This video explores the fascinating impact of J.R.R. Tolkien's work, particularly 'The Lord of the Rings,' on both literature and the power dynamics of creativity in everyday work environments. Starting as mere bedtime stories for his children, Tolkien's work evolved into a global phenomenon reshaping not only literature but also the ethos of creativity and resilience in work environments. The exploration shows how fantasy literature can serve as a powerful allegory for the challenges and complexities we face in life and work, offering valuable life lessons.

The narrative unfolds by highlighting how Tolkien, along with C.S. Lewis and the Inklings, embraced deep engagement with literature and creativity. Their journeys provide insights into the realms of going deep, choosing the right company, taking risks, staying playful, adopting rituals, and becoming resonators. Each of these aspects contributes significantly to enhancing creativity, inspiration, and collaboration within work scenarios, often drawing upon the camaraderie and intellectual support found within their literary circles.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. phenomenon [fəˈnɑːmɪnən] - (n.) - An observable event or fact, especially one that causes people to be surprised or interested. - Synonyms: (occurrence, event, happening)

When it was first published on 29 July 1954, fantasy literature wasn't popular. And yet it has found a readership of over 100 million since then.

2. allegory [ˈæləˌɡɔːri] - (n.) - A symbolic representation, conveying deeper meanings through characters, events, etc. - Synonyms: (parable, fable, analogy)

The exploration shows how fantasy literature can serve as a powerful allegory for the challenges and complexities we face in life and work.

3. seduction [sɪˈdʌkʃən] - (n.) - The act of attracting someone to do something inadvisable or wrong. - Synonyms: (temptation, allure, attraction)

It's about the seduction of power.

4. camaraderie [ˌkæməˈrɑːdəri] - (n.) - A feeling of good friendship among people in a group. - Synonyms: (companionship, fellowship, comradeship)

Drawing upon the camaraderie and intellectual support found within their literary circles.

5. resonator [ˈrɛzəˌneɪtər] - (n.) - A person or thing that amplifies or reinforces personal strengths or qualities. - Synonyms: (amplifier, enhancer, booster)

Establish rituals and routines to foster growth and consistency, while acting as a resonator to draw out and showcase the strengths of others.

6. immersion [ɪˈmɜːrʒən] - (n.) - The deep mental involvement in something. - Synonyms: (submersion, absorption, engrossment)

The first one is immersion. And that was so true of Tolkien.

7. incubating [ˈɪnkjʊˌbeɪtɪŋ] - (v.) - To maintain the conditions necessary for the development or growth of ideas. - Synonyms: (developing, nurturing, maturing)

And within that immersion, then you start incubating, you start thinking things through.

8. ethos [ˈiːθɒs] - (n.) - The characteristic spirit or culture of a community or system. - Synonyms: (spirit, character, culture)

Reshaping not only literature but also the ethos of creativity and resilience in work environments.

9. apex [ˈeɪpɛks] - (n.) - The highest or culminating point. - Synonyms: (peak, zenith, pinnacle)

To explain that, I want to talk about the primitive old days, the days before we streamed music and we streamed video, when the absolute apex of entertainment was when you got hold of that special edition box DVD set.

10. intellectual [ˌɪntəˈlektʃuəl] - (adj.) - Related to the ability to think in a reasoned way. - Synonyms: (rational, thoughtful, cerebral)

Drawing upon the camaraderie and intellectual support found within their literary circles.

Taking Tolkien to Work - Lessons from 'The Lord of the Rings' - Martin Downes - TEDxNantymoel

Well, it all began for him as a hobby, but actually it's left an estate worth in excess of 500 million. When he first started writing the stories, he actually told them to his children. But by the turn of the 20th century, it was adults who voted the Lord of the Rings the greatest book of the century. When it was first published on 29 July 1954, fantasy literature wasn't popular. And when this three-volume set came out, it would cost you 30 times more than your average paperback. And yet it has found a readership of over 100 million since then. Let alone when we think about the films and their impact and when we think about the TV series, the Rings of Power, what started out as something really quite small has had a huge global success.

