Strong Recommend: Elden Ring

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Speaker 4 BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Speaker 1 Hello again. Welcome to Strong Message here.
Strong recommend our cultural recommendations for the summer and a look at their impact on language.

Speaker 1 And Helen, it's your turn to recommend something this week.

Speaker 4 Can I say how much I enjoyed that introduction? It was very mellow.

Speaker 1 It was very jackanory. I know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, I've got a cup of tea and a tannocks caramel wafer as

Speaker 1 we're settling in. It's a bit like when rain stops play at a test match.
We're just

Speaker 1 vibing. Do you read Graeme Green?

Speaker 4 I've read one of them.

Speaker 1 Graham Green, I can't remember what he was.

Speaker 1 Amazing novelist, but he separated his novels into serious novels about morality and the end of the affair. Yes.

Speaker 1 And others, which he called entertainments, which were lighter and frothier, but were still really good. I suppose Our Man in Havana is probably

Speaker 1 one of those. I see this as the entertainments version of a

Speaker 1 long font podcast. We'll get back to the miserable Catholic ones in a bit.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 4 this time I'm going to recommend Elden Ring, which is a Japanese video game that came out a couple of years ago, in which you ride around often on your spectral steed, a torrent, killing a variety of baddies and progressing.

Speaker 4 I mean, honestly, I could try and explain the backstory to you. Some of it was written by George R.R.
Martin. They brought him in to do the lore.

Speaker 4 But I don't think even among fans, it really makes a lot of sense. So someone was the Elden Lord, the ring shattered, you're trying to put the ring back together again.

Speaker 4 But the thing I thought was interesting to talk about is that the place names in it are things like Lainendale, Ashen City, Limgrave, Stormhill, and the bosses have got names like Merg the Omen.

Speaker 4 I thought I was fighting Merg the Omen last night.

Speaker 5 I was in fact fighting Morgot,

Speaker 4 Godric the Grafted, who's got bits of other people sewn onto him. Star Scourge Rodan.
And it just struck me that there was a very Tolkien-esque quality to all of this language.

Speaker 4 And it just, I suddenly thought, it is odd that that is our accepted register for sort of fantasy.

Speaker 1 It's that sort of thing. Something to something post-Charlemagne, the Frankish kings were called things like, yeah,

Speaker 4 oh, yes, like Charles the Bold or Pippin the Hunchback.

Speaker 1 Yes, although you'd never say that to their face, right? Yes,

Speaker 4 Charles the Mad. Yeah, it was not even a bad breath.

Speaker 1 It was even bad breath.

Speaker 1 My liege.

Speaker 4 But I just think, I think that's kind of fascinating that Tolkien was obviously obsessed with creating languages.

Speaker 1 Well, he was a linguist, wasn't he? He was a specialist in Old English.

Speaker 1 But and yes, I think with the Hobbit and the whole Middle-earth epics, he was trying to give Britain a kind of folklore that he felt it hadn't otherwise had.

Speaker 1 I suppose we had Arthur and the Knights, but various other countries have claimed that mythology. Germany had the whole, you know, Waldan and, you know, the values of the...

Speaker 1 Old Norse as well.

Speaker 4 I think that was his special thesis that he wrote on as an undergraduate. But yeah, you're right.

Speaker 4 He did two different elvish languages which seems a bit much amite surely one would have been sufficient but one of which was based on old norse i think the other one was based on a mixture of english and finish which is kind of fascinating to me but he loved coming up with the different grammars and also he had a thing about um he was obsessed with the sounds of words and whether or not you could tell what type of language was by what the kind of phonemes what the word units are within it i'm kind of fascinated also by the fact that Tolkien has ended up being a big favourite of the online tech right, which I know that you are as obsessed with as I am.

Speaker 4 So, here's what you want to hear something really wacky.

Speaker 4 This is from the New York Times. Michiko Catacano wrote a piece about it.
Prime Minister Giorgia Maloney of Italy is famous for her love of Tolkien.

Speaker 4 As a teenager in the 1990s, she attended a hobbit camp attended by members of the country's post-fascist right, which embraced the fantasy series as a way of turning their own political marginisation into an asset.

Speaker 4 By identifying with hobbits, they hoped to override memories of Mussolini and recast themselves with underdogs.

Speaker 4 The young Maloney, dressed up as a hobbit, and this is going to strike fear into your heart, attended sing-alongs with the extremist folk band, Compagna dell'Agnello, or Fellowship of the Ring.

Speaker 4 Have you ever heard a more terrifying phrase than extremist folk band?

Speaker 1 A fascist hobbit count. It's fascist hobbit.
Always going to neo-fascists wearing big feet and pointed ears. Huge hairy feet.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I can see why.

Speaker 1 What is that? But why? Why? I mean,

Speaker 1 and Silicon Valley is full of references to Middle-earth, aren't they? Palantir, Peter Thiel's Thiel's company, Palantir.

Speaker 4 Yeah, which I went and looked up, and that is a seeing stone. Right.

Speaker 4 So Your Big Bad Wizard Who's Not Gandalf, probably by Christopher Lee in the movies. What's he called?

Speaker 1 Oh, not Sauron, but Saruman.

Speaker 4 The voice from beyond

Speaker 1 Saruman, yes.

Speaker 4 Saruman had a seeing stone, which could be corrupted, which, if you run a data analytics company that might also dabble in surveillance, is a pretty on-the-nose name.

Speaker 1 And also, his boss was Sauron, you know, who had all the data of everyone because he had a massive eye. That was all he was.

Speaker 1 He could see everything and everyone and had it all stored in his little box.

Speaker 4 Yes, Teal's investment firm is called Mithril, which is from the Sindarin language, a riff on Welsh. That's a fictional metal, like silver that's strung on the seal.

