"It is the greatest myth of modern times." "An evil ring of power and an unlikely hero on a mission to destroy it." "The Lord of the Rings is a world filled with warriors, wizards and monsters, all created in the mind of one man." "But there is more to it than imagination." "The story has a series of intriguing connections to reality." "From the trenches of WWI to the Bible." "Now, discover the facts behind the fiction." "This is the real story of the Lord of the Rings." "A lone figure teeters on the edge of an abyss." "Gazing into the fiery pool of lava below." "Here the long, arduous journey of Frodo Baggins has come to an end." "A mission to destroy an evil ring by casting it into the same fires from which it was forged." "This is the quest at the heart of the Lord of the Rings." "It is a classic story of good versus evil unfolding in a world called Middle Earth." "There's something about the Lord of the Rings that is able to speak to people, and I think that has a lot to do with its connection to mythology." "Behind The Lord of the Rings there are a number of ancient and modern influences that combine to create the most ambitious mythological journey since the Odyssey." "All of them are channeled through one man, author JRR Tolkien." "Tolkien famously wrote a letter saying that he wanted to create" ""a mythology for my country"." "He was trying to produce a mythology that was truly English that was centred around the North and West rather than around the Mediterranean Sea like the Greek and Roman had been, and since it didn't exist, he figured he would have to write it." "To create his mythology," "Tolkien drew from his own experiences in the modern world." "As well as his favourite stories from the ancient world." "He broke down many different mythologies and medieval traditions then refashioned them to create his own "mythos"." "Tolkien was really using a lot of the mythological elements from old English and from the old Norse material." "Beowulf, King Arthur, the Viking sagas," "all are sources behind The Lord of the Rings." "The ancient connections begin with the setting of the story." "In Norse mythology, the world is made up of three levels - the highest is Asgaard, dwelling place of the gods." "The lowest is Hel, underworld of the dead." "Between the two lies the world inhabited by elves, dwarves and men." "It is called Midgaard, which translates as "Middle Earth"." "Middle Earth is the Midgaard that we've encountered in old Norse, or "middangeard" in Anglo-Saxon." "And it simply, in those contexts, means the earth in the middle between the sky and hell surrounded by the ocean." "In The Lord of the Rings it is through Middle Earth that Frodo must travel to destroy the evil ring." "This ring is the central focus of the story." "And it, too, is inspired by earlier legends." "The Lord of the Rings centres in 20 magical rings found in Middle Earth." "Some of them are for healing." "Others can extend life." "But one is more powerful than all the others." "It is called "The One Ring"." "It has the ability to make the new wearer invisible when they put the ring on." "A ring that can make someone invisible." "It is a concept that plays a key role in The Lord of the Rings." "But it didn't begin there." "It can also be found in the most legendary tale of the Middle Ages." "Another story of courage in a time of peril." "King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table." "In the Arthurian legend there are magical objects and there is actually a case of a ring of invisibility that the maiden Lunete gives to Knight Ywain." "It's an intriguing parallel between two myths created more than a thousand years apart." "But Frodo's ring does more than make its wearers invisible, it also corrupts them." "The One Ring is a creation of an evil lord who imbued it with his own destructive power," "Sauron." "When Sauron forged the ring he put part of himself in it." "It's intrinsically evil." "If you wear it and claim it you cannot use it for any good cause." "It is going to twist everything you do for evil." "The One Ring actually has a malevolent spirit, part of Sauron's spirit, living inside of it." "So this malevolent spirit works on people to change them, to manipulate them to do evil things." "And the rings acts as an addiction, the longer you have it the more you desire it, it's like a bottomless pit." "This idea of an evil ring also has a mythical precedent in an old Norse epic called the Volsungasaga." "Many of the Norse sagas are based on family histories and we find this very engaging combination of historical material and mythological traditions." "The saga of the Völsungs is an Icelandic saga written some time probably in the 1300's based on old Germanic tradition." "It treats a set of Germanic cultural heroes based loosely on historical figures that existed in pre-medieval times, the end of the Western Roman Empire." "These heroes and the epic poems about them were very important in the Germanic warrior courts." "When the Scandinavian settled Iceland the took this tradition with them." "There