We Acquired a Tolkien Brick — Intentionally Blank Ep. 271

Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells return to Intentionally Blank in high spirits after their summer travels across the pond. With whimsy and gusto, they spin tales of their time in the land of chips and iceless drinks. Bear witness to the many marvels and gifts bestowed to them there and the gratitude with which the authors esteem them. All that and more on this episode of Intentionally Blank!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Mr. Wells, I am just finishing the tip-in pages for the UK edition of Fires of December. So people will be a little bit done. They're signed copies. That is all the UK editions. Now here's the US editions. I've actually signed some of these last time, I think.

SPEAKER_02 0:23

These are fun to watch you sign because instead of like a whole four-page signature kind of thing, it's just one sheet or is it two sheets? Nope, just one. Yeah. So you go through the pile slower because Yeah, there's a lot of sheets in these.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

These are also the cool ones that'll be numbered. Yep, these will be numbered. These ones are in color. The US ones are. Yep. With a cool little stamp.

SPEAKER_04 0:43

Yay.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Obligatory go pre-order fires of December. Go pre-order, fires of December. Yep. It's real good. Yay. Okay. So do you want a food heist? I do want a food heist. In fact, I told you, Dan, we should have a food heist.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

And then you went to find this one. Correct. This is one that several people, well, like three people have sent me because it is pretty recent. So somebody stole. Well, the crime is not recent, but the conviction of this. So a former soldier in Texas, Fort Bliss, Texas, stole 115,200 MREs. I was hoping it was going to be MREs. Yeah. Uh-huh. That is over a million dollars worth of REs. MREs. MRE is meals ready to eat. They are the kind of rations that you give to soldiers in the field when you don't have a mess hall or something to feed them. This is what they eat when they're out in the woods.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Packed with a ton of calories on purpose. Scar claims they also have certain foods chosen specifically. Let's see how we can say this in a family-friendly way, to make it so that the soldiers don't have to worry about using the restroom as often as they might have before. He is convinced that's in there on purpose. To keep them focused on the That's good.

SPEAKER_02 2:12

Yes. I mean, if I'm going to be in the middle of the desert, hiding, I would rather be constipated than have diarrhea. Yes. And that is, I think, the idea. Yeah. This article makes sure to tell us that uh the Pentagon last year announced that they were testing new flavors of MRE such as Thai curry chicken. And Donald just broke an expensive piece of audio video equipment. What was it that you're still clock? It's the clock. Oh, the clock. Okay. Well, fine. We have a little magnetic clock. And well, we used to.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

No, it's fine.

SPEAKER_02 2:54

Then why isn't hanging back up on the clock? Because I'm fixing. Hold on. Um it's also amusing to me that this website that somebody sent me, the article links directly to a different article that just talks about the worst MREs, which are apparently veggie burger and beef enchilada.

SPEAKER_00 3:13

Okay. I feel like there's got to be a good name for Mr. E. The you know, the his good nickname. We know his name, but you know, if we're gonna give him a nickname, you know, Mr. Eater for MRE. Well, I know that this is probably a wise theft because they like to sell these at Army surplus stores. Yeah. In fact, I would not be surprised if they make extra to sell there just because they're great for backpacking, right? Yeah, they're good for food stores.

SPEAKER_02 3:44

We would take them on all the backpacking trips when I was in Scouts. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:48

So these are items he could definitely sell. We had them in Korea. The missionaries had them as their emergency food in case of disaster because you could buy them at the military surplus stores there and whatnot. And so we had to rotate them every year. And I didn't like them. I never ate them. But I had several missionaries who are with me who loved the MREs and just ate them all the time.

SPEAKER_02 4:17

I can understand if you're in Korea and your options are delicious Korean food or this brick of whatever, this veggie burger in a bag.

SPEAKER_00 4:29

Couldn't believe that they would like he loved the spaghetti. And I'm like, dude, we can go get kimch chiga. That's wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 4:36

Well, you know, people miss the flavors they're familiar with. Yeah. Can you guess what the best MREs are?

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Best MRE according to that article. I mean, probably one of the pastas. So is it the spaghetti? It is Chili Mac. Chili Mac, okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:52

Yeah, and then the other one is chicken fajita. The ones that I remember most from the 50-mile hike I did when I was 12 are chicken a la king. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:04

Well, we're speaking about food. I have a bunch of gifts here, and there is this is from my trip to London. Okay. Someone brought me chocolate from Brussels. Ooh. Yes. So we're gonna eat right now.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

We're gonna we're gonna have some of this chocolate from Brussels. And you've confirmed these are not, you know, fake Kit Kats.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

Not fake kick cats. So let's see. That's true.

