https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KiWusljSljc
So the following discussion is one I had with the author Nicholas Kotar who writes epic fantasy fiction based on Russian fairy tales. And it was a really interesting reason to discuss Tolkien and fairy tales in general, traditional storytelling and how it compares to history. And so we go into all of that. It’s pretty interesting. There’s a two minute little part of the interview where the file gets a bit choppy. You can still follow the discussion but it gets a little bit difficult. So don’t worry, it just lasts two minutes and then after that everything returns to normal and it’s fine. And so stay tuned at the end of the video. I have a few more things to say. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. So hello everybody. I am here with Nicholas Kotar. I hope I’m saying that right. Nicholas is an author. He’s a deacon in the Orthodox Church but he’s also an author of fantasy fiction. He’s written articles for the Orthodox Art Journal and I’m sure he’s also a translator and he’s a smart guy. And I met him as he wrote an article for the Orthodox Art Journal about the lives of the saints and the way that he approached the lives of the saints through a different vision really excited me because it connected with the way I see storytelling as a structure around which reality kind of manifests itself. And he’s also written some articles connecting the lives of the saints to a Tokian’s work and so a lot of interesting things to talk about. So maybe Nicholas you can introduce yourself a little bit and maybe talk just briefly about the work that you’re doing and the novel that you’re writing and then we’ll go on with the interview. Well the novels I’m writing come out of a very long period of thinking about the need for storytelling in the modern world and what that storytelling should look like. And it also comes from my own deep desire to tell the kinds of stories that Tokian told because they’ve resonated with me and with so many people throughout these decades on a very, very profound level. When I went to seminary I had to start to reassess a lot of my worldview as odd as that might sound in the seminary usually you’d think you’d come in you already have a worldview form but that’s not the case. You have to come up against a lot of misconceptions that you might have against a lot of difficult realities that the church manifests within the world because it’s not a purely divine institution that exists out there somewhere but it’s enmeshed together with humanity with all those problems. And one thing that I came up against again and again was the reality of the church’s way of storytelling and how it didn’t mesh very well with the way the history is told nowadays and it fascinated me and I remembered my first encounter with this sort of disconnect between modern historiography and hagiography. I was still in college at that point in University of California Berkeley. This was at a class of Russian Eastern European and Eurasian studies. It was a kind of a survey course for undergraduates. And my professor was talking about the life of St. Vladimir the baptizer of Rus and he kind of laughed very kind of provocatively at the idea that he could be a monogamous after his conversion to Christianity because for those who don’t know Vladimir was a famous womanizer. I mean he was and if any of you have had the pleasure of seeing the new Russian movie about his early life called Viking, highly recommended by the way, it shows that aspect of his present personality very well. He was kind of a more Viking than Rus, kind of a wild man, loved his women. But something happened after he converted and at least this is the way the hagiography tells it. And I was really shocked that everybody seemed to laugh together with the professor in not accepting the possibility of this sea change in St. Vladimir. And it made me think and made me realize that basically and I learned later on in more systematic fashion that modern historians consider most hagiography to be nothing more than legends. You’ll see the icon of St. Eustace over there. I don’t know if you can see it in detail but he’s very symbolic for me because his story of hunting the deer and finding the deer in the wood and catching it and then seeing the cross and the antlers and the Christ from the cross begins to speak to him and convert him appears in actually several different lives of saints. And because of that, St. Eustace’s life is considered to be legendary by the Catholic Church so he is considered to not have existed. And that doesn’t sit well with me because that would mean you have to throw out more than one baby with the bathwater. So when I was in seminary I started to study this more systematically and I came across this disconnect in the modern mindset and a kind of inability to accept the reality of storytelling as it was always told throughout history and replacing it with this sort of positive positivistic scientific method way of thinking about history where the only thing you can believe in are things that you can see in the primary sources or in the secondary sources and things that can be positively identified as having existed. And I had a problem with that because as a student of history I know that you can’t look at a document as a datum in the scientific sense because it was written by a human being with his own preconceptions in a certain time period which we don’t understand very well. And if we don’t try to encounter the point of view of the person writing those primary sources without stamping onto that person the preconceptions of the 21st century then we’re missing everything that that primary source might have to tell us. So actually these lies of the saints even though they are anachronistic very often in the modern historiographical sense they are actually telling us something very profound and something very deep and they are telling something to us that is very true. And for that reason the Orthodox Church at least has never shied away from its hagiographical tradition and continues to have the lies of the saints as part even of liturgy. So that’s where I started to approach this question and that’s where I actually don’t remember who approached me