By decree of the Tolkien Society, January 3 is official J.R.R. Tolkien Day. The iconic high-fantasy author was born John Ronald Reuel Tolkien on January 3, 1892, in South Africa, but his tales are beyond time.
J.R.R. Tolkien's rich Middle-Earth lore, runes, and cultural weight have been with the race of men since the publication of The Hobbit in 1937. Consider that Harry Potter and Game of Thrones obtained assists from multi-media promotion (not to mention the internet), theme parks, videogames, Instagram cosplay, and San Diego Comic-Con. Other than fan art and perhaps the early Dungeons & Dragons board-game synergy, Tolkien himself had none of these cross-platform advantages for his "re-imagined English mythology." Yet generations of readers were to grow up knowing of High Elvish, the rising of Sauron, and the pleasures of waybread on the trail.
An avid "philologist," or student of early Anglo-Saxon languages, Tolkien taught at Oxford University in the 1930s and ascended to Merton Professor of English in 1945. Along with fellow writers C.S. Lewis (also to be a font of film adaptations for his Narnia stories) and the less-heralded Charles Williams and Owen Barfield, Tolkien formed The Inklings, a regular meeting of writers devoted to creating fantastic fictional realms "inside which the green sun would be credible."
Much of the groundwork for Middle Earth, in what Tolkien called "subcreation" or "secondary worlds" were lain years before the vast majority of the Lord of the Rings trilogy was ever formally presented to the reading public, some preliminary tales dating as far back as 1910 and during the Great War. Inkling salons and years and years of brainstorming sessions ultimately yielded The Hobbit (full title: The Hobbit, or There and Back Again), then The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King (1955).
Many of the other literati of Tolkien's own era, particularly Edmond Wilson, were appalled by the novels' popularity, but by the 1960s, the hippie counterculture had taken Gandalf Stormcrow as one of their own (no doubt his fondness for pipeweed helped) and elevated Tolkien (who had retired from the Merton chair in 1959) to a near-mystic figure.
An unseemly court case over American reprint rights to the trilogy fought with uber-prolific science fiction/fantasy publisher-author Donald Wollheim somehow rallied even more fans to Tolkien's side; it showed how his books were more special than, say, the Mike Mars series put out by Wollheim's New York-based paperback mills.
By the time Tolkien died in 1973, he had given humanity "Tolkienesque" to describe his brand of literature. There were a few works outside of Middle-Earth material, including Father Giles of Ham and The Father Christmas Letters and Mr. Bliss (posthumously issued in 1976 and 2011, respectively). But the Tolkien estate, delving into reams of Inklings drafts and set-aside manuscripts like dwarves digging into the Mines of Moriah, issued other Middle-Earth entries such as The Simarillion in 1977 and Children of Hurin in 2007.
Science-fiction/fantasy authority John Clute observed that Tolkien dealt readers an imaginary world in concretely realistic, acutely delineated terms and consistent rules, complete with territorial maps and ancestral folk songs. And no wink-wink narrative gimmicks of a hero who arrives via walking through an enchanted wardrobe, getting swept up in a Kansas tornado, wishing himself to be on Barsoom, or just visiting in a dream (or...WAS IT A DREAM?). Aye, other fantasy writers, from Conan's accomplished pulp-master Robert E. Howard to unpublished-in-their-lifetime eccentrics such as Austin Tappan Wright and Henry Darger may have done similar literary heavy-lifting in concocting vastly detailed unreal worldscapes. But none better than Tolkien.
Middle-Earth had a strong influence on Led Zepplin, T. Rex, and other UK music ensembles, and the chronicles actually note that none other than The Beatles considered starring in an (apparently sincere) film adaptation of Tolkien. The author sold motion-picture rights to United Artists in 1969, and movie lore has it that casting would have included Paul McCartney as Frodo, Ringo Starr as Samwise, John Lennon as Gollum, and George Harrison as Gandalf, but the notion dissolved with the breakup of the band. Visionary director John Boorman was attached to the UA Rings project, getting as far as an early 1970s script draft.
Instead of those what-ifs, 2022 Tolkien Day instead cannot miss the 20th anniversary of the late 2001 theatrical release of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, first of filmmaker Peter Jackson's (so far) two Middle Earth trilogies, followed by The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in late 2002, and a triumphant The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King at the end of 2003.
