Looking beyond Peter Jackson to...J.R.R. Tolkien

Well, to make a short story longer, the video packed in the room. I don't think we had an empty seat in the first session. And the audience was enraptured. Of course, I've watched the video several times over the years (usually when I need to research a question that comes up). Christopher Tolkien is a marvellous speaker. "I realize now why you hold audiences," his father wrote to Christopher in 1958. "There was, of course, life and vividness in your phrases, but you are clear, generally unemphatic and let your stuff speak for itself by sheer placing and shaping." Many years later, this description still rings true. I think people who have long known who Christopher Tolkien is simply wanted to put a face and a voice to his words, and now they could. But he also captures the audience's attention and holds it, as his father noted. He brings something to the dry documentary. But the show was probably stolen by Tom Shippey. He is one of these furious, energetic speakers (much like John Cleese, for those of you who are familiar with the actor) who reaches out and draws you along with his parade of details, questions, facts, and answers. Shippey seems almost as much a historian as linguist, because he kept reaching back into history to look for explanations of what Tolkien was doing both with his languages and his stories. Every now and then when I am browsing through Tolkien's letters, I come across some anecdote from his life that makes me wonder if he didn't have a bit of an "insider's" touch to his life. He met all sorts of interesting people before he himself became truly famous. And his early life, when you read Carpenter's biography of Tolkien, reads much like a novel. He was orphaned by age twelve, fell in love with an older woman -- a forbidden love -- whom he all but had to snatch away from the altar when she was preparing to marry another man, and he was swept up into World War I, in which most of his friends were killed. Had it not been for the war and Edith Bratt, I suppose, there would have been no BOOK OF LOST TALES, and subsequently no Hobbit, no Silmarillion, no Lord of the Rings. We wouldn't have The Sword of Shannara to shake our heads at, and there would have been no onslought of

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