to write the essay whether I approached you or what but anyway that’s how it started. No I think that I totally agree with you. I think that’s a place where we really connect in terms of the way we see the world. We look at any ancient story. People will read will try to let’s say they’ll read the Iliad and then they’ll try to parse out of the Iliad little bits that maybe they could use and then retell a historical version of what might have happened at Troy. You figure you have why are you doing that? What is it helping you with? And in the process missing the point of the Iliad completely right? It’s not the Iliad anymore. But also missing the truth of the Iliad or the truth of the Trojan War in the sense that the way that the Greeks told the story of the Trojan War encompasses what that event was in their lives and in their society. What impact that event had in their society. So if you go back and now you try to mince it up and kind of pull out some little bit and you say well yes we’re so happy we found this historical nugget and you show it to the world but now you don’t understand why that story is the basis of a large part of Western civilization. Nor can you. And you can’t understand the story on its own terms and you can’t understand how it can inform your way of thinking or your way of dealing with the outside world which is the point of literature on some level as well. Yeah and this sort of there’s an interesting philosopher whom I haven’t read too much but just a little bit Hans Geir Gadamer who was a mid 20th century philosopher and he talks about this approach towards history and he says that it’s like having a conversation with someone where you’re staring at that person and you’re not talking to him. You’re just letting them talk with a little notebook and you’re writing down everything that they say and staring at the way that their eyebrows move up and you know his hand moved that way. Let me write that down. It’s important. And so history is you’re examining history as though it’s some sort of a specimen while he says that a much more holistic a much more intelligent and much more productive way of viewing history is to actually have a conversation with it which means actually listening to it and then providing your input and then you know this sort of image of a conversation between two people meaning you come with your preconceived notions but then you also listen to the preconceptions of the people in that distant time period and kind of transcending time in that conversation. And that’s really what history should be. You should be encountering people from a very distant time period in a way that makes them very real to and in a way that can inform your own perspective and your own experience of the world around you. And it’s a way to make the world around you a more vivid and a more living place which is a problem nowadays I think because we do notice that people are retreating from the natural world. They’re not seeing the world around them in very clear in very beautiful colors. They’re retreating to the comfort of their computers and to the comfort of the virtual realities and augmented realities. I mean I don’t know if you read this one but there was this essay about underestimating America’s collapse that came out a few days ago. I forgot who wrote it but you know it’s another one of these doom and gloom things but what was interesting is it was picked up by the American conservative and I think it was Rod Dreher that added a little bit of his own context to it. And he noted this, I’m sorry I mentioned this, this is really bringing the conversation a little bit down from the heights of history but he showed a tracker of the number of views on Pornhub during the missile disaster in Hawaii. And right before it happened it was at some extremely low point. Nobody was doing anything because that was when the warning was going out and everybody was freaking out. Nobody was on Pornhub. And as soon as the warning was revealed to be fake, the number of users of Pornhub shot up an incredible percent compared to the user data from the last week before and the last week after it was completely incomparable. Yeah, people were finding their religion, they were finding their relief where they tend to look for it. Exactly, yeah. And I put to you that this is a direct result of looking at history and looking at the world in this sort of incorrect Hans-Georges Gadamer way of looking at it, trying to examine it and seeing what you need to get out of it and using it for your own advantage rather than having a conversation with history, with literature in a way that you can learn the perspective of people from a different time period and help that inform the way you live. Yeah, and I think that the way you live is really the right way to see it. That is, the purpose of studying these stories, the purpose of telling these stories isn’t just to gather all this data and facts, who knows exactly why you’re doing it. The purpose is to find ways to live, find warnings about how not to live and also to, let’s say, create a kind of glue which holds your world together. I always talk about the patterns that inform a world and when you read fairy tales, when you read old stories, when you read the Bible especially and you encounter that in liturgy, in liturgy because you live it, you’re physically engaged with it, it’s almost like you’re fine tuning your perceptions and you’re fine tuning your soul to be living in a proper or let’s say at least a colorful and alive manner instead of this dreary… It didn’t used to be a problem, right? I mean this is something that people did naturally before. It seems to be an issue with the modern, postmodern, whatever human being but it used to be natural because people were raised with these stories and these stories have been retold in basically the same format since we have written records. Right. And before they’ve written records, a lot of these stories come from oral tradition. It’s interesting, I’ve thought about this a lot and it seems to me that part of the reason that the West has lost its connection with its stories is of course it’s lost its connection with its Christianity and the reality of the world today is that and part of the disconnect between people