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Episode: Tim's Tolkien Obsession & Amazon Prime's The Rings of Power

Author: Pushkin Industries
Duration: 00:45:07

Episode Shownotes

Tim Harford's life has been building up to this moment. In this Cautionary Conversation, he discusses the works of his favorite author J.R.R. Tolkien and the social science at play in Amazon Prime's series The Rings of Power. What do elves and whistleblowers have in common? How can evil hide

in plain sight? And where do orcs come from? Season 2 of The Rings of Power is available to watch on Prime Video from August 29th.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Summary

In this episode of 'Revisionist History,' Tim Harford examines Galadriel's character in Amazon Prime's 'The Rings of Power,' comparing her obsessive quest for Sauron to the role of a whistleblower. The discussion delves into the challenges faced by those who confront evil, drawing parallels with societal perceptions of figures like Galadriel and Anna-Marie Jarvis. It explores themes of obsession, the moral complexities surrounding orcs as representations of evil, and the broader societal implications of recognizing threats. The narrative reveals how historical and contemporary themes of power dynamics and technology’s moral dilemmas are intricately woven into Tolkien's legacy.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Tim's Tolkien Obsession & Amazon Prime's The Rings of Power) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
Chase for Business and iHeart bring you a podcast series called The Unshakables. This one-of-a-kind series will shine the spotlight on small business owners like you, who faced a do-or-die moment that ultimately made their business what it is today.

00:00:16 Speaker_00
Learn more at Chase.com slash business slash podcast. Chase. Make more of what's yours. Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase and a member FDIC 2024 JPMorgan Chase and Co.

00:00:40 Speaker_01
Pushkin. Hello and welcome to Cautionary Tales. I am Tim Harford. This is one of our Cautionary Conversations episodes. We are sponsored this week by Amazon Prime, the creators of The Rings of Power. And I'm actually so excited I could pop.

00:00:58 Speaker_01
I'm in the studio with Alice Fiennes, Cautionary Tales series producer. And why am I so excited, Alice?

00:01:04 Speaker_03
You're so excited because we're about to do a massive rundown of all your favourite cautionary tales and the works of your favourite author, Tolkien.

00:01:12 Speaker_01
Yes, we're going to talk about J.R.R. Tolkien, we're going to talk about the Rings of Power, and we're going to talk about cautionary tales. It's like all my birthdays and Christmas have come at the same time.

00:01:21 Speaker_01
In case you haven't guessed, I'm an absolutely massive fan of Tolkien. I've been a massive fan of Tolkien for approximately 45 years. And I think that Tolkien is full of cautionary tales.

00:01:33 Speaker_01
And this new series, Rings of Power, is also full of cautionary tales. So that is what we're going to talk about.

00:01:38 Speaker_03
And I am this side of the glass today as a non-expert enthusiast who has also watched Rings of Power and is also very excited to speak about it. Now, if you haven't seen Rings of Power yet, there's something for everyone in the mix.

00:01:51 Speaker_03
It's an action story. It's a psychological thriller. It's a fantasy story. So make sure you go and watch it.

00:01:56 Speaker_01
My whole life has built up to this moment.

00:01:58 Speaker_03
I sense that for you.

00:01:59 Speaker_01
This is amazing. Obviously, it's a fantasy about elves and orcs and all things Tolkien-esque, and we will get into that, but it is also full of cautionary tales. It is full of the kinds of ideas that we explore in cautionary tales.

00:02:13 Speaker_01
And as I was watching it, all kinds of things sprung to mind, and I imagine they sprung to your mind as well.

00:02:18 Speaker_03
They certainly did.

00:02:20 Speaker_01
Okay, so we should probably begin with a little bit of background. The Rings of Power is a prequel to the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It is set thousands of years before those events.

00:02:33 Speaker_01
Tolkien wrote enormous amounts of lore, so this is a new story set thousands of years before The Lord of the Rings. We do meet some of the characters in the Lord of the Rings. For example, we meet Elrond, we meet Galadriel. They are elves.

00:02:48 Speaker_01
Elrond is half-elven. They lived for thousands of years. So, you know, you can meet them as their younger selves before they became those later characters.

00:02:56 Speaker_03
Yes, so Elrond we know later as an elf ruler in Rivendell. Galadriel, a very powerful royal elf. They are played by Robert Arameo and Morfydd Clark rather brilliantly.

00:03:06 Speaker_03
So Rings of Power gives us their origin stories and it's also the origin story of the Rings of Power themselves and the One Ring, which there's quite a lot of fuss about. So Tim, what is going on with those?

00:03:16 Speaker_01
a lot of fuss about. immortal man, and Sauron wrought by himself the One Ring, and this is a source of ultimate evil and corruption in the Lord of the Rings. So in the Rings of Power, we get to see, well, why were these things made? Who made them?

00:03:47 Speaker_01
And I imagine in season two, which we haven't watched yet, we're going to see a little bit more about the consequences of making them.

00:03:53 Speaker_03
We actually see quite a few sort of mini origin stories peppered throughout season one. So someone else we meet is an ancestor of Aragorn, Isildur.

00:04:03 Speaker_01
Actually, sorry to correct you there, Alice. Aragorn is actually descended from Aenarion, who is Isildur's brother. Thank you.

00:04:10 Speaker_01
But yes, Isildur, we know from the Lord of the Rings, famous tool who fails to destroy the One Ring when he could have destroyed the One Ring. And he's, you know, a little bit of a Muppet in the Rings of Power as well, isn't he?

00:04:23 Speaker_03
I was about to say, if I'm honest, it's not looking good for him.

00:04:26 Speaker_01
No, no, but there you go. I mean, the character arc is consistent. You know, he makes mistakes. He's going to make mistakes in the future.

