An American professor spent a summer with Tolkien. He remembers the man, his faith, and his writings.
Clyde S. Kilby | posted 4/01/2003 12:00AM
I first met J. R. R. Tolkien late on the afternoon of September 1, 1964. His fame was then rapidly on the rise and he had been forced to escape his public whenever he could. Visitors were more or less constantly at his door and his telephone busy. Phone callers from the United States sometimes forgot the time differential and would get him out of bed at two or three o'clock in the morning. He was paying the price of sudden emergence from the relative obscurity of a professional scholar to the glare of publicity accorded to any internationally known writer.
Close encounter
With great hopes and some fears I walked to 76 Sanfield Road, opened the gate, nervously approached his door and rang the bell. I waited what seemed to me a very long time and was on the point of a reluctant departure when the door opened and there stood the man himself. Tolkien matter-of-factly invited me inside. … We went into his downstairs office, remodeled from a garage. Possessing no automobile, he was then using ...
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