.

And that, I think, is one of those terrifying experiences

from the First World War, that people became monsters.

In Tolkien's mind, something new emerges

from the true story of the rings.

There are many possible interpretations,

including that of Gollum:

Is he, like the author,

a traumatised veteran of the Great War?

Does this schizophrenic being go back

to Jekyll and Hyde?

To the biblical brothers Cain and Abel?

Or to figures from Wagner's "Nibelungen"?

Tolkien works with

a huge amount of material.

He seems, and this also makes him

the very special author that he is,

to be able to work

with almost anything.

In Middle-earth, we find the history

of antiquity, of the Middle Ages.

But we also find

Tolkien's biography. Again and again

we find his personal attitude.

If we ask ourselves where Middle-earth

actually comes from, then I could almost ask back:

Where doesn't Middle-earth come from?

The search for inspiration for Tolkien's

one "Ring of Power"

is particularly of interest to fans and researchers.

In 2013, a ring was on display

at The Vyne Museum in Hampshire,

which was claimed to be

the "One Ring" to attract tourists.

The ring, which is over 1500 years old,

was once discovered by a farmer while ploughing.

According to the Latin inscription,

it belonged to a certain "Senicianus".

The same name is discovered during an excavation

in 1929

at an ancient temple around 100 kilometres away

in Gloucestershire,

on a leaden plaque with a curse.

The well-known archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler

asks Tolkien for an expert opinion on the history of the language,

published on the excavation.

The inscription on the tablet

curses a Senicianus with illness.

"Among those who bear the name Senicianus,

give no one good health

until he returns the ring to the temple".

But the chain of evidence from the ancient gold ring

to the curse tablet to Tolkien's work

is incomplete.

The curse that was written down here

curses someone who has stolen

a ring.

On first hearing,

this does indeed sound like

"The Lord of the Rings".

But the fact that the ring is magical

is not what is written on this tablet.

It is simply to curse a thief

who has taken a ring.

He always used the analogy of the soup.

There are all kinds of ingredients

which make the soup great.

The real thing is about

drinking the soup and enjoying the soup.

It's not how much pepper in and so on, like that.

You shouldn't really be going in and delving into that.

The first Tolkien "soup" tastes good to its readers.

After the global success of The Hobbit,

his publisher wanted a sequel.

I now wanted

to try my hand...

at writing a really stupendously long narrative

and to see whether I had sufficient

cunning or material

to make a really long narrative

which would hold the average reader right through.

The best... One of the best forms

for long narrative, as was found in The Hobbit.

There's a much more elaborate form of the

pilgrimage or journey with an object.

So that was inevitably the form I adopted.

An epic pilgrimage, as he himself

experienced in Switzerland in 1911.

An item.

That sounds so simple.

Tolkien spent 15 years writing this book,

the three-part epic

The Lord of the Rings.

This "doorstop" is a worldwide classic today.

But because he invented wizards

and magical creatures,

dwarves, Hobbits and orcs,

its author

has long been accused of not paying much attention

to the political present of his lifetime.

As if a fantasy author

is not from this world.

I do believe that if

you look at his biography, you will realise

that his entire life

was spent at war

in one form or another.

The First World War, in which he himself served,

the Second World War, in which two of his sons served,

the Spanish Civil War,

the Cold War. So there's always

this threat in the background.

It could be that time again, at any moment.

While he was writing The Lord of the Rings,

a second world war shook Europe.

Now his sons Christopher and Michael

wore the uniform of the fatherland.

Tolkien sent Christopher the latest chapters

to review.

And to give him hope,

to comfort him.

Your accounts, which were uncensored,

distressed but did not surprise me.

How it reminds me of my own experience!

One war is enough for any man.

I hope you will be spared a second.

Either the bitterness

of youth or that of middle-age is enough

for a lifetime:

both is too much.

The world in which Tolkien wrote the book

has become even darker.

And Middle-earth is now also

threatened by even more evil forces.

Is he referring to his immediate present?

People do not fully understand the difference between an allegory

and an application. You can go to a Shakespeare play

and you can apply it to things in your mind if you like,

but they're not allegories.

Many people applied "The Ring"

to the nuclear bomb, don't they?

They think it was in my mind, the whole thing

was only an allegory of it.

But it isn't.

At first glance, little about this work seems

directly political.

But at second glance,

is it not "applicable" after all?

Sauron, for example, the new villain -

Tolkien himself later even referred to him in a letter later as

a "Hitler with a ring".

Sauron's goal is to turn the world

into hell on Earth,

to spread Mordor.

He has no other goal.

He has no identifiable, objective goal

other than destruction.

He is evil in itself. The devil.

Seeing him as an allusion to Hitler, Mussolini

or Stalin doesn't work, because these people

have a cult of personality surrounding them.

But Sauron is not a person at all.

We never see him as a presence.

And...

he's represented by this all seeing eye,

which seems to have control around Mordor

without him being present.

So there's something very Orwellian

about this idea of sort of a

totalitarian regime,

which is in many ways what

the Second World War was fighting against. Right?

