The Hobbit

Tuesday

Druin Burch

The Hobbit is not a great book

It was 1937, an age away, when JRR Tolkien's book The Hobbit was first released. There are people alive who remember that year, but not many. The Hobbit was published by George Allen & Unwin after Stanley Unwin commissioned a review of the typescript (standard fee, one shilling) from his ten-year-old son, Rayner. When he reviewed The Hobbit, CS Lewis said it was a children’s book “only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery.” “Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit,” it read, complete with a ten-year-old’s errors, “who lived in his hobbit-hole and never went for adventures, at last Gandalf the wizard and his dwarves perswaded him to go. He had a very exiting time fighting goblins...

Monday

Alexander Larman

The Penguin, Agatha All Along and the perils of spin-offs of spin-offs

Two of the highest-profile show launches of the past month are also two of the least original. If your taste runs to hard-bitten, Sopranos­-accented crime, then you might enjoy the new HBO series The Penguin, with Colin Farrell reprising his role from 2022’s The Batman as Oswald Cobb, the so-called “Penguin,” a Mafioso who is attempting to gain control of Gotham City’s crime underworld following the death of Carmine Falcone. And if you’re more interested in female-driven whimsy, then Marvel’s Agatha All Along, the latest genre-hopping comedy-drama-fantasy-horror on Disney+, will allow Kathryn Hahn ample opportunity to chew the scenery as the witch Agatha Harkness, who forms a new coven after the misadventures of WandaVision.

penguin spin-off

Monday

Alexander Larman

Why does a new Tolkien biography remain elusive?

Last year’s big-budget, much talked-about television series, Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, had a somewhat unlikely figure as its presiding genius. For one thing, he has been dead half a century this year, and for another, he was a mild-mannered Oxford don with a particular scholarly interest in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature. His reputation rests on four novels published during his lifetime, which have not only been bestsellers since their publications in 1937, 1954 and 1955, but continue to attract millions of readers, who are unusually ardent in their appreciation.

tolkien

Friday

Cockburn

George Santos thinks the Hobbit movies were better than Lord of the Rings

Hammer time Cockburn hears that Jamie Kirchick, the New York Times bestselling author and sometime Speccie writer, has scored an exclusive interview with Armie Hammer, the disgraced Call Me By Your Name star that just might be a cannibal, out this weekend in Graydon Carter's Air Mail. Cockburn wonders whether the meet was over dinner — and if so, who was on the menu… Will CPAC be wack? We are just a month away from CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, which in the Trump era was one of the highlights of Cockburn's year (as you can see from his previous coverage). But buzz ahead of the flagship conservative conference this year has been muted — and right now the line-up lacks the dazzle of previous years, though it does, of course, include President Trump.

george santos hobbit

Friday

Melanie McDonagh

A Hobbit-sized exhibition about Tolkien as pipe-smoker and parent

To no one’s surprise, the Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth exhibition was a huge success when it opened last October at the Bodleian in Oxford, the library where J.R.R. spent so much of his time. Had tickets been on sale, Tolkein would have been be a sell-out, but the Bodleian had made it free. The visitors book was peppered with observations such as: ‘It made me cry with joy… sensationally splendid.’ There’s also a less hyperbolic view, in a childish hand: ‘It was interesting to see how he made The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.’ Tolkien, Maker of Middle-Earth is now at the Morgan Library, New York City. It is rather a small show, almost Hobbit-sized.

tolkien