00:04:32 Speaker_01
So we're going to talk about some of these characters, and we are going to talk about the cautionary tales they bring to mind, some of the social science behind what happens in the Rings of Power, and some of the things that occur in the Rings of Power that echo true stories that we have told in cautionary tales.

00:04:51 Speaker_01
I should say there are going to be some spoilers for season one. There are not going to be any spoilers for Season 2 because we haven't seen Season 2. It is out on the 29th of August on Amazon Prime. I, for one, am eagerly looking forward to it.

00:05:29 Speaker_01
So we should begin with one of the key protagonists, the heroine, one of the heroines of the Rings of Power, Galadriel. We see her in the Lord of the Rings. Here we see her as a child and then later as an incredibly determined pursuer of evil.

00:05:49 Speaker_01
I say determined, I mean maybe it's determined, maybe it's obsessive. Maybe it's irrational. Everyone else seems to think that she's completely unhinged.

00:05:58 Speaker_01
Sauron has long since disappeared from the world and yet Galadriel will not give up the hunt for him.

00:06:03 Speaker_03
So early on in the series covers a few centuries of Galadriel's life. We see Galadriel and her beloved brother Finrod battling Morgoth, who is a kind of evil entity, demonic entity. Actually, who or what is Morgoth?

00:06:17 Speaker_01
Morgoth's Sauron's boss. So when he was defeated, Sauron took up the baton and continued the pursuit of evil in Middle-earth.

00:06:25 Speaker_03
So Galadriel vows to take up her brother's mission and she spends centuries seeking out Sauron and this intangible evil that she believes is there. And eventually others stop rallying around the cause.

00:06:38 Speaker_03
She starts to seem like she might just be kind of a lone zealot. And it all comes to a head when she leads her company to this sort of snowy wasteland.

00:06:48 Speaker_01
It looks absolutely miserable, but because they're elves, I guess, they don't die of cold.

00:06:52 Speaker_03
Absolutely. She thinks that she is seeing signs of Sauron, but others don't really believe that that's what she's seeing.

00:06:59 Speaker_01
There are signs, right? But the signs are centuries old. So the fact that somebody wrote a sign hundreds of years ago, what does that tell you now?

00:07:07 Speaker_03
Right, exactly. The threat is not imminent. There's this brush with the Snow Troll. They lose faith in her. They stop following her. And when they go home, she's commended for her bravery, but it's all kind of a bit hollow.

00:07:18 Speaker_01
It's very hollow. So the King of the Elves, Gil-galad, rewards her with a one-way trip to Valinor, which

00:07:26 Speaker_03
It's forced retirement, isn't it?

00:07:27 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's kind of Elf Heaven. And I mean, it's supposed to be a big reward, but it doesn't feel like a reward to her. It feels like she's basically being, as you say, forcibly retired and stripped of her duties. And it feels like a punishment to her.

00:07:44 Speaker_01
It becomes apparent later that Gilgala did this deliberately. It's not just that he meant to reward her, but she didn't really view it as a reward. He wanted to take her out of the picture because

00:07:53 Speaker_01
it becomes clear that Gil-galad, the elf king, he thinks that Galadriel is actually the problem. Like the fact that there is still evil in the world, there's evil in the world because Galadriel is so obsessed with evil.

00:08:03 Speaker_01
There's a line that the wind that can blow out a fire can also fan the flames.

00:08:08 Speaker_01
One of the things that really struck me here is Galadriel is treated a little bit like our whistleblowing hero in Whistleblower on the 28th Floor, which is our episode about the equity finance fraud.

00:08:21 Speaker_01
The equity finance fraud was effectively the equivalent of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, only in the 1970s.

00:08:27 Speaker_01
And the man who identified that this fraud was taking place and delivered the evidence of this fraud to the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US financial regulator, he was then prosecuted by the SEC.

00:08:40 Speaker_01
And obviously, Galadriel is a rather more dynamic and compelling and charismatic figure than Ray Dirks. But the way that we punish the people who are

00:08:49 Speaker_01
trying to alert us to danger, I think, is a theme in certain cautionary tales and very strongly a theme in the early episodes of Rings of Power.

00:08:57 Speaker_03
Yes, a key takeaway in that episode, the whistleblower on the 28th floor, is that whistleblowing is often far more trouble than it's worth. You might be shunned. It may be hard to find employment after people don't like bad news, essentially.

00:09:10 Speaker_05
You lose your friends because your friends are people from work. It's difficult to survive financially and emotionally.

00:09:19 Speaker_01
They don't like bad news, and also they often blame the messenger, not because they don't just dislike the bad news, but because the people who are willing to defy that social pressure are often quite awkward.

00:09:30 Speaker_01
A whistleblower once contacted my colleagues at the Financial Times. When my journalistic colleague picked up the phone, the first line the whistleblower uttered was, my name is Tarantula. Daddy's not my real name. You just sound mad.

00:09:45 Speaker_01
Who phones a journalist and says, my name is Tarantula?

00:09:47 Speaker_03
Yeah, you might not endear yourself to people by doing that.

00:09:50 Speaker_01
Really not. But it turns out, actually, it was a very important fraud that this person was blowing the whistle on. And Ray Dirks was a kind of awkward character. And Galadriel is, in many ways, extremely obnoxious in this series.

00:10:01 Speaker_01
She rubs people up the wrong way. She's absolutely convinced she's right. She doesn't hesitate to let other people know that she thinks they're idiots. And this turns out to be quite common behaviour from whistleblowers.

00:10:12 Speaker_03
She is right. But there are moments where you think, oh, take a day off. We talk in that episode particularly about anti-money laundering officers in banks.

