Tolkien’s first words
It is difficult not to feel that JRR Tolkien’s name destined him for philological studies and perhaps in the end for the creation of imaginary worlds. There is a good deal about his name in a new film that takes as its title his unusual surname. At King Edward’s School in Birmingham, the teenage Tolkien fearlessly corrects a terrifying schoolmaster who has addressed “the new man” in class as “Tolkine” (to rhyme with “nine”). “It’s pronounced Tol-keen, Sir, not Tol-kine.” Anyone who knows Germani
