“What would you have done if you had been a little boy, and a wizard had come and asked you to go to the misty mountain and help kill a dragon?” A question put to a 76-year-old J R R Tolkien during an interview in 1968. Tolkien amusedly shot back: “I’d been very well brought up to avoid conversations with dubious old gentlemen, and would have retired into the house and asked my mother.” This is one of many memorable out-takes from a BBC documentary about the writer, never heard until now.
Born in what is now South Africa and raised “miserably poor” in Birmingham, Tolkien has a voice that in these clips sounds never too imperious, but stupendously precise and musical. I was reminded of something the actor Robert Hardy told me, and I went and dug out my notes from that exchange. Hardy had been taught Anglo-Saxon by Tolkien, along with six others, in the 1940s at Oxford. At their first lesson Tolkien persuaded them to enact a parlour game involving him listening to their voices without knowing who was speaking, all the while making “complicated notes”. He then proceeded to “go through us all one by one, analysing what the voice he had heard meant to him”.
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