Tag Archives: J.R.R. Tolkien

Fiction, Reviews

Reading report: ‘The Hobbit,’ by J.R.R. Tolkien

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It was a terrible battle. The most dreadful of all Bilbo’s experiences, and the one which at the time he hated most—which is to say it was the one he was the most proud of, and most fond of recalling long afterwards, although he was quite unimportant in it.

Recently I watched the Lord of the Rings movies (extended versions, of course; not the Hobbit films). And whenever I do that, it comes into my mind that I need to read the books again. Christopher Lee read them once a year, after all. I’m far behind that tally. So I pulled out The Hobbit, to begin the journey.

I’ll confess that at first I thought it kind of elementary. It is a children’s book, after all, and sometimes the author talks down to his audience.

However, it grew on my mind as I read that this book (along with the Trilogy) can be viewed from the perspective of veteran’s literature (I’m not a veteran, I hasten to note; but it’s something I can be aware of). When Tolkien tells us, again and again, that Bilbo wished himself back in his cozy hobbit hole, “not for the last time,” he’s conveying the feelings of the soldier at war. Not long ago, he was comfortable in his rooms at Oxford, eating well, cared for by servants, keeping regular hours. Now he’s slogging through mud or crouched in a flooded trench, struggling with boredom or dreading going “over the top.” Thoughts of home flood in; they are a torment and a comfort all at once.

And by the end of the book, I must confess, I had to blink back manly tears. I was moved.

The Hobbit is a great book. But you knew that.

Non-fiction, Reviews

Shippey on the Staffordshire Hoard

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Photo credit: theguardian.com

We usually specialize in Vikings on this blog, but we are not above tolerating Anglo-Saxons, especially when there’s a Tolkien connection.

Tom Shippey, successor to and biographer of J.R.R. Tolkien, has a review in the London Review and Books of a new book on the Staffordshire Hoard, a rather amazing 2009 find:

What one can say is, first, that the hoard is unique from the period. Previous discoveries have been grave burials, or single finds, not collections buried with (presumably) the intention of later recovery. Second, the general nature of the hoard is clear. It is strongly weapon-related, but without weapons. There are no coins, no brooches, no items of women’s jewellery, not even a single knife or sword blade. Some 80 per cent of the objects are fittings from weapons, mostly sword-hilt parts. An Anglo-Saxon sword typically had a wooden hilt fitted over the iron tang on the blade, but to this were added an upper and a lower guard, each secured by two hilt plates and a hilt collar, fixed by bosses, with a pommel on top. All these appear in the hoard in large numbers.

Read it all here. Thanks to Dale Nelson for sending me the link.

Authors, Fiction, Reading

The Lighting of the Beacons

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhRFaY8A9cA

I’m sure you recognize this clip from The Two Towers, in which the beacons are lit in Gondor, to call for help from Rohan.

I believe (I could be wrong) that the inspiration for this plot element in The Lord of the Rings was the following passage from Heimskringla (here in Lee Hollander’s translation) and the Saga of King Haakon the Good:

After this battle King Haakon incorporated into the laws for all the land along the seas, and as far inland as the salmon goes upstream, that all districts were divided into “ship-levies”; and these he parcelled out among the districts…. Along with this it was ordered that whenever there was a general levy, beacons were to be lit on high mountains, so that one could be seen from the other. It is said that news of the levy travelled from the southern-most beacon to the northernmost borough in seven nights.

If anyone knows of an earlier example of such a beacon signalling system, which might have inspired Tolkien, let me know.

Authors

Tolkien’s Long Procrastination in the Same Direction

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J.R.R. Tolkien wrote essays and myths for years before the publication of The Hobbit in 1937. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics is also published this year. The Lord of the Rings is published in three volumes during 1954-55. And through all of this time, the author may have been thinking he should possibly find time to write something deep on Chaucer.

His research student V.A. Kolve said, “He confessed to me once that some were disappointed by how little he had done in the academic way, but that he had chosen instead to explore his own vision of things.”

Tolkien himself said, “I have always been incapable of doing the job at hand.”

John M. Bowers has written a book on the long academic project Tolkien intended to return to. He reports,

[Tolkien] confided to his publisher in 1937 that Oxford would merely add The Hobbit to his “long list of never-never procrastinations” (Letters, 18). Fiction-writing simply did not count in terms of academic production, especially after Tolkien had idled away his two-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship. “The authorities of the university,” he would lament when The Lord of the Rings was in press, “might well consider it an aberration of an elderly professor of philology to write and publish fairy stories and romances” (Letters, 219). He explained to his American publisher this widespread view of his failings: “Most of my philological colleagues are shocked (cert. behind my back, sometimes to my face) at the fall of a philological into ‘Trivial literature’; and anyway the cry is: ‘now we know how you have been wasting your time for 20 years’” (Letters, 238).

