care to elaborate on the Beatles being a Tolkien antagonist??
YES I would love to, okay so first of all here’s the urban legend version of the feud:
Awesome. Here’s the original quote from the 1964 JRRT letter complaining about his neighbors:
“In addition in a house three doors away dwells a member of a group of young men who are evidently aiming to turn themselves into a Beatle Group. On days when it falls to his turn to have a practice session the noise is indescribable…”
While we can probably agree that the idea of Tolkien as the suffering neighbor of the actual Beatles is the funniest possible interpretation, calling a generic garage band “a Beatle Group” because they’re annoying is pretty funny too. Either way, we have motive.
And yeah, around the time they got back from India the Beatles were apparently interested in doing a movie adaptation of the Lord of the Rings (with Paul as Frodo, Ringo as Sam, George as *checks notes* Gandalf, and John as uhh Gollum). They did approach Stanley Kubrick to direct but he was skeptical (for what reason?) while Tolkien basically said "over my dead body" and then managed to live a few years past the breakup of the Beatles.
(The rest is history, most of which has been corroborated by Peter Jackson, definitely the leading scholar on the subject.)
