He was born today in 1892. The picture below is of him in 1916 when he was in the British army and 24 years old. He had a very difficult childhood; father died when he was very young and mother converted to Catholicism, was disowned by her family and then died of diabetes when he was 12 and she was 34. After WW 1 he is said all but one of his close friends died during the war. Of course one of the great writers of the 20th century. As in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. (Both of these are available for free on kindle if you have amazon prime, or for $3.99 if you don't.)
I got piqued last week while Brigid and I were watching an excellent PBS (channel 132 in Croton) one hour show Tolkien & Lewis Myth, Imagination & The Quest For Meaning and ordered two other books – to join the hundreds of others in my house, waiting for me to read – The Tolkien Reader and The letters of JRR Tokien.
Here's the picture – certainly nothing like he looked when he became famous – and below that a well-known quote from one of his letters –
Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat' – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.
Leave a Reply