If you’ve been on the hunt for a more in-depth analysis of Tolkien’s writings, Rich, Chris, Nathan, and Matt make up a fellowship of their own that goes above and beyond my expectations in their podcast titled The Tolkien Heads. For the past two years, the four hosts have been working their way through Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, starting with The Fellowship of the Ring. Each podcast follows a routine structure, while digging into the text and expanding the reader’s understanding and perspective. Having read the books many times over, I found their process refreshing and it helped challenge and broaden my own take on passages I thought I knew well.
I recently had the pleasure of being a guest on their podcast, where we covered The Houses of Healing chapter in The Return of the King. Being an avid gardener, I focused my discussion on the types of plants one might find in the Houses of Healing and the different aliments they would have been used to cure. You can listen to the podcast in full, HERE.
In this Q&A with the podcast hosts, I invite you to get to know Rich, Chris, Nathan, and Matt and learn more about why they run the podcast, how they became fans of Tolkien’s work, and their thoughts on the upcoming film and TV adaptions inspired by the Professor’s books.
Q: How did you all meet initially?
A: (MATT) Ah, we go way back! Back to 2013 for three of us; then we fell in with the likes of Nathan a year or two later. Rich and Chris joined the UW German department as new grad students. Rich had stirred up plenty of controversy before even getting here by going shoeless in our building during his campus visit. We instantly found that we had many interests in common (I remember an Oct. ’13 party where Chris wound up serenading a bunch of students from Library & Information Studies with a dramatic reading of Beowulf) but maybe it took some time for Rich to put it together that Tolkien was potentially one of those interests. Nathan had been in Madison, WI for a while when we met him through mutual friends in the French department in 2015. When I first heard him recount from memory the story of the fall of Númenor I knew it was meant to be!
Q: Who was the first to proposed the idea of a Tolkien-inspired podcast, and what is the story behind its name, The Tolkien Heads?
A: (RICH) I proposed the podcast first. Before this reading, I’d only read all the way through the trilogy once and it had been in the back of my mind that I’d like to do it again at some point. I think my love for Jackson’s [film] trilogy kept the embers of my enthusiasm for the books glowing. My wife and I often watch the Jackson trilogy over winter break. Fall of 2016 was really hard. We had learned late that Summer that my wife had breast cancer and she was going through surgeries and treatments. On top of that, I was personally devastated by Trump’s election. I think it just seemed like a right time to reinvest in something known and comfortable. It occurred to me that Matt and I had often talked about Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings during lunch breaks in our grad student lounge. Less frequently, [Chris] Stohs had joined in but I knew he was a huge fan. I think I only by chance figured out that Nathan was a fan…he is a student of French and of course the Germans don’t mix with the Frenchies (j/k). I realized that I was surrounded by people who are smarter than me and who have intimate knowledge about certain topics all of which play a large role in Tolkien’s work. Really, this podcast idea was all about me. I wanted to explore the text with these people and take advantage of their unique perspectives to illuminate the story. I just thought that we might as well record it for posterity’s sake. There was much debate about the name… we involved all of our significant others. I had proposed “The Fellowship of the R(ead)ing”. Pretty cheesy. At some point, though, my wife proposed “The Tolkien Heads”. I think we all liked it…it’s simple, it’s punny, it reminds us that we’re not important but just talking heads and recalls that band The Talking Heads. Why not?
Q: When did you become a fan of Tolkien’s work?
A: (CHRIS) I think I must have started reading The Hobbit at some point in elementary school. I recall trying Lord of the Rings, too, but putting it down because it was a bit too much for me yet. By middle school I had definitely read it, and it became a tradition of mine to start reading Lord of the Rings at summer camp before bed by the light of my flashlight. I had thus read Lord of the Rings a few times by the time I went off to college. After college, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I still loved the book, and was moved by passages that had not moved me before in prior readings.
Q: Out of all of Tolkien’s books, which character is your favorite and why?
A: (NATHAN) It changes with each reading, so it’s hard to pick just one! According to my own state of mind as a person and a reader, I grow attached to one person or another. Since I first read The Hobbit, Gandalf has been my consistent favorite. At other times, I’ve been drawn to Sam’s humble brand of heroism and self-sacrifice, or to Aragorn’s quiet wisdom and strength, which always seemed more compelling than Boromir’s militant nationalism. This time, I found Galadriel a very intriguing character. What is the nature of her power? Does she maintain the beauty of Lórien through some hidden magic or is it more a function of her attentiveness to the land and the value of everything that lives there? She might be the most “powerful” character in Middle-earth, and I’d like to learn more about her as a person and how her power works.
Q: Where do you hope to see the podcast in the next five years?
A: (RICH) I can’t really even imagine the world in five years. Just last year, Nathan received his doctorate and moved to Rhode Island. The year before that, Chris’ wife got a job in DC and he moved out there with her. Matt’s planning on defending his dissertation this semester and where he’ll be this Fall is a mystery. I hope to be done with my dissertation by the end of the next school year. We’ve kicked around the idea of reading The Silmarillion and doing a similar type of interpretation of it: both adoring and acerbic. However, no where is it written in the stars that we’ll even finish The Return of the King. So I’d rather focus on doing a good job on that and finding more interesting guests to talk with than prognosticate about what will happen in 5 years.