are some intriguing parallels between Volsungasaga and The Lord of the Rings." "In one scene of the Saga a king possesses a golden ring that gives him unimaginable wealth and riches." "But king's son wants it for himself." "And the temptation drives him over the edge." "He kills his father to claim the ring." "Then takes it and hides in a cavern." "There, the evil ring transforms the prince into a hideous serpent." "It's a harsh lesson in the danger of greed." "One that echoes in The Lord of the Rings." "This is, in some ways, quite similar to Gollum in the Lord of the Rings." "Gollum was a hobbit, originally." "One day he and his friend Deagol went fishing and Deagol sees something glinting in the bottom of the river." "He pulls it out." "It's the ring, and it so beautiful, but Gollum, whose name was Smeagol at that time, wants the ring." "He's so greedy about the gold that he murders his best friend." "Gollum takes the Ring and hides in a cavern, just like the prince in the Volsungasaga." "He transforms into this hideous long-lived but very pathetic creature." "Gollum's entire life is spent dwelling on the fact that he possesses this ring and obsessing with it." "It's completely taken over his mind." "After possessing the ring for nearly 500 years, Gollum loses it." "Some time later, it ends up the hands of an innocent hobbit named Frodo Baggins." "Frodo, who has an interesting name because it means "wise" in old Norse and Anglo-Saxon, and Frodo is the one who gets stuck with the ring." "Frodo's journey begins in a land of rolling hills and green fields called the Shire." "This is the home of his race, the hobbits." "Hobbits are a little people, probably four feet or shorter." "They don't wear shoes, because they have very thick soles on the bottom of their feet and lots of fur on the top of their feet." "They're sort of homebodies." "They don't ever really go in for adventures." "The slow pace of life in the Shire mirrors author JRR Tolkien's own childhood in the countryside of Western England." "In some ways, Tolkien must have put himself into the hobbits." "Many of his ideals are embodied in the hobbits, a sort of embracing the rural ideal, embracing the simple pastoral life, common good old-fashioned virtues in the face of grandeur and pretension." "A hobbit is the last creature one might expect to save the world from evil, but Frodo Baggins is different." "Frodo is not a typical hobbit, because he's learned." "He's interested in elves and dwarves and outsiders, and he knows a little bit about the world, and he cares about the outside world enough to sacrifice everything he actually loves." "If you go back to these original myths, you're looking at the heroes themselves, the warriors, if you will." "Tolkien then takes this story, and he tells it from the point of view of a not likely hero, the reluctant warrior, and that, I think, is rather unique." "Frodo inherits the One Ring from his uncle, Bilbo, who found it in Gollum's cave." "When he discovers the ring's destructive power, he sets out to destroy it." "But he soon finds himself being drawn in by its evil." "In the beginning of the book, he already starts feeling the temptation of maybe putting the ring on and escaping, leaving his friends behind." "He passes the test at that stage, but later on, the temptation becomes worse and worse." "Frodo's quest to destroy evil is the heart of The Lord of the Rings, but the myth of Middle Earth doesn't begin there." "This is only its final chapter." "In 1977, more than 20 years after" "The Lord of the Rings was first published, its forgotten blueprint emerged, revealing for the first time how the most ambitious myth of the modern era really begins." "It's a creation story with intriguing ties to the Christian Bible." "The Lord of the Rings is a modern myth with direct connections to history's most legendary tales." "JRR Tolkien's mythological world is so detailed, he even created a word to describe it:" ""Mythopoeia"." "By this, he meant a whole mythic place that was a whole world, very populated, with a whole geography and a whole ability to map it." "If you wanted an example in the modern period, you would look at the world created with Star Wars, for example." "Tolkien's Mythopoeia even had a creation story to explain how Middle Earth came into existence before the Lord of the Rings." "But it wasn't published until after his death in a book called The Silmarillion." "This was the blueprint for Middle Earth." "All the ancient backstory to the Lord of the Rings, all the things that had happened thousands of years before." "More than two feet thick, huge pile of papers, poems written in Elvish and English and histories, and the publishers were like," ""Ah, we have no idea what to do with this. "" "Tolkien drew from many sources as he set out to create his own mythical world." "But there was one that influenced it above all others:" "The Bible." "Tolkien was an extremely devout Roman Catholic for reasons of personal faith and also for family history." "His mother converted to Catholicism, and