it fucks me up that tolkien only died in 1973. dude has the vibe of a victorian scholar who wrote all his manuscripts by candlelight but then you look him up and realise that he knew what color tv was. what the fuck.
Can we go back to where he had a beef with the Beatles because that would be like watching my two least favorite cousins have a fight
At the time when the Beatles wanted to make an on-screen adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien hadn’t yet sold the rights to the trilogy to any production company. When the band approached him with their idea and asked him to sell the rights to them so that they could start working on the movie, he refused without any negotiation. Tolkien was quite a traditionalist and he openly disliked the new musical trend sparked by the Beatles.
At the time, he lived on Sandfield Road in Oxford: incidentally, a band practice garage was situated just three doors away from his house. An unknown local band whose members frequently used the garage may have amplified his hatred of the Beatles and their music, which he considered overly aggressive. In a 1964 letter to his friend Christopher Bretherton, Tolkien wrote: “In a house three doors away dwells a member of a group of young men who are evidently aiming to turn themselves into a Beatle Group. On days when it falls to his turn to have a practice session the noise is indescribable.”
