TOLKIEN’S “GREEN GREAT DRAGON”. Mark Liberman begins his review of Forsyth’s book on the Language Log website by quoting an anecdote that Forsyth tells about Tokien: “Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a ‘green great dragon.’ He showed it to his mother who told him that you absolutely couldn’t have a green great dragon, and that it had to be a great green one instead. Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years.”
Tolkien became a great philologist and story teller and continued to be fascinated by dragons (I quoted Tolkien in this post that: “The dragon had the trade-mark Of Fairie written upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Other-world. Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds, was a profound desire. I desired dragons with a profound desire.â€)