Audio of Tolkien reading Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit in the early 50's

[underpants]

J.R.R. Tolkien was not a big fan of his fandom. He had serious doubts about whether any of the millions of readers who adored The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy understood anything about what he was trying to do. But none of them can be blamed, since he didn’t at first set out to write fiction at all—at least not when it came to The Lord of the Rings. The books, he said, were “an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real.”

In the clips here, you can listen to Tolkien himself read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, including a recording at the top of him reading one of the fantasy languages he invented, then created an entire world around, the Elvish tongue Quenya in the poem "Namarie."

http://www.openculture.com/2019/04/hear-j-r-r-tolkien-read-from-the-lord-of-the-rings-and-the-hobbit-in-vintage-recordings-from-the-early-1950s.html

[lagomorph777]

1. That's fantastic!

Tolkien is as much of a storyteller "live" as on the page!

I love his Gollum voice.

[Docreed2003]

2. Wow...incredible!!

Can't believe I haven't heard this before!

[underpants]

3. That's a really great website.

From Faulkner (I think it was) reading his writing to The Cramps playing at a mental hospital ...you simply never know what will be on there.

[Aristus]

4. I've loved this recording for years.

His excerpt from The Hobbit is extraordinary. And the spoken voice can convey things the written word cannot. For example, even though I had read the passage a hundred times about Gollum's life, year upon endless year without the sun, without friendly company, without any way to tell time, it didn't really hit me until I heard Tolkien read it.

Then the horror of such a life struck me, and something in me died a little. That's when I truly started to pity Gollum.

[murielm99]

5. S.M. Stirling's Embervse and Tolkien

The Emberverse series, starting with Dies the Fire, is a postapacolyptic series. Two sets of characters want to use Tolkien and his symbols in their new societies. The evil character uses the Eye of Sauron for his symbol.

Another survivor in the series is an archer who was obsessed with The Lord of the Rings before the apocalyptic event. She goes to live in the redwood forests of the Northwest with some friends. They say they are the descendants of the Numenoreans, and become Dunedain Rangers. They speak Sindarin and study the Tolkien books as true history. As you read those books, you will find some interesting takes on the "Dunedain Rangers" behavior and use of language.

I wonder if Stirling was familiar with this recording before he wrote the books. I would not be surprised if he was.