Lord Rings Best Seller New York Times Book Review
Behind the Best Sellers: J. R. R. Tolkien
See the article in its original context from
October 2, 1977
,
Department BR , Folio
13Buy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for habitation delivery and digital subscribers.
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an commodity from The Times's impress archive, before the outset of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not modify, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other bug; we are continuing to work to meliorate these archived versions.
Here is the word from Middle‐globe about. 1. R. R. Tolkien (1892‐1973) and "The Sdmarillion," its Elves, Dwarves, the Blue Mountains, the Night Lord and the Hobbits and Fellowship of the Ring. But information technology is not the last word.
To begin with: One day in 1935, Sir Stanley Unwin, of George Allen & Unwin, gave his son, Rayner, then x years old, the manuscript of a children'southward book chosen "The Hobbit." Information technology was the piece of work of the distinguished Oxford philologist. Prof. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.
"i liked the book," said Rayner Unwin, at present chairman of the board of the British publishing business firm, when we rang him up in London. "i was the first reader‐my father believed in children reading children'south books. I was paid ane shilling for my written report. Information technology turned out to be a skilful investment on my father's part‐the best shilling our firm ever spent."
"The Hobbit" was published in 1938 in the Us by Houghton Mifflin. In the 1950's came the three volumes of "The Lord of the Rings." During the late threescore's, in Ballantine's paperback edition they all became all-time sellers on the nation's campuses. For the immature, Professor Tolkien's world of the imagination became a landscape of reality‐a more than perfect world in many ways than the one created by culture on earth.
After Professor Tolkien's decease at 81, international readers hoped that Heart‐earth would somehow continue to live. The writer's son, Christopher, a World State of war eleven R.A.F. pilot, resigned his fellowship in Old English at Oxford and devoted himself to his begetter's works. From a vast corporeality of writing, Christopher Tolkien relates, "ane set myself to work out a single text, by selection and arrangement. Here and there I had to develop the narrative out of notes and crude drafts. I had to make many choices betwixt competing versions. Essentially, it was a chore of organization. not of completion, and the result was 'The Silmarillion.' "
What sort of man created hts own earthlings?
"If you imagine the archetype of the Oxford don, you have him," said Rayner Unwin. "He was a little offputting and at a distance, until you got to know him, and so he became immensely warm. Fame puzzled him. He was not pretentious. He lived in a very elementary mode, wrapped up in his family and ain internal world. He laughed a lot and smoked a pipe a lot.
"He was very sugariness to me, knowing that I had been the first reader of 'The Hobbit.' Occasionally, he would show me bits of his work while I was an undergraduate at Oxford. Luckily, he seldom followed my communication. He took criticism' in one of two ways‐ignore it completely or go back to Square I and exercise it all over once more.
"He was a very great philologist, and he knew precisely the manner he wanted to say things. In a sense, I was more his correspondent than his editor during 'The Lord of the Rings.' His spellings could be eccentric‐his plural of dwarf was dwarves, for example. Once a printer corrected all his so‐called misspellings. Tolkien was furious. The printer so quoted as his authority the Oxford English Lexicon. And Tolkien responded, 'Why, I wrote the O.E.D.!' As a matter of fact, he had worked on information technology early on in his career."
The Middle‐earth cult has bought millions of copies of Tolkien'due south books in the concluding decade. The end is not in sight. By publication 24-hour interval Houghton Mifflin had received orders for more than than 750,000 copies of "The Silmarillion," and two printers are now turning out literally tens of thousands of books a twenty-four hour period.
And will there exist more Tolkien books? The skilful word from Rayner Unwin of Middle‐globe: "The current one is the final in the great line, just there will be other books for his fans."
Tolkien.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1977/10/02/archives/behind-the-best-sellers-jrr-tolkien.html
0 Response to "Lord Rings Best Seller New York Times Book Review"
Post a Comment