Episode Details

A toddler in a South African garden was bitten by a baboon spider, a perfect origin story for the author of giant fantasy spiders, except that Tolkien claimed no memory of it. This episode traces the real forces that shaped him: his father's death when he was three, the move to Sarehole in Worcestershire that became the model for the Shire, his mother Mabel's conversion to Catholicism that cost her family's financial support, and her death from diabetes when he was twelve, which he came to view as martyrdom.

We follow the three years of enforced silence imposed by his guardian Father Morgan before he could write to Edith Bratt, the Battle of the Somme and the trench fever that likely saved his life, and the woodland clearing where Edith danced among the hemlock and inspired the legend of Beren and Luthien. The conversation covers his work tracing the word walrus for the Oxford English Dictionary, how invented languages like Quenya and Sindarin came before the world built to house them, the pressure from C. S. Lewis and the Inklings that got the books finished, and the counterculture fame he deplored.

• Why he obeyed a total ban on contacting Edith until his 21st birthday and wrote to her that very evening
• How working-class soldiers at the Somme inspired the unassuming heroism of hobbits
• The Book of Lost Tales, begun in hospital beds as a bulwark against industrial trauma
• The Viking club at Leeds, Finnish and Welsh as linguistic seeds, and the phone number he had to unlist
• The names Luthien and Beren on a shared Oxford grave, and Christopher Tolkien's decades editing the unpublished mythology