00:10:22 Speaker_03
And there are these examples of how when you blow the whistle on a bank, you're blowing the whistle on regulatory failure. You're blowing the whistle on everyone not doing what they're supposed to do.

00:10:32 Speaker_01
You're telling people that they screwed up. This organisation screwed up, you screwed up, and my job is to tell you that you screwed up. And it turns out that that's your job title, but your actual job is to tick some boxes and not make a fuss.

00:10:43 Speaker_03
Don't rock the boat. And Galadriel is absolutely rocking the boat, right? She's pointing to everyone's collective failure to vanquish evil and to stay vigilant.

00:10:51 Speaker_03
And it's a lot easier to dismiss that lone voice that's screaming into the wind than to say, hey, maybe we do actually have a problem here.

00:10:59 Speaker_01
Yes. I mean, there is another way of seeing this as anybody who's read The Lord of the Rings knows Sauron did not disappear. Sauron comes back. We know Sauron comes back.

00:11:09 Speaker_01
And even if we haven't read The Lord of the Rings, we kind of guess that Sauron is still out there. So we kind of narratively, we know Galadriel's right.

00:11:17 Speaker_01
And so there is such a thing as hindsight bias, and I think it's hard to avoid that as a viewer of the series.

00:11:24 Speaker_01
So the classic example of outcome bias is an experiment run by a couple of psychologists in 1988, Barron and Hershey, where they were asking people to evaluate decisions.

00:11:34 Speaker_01
These might be medical decisions, for example, or they might be financial decisions, but they also explained how things worked out. So here's a doctor, this is what the doctor did, and this is in the end what happened to the patient.

00:11:44 Speaker_01
And people find it completely impossible to separate the decision-making process from the outcome. If you're told the outcome, you can't neutrally judge the process.

00:11:54 Speaker_01
And here we know the outcome, we know Sauron's out there, so we know Galadriel's right. So I think the storytellers have to work quite hard in this series to make Galadriel seem irrational and seem unhinged.

00:12:05 Speaker_03
When she's speaking about this intangible evil being out there, what she keeps referencing is this inner intuition. It's not really perceptible or measurable by her colleagues.

00:12:14 Speaker_03
They can only kind of work with what's in front of them and think about all the other things they need to balance.

00:12:18 Speaker_01
Yeah. She thinks she's right. She thinks they're wrong. They think the opposite. I mean, who's to judge, right?

00:12:24 Speaker_03
I think there is another reading of Galadriel which is possible here, which is that she is a grieving person or a grieving elf. She takes on her brother's mission after he dies. She takes his dagger. She says, his vow became mine.

00:12:39 Speaker_03
She's grappling with her relationship with him even though he's gone, which is sort of what grieving is. There's a sense in which his death ignites this fire in her. In her words, it whips up a tempest that won't be quelled.

00:12:52 Speaker_03
Emotion and loss are kind of propelling her on. For Elrond, for people observing her, it seems like something's broken in her, right?

00:13:00 Speaker_03
There's a sense that emotion and anger are clouding her judgment rather than helping her maybe see truths other people can't.

00:13:07 Speaker_03
which reminds me of this trope of the mad woman that we see kind of recur in history and in literature, powerful women in particular, whose emotion renders them overly dramatic, overly passionate. It automatically undermines them.

00:13:21 Speaker_03
In Cautionary Tales, it reminds me of Anna-Marie Jarvis.

00:13:26 Speaker_01
Oh wow, Anna-Marie Jarvis, that's a deep cut. I like that. So yes, the inventor of Mother's Day, or was she the inventor of Mother's Day? She certainly thought she was the inventor of Mother's Day and then was incredibly defensive of it.

00:13:40 Speaker_03
Indeed. So her life's work, I mean, Anne-Marie Jarvis is also a grieving woman, right? Her life's work is honouring her dead mother. And she believes that then her day, Mother's Day, gets co-opted by these sort of cynical interests.

00:13:54 Speaker_03
And she tries to take back what she's created. And she's upset. I mean, of course she's upset.

00:13:59 Speaker_01
Yeah, but she starts writing very vitriolic letters and everything is painted as good and evil and the noble idea of Mother's Day and these corrupt florists, the evil florists who have initially, of course, supported her.

00:14:16 Speaker_02
Why don't you stop fraud against Mother's Day through misrepresentation about Founder? You know no person in your town ever gave a cent for Mother's Day, nor was its promoter. No honest person would make such a claim. Stop the deception and game.

00:14:35 Speaker_01
It's a miserable story at the end, I think.

00:14:37 Speaker_03
It is. So she does write these letters. But it is striking to me that she starts something or she is instrumental in starting something that is still recognised in the US today.

00:14:45 Speaker_03
But in the end, Time magazine remembers her as just this old woman, a busybody, a recluse, a bit of a weirdo. And there are many, many ways I think that Galadriel and Anna-Marie Jarvis are very different.

00:14:58 Speaker_03
But I do think they are both judged very harshly by the societies they live in.

00:15:03 Speaker_01
Did Galadriel ever throw a Mother's Day salad on the floor?

00:15:06 Speaker_03
I wouldn't put it past her. But they're judged for their extremes of emotion and for the fire that lights in them and the missions that gives them.

00:15:14 Speaker_01
I think Eladriel is going to come out very well in the end. Well, I think we know that she is, but I think you're right.

00:15:20 Speaker_03
I will say, overall in Rings of Power, women come across very well. They're very powerful, very wise, very brave.

00:15:27 Speaker_01
Yes, but Galadriel certainly has an edge to her. So Galadriel as Ray Dirks, the equity finance whistleblower, Galadriel as Anna Marie Jarvis, the salad hurling creator of Mother's Day.

