![]() ![]() It is a mistaken thing to do anyway, either useless (when applied to the stupid) or pernicious (when inflicted on the gifted).’ But when he wrote The Hobbit he was still suffering from what he later called ‘the contemporary delusions about “fairy-stories” and children’ – delusions that not long afterwards he made a conscious decision to renounce. ![]() By his teen years he had mastered Latin and Greek, and he soon developed proficiency in modern and ancient tongues, notably Gothic and Finnish. As a child, he fell in love with a hamlet in the Midlands where he later set what has become the worlds most. ![]() ‘I am not interested in the “child” as such, modern or otherwise, and certainly have no intention of meeting him/her half way, or a quarter of the way. From a young age Tolkien demonstrated remarkable ability at reading and speaking languages. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on Januin the South African velt. ‘Never mind about the young!’ he once wrote. He later removed many of these, but some remain in the published text – to his regret, for he came to dislike them, and even to believe that any deliberate talking down to children is a great mistake in a story. Indeed he did this too consciously and deliberately at times in the first draft, which contains a large number of ‘asides’ to juvenile readers, remarks such as ‘Now you know quite enough to go on with’ and ‘As we shall see in the end’. Despite the fact that it had been drawn into his mythology, Tolkien did not allow it to become overwhelmingly serious or even adult in tone, but stuck to his original intention of amusing his own and perhaps other people’s children. ![]()
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