The international breakthrough

for the novel The Lord of the Rings

did not come until 1965:

with a paperback edition in the USA,

which was published quasi-illegally

due to a loophole in the licence law for North America.

Once again, it was a time of unrest

and change,

and once again, Tolkien's book

fitted perfectly into this period.

In the 60s and 70s,

the Hobbits became important

to the hippie movement,

essentially people in search of an alternative way of life,

an alternative society.

If you identify with the Hobbits,

you are even satisfied with your own inadequacy,

because the Hobbits are obviously inadequate too,

so it can't be that wrong.

In the Middle of the Earth In the land of Shire

Lives a brave little Hobbit Whom we all admire

A veritable Hobbit hype breaks out.

Tolkien goes pop

and even Mr Spock sings along.

It's a fantastic place to shop,

you can practically try to live there.

So get out of Mordor,

out of the industrialised city, into the Shire,

back to the countryside, to the organic farm.

It's practically exemplified

in The Lord of the Rings.

So what is

this huge work?

Sure, the greatest fantasy adventure of all time.

But it is also an artistically alienated image

of our world.

Tolkien created it

from his own experiences and those of mankind.

From sagas and legends,

his childhood in central England

and his experiences in the trenches

on the Somme.

In the course of his life,

Tolkien learnt

that war and peace come and go,

almost like the seasons.

Nothing is permanent,

nothing is guaranteed.

What can be said is that every age of Middle-earth

ends with a war

and that this is a caesura

and that a new age then begins,

first in relative peace,

only to end with war again.

We must always rejoice,

be grateful, but also

work ourselves to ensure that this does not happen again.

That's what the comrades do in The Lord of the Rings.

Put themselves out there.

They embark on a dangerous journey into the unknown,

just as Tolkien experienced in Switzerland.

They are the only hope for Middle-earth.

And somehow,

they are also a reflection of humanity.

Their goal is to destroy the One Ring,

to destroy evil.

How do you do that?

With will. With values.

With friends.

In Peter Jackson's film The Two Towers,

the Hobbit Samwise Gamgee embodies these values:

What are we holding on to, Sam?

There is some good in this world, Mr Frodo,

and it's worth fighting for.

He brought the Hobbits

into the story as a stroke of genius.

The real heroes are the little ones.

I think that is something that the sixty-eighters

became very aware of. We have to stand up

against the big ones up there,

against the bigwigs, the big-heads.

And the little man, the little woman,

we can all make a difference.

Tolkien wrote books full of symbolic wisdom

that have always held true

and have since captivated

hundreds of millions of readers.

Respect nature.

Stick together. Believe in yourselves.

Do not despair.

The reader is free to apply

the book to their own experience

or to history, as they wish.

Tolkien's books combine history

and values that everyone can connect to.

I was maybe 10 years old

when I read The Hobbit for the first time.

I grew up in Puerto Rico,

a world away from this.

In the tropics, speaking Spanish.

But when I read The Hobbit,

there are things about it, there are hints

and fragments of a deeper world,

of a longer history that Tolkien

spreads into these stories.

He teaches us as we read,

to appreciate these things

about our environment and about our landscape

that are ancient, that go beyond us and will outlast us.

After The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien begins a sequel

that is not supposed to have a happy ending.

The dystopia The New Shadow

from the Fourth Age of Middle-earth.

He finished it after just a few pages.

If I recall correctly,

he abandoned it basically because he felt it

was too dark and he was going into a dark place.

It kind of

undermined his whole...

his whole theory that good will eventually

conquer evil, coming from his Christian beliefs.

By the end of his life,

his Middle-earth epic was a global success.

And Tolkien himself lived more and more in the world

he had created.

When Edith died in 1971

at the age of 82,

he has "Luthien" written on her gravestone -

a character from his posthumously published book

Beren and Luthien.

A great love story between a mortal

and an Elf.

When he died two years later in 1973,

the name of the mortal

was found under his own name:

"Beren".

Tolkien did not continue the story

of the Fourth Age, the Age of Men,

as he also called it.

What we do know: Middle-earth

has the shape of a sphere

and corresponds in many ways

to our world today.

His books for adults,

especially The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion,

have a very melancholic, even pessimistic undertone

regarding the history of mankind.

The way he portrays humanity

is like a warning about the threats of his time

and is frighteningly topical again today.

Time and again, "evil rulers" start wars

and thus seem to confirm Tolkien's terrifying vision

of a "Fourth Age".

Did he become a pessimist in the end?

A key scene in Peter Jackson's film

The Fellowship of the Ring provides the answer:

I wish the Ring had never come to me.

I wish none of this had happened.

So do all who live to see such times.

But that is not for them to decide.

All we have to decide, is what to do

with the time that is given to us.

A look at the true history of the rings shows

that not only evil,

but also good, repeats itself cyclically

in human history.

That there are always "companions"

who destroy evil.

If that's not a message...

Subtitles by Alison Watt