And his hobbits, the most famous of all his characters are a distinctly unfanciful race – food-loving, gift-giving, house-proud, paunchy – and as believable as your local newsagent. His wizards work according to union rules. His elves have their own carefully-constructed languages. In his world of wondrous things, he moves with the surety of a white hunter on a game reservation. To Professor Tolkien, a retired Oxford philologist and a man used to dealing evidentially with his material, everything, even in fantasy, must be specific. She is a sucking, strangling, trapping creature.” He was on the subject of dragons and the other horrenda which are his scholarly stock-in-trade.ĭiscussing one of his own monsters, a man-devouring, spider-like female, he said, “The female monster is certainly no deadlier than the male, but she is different. “Spiders,” observed Professor JRR Tolkien, cradling the word with the same affection that he cradled the pipe in his hand, “are the particular terror of northern imaginations.” The Professor, now 76, is the author of The Hobbit and of the three-volume epic fairy-tale, The Lord of the Rings, the slowest-developing bestseller in modern publishing history. This interview was originally published in The Telegraph magazine on March 22, 1968
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