Born in South Africa on this day in 1892, the great John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, commonly known as J.R.R. Tolkien, a WWI vet, author, translator, linguist, professor, essayist, poet, Catholic, and most importantly, the man who all but founded the modern fantasy genre with his marvelous Lord of the Rings series. In order to build a successful fiction work, an author must create a universe in which his characters are to live - what schools did they attend, what were their upbringings like, what cities did they live in? Well, JRR Tolkien went much farther than most authors do. When he wrote The Hobbit, and then the Lord of the Rings, and then many more notes that his son gathered together to publish posthumously, Tolkien invented a world - a planet of magic, a world in which the Lord sent angels in the form of wizards to help us, a world in which the devil sent his own demons in the form of trolls and balrogs and lieutenants to harm us. He created sentient beings and geography and languages and religions... His stories work because he was a great storyteller, but also because he had thought them through in such detail. Those who read The Hobbit in the 40s or LotR in the 50s would come upon obscure references to imagined mythologies, only to discover with the publication of the Silmarillion in the 70s that JRR Tolkien had thought of THOSE stories, the backstory of LotR, long before he thought of Hobbits! An amazing talent... and his humor and poems were worth reading as well. Farmer Giles of Ham, Leaf by Niggle, and On Fairy Stories are well worth enjoying. John F. Di Leo Heres a link to the first biography I ever read on JRRT, by Humphrey Carpenter. I think there have been a couple others since, as well. A great Christian, a great Englishman, a great writer. amazon/J-R-R-Tolkien-Biography-Humphrey-Carpenter/dp/0618057021
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 01:43:34 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015