SPEAKER_02 5:25

Last time we ate chocolate on this show, it was not a pleasant experience.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

This is a petite praline. I'm gonna keep that.

SPEAKER_02 5:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

I'm gonna give you this chocolate. Do you do you like chocolate? I like chocolate.

SPEAKER_02 5:36

I love chocolate.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

Ben doesn't like chocolate, does he?

SPEAKER_02 5:39

I don't know. That sounds like a Ben thing, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 5:41

I think he I think he hates chocolate and ice cream. I remember him Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:45

I seem actually to remember him saying that he hates people who like chocolate. Oh yeah. What? So this is like a little brick of fudge. Yep. Oh, except it has Marza pen inside.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

That's pretty good. Oh, mine is actually. I knew I would like that one though.

SPEAKER_02 6:04

So uh if any of you get a chocolate fingerprinted signed copy of Fires of December, you know exactly when it was signed.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

I I I got I cleaned my finger well enough. So thank you for the chocolate person who gave it to us. I also have someone give me their self-published book uh and the author here.

SPEAKER_02 6:30

Tenants. Everyone go buy it.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

So nice people giving me nice stuff. I realized that we talked a lot about England and things, but I didn't talk about my visit to Oxford.

SPEAKER_02 6:42

Yeah. Let's talk about Oxford because I was very jealous that you got to go and speak at Oxford.

SPEAKER_00 6:47

I got to go speak at Oxford. And number one, speaking at Oxford is very cool. Lecturing on Professor Tolkien at Pembroke College at Oxford is just incredible. One of the highlights of my professional career, definitely. That's awesome. But uh there are some fun things about it. First off, I didn't know this before I went there, and maybe I should have. So in the US, you will pick a major at a university. You'll go to the college that focuses on that. For instance, we were in the College of Humanities. Oxford is a collection of a bunch of colleges that each have all the disciplines. Oh, I didn't know that either. Yeah. It's so weird. If you want to study humanities, you can go to Pembroke or many of the other colleges, and they each have a humanities section thing with their own personalized curriculum. Well, and the curriculum is at Oxford in particular is very odd. Their average classroom size is two and a half. Oh, what? Why? Yes, even for undergraduates. Okay. So you will pick a topic and there will be three of you studying with a professor that topic for the semester. And that's it. Okay. As I understand. Now, maybe I misunderstood. Someone at Oxford can tell me maybe I was hearing about graduate studies and I applied it to undergraduate. But I do know that it's the case that just very foreign to us where you could study linguistics at any of these colleges. In fact, Tolkien moved from one to the other because he felt that one of them was a little too stuffy for him. And he moved to a different one at Oxford. So so yeah. But anyway, that was that was oddity number one. Not a lot of things that were super odd, but I did get to, and I didn't even talk about this. They rolled out the red carpet, which in this case was Tolkien's original drawings. Oh my. They took at the library there, the Bodleian, they got out Tolkien's drawings that they have for The Hobbit and for Lord of the Rings, and they are amazing.

SPEAKER_02 8:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:57

And you've seen some of these. You've probably seen the maps.

SPEAKER_02 8:59

He did a lot of his own illustrations. He did maps, he drew Gollum, he did things like that.

SPEAKER_00 9:05

But there's a picture of Bilbo with the Eagles that I think I've seen before. That was really awesome. And did I tell you that in their collection they have a sketch of Helms Deep that I had never seen before? Okay. The sketch of Helm's Deep is on the back of a student paper. He was grading papers over the summer, and during that time, you didn't get your paper back. The professor read it, graded it, gave you a grade, and didn't give you your paper back. That was just how it worked. And so there was space on the back of this paper, and you can see the student's writing takes up half the page and then ends. And he's like, Well, shame to waste this paper. Yeah. And he did a sketch of Helm's Deep as he was trying to figure out where all the things were in Helm's Deep, and they have that. Like it's a sketch for himself to figure out the geography of Helm's Deep.

SPEAKER_02 10:00

Really incredible. That's really neat. It makes me wonder like if you were submitting a high-level paper, did you just type up two copies of it so that if it was good, you could try to publish it or something?

