Tolkien (2019)

Derek Jacobi: Professor Wright

Photos 

Quotes 

• Professor Wright : A child points, and is taught a word. Tree. Later, he learns to distinguish this tree from all the others. He learns its particular name. He plays under the tree. He dances around it. Stands beneath its branches, for shade or shelter. He kisses under it, sleeps under it, he weds under it. He marches past it on his way to war, and limps past it on his journey home. A king is said to have hidden in this tree. A spirit may dwell within its bark. Its distinctive leaves are carved onto the tombs and monuments of his landlords. Its wood might have built the galleons that saved his ancestors from invasion. And all this, the general and the specific, the national and the personal, all this, he knows, and feels, and summons somehow, however faintly, with the utterance of a single sound. 'Oak.' Saxon word. Proto-Germanic. Cognates in Old Norse. 'Eik.' Language is never nonsense. Language is meaning. History. Layer upon layer upon layer. And a word without meaning is -- what? Merely a sound.

• Professor Wright : Could you write five thousand words on the influence of Norse elements in Gawain?

  J.R.R. Tolkien : Yes, absolutely. When would you like it by?

  Professor Wright : This evening.

• Professor Wright : The way you follow the rhythms of the poetry, your sensitivity to it. I have to tell you, Mr. Tolkien, I've never come across anything like it. Never.

• J.R.R. Tolkien : Professor, since childhood, I have been fascinated with language. Obsessed with it. I've invented my own. Full, complete languages. Look. This is, it's - everything.

  [presents a notebook] 

  J.R.R. Tolkien : From the Breost-hord. My heart. The treasure of the breast.

  Professor Wright : And the drawings?

  J.R.R. Tolkien : I made stories. Legends. After all, what is language for? It's not just the naming of things, is it? It's the lifeblood of a culture, a people.

• J.R.R. Tolkien : I'd like to change to your class. To study philology.

  Professor Wright : To my class?

  J.R.R. Tolkien : Yes. Yes, I'm Tolkien, Ronald Tolkien. I stood outside your window and shouted obscenities in a kind of bastardized Finnish.

  Professor Wright : And you consider that a recommendation?

• Professor Wright : Languages never steal.