But actually, I wanted to talk to you about how do you take Tolkien to work and how do you do that when at the end of the day, this is fantasy literature? What on earth has it got to do with life and with work? To explain that, I want to talk about the primitive old days, the days before we streamed music and we streamed video, when the absolute apex of entertainment was when you got hold of that special edition box DVD set. And when you open that up, on the one side are all the discs and on the other side is the bonus material and the behind-the-scenes footage. And actually, it's no wonder that Tolkien and the themes of the book have had a huge impact.

So when you think about the discs on the one side and the story and the themes, what is it really all about? What was the Lord of the Rings all about? Well, it was about small people in a big world feeling absolutely overwhelmed. And I don't think that's a feeling that is very far from a lot of us. It's about people facing circumstances they wish they'd never had to face. And again, there's the kind of things that actually we might feel from time to time. It's about the dethronement of power, it's about giving away power, it's about the seduction of power. And actually hundreds of millions of readers have found that all of this really has resonated with them.

And Tolkien did something very clever because he was writing fantasy. But when C.S. Lewis, who I warn you, was going to feature quite heavily in this whole story, when he first reviewed the books, he said that there was a veil of familiarity, some things that we look at that we can't see clearly. And so we're given a totally different vantage point. And Tolkien chose myth and legend and fantasy to actually make some really big points about our lives and the world in which we live. But there's another dimension to this and I want to explain it in two ways. And this is the sort of the other half of the box set, DVD and all that behind the scenes footage. And to tell you something of the story of how this book came about and really the story of a group in Oxford in the 1920s and 1930s who gathered around Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

But there's also person reason as well. And so let me properly introduce myself to you. So my name's Martin Downs. For the last five years I have been gathering people for events where they've come up with creative ideas and solutions to largely social challenges that are facing us. Over those five years we have gathered people to over 60 events, over two and a half thousand attendees. And I've drawn a huge inspiration in thinking about creativity and thinking about innovation and thinking about how we collaborate together from Tolkien and Lewis and that circle of friends known as the Inklings, who met in Oxford some 90 odd years ago.

And what I want to do with you in the remainder of this talk is to share with you six lessons that I have learned and that I also want to pass on to you and I hope will resonate with you and that you will find useful. And whether that sparks creativity or it makes you think about collaboration, makes you think about feedback, makes you think about how you support others, I hope you will find this a helpful way to do it. The first lesson is simply go deep. Tolkien, when he returned to Oxford after the First World War, became professor of Anglo Saxon. He was a man steeped in language, in literature. And to become a world-renowned expert in all of these things, there's something to learn from somebody who has gone so deep into a subject that they know it exhaustively.

But actually, when we think about creativity and how creativity happens, there are some really interesting lessons to learn on this and probably five things about the creative process. Now these five things don't always happen in sequence, but they're all important elements of how we come up with creative ideas. And the first one is immersion. And that was so true of Tolkien. He was immersed in this world of language and literature. And within that immersion, then you start incubating, you start thinking things through. So whatever the topic, whatever the subject, whatever the problem, whatever the challenge, you start incubating and you start thinking through new ways and new approaches and eventually you reach a point where you gain insight.

And sometimes that happens as you're sat thinking, sometimes it happens when you're having a shower, walking the dog. But you have a moment of insight and clarity and you've found some answers or you've been inspired to produce something. But after that comes a very delicate moment where you've got to share those insights and you share them with the world. And then somebody else evaluates them, and they'll either say, you don't know what you're talking about, or they'll say, this is brilliant. This is really helpful. But there comes that moment of risk and that moment of evaluation, and then eventually there comes elaboration where the poem is published, the song is performed, the film is made, or the paper is written up and becomes an article.

And I find that really helpful. I think I've really learned from looking at Tolkien and Lewis how important it is to immerse yourself, whatever it is, whatever the challenge, whatever the subject that you go fully in. There's a lovely story told about a child in Vienna who was taken. A child with real musical talent was adopted into the Wittgenstein family, was taken to be tutored by Felix Mendelssohn, the composer. And Hermann Wittgenstein, the father who adopted his child, went to Mendelssohn and said, I want you to teach him. Mendelssohn says, well, what do you want me to teach? And Wittgenstein says, I want him to breathe the air that you breathe. And there's something quite lovely about that.

