Category Archives: Tolkien

The Professor’s Birthday

On the third day of Jan­u­ary, in the year 1892, in the city of Bloem­fontein in what is now South Africa, a child was born. A child who would grow to become this man. It is really impos­si­ble to quan­tify how much, how pro­foundly, one man and his cre­ative work could shape my life; I am sure

Unfinished tales

A new vol­ume has been added to my Tolkien col­lec­tion of roughly 200 vol­umes. The fact that I do not know pre­cisely how many is per­haps more indica­tive than any­thing else how dis­con­nected I have been from this deep­est of my lit­er­ary pas­sions for the past few years. Despite my opti­mistic expec­ta­tions to the con­trary

Living for the hobbits

The other day a friend emailed me. He had read a brief arti­cle about the new musi­cal adap­ta­tion of The Lord of Rings cur­rently being staged (I believe) in Toronto. Not sur­pris­ingly, he imme­di­ately wanted to know what my thoughts were. Read­ers of this blog may not be aware that I a fan of LotR

Birthday of the Master

We take a moment at the begin­ning of the new year to mark the arrival of the most imag­i­na­tive author of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on this date in 1897 in Bloem­fontein, South Africa. It is with­out hyper­bole that I may say that his work has had a unfath­omable effect