JRR Tolkien, creator of The Hobbit
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 December 2021
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein in 1892.
Orphaned before he was a teenager, he fought at the Somme in the First World War before going on to become one of the best-selling authors of all time.
Bilbo, Gandalf, Gollum, Frodo, Sauron - these are just a few of the famous characters he created for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Nominating Tolkien - an Oxford University professor - is the popular historian, Niall Ferguson. He aims to rescue Tolkien from the hippies, who, he says, claimed Tolkien as their own.
"The fascinating thing to me about Tolkien is that his sensibility is so profoundly conservative - with a small 'c'. ...when you look at the man's politics, he was such a reactionary!"
Presenter Matthew Parris, who doesn't believe in elves or dwarves, is not so sure that the fantasy author deserves to be rescued.
With additional help and guidance from Malcolm Guite.
Niall Ferguson is senior fellow of the Hoover Institution and author of Empire: How Britain made the Modern World.
Producer: Ellie Richold
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2021.
Transcript
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| 0:48.7 | It's 1968 and a 2D middle-aged professor is eating his breakfast in a very unremarkable |
| 0:55.5 | dining room in a quiet suburb of Oxford. |
| 0:58.4 | Suddenly, the man's piece is broken by the sound of footsteps and a camera shutter. |
| 1:04.5 | He looks up through the window to see a young man with long hair and a stoned hapless |
| 1:09.8 | smile of delight on his face. |
| 1:12.5 | Angrily shutting the curtains, the older man shouts, |
| 1:14.7 | Ídith, there's another one come to take my picture and he's gone and trampled over |
| 1:18.8 | all the roses. |
| 1:21.0 | Interrupted Oxford Don, who found fame not just annoying but baffling, was John Ronald |
| 1:28.2 | Rull Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and the subject of today's |
... |
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