5 to Find: Mediums for your Tolkien fix

BY JAMES D. WATTS JR. World Scene Writer
Thursday, January 03, 2013
1/03/13 at 4:18 AM

The story is told that, one day while correcting his students' essays, a teacher came upon a blank page in one student's answer book. Without really understanding why, the teacher scribbled 10 words: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

This simple sentence gave John Ronald Reuel Tolkien the way into the fantastic world whose creatures, landscape, language, history and mythology had occupied his imagination for years. Beginning with "The Hobbit," Tolkien would elaborate and expand on all aspects of the place he called Middle Earth, most famously in the three volumes that make up "The Lord of the Rings."

Thanks to Peter Jackson's films, Tolkien's stories have gained millions of new fans - even if some of them think that Jackson's efforts to squeeze three epic movies out of the children's story that is "The Hobbit" might be a tad misguided.

Still, today (Jan. 3) would have been J.R.R. Tolkien's 120th birthday. And since "The Hobbit" is still playing in local theaters and "The Lord of the Rings" is available in myriad forms, here are five other Tolkien-related items you might like to track down this weekend.

	"The Silmarillion" by J.R.R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40) - Published in 1977, four years after Tolkien's death, this book actually precedes "The Hobbit." It is a collection of tales that give a kind of history of the world Tolkien created, leading up to the story told in "The Lord of the Rings." It is, however, nothing like "The Lord of the Rings," and can be heavy sledding for all but the most rabid Tolkien fans.
	"Bored of the Rings" (Touchstone, $13.99) - In 1968, when Tolkien's novels were becoming a fixture on college campuses, the Harvard Lampoon created this parody, a gleeful send-up of hobbits, elves, epic quests and '60s consumer culture. It's just been reprinted in a new edition.
	"The Art of 'The Hobbit'" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40) - Tolkien was an accomplished enough artist to create illustrations for "The Hobbit" when it was still in manuscript, and he designed the binding and dust-jacket for the first edition. All this and more is contained in this newly published tome, with some of the material being made public for the first time.
	"The Inklings of Oxford: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Their Friends," By Harry Lee Poe (Zondervan, $24.99) - Humphrey Carpenter's award-winning book on this influential group of writers is out of print, so this will have to do. Tolkien, Lewis and Charles Williams were the leading lights of this collective, who were the first audiences for such works as "The Lord of the Rings," "The Screwtape Letters" and "All Hallows Eve." This book is as much about the Oxford environment in which they worked and lived as it is about the men themselves.
	"The Hobbit" (DVD, $9.95) - Not Peter Jackson's big-screen version, but the animated TV movie made in 1977, with Orson Bean giving voice to Bilbo Baggins and John Huston as Gandalf. Maybe not the greatest film ever made, but at least it tells the entire story in under 90 minutes. You could also track down Ralph Bakshi's animated film of "The Lord of the Rings," although that tells only the first half of the story.

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