when she did, her family sort of disowned her." "She raised her two children catholic, and then she died of diabetes when Tolkien was very young." "He was adopted by a Roman Catholic priest who took care of him and his brother." "So the whole work is informed by catholic thought." "And that shows through in his stories in some interesting ways, especially in the Creation stories and the role that the creator plays there." "In Tolkien's story, there is one supreme god called Ilúvatar." "He creates angelic beings called the Ainur, who sing songs so beautiful that the world springs forth from them." "The world is created in a kind of giant symphony or music of the Ainur, as it's called, and in singing their song before the throne of god, they map out the whole history of the world that's to come," "which god then makes real." "This is the beginning of Middle Earth, the future setting of The Lord of the Rings." "By 1928, Tolkien had quietly sketched out the framework of his mythology." "He didn't expect it to be seen beyond his close circle of friends." "But then a spark of inspiration hit that would transform him from a 36-year-old college professor into the modern master of myth." "The famous story is, he was grading exams, a student had left a page blank, and Tolkien just wrote on it," ""In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. "" "From this one sentence, a whole new world would open up." "He had no idea what it meant and started to develop the story from that." "There may not be any very clear linguistic precedents for the word "hobbit", nevertheless, if you think about it, it sounds quite like the word "habit" or, in earlier Latin,"habitus"," "a creature of habit, a creature that's set in its ways, living a very ordinary existence." "Wordplay was nothing new for Tolkien." "He began inventing his own phrases as a child." "They became the foundation for the many languages spoken in the Lord of the Rings, especially the language of the Elves." "The Elves are not to be confused with hobbits." "They are a race of near-perfect immortal beings who represent a vision of what humans would be like had they not been tainted by the original sin of Adam and Eve." "The Elves speak in several distinct dialects and have the most fully developed of Middle Earth's languages." "Some parts of the Elvish language are based on a real one:" "Finnish." "Tolkien learned it while studying the national myth of Finland called the Kalevala." "The Kalevala is the epic of the Finnish people." "It includes Dwarves and Elves, and so in that way, it has characters that resonate and perhaps inspired some of Tolkien's later writings." "Languages of other creatures also they play an important role in the story." "Even the language of the black speech spoken by Sauron gives you a sense of his ethos, of the nature of his being." "So the languages of each of these different races tells you something about their nature." "In the Lord of the Rings, another language belongs to the Dwarves, a short, stout group of characters who live underground." "Their alphabet is inspired by Norse inscriptions that can still be found in Scandinavia on ancient memorials called "Rune stones"." "Runes were often used to mark objects of great significance, for example, swords that would be passed down as heirlooms, sometimes burial sites." "Sometimes we have in runic writing short riddles that provide an extra problem for their interpreters." "First you have to read the Runic alphabet, then you have to figure out what the riddle means." "Tolkien added a Runic riddle to his first published novel, the epic precursor to The Lord of the Rings:" "The Hobbit" "It centres on Bilbo Baggins, Frodo's uncle, a hobbit in search of stolen treasure." "The clue to finding it is on an ancient map." "It is a hidden Runic text that can only be seen in moonlight." "Tolkien wanted to make the Runes be representative of a real language." "It was an idea of secret writing, of magic writing, but also it was connected with his invented languages." "The magic writing on the map leads Bilbo to the lair of Smaug, the most dreaded dragon in Middle Earth." "This is the monster who holds the treasure." "Smaug is the last of the great golden dragons, and it gathered up all the wealth from the dwarfish kingdom and piled it up into a huge mound." "Dragons represent human greed but really, you know, amplified, because this is this monstrous creature whose only interest is in gathering gold and keeping it." "Bilbo bravely enters the dragon's lair and steals a golden cup from its hoard." "In retaliation, Smaug angrily attacks a nearby village." "This is the myth, but what inspired it?" "If the story of a dragon who guards a hoard of gold sounds familiar, there's a good reason." "The plot of this incident is almost identical with the incident in Beowulf." "Beowulf:" "One of the most famous myths in human history and one that was a favourite of JRR Tolkien." "It is the story of a Scandinavian hero who becomes king of his homeland and faces the ultimate test:" "A fire-breathing