who consider themselves churchy so to speak and people who are spiritual but not religious maybe is that the worldviews are so market different that you could be having a conversation and I’m not talking about having a conversation with somebody in the past, I’m talking about having a normal conversation with somebody across the table. You could be using the same word, the same language and the person across from the table doesn’t understand you at all or they think they do but they don’t and you have basically people talking across from each other and you see this in the ideological warfare that we see or in that famous Kathy Newman, Jordan Peterson interview which was tremendous but you know and I’m interested in transcending that gap you know personally and that’s why I write the stories that I do to bring it back full circle to what we’re talking about originally and I find that the medium of fairy tales in particular and it’s not just me that thinks this but I find them to be particularly effective for people now because they because people are no longer interested or moved by the traditional religious narrative whether it’s Christian whether it’s whatever it doesn’t matter but people still respond on a very intrinsic level to the questions posed by fairy tales and this is something that for example there’s a Russian philosopher by the name of Ivan Ilyin who lived in the late 19th early 20th century who writes a lot about Russian fairy tales and he has an article on the spiritual meaning of fairy tales that I’ve translated that’s on my website and he basically says if I can quote him a little bit he says that the fairy tale he’s talking specifically about the Russian fairy tale but it’s true of any fairy tale he says that it asks questions like this sorry oh yes questions like this what is happiness is it in riches or not is it in love or is it in freedom is it perhaps in goodness and righteousness what is self-sacrificing love and why is it important what is fate what does it mean that smart people often get the wrong end of the stick and idiots get happiness I mean these are these are very very profound questions that we sometimes don’t even think about on a rational level but that worry us on a very very deep and intrinsic level and to tell to write novels from the perspective of these stories is to talk about those same questions that the Staevsky was talking about in the 19th century or any of the great realistic novelists of the 18th 19th and early 20th centuries but in a way that I think now accesses people’s experiences in a more direct way because I don’t think that realistic fiction has the same power to move people as it did in the 19th century for whatever reason maybe it’s because we’ve gotten to a point where style trumps substance I mean some of the some of the Pulitzer Prize winners of the last few years in particular I’m thinking of the Goldfinch I don’t know if you’ve ever read it by Donna Tartt it’s it won in 2007 I think if I remember correctly but I mean I couldn’t get through a hundred pages of it it was like it was it was a long exercise in writing pretty sentences that while the characters were doing extremely stupid juvenile things to each other and and just had people just like like the Russians say like a hamster in a wheel just making the same mistakes over and over and over and over again not learning from them and just being extremely unpleasant throughout the whole process but it’s described in incredibly beautiful language so you’re supposed to be moved by it and I just felt like throwing it against the wall so maybe you can tell us a little about because I’ve been my solution let’s say to the problem now has been visual art you know going back to traditional iconography to medieval image in the west and orthodox icon in general and trying to use a lot of the traditional languages into let’s say a coherent visual language for today doing these videos trying to get people to wake up to this so I’d like to maybe you could a bit of how because you’re writing these novels so maybe you can tell us a little bit about your process and especially about how you you’re trying to bridge this gap with your with your that you’re working on well for me it’s it’s all it goes because my first experience with the fantasy genre was was but mostly token because he he told a kind of story that seemed to suggest a lot more than it was written on the page and it initially drove me kind of crazy because I’m reading this and I feel I’m feeling the level of not quite scripture but certainly great literature because there’s and it’s it’s talking about such such profound truths and it didn’t mean how he did it so I started to study him a lot just in my own being his his critical literature and his essay on fairy stories right which I used in my in my third article for for the lies of saints series he has a very interesting and I’m not sure how a folklorist consider him in terms of in terms of his method fairy tales but I don’t care because the way the way he the function of fairy tale makes so much intrinsic it and it really spoke to so I thought I would somehow repeat his process and basically what he he talks about it has has something going for it that’s that’s very helpful in terms of getting a message across about it in that sense and that’s that it has something called the resting strangeness I love this phrase that he was already it stops you in your tracks because of its strangeness but it for it but it forces you to stop and reassess what you’re looking at but what’s interesting is that he doesn’t then go and say their resting strangeness is what it is for its own sake meaning we’re not creating a Pandora like like what’s his name like Salvador Dali let’s say right okay yeah I’m specifically said Pandora because the Avatar the movie Avatar because people after they had they had watched that they were having withdrawal syndrome or whatever like they couldn’t they couldn’t not be in the in the imagined fake world of Pandora they couldn’t come back into the and that’s that’s fantasy gone bad and that’s that’s arresting strangers for its own sake right but Tolkien says arresting strangers has a point and what the point is that it stops you and it forces you to look at the world that