Given the subject matter of my last post, this would be a natural point to share a discussion I had some time ago with Sørina Higgins on her podcast, Words Do Things, “about the powers and limits of language”. Sørina is an Inklings scholar (like me), public speaker (like me), a Mythopoeic Award winner (like me), and teacher (me, maybe, in a parallel life). Buy her a coffee or hire her as an editor. You won’t regret it.
I appeared in Series Three of her podcast (“Elvish English”),
in which she met with guests to discuss “the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, digging
deeply into what he thought and wrote about how words work and what his own
writings have achieved” (quoting from Sørina’s introduction).
She titled our episode, “Tolkien vs the Robots”, because we talked in part about artificial intelligence, as I’ve also done here on this blog. We had a wonderful, far-ranging conversation, which Sørina summarized this way:
Was Éowyn a tradwife?! This episode tackles a triad of topics: Tolkien and source criticism, Tolkien and AI, Tolkien and politics. Filled with some of the most beautiful poetry recitations of the series and packed with both technical details and inspiring insights, this talk between Jason Fisher and Sørina Higgins dips into the cauldron of stories, coming up with rich and delicious details — and also denouncing big tech companies who appropriate names from Middle-earth while opposing Tolkien’s ethics. It ends with a thoughtful examination of why people from opposite religious and political positions all claim Tolkien as their own.
I’m always a bit self-conscious about recordings of myself — aren’t we all? — but listening back to it, I was very happy with how it all turned out, especially since this was the first time I’ve ever appeared on anyone’s podcast. I’ve had a tentative invitation or two from other podcasts in the past, but we never circled back. Hopefully this won’t be the last time.
Here’s a moment from our chat where you can see me doing my signature
air quotes. Seriously, if you ever see me speak in public, there’s a fun
drinking game you can play: just take a shot whenever you see me doing air
quotes, and I can promise you a very good time!
It’s a bit shocking to me that this interview took place five months ago and was edited and posted online more than three months ago already! Where did that time go!? I’ve been shamefully dilatory about pointing people to Sørina’s excellent podcast, but do check it out if you have an interest in Tolkien, in words and language, in philosophy, theology, Rogerian debate — or all of these.
I will say that I made a couple of small errors in the course of the conversation. Nothing too serious — just slips of mind while speaking extemporaneously. This has happened before — as when I said in a 2012 NPR interview that Tolkien made “references to policemen on bicycles, references to Lilliputians, a reference to the Gobi Desert, the wild wireworms of the Chinese” in the first edition of The Hobbit, when of course I meant the first draft, not the first published edition. Nobody’s perfect, and it’ll probably happen again. Will anyone notice? We wonders, yes we wonders. But part of getting older is not caring so much about making the occasional slip!
