This is the part I hate. I’m speaking, of course, of winter, the time after the Nativity festival, the White Witch season when it’s “always winter and never Christmas.”
My Christmas was fine, by the way, thank you very much. The Walkers gathered here on New Year’s Day, and revelry was unrestrained. Actually it was pretty darn restrained, but that’s how I like it.
However, we’re not entirely out of celebrations. Today is J. R. R. Tolkien’s birthday. It’s customary for Tolkien fans to do a rolling tribute, around the world. You bring out your preferred beverage at 8:00 p.m. local time, say, “The Professor!” and drink your toast.
Our friend Dale Nelson sends this link to an article, from Too Many Books and Never Enough, on Tolkien’s recordings of his own writings. I wasn’t aware that he did so many. One would think there’s an untapped market there, though Caedmon brought out a small collection some time back.
For a sample, here’s YouTube recording of the Professor reading “Riddles in the Dark.”
I think that the major part of what’s not commercially available is Tolkien’s Beorhtnoth dramatization and his Linguaphone recordings, both being things for which there probably wouldn’t be high demand. The available things are treasures.
Like Scull and Hammond, I wonder about what happened to George Sayer’s original 1952 tapes. I wonder too about what happened to the recording of C. S. Lewis, Kingsley Amis, and Brian Aldiss discussing science fiction (the transcript, “Unreal Estates,” is easily available in Lewis’s Of This and Other Worlds). If it still exists in decent shape, it would be delightful to be able to hear it.