In 2002 The Tolkien Audio Collection was released, containing snippets of the author reading from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. This 1952 recording of Tolkien feature the author reading the famous ‘One Ring’ poem which forms the epigraph to each of the trilogy’s novels. It is fascinating to hear him pronounce the words of his invented languages – listen to the guttural way in which he rolls the ‘rs’ in ‘Mordor,’ giving the dark land a harsh and foreboding feel. Before speaking these lines in his role as Gandalf in the Peter Jackson movie adaptation, Sir Ian McKellen listened to this recording and strove to imitate Tolkien’s accent.
As well as an author of fantasy literature, Tolkien was a prolific scholar of medieval English, and was closely associated with Oxford. He was twice pointed Professor of Anglo-Saxon, as well as the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. The influence of his studies on The Lord of the Rings is huge: Mordor, for example, derives from the Old English word ‘morthor,’ which means murder, and Middle Earth, the setting for Tolkien’s stories, is taken from the Anglo-Saxon ‘middengeard’ – a term they used to describe the inhabitable world. Tolkien single-handedly invented several languages, and it is an immense pleasure to hear these beautiful and alien tongues spoken from the creator’s mouth.
