September 2023 – hbauld's Weblog

LOS ANGELES – FEBRUARY 28: Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock and William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk in the STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES episode, “The Cloud Minders.” Season 3, episode 21. Original air date, February 28, 1969. Image is a frame grab. (Photo by CBS via Getty Images)
LOS ANGELES – SEPTEMBER 15: Nichelle Nichols as Lieutenant Uhura and William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk in the STAR TREK episode, “Charlie X.” Season 1, episode, 2. Original air date September 15, 1966. Image is a screen grab. (Photo by CBS via Getty Images)

by HB Auld, Jr.

Star Trek, the Original Series, debuted on television on this date, 57 years ago on September 8, 1966.

The first episode was entitled: “The Man Trap.” In this episode, the Enterprise visits a planet to perform routine medical examinations of the husband-and-wife archaeological team. The woman has been replaced by a shape-shifting creature.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the passing of the great writer and philologist, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, known professionally as J. R. R. Tolkien. The following is copied from a remembrance and homage posted elsewhere today by my son, a great fan of Professor Tolkien and his written works:

“The Professor, J.R.R. Tolkien, passed on to his reward on September 2, 1973. That’s 50 years ago today.

In 1937, he gave us The Hobbit, a playful there-and-back-again adventure faerie story. Over the next 20 years he produced an an epic high-fantasy legend, as he cast a spell over tens of thousands of Americans in the ’60s with his 500,000-word trilogy, “The Lord of the Rings,” in essence a fantasy of the war between ultimate good and ultimate evil. For many of us, it is the finest work of English literature, full stop. The next 20 years were spent collating and rewriting the tales and histories he’d been working on since 1914 (during World War I, including his time at the Somme), the stories that would become The Silmarillion, published four years after his death by his son and literary heir, Christopher.

Somewhere in all that time J.R.R. found time to produce A Middle English Vocabulary and a definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; both became academic standard works for several decades. He invented several fully developed languages (and alphabets), translated Sir Gawain, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. He published a philological essay in 1932 on the name “Nodens“, following the unearthing of a Roman Asclepeion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire. He translated Beowulf, finally published in 2014. He became the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford, was an external examiner for University College, Galway; had four children to whom he was very devoted, was a consultant and translator for The Jerusalem Bible, was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and received the insignia of the Order at Buckingham Palace.