This is something that we can all
look forward to with enthusiasm. My own
encounter began as part of my reading assignment for my major essay in First
Year honors English back in the fall of 1967.
Prior to that I had heard a part of the hobbit read on CBC radio and I
was completely captured although I had not heard the name of the book or the
author. Not that it mattered as
acquiring such a book was then beyond my means.
Even here we discover that the
core purpose of that silly ring was to drive the narrative. Even now we learn from the true master of
writing and English Letters. I was
convinced immediately that this was an important work, a position hardly held
by English departments anywhere.
This work stimulated an entire
subgenre and set the rules for it as well.
That this subgenre has largely grown to dominate English Letters in
terms of reader popularity is the ultimate answer and that this book could be
voted as the most important book of the twentieth century declares Tolkien’s
genius.
I expect this early verdict to
hold up.
J.R.R.
Tolkien Reveals TRUE Meaning Of 'The Lord Of The Rings' In Unearthed Audio
Recording
Posted: 05/22/2014 1:05 pm
EDT Updated: 2 hours ago
Over 20 years ago, a lost recording of
J.R.R. Tolkien was discovered in a basement in Rotterdam, but the man who found
it kept this important reel-to-reel tape hidden away. Until recently, only he
had heard the recording. But now, I am one of those lucky Middle-earth lovers
who has listened to this magical magnetic tape, and I happily declare that it
is awesome. For it proves once and for all that Professor Tolkien was, in fact,
very much the hobbit that we all suspected him to be. What's more, we get to
hear Tolkien reading a lost poem in the Elven tongue which he translates into
English. And to top it off, he states in unambiguous terms (cue Rohirrim war
trumpets) the real meaning of The Lord of the Rings!
Got chills yet Tolkien fans? Just wait until
you hear it yourself.
The recording took place on March 28th,
1958 in Rotterdam at a "Hobbit Dinner" put on by Tolkien's Dutch
publisher and a bookseller. Tolkien's own publisher, Allen and Unwin, paid for
his trip to the Netherlands to attend this special party. According to his
letters the author was chuffed to find that Rotterdam was filled with people
"intoxicated with hobbits." Tolkien showed up at a packed hall where
200 hobbit fanatics had come to hear him and other scholars talk about
Middle-earth. The menu for the dinner was whimsically Tolkienesque, with
Egg-salad à la Barliman Butterbur, Vegetables of Goldberry, and Maggot-soup
(mushroom soup regrettably named after Farmer Maggot). And a Dutch tobacco
company supplied the tables with clay pipes and tobacco labeled Old Toby and
Longbottom Leaf, which pleased Tolkien, a devotee of the "art" of
smoking pipe-weed.
Accounts of the event have been cobbled
together over the years but, sadly, nobody bothered to transcribe exactly what
Tolkien said. Christopher Tolkien must have had some of his father's notes for
his speech, because a brief passage from Tolkien's Hobbit Dinner oration
appears in Humphrey Carpenter's biography, albeit in a slightly different form.
Thankfully we now know that someone had made a complete recording of the
event. This reel-to-reel tape was discovered in 1993 by a Dutchman named
René van Rossenberg, a Tolkien expert who owns a shop in the Netherlands
devoted to all things Middle-earth (TolkienShop.com). Why didn't van Rossenberg
show it to anybody until now?
"Like Smaug I am guarding my treasure,
hissing at any collector who comes near," he recently stated in response
to my email query. Fortunately, a Middle-earth maven named Jay Johnstone, one
of the founders of the fantasy/sci-fi site Legendarium.me, sleuthed that van Rossenberg had the recording in his possession, and
persuaded him to open his dragon hoard. "I am looking forward to sharing
with all Tolkien aficionados the great joy I felt when I first played the tape
and heard Tolkien give his great speech," added van Rossenberg.
Legendarium and the Tolkien site MiddleEarthNetwork.com have
partnered with van Rossenberg to raise both awareness and funds in order to
remaster the original reel-to-reel tape, chronicle the event, and make it
available to the world this fall via the Rotterdam Project. "Anything new
from Tolkien is always exciting," said Tom Shippey, author of J.R.R.
