Tolkien’s 1968 BBC Interview Reveals the Most Tragic Moment He Ever Wrote

Half a century ago, the BBC sat down with JRR Tolkien for what would turn out to be his last recorded interview. Filmed in 1968, only fragments made it to air at the time; the rest sat largely untouched in the corporation’s archive until a radio programme revived it in 2019, revealing candid moments rarely heard from the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

One surprise: Tolkien admitted he likely wouldn’t have accepted the adventure he gave to his own hero. “If a wizard had come to me as a small boy, the situation would be totally different than that in The Hobbit,” he said. “I should have found some excuse for not going… I had no desire whatever to place myself in an awkward position just for the sake of adventure.”

The Hobbit was published on 21 September 1937, and the week surrounding that date is now marked annually as “Tolkien Week.” In the interview, Tolkien traced the book’s origins to a hiking trip through Switzerland in 1911, when he was just 19. “One of the cardinal things in The Hobbit is one of the few adventures I ever went through in my life,” he recalled. “We crossed many mountain passes… We wore only packs on our back. We slept in the most extraordinary places. We had some narrow escapes from death, rather like the one with the rocks from the giants, and so on. And I think that’s why, really, [Bilbo’s] journey is an actual personal experience – altered, of course. We met no goblin.”

He also discussed the invented languages in his fiction, tracing them to an unlikely distraction during his classics studies at Oxford: learning Finnish. “Its formation, its sound texture is very remarkable,” he said. “It actually makes me quite intoxicated.” That fascination shaped the languages of Middle-earth directly: “It started out by being extremely Finnish… It’s, as you might say, on a Finnish basis, with a certain amount of Greek thrown in and other languages I’ve learned since.”

After World War One, Tolkien worked as an assistant on the Oxford English Dictionary, deepening his fascination with word origins, recalling how researching the word “wampum” led him into studying Algonquin languages of eastern America.

The most painful scene he ever wrote

Perhaps the richest moment of the interview came when Tolkien discussed Gollum — “an example of corruption” — and a pivotal scene in which the creature nearly reforms while travelling with Frodo. Stuart Lee, a Professor of English at the University of Oxford who worked on the 2019 radio programme, explained the moment: “The incident he’s talking about is when Gollum is actually beginning to change back to Sméagol [his earlier, less monstrous self]. He’s winning the battle – the good side is winning through and he tries to stroke Frodo, who’s asleep.” But then Frodo’s loyal friend Sam steps in.

“People have often asked me what moves me most,” Tolkien said. “I think the most tragic point in the whole story is the terrible irony that good often does evil. The most tragic moment is when Sam in his protectiveness says, ‘Take your hands off.’ And therefore defeats Gollum’s repentance. Because that seems to be very true to life.”

Lee notes this reflects Tolkien’s broader worldview: “What happens in his mythology is that good can sometimes do excessive evil unintentionally.” Tolkien himself put it simply when asked if his stories were just good against evil: “The general lines are rather simple. But of course, as a matter of fact it isn’t really, is it? You see evil on the good side. It isn’t just goodies against baddies, as they call it modern parlance.”

Source: BBC News