…as you perform for the youths of your villages, hamlets and hollers your much anticipated reading of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil for National Tolkien Reading Day, but we would be remiss if we did not alert you that our pal Burr Deming has posted his best-of-the-web links complete with wry commentary at the essential blog Fair and Unbalanced.
PS – I’ve been meaning to include Scissorhead Buttermilk Sky forever, who runs a really smart, nearly daily round-up. Go check it out and say hi!
We will of course keep this post on top and fresher posts —if any!— will be below.
Mock Paper Scissors 
I just reread Farmer Giles of Ham about a month ago. Tolkien brings the funny in that one.
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One of the many things excised from the film trilogy.
I can understand the biggies, Tom Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire (SJ discusses both in one of the extras on the deluxe directors cut version I own) but I still missed them, particularly the latter, as it dealt with Saruman and Grima Wormtongue in a much more satisfying manner. Saruman was just as evil, but his powers so reduced he was trying to ruin the Shire instead of the world.
It also brought home the devastation of the War, in miniature, to the shire; which was a huge thing to Tolkein (basically the entire trilogy was shaped by industrialization of the small rural village he grew up in and his experiences in WWI.)
Of course Jackson then made up for omitting things from LOTR by cramming in a vast array of random stuff in padding out the Hobbit to three movies.
(although Billy Connolly as a Dwarven chieftain on his War Pig made up for a LOT of liberties, IMO)
Haven’t thought of Farmer Giles of Ham in years and years.
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Guys –
We have some of the finest Tolkien nerds in the entire inner tubes, right here. I’m always stunned by what Scissorheads share about Tolkien; I mean I thought I was in deep (when I was a kid), but you could all write a doctoral on it.
I’m in awe.
Rgds,
TG
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For me it started in the fourth grade, when my (AWESOME) teacher recognized a bored young desertrat who read at a much more advanced grade level (I read anything I could get my hands on, Cereal boxes, etc.
I worked my way through two sets of encyclopedias we had in the house, one was a reprint (I guess, I don’t know when my parents got it) of a much older set with all sorts of amazing stuff about mythology and art and outdated stuff, and the other much more up-to-date, because I was bored reading the stuff at school.)
Anyway my teacher picked me to gift me with the loan of her big hardback copy of ‘The Hobbit’, saying “I think you’ll like this better than rereading the 14 dinosaur books in the library for the 13th time” 🙂
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It was my 4th Grade teacher, too. —TG
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I went to a school in the same foundation as Tolkien, and we used to manage Moseley Bog right next to Sarehole Mill where Tolkien used to play as a child. From there, Birmingham may have seemed like a smoky Mordor-like place. Conservation was an option for the sport averse at my school, but was hard work mainly cutting down Sycamore trees (an American import that harms the local ecosystems in the UK), and then burning them on site so that kids couldn’t chuck them into the mill pond. LOTR and the Hobbit seemed to get read around age 12 in my experience. I also had Smith of Wootton Major as a prize at school, which i enjoyed.
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