This German art student, Benjamin Harff, decided, for his exam at the Academy of Arts, to do something only slightly ambitious — to hand-illuminate and bind a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion. It took him six months of work. He hand-illuminated the text which had been printed on his home Canon inkjet printer. He worked with a binder to assemble the resulting book.
Thesis: the reason we joke about what J R R Tolkien’s initials stand for but not C S Lewis’ is because nothing could possibly be funnier than C S Lewis’ actual name.
Tolkien gets a lot of credit for the work that he put into crafting the sounds of names (“Ungoliant” sounds evil, “Galadriel” sounds beautiful, etc.) but as far as I’m concerned, his best named character ever was Bilbo’s dad. Bungo is boring from the first syllable. Amazing.
And Belladonna sounds exactly like the name of someone who would start some shit.
Tolkien was amazing at writing very serious and dramatic scenes that move the reader to tears, but please take a moment to read about Smaug noticing that Bilbo had stolen a single gold cup:
His rage passes description – the sort of rage that is only seen when
rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they
have long had but have never before used or wanted.
Not only is Tolkien a wonderful writer, but he also had a great sense of humor, and used it perfectly especially in the Hobbit.
Personally I always felt like Hobbits age at roughly the same rate as exceptionally healthy humans and that the reason they don’t come of legal age until 33 is because have you met people in their 20s because Tolkien did
Funny: Pippin is an idiot because he’s not an adult yet.
Funnier: Pippin is an idiot because he’s 28.
Buzzkill: Approximately 85% if soldiers fighting in the trenches of WW1 were under the age of 30. A quarter of a million British soldiers were under the age of 19….and the average life expectancy of a trench soldier was six weeks.
Six weeks.
Tolkien was pressured to enlist and did so at the age of 23. He was in the trenches during the Battle of the Somme where he watched so many young people die around him, all kids like him. His entire battalion was decimated. So he was no stranger to the effects (both experienced and observed) of very young men being tossed into very adult situations and having to grow up very, very quickly. Yes, Pippin is an idiot and the youngest…but he joins the soldiers of Gondor and fights in a war where EVERYONE is bigger, stronger, and older than he is.
Pippin is a badass and so was Tolkien.
Another reason I believe we’re supposed to see Hobbit aging as at the same rate of human aging: the Shire is so sheltered and idyllic you don’t have to come of age until 33. No village boys sent off to die en masse in the trenches of WW1, no sons sent across oceans to fight in the deserts of WW2, a long childhood and a sheltered adolescence and a slow transition into citizenship.
Wide Spread Interests 