{"id":25859,"date":"2023-04-09T13:14:14","date_gmt":"2023-04-09T17:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=25859"},"modified":"2023-04-09T13:53:35","modified_gmt":"2023-04-09T17:53:35","slug":"the-tolkien-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=25859","title":{"rendered":"The Tolkien Society"},"content":{"rendered":"<hr>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"960\" height=\"979\" src=\"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/tolkien-letter.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-25860\" srcset=\"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/tolkien-letter.jpg 960w, https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/tolkien-letter-294x300.jpg 294w, https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/tolkien-letter-768x783.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px\" \/><br \/>\n<center><em>Letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to an American fan. The letter was posted recently to the Reddit group \/r\/typewriters.<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>After I saw this letter in the Reddit \/r\/typewriters group, I Googled for Tolkien&#8217;s address to have a look at the house. In that search there was a link to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tolkiensociety.org\/\">the Tolkien Society<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>A Tolkien Society! Now that is cool. According to the web site, the Tolkien Society has existed since 1969, with Tolkien&#8217;s blessing. Tolkien also was the society&#8217;s first president and remains the honorary president today. It seems to be a fairly small, but viable and active, organization.<\/p>\n<p>One of the first things I noticed is that, each year, they have a gathering at Oxford called Oxenmoot. This year&#8217;s Oxenmoot is August 31 through September 3 at Saint Anne&#8217;s College. Next year&#8217;s World Science Fiction Convention will be in Glasgow, August 8-12, 2024. So I immediately wondered whether an American traveler might be able to attend both WorldCon and Oxenmoot next year on the same trip. I have emailed the Oxenmoot chair to encourage that.<\/p>\n<p>I instantly joined the Tolkien Society for a year, to see what they&#8217;re like and what they&#8217;re up to. They create some printed periodicals, and I&#8217;d paid a bit extra to have those mailed to me in the U.S.<\/p>\n<p>Tolkien, by the way, is known to have loved typewriters. His favorite typewriter was a very expensive Varitype. He did use other typewriters, though, and the letter above clearly was not typed with a Varitype. The characters are very sharp and even, so my guess is that the letter was written with an electric typewriter. Tolkien was known to have had some painful rheumatism in his hands, so an electric typewriter would have been easier for him to use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to an American fan. The letter was posted recently to the Reddit group \/r\/typewriters. After I saw this letter in the Reddit \/r\/typewriters group, I Googled for Tolkien&#8217;s address to have a look at the house. In that search there was a link to the Tolkien Society. A Tolkien Society! Now &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/?p=25859\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Tolkien Society&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25859"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25869,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25859\/revisions\/25869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}