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Quick LinksTolkien's Love of Mythology Was Reflected in GandalfTolkien Used Gandalf to Recontextualize Ancient Tropes

It is impossible to overstate the impact that The Lord of the Rings has had on the fantasy genre and pop culture as a whole. J. R. R. Tolkien's novel solidified many of the tropes that exist in modern fantasy, and Peter Jackson's trilogy of film adaptations cemented those ideas in the public consciousness. When one imagines a classic wizard, the image that springs to mind is likely similar to Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings: an elderly, bearded man wearing long robes and a pointed, wide-brimmed hat, usually with a wooden staff in his hand.

Yet Tolkien did not come up with Gandalf out of nowhere; he drew inspiration from various sources across cultures and history. Most notably, Gandalf bore similarities to two mythological figures. The first was the wizard Merlin from Arthurian legend,...

Ian Fleming is perhaps best known for being the creator of James Bond and the series of novels that center the character, but he's also the mind behind the 1964 children's novel "Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car," which was subsequently turned into the beloved, Academy Award-nominated fantasy movie musical and later, a stage musical. The story focuses on the Potts family, namely, siblings Jeremy and Jemima, who desperately try to set up their widowed inventor father Caractacus with a beautiful woman named Truly Scrumptious. And people had the audacity to make fun of the character names in "The Hunger Games" series? Tsk. Tsk. During a day at the beach, Caractacus tells the children a fantastical tale about the villainous Baron Bomburst, the tyrant ruler of the land of Vulgaria, and his attempts to steal their magical family car, the titular Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

"Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" is a whimsical story through and through,...

All of the English-language screen versions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings came out after J.R.R. Tolkien passed away in 1973, so we’ll sadly never know what he might have thought of them. But things were nearly quite different. In the late 1950s, Tolkien and his publishers seriously considered a proposal for an animated film, which even got to the script stage before the project was eventually scrapped.

In 1957, Tolkien was approached by an American film agent, Forrest J. Ackerman, about a proposed animated film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Early on, Tolkien was really quite positive about the idea, in a pragmatic sort of way. At this stage, Tolkien was shown some drawings and color photographs to indicate the sort of look they were going for in the animation, and he read a “Story Line,” a synopsis of the film’s proposed plot.

He told one of his publishers,...

More and more screen adaptations of the works of Jrr Tolkien are in development these days. In addition to Amazon’s The Rings of Power, a prequel series set during the Second Age of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Warner Bros. Discovery announced in February that new films are also in development. The first will be an animated movie called The War of the Rohirrim, set 183 years before The Lord of the Rings and telling the story of a legendary king of Rohan called Helm Hammerhand, owner of the great horn at Helm’s Deep, which was named after him. We can only speculate on what else Wbd might have planned — the love story of Aragorn and Arwen, told in the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings, is surely ripe for a film adaptation and would probably be our first choice.

A blockbuster Tolkien franchise incorporating various different stories and characters...

How would Sky Sports News react as the votes were counted on a tense election night?

Those of you familiar with Hitchcock's film The Lady Vanishes may remember the characters played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne continuing to obsess about cricket, as war clouds gathered over Europe, and little old ladies bizarrely were put in charge of important messages about troop movements. Well, on election night, I think I found the modern equivalent.

I thought it might be quite fun, as the marathon election programmes began, to turn to Sky Sports News to see if they were even acknowledging that an election was taking place; and blow me if they were not reading out county cricket scores. Having just switched over from some economic expert reporting that in New York the Dow Jones was falling faster than Vanessa Feltz on a bungee rope, it was strangely soothing to find...