Saturday, March 19, 2016

Tolkien Reading Day

Today I went out to celebrate Tolkien Reading Day. It's a day of celebrating this great author and his works. And so, when I spotted that this event was on at a local library, I thought it was about time I went to see who was giving the talk; and what it was about.

However, a few days ago, I was at the Logan North Library when I spotted the advertising about this event and called up Peter Kenny - Brisbane's biggest collector of JRR Tolkien memorabilia - and we chatted for a good half hour about just that topic; as well as collecting books. I found that Peter has a huge collection of 'The Hobbit' in a variety of languages, of merchandise, costumes and other information he's researched about the realms that JRR Tolkien created just to write 'Lord of the Rings', 'The Hobbit' and 'The Silmarillion'; as well as other books on how those books came together. 

There weren't many people at today's reading, but the few who were there knew their fair share of information about Middle Earth and some of the specifics. One girl showed up and greeted us in Elvish - a language that JRR Tolkien developed himself to use in the just the books, but people have learned and used for themselves - and she bowed to him as well; fun stuff.

Well, the talk went for over an hour on the history of how the spirit guides and the lands were created. This was very briefly explained. Then, Peter talked in-depth about how 'Lord of the Rings' was about Aragorn more and less about Frodo and him getting the ring he had to Mount Doom. Believe me, I'll be rereading that book again just to pick up on it all.
He also made note that the movies were a mess of mis-quoted lines from the books that were placed in the wrong places, into the wrong character's mouths in the movies.  

Overall, the whole talk was fascinating and was well worth my morning there. I stuck around to chat to Peter more as he asked me to stay after his talk so we could catch up about our books and collections. It was good to talk to somebody about something we both understood completely. What made it worthwhile was that he had a huge amount of knowledge and books I didn't; and I had some books he wanted to look at that he hadn't seen. So, it was good for us both. Until my next post, happy reading.

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