New York [US], September 23: In 1968, the BBC broadcast extracts from JRR Tolkien's last ever recorded interview, 31 years after The Hobbit was published. In 2019, the full video was unearthed from the archive.
JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit begins with Gandalf the wizard visiting Bilbo, the titular hobbit, and persuading him to go on a dangerous quest. But would the British author himself have accepted the challenge? "If a wizard had come to me as a small boy, the situation would be totally different than that in The Hobbit," Tolkien revealed in a rare interview, filmed by the BBC in 1968. "I should have found some excuse for not going. I had no desire whatever to place myself in an awkward position just for the sake of adventure."
Besides, he added, "I'd been very well brought up to avoid conversations with dubious old gentlemen."
Yet this admission was never broadcast. Only a few extracts from the interview made it onto television in 1968, while most of it was stored deep in the BBC archive until it was unearthed for a radio programme in 2019. The previously unseen and unheard footage features startling moments of candour from the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and reveals Tolkien's thoughts on key characters in his bestselling books.
Source: Fijian Broadcasting Corporation
