67.
Which of the following is the best title?
A. Five Key Factors Affecing the
Partnership.
B. Beauties Are Doomed to Fail in Love.
C. Beautiful Or Common?
D. The Beauties Are Diferent.
D
“The Lord of the Rings”, one of the best
sellers in the new millennium (千年), was made up of three parts --
“The Fellowship of the Ring”, “Two Towers”, and “The Return of the King”.
Millions upon millions of people have read it in over 25 different languages,
but fewer know about the author and the history of the composition of the
creative masterwork.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in South Africa
in 1892. His parents died when he was a child. Living in England with his aunt, Tolkien and
his cousins made up play languages, a hobby that led to Tolkien’s becoming
skilled in Welsh, Greek, Gothic, Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon.
After
graduating from Oxford,
Tolkien served in World War I. In 1917, while recovering from trench fever, he
began composing the mythology (神话) for The Rings. As a professor of
Anglo-Saxon in 1930s at Oxford,
Tolkien was part of an informal discussion group called the Inklings, which
included several writers. The group was soon listening to chapters of Tolkien’s
imaginative work “The Hobbit”.
Hobbit
was a name Tolkien created for a local people that could best be described as
half-sized members of the English rural (乡村的) class.
Hobbits live in hillside holes. One of them, Bilbo Baggins, looks for treasures
with a group of dwarves (侏儒). On the way, he meets the
twisted, pitiful creature Gollum, from whom he sees a golden ring that makes
the holder invisible.
One
of Tolkien’s students persuaded her employer, publisher Allen & Unwin, to
look at a draft (草稿). The chairman of the firm, Stanley Unwin, thought
that the best judge for a children’s book would be his ten-year-old son. The
boy earned a shilling for reporting back that the adventure was exciting, and
“The Hobbit” was published in 1937.
It
sold so well that Unwin asked for a continuation. Over a dozen years later, in
1954, Tolkien produced “The Lord of the Rings”, a series of books so creative
that they hold readers - new and old - after their publication.