you are in and to notice it anew and to notice it with fresh eyes and with fresh glasses on so to speak and what what that does that it not only forces you to reassess your relationship with the with the created world around you but it makes you listen to what that created world is telling you and the what fairy tales do and rather what fantasy does in in Tolkien’s in Tolkien’s system is that it tells the kind of story that was actually reflected in history with the incarnation of Christ but it also reflects in a kind of weird not in terms of history but not in the kind of in the way that we are trained to look at history but basically the incarnation of Christ is the minute came true it’s the it’s the bringing down into history of all of the myths that have been told before the coming of Christ and all of the stories that were told the happy ending stories that were told after his resurrection and ascension so it’s a kind of view of history that is starting from a middle point and going outwards like ripples in a pond as opposed to starting at a single point sometime in our past and moving forward towards some sort of progressive future which is the way we tend to look at history nowadays and it’s not a very helpful way and it’s certainly not it’s certainly not the way that man used to look at history in the Middle Ages there’s a great article by Evgeny Vodolaskin who wrote the novel Loras which is everybody’s reading this Loras read Loras it’s a it’s an amazing book yeah and he’s talking about how the medieval man looked at history not as a circle because then there would be nothing more than repeating patterns that we can never get out of it and that’s pretty depressing view of history but as a helix like a DNA helix where it’s something there’s repeating pattern happening throughout history where events repeat themselves but they repeat themselves in a different time and it’s slightly different meaning but the previous event that it kind of echoes is no less important and is no less real even if it never happened and that’s what’s so interesting about this view of history is that actually medieval men didn’t write fiction writing fiction was a sin but at the same time medieval man accepted the fact that these lives of the saints might have some things that kind of don’t jive with reality because they their experience of the divine was something that happened on a very everyday level like they everything that happened to them whether it’s weather whether it’s you know the things that happen to you in your life is a manifestation of the presence of God and so for them looking at these reading these stories is a reflection of reality even though these things might not be true they are true because they were they express something very true about the human condition and even if they’re not positivistically true meaning they never happened in terms of our modern view of history doesn’t make them any less true and actually of all people Neil Gaiman talks about this a lot in his lectures which is fascinating to me because I don’t think he’s a particularly religious guy but it’s just that there’s something about fairy tales and Tolkien captures it in a very profound way because he basically says that man as a created species has a responsibility to tell stories because by doing that he is creating a secondary world in his stories and in that secondary world he can populate that secondary world with reflections of the primary world truth so to speak that makes people reassess those truths in a new light because of the arresting strangeness and so the eternal truths about the human condition can then be understood in ways that perhaps somebody wouldn’t be able to accept listening to a sermon or listening to somebody just speaking to them across the table. It’s good that you mentioned Gaiman I think it’s important to understand when I look at Neil Gaiman’s work I feel like he had a very very profound intuition at some point about the structure of the world and about the structure of stories not just him but other people who come from the comic world like Alan Moore as well but just like let’s say let’s say radical feminism today they also have had a strange symbolic vision let’s say or an understanding of the symbolic world it’s just that they’re exploring the fringes of it and they tend to glorify the fringe aspect and so that’s why Gaiman talks about that’s why his characters are you know like the dream master and Anansi the spider the trickster all these figures that exist in the buffer zones of reality and I think it’s important because in a way that’s where we are today in the world but finding a balance where that let’s say chaotic dream-like world and the more inverted trickster world is has a place but then connecting it also to the more heroic figure or let’s say the memory of our traditions is has to happen or else you know we’re going to we’re gonna get stuck in Anansi’s web and then that’s the end of the West for us you know Anansi is all great with his stories but if you get stuck in his web you’re dead. Yeah well that’s what’s so interesting about fantasy right now I do maintain that it’s a very powerful genre but it’s not not all the fantasy is able to do that particularly well particularly well and certainly almost no modern fantasy is trying to take the journey back from from the fringes to the center it’s it all of it is sort of glorying in uncovering the ugliness of the fringes in particular there’s there’s this fantastic series by a writer her name is N.K. Jemisin it’s called the broken earth series it’s basically a symbolic retelling of slavery in the US but it kind of moved into a into a far distant future where the slavery aspect is flipped around and the dominant race is dark-skinned and the slave race is white-skinned but basically it’s it’s it’s her working through her experience of being a black woman in the United States and all the racism and those that she has to deal with and it’s not able to go very far at the end of the series in terms of coming up with with any sort of world-altering solution to this problem it’s it’s it stays at the fringes it finds some sort of a transcendence but it’s not able to go very far so since talking about my books this is ultimately what I’m