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Simon and JRR photo

30 Apr, 2010
2010-4-30 9:50:43 PM UTC

Don't know if you all caught the Huffington Post article written by Simon Tolkien talking about writing and a bit about his relationship with his grandfather.


I had a lot of fun times with my grandfather when I was a boy and went to stay with him and my grandmother for seaside holidays at the Miramar Hotel in Bournemouth on the south coast of England. We played endless word games and I asked him innumerable questions about Middle Earth and he was always kind and affectionate. I can close my eyes and see him now, wreathed in smoke like Gandalf as he lit his pipe with a flaring Swan Vesta match and spoke in a deep voice about dragons and dwarves. In the afternoons we went for long walks along the beach with the wind in our faces and he showed me just the right thin black stones for skimming out into the waves, and yet, however hard I tried, I never managed to skim mine as far as his, even though he was sixty-seven years older than me. But I know that this doesn't matter. I don't need to compete with my grandfather's legacy. Instead, now that I have something that I have created that I can be proud of myself, I can start being proud of being the grandson of a genius and rejoice in the fact that I may have inherited a few of his creative genes. Now I have come to terms with it, I realize it's a wonderful inheritance.

The really nice tidbit that was on the books page (now gone) was a photo of the two of them (attached here for those that missed it originally). Does anyone know where this has appeared before?

1_4bdb50ad235be.jpg 600X380 px
1 May, 2010
2010-5-1 4:46:47 AM UTC
I recently found another picture of Tolkien and his grandson (Simon) that I had not seen before from a BBC News article.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/breakfast/2804941.stm

10_4bdbb1cfca382.jpg 315X180 px
1 May, 2010
2010-5-1 11:32:09 AM UTC
Great, thanks for that, Trotter. But can that really be Simon? He looks just as tall as his grandfather.
1 May, 2010 (edited)
2010-5-1 12:02:21 PM UTC

Ardamir wrote:
Great, thanks for that, Trotter. But can that really be Simon? He looks just as tall as his grandfather.

I'm going to have to point you towards a Wikipedia article on "Perspective", take note of the first point below

Simon is a distance in front of his Grandfather.

The two most characteristic features of perspective are that objects are drawn:

* Smaller as their distance from the observer increases
* Foreshortened: the size of an object's dimensions along the line of sight are relatively shorter than dimensions across the line of sight


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_%28graphical%29
1 May, 2010
2010-5-1 9:31:49 PM UTC
Oh, alright. You always learn something new.
2 May, 2010
2010-5-2 5:28:36 AM UTC
It does look like Tolkien is leaning on Simon though and that he has three hands.
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