133. Ainulindalë – A Reading in JRR Tolkien’s Voice

JRR Tolkien’s voice was, well, unique. He was notably hard to understand (his students regularly complained that his classes were difficult because they simply couldn’t understand him), and even the Inklings (his friends and reading group that included CS Lewis and Charles Williams) preferred it when Christopher Tolkien read excerpts from Lord of the Rings to the group in the 1940s!

We do have few of his voice recordings of him reading his own work (mostly from The Hobbit). We’ve always wondered, though, what would it sound like if he read from his other works… like The Silmarillion? So, we spent some time to try and put together an approximation of his voice (using different technologies), including some of his idiosyncratic pauses and speech patterns.

Here, then, is an approximation of Tolkien’s voice reading Ainulindalë from The Silmarillion! (pardon any mispronunciations–that part is tough to get right!)

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🔍 If You Like Tolkien
The History of The Hobbit
The Expanded Letters of JRR Tolkien (audiobook)
The Expanded Letters of JRR Tolkien (book)
The Silmarillion
The Children of Hurin
The Atlas of Middle-earth
Make Tolkien Great Again – Tengwar Hat