A
lot of us make reference to Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. But let
us imagine the hobbits set off to defend the Shire after Saruman had
turned it into an industrialised shithole full of alien invaders. That
is the task that we face. We must defend not the Shire that is, but the
memory of the Shire that once was, that it may be so again.
 |
Hobbiton by JRR Tolkien
|
Christopher Tolkien has sadly passed away at the age of 95. As any reader of JRR Tolkien's works knows, Christopher was far more than the curator of his father's works, and we are as much dependent on Christopher as we are on John for bringing the whole Middle Earth saga to print. John had immense creative genius, but, as with many of those kind of people, lacked the organisational skills to order things properly. It fell to Christopher, both before and after his father's death, to organise his father's work into a coherent whole. It was Christopher who was tasked with reading what would become The Lord of the Rings to the rest of the Inklings in Oxford and he who created the map of Middle Earth that would adorn each volume.