dragon." "The dragon is guarding a treasure from kings of a previous age." "A slave discovers a secret passageway down into the dragon's lair, finds this fabulous treasure, sees the sleeping dragon, creeps in, and steals a gold cup." "It's a tale with obvious similarities to the story in the hobbit." "Both are allegories about the danger of greed." "In each case, a desire for treasure sets off a chain reaction of horrific consequences." "Tolkien has taken that from Beowulf and made it into one of the crucial centrepieces of his entire story." "Beowulf is one of many written sources that had a major impact on The Lord of the Rings." "But there was a real-life experience that shaped the story more than anything pulled from the pages of a book, a terrifying trauma laden with ghosts, blood, an death:" "The battle-scarred trenches of WWI." "France, 1916." "A barrage of enemy fire rattles an allied trench." "A group of British soldiers scrambles for safety, crawling like worms inch by inch." "Among them is 24-year old Second Lieutenant, JRR Tolkien." "Future author of The Lord of the Rings." "His experiences in war will have a profound influence on the mythical battle for Middle Earth." "When we read Lord of the Rings, and we read about the battles and we read about the bloodiness and we read about the destruction of nature, it is a statement about war." "WWI was a scene of death on a scale that defies belief." "The history books call it "The Great War,"" "a time when men slaughtered each other over mere yards of mud." "Tolkien and the people of his generation that experienced WWI experienced a brutality in warfare that was unique - not to say that warfare itself isn't bloody or violent, just that trench warfare in Northern France was particularly gruesome." "It was waiting around to see if you were going be hit by an artillery shell." "It was having your feet in so much trench water that you developed a condition called trench foot, in which the flesh just slid off your bones." "It was being attacked by mustard gas." "And all this, Tolkien would have seen." "Lieutenant Tolkien sees action in the Battle of the Somme:" "A brutal stalemate that results in carnage on a scale never seen in human history." "The Battle of the Somme raged for four months, each side losing 1.5 million men." "Nobody gained or lost an inch at the end of that battle." "It was just a tragic waste of lives." "After serving for approximately a year or so," "Tolkien developed trench fever, in the form of dysentery or typhus, and was hospitalised and taken home, and it took him a very long time to recover." "He actually never returned to the war." "He was damaged, wounded internally by the war, and traumatized." "The trauma that he had suffered had to have influenced the way he wrote about the trauma that Frodo experiences in his quest to destroy the Ring." "Much of Tolkien made its way into the hobbits without them being a thinly disguised Tolkien." "In The Lord of the Rings, the hobbit Frodo travels through a bog called the Dead Marshes, where a great battle had taken place thousands of years earlier." "There, ghosts are still lurking beneath the waterline." ""They lie in all the pools," ""pale faces deep, deep under the dark water." ""I saw them." "Grim faces and evil," ""and noble faces and sad." ""But all foul, all rotting, all dead. "" "In the Dead Marshes where you have this kind of rotting landscape with bodies of an older war, you definitely get these memories of the Somme or of the trenches, of these rotting bodies of soldiers." "This is not anymore the idea of a heroic war." "This is the death and devastation." "What is left, really, is just dead men." "The horrors of war were first exposed in the precursor to The Lord of the Rings," "The Hobbit." "The story culminates in a battle of five different armies, all vying for the dragon's treasure." "The main character, Bilbo Baggins, sees many of his companions killed on the battlefield and comes to understand the futility of war." "Like Bilbo, Tolkien himself watched his companions die in battle." "In France, he fought alongside three of his oldest and closest friends." "But by November of 1916, two of them were dead." "It seems obvious, when one reads the story where you have comrades in arms facing a seemingly insurmountable foe, in the fear that they feel and the sounds of the battle approaching." "They know they're going to tested and probably die that night and so on, and yet the way they find a way to express both humour and courage and to keep each other's spirits up in a time like that" "seems to be drawn directly from his battle experience." "The misery and terror of WWI are reflected not only in the suffering of Middle Earth's heroes but in the ruthlessness of its villains." "Perhaps nowhere is Tolkien's war experience more powerfully revealed than in the horrific evil of the orcs." "The Lord of the Rings is the work of a vivid imagination rooted in ancient myth and modern life." "The firsthand war experience of its author JRR Tolkien, framed its central conflict between good