Posted on 04/03/2013 9:44:42 AM PDT by Altariel
In what was once the housekeeper's office of a Tudor mansion in Hampshire, a very odd golden ring glitters on a revolving stand in a tall perspex column. In chapter five of The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins finds a ring in the gloom of Gollum's cave. Not just any ring. "One very beautiful thing, very beautiful, very wonderful. He had a ring, a golden ring, a precious ring."
A new exhibition opening today at The Vyne, now owned by the National Trust, raises the intriguing possibility that the Roman ring in the case, and the ring of power in JRR Tolkien's book The Hobbit, and in his Lord of the Rings trilogy, are one and the same.
As Dave Green, the property manager, explains, there's more to the story than the ring an iron-age site with ancient mine workings known as "the Dwarf's Hill", a curse on the thief who stole the ring, and a strong link to Tolkien himself.
Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford before he found fame as an author, with the publication of The Hobbit in 1937, and the first of the Rings trilogy in 1954. He certainly knew the story of the curse and the ring, and was researching the subject two years before he began work on The Hobbit.
The ring was in the collection of the Chute family which for generations was interested in politics, collecting, and antiquarian research for centuries before the house came to the National Trust in the 1930s.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Nah. It is in the possession of Dr. Leonard Hofstadter.
I think it was Wagner’s ring music and its impact on the nazis which inspired tolkein.
Did y’all read the story about Senicianus & the tablet? Pretty cool! An ancient Miss Marple mystery unfolds....
A hypothesis easily tested: Put in on and see whther you become invisible and acquire strange powers. How difficult can that be?
...”whether”...
What if you're already invisible and have strange powers, like me ever since I found this old watch in a cave?
It doesn’t count if you’re only invisible to females...just sayin’ ;-)
I actually believe Richard Wagners ring cycle was stolen by Tolkien.
Thank you! Another well cultured Freeper.
Well, I’m getting plenty ripe...if that counts as well cultured.
Seeing as I was quoting from the book (Yep, even the reference to Viking Kitties. Little known fact: J.R.R. Tolkien was one of the original Freepers...)
Most of the Nazi brass were bored by Wagner’s operas. Hitler loved them but ideologically they don’t really fit the Nazi agenda.
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