Out of the wreck rose the Black Rider, tall and threatening, towering above her. With a cry of hatred that stung the very ears like venom he let fall his mace. Her shield was shivered in many pieces, and her arm was broken; she stumbled to her knees. He bent over her like a cloud, and his eyes glittered; he raised his mace to kill.One of the best books ever. Stirred the embers of more imaginations than can be measured. Found a way to reach something vital but ineffable inside millions of different souls. Presented the world with Sauron, his Nazgûl, and the Balrog to tip the scales of evil; Gandalf, Galadriel, and the stalwart gentlehobbit Frodo to lend ballast to those of good; whereas, with Tom Bombadil, who really knows what trippy trail that earth-bound spirit is blazing: and who the can top all of that? It first spoke to me when my fantastic fifth grade teacher chose The Fellowship of the Ring for our classroom reading period, and I've never looked back.There are curiosities that abound within the trilogy, not least in that the opening chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring would not be out of place as a direct sequel to The Hobbit, whereas by the time we have reached Rivendell, the entire tone of the book has been altered: become more adult, more serious and darker, possessed of a sense of finality and portents of an end to wondrous things that comes to permeate the remainder of this questing original. By the time we get to the Scouring of the Shire at the close of the third book, it is understood that even the bucolic goodwill and perduring staidness of the Hobbit realm has been stirred, shaken, even broken in parts, and cannot go back to what it was. What's more, with every subsequent reading I found it more difficult to accept that the Nazgûl failed so miserably in their great and urgent task of taking back the Ring from Frodo, even with Strider/Aragorn in the picture; that these ferocious sorcerer-spectres were driven away—all nine at once, mind, which few men had ever proven able to withstand—with the Ring well within their grasp, well, it truly tests my suspension of disbelief. With that said, though, how many other parts of the story fail? Precious few, I think, particularly within the context of a transitional world linked to the ancient and primordial past only by the maintenance of Elvish magic, and that contingent upon the very survival of the One Ring that they would most wish to see utterly unmade. The trilogy represents a final outreach of the elder races ere the full and overwhelming dominion of Man; and the evil incarnate within such demi-gods as Morgoth and Sauron, its essence imbued within the very earth itself and permeating the susceptible souls of the new ruling race of free-choosing (and hence, free-damning) mortal (wo)men will in the future prove just as effective a corruptive and destructive force without the dominating presence of an avataric darkling lord to wield it from a centre of power. But what interests me these days, more than the well-known story itself, is trying to suss what constitutes the enduring spell that TLOTR casts upon its legion of readers, whether experienced hands or rookies new to its peculiar fantastic delights. Is it a yearning to escape a world of routine and rational technodemocracy where everything seems sullied by the pursuit of the dollar and tomorrow will be but a twin of today, which was sibling to its brethren of the day before? A world absent of miracles and beauty that stirs the very body to fealty? Where lawyers abound to clarify the legal implications of every action that falls outside of the commonplace or expected? Where the rich are not bound by a noblesse oblige to fight to protect those who labour on their behalf, but hire those selfsame workers to do the fighting for them? Where the powerful rules that uphold modern science can be replaced by naught but the mystical exertion of a rich spirit's will - a Nietzschean surmounting of the barriers to controlling the energies of a nature that, to us, seems distant and out of sync? Where things like honor and blood ties bound people together with a lasting surety and strength that would be incomprehensible in our modern fragmented neighborhoods, where you can wander through blocks of crammed apartments and dirty houses without meeting with a single smile or nodding acknowledgement? Where evil, though ever lurking to tempt men away from the path of truth, could be traced to its roots in the rebellious uprising of cosmogonic spirits, blackened godlings whose lusts for chaos and dominance seeped into the human psyche through a process of corrupting what, in its original nature, was pure and fulgent? Beats me - but it's got to be something, because Tolkien's trilogy is one of those rare books that, it seems, will never be in danger of being removed from the presses.In an irony-drenched and übersceptical postmodern civilization it must strike many as absurd that there exists an insatiable demand for this tripartite tale penned in the manner of an irascible, waddling county squire whose tropes and forms—slavishly reworked and rehashed in the reams of fantasy fiction that has been churned out since its initial publication—hearken back to the foundational mythologies of patriarchal oppression, class division, and romantic irrationality that it was both hoped and expected the postwar years would have superseded. I've read critiques from the likes of Moorcock - Epic Pooh - and, while able to understand why he dismisses it, simply cannot manage to summon any commiseration for the repugnance he feels. First and foremost, the tale grew out of the