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

J.R.R. Tolkien was not a big fan of his fan­dom. He had seri­ous doubts about whether any of the mil­lions of read­ers who adored The Hob­bit and The Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy under­stood any­thing about what he was try­ing to do. But none of them can be blamed, since he didn’t at first set out to write fic­tion at all—at least not when it came to The Lord of the Rings. The books, he said, were “an attempt to cre­ate a world in which a form of lan­guage agree­able to my per­son­al aes­thet­ic might seem real.”

The most famous fan­ta­sy series of all time began its life as a lin­guis­tic exper­i­ment, in oth­er words. “The inven­tion of lan­guages is the foun­da­tion,” said Tolkien. “The ‘sto­ries’ were made rather to pro­vide a world for the lan­guages than the reverse.” Of course, Tolkien fans know quite a bit about how per­son­al his sto­ries became, even as they incor­po­rat­ed more and more myth­i­cal ele­ments. How could we pos­si­bly under­stand these sto­ries the way Tolkien did?

Authors do not get to choose their read­ers, nor can they direct the inter­pre­ta­tions of their work. Still Tolkien may have been more mis­un­der­stood than oth­ers, and maybe more enti­tled to com­plain. The schol­ar­ly work of philol­o­gists like himself—academics who stud­ied the roots of lan­guages and mythologies—had been man­gled and mis­used by the Nazis. The fact caused Tolkien to con­fess to his son “a burn­ing pri­vate grudge against that rud­dy lit­tle igno­ra­mus Adolf Hitler” for “ruin­ing, per­vert­ing, mis­ap­ply­ing, and mak­ing for ever accursed” the his­to­ry Tolkien had made his life’s work. (He also penned a scathing reply to a Ger­man pub­lish­er who asked him for proof of his “Aryan” descent.)

He would also have been appalled that not long after his death, Mid­dle Earth became a “mer­chan­dis­ing jug­ger­naut,” as one stu­dent of his effect on pop­u­lar cul­ture puts it. Tolkien had stren­u­ous­ly resist­ed efforts by Dis­ney to buy the rights to his fic­tion, object­ing to what he saw as vul­gar, mer­ce­nary com­mer­cial­ism. The hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars poured into the Hob­bit and Lord of the Rings films, and the empire of games, action fig­ures, t‑shirts, etc., might have seemed to him the very image of pow­er-mad wiz­ard Saruman’s designs for world dom­i­na­tion.

This isn’t to say we should hear Tolkien scold­ing us as we pick up our box set of spe­cial edi­tion books, Blu-Rays, and LOTR tchotchkes. He was no stranger to mar­ket­ing. And he pro­duced the inspi­ra­tion for some of the most beloved adap­ta­tions with his own cov­er art designs and over a hun­dred draw­ings and paint­ings of Mid­dle Earth and its Eng­lish ref­er­ents. But per­haps it would repay fans of the many LOTR-themed con­sum­ables to attend to the cre­ator of the now-self-exis­tent world of Mid­dle Earth every now and then—to get clos­er, if not to Tolkien’s inten­tions, then at least to his mind and voice, both record­ed in his let­ters and his own read­ings from his work.

In the clips here, you can lis­ten to Tolkien him­self read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit, includ­ing a record­ing at the top of him read­ing one of the fan­ta­sy lan­guages he invent­ed, then cre­at­ed an entire world around, the Elvish tongue Quenya in the poem “Namarie.” Some of these YouTube clips have received their own cin­e­mat­ic treat­ment, in a YouTube sort of way, like the video below with a mon­tage of Tolkien-inspired media and a dra­mat­ic score. This may or may not be to your lik­ing, but the ori­gin sto­ry of the record­ing deserves a men­tion.

Shown a tape recorder by a friend, whom Tolkien had vis­it­ed to pick up a man­u­script of The Lord of the Rings, the author decid­ed to sit down and record him­self. Delight­ed with the results, he agreed to read from The Hob­bit. He liked the tech­nol­o­gy enough that he con­tin­ued to record him­self read­ing from his own work. Tolkien may not have desired to see his books turned into spec­ta­cles, but as we lis­ten to him read, it’s hard to see how any­one could resist the temp­ta­tion to put his mag­nif­i­cent descrip­tions on the big screen. Hear the sec­ond part of that Hob­bit read­ing here, and more Tolkien read­ings in the many links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Lis­ten to J.R.R. Tolkien Read Poems from The Fel­low­ship of the Ring, in Elvish and Eng­lish (1952)

J.R.R. Tolkien Reads From The Two Tow­ers, the Sec­ond Book of The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read From The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit

J.R.R. Tolkien Expressed a “Heart­felt Loathing” for Walt Dis­ney and Refused to Let Dis­ney Stu­dios Adapt His Work

J.R.R. Tolkien Snubs a Ger­man Pub­lish­er Ask­ing for Proof of His “Aryan Descent” (1938)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness