Happy Birthday J.R.R. Tolkien!

Happy Birthday J.R.R. Tolkien!  He is professor of Anglo-Saxon and worked on the Oxford English Dictionary.  Tolkien was born in South African and there was bitten by a baboon spider which he says he doesn’t remember, but may have appeared as Shelob.  His family moved to Birmingham, the inspiration for Hobbiton?, and then he married Edith Mary Bratt.  He fought in World War I and returned to England to work on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  There is a forthcoming Tolkien bio pic that will star Nicholas Hoult.  Tolkien write at Pembroke College The Hobbit and begun Lord of the Rings.  He started work on translating Beowulf.  The Hobbit was published in 1937.  The adaptation that I know well was the tv animated movie from Rankin and Bass in 1977; an important year with Star Wars.  Of course, we know that Peter Jackson filled the book as a film trilogy from 2012 to 2014.  Farmer Giles of Ham, a comic tale in the spirit of Medieval stories, was published in in 1949.  Tolkien published The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in 1962.  At Oxford, Tolkien was in a group called the Inklings which included C.S. Lewis, their fantasy worlds have interesting reflections.

Tolkien completed Lord of the Rings during his time at Oxford.   Ralph Bakshi produced an animated film The Lord of the Rings (1978) which adapted the first two books.  In 1980, Rankin and Bass finished up the story with The Return of the King.  We of course know Tolkien best from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films which begun in 2001 and completed in 2003.  Most of Tolkien’s work was compiled and finished by his son, Christopher Tolkien, including The Silmarillion in 1977.  The Silmarillion is the sweeping history of Middle Earth from its creation to the Third Age of Lord of the Rings, only hints of it are seen in the films and books.  The Tolkien book on Norse myth was published in 2010  as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. The Fall of Arthur was published in 2013.  A new printing was made of Tolkien’s landmark work, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, in 2015.  The Finnish epic was influential for Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s book, The Story of Kullervo, was published in 2017.  The  What is considered Tolkien’s greatest love story, Beren and Lúthien, was published in 2017.  J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973 and he was buried with his wife, Edith, with Luthien underneath her name, and Beren under his name.  Happy Birthday J.R.R. Tolkien!  

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