imaginative legends Tolkien had concocted as backdrop for his linguistic creations—and coming as he did from a proud and tradition-bound Roman-Catholic background; and pursuing as he did his studies in the philological field of Anglo-Saxon language and literature; and enjoying as he did various ancient and medieval mythologies and the fantastic weavings of influential forbears such as Dunsany, MacDonald, and Eddison; well, can there be any surprise that his brilliant questing trilogy evoked calls to Welsh faeries, Norse dragons, Scots trolls, Finnish hunters, comfortable and sturdy Midland farms, Gaelic heroes, and a loving but distant God beyond a host of angels whose essence devolves downward? It is hard to fault the man for pursuing his own personal passions and visions and putting them into a textual form for which he expected, at best, a modest return—why not swing, rather, at a public that—from the very first printing—lapped it up with all the eagerness of a thirsty tribe wandered in from an exodus amidst a particularly sere desert?And therein lies the rub: it galls such as Moorcock that one generation after another yields en masse an avid affection and enthusiasm to what he considers a frivolous and archaic bit of stuffiness and prudery and dusty parochialism set to the service of an aulde England of division and oppression that it would be far better to have left behind. He wonders, as do others, at what can be hale about a tale that deftly avoids anything beyond the faintest intimations of sexuality and, for the most part, relegates women to a gender-specified subservience and passivity as Middle-Earth window-dressing; that appears to embrace the pernicious prejudice of the inherent superiority of white North European culture; that avoids any avowal of the economic, religious, or political structures and systems that must inevitably have been at play and working their damaging and divisive effects upon such a vast civilization; that fluffs and puffs with trite, sentimental songs and portentous magic and heavy-lidded memories the better to disguise the utter irrelevance and unseriousness of what is unfolding, the priggish and confining morality that puts everyone in their place—bowing to the gods and to one's social superiors—whilst upholding the aristocratic warrior as the virtuous ideal; that separates good and evil in a manner that provides a comforting and ready accounting for the myriad ills of the world, but which actually trivializes these ethical issues, especially in an age that witnessed the horrors of the holocaust and communist purges.How can this be? How can an enlightened and post-capitalist postwar society continue to be enthralled by an updated version of timeworn mythologies—the latest of which ripened during the Dark Ages—shaped with the hammer of mothballed and morbid uppercrust morality of the sort that harumphs conspicuously and comes bearing bow-ties? Perhaps for some of the reasons I listed at the start of this review. Escapist fare has always been popular, but there seems to be as much, if not more of a hunger for the fantastic the more the trappings of the latter fade from our view. Modern society is one bound to the clock, ofttimes divided and parceled out down to the very minute; one in which we spend hours every day idling in a car, riding an elevator, waiting in queues, sitting at a desk, pushing a cart, with productivity and efficiency forever on the increase and a sense of who we are, where we are going, why we are on that journey, what we are meant to accomplish along the way and how we are to achieve these goals—with the very knowledge of our mortality, the ephemeral nature of all our achievements, staring us full-on in the face even when we deign to look away—eludes our grasp like the mists wafted forth on a humid spring morning.To be taken away to an invented world wherein everything serves some manner of purpose and greater goods actually carry an immediate import and eternal consequence, where the enemy is implacable and can be neither appeased nor reasoned with but only defeated—Nazis in cloaks and armed with swords—and magic is suzerain over realms where twentieth-century science holds sway, where love is inflamed within the arterial passions of the romantic, perduring and encompassing though it progresses within tropes of courtship and calling interwoven with the streams of fate, where petty beings from the outliers of a world contested by mighty powers prove the enduring significance of the strength and fidelity of the individual will over seemingly stronger currents sourced within the misty recesses of time and bearing loftier lineages, where the freedoms cherished are not those currently stressed and promised by our political professionals and the bonds of honor hold straighter than those we perceive in our own lives, where those in power, though bowed beneath the weight of shadow-laden years, might yet endeavor to do what serves the world and not just their immediate self-interest; all of this must carry some powerful, primeval attraction that—combined with the aesthetic and geographical wonders of a travelogue, the eldritch presence of creatures and beings sown from human myth and fertilized by the author's potent demiurgical imagination, and the thrilling suspense of a chase/race to potentially the most apocalyptic of ends—finds a way to reach that part of the mind where such fantastic delights serve as satiating fare, and in which this popular escapism can be engirt with a morality now out of fashion but held necessary to burnish the imaginary with the gloss of both the good and the real—not to mention the fun.
