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underpants

(182,271 posts)
Wed Apr 24, 2019, 12:54 PM Apr 2019

Audio of Tolkien reading Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit in the early 50's [View all]

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

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That's fantastic! lagomorph777 Apr 2019 #1
Wow...incredible!! Docreed2003 Apr 2019 #2
That's a really great website. underpants Apr 2019 #3
I've loved this recording for years. Aristus Apr 2019 #4
S.M. Stirling's Embervse and Tolkien murielm99 May 2019 #5
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