About this title: THE LORD OF THE RINGS is regarded by many to be the most important and influential work of fantasy of the 20th century. It generated the fantasy novel industry practically single-handedly, inspiring a multitude of novels concerning elves and dwarves on quests to conquer ultimate evil despite overwhelming odds. Although Tolkien had always intended for THE LORD OF THE RINGS to be published as a single volume, its division into a trilogy created the iconic format for epic fantasy literature. In the first book of the series, THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, the Dark Lord Sauron, an utterly evil and ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Del Rey Books
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780345339706ISBN:0345339703
Description: Fine. No dust jacket as issued. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 480 p. Lord of the Rings (Paperback), 1. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Ballantine Books, New York, New York, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9780345339706ISBN:0345339703
Description: Good. No Jacket. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. The book is very solid with unmarked pages. The front corners are feathered. The cover has moderate shelf & edge wear with creases at the corners. The spine has a few creases. read more
"Considering that The Lord of the Rings is one of the most popular books of the last century, it's surprising to see how few reviews there are here. I get the impression that many people feel guilty about liking it. It's a phase you go through, and the less said about it, the better. I think this is unfair to the book, which, I am prepared to argue, is a whole lot better than it's generally made out to be; I don't think its huge success is just evidence that people have no taste. It's something that can be read at more than one level, and, before dismissing it, let's take a look at what those levels might be.
On the surface, it's a heroic fantasy novel, and quite a good one. It's a gripping, well-realized story, with an interesting fantasy world as background. Under the surface story, it's also clear that there's a moral discourse. It's not an allegory; as Tolkien points out in the foreword, he hated allegory, and we certainly don't have an in-your-face piece of Christian apology by numbers. None the less, the author has constructed some inspiring and thought-provoking symbols. The Ring confers great power, but the only way to defeat Sauron is to refuse that power, and destroy it, even at great personal cost. Frodo's self-sacrifice is quite moving. I also think that Gandalf is an unusually interesting Christ-figure; sufficiently so that many people refuse even to accept him as one, though, at least to me, the argument on that point seems convincing. He comes from Valinor, obviously the Heavenly Realm, to help the Free Peoples of the West. A central part of his message is the importance of mercy, as, in particular, shown by the memorable scene near the beginning, when he rebukes Frodo for wishing that Bilbo had killed Sméagol when he had the opportunity. As we discover, Sméagol is finally the one person who can destroy the Ring. And let's not miss the obvious point that Gandalf is killed, and then returns reborn in a new shape. I find him vastly more sympathetic than C.S. Lewis's bland Aslan, and he is the book's most memorable character.
But I don't think the morality play is the real kernel either. What makes LOTR a unique book, and one of the most ambitious experiments in literary history, is Tolkien's use of names. All authors knows how important names are, and use them to suggest character; though when you think about what is going on, it is rather surprising how much can be conveyed just by a name. Proust has a couple of long discussions about this, describing in great detail how the narrator's initial mental pictures of Balbec, Venice and the Guermantes family come just from the sounds of their names. Tolkien goes much further. Most of his names are based on a family of invented languages, linked by a vast complex of legends and histories, the greater part of which are invisible to the reader and only surface occasionally.
The astonishing thing is that the technique actually works. The interrelations between all the invented names and languages make Middle-Earth feel real, in a way no other fantasy world ever has. When some readers complain that characters and locations are hastily sketched, I feel they are missing the point. Tolkien was a philologist. He loved languages, words and names, and tracing back what the relationships between them say about their history. In LOTR, he's able to convey some of that love of language to his readers. You have to read the book more than once, but after a while it all comes together. To give just a few obvious examples, you see how "hobbit" is a debased form of the word holbytla ("hole-dweller") in the Old Norse-like language of Rohan, how the "mor" in "Moria" is the same as the one in "Mordor" and "morgul", and how Arwen Undómiel's name expresses her unearthly beauty partly through the element it shares with her ancestor Lúthien Tinúviel. There are literally hundred more things like this, most of which one perceives on a partly unconscious level. The adolescent readers who are typically captivated by LOTR are at a stage of their linguistic development when they are very sensitive to nuances of language, and programmed to pick them up; I can't help thinking that they are intuitively seeing things that more sophisticated readers may miss.
