The springs of imagination: Tolkien, Chaucer and the Somme by Philippa Linton
Canterbury Tales ... a fellowship of pilgrims Yesterday I went to see the new film about Tolkien’s early life, starring Nicholas Hoult as the young Tolkien and the elvishly beautiful Lily Collins as his wife Edith. As a Tolkien geek, I liked it. How many mainstream films have their schoolboy protagonist confidently reciting from memory the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English? Whether the teenage Tolkien actually did this is not the point: the film-makers use poetic license to show that he was an extremely clever boy with a deep, heartfelt passion for language. The film shows the many influences on Tolkien’s imagination: the Norse legends, the Finnish Kalevala , Arthurian myths and – inevitably – Wagner’s Ring Cycle. (I’m not sure that Tolkien actually liked Wagner, but I did like the scene where he attempts to treat Edith to a performance of the Ring Cycle at Birmingham’s Town Hall, only for the young lovers to be turned away for being too poor...