Tolkien Reading Day is held on the 25th of March each year. It has been organised by the Tolkien Society since 2003 to encourage fans to celebrate and promote the life and works of J.R.R. Tolkien by reading favourite passages.
TolkienSociety.org
According to reading length “The Silmarillion” only takes 7 hours and 22 minutes.
Tolkien was influenced by Germanic heroic legend, especially its Norse and Old English forms. During his education at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, he read and translated from the Old Norse in his free time. One of his first Norse purchases was the Völsunga saga.
March 25 was chosen as the date to celebrate annually because it marks the date of Sauron’s defeat, a key evil character in “Lord of the Rings.”
Tolkien Could Read by the Age of Four.
He was a philologist (scholar of languages) at Oxford and even worked on the Oxford English Dictionary.
Many people believed Sauron was based on Adolf Hitler. However, he was based on a character in one of JRR Tolkien’s favourite boyhood books. Tolkien loved SR Crockett’s historical novel, The Black Douglas. Its villain, Gilles de Retz, was based on the French knight (and associate of Joan of Arc), Gilles de Rais, a convicted child murderer. Crockett’s character was also a devil worshipper, allied with a shapeshifting witch and a pack of wolves — similar to wargs.
Tolkien and Lewis were friends for several decades when they both taught at the University of Oxford. They were critical of each other’s work: Tolkien disliked The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe because he found the *allegorical depiction of good and evil too *strident. After their first meeting, Lewis wrote in his diary of Tolkien: ‘No harm in him, only needs a smack or so.’
Tolkien was Catholic while Lewis was Protestant.
*As a literary device or artistic form, an allegory is a narrative or visual representation in which a character, place, or event can be interpreted to represent a hidden meaning with moral or political significance.
*loud and harsh; grating. presenting a point of view, especially a controversial one, in an excessively forceful way.
So it seems that Tolkien found Lewis works, either too obvious with the meaning and/or (at the time) Tolkien felt it was too obvious what Lewis was writing. Rather than having a more subtle meaning. Then again, it is Tolkien. The man who created an entire new language for an epic tale.
And STILL Tolkien was rejected for a Nobel Peace Prize for Literature!
Lolsys Library 