In Depth:  Colin Duriez

People around the planet have been waiting. The Peter Jackson film of the first part of The Hobbit, based upon the children’s classic by J.R.R. Tolkien, which has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, is imminent.

There may still be some who might ask, ‘What is a hobbit?’ But with the book’s readership so vast, and audiences of The Hobbit sequel film, The Lord of the Rings, so numerous, images of hobbits are familiar, in their colourful, rustic clothes. As Tolkien wrote, when he first introduced them to the world, hobbits ‘are (or were) a little people, about half our height, and smaller than bearded dwarves’. Hobbit identity is tied up with their home country, The Shire, from which the hero of The Hobbit, Mr. Bilbo Baggins, sets out on an adventure, in the teeth of long years of provincial respectability. Before the late 1920s, or thereabouts, however, the word ‘hobbit’ in the new familiar sense did not exist.

The weight of the word of truth: ‘One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world’, Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1970.

‘During all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known. Finally, at the age of 42, this secret authorship began to wear me down. … In 1961 … I decided to emerge and to offer One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.’

David Porter was a prolific writer, editor, moralist, lecturer and journalist, whose intellectual curiosity, suffused with wit and humour, was irrepressible and highly infectious.

His 36 or so books, which indicate his wide concerns, include 13 ghost-written for others, such as Rita Nightingale (imprisoned for drug-smuggling in Thailand), Charles Fraser-Smith (the original ‘Q’ of the James Bond movies), Harry Bagnell (vicar of Port Stanley during the Argentine invasion), Bishop Lazlo Tokes of Romania (instigator of the 1989 revolution), Ram Gidoomal (entrepreneur, academic and politician), and Nigel Goodwin (pioneer in evangelical involvement in the arts and media).

The first part of a series of screen adaptations of Tolkien's classic The Lord of The Rings is scheduled for release on December 19. Colin Duriez reflects on the abiding popularity of these elven tales.

The word 'spell' comes from an early English word meaning 'story'. Hence 'Gospel' was originally 'God's spell' - God's story. The spell that Tolkien's storytelling has cast is enormous.

Known to his friends as 'Jack' (he didn't like 'Clive Staples'), C.S. Lewis was born on the outskirts of Belfast on November 29 1898, and died in his Oxford home, The Kilns, almost 65 years later on November 22 1963.

He was equally a scholar and a storyteller, for years an Oxford don, and then Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge.