Episode 313: The Tower and the Ruin with Dr. Michael Drout

Listen to The Literary Life:

On The Literary Life Podcast this week, Angelina and Thomas are pleased to have special guest Dr. Michael Drout joining them to discuss his book The Tower and the Ruin: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Creation. Together they talk about the background for writing this book and who Drout intended his audience to be. They also share thoughts on the current academic trends and the state of the humanities and literary studies in higher education. Other topics they cover include high modernism, literary criticism, realism and fantasy, and critical reviews of Tolkien’s work. Don’t forget to share this episode with the hashtag #LitLifeTolkien on Facebook or Instagram to be entered to win a copy of The Tower and the Ruin!

There is still time to join a few more live sessions of this year’s Literary Life Online Conference, happening January 23-30, 2026, “The Letter Killeth, but the Spirit Quickeneth: Reading Like a Human”. Our speakers will be Dr. Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, Dr. Anne Phillips, and, of course, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks. As always, these sessions are also recorded, so you can purchase lifetime access and view the past videos anytime!

Finally, you can also still sign up for Dr. Michael Drout’s “Viking and Old Norse Culture” and get the recordings for the opening classes you may have missed.

Episode 189: On Fairy Stories by J.R.R. Tolkien

Commonplace Quotes:

He had been so long buried in books that he had almost forgotten the earth around him.
Arthur Bryant, Macaulay

“I just want to see what the words are on the page.” Let me point out, you don’t read EVER just the words on the page because the only way you know what the words on the page mean is how they refer to other things and other words in a network of meaning spread throughout a culture.
Michael Drout

A ruin preserves the memory of what has been at the cost of making it impossible not to recognize the permanence of the loss. This melancholy, a longing for the unrecoverable past, is the dominant emotion in all of Tolkien’s works, an important reason why they affect readers so strongly.
Michael Drout, from The Tower and the Ruin

from The Ballad of the White Horse

by G. K. Chesterton

Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.

Before the gods that made the gods
Had drunk at dawn their fill,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was hoary on the hill.

Age beyond age on British land,
Aeons on aeons gone,
Was peace and war in western hills,
And the White Horse looked on.

For the White Horse knew England
When there was none to know;
He saw the first oar break or bend,
He saw heaven fall and the world end,
O God, how long ago.

For the end of the world was long ago,
And all we dwell to-day
As children of some second birth,
Like a strange people left on earth
After a judgment day.

Book List:

The Tower and the Ruin by Dr. Michael Drout

J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century by Tom Shippey

Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation by Guiseppe Pezzini

The Monster and the Critics and Other Essays by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien

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You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

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