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One of the highlights of 2019 was
reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Hobbit aloud
to my 6-and-a-half-year-old son
at bedtime. We started
towards the end of August 2019,
and finished it in just over a month.
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Why should one read «The Hobbit»
before watching the film?
Because, judging by the trailers and interviews,
the Hobbit film adaptation will be presented
as a coherent ‘prequel’ to «The Lord of the Rings» films.
But the book was no such thing!
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Alice is turning 150 this year,
yet we still love
to read about (or watch)
this curious little girl’s
adventures in Wonderland
again and again.
There’s something about this book
that has made it a timeless classic,
a fascinating story which has reached
far beyond the children
of the mid-19th century,
for whom it was first written.
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Like parents the world over,
J.R.R. Tolkien dedicated considerable time and effort
to making Christmas a joyful time for his young children.
Yet this was a man whose rich imagination brought to life
an entire world with thousands of years of legendary history;
described different orders of creatures, wars and battles;
even invented languages.
So inevitably, his family traditions were something rather special. […]
In «A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages,»
edited by myself [Dimitra Fimi] and Andrew Higgins,
we present Tolkien’s own reflections on his language invention. […]
– Constructions of Childhood in Tolkien’s Legendarium
