Royal Mail commemorates the 50th anniversary of the publication of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers in 1954 with an issue of a block of 10 x 1st class stamps depicting drawings illustrating locations in the books. All the illustrations are by the author except for the map which is by his son Christopher.
Top Row: Map of Middle Earth from The Lord of the Rings (drawn by Christopher Tolkien); The Forest of Lothlorien (in spring); dust-jacket of The Fellowship of the Ring; Rivendell; The Hall at Bag-End (residence of Bilbo Baggins);
Bottom Row: Orthanc; Doors of Durin; Barad-Dϋr; Minas Tirith; Fangorn Forest.
Technical details: The stamps, designed by HGV Design, are printed in se-tenant blocks of 10 in sheets of 30 and 60. They are printed in lithography by Walsall Security Print, perf 14½.
TOLKIEN'S EPIC FANTASY The Lord of the Rings has enthralled millions of readers in some three dozen languages since its first publication fifty years ago. Its success remains as unbounded as it was unexpected by its author. Tolkien was by no means a professional writer of fiction, but a highly regarded professor of English Language and Literature. And yet the path of his life led as surely to the creation of hobbits as it did to the lecture-halls of Leeds and Oxford.
As a boy, Tolkien lived briefly in Sarehole, near Birmingham, an idyllic hamlet which instilled in him a love of unspoiled countryside and of Nature: it was on this rural landscape that he based the Shire, the beloved hobbit-country of The Lord of the Rings. A visit to Switzerland in 1911inspired the mountains of Middle-earth and the fair valley of Rivendell. A boyhood interest in languages, nurtured by his mother, led him to study Old and Middle English, Gothic and OLd Norse, in addition to the Latin and Greek he had been taught at King Edward's School, Birmingham; and as a hobby he devised languages of his own.
Tolkien was also an aspiring poet and storyteller, and at length began to write about a place in which his invented languages were spoken, with its own geography, history and traditions. In this he was influenced by fairy-tales and by works such as the Norse sagas, the Finnish Kalevala, and the romances of William Morris, but his own imagination was rich and deep. The earliest expression of this private "Silmarillion" mythology was in verse, and in visionary paintings and drawings. The Book of Lost Tales, begun in 1917, was its first outlet in prose. Tolkien wrote and rewrote these and other poems and stories for most of his life but they were not published until after his death, as The Silmarillion.
The "Silmarillion", largely concerned with the attempts of Elves and Men to recover precious jewels stolen by the evil Morgoth, is in a formal style, and often dark and sad. But Tolkien also composed lighter stories for his children, such as the comic adventures of Farmer Giles of Ham and of Roverandom, and, more ambitiously, the story of Bilbo Baggins which was published as
The Hobbit in 1937. This was so successful that the publisher asked for a sequel. The result was
The Lord of the Rings, published from 1954 to 1955.
The Lord of the Rings is Tolkien's masterpiece, a brilliant combination of the popular storytelling he perfected in tales for his children and of the finely wrought landscapes, peoples, cultures and languages he developed in the "Silmarillion". It is a tale of high adventure but also speaks to reades on deeper levels. In the company of the Ring, readers learn to value friendship and loyalty. In the forests, fields and mountains of Middle-earth are the glories of Nature, and in the devasted Shire every nightmare of industrialization. In the Dead Marshes and the blasted landscape of Mordor are horrific echoes of No Man's Land, which Tolkien saw at first hand in the Somme. Inthe war against Sauron we see that even in victory there is loss, and even those who return from battle do not always live happily ever after. And among hobbits we find that even "little" folk like ourselves may help to shape the world. In these and other ways,
The Lord of the Rings gives readers new rewards with every visit to Middle-earth.
