"The Lord of the Rings as a story was finished so long ago now that I can take a largely impersonal view of it, and find ‘interpretations’ quite amusing; even those that I might make myself, which are mostly post scriptum: I had very little particular, conscious, intellectual, intention in mind at any point. Except for a few deliberately ( Read more... )

better late than never, right? :p

Some passages from Tom Shippey's Author of the Century:

"Once again, as far as I know no contemporary writer has gone as far as Tolkien did in the creation of imaginary languages, and probably no one could, but what have been very well digested are his views about the importance of language, the importance of ( Read more... )

From Letter 163 to W.H Auden.

“Linguistic taste changes like everything else, as time goes on; or oscillates between poles. … All this only as background to the stories, though languages and names are for me inextricable from the stories. The are and were so to speak an attempt to give a background or a world in which my expressions of ( Read more... )