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  • - I'm Colin B. Bailey,

  • the director of the Morgan Library & Museum.

  • The Morgan, in collaboration Bodleian Libraries,

  • University of Oxford, and the Tolkien Trust,

  • presents "Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth,"

  • on view from January 25 to May 12, 2019.

  • This exhibition celebrates the creative genius

  • of one of the most renowned and admired authors of the 20th century.

  • The Morgan exhibition is your only opportunity in America

  • to see the largest collection ever assembled

  • of J. R. R. Tolkien's original drawings, manuscripts, and maps.

  • [bell tolls]

  • - For many of us, the name "Tolkien" conjures up visions

  • of bucolic hillsides and bloody battles--

  • of little hobbits and beautiful elves and gruesome orcs.

  • Tolkien had a immensely creative and active mind,

  • and this of course comes through in the creation of Middle-earth.

  • Tolkien spent his childhood in the countryside near Birmingham, England,

  • where he developed a great love of the natural world.

  • At a very early age, his mother instilled in him

  • a love of language and literature

  • that would have immense impact on his future.

  • Even before he was out of school, he was already creating

  • a fictitious language that would eventually develop into Elvish.

  • While he was in college and even in the trenches of World War I,

  • he was starting to write down the stories

  • that would eventually become his legendarium,

  • the history of the Elves.

  • Drawings depicting a cloaked and hooded figure

  • walking in a shadowy forest

  • or landscapes of distant, solitary mountains

  • that he produced in his teenage years were so embedded in his imagination

  • that 20 years later, it came out in "The Hobbit."

  • What was to be a sequel-- another of Bilbo's adventures--

  • quickly developed and became "The Lord of the Rings."

  • Manuscript drafts and maps in Tolkien's own hand

  • show how the characters and the narrative developed

  • while his illustrations, which were never really intended for publication,

  • show his own visual concepts of the gates of Moria,

  • Sauron's fortress of Barad-dûr,

  • and Galadriel's realm, the forest of Lothlórien.

  • Tolkien's Middle-earth speaks to so many of us

  • because it is a complete world.

  • It has geography. It has history. It has languages.

  • We are not reading isolated tales--

  • glimpses of a much richer and interwoven narrative.

  • These rarely seen items in the exhibition

  • reveal how, for Tolkien, the production of textual and visual material

  • went hand in hand in the creation of Middle-earth.

- I'm Colin B. Bailey,

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