His were small people surmounting impossible odds.
Humphrey Carpenter | posted 4/01/2003 12:00AM
Why should [Tolkien] choose to specialise in early English? Something exciting happened when he first realised that a large proportion of the poetry and prose of Anglo-Saxon and early medieval England was written in the dialect that had been spoken by his mother's ancestors.
He was deeply attached to the West Midlands because of their associations with his mother. Her family had come from the town of Evesham, and he believed that his West Midland borough and its surrounding county of Worcestershire had been the home of that family, the Suffields, for countless generations. He himself had also spent much of his childhood at Sarehole, a West Midland hamlet. That part of the English countryside had in consequence a strong emotional attraction for him; and as a result so did its language.
His deep feeling that his real home was in the West Midland countryside of England had, since his undergraduate days, defined … his scholarly work. The same motives … now created a character that embodied everything ...
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