Today is the 50 anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien.
I owe a great deal to Tolkien, whose books formed a major foundation of my world view and my eventual life-choices.
The news of his death hit me hard, since I had a brief correspondence with him. My grandmother knew of my great interest, so she said, “Write him a letter!” I did. He responded. He took the time to write back to a American teenager, not even, I was 12. I received the last letter from him, an aerogram (remember those?) a week after his death. In it he said that he couldn’t write much because he was about to go on holiday and the car was waiting. He died that night.
The older I get, the more I see in his works. They are gifts that keep giving. He was a great Catholic gentleman, scholar, and teacher.
Dear readers, if you have not read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, please do. Then The Silmarillion awaits.
Set aside the bad influence of the movies. They got soooo much just plain wrong, apart from well…
Meanwhile, Joseph Shaw of the Latin Mass Society posted this:
Zoom in to spot the altar cards… https://t.co/4HFq5ubEbU
— Joseph Shaw (@LMSChairman) September 2, 2023
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The Royal Mint (UK) currently offers a nice Tolkien coin – simple, well done (and yes, I’ve bought one).
amazing that you are the recipient of one of his very last missives.
i too love JRRT. i, a bit younger than you, started on him later. as an actual teen i set several songs from LOTR to music. still remember some of them. wrote one melody between 7 and 8 pm on the last day of 1979 (“ho, ho, ho to the bottle i go”). probably one of the last melodies written during that decade of generally unhappy memory. the tune, though, is not characteristic of its era.
Your anecdote is something truly special. What an experience to have, and as a 12 year old. That is really something.
What is it about those men and the whole Inklings et al group. What is it about that time period and Great Britain when it was great. My favorite is C.S. Lewis, who, when I read his work, I miss him like a long-lost friend, I mourn him being gone. There is just something about those writers.
Clamavi de Profundis has set quite a few of the LOTHR poems to music, mostly doing a better job than the film score. At least it’s better than that guitar priest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wS-uS9pmho
There are recordings of Tolkien singing the Dwarves’ teasing song, “Chip the glasses” from The Hobbit, one or another version of the Troll song which Sam sings in The Lord of the Rings, and ‘Namárië’ (also called ‘Galadriel’s Lament’) from The Lord of the Rings. The Troll song is a contrafactum of the folk song ‘The Fox went out’, and interestingly, Tolkien and at least one of his colleagues at Leeds University in the 1920s wrote a number of contrafacta to sing together with their students at parties – variously in Gothic, Old English, Icelandic, Scots, and in modern English – the latter including Tolkien’s versification – as ‘Natura Apis: Morali Ricardi Eremite’ – of part of Richard Rolle’s short Middle English work about bees – many of which were later printed by one of their old students, A. H. Smith as Songs for the Philologists (in 1936, when Smith was a professor in London). This leaves me wondering if the Dwarves’ song is also a contrafactum. And someone comments under a YouTube upload of ‘Namárië’ that “Tolkien sings this using almost exactly the same melody as his fellow Catholics use to chant the Lamentations of Jeremiah at the Tenebrae Office during the Sacred Triduum (Holy Thursday evening to Easter Sunday)” – something I have not yet checked…
By the way, the song-name given for Tolkien’s contrafactum, ‘Ides Aelfscyne’ is ‘Daddy Neptune’: the first two words of Thomas Dibdin’s anti-Napoleonic patriotic song, ‘The Snug Little Island’ for which Dibdin gave the tune as ‘The Rogues March’. Apparently that tune is used in the television series of Cornwell’s Sharpe – I don’t know the Aubrey-Maturin series well enough to know if either the Rogues March or ‘The Sung Little Island’ ever turns up, there… Tolkien’s title comes from a description of Judith in the Old English poem versifying (part of ) her book of the Bible, though the character in his song is a very different one, an dangerous elf-woman!
[I, too, don’t recall if those tunes are in the Aubrey/Maturin books. The TV series, Sharpe’s Rifles features Sean Bean, of course, who is Boromir in the Jackson movies. If I recall the story correctly, after being in Sharpe’s, he insisted that at some point in every show he was in, he had to be able to say the word “sharp”. The main theme of Sharpe’s Rifle’s, is a tune called “Over The Hills and Far Away”, which surely sounds also Tolkienesque. I should say… Which it sound’s like something he’d sing. Not to be confused with anything by Led Zepplin. Lot’s of versions of “Over the Hills and Far Away” on YouTube, some military some more reflective and melancholy.]
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May he rest in peace! His literary works have made a great impression on my life. I had to read The Hobbit in high school about 40 years ago. I dreaded it since at that time I didn’t particularly enjoy reading and I thought that it was the basis for the Dungeons and Dragons board game which my younger brother played with his immature friends. Little did I know I would discover a masterpiece of adventure which captivated my imagination. That next summer I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, something I would never have imagined a few months earlier. I didn’t appreciate the Catholic overtones until much later, and I am so glad that my children have been exposed to his writings at a much earlier age.
Thank you! I just enjoyed listening to a couple of those versions of “Over the Hills and Far Away”, and the uploader’s notes for one pointed to Thomas D’Urfey’s Pills to Purge Melancholy – which I found scanned in the Internet Archive, including the music (1719 edition, volume V, p. 316). Funnily enough, Tolkien, in army training in the winter of 1915-16, wrote a poem which he entitled “Over Old Hills and Far Away”, which his son Christopher published in 1983. It is about hearing, then seeing , an “old elf” playing a flute on a night in June, and the music drawing the speaker to follow him “Over old hills and far away”. And looking at it, now, in The Book of Lost Tales Part I, I think it can be sung to the tune “Over the Hills and Far Away”! Tolkien’s poem seems to be playing with the famous American poem describing St. Nicholas as “a jolly old elf” – including, I now see, with its meter, so I guess “‘Twas the night before Christmas” can be sung to “Over the Hills and Far Away” as well (and now I wonder if it has been – perhaps even traditionally?).