Episode

This month CM Lowry is talking to Chris Durston, author of Chronicles from the World of Guilt, about The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien in ‘This Book I Read...’

Topics covered include:

Being old enough to remember the internet before Wikipedia existed, writing stories on early PCs and reading the Yellow Pages Re-reading childhood classics to the point of the covers disintegrating and how much harder that is to do as you get older and your time becomes more constrained Tolkien's love of linguistics and how his languages shaped the world of The Lord of the Rings as well as the various races that exist within the world. Accents within fiction writing and how they can bring the character to life immediately. Tolkien tends to use patterns of speech instead of phonetic accents to communicate character. The least heroic character in The Lord of The Rings is the one that makes it all happen and watching the heroic characters doing everything they can just to give the Hobbits a little bit more time to destroy the ring. Extra-natural characters within The Lord of the Rings such as Tom Bombadil and Gandalf, whom Tolkien used as illustrations of the fact that something does exist outside of the ordinary. These contrast beautifully with the very normal lives of the hobbits who concerned themselves only with where second breakfast was coming from. Magic in The Lord of the Rings is far more soft than people expect - …