Speaker 5 His military AI company is called Anduril, after Aragorn's Reforged Sword.

Speaker 4 And J.D. Vance, his protege, named his venture firm Naria Capital after, and this, I take this phrase directly from Wikipedia, Gandalf's Magic Ring of Fire.

Speaker 1 Excellent.

Speaker 4 not a happy phrase in my view but I think you're right

Speaker 4 is military AI a company oh military AI company that's not gonna end well is it it's called after in a reforged sword implies at some point that they broke it I'm not sure what they broke democracy yeah said tweet I think you're right there is something that's deeply nostalgic about it isn't it because a lot of that mythology is quite Celtic it's about like lost peoples and earthy as well you know if you're spending all your time playing these games that you play, you young people, in a digital realm, you want to remind yourself that there's a solidity and a littleness behind it.

Speaker 4 But this is what I don't get because it's been a long time since I read Lord of the Rings. But my understanding of it was that industrialization is bad.

Speaker 4 The Ents, the tree people, it's quite sad when they all are threatened with destruction. And it's quite sad how Saruman has turned essentially all the planes into a kind of huge war machine.

Speaker 4 And we're much more like the Shire, which is a sort of pre-industrial agricultural society.

Speaker 1 But the tech bros seem to favour the Sairon view of things rather than the elvish and Hobitean. Is that a word?

Speaker 4 Hobitian. Yeah, so I love Elden Ring.
It's a game that I would not recommend to a beginner because you haven't played any games, have you?

Speaker 1 I don't. I have never played a video game.
I remember the first, I mean, this was before they became huge things. I remember one, I think it was Lara Croft.

Speaker 1 I always thought, what happens if you just bash her into a wall? I just wanted to see what happens. Psychopathic.
Maybe you're a missing.

Speaker 1 I just wanted to see what they'd kind of programmed into it and whatnot. And it was pretty unsightly.
I mean, they had,

Speaker 1 you just see the after effects of what.

Speaker 1 I'll put it down afterwards.

Speaker 4 Yeah, one of the things about the books.

Speaker 1 The Dutch prefer books. Right.
But also television. Right, okay.

Speaker 4 Well, one of the things that's really intimate about Elden Ring is that it doesn't force the story down your throat.

Speaker 4 It's not a narrative linear game where it goes, oh no, now you must go on the quest to X and deliver the letter to Y.

Speaker 4 You just sort of sometimes, I wandered around for hours on end going, what do you want from me? Where am I supposed to be? What's happening? I'm my little horse.

Speaker 4 And you just pick up bits of snatches of dialogue by sort of talking to ghosts along the way. Okay.
And people, you accidentally feed someone eyeballs at one point.

Speaker 4 You know, there's a lot of that sort of stuff going on. But I would recommend watching someone who's good at it play it because it's interesting narratively and the names are quite beautiful.

Speaker 1 And the George R R R R R R Martin Law.

Speaker 4 It's quite interesting.

Speaker 1 And what I know this isn't the right question to ask about a game, but what happens at the end?

Speaker 1 What do you gain? What are you trying to achieve?

Speaker 4 We were trying to become, you're trying to mend the Elden Ring and become the Elden Lord. Oh, right.

Speaker 4 And there was something called The Shattering Happened, which I'm guessing from the name was bad, and you're trying to reverse that in some way.

Speaker 1 Very grim. Right.

Speaker 4 But in common with many video games, I believe there to be.

Speaker 4 Let me tell you, Amanda, I'm 120 hours into this game.

Speaker 1 And I would say I'm about halfway through the story.

Speaker 1 Are you ranked?

Speaker 4 I've honestly worked harder on on this game than most of the exams I've taken in my life.

Speaker 4 And in a way, that's sort of rewarding because now when I kill some large person called Moog the Omen or whatever it might be, I feel a real sense of achievement because I've worked for it, God knows I worked for it.

Speaker 1 So be the sandwich muncher.

Speaker 1 That sounds like a really obscure slur, but okay.

Speaker 4 Yes. But you know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Like, in the same way that reading, you know, I know you love Victorian literature, which is you have to put a lot of effort in to retune your brain into like Dickens FM.

Speaker 1 This is like that. I'm merely exaggerating my befuddled persona for comedy effect.
But you also haven't really.

Speaker 4 Have you played even a bit of Tetris?

Speaker 1 No. Oh, Tetris, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I mean, that's basically. Angry Birds? Oh, yes.
Oh, right. Yeah.
For a month.

Speaker 1 And then what happened? I haven't played them for like six years now. Oh, okay.
Pokemon? No, no, no, no. But that's fine.
That's absolutely fine. Oh, no, I don't.
Whatever keeps us happy. Yeah.

Speaker 4 I wouldn't recommend this to you because it would be like taking on a part-time job, essentially.

Speaker 1 But if people like Elvish, they like being punished by japanese game designers and they like the work of george ramartin please exactly try elden ring and what i say whenever anyone discusses how do we make kids interested in i don't know classical music or drama or shakespeare or whatever the initial attempt is always to make it very simple and basic and my argument is always you know look at video games and the complexity the many levels and the infinite number of possibilities that go

Speaker 1 people are building notre dame in minecraft you know there's not a problem of people getting engaged with stuff if they enjoy it and find it. People are not bothered by complexity.

Speaker 1 And that is the lesson from today's podcast. We will be back next week with another recommendation.
Thank you, Helen, for your recommendation for Elden Ring.

Speaker 1 Elden Ring is available on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. This could be when I reveal that I'm all along I have been Thraga on the

Speaker 1 level 695 wizard.

Speaker 1 But I'm not. Do subscribe to our feed on BBC Sounds.
We'll be back next week. Bye-bye.
Goodbye.

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