J.R.R. Tolkien - Designer of Worlds

A 2014 Arte France Documentary Directed by Simon Backès.

For many people, the English writer JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) is above all the author of the Lord of the Rings, the film series directed and produced by Peter Jackson from 2001 to 2003. But what most people are unaware of is that this immensely successful novel is only the tip of a monumental corpus, started in the 1910s, and which Tolkien pursued to the day he died in 1973.

This documentary goes back to the origins of this tremendous creation and, at the same time, it is an opportunity to rediscover the surprising personality of its author. Who was this quiet and scholarly man who taught languages and old English literature at Oxford? How was this gigantic project born?

Going back and forth between ordinary reality and an immaterial and fabulously rich reality, the story offers to reveal the meaning of Tolkien’s life as a marvelous adventure of the mind.