Tolkien's Dragons and Ours -- Timothy Snyder

[erronis]

https://snyder.substack.com/p/tolkiens-dragons-and-ours

Oligarchy's Blasted Heath

In the first month of a threatening year, in January of 1938, a great writer gathered himself to speak to children about dragons.

We know JRR Tolkien as the creator of Middle Earth and the author of the Lord of the Rings. But at the time he was just an Oxford university professor who had agreed to bring some light to a dark winter's evening.

His first book, The Hobbit, had just been published. Most likely the children who gathered in the University Museum had not read it. Professor Tolkien over-prepared, bringing twenty-four pages of hand-written prose.

. . .

And his purpose was a serious one: not so much as to describe dragons as to explain what they essentially are. The dragons faced by the heroes Beowulf and Sigurd had elements in common, which Tolkien had gathered together in the form of his own dragon, Smaug, the terror of Bilbo the hobbit and his dwarf companions.

The lecture gives us a bit of the moral theory behind The Hobbit, and of the books to follow. Dragons, explained Tolkien, assemble huge wealth, appreciating only its quantity, but taking no joy in any particular object. They are, however, enraged if any one piece were to go missing, and would burn the world with fury. They are obsessed to the point of paranoia with thieves. Their great intelligence is thus reduced to the cunning of protecting their hoard.

. . .

It is the spirit of dragons, concluded Tolkien, that has survived, and it survives in us, or in some of us. A man can become a dragon through sheer greed. If we want to find a dragon, the place to look is the "vaults of the Bank of England." And if "you want to see a dragon-heath just go out and look" at a landscape tortured by machines, a sky blackened with smoke.

. . .

[justaprogressive]

1. Excellent!

thanks!

[2naSalit]

2. K&R