and evil forces." "The final battlefield in that conflict is an infernal hell:" "Mordor." "At the heart of Mordor lies Mount Doom, the volcano where the One Ring was forged." "This is where the hobbit Frodo must come to destroy the Ring before its evil power overcomes him." "It is a setting drawn from one of the world's most well-known ancient sources:" "the Bible." "If we look at the Bible, Hell has been described as this place of fire and brimstone and eternal torment, and when we see Mordor, we see this place of this black wasteland." "It's got very close connections with Dante's description of Hell in that there's the burning plane in hell, the dry desert with the flakes of fire falling from the sky." "Even Mordor's name has a sinister ring to it." "This is no accident." "Mordor actually sounds similar to "morthor" in Anglo-Saxon, which means "morth," or it means a murderer." "We also have the connection to the old Norse "morth,"" "literally same thing, meaning murder." "In the story, those who enter Mordor are as good as dead." "It is patrolled by a race of ruthless foot soldiers known as Orcs." "Orcs are very horrible." "They're bent." "They're crooked." "They're ugly." "We're told that they're actually elves gone wrong." "The dark forces have taken and twisted into this horrible race." "They are described as creatures fascinated with machines, fascinated with making clever things, fascinated with profit." "They try to get other people to work for them." "This has been read as sort of a thinly disguised capitalist or capitalism - the orcs as capitalists." "Orcs are completely corrupted." "They are ruined." "They were good creatures originally, but their wills are set entirely on evil." "Mordor's evil race, like so many components of the Lord of the Rings, may derive from an ancient myth." "In line 512 of Beowulf, there's a description of all the evil creatures that have been descended from Cain after Cain killed his brother Abel, and those are "eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas", and that is etins and elves and "orcneas"." "The orcneas are demon-like beings in Beowulf." "They have a spirit-like quality, but they are considered like an evil spirit being." "Historical sources inspired not only Middle Earth's most despised fiends but also one of its principal heroes:" "The Wizard Gandalf." "In The Lord of the Rings," "Gandalf guides Frodo in his quest to destroy the One Ring." "Gandalf has become an archetype for wizards after the writing of Lord of the Rings." "Prior to that, magic was considered bad, anti-Christian, was a little bit evil." "Gandalf, I think, is a solidly good figure." "He really tries to do what's best for all the creatures of Middle Earth." "Clues about Gandalf's origins can be found in Norse mythology." "In old Norse, "gandalf" means "magical elf", or "magic-using elf", of course, Gandalf is not an elf, but he is certainly a magical figure of great power." "But Gandalf draws more than his name from Norse myth." "His appearance is modeled after its most powerful deity:" "Odin." "To the ancient Scandinavians, Odin represented many things." "He was a god of wisdom, war, battle, and death." "But it is his role as "the wanderer" that echoes most clearly in Gandalf." "It's clear that Odin inspired Gandalf." "One of his aspects is the god of masks and many identities, and so he has many names, hundreds of names and disguises, and when he travels on earth, he often travels as the gray wanderer." "He wears a gray robe, he has a wide-brimmed hat, he has a long beard, and all these things fit very well with Gandalf." "Like Odin, Gandalf roams Middle Earth for years, quietly working to destroy its evil forces." "But the wizard may also be influenced by another, more prominent ancient figure." "Gandalf has also been compared by some people to Jesus." "He sacrifices himself, is dead, and comes back clothed in white." "As Gandalf battles to save Frodo, he metaphorically dies and is resurrected as Gandalf The White," "and this is one of the instances where we can see Tolkien's Catholic roots." "A pagan god of many disguises and a Christian savior who was resurrected:" "Two powerful figures from the ancient world, both seen in one main character." "This is what is so unique about Tolkien." "He's very good at bringing together Christian and pagan motif." "The religious influences behind The Lord of the Rings are fully revealed in the climax of the epic." "As the story concludes, it is not Gandalf but Frodo who is in a position to save the world." "The myth's defining moment will draw from a pivotal chapter in the life of Christ as Frodo faces the last temptation of the Ring." "Mordor, a fiery hell, home to the orcs and the evil lord Sauron." "This is where the hobbit Frodo finds himself at the end of a painful journey across Middle Earth." "His quest to reach Mount Doom is over, but his real test is about to begin." "To destroy the one ring," "Frodo must scale the mountain and drop it into the volcanic fires from which it was forged." "But the ring won't go quietly." "It's