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Maybe. This felt like an undergraduate sort of thing, like not a graduate paper. Yeah. But I don't know for sure. So maybe we can get context on that.

SPEAKER_04 10:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

So that was one whole side was some of Tolkien's notes, some manuscripts that he gotten back from the publisher where he was adding liner notes to, you know, tell them, no, you don't get to edit Professor Tolkien and things like that. And his drawings. And then on the other side of the table where they took me was Mary Shelley artifacts. Oh. Which I know you have a deep love of Mary Shelley. Absolutely. So I'm actually more jealous of that than of the Tolkien's. I thought that you might be. They had Mary Shelley's hair. Oh my. The one that her husband, Percy Shelley, wore around his neck in a locket. And they had Percy Shelley's hair that she wore in a locket around her neck. So cool. Doesn't that feel so much like the Shelley's? Oh yeah. So, so amusingly them to have the hair. Mary emo. Yeah. It's just so great. And they have this there, and I'm like, this is like a religious relic. You have a piece of Mary Shelley right here. And I'm like, yep. And then they had Mary Shelley's diary open to a page where she talked about working on her novel. That's awesome. Didn't call it by name, she just said my novel. And then they had the handwritten manuscript of uh Frankenstein next to it. Wow. So I'm so jealous. Yeah. So that was that was the Bodleian, that was part of the Bodleian. There's all sorts of things we saw there, but I thought that would be the parts that you were most jealous of.

SPEAKER_02 11:46

Very much so. I mean, those two in particular, obviously not the first fantasy we'd ever gotten, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Right. I I talked about it in my essay. We have trouble figuring out where the first fantasy is. There's a really good contender, early 1800s, the first secondary world fantasy that I haven't seen anybody else give me. Like I went and read it, and it feels very like the first I've seen.

SPEAKER_02 12:12

But yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

But you know.

SPEAKER_02 12:14

But founder of epic fantasy as a genre. Yeah. Founder of epic fantasy as a genre and the woman who essentially created science fiction.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:24

It's oh just the sheer inventiveness to say, you know what, I'm not content to just write a book. I am also going to combine certain elements in certain ways and create a thing no one in the world has ever seen before.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

It's really neat that they have that there. And then you can also go down to Cambridge, which I didn't do, but they've got, you know, Newton was one of theirs. The lore in history, like we're talking about 1800s and things. I asked them, how old is Oxford? And they're like, well, it depends. The first classes that we know were taught on this site were 1080, only a few years after the Norman invasion.

unknown 13:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

So by at least one metric. And there's pretty good evidence there was a school there as much as 200 years earlier. By some metrics, Oxford is approaching its thousandth year anniversary, but it could be even older. Now, this was a religious college at that point. That's what schools were in 1080. But that's yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

To give our audience context for how old Oxford is, it was constructed more or less at the same time that Tenochtitlan, the Mexico City Aztec pyramids were constructed. Yep. And we think of those as, you know, unbelievably old because that civilization has fallen. And we think of Oxford as just a current thing because it's still in service. But yeah, they were built around the same time.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

There was at the Bodleian, they had a library that still had one of the original collections of books that they got. So there was a it has a fraught history in that the very first collection they got was pre-Reformation. Oh and then the Reformation happened, and anything that was associated with Catholicism, and most of the books were written by Catholics and, you know, or priests or things like that or copied by them, they wanted to burn. And so very few of those books survived that period. And that was that was only like, you know, the library, it was only a few decades before that they'd done this, maybe as much as 100 years. But then soon after they got back those and they got their first really big good collection donated by a rich dude. I think that is Bodley and himself, 1600s. And they still have all those books on the original shelves. Wow. And you can still check them out.

unknown 14:55

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

In fact, they're not worried about like acid on fingers and stuff. So apparently, acid on fingers is not as bad for books as we think. Okay. Especially if they're vellum, I guess. But you know, to get those books, you can't just walk up and pick them up.

SPEAKER_02 15:11

They actually are alarmed. It still is a special collection that you need special permission.

SPEAKER_00 15:16

But they're on display. You walk down the main hall that was built the first part, and that was the library, and they're all there on the shelves. And they're these big, thick tomes. And back in the day, to read them, you had to sit where the tome was on the shelf because they all had a chain to the wall right there. You couldn't take the book. In fact, you couldn't take it to a reading table. You sat, there's a bench, like not even a comfortable bench, there's not even a real bench, like a leaning bench type thing. Oh wow. Where you would sit and you clank, pull your book to where it could, and then read it there, and then put it back where it was locked.