trying to do with my novels and this is why give us the title because people that don’t know like get tell us what the title do not give us a give us a little glimpse of what you’re doing so you can know what right for okay well my first novel is called the song of the Syrian the Syrian being not the siren of Greek Greek legends but kind of an inversion of that she is a an amalgam a half half woman half half bird creature but rather than being someone whose song drives you insane she’s someone in from Russian mythology or kind of folk mythology who calls she can her song can drive somebody insane but it’s the kind of insanity that drives them away from the world and towards paradise so she’s a bird of paradise that occasionally comes down to the world and sings to to certain chosen individuals who then can’t rest until they either hear them hear the music again or until they leave the world entirely with with their bodies and their spirits kind of ascend upwards so the her song kind of erupts into the into the world of into my secondary world which is a kind of fantasy version of old ruse 9th 10th 11th century and the main character hears hears the song and he’s unable to rest until he does something with it but basically he’s the hero figure but this is not a traditional hero story it’s it’s very much a kind of a breakdown of the hero story in the sense that he does have to go on a journey from from the fringes to the center but his journey is extremely convoluted he he’s a reflection of me in a lot of ways it’s constantly making mistakes and constantly trying to get back back to the center but constantly you know being drawn back to the fringes for various reasons does the series at large the five a five volume series the title of the whole series is called Ravenson which which is a it’s kind of a pun it has to do with something that happens in book one so I’m not going to tell you why it’s called Ravenson but it does have to do with the Raven the Raven being it’s kind of demonic figure in Russian fairy tales who plays a very important role in shaking up the world of my main character and forcing him to reassess his reality and try to find the truth and you which is what we’ve been talking about so well so maybe yeah so I maybe you can tell us a little bit about Russian fairy tales because one of the things that has you know my wife is from Slovakia and one of the great things about about meeting her I mean obviously that’s you can’t limit it to that but one of the great things about me here was discovering Slavic fairy tales and so moving you know in my as I talked to her mother and she she she showed me these these old books of of kind of Slovak and Czech fairy tales and discovering characters like Baba Yaga and all these amazing characters and finally discovering Russian fairy tales and the firebird and you know all the amazing stories there so maybe you can tell us a little bit about your connection to right and maybe maybe how Russian fairy tales differ a little bit from the western fairy tales and and how you’re trying to to plunge into that yeah absolutely I mean I grew up in them this my my first memories are of my parents telling me telling me these stories before I before I went to bed I mean they’re my most vivid memories I still remember the books that I that I used to leaf through even before I could read the pictures in them and a lot of those those drawings and paintings are are so vividly still stuck in my head that they come out in actual form in in my writing I mean I actually I paint with words those pictures that I remember from my childhood but they’re they’re really interesting I find them very useful not only because I’m I stew in them so it comes out whether I like it or not but because they’re different enough but first of all they’re similar enough to to northern European fairy tales like like Scandinavian or German fairy tales that people can read them and say oh I kind of remember this this sort of idea particularly there’s a story about the the dragon’s heart I think it’s an old an old German story about how there’s this evil dragon and he can only be killed if you find his heart but his heart is is is stuck inside a chest and the chest is on top of a tree and and like there’s these levels of like or is or in a needle needles in an egg and the egg is a chest and the chest on top of a tree right so that that that motif happens in Russian fairy tales as well very often and it has to do with this character called the the deathless one who’s constantly dying and coming back to life like in every fairy tale the deathless one dies but in the next fairy tale he’s back again so it’s it’s just very interesting but um in particular what I find so fascinating about these is that they are not um traditional good versus evil tales at all at all they’re very messy the main characters do really stupid things and a lot of times they’re they’re complete morons in particular the famous one that that that informs my first book is the is one of the many versions of Prince Ivan and the and the gray wolf Prince Ivan is is a sniveling idiot who’s constantly whining and the then what the only thing that ever happens to him comes through the agency of this wolf and we have no idea why this wolf is helping him he just does and so there’s this there’s this wildness about the stories this this kid this sort of wild chaos that can be good or it can be bad and it depends very much it depends very much on sort of the spiritual state of the main character and this is particularly visible in the in the Ivan the idiot stories because um well they’re fascinating in a historical sense as well but the Ivan the idiot story is it’s basically the the youngest son in a family of boys and he’s the one he’s lazy he he’s literally described as rubbing the snot off his nose with the sleeve like i mean these images are just and he he he sleeps on the on the pichka on the russian stove the which has a ledge which is warm the lazy people all they ever do sleep on the ledge lazy people and cats that that’s the place for lazy people and cats so all he ever does is sleep there and yet when push comes to shove he gets the princess he he beats the evil tsar which is a different conversation that has to do with with the