An interview with Simon Tolkien

Earlier this year, I conducted an interview with Simon Tolkien for Mythprint (it appeared in the June 2010 issue, Vol. 47, No. 6, on pp. 3–4). Simon Tolkien is the author of Final Witness, The Inheritance, and The King of Diamonds (coming in April, 2011). Of equal importance — to this audience, at least — he is the son of Christopher Tolkien and grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien.

As part of the new blog of the Mythopoeic Society, dubbed The Horn of Rohan, my interview has been made available online. In the interview, we talk about Simon’s memories of his grandparents, his feelings about The Lord of the Rings, recollections of the barn in which his father assembled The Silmarillion, his tastes in literature, and of course, his own legal and mystery fiction. You can read it by following this link.

And by the way, I should add that I really enjoyed The Inheritance. I don’t read a lot in that particular genre — I could probably enumerate my experience using no more than my ten fingers: a little Agatha Christie, the occasional Arthur Conan Doyle, but nary a Grisham, Turow, or Grafton — but this is a book I can recommend. I was particularly impressed with its sense of time and place, as well as the carefully rendered characters. Why don’t you give it a try?