SPEAKER_02 15:57

That's great. It's great. That's that's what I'm gonna do with all my books. Yeah. Chain them to the wall. Chain them to the wall.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

So that was really cool. Oxford is Hogwarts. Uh a lot of Harry Potter was filmed on location there. So the dining halls, like there are dining halls you walk in, you're like, oh, I've seen this on the screen many times. Very, very cool.

SPEAKER_02 16:20

I had a friend from high school who we graduated, I lost track of him, and then many years later we ended up working as writers for the same company. And so I stayed in touch with him for a while. And eventually he moved his family to Oxford and attended Pembroke College. Oh, cool. And so we went over and spent Easter weekend with them, actually. This is why we lived in Germany. And he, you know, took me inside. Apparently, Professor Xavier of the X-Men also went to Oxford to Pembroke. Pembroke.

SPEAKER_00 16:54

So yeah. And they were very proud of that. So I'm going to show a nice fan from Romania brought me a Romanian postcard with a nice letter on the back, which I have read, along with this little pamphlet of cool Romanian sites that might make for good inspirations for fantasy stories. And so they brought this along to me and asked me to visit Romania someday. Romania looks very, very cool, so I would like to do that. You should. I definitely should. And this was cool. Someone brought me a hand-carved blade? Shard blade made out of wood. Neat. Yeah. Sounds carved. Hand carved shard blade.

SPEAKER_02 17:37

That's great. What is the thing with wings?

SPEAKER_00 17:40

Oh, the wings. You gotta see. So these are glory spren. Oh. But they're the the Shadesmar version. There was a person they have clips on them. They had them all around themselves for their cosplay. And they brought me a few 3D printed glory sprents. So you can clip these around at some point if you want to. Yeah. That's cool. So more fun stories from Oxford. Okay. A number of years back. Not that many years. We're not talking centuries back. America, a college, I believe that they have a connection with, because there's a bunch of colleges that share, sent to Pembroke a giant bust of George Washington. Okay. Giant metal bust of George Washington, about maybe five feet high, probably more like four feet high. So that's big. Yeah. Significant bust. Like that's almost as big as he was in real life. Yes. Yes. Of George Washington. And Pembroke, they say we they weren't sure what to do with a bust of the traitor George Washington. They unrespected and understood the uh significance to the Yanks, but it's like, why would you send us a giant bust of the guy whose most famous attribute is that he betrayed us? So they put him in the garden facing the wall. That is awesome. And multiple people, when I was there, are like, oh, oh, you need to know that we turned George around. So maybe a year or two ago, it was pretty recent. I had four different people say, we turned George around. It's all right.

SPEAKER_02 19:11

Don't worry. Don't worry. And as if we would be grossly offended.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

One of my guides said, we put him in timeout for a few years for what he did. But we do like the Yanks. So we turned him around. And he's in one of their little gardens off the side, and there's a giant bust of George Washington. See?

SPEAKER_02 19:31

Sending it to a university feels like this is an important historical figure, and we want you to have this thing. Yes. If they had sent a four-foot bust of George Washington to like Buckingham Palace, that would be a middle finger, you know?

SPEAKER_00 19:49

No, I I fully understand the hey, we have a shared heritage. This famous person, the one of the most famous people from America, was from the UK. And yeah, you know, he rebelled against the king, but you guys kind of did too eventually. So we're we're good. So they have that. They also have a it's not a statue, it's more like a relief, but it's like imagine a giant gravestone, that sort of shape, except it's bronze and it has Tolkien on it. Oh. So it's not his gravestone, it's not meant to look like a gravestone, but it's like I don't know what to call it of a statue or relief, because it's it's it could be freestanding, but it's a relief. Interesting. An homage. It's outside his old office. And it's very cool. It's a good likeness. I think they said it was created and paid for by one of his scions, one of his descendants. And it's there, and the story about that is his nose is very shiny because people rub his nose for good luck before tests. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

So I have a pedantic question. Okay. Let's hear it. When do you hit statue level? When have you earned the right, if you will, to become a statue? To become a statue? Yes. When have you hit statue level?

