'Good often does evil': JRR Tolkien on 'the most tragic moment' in The Lord of the Rings

In 1968, the BBC broadcast extracts from JRR Tolkien's last ever recorded interview, 31 years after The Hobbit was published. In 2019, the full video was unearthed from the archive.

JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit begins with Gandalf the wizard visiting Bilbo, the titular hobbit, and persuading him to go on a dangerous quest. But would the British author himself have accepted the challenge? "If a wizard had come to me as a small boy, the situation would be totally different than that in The Hobbit," Tolkien revealed in a rare interview, filmed by the BBC in 1968. "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."

Besides, he added, "I'd been very well brought up to avoid conversations with dubious old gentlemen." 

Yet this admission was never broadcast. Only a few extracts from the interview made it onto television in 1968, while most of it was stored deep in the BBC archive until it was unearthed for a radio programme in 2019. The previously unseen and unheard footage features startling moments of candour from the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and reveals Tolkien's thoughts on key characters in his bestselling books.

The Hobbit was first published on 21 September 1937, and the calendar week around then has since been designated "Tolkien Week" in celebration. In the 1968 interview, Tolkien told the BBC about a hiking trip in Switzerland in 1911, when he was just 19, that inspired his much-loved epic.

"One of the cardinal things in The Hobbit is one of the few adventures I ever went through in my life," he said. "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."

In History is a series which uses the BBC's unique audio and video archive to explore historical events that still resonate today. Sign up to the accompanying weekly newsletter. 

Tolkien also discussed the invented languages in his fantasy novels. He traced them back to the time when he was studying classics at the University of Oxford, and he was........

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