Tolkien's Birthday

Happy Tolkien Day, all!

--JDR

Fifty

So, today was my fiftieth birthday.

Fifty. Half a hundred. Still not dead.

Or, as my wife puts it, "Too late to die young!"

Woo-hoo.

--JDR

My Father's Birthday

Today would have been my father's seventy-seventh birthday.

I'm proud to share the name of the smartest man I ever knew; a songwriter who could never get his work recorded, a natural-born teacher who helped inspire my love of history, a parent who no matter how overworked was never too busy not to read us a bedtime story. Some people have trouble imagining their parents or grandparents as young; for me it's hard to imagine what he'd be like in his seventies, now that he's been dead for forty years after only living to the age of thirty-seven.* I do know he'd be deeply interested in the current election: I remember trying to make sense of the tv coverage of the 1968 Chicago convention he was watching, and that he was disappointed by Nixon's defeat of Humphrey just weeks before his first heart attack; my first date-able memory is his deep distress while watching the news (Huntley-Brinkley?) about JFK's assassination.** A war veteran himself (a radio operator in Korea) who hated war and whose best friend in the army was black, he'd be fascinated and proud we'd come so far as to nominate an African-American as one of the two candidates for president. His field was American History, and he was years ahead of the Dee Brown revolution in his admiration for Chief Joseph, and Geronimo, and the other American Indians leaders of the late nineteenth century. His favorite president was Jefferson; having recently come to consider Adams the better man of the two, I wish there were some way to have a conversation with him about the two men's respective merits. His death left a hole in our family that nothing ever filled, but I'm grateful to have been old enough to remember him.

From all of us who still remember you, rest in peace Papaw.

--John D. Rateliff, Jr.



*especially since none of his brothers lived past their sixties, no doubt in part due to heredity (Uncle J.W. had a stroke at 56, Uncle Aubrey an aneurism at 62; Uncle Trig and Uncle Curtis both died in their late sixties), and in part to smoking -- my father smoked three and a half packs of Pall Malls a day, or about ninety cigarettes.

**I was actually taken to see Kennedy when he came to Texarkana in the 1960 campaign, but of course I was too young to remember anything about it. I do remember seeing Johnson speak there when he was running for re-election in 1964 -- the only time I've seen a President while he was in office (I've shaken hands with Clinton, but that was while he was governor, and with Carter, but that was while he was on a book tour as ex-president).

Belated Tolkien's Birthday

Happy Belated Tolkien's birthday, all.

2007 was a big year for us, between finally completing and seeing published MR. BAGGINS and RETURN TO BAG-END, as well as making my first trip to England in thirteen years (and my first research trip in fifteen). 2008 also promises to be eventful, if somewhat more low key, as I absorb the research I did in Oxford and start sketching out the next project(s).

Thanks to all who sent in errata; I've passed along a list of corrections to the good folks at HarperCollins, who will be incorporating them into the forthcoming trade paperback edition, due out in March. This expanded edition will include Appendix V, which looks at whom Tolkien sent his author's copies of THE HOBBIT to, and the Addendum, some late material from 1965-66 that came to light too late for inclusion in the original edition. It's not many more pages, and I don't think any startling revelations are included therein, but I think folks will find these last few odds and ins interesting in and of themselves. More on this later.


Thanks also to the good folks at Houghton Mifflin, who pointed out to me a favorable review in the L. A. TIMES by Nick Owchar. My two favorite lines:

"Rateliff's labors have resulted in a rich treatment of the many changes, false starts and motivations behind Tolkien's storytelling choices."

and

"Rateliff's efforts have a paradoxical effect: Even as they demystify Tolkien and show us that there is no such thing as easy genius, they remind us that his willingness to endure numbing revisions to develop a nuanced story is even greater reason to revere him."

Needless to say, I've very pleased. The whole review can be found here:

http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/books/la-bk-owchar30dec30,1,6672345.story?coll=la-headlines-bookreview


I've also done a ten-minute audio interview that should soon be posted online in what is, for me, an unlikely forum; I'll provide the link once it's up.


Finally, here's another little piece I came across that supports the argument that MR. BLISS dates from 1932 or '33, not the late '20s. In the same illustration that shows Gaffer Gamgee, a character who entered the family mythology following the Tolkiens' holiday to Lamora Cove in Cornwall in the summer of 1932, one of the shops on the street is ALLBONE the butcher (MR. BLISS page 36). Given the otherwise unexplained appearance of the name Allibone-Baggins in the final chapter of the first draft HOBBIT (soon to be renamed the Sackville-Bagginses), I would now suggest that the 'allibone' element is probably another family joke, the significance of which is lost. In any case, as with all the elements from THE HOBBIT incorporated into the 1932 FATHER CHRISTMAS LETTER, the Allbone/Allibone parallel suggests that MR. BLISS might have been written around the same time (1932-33) as the conclusion of THE HOBBIT (January 1933).

--JDR