SPEAKER_02 21:02

Okay, so there is a soccer player. Okay. Ronaldo. European. No, Zidane. Okay, because the Ronaldo statue is something else. The Ronaldo statue is wild. Yes. But he earned that because he, you know, plays soccer really well. Yes. Zidane, who to be fair, was also a very good soccer player. There is a very large statue of him, I think in Dubai, of his infamous headbutt. His final game as a professional player, he got so mad at somebody because they, you know, gave him a pretty grave insult, to be fair, that he just headbutted them. I've seen that video so hard, just caved the guy's chest in, and there's a statue of the headbutt. So, what does it take to get a statue?

SPEAKER_00 21:51

You have to intrigue a sculptor. I was gonna say earning a statue probably should mean that you've passed away. But I do think that. Like statues like to US presidents at their like presidential library makes a lot of sense, even if they're living. And so I guess you don't have to, but I think you have to have finished the thing that you did. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, he is retired. That's statue.

SPEAKER_02 22:20

So he gets a statue.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

The U.S. president is, you know, done their thing for their four or eight years. Statue. All right. We hope it stays to eight years. Yes, yes. But I think for most people, you need to have finished the thing or you need to have passed away. I do not want any statues of me.

SPEAKER_01 22:38

I was gonna say, yeah, do either of you want a statue? Brandon's a no.

SPEAKER_00 22:42

Like if I pass away when I pass away and they want to put a statue somewhere, like, you know, that's cool. I'm cool with that. Okay. Right. But while I'm alive, it feels weird. Okay. Because I haven't finished the thing that I'm doing. Maybe if you retire, an author who retires and hasn't written for a long time, statue would be appropriate. Then you can do a statue.

SPEAKER_02 23:01

Yeah. I want a statue of me and a statue of Dawn standing like the Argonath in Middle Earth outside of my front door of my house. And for my descendants to live in it for all time.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

Of course you do. I did visit both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis's graves while I was there. Cool. They're both in, yeah, as you would hope, very quiet, serene locations, both in graveyards. So C. S. Lewis's grave is at his parish church that he all went to every week, which I would think would be really intimidating to have C. S. Lewis, the great theologian in your congregation. Yeah. That's gotta have been something.

SPEAKER_02 23:43

Intimidating, but also you kind of gotta feel good, right? Yeah. Like, ah, if C. S. Lewis is going here, I picked the right thing. He's not leaving. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:50

So I must be doing something right. Yeah. Yeah. You could definitely do worse than be wherever C.S. Lewis was. Yeah. Have you been to Westminster Abbey?

SPEAKER_02 24:00

I have not. That is arguably my favorite thing that I visited tourist-wise in England. Artists Corner, where, you know, not every artist is buried there, but they have memorials for several of them. Yeah. And you just kind of walk through and you're like, oh, this person? Oh, this person? It is it's a church, so it's already holy grounds.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 24:24

But from my perspective as an artist, Artist's Corner is the holiest of the grounds there. It's just an unbelievable sense of history and moment walking through it.

SPEAKER_00 24:37

It was really cool to see what people left, like, particularly Tolkien's grave. Because Tolkien's grave had all kinds of letters and fan art and fan crafts that people had made and brought. And then a whole lot of coins. Do you know about this? No. It's a military thing. Did I challenge coins? Nope. So I looked it up online and there are varying accounts. But basically, if you visit a grave and you served with this person, you're supposed to live like, you know, a quarter or a shilling or whatever, right? And the level you leave indicates how close you were to them. It's some sort of thing. I would imagine that because Tolkien he served in World War I, I'm going to guess that these people visiting were not people who served with him. And so it can't follow what it was saying online, but maybe if you served in the same branch, you leave a certain thing if you or whatnot.

SPEAKER_02 25:32

Or battalion. Or even just homage to military men. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

That's what I took it as. Yeah. That they were they were leaving the coins. So that was that was really cool to see.

SPEAKER_02 25:42

I I don't think I've told you this. I received last week my favorite fan letter that I've ever gotten. Wow. It was from it's actually in my office if I want to send a runner to go get it. Donald, do you want to go get it? I've got my red and black dragon steel bag on the chairs. Yep. There's an envelope inside.

