We bring you the man responsible for all this

In a few hours, I, like millions of other readers around the world, will be plunged into the final adventure featuring Harry Potter. So I thought it only fair to present this YouTube clip of the writer indirectly responsible for the success of J.K. Rowling and virtually all of modern fantasy: J.R.R. Tolkien. In this interview from 1968, Tolkien explains some of the backstory of the various races in his entire mythology (and listen to the way he pronounces "meyethology").



In his memoirs, Kingsley Amis remarks that Tolkien was the worst lecturer on the Oxford English faculty (and C. S. Lewis the best), in terms of elocution and audience understanding. This clip reveals some of that. Many of the comments to it declare that his speech is incomprehensible, and the uploader has seen fit to append a translation of the remarks (although it gets "demiurgic" wrong, calling it "emerging").

I think it's nice that he at least got to see a little of the money his tales would earn before he died--even as a tenured professor in England, he'd had to grade exams during his vacations to supplement his income (no National Health then). Orwell, on the other hand, died before his works took off, and from what I've read, his wife, whom he married on his deathbed, drank up all the money.

Oh, well. Ave, Tollers, and Vale, Harry.