There's something about actually leaning into somebody who has learned their craft, who knows their subject, and just soaking up inspiration from them. So that's the first thing is to go deep. The second thing then is, well, think about the company that you're going to keep as well. Tolkien's story is a really interesting one. He was part of a generation that went to war in the trenches of the Western Front. He had a group of friends who were at school, then went to university, who had great ambitions for what they wanted to do with their futures. They had great aspirations to be poets and writers and to do all sorts of things in life. Tolkien was a soldier in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 when he wrote, in the 1950s, the Lord of the Rings, and it was eventually published in the second edition he wrote in the preface.

By 1918, all but one of my friends were dead by the time he got back to Oxford. In the mid-1920s, he struck up a friendship in the English department with C.S. Lewis, who would become, in the 1950s, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a whole host of other books, and they struck up a friendship. They had a shared love of myth and legend and literature. They would meet every week, have lunch on a Monday and talk and discuss all of these things. And there is no doubt that Tolkien found in Lewis something that he had lost in his friends who never made it out of the war. He found the right company, he found the encouragers, he found the fellow traveler who was going to help him.

And actually, that friendship group was much more than those two. It included men like Owen Barfield, who had a massive influence on Tolkien and Lewis. When Barfield wrote in 1928 a book called Poetic Diction, he dedicated it to Lewis and he put a quote in the dedication from the poet William Blake, and it said, opposition is true friendship. It wasn't just they were friends, they were able to have robust conversations. They were able to challenge each other, to spur each other on. And I find something really infectious with that, something really inspiring, that actually, if we want to do good work, if we want to produce new creative things, that we need the right company, we need to travel with the right people who are going to help us along the way.

The third big lesson that I've learned is actually, then you need to take risks. This takes us back to that point where we've had the insight we've made something and now we're going to share it with the world, and that we need to take risks in doing so. I want to take you back to 1929. It's the 6th of December. Lewis and Tolkien are meeting as they always do. And then Tolkien shares with Lewis a poem he's been working on, a draft of a poem, a long, extended poem called the Lay of Luthien. And he gives it to Lewis to read and for Lewis to comment.

And then Lewis writes him a letter to say how thrilled he was that Tolkien had shared this with him, how much he loved the story. And he said, I'm not just saying it because you're my friend. If I'd gone to a bookshop and I'd found this and I didn't know the author, I would still have the same feelings about how good this piece of work is. But he said, detailed criticism to follow. And then what follows is a 14-page letter in which Lewis critiques, quibbles about words, makes suggestions, actually rewrites whole sections of the poem. And Tolkien was grateful for both. He was grateful that he took the risk and the poem was well received. But he was grateful for the criticism because it helped him improve what he was doing.

And if we want to do anything of a creative nature, any new work, there comes a point where you've got to take a risk. And then when you take a risk, you've got to brace yourself for the feedback. The fourth big lesson that I've learned from this is the importance to be playful. And I want to tell you two very brief stories about this. So we're back in the 1930s. Tolkien is marking school exam. It's a summer job for somebody of his kind of great intellect and mind. It must have been really boring, but it helped pay the bills. So he's got this wad of papers and as he's working through, he gets to a blank page and he stops and he writes a sentence.

And this is the sentence he wrote. In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit. And he thought to himself, well, I better find out what a hobbit is. And that literally is the origin of what, in 1937, was his first published work, a children's story that was immediately a huge success and is still popular down to today, or another story in 1936, again, our two heroes, Lewis and Tolkien, they're meeting together. And Lewis says, Tullers, nobody is writing the kind of stories that we like, so we're going to have to write them ourselves.

And so they decide to toss a coin. One of them is going to write the science fiction story, the other is going to write a time travel story. Now, you need to understand Tolkien's a bit of a perfectionist. So eventually, and I really mean eventually, we get a story called the Notion Club. Decades later, Lewis went off and wrote a book called Out of the Silent Planet. And then another two volumes on of science fiction. Lewis was the much quicker writer, Tolkien was the perfectionist, and it took him so much longer to get there.

But what I found really interesting about that, it was completely playful. It was a blank page that started The Hobbit when Tolkien was just doing his routine of marking papers. It was a toss of a coin. They weren't trying to find fame, they weren't trying to make money. It was their sheer love of story that was behind it all. They do say that actually, if you find something that you love, you'll never feel like you've done a day's work in your life. And I really think there is an absolute sweet spot.