I managed to avoid reading this until the first film came out. After the credits rolled on The Fellowship of the Ring, I wanted to know what happened next, and so I read the book. It took me quite a while. I'm not naturally a fan of the peculiar writing style that characterises High Fantasy, and at the risk of angering Tolkienites everywhere, I have to say there are number of things about the book I'm not wild about. I don't like Tom Bombadil, the way orcs and uruk-hai sound like gangs of Victorian cutthroats, or the tiresome sl-o-o-o-wness of Ents. I don't need that many detailed descriptions of forests. Aragorn's romance with Arwen is one of those idealised, up-on-a-pedestal things with no real substance. (I will always have a problem with an Elf thousands of years old wanting to couple up with a human, even one of the Numenor, but the films gave Arwen some things to do and some depth.) The structure of the book, following certain characters for long stretches while leaving others in the lurch, gets frustrating at times. Part of my extreme fondness for Faramir is because he showed up just when I was getting really tired of Frodo and Gollum and Sam bickering during their long, slow trudge toward Mordor. (Pacing is something else the films do so much better than the book.) But I like Faramir for other reasons, too; he is steadfast, honourable, and completely undeserving of his paranoid and unfair father. What kept the story going for me was the collection of interesting characters. Despite the things that irritate me, I did find myself at the end wanting to know more about what happened to a lot of them. The little Hobbits are truly resilient, and I really like Samwise most of all. Without Sam, the journey would've ended in tragedy. I like Aragorn a lot, too; he has the most interesting character arc, moving from doubt and lack of confidence into his destined position as a great leader. I like his compassion for his fellow travelers, as well, and really like the Houses of Healing sequence. Eowyn is wonderful. If I remember correctly, her part is one of the least changed from page to screen. Her bravery and determination set her apart from all the other female characters (and many of the males) in the book. Even though I knew she could not win Aragorn's heart, I still felt bad for her over it--but Faramir is a good match for her, after all. Boromir is terribly flawed but sympathetic and proves himself in the end. Gandalf, part kindly old uncle and part scary sorcerer, helps keep everything moving forward. Theoden, cheated out of his life and power, gets to make a final stand on his own terms. In the end, the story comes together well. But, while I usually prefer books to the films based on them, in this case, I prefer the films. The films wouldn't exist if it weren't for the book, but I prefer the Jackson team's editing strategy, seeing those trees on screen, and how the actors bring the characters to life.
What do You think about The Lord Of The Rings (2005)?
Actually, I read Tolkien's masterful Middle Earth fantasy corpus, beginning with The Hobbit in the early 70's and finishing the Lord of the Rings trilogy almost a decade later, before this anniversary edition came out. (I also read all four books to my wife in the early 80's; she loved them too!)This body of work is, of course, the genre-defining classic of modern fantasy --especially epic, or "high" fantasy -- which popularized the genre as the publishing market force it is today, exerted enormous influence over practically all subsequent fantasy authors (including R. A. Salvatore and Terry Brooks), and set the conventions readers would come to expect: a pre-technological setting, an epochal struggle between good and evil whose outcome is determined by magical factors, and a demand for personal moral growth on the part of the characters thrust into a pivotal role in that struggle. And Tolkien's depictions of wizards, elves, dwarfs, dragons, etc. became the template for all subsequent portrayals of these creatures.Part of the success of Tolkien's work derives from the breath- taking scope of his world-building, which reflects his day jobs as a philologist and medievalist; he created entire languages and folklores for his "Middle Earth," as well as a detailed, millenia-spanning history. But more importantly, as a devout Catholic, he embodied his deeply Christian world-view in the writing: his fantasy world (though he doesn't employ the kind of explicit Christian symbolism that C. S. Lewis does) is the scene of conflict between and evil with world-altering significance, under a superintending Providence, in which the individual moral choices of both the high and the lowly have significance, and temptation is an ever-present danger.
