"Carriages at Midnight, Ambulances at 2 a.m., Wheelbarrows at 5 a.m., Hearses at Daybreak"

A funny, and seemingly authentic card for a birthday party thrown by J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife for their son Christopher Tolkien:

Thanks to Prof. Glenn Reynolds (InstaPundit) for the pointer.

Comments

[John W]

He was born 1924 so "coming of age" is 21. Was he now allowed to legally drink? Why would he want to be around his parents? The invite seems creepy.

I was in the Army for my coming of age. I may have got a box of cookies in the mail, but I know I got shitfaced.

[John F. Carr]

You remind me of a song lyric from a couple decades ago:

In May he turned 21 on the base at Fort Bliss
"Just a day," he said down to the flask in his fist
"Ain't been sober, since maybe October of last year"

[tkamenick]

This song has my all time favorite lyric:

And I feel like I'm naked in front of the crowd
'Cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud
And I know that you'll use them, however you want to

[gormadoc]

The war was finally over and he was invited to join the "Inklings." Maybe that's what the invite was for.

[WuzYoungOnceToo]

When the wife and I visited Oxford as part of our vacation a few years ago we had a pint at The Eagle and Child, the pub where Tolkien and the other Inklings hung out. It was the geeky highlight of the trip.

[arch1]

Not to be confused with The Eagle pub in Cambridge, at which the discovery of the structure of DNA was announced (and which as a result will likely stand as long as England does).

[Rossami]

Or perhaps they were just having the party in Nov 1945 because he was finally out of the war and able to attend?

[Milhouse]

Um, no, 21 is when he became an adult. Before then he was a minor and couldn't do anything that is restricted to adults.

But drinking was not one of those things. I don't think there were any laws, at that time, against minors drinking at any age. Even in the USA 21 didn't become the drinking age until the 1980s, thanks to Elizabeth Dole. I am unaware of any other country that has or has ever had such a law.

[gormadoc]

The war was finally over and he was invited to join the "Inklings." Maybe that's what the invite was for.

[Paul Zrimsek]

The carriages and the wheelbarrows-- luckily not the ambulances or hearses-- also put in an appearance at Bilbo Baggins' birthday party.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Maybe they were showing off their son after he was back from the war?

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

What the many fantasy authors who tried to follow in Tolkien's footsteps often failed to include was Tolkien's sometimes subtle sense of humor, which is all through his writings.

[SRG]

Tolkien, as an English scholar, would have been well aware of how Chaucer, Shakespeare, et al, used humour and light relief in their work. Peter Jackson didn't lose sight of that in the films. Other fantasy series - both written and filmed - tend to miss such.

[MatthewSlyfield]

Now that's a party.

[Jimmy the Dane]

It is a play on from a famous play line, which I am forgetting at the time, that starts something like "daggers at dawn, pistols at noon, cannons after dinner" when going through various types of dueling potentials

[AmosArch]

Needs more transgender hobbits and diverse bearded black female dwarves.

[FivebySixThree]

“Your screenwriters were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

[Sarcastr0]

Jesus, dude, have some fun for once in your life.

[AmosArch]

I did try to have fun but then they pumped practically everything I go to for recreation full of politics and wokeness sports, video games, comics, movies you name it.

[David Nieporent]

An all white, Christian, heterosexual cast = perfectly normal, nothing to see here. Including some black or gay or Jewish characters in there = "full of politics."

[Davedave]

Hobbits in the original are transgender, without a shadow of a doubt. And female dwarves _are_ bearded, and of course all the dwarves are black - the portrayal in film does not match the written descriptions.

Have you ever actually read Tolkien?

[Ben of Houston]

The problem many fans had with the Rings of Power announcement was that the dwarven women were non-bearded.

I had actually wanted all-male actors playing both male and female roles to fit the descriptions in the text. It would have been nice to see John Reese Davis as a queen of Moria.

[santamonica811]

My dad knew JRR fairly well, going back to my dad's short stints teaching in England. My family used to have (still has, somewhere??) a tape recording of Tolkien, at a dinner party, singing in Elvish. Sadly, almost all these social interactions were before I was born, and the rest were when I was a toddler, so I have zero memories of meeting him. 🙁

[Brett Bellmore]

That's cool, in a sad way. (To have met somebody that famous, and forgotten it.)

I've known one or two really famous people in my day, (Well, famous enough to have Wikipedia entries, anyway.) and always was too busy hanging out with them to remember to get an autograph.