Today, January 3, is the birthday of J. R. R. Tolkien (b. 1892). A month or so ago, a minor writer of short stories pulled the ol’ drum-up-publicity-for-my-book-launch-by-attcking-someone-greater-than-me trick.
It worked, just not the way the guy that thought. At least with me. I’ve started rereading The Lord of the Rings. Other than The Hobbit, I’ve never read deeply in Tolkien’s other works. I’ve decided to change that and have gotten several volumes in The History of Middle-Earth. I don’t know if I’ll blog about them, but I’m going to dip into them over the course of 2019.
Also, there are two birthdays from yesterday I didn’t mention because I was slightly distracted by my wife’s surgery.
Those were Charles Beaumont (b. Jan. 2, 1929) and Robert Nathan (b. Jan. 2, 1894). Beaumont I’ve written about before. A protege of Ray Bradbury, he wrote some great short stories and a number of well-regarded Twilight Zone scripts. I’ll try to read something of his in the next day or so.
Robert Nathan is best remembered for his short novel Portrait of Jenny. It’s a love story set in the Great Depression about an artist who keeps meeting a girl in the park. He meets her every few weeks, but each time she’s a few years older. It’s not an adventure story, but it’s one of my favorite novels. It’s definitely worth tracking down.
All the unnamed idiot got me to do was reread The Lord of the Rings.
🙂
Ever since I lost most of my JRRT books in the Flood of 2012, I just haven’t read that much of his work. Kinda painful, thinking about the first editions/leatherbound/rare stuff I lost. I have listened to the classic Christopher Lee audiobook of “Turin” on YT, along with an excellent audiobook of THE SILMARILLION. The guy’s voice is great and his pronuniciation of the Elvish/Dunedain names is spot-on according to JRRT’s instructions.
I need to order BEREN AND LUTHIEN. THE foundational tale for Tolkien. Structure-wise, he used the same template later for THE HOBBIT and LotR.
Beren and Luthien is on my radar, and I intend to read it at some point.
JRRT shares a birthday with the great SFF artist, Stephen Fabian. Fabian almost did some artwork for a LotR edition. I speculate–using examples of Fabian’s non-JRRT art–on what Fabian illos for Tolkien’s works might’ve looked like here:
https://dmrbooks.com/test-blog/2018/1/3/fabian-and-tolkien-what-might-have-been
I did not know that! Fabian is one of of my favorite artists.
Thanks for the link.