Tolkien on 'The Hobbit’

The BBC has an article by Fiona Macdonald about Tolkien's book:

In a 1968 interview, the author describes the moment he wrote The Hobbit’s first line. BBC Culture pits it against The Hobbit’s new trailer in our round up of the week’s viral hits, alongside their archive predecessors: 

Evangeline Lilly, Cate Blanchett (photo, top), and Orlando Bloom come together as a group of elves whose beauty is matched only by the landscape of Middle Earth in the new Hobbit trailer. Unveiled at Comic-Con, the clip shows Martin Freeman’s Bilbo Baggins looking baffled, Ian McKellen’s Gandalf looking resolute, and Bloom looking battle-ready: he’ll need to be, what with those five armies on the march. The final installment of director Peter Jackson’s Tolkien franchise is out in December.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.” JRR Tolkien described the moment he was inspired to write the opening line of his Middle Earth saga in an 1968 interview, with footage showing the author visiting his former Oxford college, sipping from a pint of beer and expressing his love of trees. It also serves as a trailer of sorts, as a woman outlines the plot of the 1937 book, albeit in a more rudimentary way than this week’s Hollywood extravaganza. As she says: “Well it’s a very long story and it’s rather difficult to explain it, but I suppose it all begins when Bilbo finds a magic ring… They have lots of adventures, and they make friends with a lot of very interesting and influential elves.”

Rico says now that Jackson has finished fucking up the last Tolkien book, can Martin Freeman please get back to Sherlock?