The Rainbow Goblins has been a favorite of mine since I first discovered it not long after U.S. publication in 1978. His family's announcement of his death notes that it came after years of suffering endured with admirable bravery. Perhaps that explains why The White Goblin (1996) was his last book.
His passing seems to have had no notice in English-language publications. Some of his art can be seen here. Note the short biography at the very bottom of that webpage.
In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1981), there is about eight pages worth of text comprising "Drafts for a letter to 'Mr Rang'" (Letter no. 297, pp. 379-387). I never knew there was any mystery about the identity of Mr. Rang until my friend Jessica Yates just sent me a draft of her short piece on this topic (now published here). My research of some ten years ago identified a different person. With Jessica's permission, I present my findings here.
According to the Humphrey Carpenter's headnote to the letter, Tolkien had written at the top: "Some reflections in preparing an answer to a letter from one Mr Rang about investigation into my nomenclature. In the event only a brief (and therefore rather severe) reply was sent, but I retain these notes". Tolkien had added the date of August 1967.
I have long believed that this Mr. Rang was Jack C. Rang, who delivered a talk "Two Servants" (on Niggle and Sam Gamgee) at the Tolkien Symposium at Mankato, Minnesota (somewhat south and west of Minneapolis) on 28-29 October 1966. This talk was subsequently published in February 1967 in "The Tolkien Papers", an issue of Mankato Studies in English. Here we have a Mr. Rang who showed considerable interest in Tolkien in 1966, the year before Tolkien dated his notes in reply to a letter from a Mr. Rang. It has always seemed to me likely that these two Rangs were one and the same person.
Jack Charles Rang was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 27 September 1923. He was the only child of Carl John Rang (1890-1944), a bank cashier, and his wife Lena B. Willey (1888-1976). Jack died at the age of 87 in Centerville, Ohio, on 7 February 2011. On obituary in the Dayton News (11 February 2011) tells us that:
He served in the U.S. army during World War II and was a graduate of Northwestern University [B.S. 1948], receiving advanced degrees from Aquinas College [M.A. 1965] and Northwestern. Jack had a life-long love of the theatre and was involved in acting and directing many educational and community theatre productions. He was a radio and television personality and taught broadcasting courses, most recently at the University of Dayton, from which he retired in 1994 with the rank of Professor Emeritus.
Jack C. Rang had married in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1948, and was survived by his wife, Mary Ruth Rang (b. 1927), and their son, daughter and grandson.
If this isn't the Mr. Rang that Tolkien wrote to in 1967, it is undoubtedly the Jack C. Rang who presented on Tolkien at Mankato in 1966.
So I started watching the Apple tv series The Changeling, based on the Victor Lavelle novel, and at the very beginning there is shown a shelf of books in a library in Queens. I always cue in to the titles of books when they show up as props in a film or in a series. So imagine my surprise to see one of my own books, Tales Before Tolkien, in this shot from The Changeling.
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I can recognize a few other titles, like Fiasco (which book of that title is unclear), A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connections, The Other Islands of New York City, a Sidney Sheldon book (I can't discern the title), my book, and Tellers of Tales (presumably the W. Somerset Maugham book, and not the Roger Lancelyn Green one, which is not as thick as the former). If these titles, singly or in toto, are meant to foreshadow anything of the plot, it escapes me. But I enjoyed the diversion.
In May 2024, a scrap of paper—a legitimate Tolkien manuscript—was auctioned at Doyle of New York. The piece of paper is 3 3/4 x 7 inches, and contains sixteen words, plus Tolkien's signature. The words are from a letter of 30 June 1972 that Tolkien sent to The Daily Telegraph, and which was duly published in their issue dated 4 July 1972. Here is the item, as it appears on the Doyle auction website:
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Adams felt he had been granted "one of the greatest literary privileges and experiences of my life to be among the first, outside of the departed author’s circle, to read The Silmarillion." Yet he complained that: "I have been very seriously hindered indeed (I’m hopping mad, actually) because my proof copy lacks the most important map, the index of names, and the appendix on Quenya and Sindarin. This is crippling."
By these omissions, Brian Henderson has noticed that the details match with the proof copies circulated by Houghton Mifflin. (See Brian's comments here.)
But the lack of those paratexts didn't really hurt Adams's appreciation for the book itself. Here follows a selection of Richard Adams's comments.
O mighty Tolkien! Prince of fantasists! How shall we find words rightly to praise thy nobility of conception, faultless consistency of narrative, and superb fecundity of invention?
When I was asked to review The Silmarillion, I thought, “Ah, barrel-scraping, no doubt.” . . . Usually these are dredged-up bits and pieces, well below the standard of the great work. The Silmarillion is not. It is, in my view, greater and more satisfying than both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
The form of The Silmarillion is not a romantic novel, like its forerunners, but a sort of Elvish Bible. The general “feel” most resembles that of the Old Testament. Dialogue and invididual character have about the same degree of importance that they have in the Old Testament—that is to say, characters appear and vanish, subordinate to history and narrative flow as they are not in Lord of the Rings.
The style is most like Malory, the greatest fantasist of all—a kind of simple, stately, half-archaic prose, eminently clear and readable. Like Malory too is the flow and the feeling that a huge plan is being worked out. . . . Some critics may feel this is eclectic. I can imagine no other style or treatment appropriate to such a theme.
Many characters and places have two and sometimes even three names each. . . . Tolkien here is “doing his thing,” if you like it. Personally, I could unravel this stuff with delight all day and all night.
It's a pity that Adams's review hasn't been more widely known, especially back in 1977 when reviews of the book in important venues weren't very favorable. I know Tolkien bibliographer Richard C. West would have been delighted by Adams's review.
