Chapter 88 - 88: Concerning Two Brothers and an Unexpected Invitation

In a smoky city in central England, in the early days of September 1907, there lived two brothers with a name that did not quite sound English in an English mouth.

They were called Tolkien.

Now, if you imagine them living in a neat little cottage with roses and a low stone wall, you have imagined the wrong kind of story. The Tolkien brothers did not live in the countryside, where the air is clean and the neighbors know your aunt's cousin's dog by name. They lived in Birmingham, a modern industrial city—a place of factories, foundries, rail lines, and chimneys, where coal smoke could hang in the air like a permanent grey curtain and the streets always seemed busy with noise and movement.

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