Perhaps the simplest way to demonstrate the magnitude of Tolkien's achievement is the fact that it's proven impossible to copy it; none of the other fantasy novels I've seen have come anywhere close. Tolkein's names lend reality to his world, because he put so much energy into the linguistic back-story, and before that worked for decades as a philologist. Basically, he was an extremely talented person who spent his whole life training to write The Lord of the Rings. In principle, I suppose other authors could have done the same thing. In practice, you have to be a very unusual person to want to live that kind of life.
Writing this down reminds me of one of the Sufi stories in The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mullah Nasrudin. The guy is invited to a posh house, and sees this incredibly beautiful, smooth lawn. It's like a billiard table. "I love your lawn!" he says. "What's the secret?"
"Oh," his host says, "It's easy. Just seed, water, mow and roll regularly, and anyone can do it!"
"Ah yes!" says the visitor, "And about how long before it looks like that?"
"Hm, I don't know," says the host. "Maybe... 800 years?""
"OK, first of all I know some folk love this and I'm not saying they shouldn't. Everyone has different tastes. I read this on my second attempt. I tried first when I was in my teens and found it dull, I gave up around page 100 or so. I finally read it years back in my early 30s, but although it was still dull I gave it the benefit of the doubt and finished it. My opinion changed from dull to dull and not that big a deal. It seems to be full of: long descriptions of folk walking about (dull); elf poetry (dull); pantomime style bad guys (yawn); hobbits (oh, they irritate me...). Again I say it wasn't for me. I'm treading carefully here as I realise some folk are fairly into JRRT, learning elfish (elvan?), memorising family trees etc. If you're a JRRT fanboy please re-read this paragraph before replying, I'm not trying to insult you (unless you can actually translate this into dwarf runes), merely aknowledge that these books can encourage a level of evangelical response that I recognise but don't personnaly get. Before coming to this I had been exposed to faster paced fantasy tales from the early 20th cent. and as a result found JRRT slow, very slow. Also I'd read many of the sources he draws from so found the world derivative at times. Having said that, I think that if you like big wordy novels and haven't read any other fantasy this may be the thing for you. And before anyone suggests re-reading LOTR, life's too short...I have other books to read...even other books (that I enjoyed the first time) to re-read. In summary: I found LOTR dull, dull, dull."
"Apparently people either love reading Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or they find it boring. I've read and reread the books at least ten times, mostly in the late 1960's, but also when I read the books aloud to my children, especially when my son was quite ill. He, in turn, read the stories many times when he was in high school, and my original Ballentine books were amess. No wonder I was thrilled to get my hands on another set of the Ballentine paperbacks in quite good condition! It's great to have this classic tale in a set that holds so many treasured memories."
"To even attempt to review Tolkien's epic is like measuring the coastline - the deeper you go, the more there is to find (or, as the more cynical might put it, the longer it gets.)
And it's because it is so many different stories and, indeed, types of story, all melded together into one (at times unwieldy) whole. So, for example, you can read it as a poetry book. Skip all the narrative sections and just read the verse. You'll be surprised at how much of the narrative structure remains intact, and how the themes of loss, redemption, love and courage are still present. Likewise, I often tell people who got frustrated with the "hobbit stuff" at the start to skip straight past that and just read Aragorn's story instead, which is far easier to relate to.
So the shifts in tone and style are not signs of bad writing, they are deliberate echoes of the different mythic forms he used as his original model for creating the world of Middle Earth. And it's this underpinning that makes the book so special - his characters live in a world that has its own intricate mythos that they can casually refer to, almost as though they expect the reader to know the stories just as intimately. In the way that an author today could refer to, say, the story of Romeo & Juliet and expect the reader to know the basics, here Aragorn talks about Beren & Luthien in the same way - and we (as readers) realise that we have no idea who these people are - but that those characters do. And, more importantly, that that story has absolutely nothing to do (in plot terms) with the one we are reading (except insofar as establishing a parallelism for Aragorn & Arwen.)
It's a common flaw, especially in fantasy fiction, for the world to exist solely for the story that is being told; what makes Middle Earth so special is that, for all its inconsistency and implausibility, it really does have large parts of history that are nothing to do with The One Ring.
Tolkien originally set out to create a mythology for England. He ended up doing more than that - and for that we should all be grateful."
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