The Professor!
A time for a birthday toast and sharing thoughts about his interviews
Today we celebrate the birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien, who was born on this day in 1892. If you aren’t familiar, that also means the annual toast. It’s simple and fun, not matter where you are. As the Tolkien Society shares, “we invite you to celebrate the birthday of this much loved author by raising a glass at 9pm your local time. The toast is simply:
The Professor!
All you need to do is stand, raise a glass of your choice of drink (not necessarily alcoholic), and say the words “The Professor” before taking a sip (or swig, if that’s more appropriate for your drink). Sit and enjoy the rest of your drink.”1
I also wanted to share about the collection of BBC interviews from the 1960s. Have you seen them? Thankfully this YouTube channel collected them all, so you can watch them all in one place. It’s a collection of different interviews and clips from each interview. The majority are from a 1962 and 1968 BBC interview. Most are with sound, but there’s even some b-roll as well.
I enjoyed the clips and his thoughts on writing and LOTR. I loved that he stated he wanted to write a “stupendously long narrative” when talking about the beginning of The Lord of the Rings. It was also refreshing to hear his thoughts on escapism through story. At one point he says: “Well, it’s meant to be escapist, because I use escapism in its proper sense, as a man getting out of prison.”
Surprisingly, I had never read that people thought the one ring was an allegory for the nuclear bomb (also possible I read that once many years ago and it was buried long ago in the deep recesses of my brain). He shuts that down, but I can see why people would have thought that reading after WWII and knowing how some of his own war experiences shaped some of his characters, like Samwise Gamgee.
Other favorites includes him speaking the Black speech, making sure they know that he doesn’t want to have chats in elvish because it’s too hard and he’ll never finish making it, and there’s a clip where he’s writing in elvish and makes a mistake. So funny, since it’s his own made up language, no one would ever know if he did or not.
Finally a couple favorite quotes are:
His love of trees: “I should have liked to make contact with the tree and find out what he feels about things.”
Why he wanted to create: “Because being made by a creator one of our natural factors is wishing to create but since we aren’t creators we have to sub-create let’s say we have to rearrange the primary material in some particular form which pleases, which may it isn’t necessarily a moral pleasing it’s partly aesthetic pleasing.”
Overall it’s a wonderful collection of interviews to enjoy.
What documentaries about Tolkien have you seen? Would love to see a new one come out. And one about Lewis too!
You can watch it here:
© 2026 Jamie Lapeyrolerie