J. R. R. Tolkien Reads from The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings & Other Works

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist

If you want­ed to hear the voice of your favorite writer in the nine­teen-six­ties — a time before audio­books, let alone pod­casts — you con­sult­ed the cat­a­log of Caed­mon Records. That label spe­cial­ized in LPs of lit­er­ary emi­nences read­ing their own work. This may or may not be the kind of com­pa­ny in which you’d expect to find a writer of high fan­ta­sy like J. R. R. Tolkien. But in 1967, just as The Lord of the Rings was enjoy­ing a burst of coun­ter­cul­ture-dri­ven pop­u­lar­i­ty, the label put out the album Poems and Songs of Mid­dle-Earth, which you can sam­ple above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist

Tolkien’s voice had been put on a com­mer­cial record just once before, in 1930, years before he’d pub­lished even The Hob­bit. That was for a series of Eng­lish lessons by Arthur Lloyd James, the ill-fat­ed pho­neti­cian who pio­neered stan­dards of pro­nun­ci­a­tion in broad­cast­ing. Tolkien had already estab­lished him­self at Oxford as a philol­o­gist, which may have had some­thing to do with his selec­tion to par­tic­i­pate in such a project.

Not that Tolkien him­self sound­ed quite like the ide­al BBC announc­er, but then, the vast read­er­ship he would lat­er accrue with his nov­els would­n’t have want­ed him to — and indeed, they’d thrill par­tic­u­lar­ly to the record­ings he would make not in Eng­lish at all, but in Quenya and Sin­darin, two Elvish lan­guages of his own inven­tion. The album’s sec­ond side is tak­en up by The Road Goes Ever On, a song cycle adapt­ed from Tolkien’s poems of Mid­dle-Earth by pro­lif­ic com­pos­er and per­former Don­ald Swann.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=playlist

Lat­er, in the sev­en­ties, the now defunct label would assem­ble the mate­r­i­al for two more releas­es fea­tur­ing the author’s voice and the author’s voice alone, one with selec­tions from The Hob­bit and The Fel­low­ship of the Ring and anoth­er with selec­tions from The Two Tow­ers and The Return of The King. By that time, there was a large and recep­tive mar­ket for such prod­uct. “I pre­sume that most peo­ple who buy this record will already have read Pro­fes­sor Tolkien’s tetral­o­gy,” say the lin­er notes for Poems and Songs of Mid­dle-Earth, describ­ing that tetral­o­gy as “a work that will either total­ly enthrall you or leave you stone cold, and, whichev­er your response, noth­ing and nobody will ever change it.” The writer adds that, “as a mem­ber of the enchant­ed par­ty, I have found by expe­ri­ence that it is quite use­less to argue with the uncon­vert­ed.” His name: W. H. Auden.

Relat­ed con­tent:

J. R. R. Tolkien, Using a Tape Recorder for the First Time, Reads from The Hob­bit for 30 Min­utes (1952)

J. R. R. Tolkien Writes & Speaks in Elvish, a Lan­guage He Invent­ed for The Lord of the Rings

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit in Vin­tage Record­ings from the Ear­ly 1950s

When J. R. R. Tolkien Worked for the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary and “Learned More … Than Any Oth­er Equal Peri­od of My Life” (1919–1920)

110 Draw­ings and Paint­ings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Mid­dle-Earth and Beyond

J. R. R. Tolkien in His Own Words

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.