From Newsgroup: rec.arts.books.tolkien
I read an interesting article today by Timothy Snyder, describing a presentation Tolkien wrote for children in 1938 to talk about dragons.
I'd be very interested in reading Tolkien's presentation, and If
any of you know where to find the Professor's text, I'd be interested
in reading a copy.
Tolkien's description of dragons is... surprisingly topical.
Mr. Snyder's article was posted to his Substack at
https://snyder.substack.com/p/tolkiens-dragons-and-ours
if you want to look at it in its original form.
Anyway, to quote...
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.
The text is powerful, if scattered. It would have taken about two hours to read aloud. While I mulled over it in the archives in Oxford, I pictured
the mothers leading their children out of the lecture hall to look at the museum's collection of dinosaur fossils, or for hot chocolate (just "chocolate," the English boys and girls would have said) elsewhere.
The good linguist was a specialist in Old English, Old Icelandic, and
Gothic. Anyone who did not know the plot of Beowulf and the Volsung Saga
would have had some trouble following what the professor was talking
about.
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.
A dragon is not a fearful beast of a real or imaginary past, but a way of being in the world. They are not the serpent that represents evil; they
are not a symbol of something abstract. "The alarming thing about dragons
as I have said is not only their shape - which may have dwindled or
vanished - but their spirit." Dragons convey to us a way that people can
be evil, here in our world: turning the quality of small joys into the quantity of a senseless hoard, mocking and destroying others who still see
the good things of life.
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.
Dragons might seem invulnerable. Their scaled skin is armored by jewels.
Their eyes can entrance, and their speech is an enchantment of its own.
Some of today's dragons have gone so far as to claim Tolkien for their
own. But, as Tolkien said in his lecture, citing "my friend Mr. Baggins," every worm has a weak spot.
Tolkien himself thought that the lecture to the children was "very unsuccessful." In the reading, though, it delivers its reward, as the
explicit moral complement to the book that, in decades to come, millions
of children would read.
The dragons were, for Tolkien, "the final test of heroes." It was not so
much the strength and the sword that defines the hero, he said, but the courage and the comradeship. A hero sees a dragon for what it is, fearsome
but fallible. A hero sees the dragon as the harbinger of one world, wants another, and steps forward.
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ohh@panix.com We could definitely use the moral equivalent of
a bunch of Black Arrows right about now.
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