Lord of the Rings Quiz
Tolkien began with the languages, and wrote the stories to give them a home.
A Lord of the Rings quiz with answers for readers and film fans alike. It covers the author, the invented languages, the way the book was published and the making of the films, without giving away the ending.
Did you know?
- The first sentence about hobbits was written by chance. While marking examination papers one summer, Tolkien came across a page a student had left blank and scribbled on it a line about a hobbit living in a hole in the ground. He later said he did not yet know what a hobbit was.
- Christopher Lee, who played the wizard Saruman in the films, was the only member of the cast who had met Tolkien in person. He had run into the author by chance in an Oxford pub many years earlier and re-read the books every year.
- In the 1960s the Beatles hoped to make their own film of the book, with the four band members in the main roles. Tolkien, who still held the film rights at the time, did not like the idea, and the project never went ahead.
From a professor's notebooks to the cinema
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 and spent most of his working life at Oxford. From his youth he invented languages for pleasure, complete with grammar and history, and he began to imagine the peoples who might have spoken them. He read early drafts aloud to a circle of friends, among them the writer C. S. Lewis, who met in a local pub and called themselves the Inklings.
Twelve years of writing
Tolkien started the sequel to his children's book in 1937 and did not finish it until 1949. He wrote in the evenings, typed the whole text himself with two fingers and drew his own maps so that distances and phases of the moon would be consistent. The three volumes appeared in 1954 and 1955. Sales grew slowly at first, then sharply in the 1960s when paperback editions reached American students.
The father of modern fantasy
Stories of elves and dwarves were far older than Tolkien, but he gave them a complete world with its own geography, calendars and thousands of years of history. Countless later novels, role-playing games and video games borrow that pattern: a detailed map at the front of the book, several invented peoples and a small group on a long journey. The books have been translated into dozens of languages.
Making the films
For decades the story was thought impossible to film. Peter Jackson's production, released from 2001 to 2003, shot all three parts together over more than a year. A workshop in Wellington made thousands of costumes, weapons and prosthetic feet by hand. The creature Gollum was created by recording the movements of the actor Andy Serkis and turning them into a digital character, a method that changed how films are made.