Tolkien: Author of the Century, "but the Rotterdam Project is especially
so. A speech from Tolkien, in the first years of his success with Lord of
the Rings, when he was among friends, enjoying himself, and able to speak
freely!"
The above photograph, taken on the night of
the Rotterdam Hobbit Dinner, shows Tolkien in his fancy waistcoat (or weskit as
they would have called it in the Shire). No doubt Tolkien had already imbibed a
pint or two at his table by the time he made his way to the microphone to stand
in front of the adoring crowd of Netherlanders. I've studied many photos of
Tolkien over the years, but this is absolutely one of my favorites. Look at the
jaunty way he puts his right hand on his hip. The cheerful yet wry smile of a
skilled speaker who knows how to work a crowd. This is the kind of man you'd
want to go inn-crawling with through the Shire (or even Rotterdam).
At the start of the speech Tolkien is indeed
full of high-spirits and cracks jokes in a way that we've never heard him do
before. Rather than the ultra-serious Oxford don whom most of us know from his
scanty recordings, we get Tolkien-as-Bilbo, right out of the chapter "A
Long-expected Party." He even makes reference to that famous
eleventy-first birthday, for Tolkien's oration was intended as a parody of
Bilbo's farewell speech. The author's merry voice, with its brusque and rich
accent, dances around your head like a hobbit drinking song. For the Professor,
it was said by one of his former students, "Could turn a lecture room into
a mead hall."
Tolkien thanked the assembled
"hobbits" for giving him the greatest party of his life. He spoke
very modestly about The Lord of the Rings calling it "A poor
thing, but my own." He couldn't believe that the people there would want
to hear an after-dinner autobiography. So he jumped right into explaining the
construction of his great narrative work, stating that the One Ring is a
mere mechanism that "sets the clock ticking fast." And then
he quite plainly spells out what the books are about--something he only alluded
to once in a letter, but is incontrovertible in this speech. (If you want to
know exactly what he says you'll just have to listen for yourself!)
At one point he read a poem in Elvish,
joking that hobbits were always terrified when someone threatened to recite
poetry at a party. He prefaced the poem by saying it was almost twenty years to
the day since he had started working on The Lord of the Rings. His
mellifluous voice makes the imaginary language come alive, like sinuous
silvery mithril script etched in the mind's eye:
Twenty years have flowed away down the long river
And never in my life will return for me from the sea
Ah years in which looking far away I saw ages long past
When still trees bloomed free in a wide country
And thus now all begins to wither
With the breath of cold-hearted wizards
To know things they break them
And their stern lordship they establish
Through fear of death
And never in my life will return for me from the sea
Ah years in which looking far away I saw ages long past
When still trees bloomed free in a wide country
And thus now all begins to wither
With the breath of cold-hearted wizards
To know things they break them
And their stern lordship they establish
Through fear of death
Tolkien had spent the afternoon walking
around Rotterdam--a city that had suffered much destruction during World War
II. The sight of it had saddened him, reminding him of the "orc-ery"
that he so lamented taking hold of the world. The "cold-hearted
wizards," in their quest for knowledge and power, were only good at
destroying things. In his final salute to the assembly of hobbit-lovers, Tolkien
said that Sauron is gone, but the descendants of the hateful, Shire-polluting
wizard Saruman are everywhere. The hobbits of the world have no magic
weapons to fight them. But, he adds with a robust and hopeful declaration:
"And yet here gentlehobbits may I
conclude by giving you this toast. To the hobbits! And may they outlast all the
wizards!"
The Rotterdam Hobbit Dinner was the first of
its kind, and also the last. For Tolkien never again attended another party
like this in his honor. But now we have the proof of what took place on that
wonderful night, and what the great author said. And the sound of Tolkien's
voice, like his works, will outlast death.
Here is a preview of the Rotterdam Project.
As Jay Johnstone says, "It's a rare insight into Tolkien the man, rather
than the author."
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