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nothinglikethesun9
The Shire
Jan 23 2015, 1:51am
Post #1 of 4
(611 views)
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Does anyone know just how Guy Gavriel Kay got plucked out out of Winnipeg to work on The Silmarillion?
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squire
Half-elven
Jan 23 2015, 2:40am
Post #2 of 4
(540 views)
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For some reason I have had in my mind for years the idea that Kay had written C. Tolkien asking for an internship. But where did I get that from? Tonight, after finding nothing about the actual hiring process in several standard Tolkien references, I went crazy and looked on the World Wide Web, using the Google search engine. Here's what I found in about, oh, ten seconds:
[Kay] spent a year, between 1974 and 1975, in Oxford helping Christopher Tolkien put together The Silmarillion, JRR Tolkien’s history of Middle-earth. It was quite the training ground for “a Canadian prairie boy”, in Kay’s words. The job had come about through a family connection – Christopher Tolkien’s second wife was Canadian, and the two families knew each other. When Tolkien was made literary executor for his father’s estate, he decided he needed help, and Kay ended up being drafted in. “It was a massive, massive project,” says Kay. “And he did not want another fully fledged academic working with him. Family privacy, anxiety, ego elements came into it. And at the time he saw the editing process in the classic ‘senior academic working with the bright young graduate student’ way, which is the template for so much academic work.” - from a retrospective on Kay's career published in The Guardian in 2014. The entire article is quite interesting.
squire online: RR Discussions: The Valaquenta, A Shortcut to Mushrooms, and Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit Lights! Action! Discuss on the Movie board!: 'A Journey in the Dark'. and 'Designing The Two Towers'. Footeramas: The 3rd & 4th TORn Reading Room LotR Discussion and NOW the 1st BotR Discussion too! and "Tolkien would have LOVED it!" squiretalk introduces the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: A Reader's Diary = Forum has no new posts. Forum needs no new posts.
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sador
Half-elven
Jan 23 2015, 10:18am
Post #4 of 4
(511 views)
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Fascinating indeed!
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