INSCRIBED FOR THE FIRST BRITISH NEWSPAPER JOURNALIST TO INTERVIEW TOLKIEN
 
First edition. Small octavo. Publisher’s original black pictorial boards. Inscribed by Tolkien for John Ezard to a card pasted on the front free endpaper, “John Ezard from J.R.R. Tolkien”. A good copy, rubbed and well read, with splits to the joints.
 
PROVENANCE: John Ezard (1939-2010), longtime journalist for the Guardian, who in his days at the Oxford Mail interviewed Tolkien.
 
In 1966 J.R.R. Tolkien granted his first newspaper interview to a British journalist. Then Tolkien didn’t have the huge status he now possesses, he was newsorthy at the time because of an illicitly produced American edition of The Lord Of The Rings.
 
The journalist was John Ezard, a young reporter at the Oxford Mail, and while Ezard wanted Tolkien to weigh in on the controversy, Tolkien instead wanted to about Sarehole, where he had grown up between the ages of four and eight.
 
“It was a kind of lost paradise,' he said. 'There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill. I always knew it would go - and it did.”
 
Tolkien took a shine to Ezard and befriended him and they stayed in touch in the years before Tolkien’s death in 1973.
 
In 1967 Tolkien published his short story Smith Of Wootton Major, whose opening line “There was a village once, not very long ago for those with long memories nor very far away for those with long legs” sets the scene for Tolkien’s fictional farewell to his lost childhood at Sarehole.
 
Tolkien sent Ezard a carbon of the story, and later this copy of the first edition, into which Ezard has placed Tolkien’s inscription. It has remained in Ezard’s family ever since.