00:15:38 Speaker_01
These are depths that I had not previously seen in the Rings of Power. We will plumb more depths and we will explore more parallels after the break.

00:15:55 Speaker_04
Small business owners, this one's for you. Chase for Business and iHeart bring you a podcast series called The Unshakables.

00:16:02 Speaker_04
This one-of-a-kind series will shine the spotlight on small business owners like you, who faced a do-or-die moment that ultimately made their business what it is today. Learn more at chase.com slash business slash podcast.

00:16:15 Speaker_04
Chase, make more of what's yours. Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank, NA member, FDIC. Copyright 2024, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

00:16:33 Speaker_03
OK, Tim, picture the scene. You're at home in Oxford in your living room, waging a very intriguing Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

00:16:43 Speaker_01
OK, it's all too easy to picture. All of a sudden... Typical Tuesday.

00:16:49 Speaker_03
Well, it's all about to change. All of a sudden, there's an almighty crash, and through the floorboards appears an orc who has been undermining your house.

00:16:58 Speaker_01
What are you going to do? Okay. Yeah, hide in the cupboard, I think, would be my reaction.

00:17:03 Speaker_03
And that's fair, because they're terrifying.

00:17:05 Speaker_01
They are absolutely terrifying in the Rings of Power.

00:17:09 Speaker_01
We should just remind people, I'm Tim Harford, you're Alice Vines, we are sponsored by Amazon Prime and the Rings of Power, and we're talking about parallels between the Rings of Power and cautionary tales. And yes, they are spine-chilling, the orcs.

00:17:24 Speaker_03
They're spine-chilling. They spend a lot of time digging. That scene I just described, in fact, unfolds in the show. I have to say, I would back you more than most to survive the orc apocalypse.

00:17:35 Speaker_01
Any particular reason?

00:17:36 Speaker_03
Just your extensive knowledge of the law.

00:17:38 Speaker_01
I know the enemy. I know the enemy. You know the enemy, exactly.

00:17:40 Speaker_03
You know their weaknesses.

00:17:42 Speaker_01
Yes, well, Sunlight, one of the weaknesses, which indeed the Orcs are planning to do something about that particular problem in this series. But no, they just are unsettling. They're like something out of a horror movie. They absolutely are.

00:17:58 Speaker_01
Rather than an action film here. They're thoroughly chilling, which I think is a very welcome development in the Rings of Power. But yes, so they've got this project though, the orcs. They have a project.

00:18:10 Speaker_01
They're not just interested in butchering livestock and kidnapping people and shooting people full of arrows, although they do do plenty of that.

00:18:17 Speaker_03
That's also a hobby.

00:18:18 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:18:19 Speaker_03
I mean, we'll come to the project, but I do have a question for you first.

00:18:22 Speaker_01
Okay.

00:18:23 Speaker_03
Rings of Power sort of elucidates where orcs come from. They are these twisted, tortured elves, according to Galadriel.

00:18:31 Speaker_01
Yes.

00:18:32 Speaker_03
I've not totally got my head around it. There seems to be a limitless supply of them. How does this work?

00:18:38 Speaker_01
Yes, well, I think orcs are quite fecund, I think. Orcs like to get busy with other orcs. And yes, there are certain scenes where they appear to be almost manufactured. But yes, I think they breed quickly as a race.

00:18:53 Speaker_01
And yes, Galadriel says they're twisted elves. Tolkien himself actually gave different accounts of where Orcs came from. I mean, this is almost like a theological thing for him.

00:19:05 Speaker_01
Could the master of all evil, Morgoth, could he create life or could he only twist and pervert life? And so he had different views. But I think the view that is most popular that's expressed in The Lord of the Rings is that Morgoth took

00:19:20 Speaker_01
elves, and then he twisted elves in mockery and turned them into orcs. And that was the worst thing he ever did, was to take elves and turn them into orcs.

00:19:29 Speaker_01
It was all the evil acts he commits over thousands of years, and he gets up to all sorts of mischief. The creation of the orcs was the worst, the most spiteful thing he did. But anyway, wherever they came from, they're back.

00:19:44 Speaker_01
and they are undermining, literally undermining human civilization in this series. They are.

00:19:50 Speaker_03
This sense of them as an inversion of something is very interesting. There's something kind of corpse-like about them. They're sort of bloated, rotting, sunken flesh almost.

00:20:01 Speaker_03
It's like they shouldn't exist really, I suppose, which is partly what makes them terrifying.

00:20:06 Speaker_01
And they kill things, they kill livestock and they chop down trees and for no obvious reason. They're just destruction for destruction's sake. But in the end they do have a plan.

00:20:17 Speaker_03
They have a plan. We see them imprisoning elves in what seems to be a kind of prison camp, I would say. And we don't know what they're building at first, we find out later.

00:20:29 Speaker_01
Yes, yes. But both humans and elves are being kidnapped and enslaved and put to work on this project. So the leader of the orcs, who is this character called Adar... Played terrifyingly by Joseph Moore.

00:20:43 Speaker_01
He is very unsettling and we're trying to work out who he is and where he came from and what his connection is to Sauron. That's one of the mysteries of the show. But I think you've identified him. He's Fëanor von Braun.

00:20:55 Speaker_03
Adar is Fëanor von Braun. He is indeed. Do you want to unpack that a bit?

00:20:58 Speaker_01
Well, as listeners to our epic V2 rocket trilogy will know, Von Braun was this not so much brilliant engineer or brilliant scientist, but brilliant coordinator of scientists, brilliant project manager who had this vision of going to the moon.

00:21:15 Speaker_01
and didn't really care who was hurt in seeing that vision realised. And so while it all worked out very well for him in the end, he ended up working for NASA and making films with Disney and living the American dream.

