The Houses of Healing: Tolkien, Fantasy, and the Road to Recovery

Join us for 'The Houses of Healing: Tolkien, Fantasy, and the Road to Recovery' our Second Annual Tolkien Lecture, delivered by John Garth, renowned Tolkien expert. Garth argues that creating his Middle-earth mythology helped J.R.R. Tolkien to recover from the horrors and griefs of war, and shows how this infuses his own theory about fantasy as a means of recovering ‘a clear view’ of the world.

John is a British journalist and author, known especially for writings about J.R.R. Tolkien including his biography Tolkien and the Great War and a book on the places that inspired Middle-earth, The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien. The biography influenced much Tolkien scholarship in the subsequent decades.

00:00 Intro
00:05 University of Birmingham during World War 1
01:10 Sam Gamgee
02:38 There and back again
03:19 Faramir and Éowyn's trauma
05:12 The Great Wave nightmare
07:49 Tolkien's childhood trauma
09:49 Carl Jung
10:28 Tolkien's friends' deaths in WW1
13:25 Convalescence at Great Haywood
13:45 The Book of Lost Tales
14:44 The Lonely Isle of the Elves - Tol Eressëa
16:00 The Creation Myth - the Ainur and Ilúvatar
18:12 Trenches in the Battle of the Somme
19:21 The Lord of the Rings
19:57 On Fairy Stories
20:25 Recovery in fairy stories
22:05 Bilbo and Smaug's hoard
22:33 Tom Bombadil and the hoard of the barrow-wight
23:37 Eucatastrophe - a good turning point
25:26 The ordinary and extraordinary in Lord of the Rings
27:05 Exorcising nightmares through drawing and writing
28:47 The Black Riders
30:04 Frodo stabbed
31:27 Terror in the Lord of the Rings
32:53 Tolkien's return to King Edward's School, Birmingham
35:08 The Dead Marshes
39:00 Gandalf
41:04 Láthspell and gódspell
41:49 The miracle of the Lord of the Rings
42:26 Sam wakes up in Ithilien
44:12 Healing that works and healing that does not work
45:13 Merry mourns Théoden
46:13 Faramir's war trauma
49:05 Tolkien's healing and the Lord of the Rings
50:46 There and back again

[mirowena]

A beautiful talk about Tolkien and healing from trauma.

[MaryPGalbraith]

Dear John Garth,  
What a magnificent lecture. I was moved to tears several times--your readings brought commanding presence to every word. A tour de force.
Your admirer,  
Mary Galbraith
PS On the light-hearted side, I enjoyed your endearing habit of shuffling papers as if looking for something without ever losing your "place."

[pilarerika]

I have really enjoyed listening to this talk and seeing the way in which John Garth expressed its content through his movements, gestures and modulation of his voice.

[joancarlesnirnaeth]

Looking forward to "Tolkien's Mirror", title you already told me you had chosen there in 2017

[YvonneAburrow]

Beautiful delivery of both the talk and the excerpts from the book. Weirdly Michael Tolkien also had that dream of the wave overwhelming the land. (Edited to add: ah you mentioned it later on in the talk)