11. So many people rang him about Lord of the Rings that Tolkien permanently disconnected his telephone
As we have seen, Tolkien saw himself as a professional academic first, literary legend second. Inevitably, however, his two lives overlapped, no matter how hard he tried to keep them separate. Tolkien had to grow accustomed to receiving strange gifts from his adoring fans, such as a drinking goblet inscribed with the words on the One Ring, and was good-humored if rather bemused by his fiction’s popularity. He variously called his fans ‘lunatics’ and ‘my deplorable cultus‘, and once remarked that ‘many young Americans are involved in the stories in a way that I’m not’.
Perhaps he should have taken heed of his children’s firm line of questioning about his bedtime stories back in the 1920s. For whilst Tolkien was happy to receive correspondence and gifts, one thing he couldn’t abide was super-fans impinging on his working life. He was led to curse Alexander Graham Bell when the telephone at his office in Merton College started to ring throughout the day as fans sought for an explanation of a specific aspect of The Lord of the Rings or the meaning of an Elvish word. The only solution was to chuck the phone away altogether.