'Rings' master's accidental circus

By GREG DIXON

Fans have already queued to be first to see it. The advertising has already started on the box. And you can bet the action figurines have already been delivered to a toy store near you.

Yes, the barrage of hype surrounding the first film of The Lord of the Rings trilogy has begun, and will no doubt soon start driving us bonkers.

With the Yanks giving $572 million to Peter Jackson to make the thing, you can be sure it's going to be the lord of the tie-ins as well.

But for those of us who love J.R.R. Tolkien's books - yes, I know, we should grow up - TV One is screening a timely reminder of where the gross amounts of money-making and obscene amounts of hype originated.

An Awfully Big Adventure, a BBC series on the making of modern children's literature, is a rather old-fashioned sort of reminder.

Its episode on Tolkien (it seems TVNZ hasn't bothered buying the ones on C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, Doc Seuss and the rest) has a pace so slow it feels like it's been made for a 70s arts show.

It does, however, offer a reflective study of a literary life and a series of epic stories which are either loved or hated by readers.

Tolkien, a Catholic left parentless at 14 by untimely deaths, did not set out to be an author.

But he was a master of languages and, indeed, the inventor of his own tongues from an early age.

After graduating from Oxford and catching trench fever at the Somme, Tolkien began a life of teaching and was eventually appointed, in 1933, professor of Anglo Saxon at Oxford, where he stayed until his death in 1973.

It was there that he met C.S. Lewis, another young don with a penchant for language and Anglo-Saxon and Norse mythology, and the pair formed an informal circle of academics-cum-storytellers known as the Inklings.

With Lewis' encouragement, Tolkien wrote his first book, The Hobbit, perhaps the most famous of all the works of children's literature.

That novel also, in a modest way, touched on a mythical epic Tolkien had begun to work on while in the trenches, The Silmarillion, which would take the rest of his life to not quite complete).

Published in 1937, The Hobbit has gone on to sell 36 million copies.

But it was its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, begun in 1937 but not finished until the early 50s, which was to bring international fame to this serious, Christian, conservative - and, let's face it, dull - academic.

It was the hippies of the 60s who really turned on and tuned in the world to Rings, and founded the barmy cults which still dog the books (we get to hear members of Britain's Tolkien Society, a bunch of sad bastards if ever you saw them, standing around Tolkien's grave and singing a lament to him in his invented language, Elvish).

This is principally the story of an incredibly inventive man who simply loved creating languages, and who turned his hand to writing to provide stories and worlds in which these languages could be used.

He wanted to create a mythology for England, says someone who, irritatingly, remains unnamed, as do all the other Tolkien experts who appear in the programme.

But this is also, sadly, the story of a man who yearned for a more simple, rural and epic past through his writing, and found himself unexpectedly and rather awkwardly famous in a modern world.

One can only imagine his displeasure at the newest and undoubtedly biggest Rings brouhaha which Jackson's films are generating.

* An Awfully Big Adventure - J.R.R. Tolkien, TV One, Saturday, 10.35 pm