I hope they get it right... I've read a lot of fanfiction and short articles that get it wrong... he was a complex man.
this snippet from the HR article makes me shudder:
Actually, he wasn't married in 1914 when the war broke out, only engaged. He married shortly before he joined up in 1916.... and that "four years of hardship" was not just the Battle of the Somme, but trench fever, i.e. typhus, which tends to relapse, which hospitalized him on and off for 2 years.
when war broke out in 1914, disrupting his Oxford life with his wife Edith Bratt, Tolkien embarked on four years of battle, hardship, and new friendships, which served to shape his imagination and start him on the path to Middle Earth.
and I wonder how they will portray his wife? Supposedly, he always had a lot of female students to tutor, which he did in his home since he was married and his wife was there he didn't need a "Chaparone" in those old fashioned days. Many reports are that Edith "mothered" them. I always thought the professor and his wife in "That Hideous Strength" was based on them, but I've never read anyone who observed that so I could be wrong.
The character Ransom, in "out of the silent planet" (written in the 1930's) is supposedly partly based on Tolkien... there is a passage where Ransom befriends all the Hrossa children, and plays with them, and George Sayers relates that once when he visited them (as a widower) he found Tolkien playing Thomas the Tank engine with his children...
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AlasNotMe Blog has an essay on Tolkien's Beren/Luthien romance as a mirror image of the elf king in Sir Orpheo.
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The Pope's hatchet man called Bishop Burke "Wormtongue" in a tweet for daring to question the Pope (and the German bishop's) agenda to take sinful deeds less seriously, under the guise of "mercy".
He has the analogy wrong, of course. Bishop Burke is actually closer to "Gandalf Stormcrow" for warning a sleeping king that there is trouble ahead and that he should ignore the "experts" who are advising him.
What'sNewWithKRu has an essay comparing Grima to Alfrid, in the Jackson Middle Earth series.
Father and son? unlikely, but...Grima is 59 years old in TT, and although Afrid was killed in Hobbit 3 extended edition, if he had left an unborn child behind, this could almost fit the 60 year time gap in the books.
Both characters are slimey suckup A**kissers who manipulate their master so they have that in common.
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Michael Martinez' blog is back up and running with lots of articles for Tolkien geeks.
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the present podcast series on modern myth and fantasy from Mythgard is Ursula LeGuin's the Dispossessed, but you can find a lot of the Tolkien based lectures on their website.
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