russian russian history and all that but um and it’s not because he’s an idiot it’s because he’s not tied to the to the rule-bound world of logic yeah of of consequence he’s connected to something different like he he leads with his heart and so things happen to because he’s connected on some level to to the spiritual world and the spiritual world works through him because he’s not an empty vessel so much as as he’s able to let it to kind of channel through him and baba yaga is a wonderful example of this because she can be she can eat you or she can or she can give you the magical help to go and defeat the big bad guy and it all depends on on who you are first of all if you’re a woman or a man traditionally she eats the eats the boys and helps the girls which is interesting and it’s all right but also you have to you have to go through different kinds of ordeals before she can help you and this is all very connected to russian paganism actually and if we go back to to ivan elian what’s so fascinating about these russian fairy tales the way he looks at it is that they are a bridge between the cultural world of russian paganism and the cultural world of russian christianity and they have a bit of both and if we um the Tolkien writes about this too in his in his famous essay on uh the monsters and the critics where he talks about beowulf and how beowulf although written by a christian possibly a christian monk celebrates the beauty of the old yeah wistfully with a kind of sense of of impending loss without willing to throw out throw out the all of the old as being inherently bad because it’s connected to paganism he celebrates the sort of the raw savage beauty of it but also celebrates the inevitable transformation of that raw raw savagery into something that can be tamed and yet retain that that um ember of wildness at its heart and that’s that’s russian fairy tales do that very well they they they live in this world that if you study uh folk history in particular russian paganism they live in a pagan world but the characters oftentimes do christian things um so it’s i think that that’s really if when christianity goes right that’s what happens it seems like one of the things that christ does we talk about this in the orthodox church a lot is the possibility of taking the world and baptizing it and then you know taking out of it those things that can continue on and that that aren’t so wild that they that that they’re useless but that they can you know participate in in the world and so you know it seems like the best of christianity in the in the celtic world and in the northern european world uh but also in rome too you know we’re so used to the we’re used to the roman christianity because it becomes let’s say the main frame for christianity but a lot of the roman world was taken into the church and and let’s say transformed so that it could be it could be the vehicle for a civilization basically that continued on for until today really and so really when christianity goes right that’s what that’s what it can do is take these stories and and bring them into uh even the scandinavian stories people always i always have these neo pagans come to me and and talk about you know oh you know odin and this and and all the old pagan stories and i just laughing in my mind and thinking do you know who wrote your stories christians wrote your stories not pagans christians wrote your stories they’re the ones who transmitted them they’re the ones who made them participate in in western europe and became part of the thread of the great the great uh story of western europe and so you have to at least acknowledge that before you tell me about odin hanging on his tree you know well i mean that’s that’s the thing on the tree thing is it you know you can only really appreciate the beauty of that story if you’re looking at history in the way that that those people who wrote those stories intended where the the central point of history is not the deep past it’s it’s the eruption of the divine into into the human and everything rippled out from that like i was saying so odin hanging from a tree is an echo even though it’s in the past technically right it’s still an echo of of the of the uh of the story of christ because because it’s you know time doesn’t matter not in that sense and you also have to you also kind of have to see that the reason why the uh let’s say the christian the christians wrote it down when they when the scandinavians converted to christianity was also probably because there are probably innumerable versions of the story of odin one a few of them got written down and those that got written down were the ones that were let’s say capable of emerging into this new world that was taking form you know and so that’s something that is that really needs to be understood because when you encounter oral uh let’s see you encounter oral traditions and and oral cultures you’ll see that their their culture their stories are so are multiple and there’s so many versions of them when they get written down the question is why was that version written down and then the whole world view comes into comes into so the stories i’m i love the scandinavian stories as much as i love the the russian stories because i can see in them you know like you said a preservation of this kind of chaotic wildness but then also a connection to a more a more ordered and let’s say tamed world at the same time so hopefully that we can we can all do well yeah and at the end the important thing and this is where Tolkien comes comes back again is that every one of the stories even if they even if they have chaotic middles they always end happily and that there is a lot there’s a lot to be said about the happy ending um on a sort of almost ontological level i hope i’m using that word right but it’s because and Tolkien even says that that the best that that the only good if you want your story to be good you have to give it a happy ending because and it has to be a very specific kind of happy ending he talks about something called the eucatastrophe and it’s a fascinating thing because the eucatastrophe for him is basically uh everything is everything to the main character everything that can possibly happen even if everything bad that can possibly happen