Jackson, a New Zealand filmmaker with a filmography wavering between gore-horror comedies and art-house curios, won a commitment from Robert Shaye and New Line Cinema (a fairly modest production company for spectacles) to simultaneously make three separate features faithful to the Tolkien Rings trilogy—this after Jackson resisted initial pressure to somehow compress all three books into one two-hour-or-so feature. The trio is now considered classic and practically canonical Tolkienia—even if the movies drop major character Tom Bombadil and excised a number of subplots (a few vital scenes, such as the death of Christopher Lee's Saruman, were still trimmed to shorten the theatrical releases; deluxe video editions do the justice of restoring them).
For Peter Jackson, the omen portending not to do a brutal abridgment of the Middle Earth saga was something one could see clearly without the help of any wizards or Palentirs. In 1977, CBS television, in association with the Rankin-Bass team who had done stop-motion holiday TV classics like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Japanese-animated Frosty the Snowman, exhibited a charming and respectful musical cartoon of The Hobbit (for a generation, the raspy voice of eccentric NYC performance artist Brother Theodore WAS Gollum, sorry John Lennon).
Producer Saul Zaentz had by then acquired the old United Artists rights to Tolkien's Rings trilogy, and the assignment fell to maverick animator Ralph Bakshi to do a big-screen theatrical Lord of the Rings. Bakshi had scored a modest success with Wizards (1977), a semi-satirical, certainly iconoclastic slant on high fantasy that certainly understood the realm.
But, faced with impossible deadlines and diminished budgets, the completed Lord of the Rings turned out a smudgy 131-minute amalgam of The Fellowship of the Rings and The Two Towers, thus effectively lacking any ending (as well as a sense of humor). Although the majesty of Middle Earth breaks through the Mirkwood in places, it is largely regarded by fans as a valiant but unsuccessful try.
In a curious follow-up, Saul Zaentz went back to Rankin-Bass for a TV attempt at the finale, and the ABC network presented its cartoon Return of the King in 1980. Stylistically completely unlike the Bakshi feature, it reunited some of the vocal cast of The Hobbit and gave posterity a truly bizarre orc musical number "Where There's a Whip There's a Way." But the fragile magic was not much in evidence this time.
Fans can (and probably will) argue all the way to Helm's Deep whether TV's 1977 The Hobbit is more worthy of respect or not compared to the amped/up New Line Cinema-MGM return visit to the material by director Peter Jackson, once more in oliphaunt-sized trilogy form, starting with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in 2012.
This time the situation was reversed; the smallish 1937 fantasy novel was, as per the model set by The Lord of the Rings, elastically stretched into three mighty widescreen spectacles, adding The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug in 2013 and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in 2014. Reams of new characters and subplots were added to attenuate Tolkein's original text, Benedict Cumberbatch joined the ensemble cast as the dragon Smaug, and there were all the special effects money could buy. It is mostly agreed, upon, however, that the Lord of the Rings trilogy from the previous decade was the more satisfying experience. And once again, poor Tom Bombadil never shows up!
Tom Bombadil, in fact, has only appeared onscreen in Hobbitit, a largely unsung nine-part 1993 Finnish TV miniseries takeoff on the entire Middle-Earth saga which restricts the plot exclusively to the vantage-point of the hobbits. It is unlikely you will find this product in your Shire in time for Tolkien Day.
Meanwhile, the cartoon Rankin-Bass Hobbit and The Return of the King, Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings, and all of the Peter Jackson LOTR and Hobbit trilogy are fairly easy to secure and should be at any J.R.R. Tolkein displays.
A few other titles may be added. Tolkien is a 2019 biographical drama on the author as a young man (portrayed by Nicholas Hoult), with an emphasis on his early academic life, religious influences, courtship of his young wife Edith, and the author's First World War perils, leading up to the inception of The Hobbit.
On the documentary side, J.R.R. Tolkien: Origin of the Rings is a 2001 biography documentary, heavily tying its Bilbo coattails to the then-concurrent release of Peter Jackson's initial The Fellowship of the Ring blockbuster. It remains a fairly obscure VHS cassette. Easier to find in stock as a DVD is 2005's Ringers: Lord of the Fans, a fun feature appreciation/celebration of all things Tolkien (right down to a vintage sequence of Leonard Nimoy's singing his "Ballad of Bilbo Baggins") with guest appearances by authors Peter S. Beagle, Clive Barker and Terry Pratchett, among others.
Those should comprise a noble library display in time for Tolkien Day, and it may even be worthwhile to leave them up for March 25—another calendar page sacred to the Tolkien Society, as it is taken to be the date of the fall of Sauron and the defeat of Barad-dûr. Live Tolkien readings and storytellings are recommended to commemorate that milestone.