If you find that right kind of work, then actually a big element of it is about play. It's about enjoyment, it's about being in flow with what you're doing. And that's a big lesson that I've learned from this, that actually, if you get people in a space where there's no money on the table, there are no contracts, but actually they can freely explore ideas and have conversations about what's possible, that creates a space that is liberating, that is freeing, and that can lead to some really remarkable things.

The fifth lesson I've learned from them is the importance of rituals, routines and having resonators. So this group called the Inklings met really from about 1933 to, roughly as a group, about 1949. And I want to paint a picture for you of what it was like to kind of meet with them on a Tuesday morning. They would meet in the Eagle and Child, or as they called it, the Bird and the Baby, in St Giles in Oxford. They'd meet about 11 o'clock, drink beer, tell stories, have a good laugh together. On a Thursday evening, they would meet somewhere else.

They would meet in Lewis rooms in Magdalen College in Oxford. And let me paint this scene for you. It sits about 9, 30, 10 o'clock in the evening. Lewis's brother, who's a retired army major, comes in with an enamel jug full of beer. And they're all there, puffing away on their pipes, the room filled with tobacco. C.S. Lewis didn't have an ashtray, so you just put your ash on the floor and the carpet and would rub it in. Okay, I'm not painting a really attractive picture that you want to be there, but that's the reality of what they did. And about 10 o'clock, Lewis would say, well, who's got something for us?

And one by one, they would bring out perhaps poetry. They were working on a manuscript of a chapter of a book that they were putting together, and they were taken in turns to read and read in a company where they would receive critique, observation, insight, support to improve whatever they've written. I find that really humbling to think you've got two of the most phenomenal authors of the 20th century and yet at this stage they are reading to a group of friends and they are completely open to the feedback that they're going to receive from them. These were resonators.

These were people who not only supported you like your family would, to champion you and to cheer you on, but actually they were full of insight, full of help, and they would open doors for each other as well. They would introduce each other to their publishers and create more and more opportunities, real resonators. I can't tell you how important that is to find people who will do that. One of the Inklings was a man named Charles Williams. He was a poet, he was a playwright, he was a novelist. His biographer said he found the gold within all of us and made it shine.

CS Lewis said something really pithy and remarkable. He said that praise is inner health made audible. And I think if I want you to take anything away from the talk this morning, it is those two things. Be that person who finds the gold in other people and makes it shine. And there's something remarkable about that. Praise is inner health made audible that we're not so preoccupied with ourselves and our agenda and our own work, that we can't be unstinting and praise people for the good work they've done and encourage them along the way. That is so important. Be that person who does that.

But I do need to tell you, it wasn't all being resonators and being helpful and being encouraging. Not everybody in that group actually liked what Tolkien was writing. Not everybody was a fan of the Lord of the Rings. It took him a long time to write. He started writing it in December 1937. He finished it in 1949. You can forgive him. The Second World War took place, okay, so maybe he wasn't going to get there very quickly.

But on those Thursday evenings, there were members of the group who really had had a guts full of the Lord of the Rings. Even at points where Tolkien would kind of bring out the manuscript and somebody would sort of sit back and say, not the elves again. And some of them just didn't like the story at all. In 1943, he didn't write a single thing, didn't put pen to paper for the entire year. And then he has lunch with Lewis, and Lewis gets the engine going again. It took him a long time to write, and he was lavishing his praise. He said, were it not for Lewis, all of that stuff would have been just a private hobby. And actually, we wouldn't have had the impact that his works have made.

So there's a story there about never give up. If you're the one producing it, you're the one doing the work. But also there's a never give up. Because his closest friends never gave up on him and encouraged him and kept him going. And I think that's really important. CS Lewis said that the gift of great literature is that we don't look only through our own eyes. We look with the eyes, he said, of A Thousand Men. And yet we remain ourselves.

That the gift of these things, and not just the book, but for me, the inspiration of the group of innovators, the group who resonated with each other, is that it takes me out of myself. I can sit at the feet of those who've gone deep, who've learned their craft, who've done things to change the world, and I can look at them. I can remain myself. But it takes me out of myself and it opens up new windows and opportunities to be creative. And that is how you take Tolkien to work.

EDUCATION, INSPIRATION, LITERATURE, THE INKLINGS, CREATIVE PROCESS, C.S. LEWIS, TEDX TALKS