to the main character happens and he comes to a point where there is absolutely no hope and there’s nothing he can do about it and at the last second there’s a turn um and something ineffable or something without it being deus ex machina it’s not that it’s just something whether it’s circumstances whether it’s he himself or whether it’s people around him something shifts and suddenly that all falls away and he’s able to come out triumphant and not only is that a reflection of course of the of the cross and then the resurrection but it’s also on a very deep level a reflection of the human experience because how how often do we human beings have to go through absolute hell before we before that little turn happens and that that terrible thing that happened to us then starts to make sense and and gives us the kind of meaning that then will let us not only live on but to make something of our lives that is beautiful for ourselves and for those who are who live around us and for those who see us and um on those different levels the happy ending is is it works and it’s very important um so yes tragedy in the greek sense has its place in literature but uh but the best kinds of stories will always have happy ending um tolkien says and i totally agree no and i i think i agree and i think that that it’s something that i never really thought about specifically but it makes sense in terms if you look at dante and you look at at uh at let’s say if you see if you see dante’s story as uh bringing together of all the threads of medieval christianity into kind of one massive story you know you really see that you really see exactly that that story that you’re talking about that he really frames it well that basic descent and then then ascent which now is everywhere you you watch any movie any you know it always is the basic structure of a of a story and people are so used to it that they’ve actually stopped seeing it they just almost expect it and uh and and they don’t understand that that basic frame which is really a christian frame has become their world view and to and if you remove uh christianity let’s say from the picture uh you might tumble back into uh into the very gloomy underworld of uh of greek of greek thinking or or pagan thinking in general well yeah and it’s true and uh it’s sort of disingenuous i think of a lot of people to to exist in this story framework and to consciously reject um the narrative of christianity um because because exactly what you said but at the same time i think that that um that the stories should still be told in that way because the reality of of that and its reflection um in the patterns of our own lives is something that’s so profound that if perhaps repeated enough times and done done in a good enough way and i’m talking about making uh writing really really good literature here i’m talking about the kind of fan the kind of fantasy that isn’t just uh repeating the the structure that Tolkien gave to the genre i mean there’s some there’s something about that people talk about fantasy being Tolkien-esque so to speak and that that there’s this certain kind of fantasy that’s now no longer in vogue but it’s not Tolkien-esque actually it’s more Terry Brooks-esque because Terry Brooks what he did when this is incredible but he took the Lord of the Rings story and he rewrote it almost scene for scene but with different characters and unfortunately without the the deep profound um underlying structure of of Tolkien’s secondary world because Tolkien had been writing that world throughout his life and he had been creating that mythology for himself and for his country i mean it was it was literally a mythology for England he’d been doing it his whole life so when Terry Brooks took this and made it more bite-sized everybody took after him so all the elves and the dwarves and the orcs and all that stuff we see recycled over and over again and even the even the the wizard figure the halfling figure the you know the the young the young man the the ingenue who has to come out and find himself in the world and i mean the ending of this sort of scenario is remarkably banal i mean compared to compared to what happens in in the Lord of the Rings it’s basically a message of self-realization like you know i am what i am who i am and that’s great i was like no sorry you’ve missed the point you’ve gone through a thousand you’ve gone through a thousand pages of this you know terrible ordeals and all you can come up with is that i am who i am that’s lovely okay i mean so one of the things one of the things about token that i really appreciate and i think one of the reasons why he can also give us a solution to the morass we’re in is that he creates a hierarchy let’s say of uh you know of beings you know he creates this this traditional really is like a traditional hierarchy of beings that kind of ascend and up to the the creator figure but what he also does is he he spends the whole book the Lord of the Rings talking about the value of the lowest rung of that hierarchy and how the let’s say the periphery can act as a frame and a guardian let’s say or a holder of the or of the of the tradition and is the one that’s able to kind of carry it through uh to to the end of the story and so the hobbit is the only one who can carry this ring this periphery and and bring it to its you know being able to to let’s say throw it into the fire so that it doesn’t consume the world and then kind of restart the the world so it’s a it’s not and so that’s why that’s why it’s the the hero figure in the Lord of the Rings isn’t you know Aragon isn’t the the king although he’s important in the story it’s the smallest figure who then is able to to to restart the the whole the whole story and so to me that kind of helps us it’s um it’s something it’s a lesson for our age let’s say to try to understand the places in the margin and the periphery that can help us to to flip things back on their on their feet let’s say well yeah well what’s what’s what’s so interesting about that is that it was largely an accident that Tolkien included the hobbits in his larger in his larger world because he wrote the hobbit as a separate thing and then it gradually became part of the larger mythos but it was possibly the most brilliant thing