If you Google the name Mary Fairburn you will find some articles about her illustrations for LotR. Last year, this calender was published.
Back in 1968, a much younger Mary wrote to JRRT and sent him some illustrations she’d done. He loved them and wrote back full of praise. They carried on a correspondence for a while. Quotes in the calender article.
Anyway, she is a friend of my partner’s family, I met her myself recently, and we spoke for quite some time - she’s had a very interesting life and is still, at 83, a very creative artist and craftsperson. In fact, I completely forgot to ask anything about her Tolkien connection :smack:
Anyway, I know there are some JRRT fans on the boards here, so there it is. Kind of mundane, but also cool.
I’m innumerate or all-but, and calculating degrees-of-separation quickly scrambles my brain to the max. However – I seem to figure that I’m one degree further away from JRRT, than Trinopus. I attended Oxford University in the late 1960s. My then girlfriend, who was studying English, was acquainted with fellow-English-students who, unlike her, were directly taught by Christopher T. – then a tutor and lecturer in English, at that seat of learning. (It was told-of then, that Chris was given to seducing some of the more attractive of his female students: a thing of which, one reckons, his devoutly Catholic father would have taken a very dim view.)
Plus you’ve got a wonderfully Tolkienian user name!
(I sometimes use “Sangahyando” as a safe-for-work expletive. Works just right after you’ve whacked your thumb with a hammer! I also use “Kricfalusi” for the same purpose.)
What constitutes a degree of separation? I’ve met and briefly talked with both Priscilla and Christopher Tolkien, the daughter and son of Tolkien. I have no reason to think that they would remember meeting me.
> It was told-of then, that Chris was given to seducing some of the more attractive of his
> female students: a thing of which, one reckons, his devoutly Catholic father would have
> taken a very dim view.
Which may be why Christopher was separated from his first wife Faith in 1964 and divorced from her in 1967. He married his second wife Baillie in 1967 and is still married to her. Incidentally, if I recall correctly, both Christopher and Michael (another of Tolkien’s sons) ceased to consider themselves Catholics at some point (and Michael is now dead). His son John (also now dead) was a Catholic priest, so he continued to consider himself a Catholic. Priscilla drifted away from the Catholic church but later drifted back to it.
Not to nitpick, but aren’t you then two degrees of separation from JRRT? The reason I ask, is that I’ve been calculating my Erdos number that way, and if your way is correct, I get to bump myself up to a 5!
My understanding is that if I meet someone, that’s no separation. Zero degrees.
If I meet person A who has met person B, I am at one degree from person B. And so on.
For example, my ex’s dad has a friend who has met Queen Elizabeth the Second. So, I am at zero degrees from my ex’s dad, as I personally know him. I am at one degree from his friend, and I am at two degrees from QE2.
Nope, sorry, Trinopus is correct at least as far as Erdős numbers go. Erdős himself was the only person with Erdős number 0; anyone who co-authored with him directly has Erdős number 1, and so forth.
This also applies to Bacon numbers, with Kevin Bacon himself having the only zero Bacon number. So I would think “Tolkien numbers” should be counted the same way, with only one zero.
