Original art by fantasy author JRR Tolkien will be on display today only, March 4th, at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, in celebration of World Book Day.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE, Oxford University professor, and author of the globally beloved fantasy epics The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was born eleventy-seven years ago today, on January 3rd, 1892, in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, a British colony and a province of the Union of South Africa.
With an estimated $50 million in income to his estate in the last 12 months, Tolkien beat out Peanuts creator Charles Schulz ($35 million); peace chance-giver John Lennon ($15 million); childrens’ author and cartoonist Theodor Seuss Geisel ($15 million); and global warming denier Michael Crichton ($9 million).
In the wake of information released by a British government agency last week, news media globally have been reporting on the supposed “spy” career of author and philologist JRR Tolkien.
If it’s hard to imagine the introverted, scholarly Oxford professor traveling the world, assassinating Nazis and bedding beautiful French Resistance fighters between swigs of a martini, shaken – not stirred, you are right to be skeptical.
Type “pronounce tolkien” into Google, and you’ll find a lively debate on how to pronounce the surname of the beloved author of The Lord of the Rings. There are two main camps. One insists on “tol-kenn.” The other will argue that “Tolkien” is a German name, properly pronounced “Tolk-een.”
They’re both wrong.
A suit filed against New Line Cinema, producers of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings film trilogy, by the heirs of author JRR Tolkien will be decided by a jury, a state court judge has ruled.
On Salon today, a review by Andrew O’Hehir of Arika Okrent’s book In the Land of Invented Languages. The book seems very entertaining, but O’Hehir points out a bizarre flaw — it barely mentions Tolkien.
The Mythopoeic Society has announced its 2009 finalists for the The Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies. The award is given to books on J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, or Charles Williams that make significant contributions to Inklings scholarship. The Inklings was an informal literary discussion group at the University of Oxford in the 1930s and 40s.
I got an email today, that I can pre-order the latest book written by the ghost of JRR Tolkien through the mediumship of Christopher Tolkien — The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. It collects translations of “The Saga of the Völsungs” written while Tolkien was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in the 1920s and ‘30s.
Sorry I stopped posting for such a long time. I intend to get back to regular posting, both here and on Sauron’s Blog, as of today.
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