A few years back I stumbled upon a Hobbit hole. I chanced upon it in a lecture of 1900 by John Rhys, the first Oxford Professor of Celtic. Rhys was arguing that behind the divinities, demons, fairies and phantoms of Celtic folklore are dim memories of various peoples that once inhabited the British Isles. What especially drew my attention was …
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J.R.R. Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth are hailed as founding texts of modern fantasy. But his recently published commentary on the Old English poem Beowulf suggests that Tolkien saw his creative writing as a work of historical reconstruction. The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings were conceived as the original stories behind an ancient but long lost English …
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In a hole in the ground there was a library, a billiard room, not to mention a luxurious smoking room with comfortable seats soft enough to get lost in. Above there would seem to be rolling hills, and a nice round window looks out onto lush views of an idyllic countryside. This idyllic retreat is not set in JRR Tolkien’s …
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