Oliver, that still is in the introduction to the libretto that accompanies the LP set of 'Siegfried': its from the 1923 film 'Siegfried' directed by Fritz Lang.
Re. earlier posts concerning Proust or Tolkein, I dont see why one should exclude the other, I've read both several times and thoroughly enjoyed them. I've just embarked on a third voyage through Proust, because Penguin have just brought out a new translation.
I was an undergraduate in the late 1960s and Tolkein was certainly a cult. Interest was especially feverish at my college, because the Dean was said to be a personal friend of Tolkein: dont know why that should have heightened interest in him, but it did. That massive yellow paperback was published in 1968 and was a best seller; I've still got mine and re-read it recently.
I did actually first read the whole thing in three days, but the circumstances were unusual. I had a summer job working on a farm in Norfolk, running a hot water sterilising tank for daffodil bulbs. They had to be cleaned of nematode infestation by the hot water treatment before the farmer could sell them to the Netherlands (I dont know why, I'm sure the Dutch have just the same nematodes as we do, but that was the requirement). The bulbs were put into steel mesh crates, stacked on a platform and lowered into the water which (I still remember this) had to be kept at exactly one hundred and eleven and a half Fahrenheit for four hours. So, every four hours you had to winch out the last batch, put them back in their sacks, stack up the next batch and lower it in. You then had nothing to do for the next three hours, except stay awake and keep an eye on the temperature. As a result, I had plenty of time to read Tolkein.
Re. earlier posts concerning Proust or Tolkein, I dont see why one should exclude the other, I've read both several times and thoroughly enjoyed them. I've just embarked on a third voyage through Proust, because Penguin have just brought out a new translation.
I was an undergraduate in the late 1960s and Tolkein was certainly a cult. Interest was especially feverish at my college, because the Dean was said to be a personal friend of Tolkein: dont know why that should have heightened interest in him, but it did. That massive yellow paperback was published in 1968 and was a best seller; I've still got mine and re-read it recently.
I did actually first read the whole thing in three days, but the circumstances were unusual. I had a summer job working on a farm in Norfolk, running a hot water sterilising tank for daffodil bulbs. They had to be cleaned of nematode infestation by the hot water treatment before the farmer could sell them to the Netherlands (I dont know why, I'm sure the Dutch have just the same nematodes as we do, but that was the requirement). The bulbs were put into steel mesh crates, stacked on a platform and lowered into the water which (I still remember this) had to be kept at exactly one hundred and eleven and a half Fahrenheit for four hours. So, every four hours you had to winch out the last batch, put them back in their sacks, stack up the next batch and lower it in. You then had nothing to do for the next three hours, except stay awake and keep an eye on the temperature. As a result, I had plenty of time to read Tolkein.
) - one of my New Year's Resolutions for 2012 
was to improve my fluency in Old English in order to be able better to read Beowulf (and The Dream of the Rood etc). Things rather got in the way, and I haven't been able to spend as much time as I'd like on the project, but what progress I've made convinces me that the original is superior even to Heaney's reworking (and it was Heaney's introductory essays that made me aware of Tolkien's important work in revealing Beowulf's importance as a work of Literature (rather than merely an example of an obsolete language).
Comment