J.R.R Tolkien 1962 interview (subtitles)

You're obliged, any author I imagine, is obliged to call on on his stock, private stock. Is this another word for what Freud would call the unconscious? No. No, I don't think it was. No, both, both. What is himself, both no doubt what he inherits, his unconscious, and what he has as part of his mental makeup and reading, his memory. But he may not have the object of revealing that, or lecturing to anybody, or even trying to put forward his view as a total one or a good one. Let's avoid the word lecture for a moment because it suggests a propagandist work, and I don't think anybody is really talking about that. Well, they have been, so perhaps... Well, I'm not, and you're not, so let's not. No, good, good. But let's then accept the fact that out of this stock you invent the world, and this stock does include a stock of ideas about how worlds ought to be. No? No. Because I don't believe that there is any one recipe at any one time. You don't yourself make out a recipe for personal behavior. You don't believe you yourself ought to live in a certain sort of way. Ah, well, but I thought you were talking about worlds when I thought you were thought to fact, for instance, that a lot of kings and obviously a hereditary principle is a strong thing, and so on, but... Well, let's be clear, for instance, in this particular world that you have invented, the hereditary principle is very strong. Yes, yes, yes. Though not ubiquitous. The hobbits don't have one, do they? No, quite so, no. But do you yourself look back on a world in which the hereditary principle is strong with affection? I do, yes. Obviously. But, you know, so and so is also very much easier one, very much... And you're only concerned with making a story? It was my primary concern, which I started out with. And you took 14 years to make the story? Quite so, yes. And this was a story in... That is partly out of the fact that I'm a meticulous sort of bloke. And I took 14 years, not for the general things it is now, but for finding time schemes and getting everything right, and so on. Well, for instance, this whole matter of the appendices, a hundred pages, language, social customs, history... Normally, if you had been writing a history as a historian, all these would have existed on a card index before you ever began to write. Yes. Is this true for the whole matter? Yes. One thing that, for instance, in the marks you made at the beginning, was the fact that time passed and the hobbits grew into this world. As a matter of fact, what really happened was that the cause, having already constructed the world, they became drawn into it. The world was constructed like a model aeroplane? No, no, no, no, but it existed in posse and in a large scale plan before the Hobbit was written. The Hobbit was, in fact, originally an attempt to write something outside it, and grew into it. So that you had invented, literally invented, the world before you even wrote the Hobbit? Oh, yes, indeed. Why? I don't think so. I could not really say why one wishes to create a thing like that. Well, then, all right, how? What started it? There must have been a point at which, quite suddenly, like God, you chose to make the world like that. I was going to use that illustration. Because, as I've said elsewhere, I think that if you wish to push me back into what semi-theological or philosophical, I think because being made by a creator, one of our natural factors is wishing to create. But since we aren't creators, we have to sub-create. Let's say we have to rearrange the primary material in some particular form which pleases us. It isn't necessarily a moral pleasing, it's partly an aesthetic pleasing. Then you make this distinction between what pleases aesthetically, because it's balanced, and what pleases morally. God, we may assume, made a moral rather than an aesthetic choice. Now, is this too great an assumption? It's one that would have required a very long time to debate, but I should have thought that we're dealing with something which we're only looking at facets of one whole, but certainly an aesthetic whole is surely an aesthetic facet is as strongly to be predicated as a moral one. In this world that you yourself have made, the complexities that exist, exist mostly, it seems to me, outside the creatures of the world. There is an absolute evil, and there is an idea of absolute good. Would you agree? Mordor, after all, is a principle of absolute evil. You don't believe in absolute evil, but you believe in absolute good. Let's say... If you don't believe in absolute evil, why did you create the Dark Lord, who seems to be the apotheosis of it? But he said in the book that he himself was not evil to begin with. Ah, he fell. Then, like Lucifer. Yeah. So you're... Well, he's several stages down from Lucifer. You do believe, then, that there can be a state of absolute good from which most people do fall. It's said, for instance, there's no religion in the book. There isn't, for reasons which are partly aesthetic, partly auctora, and partly the history. This book, The Lord of the Rings, comes at the end of a long series of stories I've created in which the situation would be explained. Why there were no, for instance, churches, rituals, and temples, and so on. Yes, but you shouldn't read into the book a kind of allegory of the H-Bomb. What is said somewhere in the book is that the One Ring is a power so enormous that even if a good man were to use it against a bad, it would corrupt the good man. But that is the thing which other people who have arrived, other viewers, other people arrived at long before the H-Bomb was invented. Also, I may say that I began building the stories in which the Dark Lord, when I was an undergraduate, they were already in an advanced stage during the First War, the H-Bomb had been heard of. Well, if you were to be remembered as the man who has made the Lord of the Rings, would you rather be remembered as a man who said something, or as a man who has made something? There is one thing you can distinguish. The made thing, unless it says something, won't be remembered.