Publisher, BBC Audiobooks America (September 2009)

NOTE: RETAIL EDITIONS are packaged in attractive, compact cardboard, jewel-case or DVD shrink-wrapped cases, with full-color art.

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Experience Tolkien's best-known works in a whole new light! These full-cast dramatizations of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and Tales From the Perilous Realm feature specially-composed music, outstanding casts, and brilliant writers, directors, engineers, and musicians. Each of these lavish recordings was broadcast to rave reviews on BBC Radio. Tolkien fans will appreciate the addition of J.R.R. Tolkien: An Audio Portrait. Presented by Brain Sibley, who dramatized many of Tolkien's works for the BBC, it is a compilation of radio and TV archive material featuring interviews with Tolkien, his relatives, and his colleagues, and in which he talks about The Lord of the Rings, his other works, life as an academic, correspondence received from fans, and his views on the 20th century.

About the Author: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on the 3rd January, 1892 at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, but at the age of four he and his brother were taken back to England by their mother to be raised. His mother died when he was only twelve and he and his brother became wards of the local priest. When a professor at Oxford, he wrote stories for his children telling them the story of "The Hobbit". When his publisher asked for a sequel to "The Hobbit", he wrote "Lord of the Rings" , which took twelve years to complete. He died in September 1973.