Austin Gilkeson
On January 24 we revealed Austin Gilkeson’s evaluation of Amazon’s new Tolkien-inspired collection, The Rings of Energy, on-line. One of many pleasures of the supply materials, Gilkeson notes, is the “sense of a deep previous that may be excavated by means of cautious studying”—a top quality that makes the spin-off present doable, but can’t fairly be replicated on the display.
Gilkeson learn The Lord of the Rings as a university pupil, and after making an attempt his hand at his personal fantasy world-building has unpacked his fascination with Center-earth in quite a few essays (together with as The Toast’s “Tolkien correspondent”). He now teaches high-school English in Houston, Texas; along with writing with heat and humor on literature, style fiction, and animation, from Miyazaki to Looney Toons, he writes tales for youngsters.
Over e-mail this week, I requested him about his Tolkien journey, the Bloomsbury Group, and what children lately are studying.
Daniel Drake: To start out with, how and the place had been you launched to Tolkien? Have been you immediately drawn in by one or one other of his books, or did they develop on you? Put one other manner, at what level did you notice you had been going to learn The Silmarillion?
Austin Gilkeson: I first learn Tolkien in faculty. The flicks had been popping out and I made a decision, like every good English main, to learn the books first. My mother has an outdated field set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, with Tolkien’s personal illustrations on the covers, so I picked it off the shelf. I appreciated The Hobbit properly sufficient, however The Lord of the Rings enthralled me. It gave me the identical sensation as studying the Epic of Gilgamesh or Beowulf: this sense of catching a glimpse of a bygone world. The Silmarillion quickly adopted, although even I discovered it powerful going at first.
In your essay you argue that one of many basic pleasures of Tolkien’s work is its scholarliness, each within the type of the work—wizards in libraries, facilities of studying because the waystations of civilization—and in the way in which the work calls to its obsessive followers with elaborate world constructing, literary references, and so forth. Are there different authors, or genres for that matter, you’ll be able to consider that so unselfconsciously foreground the lifetime of the thoughts?
Nabokov and Borges come instantly to thoughts, although for widespread speculative fiction, Frank Herbert’s Dune books come closest, with their human computer systems and quasi-monastic orders just like the Bene Gesserit. However in Herbert’s novels, the lifetime of the thoughts feels much less like a refuge, because it does in Tolkien, and extra like a lure. The thoughts is at all times a weapon for Herbert. It’s a harmful factor.
You discuss with the “apostolic succession of fantasy” that The Lord of the Rings generated. Why do you assume it’s that Tolkien’s world caught on, inspiring a long time of books and Led Zeppelin songs and role-playing video games, in a manner that, say, Spenser’s The Faerie Queen didn’t?
I imagine it’s that sense of discovery the guide evokes. The Lord of the Rings isn’t a puzzle, its that means is evident, however it invitations you again in, over and over, to rifle by means of its cupboards and drawers seeking some new little bit of historical past or slip of Elvish music. I’ve learn each footnote and appendix, however I by no means really feel fully completed with it. It at all times seems like there’s extra to seek out.
You had been additionally, I perceive, a little bit of a Virginia Woolf scholar. The Bloomsbury Group was, like Tolkien, profoundly affected by World Warfare I. Was there a lot of a relationship or overlap between the Bloomsberries and Tolkien (and Tolkien’s personal little society, with C.S. Lewis, The Inklings)?
I don’t know of any relationship between the Bloomsbury Group and the Inklings. It’s arduous to think about they’d approve of each other, although I believe it’s fascinating to think about Tolkien alongside the modernists, since they had been of the identical era, largely of the identical class, and shared so most of the identical issues, but took them in such totally different inventive instructions. You may see Mordor within the “ash gray coal pits” of the colliers in Sons and Lovers, or, to make use of an American instance, the ash heaps of Lengthy Island in The Nice Gatsby. And Tolkien’s traumatized Frodo Baggins will surely discover a kindred spirit within the shell-shocked Septimus Smith of Mrs Dalloway. However whereas Modernism’s mantra within the face of battle and industrialization was to “make it new,” as Ezra Pound put it, Tolkien’s might most likely be summed up as “make it outdated.” He didn’t need to excavate a brand new world a lot as he wished to protect the outdated one.
You are actually a highschool English trainer. Do you discover Tolkien remains to be widespread with college students? Which of the books that you simply train have you ever discovered actually resonate with college students in the present day?
I’ve a few college students who love Tolkien—one instructed me he even has a duplicate of Gandalf’s sword on his wall—however in any other case I haven’t discovered him to be widespread. We lately learn Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and plenty of of them loved it. A number of them actually like horror. I didn’t perceive why till I noticed that they misplaced two years of their youth to the pandemic and plenty of of them lived by means of the destruction of Hurricane Harvey, amongst different tragedies. I believe the grim honesty of horror resonates with them. Youngsters hate feeling like they’re being lied to. Horror doesn’t pull any punches.
What books have you ever been studying these days?
I’m at present rereading Edgar Allan Poe’s collected works, since I need to train a few of his tales to my college students. I believe they’ll notably respect “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Masque of the Crimson Loss of life.” Over the vacations, I learn Merlin Sheldrake’s guide about mushrooms and different fungi, Entangled Life, which mentions Tolkien. It’s a really hobbit-y guide. At one level Sheldrake argues that Tolkien had mycorrhizal fungi in thoughts when, on the finish of The Lord of the Rings, Sam makes use of an elvish mud to make the war-torn Shire’s timber regrow, “as if time was in a rush and wished to make one yr do for twenty.”