Authors

Christopher Tolkien Has Sailed into the West

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The French website Var-matin reported about an hour ago that Christopher Tolkien passed away in a hospital in southern France. He was 95.

The last book he edited, The Fall of Gondolin, was published in 2018.

J.R.R. Tolkien had four children with his wife, Edith: John, Michael, Christopher, and Priscilla, she being the one surviving sibling.

Authors, Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Tolkien: a Biography,’ by Humphrey Carpenter

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During the war he had said to Christopher: ‘We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring’ and now he wrote: ‘The War is not over (and the one that is, or part of it, has largely been lost). But it is of course wrong to fall into such a mood, for Wars are always lost, and The War always goes on, and it is no good growing faint.’

The trailers for the new Tolkien movie looked kind of good, so I figured I might go to see it. It seemed to me it would be a good idea to read a Tolkien biography before I did that. And although I’m now hearing that the movie leaves out Tolkien’s Catholic faith – which means I probably won’t see it after all – I’m glad I bought Humphrey Carpenter’s Tolkien: A Biography.

The book is easy to read and not too long. It follows “Toller’s” life from his birth in South Africa to his death in England, and the author is clearly a sympathetic fan – though he is often amused by Tolkien’s eccentricities. Which were many.

This is, I believe, the classic Tolkien biography, and it’s fairly old now. I expect there are new things to be learned from more recent ones. I noted, for instance, that Carpenter speaks of “Jack” Lewis’s transfer to Cambridge University only in passing, as a step backwards in the two men’s friendship. While that’s true enough, it should have been noted that it was through the good offices of Tolkien himself that Jack got the job.

But, reading as a fan, I found Tolkien: A Biography fascinating. I recommend it highly.

Authors

Don’t Rely on Movies for History

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The star of the upcoming biopic on Tolkien, Nicholas Hoult, said he loves what he has learned about the great author’s rich knowledge of history and language. His character demonstrates an early love of language in the film by talking to the woman who would become his wife about a word he felt should mean far more than it does. Entertainment Weekly states, “The give-and-take of their blossoming romance is founded on language, and in such ways, Tolkien makes a case for why the mind of The Lord of the Rings author was as fascinating as his fantasy epics.”

I gather that scene or anything like it actually never happened, which is one reason the Tolkien estate said they would not support or endorse the movie and did not authorize or participate in its production.

Tolkien historian John Garth said theirs is a good plan, because biographical movies like this usually make up things. He told The Guardian, “As a biographer, I expect I’ll be busy correcting new misconceptions arising from the movie. I hope that anyone who enjoys the film and is interested in Tolkien’s formative years will pick up a reliable biography.”

Authors, Non-fiction

Best Tolkien Movie Yet

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Jeffrey Overstreet calls Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, a documentary on the war that shaped J.R.R. Tolkien the best offering of all of Jackson’s Tolkien-inspired movies.

Honoring these intimate archival recordings, Jackson reveals harrowing accounts of the misleading propaganda that summoned so many young men, the dehumanizing pressures of the war, the particular chaos and slaughter of the Somme, the burdens that the survivors would have to carry, and the betrayals, abandonment, and loneliness that awaited those few who returned. And as we listen, he fills the screen with highlights (that word sounds trite and inappropriate here) from more than 600 hours of material from the Imperial War Museum and BBC archives. Much of it is sharpened and focused, but then, as in Wings of Desire and The Wizard of Oz, its black-and-white footage suddenly blooms into color and detail that takes your breath away.

http://www.lookingcloser.org/blog/2019/03/04/peter-jackson-reveals-his-most-harrowing-battle-scenes-yet/?fbclid=IwAR1LM6K8yyC5PTCRha0GkvSJ3fzq57yVafUeIVh_oR4Md0Sj7M9buJKp5ZM

Fiction

Amazon TV is working on prequel series of LOTR

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What would you say is the prequel to the Lord of the Rings? Yeah, that’s not this. With an estimated cost of over $1B, the new Amazon series will look into all of those details we get in the appendices about Aragorn’s life as the ranger and heir to the Gondorian throne. When Gandalf took Bilbo and the dwarves to Rivendell, the young heir was there, though perhaps not around them. A few years later, he was told who he was, that the sword of kings of Arnor was his, and that he needed to watch his back. That’s when he began to roam Middle Earth and later served under two kings for many years.

Lots of good material for them to, you know, ruin. I know they want a new Game of Thrones, which would be bad, but I hope they don’t give us a medieval Gotham, which would be like saying, “You know all of the hope and purity of Middle Earth that you’ve loved all your life? This ain’t that.”

https://nerdist.com/lord-of-the-rings-prequel-tv-series-amazon-everything-we-know/

Authors, Religion, Writing

His Twelvty-Seventh Birthday

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John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on this day in 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Here’s a recording of an interview from the 1960s. I think you can identify the slight slur in his speech, caused by an early tongue injury. By all accounts, it did not affect his lecturing voice, but it did make him hard to understand, sometimes, in conversation.