that he ever did because there’s so grounded in everyday reality they’re so set apart from the from the epic that and that inhabits the world the Cimmerlian for example and yet they’re they’re within it and they’re and they’re part of that world and even though they are 19th century english gentlemen from from the country they’re they’re still you know encountering the kings of old and for our time this is why it’s it’s why i think i think this is why it’s such a popular book is because whether he intended to or not he was able to to exactly do that to talk about the the exalted things the epic things the the really true things about the heart but through the prism of the small men of the smallest person you know and if there’s one line in the movie that i can sort of i mean it’s kind of cliched but it but it’s true it reflects Tolkien’s worldview even if even if it’s spoken in the language of self self-help books but it’s when Galadriel tells uh Frodo even the smallest person can make a difference and of course if you take it out of its context it sounds like yeah go you know go to the serious self-help aisle pull out a book and you can become a bestseller in five seconds but it’s not that it’s that uh it’s even the downtrodden even those who have no hope even those who were the literally smallest who have no strength they can topple kingdoms but it’s not because of them it’s because they are able to put their trust into the larger story and Sam talks about this incredibly on the way to Mordor when they’re about to lose faith he reminds Frodo that they are um actors in a larger story and that they are going to be sung about that people are going to sing about them later as as members of that larger story and they’re no longer going to be halflings but they’re going to be legends but in the dirty reality of of real life they have to just one foot in front of the other one foot in front of the other do what you have to because this is what you have been given this is your duty and Tolkien was very big on duty and if that’s all you need to do and in the end even though Frodo cannot do what he’s supposed to do he fails right he’s not the hero he fails right and some people consider the you know Gollum taking the ring and falling off as being the biggest cop out in the history of literature but actually it’s a very realistic and very accurate depiction on purpose by Tolkien of the way the providence works in this fallen world of shadows because also if you see Gollum as a if you see Gollum as a kind of mirror reflection of Frodo I think that’s not it’s not a strange way to see it you can almost see Gollum as the dark side of Frodo like oh yeah they’re just one being they’re hints and in the story that that show that you know Gollum is what Frodo could become if he let himself go and so the fact that that it’s the end it’s that it’s kind of like death you know the idea of conquering death by death and how this dark fallen figure finally you know even despite himself is the one who goes goes into the fire with the ring and it’s as if you know as if also his dark side is going into the fire with that ring as well so yeah and I don’t think it’s a cop out at all I think it’s a great I agree great idea I do too yeah for sure all right so look we’ve been going for about an hour and so we’ve got some great stuff we should we should probably do this again another conversation but maybe just to finish us off just tell people again the title of your your series of your books where they can get them and also where they can connect with you online I know you’ve got a website and you got a blog you’re doing all this stuff so maybe give us give us your shout outs and we’ll set up another conversation at some point okay sounds great okay so the series is the Raven Son series you can find it anywhere where Brooks are sold on Amazon in particular I do have paperback versions for those of you who think that independently published authors only do ebooks know I have paperback versions as well my website is NicholasKotar.com and if you will if you don’t mind Jonathan I will do a shout out for the Kickstarter right now I don’t know when this video is going to come out but until February 7th I have a Kickstarter going to fund the rest of the series books four and five that’s been going very very well and the reason I want to bring it up is because it’s an opportunity for people who like to listen to audiobooks to get access to my first three audiobooks which have not yet been produced basically for as low as five five dollars I mean I’m opening up I’m opening it up as a free gift to anybody who contributes at the five dollar level or higher so it’s an opportunity to help me on a purely monetary level but it’s also an opportunity for people if they want to experience my writing and also they can win a carving by me that I’m going to make I’m going to carve a I’m going to carve a serin for Nicholas so to participate in his Kickstarter so you can win a carving by me if you help Nicholas publish his books I can’t believe I forgot that that’s it yeah so basically whoever gives I think 20 or over we’ll have a chance we’ll be put into a draw for this carving so yeah there we go so so Nicholas it was great it’s great talking to you and I for sure we’ll we’ll try to do this again all right Jonathan sounds great thank you so I hope you enjoyed my discussion with Nicholas make sure you check out his web page and his Kickstarter to even get a chance to win a carving by me who knows I have a few announcements to make I’m going to do a movie interpretation in collaboration with another channel called the storytellers they’ve already used some of my the way that I discuss symbolism to to interpret other movies and so I’ll put a link to their page down below and we’re going to do Pacific Rim which is might be surprising to some but there’s a lot of great stuff in that movie to talk about another little thing is I’m going to start putting affiliate links in the description for the books that I talk about during a video so if I talk about a book I’ll put an affiliate link in the description if you want to buy the book it’s a little way to buy it and also encourage me at the same time and so another video coming soon and yeah talk to you again