Q: What are your thoughts on the Peter Jackson films?
A: (MATT) I usually say that Tolkien’s constructed languages are what drew me most to LOTR, but honestly they were probably what kept me interested after the Jackson films put LOTR back on my radar (after I had failed at reading through The Hobbit some years prior). They impressed me in middle school and they continue to impress me, both as imaginative interpretations of the text and as endeavors of creative fantasy in their own right. During this read-through (that is, the tenure of The Tolkien Heads), I keep thinking of thinking of ways I would choose to depict this or that scene or aesthetic in a way that deviates from Peter Jackson’s vision, which I think evidences the fact that for me these films are the visual canon of LOTR in a way that I see my own imagination as up against. I think that the LOTR trilogy is a beautiful, genre-shaping masterpiece, even if I sometimes find myself annoyed with them in little ways.
Q: Are you excited to see the new Tolkien Epic arriving in theaters soon?
A: (CHRIS) Having just watched the full trailer, I can now say that I am excited for the new Tolkien film. From what I could glean, it looks like it will cover a lot of the ground that John Garth did in Tolkien and the Great War, showing the early years of the Legendarium, its Entstehungsgeschichte, to borrow a German term. That is, it looks to be the story of how the story came together. You can see from the trailer’s visual style how Peter Jackson has really left his visual mark on things Tolkien. Who will be the director who first gets out of Jackson’s LOTR shadow, I wonder? In any case, it looks good. I hope they don’t overlook his deeply Catholic Christianity, though.
Q: What is your take on the new Amazon show set in Middle-earth’s Second Age?
A: (NATHAN) So far I haven’t followed this too closely since it’s a couple years away. When the show was announced, I was highly skeptical, whether about the motivation, the need, or even the seriousness of the production to the literary source material. I’m happy they appear to have decided to cover a different time period than the War of the Ring, although many questions remain about what rights they have to Tolkien’s work. If the show does cover the Second Age, I think it would be exciting to see something very different than what we’ve seen in the Peter Jackson adaptations. There is the risk of covering too much (the Second Age covers thousands of years) and simply jumping around from one incident to the next without doing the hard work of character development or the tendency to replace storytelling with shiny special effects. Personally, I’m still reticent, but initial signs are at least intriguing that we could see a new era of Middle-earth’s history told.
Q: If you could sit at the Eagle and Child and share a pint (or two) with the Professor, what is the first thing you would ask him?
A: (RICH) If I could sit and have a pint with the professor at the Eagle and Child (which I’ve been to, by the by), I’d ask him, “How’s it goin’?”.
Q: The most beautiful location in Middle-earth is?
A: (NATHAN) Honestly, it’s wherever one finds the most meaning, the most resonance with landscapes that are important to them. I love the sequences in “The Houses of Healing” when Aragorn heals Faramir, Éowyn, and Merry by recalling them back to their true selves; the athelas helps them understand who they are and what places (both real and imaginary) are the most important to them. Beyond that, I find forests the most beautiful in our own world, and little can rival the majesty of Lothlórien, with its mingling of green and golden leaves, and trees like living, silvery pillars, which recall the light of the Two Trees of Valinor, but also some very contemporary discoveries about the sensitivity, even “intelligence”, of plants. I’m also partial to the landscapes that “fight back”, like Fangorn, a proud forest full of lively trees (or Quickbeams), disturbed by cruel destruction yet determined to move toward recovery and healing.
Q: What future guest would you love to have on your podcast?
A: (MATT) This is an easy one! We’ve been half-jokingly reaching out to Stephen Colbert since the beginning of the podcast (of the fellowship, if you will), as he is a huge fan of Tolkien’s works. I tremble at the thought of the great and terrible possibilities that would arise from the unholy union of our two media dynamos. Hit us up anytime, @StephenAtHome; we’ll pencil you in!
Q: Your favorite quote from one of Tolkien’s books is?
A: (CHRIS) I wouldn’t say that I have one specific favorite quote. Since I am forced to choose, as it were, I’ll go ahead and pick a favorite. I find the scene where Sam realizes that Frodo is going to the Havens to be one of the most bittersweet scenes in the book. Reading it again just now, I teared up a little:
“Where are you going, Master?’ cried Sam, though at last he understood what was happening.
‘To the Havens, Sam,’ said Frodo.
‘And I can’t come.’
‘No, Sam. Not yet, anyway, not further than the Havens. Though you too were a Ring-bearer, if only for a little while. Your time may come. Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot always be torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do.’
‘But,’ said Sam, and tears started in his eyes, ‘I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire, too, for years and years, after all you have done.’
‘So I thought too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. But you are my heir: all that I had and might have had I leave to you. And also you have Rose, and Elanor; and Frodo-lad will come, and Rosie-lass, and Merry, and Goldilocks, and Pippin; and perhaps more that I cannot see. Your hands and your wits will be needed everywhere. You will be the Mayor, of course, as long as you want to be, and the most famous gardener in history; and you will read things out of the Red Book, and keep alive the memory of the age that is gone, so that people will remember the Great Danger, and so love their beloved land all the more. And that will keep you as busy and as happy as anyone can be, as long as your part in the Story goes on. Come now, ride with me!”
You can catch up on previous episodes or tune into the latest of The Tolkien Heads Podcast on their website HERE.
