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Old 01-08-2005, 04:10 PM   #1
littlemanpoet
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Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: The Edge of Faerie
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littlemanpoet is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.littlemanpoet is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
Tolkien Gleanings from the Biography

Here and there scattered through the late Humphrey Carpenter's authorized biography of Tolkien or fascinating little references to things, people, place, and events to which had a negative visceral reaction.

Upon reading the first one, I had to laugh. See what I mean.....

Quote:
[Tolkien] loved much of Paris and enjoyed exploring the city on his own, but he disliked the Frenchmen he saw in the streets, and wrote to Edith about 'the vulgarity and the jabber and spitting and the indecency'.
(p. 75, paperback version, 1977)

Were Parisian street Frenchmen part of the recipe for Tolkien's orcs in LotR?

But you Anglophile Francophobes had better not be too quick to laugh at your cousins across the Channel. Take note:

Quote:
Conditions were uniformly uncomfortable, and in the intervals between inedible meals, trench drill, and lectures on machine-guns, there was little to do except play bridge (which he enjoyed) and listen to ragtime on the gramophone (which he did not). Nor did he care for the majority of his fellow officers. 'Gentlemen are non-existent among the superiors,' he told Edith, 'and even human beings are rare indeed.'
(p. 87)

Am I all wet, or is this a piece of orc-dom? Are there any such references from his Letters?

Last edited by littlemanpoet; 01-10-2005 at 08:38 PM.
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