no accident that the symbol is a circle." "It sucks in everything good about you and about your personality, just like any other kind of addiction, until all you can think about is the Ring." "As Frodo climbs Mount Doom, the ring draws him in, challenging him to abandon his mission and give in to its power." "It is the ultimate battle with temptation, an internal struggle between darkness and light inspired by author JRR Tolkien's Christian worldview." "The whole work is informed by Catholic thoughts." "The very end Tolkien said was illustrating the last two petitions of the lord's prayer." "It says, "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. "" "Frodo's final moments with the Ring parallel one of the most famous passages in the New Testament." "Satan comes to earth to tempt Christ in the desert while Christ is fasting for 40 days." "He tempts him with power, he tempts him with food." "He tempts him with dominion over earth." "In the Bible, Jesus resists Satan's offer." "But Frodo's will proves weaker." "Frodo has made it to the very crack of doom, the edge of the chasm in the volcano where the ring was forged, and he has the Ring on its chain, but he can't destroy it." "It's become too much of his personality, and he says, "I do not choose to do what I came here to do." ""The ring is mine," and he puts it on." "The Ring instantly makes Frodo invisible, but he is not alone." "Gollum, the evil creature who once held the Ring for hundreds of years, has followed Frodo all the way to Mount Doom." "He desperately wants the Ring back, and now he sees his chance." "Gollum bites his finger off." "Gollum grabs the Ring." "He in turn falls into the fiery flames of the volcano." "This destroys the ring." "It obviously destroys Gollum." "But then, in a sense, it liberates Frodo." "As evil as Gollum is, it's Gollum who saves Middle Earth by doing something evil." "But if Gollum hadn't done that, the world wouldn't have been saved, so it's a nice little twist about how this all works together." "A flawed hero who doesn't save the day:" "It's an ending that strays from Tolkien's Christian roots... and mythological tradition." "Usually the tragic hero, no matter what happens to him, at least he can feel good because he's done the right thing." "Frodo could not." "Despite Frodo's failure, the final outcome echoes the Christian belief that good will triumph over evil." "But that triumph comes at a cost." "After the ring is destroyed, Frodo and the hobbits return to the Shire." "They are horrified by what awaits them there." "They find the Shire in ruins." "It's become an industrial nightmare." "There are big steel machines everywhere, the people are oppressed, and it's a very dirty, polluted place." "It is a vision of technology run amok." "This was one of Tolkien's worst fears." "In England, he saw the same transformation happening to the countryside he called home." "Tolkien was deeply concerned from his early childhood about the process of industrialization, in large part because he saw it as a reflection of human corruption." "That is, the urge to industrialize is, in his mind, inextricably connected with this impulse to dominate, and to Tolkien, it's the same will to dominate whether you're dominating people or whether you're dominating trees and plants." "When Frodo returns home from his quest to destroy the Ring, he is restless." "He has terrible dreams, and he can't readjust to life in the Shire." "Frodo, like the author who created him, is a soul forever changed by traumatic memories." "Frodo is wounded." "He is devastated by his experience, and he can never live a normal life again." "He bears the physical wound, but he also bears the spiritual wound in his soul, and this has to be a metaphor for what Tolkien is going through himself with his suffering from the First World War." "I think what's really curious about the character Frodo and the author, Tolkien, is that after the end of the drama, so to speak, after the end of WWI, after the end of the war of the Ring," "the kind of joy that we might imagine was missing." "So we see this lingering malaise in Frodo, you might say, as a result of being the ring bearer, and we might say that with Tolkien, he also had this lingering post-traumatic stress from seeing countless people butchered in the muddy fields of Northern France." "At the end of The Lord of the Rings," "Frodo remains deeply wounded by his battle with evil." "He leaves the Shire once and for all to seek a new beginning in Middle Earth's holy lands." "And so ends the most ambitious mythology of the modern age." "This is really what started, you might say, the whole genre of fantasy literature as we now know it." "The idea of creating a world that really stands as a world of its own, that has its own history, is really fairly new and quite original." "It's remarkable how popular the Lord of the Rings is." "It's so dense in so many ways and so complicated, but it has always had this really vibrant life among the common readers, and that's the thing that is so remarkable about it."