SPEAKER_00 26:03

While he's doing that, we'll just share some more of these things that people sent to us. So this looks like a food item. Oh, yep. This is Oh man. Kit. These look like they must be Japanese Kit Kats. That's right. I remember the person coming and bringing us some Japanese. A variety of Japanese Kit Kats. They're not all Kit Kats, I don't think. But they are definitely Japanese candies because they had listened to the podcast and we had talked about Kit Kats and they brought us some Kit Kats. I've got one for you too if you want one. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 26:37

When you said you had Kit Kats, I was definitely hoping that they were British.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:41

Because I want to be able to compare them to the other ones we eat to see if they have the same terrible flavor. Oh, these are like matcha ones. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

Ooh. Huh. It's an actual Kit Kat.

SPEAKER_02 26:52

Yeah. That's great. A little bit melted, but still good. Still good. Okay. So this comes from Tycho, who is, judging by the handwriting, five, six years old. Okay. Loved Dragon Planet, wants me to write more, but left me this incredible piece of art where he just drew the screen of his mom's phone showing Dragon Planet on Audible, I assume. Wow. And it has the library and the arrow, and it has the little timer at the bottom. Apparently, he listens on 1.25 speed. This just fills me with so much joy, you have no idea. So yeah. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 27:39

Adorable.

SPEAKER_00 27:41

Well, I have some last things here. We have Pembroke gave me a mug. Cool. I have an official Pembroke mug. And I have a Tolkien. Let's hold this up here. This is Tolkien's drawing of Smaug on a little tote. Did he color it himself? I believe that the one I saw had some coloring. I don't think it was this vibrant.

SPEAKER_04 28:03

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

But someone online can tell us. I think it did have coloring. In fact, I'm almost 100% certain. That's cool. And I have this little cool mug that somebody gave me that is um from let's see. Timisora? Timisoara. Can you look up this place and see where it came from? Because I bet this might be this might be the Romanians. Again, I want to credit it to the right people. Because I was in Europe and I hadn't been there for a while. We got a lot of people from all around. The Portuguese, as we showed you, and then a lot of Germans, uh a lot of people from Romania. And you were correct. This is in fact from Romania. Part of the Romanian gift set. Yep. So maybe that can go up on our real little relic shelf for a little bit. That is a very cute little. It's like a mug shot glass hybrid for those who aren't benefiting from the a shot mug? Shot mug. Shot mug. But yeah. So anyway, if you get invited to speak at Oxford, I recommend doing it. They treat you really well.

SPEAKER_02 29:08

Just on the off chance that anybody's gonna be able to do it.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

I never thought I would be invited to speak at Oxford. And you can go watch the speech, by the way.

SPEAKER_01 29:16

It is up on their channel. You'll see it on ours. We're collaborated with it. Give me the elevator pitch for what you talked about.

SPEAKER_00 29:23

I talked about Tolkien, the innovations he came up with that together create epic fantasy. So the idea is that no one thing, and people get too kind of hyperfixated on was it the first fantasy? Was it the first this? My theme was look, he wasn't the first person to create a secondary world. He wasn't the first person to put ephemera in his books. But it is the combination and alchemy of all these things that created a subgenre, and I want to talk about why those were all important for the subgenre epic fantasy and what we can learn from it to be better writers. That's awesome. So that's great. It is academic. It's an hour-long, you know, speech and QA. I'm not trying to be as entertaining as I am when I give like my Nexus speeches and things like that. I'm not a full-on scholar. It's not like you should expect that this is, you know, but it's it's got a little scholarly rigor to it. I did send it to the people who edit the Tolkien review in the US and got all of their feedback, which I incorporated and whatnot. So I did a little bit of due diligence to try and push it toward being a true academic paper, but it's, you know, I'm still a layman.

SPEAKER_02 30:32

But so you could feel a little bit like one of the team instead of just I'm the monkey they brought in to dance.

SPEAKER_00 30:39

Right. That's awesome. But this lecture series was actually started by grad students 15 years ago or something, because they're like, we don't have anything to celebrate the fact that Tolkien taught here. We should have a lecture series with fantasy novelists that come in. And so a lot of cool authors have done very cool speeches. You can watch them all. George has never done it. They would love to get George. So, you know, George, if you're watching, I know he avid fan George Martin. He actually visited Oxford, but didn't tell anybody, didn't do a signing, didn't sign stock. And you know, so they would love to have George.

SPEAKER_02 31:17

I've never been invited, but that's only because I've never really published fantasy before. Yeah. It's all science fiction and horror, and so yeah, that makes sense. How's that, Ben?