Hobbits and Dragons and one cool Professor.

I first encountered The Hobbit (Rankin-Bass) in an animated video. As I was generally into faery/fairy tales even as a kid, I enjoyed The Hobbit immensely. I loved it because of the adventure and of course, I like anything with dragons. And Smaug was one of the most magnificent dragons I had ever met. Naturally, seeing as how I enjoyed that story, my tita rented The Lord of The Rings with its rotoscope animation. It scared the hell out of me. I never really understood the story because I just realized after I read the books that the cartoon ended halfway through the tale (and I only found out about the Return of the King animation recently). Sheesh. Its screenplay was horrible and unimaginative. But, I don't hate it as much as other fans do. For one thing, I saw it first before I even knew it was a book. (Those days, I didn't pay much attention to film credits. I was 8, I think)

And so a Tolkien fan I became. To some people, a Tolkien freak. Hehe, I'm happily just one of the millions.

Now, having read the books several times, I'm quite familiar with all the characters and the events, and the histories of middle-earth. But, I didn't know much about the writer. But, this book helped.



I've just finished reading Tolkien's biography by Michael Coren. It's a biography written for kids and published by Scholastic (also Harry Potter's publisher). It was a good read. I especially liked reading about how The Hobbit first got published, and about Tolkien's retirement speech (which he ended by quoting from the elvish poem that he wrote: Namarie).

Read it! It's nicely written and the Professor's life is just as interesting as Frodo's. :D








posted by u l a n _ at 8:01 PM