1968 The Lord of the Rings (Norman Barrs)

Release Date: 1968.01
Reader: Norman Barrs
Language: English
Organization: Talking Book Publishers, recording agency. APH, distributor
Publisher: DBPH, [Washington, D.C.]
ISBN: n/a
Duration: ~60 hours
Unabridged: Yes
Country: English
Licenced: Yes
Formats: 1968: 30 10-inch vinyl discs,16⅔ rpm 1978: Cassette x 11, C-90, analog, 15/16 ips, 4 track mono
NLS Book Numbers 1968: TB 1925, 1926, and 1927
NLS Book Numbers 1978: RC10975, RC10976, RC10977

Produced by American Printing House for the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled service of the Library of Congress. This reading was made purely for eligible members of this special library service in the USA and not available for commercial release.

Norman Barrs was born on 6 November 1917 in London, England, UK. An actor who spent much of his later career in the United States. He was a veteran of the New York stage and a prolific voice artist. He appeared in numerous Broadway and Off-Broadway productions from the 1960s through the 1980s. Notable credits include the 1965 production of The Pickwick Papers and various Shakespearean roles.

Barrs recorded the first-ever unabridged audio versions of both The Lord of the Rings and Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. Unlike the cinematic or theatrical approaches of modern narrators, Barrs was known for a very precise, clear, and “proper” British delivery. This made him a favorite for educational and archival recordings. He died on 14 December 1991 in New York City, New York, USA.

He had become a fixture of the New York stage. His selection for The Lord of the Rings was a deliberate choice by the APH (American Printing House for the Blind) to provide a “classical” weight to the text. Reviewers of his Talking Books often noted his ability to differentiate characters through subtle shifts in pitch rather than exaggerated accents, which made his 60-hour marathon reading of the trilogy very listenable.

The January–February 1968 issue of Talking Book Topics list the first two volumes, with the third appearing in the March-April 1968 issue. In 1968, the “Tolkien Craze” was at such a fever pitch that the APH (American Printing House for the Blind) was under immense pressure to get the narrative into the hands of blind students. To save time and physical record space (as vinyl was expensive and bulky), the 1968 production of The Return of the King (TB1927) was truncated. He provided a very brief reading of the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen (from Appendix A), but the chronologies, family trees, and the complex linguistic essays of Appendices E and F were omitted.

In 1978, the NLS officially transferred these 1968 masters to the 4-track cassette format. This is the version most commonly found in digital archives today, (RC 10975-77) often bearing the 1978 copyright date even though the performance is a decade older. When the transfer was undertaken, they were faced with a dilemma – having to choose between the more popular Barrs reading with an incomplete text to the less popular but complete reading by Livingston Gilbert. Rather than re-record the Appendices with Barrs (who was by then busy with other projects), they simply issued the Barrs narrative as it was. This meant that for a period in the late 70s and 80s, NLS patrons actually had less information available on cassette than they previously had on the (now withdrawn) Gilbert vinyl set.