JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis used to regularly share a pub table in Oxford to discuss their work. The pair will now be honoured side by side in Westminster Abbey, which will celebrate the author of The Lord of the Rings with a memorial in Poets’ Corner, The Times can reveal.
Only feet away from where Lewis, the author of the Narnia series, has a plaque on the abbey floor, Tolkien is to be honoured with an ornate 2.5-metre memorial fitted to a pillar, depicting a magical tree with a variety of fruits and flowers that he frequently drew.
It will be unveiled next spring to mark the 90th anniversary of Tolkien’s The Hobbit and the 50th anniversary of The Silmarillion, which was published posthumously.
Full story in the Times. And information from Westminster Abbey.
The ninetieth anniversary of The Hobbit is also a good moment to remember how differently the book reached French children. For more than forty years it was Bilbo le Hobbit, in Francis Ledoux's 1969 translation, until Daniel Lauzon's retranslation of 2012 brought the French text much closer to Tolkien's own voice. A generation of French readers therefore grew up with a noticeably different Bilbo, which makes me wonder whether a memorial in Poets' Corner honours the English text alone or the book as it now lives in all its languages.
My mate, Sebastian, (named after the Sebastian in BHR) took me to all the Inkling hang outs in Oxford as part of the tour of the town. We saw the White Pony and then had a drink just in case it was a reference to the Prancing Pony...