00:21:31 Speaker_01
He, first of all, was probably the single most important person involved in the building of the V2 rocket.

00:21:37 Speaker_01
which is a weapon of mass destruction, and targeted... I mean, not really targeted at all, but to the extent that it was even vaguely aimed, it was aimed at civilians.

00:21:45 Speaker_01
So you're trying to kill civilians, and they successfully did kill civilians with this rocket. And he didn't seem to care, because, hey, he's got funding to build rockets, and he wants to build rockets, and in the end, he's going to go to the moon.

00:21:57 Speaker_01
And then the second thing, and this is the even closer parallel with the Rings of Power, the use of concentration camp labour in just the most appalling, conditions, thousands and thousands and thousands of people dying in Dora Middlebough.

00:22:12 Speaker_01
And von Braun basically did not seem to care. He was indifferent because he had his vision.

00:22:19 Speaker_03
What we discover about the massive construction project that the elves and humans are working on is that, in a sense, it's all leading up to a kind of weapon of mass destruction as well, right? They're digging all these tunnels

00:22:34 Speaker_03
We don't know what it's for, but they're digging away.

00:22:37 Speaker_03
And eventually in the series, we see a kind of would-be lackey of Sauron, who's longing for Sauron's return, put this sort of like a sword into a landmark that triggers floods that run through the tunnels they've been digging, that trigger a kind of volcanic eruption, I suppose.

00:22:57 Speaker_03
And what unfolds are these horrendous, fiery scenes that are reminiscent of a bomb going off, really.

00:23:04 Speaker_01
It is like somebody just dropped an atomic bomb on Middle Earth. That's how it reads. What has actually happened is that Adar and his orcs and their slave labor have reactivated Mount Doom.

00:23:16 Speaker_01
They have taken this dormant volcano and they have reactivated it and it explodes absolutely catastrophically. They're extraordinary scenes. It's an absolute disaster.

00:23:27 Speaker_03
I've always wondered where Mount Doom comes from, so this is it.

00:23:30 Speaker_01
This is it, according to the Rings of Power canon. So it was originally Orodroin as a mountain at the heart of the Southlands, stroke Mordor. Sort of symbiotic with Sauron. So when Sauron is there in Mordor and powerful, Orodroin is active.

00:23:48 Speaker_01
And when Sauron is dormant, Orodroin is dormant. But in the Rings of Power, it's a very deliberate plan by Adar he causes this massive steam explosion, and that causes Orodroin, Mount Doom, to erupt.

00:24:02 Speaker_01
And we know, having read Lord of the Rings, that in the end, Mount Doom will be where Sauron's powerful ring, you know, the ultimate power, the One Ring, is going to be forged in Mount Doom, and it can only be destroyed in Mount Doom.

00:24:16 Speaker_01
So as well as being this cataclysmic event as far as the Rings of Power are concerned, we also know that this is paving the way for the return of Sauron and it's going to pave the way for the creation of the evil that is the One Ring.

00:24:29 Speaker_03
Which brings me to another thought, which is that there are very big questions in this series about what evil is, where it can be found, how do we deal with it? Is it something you choose? Is it an act of self-determination?

00:24:44 Speaker_03
Is it something you inherit? For example, the Southlanders early on, they're not to be trusted because in their veins flows the blood of their ancestors who allied themselves with Morgoth, right?

00:24:55 Speaker_01
Which is very deterministic, right? It's racial determinism. Absolutely. They are the descendants of people who served Morgoth and therefore you can't trust them.

00:25:04 Speaker_03
It's this concept of evil as something primitive within us, I suppose. But also, evil may be something you choose or deny.

00:25:11 Speaker_01
But yes, there is this sense a lot of the people that we see have had their choices predetermined. I mean, Adar, the leader of the Orcs, interestingly, he argues that they have free will and they need to be viewed as individuals with names and so on.

00:25:26 Speaker_01
That's one of the reasons why they love him. But I think in the universe of Tolkien, the orcs are irredeemably evil and the elves are inherently good. But one of the really interesting questions is, well, where does that leave the humans?

00:25:40 Speaker_01
And the humans have moral agency. The humans get to choose, the humans have to choose, and some of them choose well and some of them choose very badly.

00:25:48 Speaker_03
I did have another thought actually as I was traveling here. Adar is in fact mistaken for Sauron at some point. He doesn't take that well, but that points to another issue with evil, right?

00:25:59 Speaker_01
Well, absolutely. So Adar looks very unsettling. He's this scarred or corrupted elf. He's coded as a bad guy, and he's a bad guy. He does all kinds of terrible things. The orcs look horrendous. We know the orcs are evil.

00:26:15 Speaker_01
And the elves look beautiful and do good things. So there is, in Tolkien's universe and in the universe of The Rings of Power, there is this association of people who look beautiful also being morally beautiful. And evil is worn on the surface.

00:26:32 Speaker_01
So evil creatures look evil, except It's not always like that. It's not always like that in Tolkien, and it's not always like that in the Rings of Power.

00:26:40 Speaker_03
And it's not always like that in real life, I think, either.

00:26:43 Speaker_01
I certainly agree that it's not always like that in real life. The favourite themes of cautionary tales, which we come to again and again, is the deceiver, the plausible deceiver.

00:26:54 Speaker_01
So going right back to one of our very first cautionary tales, the rogue dressed as a captain, where this impoverished shoemaker and petty criminal Wilhelm Voigt got hold of a second-hand army captain's uniform.

00:27:09 Speaker_01
This is in the early 1900s in Berlin, and just started bossing around a platoon of soldiers he found on the street. And he's wearing a captain's uniform. And so they do what he says, because he looks the part.

00:27:22 Speaker_01
And it's funny, but it's also quite dark, because we understand where this unconditional obedience to people in uniform later goes.

00:27:32 Speaker_01
And then, of course, there's Harold Shipman, who's this kindly trusted community doctor who is one of the worst serial killers ever in human history anywhere in the world. And he doesn't look like a serial killer.

00:27:46 Speaker_01
He looks like the person who's going to take care of your grandmother. So you would think that's not part of the way that Tolkien views things. That's not part of the way that the Rings of Power portrays the world.

00:27:57 Speaker_01
But then you realize, oh no, there are people in this universe who are not what they seem. And one of the pleasures of watching this season is trying to figure out who looks good and is actually good and who's hard to place.

00:28:09 Speaker_01
And I would say, I think, and we said there'd be spoilers for season one, but I don't want to spoil this. We know Sauron's coming back. I think there are four people at least four people in the rings of power who plausibly contenders for being Sauron.

00:28:25 Speaker_01
And one of the pleasures is to try to figure out who it actually is, or maybe it's none of those four. But yes, none of them, with the exception of Adar, they don't look like Sauron. They don't code as Sauron. What you're trying to see through is

00:28:40 Speaker_01
Okay, the Orcs look evil, Adar looks evil, Mount Doom looks evil, that sword looks evil, but Sauron himself is the great deceiver and he looks exactly how he chooses to look and that is one of the big challenges.

00:28:55 Speaker_03
Now that you mention Catching a Killer Doctor, our episode about Harold Shipman, I am reminded of Kahneman and Tversky's representativeness heuristic and this idea that certain things kind of fit into our pre-established frameworks and we may not question them, basically.

00:29:12 Speaker_01
Absolutely not, absolutely. So Shipman just fitted into the kindly doctor shaped box that we have in our heads.

00:29:19 Speaker_01
We've got this kind of stereotype of the community doctor who goes door to door and is always taking care of his patients and nothing's too much trouble and he just fit perfectly into that box.

00:29:28 Speaker_03
So much so that some people were actually thrilled that he was coming to comfort their aged relatives in their dying hours.

00:29:35 Speaker_01
Absolutely. How kind that he would call on them when no one else was around in the middle of the day, and then they died. And how wonderful it was that a shipment of all people, their doctor was there in that moment to comfort them and to be present.

00:29:52 Speaker_01
They didn't die alone. Of course, there was a reason they didn't die alone, which was because he murdered them and watched them die. for reasons that are still unclear and I think will never become clear.

00:30:01 Speaker_01
But yes, that representativeness heuristic is very, very powerful. We should take a break. And I think we are going to talk about one final theme in Tolkien and how that is reflected in some of my favourite ideas from Cautionary Tales.

00:30:17 Speaker_01
We'll do that after the break. We're back. I'm Tim Harford. I'm here in the studio with producer Alice Fiennes. We are being sponsored this week by Amazon Prime's series, The Rings of Power.

00:30:40 Speaker_01
And we're having a cautionary conversation about what cautionary tales spring to mind when you watch this epic series set in Tolkien's Middle Earth. Alice, what sprung to your mind?

00:30:54 Speaker_03
This isn't strictly a cautionary tale, but something we see throughout the series is this idea that evil is somehow contagious. So by touching darkness, you will be changed. That happens to Gladriel.

00:31:11 Speaker_03
There's kind of a sense in which she's changed in ways she can't quite convey to others. And in that sense, knowing evil cuts you off from other people. So she says, you have not seen what I've seen.

00:31:22 Speaker_03
And she knows others believe evil infects you as well. So you mentioned earlier this idea of the same winds that seek to blow out a fire may also cause it spread, which is an interesting problem.

00:31:33 Speaker_01
Yes.

00:31:34 Speaker_03
Because it raises a very practical issue, which is how do you deal with evil? You know, it's not a single cautionary tale, but many of our cautionary tales look at cruelty and look at where cruelty comes from and also how do we respond to it.

00:31:47 Speaker_01
Yes, and how the elves want to respond to it is to bury their heads in the sand. They are very keen at the beginning of this season to conclude that basically evil has been permanently banished. Sauron has gone forever.

00:32:02 Speaker_01
Galadriel is a problem because Galadriel keeps insisting that evil has not been vanquished and Sauron has not gone and in the end she gets blamed not just for causing a fuss but maybe she is the source of evil in making such a fuss.

00:32:16 Speaker_03
She's somehow perpetuating it.

00:32:18 Speaker_01
Absolutely, because of the anger that lives inside her. This denial, it reminded me of a couple of Cautionary Tales episodes.

00:32:25 Speaker_01
So one fairly recent episode, How Britain Ignored the Mother of All Secrets, which was this extraordinary story about how during the Second World War, the British were told

00:32:36 Speaker_01
In some detail, by an incredible piece of espionage, brave intelligence leak, they were told that the Germans had defensive radar.

00:32:45 Speaker_01
And therefore, if the British flew sorties over Germany, the Germans would see them coming and would shoot them down as a very, very important piece of information. and they just would not believe it.

00:32:56 Speaker_01
They see photographs of the radar equipment, but they're even told, before the war, they're told by a German officer. He's on a kind of like a, I don't know, it's like a student exchange kind of thing.

00:33:06 Speaker_01
He shows up and he's like, how are you chaps getting on with radar? We know you're making progress and we're making progress too. In fact, we think we're ahead of you. And that astonishing conversational tidbit just gets lost.

00:33:18 Speaker_01
So there's a huge amount of wishful thinking, I think, because the British want to believe that the Germans don't have this technology. They want to believe they're superior. They want to believe that their technology is superior.

00:33:30 Speaker_01
And they want to believe that it would be bad if the Germans had this. So they don't want to believe it's true. And that denial continues for well over a year after they should have realized. And yeah, and the elves are in the same denial.

00:33:43 Speaker_01
They're always willing to rationalize away indications that Sauron maybe has returned.

00:33:48 Speaker_03
So however we're going to confront evil, it seems that acknowledging it's there is the first step.

00:33:54 Speaker_01
Very, very important. Really helpful to know what you're facing. And I mean, there's another example of this, and this maybe gives you more sympathy for the Elf King's position, which is our pandemic.

00:34:05 Speaker_01
episode, that turned to Pascagoula, which is all about disasters that are predictable and predicted. So we compare and contrast the spread of COVID with Hurricane Katrina. Everyone knew that New Orleans was vulnerable.

00:34:22 Speaker_01
Hurricanes would come over from time to time. Just a matter of time, people knew there were weaknesses in levees. Over and over again, people were told something bad could happen.

00:34:33 Speaker_01
And they just didn't want to believe it because the costs of preparedness were so great. And in fact, in the Rings of Power, we see that the elves have been prepared for centuries.

00:34:44 Speaker_01
They have standing garrisons looking over the humans in case the bad guys come back. And ironically, they abandon them just before they're needed.

00:34:52 Speaker_01
But the fact that those garrisons are there and there's a real cost to maintaining them, there's a cost to being prepared. And so you have some sympathy with people who go, you know what, maybe this is just a waste of money.

00:35:02 Speaker_01
Maybe this bad thing is never going to happen.

00:35:06 Speaker_03
And then, as we've discussed, sometimes evil is hiding in plain sight and is unpredictable. It's not something we can totally prepare for.

00:35:16 Speaker_01
No, absolutely. So you know that pandemics are a risk, but you don't know what kind of pandemic, and you don't know when. You know that hurricanes are a risk or earthquakes, but you don't know when.

00:35:27 Speaker_01
You know there are some places they might strike and some places they're unlikely to. And then, of course, there are things that we just didn't see coming at all.

00:35:33 Speaker_01
So some of the genocides that the world has suffered since the end of the Second World War, some of them have become infamous. Some of them, I think, are barely acknowledged. Very hard to see any of them coming in advance.

00:35:45 Speaker_03
So what about you, Tim? What springs to mind for you in Rings of Power?

00:35:48 Speaker_01
I think a really important theme in this series and in Tolkien in general is the idea that power corrupts. So there's this sword that is a corrupting influence. The rings are, of course, a corrupting influence.

00:36:07 Speaker_01
The Palantiri, these seeing stones, are a corrupting influence. And It's always tempting to use them. The elves attempted to use the rings. The humans attempted to use the sword. The Numenoreans are a human civilization, very high human civilization.

00:36:25 Speaker_01
They have a Palantir. They want to look at the Palantir and use it to see the future, use it to see things far off. And everybody is always convincing themselves that it'll be for the best, that I won't lose control of these things. It's convenient.

00:36:40 Speaker_01
Yeah, I'm a good person and I'm going to use this for good ends and with good intentions and therefore good will result. And good does not result over and over again in Tolkien. Evil results. The inherent power of the object corrupts the user.

00:36:58 Speaker_01
And this really reminded me of a cautionary tale that I have not yet written, but I will write because I think it's an amazing story. And that is the tale of Herman Hollerith.

00:37:09 Speaker_03
Do you know who Herman Hollerith is? I know nothing about Herman Hollerith. Please tell me.

00:37:12 Speaker_01
Herman Hollerith was an engineer, an American engineer, late 1800s, who designed the machine that became known for obvious reasons as the Hollerith machine. And the Hollerith machine was a kind of proto-computer.

00:37:27 Speaker_01
he was trying to solve the problem for the US census, which is that you have the census every 10 years, and then you go and you ask loads and loads of households, you ask every household in the country lots of questions, and then you need to kind of organize all the answers and analyze the answers.

00:37:42 Speaker_01
And it was taking seven or eight years to put together the analysis of the answers. By the time the 1890 census was being conducted, they still would not have finished analyzing the 1880 census, the previous census.

00:37:54 Speaker_03
So I'm going to guess Hollerith is about to make this process much more efficient.

00:37:58 Speaker_01
There's a race. There is a race between man and machine. And there are various human teams. The censors say, look, we're going to have a competition. Somebody needs to figure out how to analyze the census results more quickly.

00:38:08 Speaker_01
Because they're also asking more and more complicated questions. So they're being more and more ambitious. It gets more and more difficult.

00:38:14 Speaker_01
And so there are various human teams involving, you know, colored cards and various systems and all kinds of clever kind of organizational devices, but it's all a bit Filofax-y. And then there's Hollerith's machine.

00:38:27 Speaker_01
And Hollerith's machine looks like an upright piano, and it operates using punch cards. So you've got these stiff cards with holes in them. And the machine has these spring-loaded pins that dip into little cups of mercury.

00:38:40 Speaker_01
And so you put the punch card in, and the pins come down, and those that hit a hole go through the hole and into the cup of mercury, and they complete a circuit. And those that don't hit a hole are stopped by the stiff cardboard.

00:38:52 Speaker_01
And that's fundamentally how the machine worked. And the operator of the machine was like, this is like the voice of God producing this amazing insight. Clearly, he was just high on mercury fumes.

00:39:03 Speaker_01
But the HoloEarth machine just destroyed the human teams. It wasn't even close. And so the Census Bureau adopted the HoloEarth machine. And they all lived happily ever after.

00:39:12 Speaker_03
That sounds like a cautionary tale.

00:39:14 Speaker_01
Yes, because Hollerith retired, his company turned into IBM, and well a couple of things happened. One thing is that IBM Germany became quite close with the Nazi regime, who were very interested in buying Hollerith machines.

00:39:29 Speaker_03
I see where this is going.

00:39:30 Speaker_01
Well, I mean, it is disputed exactly how important the machine was to the Nazi project of genocide. And we're perfectly capable of murdering enormous quantities of people without a machine to count them.

00:39:42 Speaker_01
But I mean, the German Census Bureau was utterly co-opted by the Nazi state. And they were very, very interested in trying to identify who was Jewish and who was not. And so having these machines be so powerful, it kind of helped.

00:39:58 Speaker_03
It may have expedited the process.

00:40:00 Speaker_01
It may have expedited the process and also the US Census Bureau for decades denied that it had helped the administration find US citizens of Japanese descent.

00:40:14 Speaker_01
for decades and decades and decades said, you know, the Census Bureau stands alone and is separate and is independent and does not do this kind of thing. We're just here to count the people.

00:40:24 Speaker_01
And then in 2006, Margo Anderson, historian, found the smoking gun that, in fact, the Census Bureau had told the Roosevelt administration exactly where all the Japanese Americans were living.

00:40:38 Speaker_01
And they were all, of course, shipped off to internment camps.

00:40:41 Speaker_01
So again, you see this machine, this very powerful machine, designed for good, supposed to be used for good, but then once you have that power, are you really going to resist the temptation?

00:40:53 Speaker_03
Here's the thing, though. You can't always tell what's going to happen to an invention. I'm thinking of our episode, The Hero Who Wrote His Segway Off a Cliff.

00:41:02 Speaker_03
Jimmy Heselden invents the Hesco Gabions, these concertinas for shoring up coastlines to manage flood risks. Ultimately, they're used in places like Kosovo and Iraq, filled with sand to protect people from bomb blasts.

00:41:19 Speaker_03
Now, you could argue that they are co-opted as instruments of war, I suppose. But you can't tell how an invention will travel once you invent it. Maybe it can also do good.

00:41:29 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah.

00:41:30 Speaker_03
Not just evil. So what's the answer?

00:41:33 Speaker_01
Well, I think the answer for Tolkien, Tolkien was quite conservative in his writings. I think the answer for Tolkien is that you shouldn't take the risk. And in general, technology is shown as being not a progressive force.

00:41:47 Speaker_01
It's a potentially destructive force. So whenever you have new technology, it could potentially be used for evil, and therefore people will be tempted to use it for evil, and most people are not strong enough to resist that temptation.

00:41:59 Speaker_01
There are a couple of exceptions, but they're very, very minor exceptions. They're the exceptions that I think serve to highlight the rule in Tolkien. There's another interesting parallel along these lines.

00:42:09 Speaker_01
I mean, Tolkien strongly rejected the idea that Lord of the Rings was an allegory. He hated the idea that the One Ring, for example, was really the atomic bomb.

00:42:18 Speaker_01
He once wrote, if Lord of the Rings was an allegory, the elves would have used the One Ring immediately, which, of course, I guess is true because the allies use the atomic bomb.

00:42:26 Speaker_03
But there are allegories and then there's drawing on ideas which are in the zeitgeist at the time, right?

00:42:32 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think it's as a watcher of the Rings of Power, it is hard not to be tempted by that parallel. And in particular, the character of Celebrimbor, the great Elf Smith as a kind of Oppenheimer figure, or a Von Braun figure.

00:42:46 Speaker_01
And Herman Hollerith, you see these characters, these brilliant creators who cause all kinds of trouble for the world. They definitely have resonances in the Rings of Power.

00:43:00 Speaker_03
Tim, this has been very fun and very interesting, but if I'm honest, also a bit of a downer. Do you think there is hope that things will get better in Series 2 of Rings of Power?

00:43:11 Speaker_01
I'm sure there will be ups and downs in series two, as there always are. But I was reflecting on this. I think Tolkien is a very, he's really a soulmate of cautionary tales. And because Tolkien, he was fascinated by fairy stories.

00:43:30 Speaker_01
He was the person who brought really Beowulf to prominence. Beowulf is not a story with a happy ending. A lot of fairy tales don't actually have happy endings. A lot of cautionary tales don't have happy endings.

00:43:41 Speaker_01
And a lot of Tolkien stories are about, yes, evil is defeated, but it comes back and often comes back stronger. There is a sense in Tolkien of often of diminishment, of loss, of death.

00:43:54 Speaker_01
And he wants us to look at that and reflect on it and learn from it. And in Cautionary Tales, we want people to look at diminishment and loss and death and to learn from it.

00:44:05 Speaker_01
So I don't want to paint too close a parallel, but there's definitely... What you're saying is you are basically Tolkien.

00:44:12 Speaker_03
Is that what you're telling me?

00:44:14 Speaker_01
Well, all I'm saying is that Tolkien died September 1973. I was born September 1973. I've often reflected on this fact. I'm speechless, absolutely speechless. The sheer gall of that. There are no words. There are no words. Big fan. I love watching this.

00:44:35 Speaker_01
I really did love watching this and I'm looking forward to season two. And just a reminder, you can watch season two of The Rings of Power on Amazon Prime starting August the 29th. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright.

00:44:56 Speaker_01
It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts.

00:45:06 Speaker_01
It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutteridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders, and Rufus Wright.

00:45:13 Speaker_01
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohen, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.

00:45:28 Speaker_01
It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends.

00:45:39 Speaker_01
And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm. Attention parents and grandparents. Are you searching for the perfect gift for your kids this holiday season?

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