—Werner
I'm a huge fan of LOTR. Always have been, always will be. It's so bad that I have figurines of all the characters, cards, posters, an original autographed Italian copy of the book, all the paperbacks, hardbacks and I am now starting a collection of the "special edition" covers... or what I like to call "the super amazing pretty covers" that look like this:(I know it's The Hobbit, but shush, I'll get the rest soon)I've read my Italian copy so many times that it now looks like this:Once upon a time, it had a sleeve and a front cover. That was before I read it 16 times.So yeah, you can say I'm a hardcore fan. My sister and I even do a LOTR reading and watching marathon once a year. She opts out of the reading marathon, but we happily watch all the films (in both Italian and English, because our DVDs are mixed) at least once a year, and it's usually before Christmas.Needless to say, I absolutely adore J.R.R Tolkien and his amazing books. Say what you will, but he is beyond marginally talented. He is amazing.Therefore, instead of a review, here's a compilation of GIFs because I love you all.You should also know that I have a huge crush on Aragorn. He will be my husband one day.(HOW PERFECT IS HE?!)*FANGIRLS*
—Aly∞
It's nice to have favorites. When you have a favorite -- a favorite menu item, a favorite car, a favorite shirt -- you can enter at least one corner of the maelstrom of subjective choices that life presents to you and evaluate the choices in that corner not with respect to some external criteria, but rather with respect to one specific thing. For example, when asking oneself what the greatest book of all time is, one might first have to ask, "what makes a book great?" -- which is a question that one could spend a lifetime only attempting to answer.Instead, after reading a book, I am able to ask myself, "Which is better -- this book, or The Lord of The Rings?"The Lord of the Rings is the best story I've ever read.(Naturally, your mileage may vary -- possibly even dramatically.)A British writer posted something about The Lord of the Rings on his now-defunct website, oh, maybe 7 or 8 years ago. Paraphrasing, he said: "As a creative work, The Lord of the Rings is the work of a second-rate novelist. But if the creative work is Middle-Earth, then Tolkien is one of the very greatest artists who has ever lived." I think that's basically true. (Plus, since I'm not terribly widely- or well-read, it gives me a comforting measure of self-satisfaction.)I caught wind of the movies before filming began -- it was the sort of thing that would have cropped up in the fractions of the internet I frequented. I've come to have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the movies. (stinking academy award winning...) I am thankful Jackson was able to bring them to the masses. I am saddened that in repackaging for the masses, much of what I love about the story was left behind.Why do I like The Lord of the Rings? I like Tolkien's crochety introduction. I like the depth of the invented world -- it has its own stories, its own poetry (of different meters and rhyme-schemes, even), its own languages, its own geography, it's own history. I like the narrator's tone. I like the moments of understated humor. I like the medieval fantasy: swords and monsters and magic. Most of all, I like the characters and the ways in which their actions reflect such primitive things as courage, compassion, honor, and love.Some may hold this genre to be childish, or inherently imperfect. Some time ago I began to speculate that the more straight-up fiction of the mainstream variety may be fraught with more danger, and that there is something objectively worthy even in the fanciful and simplistic. One could scan the New York Times bestseller list and/or book reviews in literary journals and pick out a work that seems well respected, taking place in an essentially real time and place -- say, Chicago, in 1998 -- with, say, a protagonist named Joe, and a Holly-Golightly-esque object of his conflicted affections. Joe and Holly-esque wander and banter and ponder; lather, rinse, repeat. Throw in some other characters. Joe and Holly-esque hit it off! or, they don't. Finis.What lesson is a reader to draw from this? Perhaps Joe and Holly-esque's drama will enter the reader's subconscious (or some such) and, over the course of the reader's life, will impact or inform the way the reader interacts with the world. The reader may come to behave toward the world based on an understanding of the world that derives in part from what the reader observed in the interaction between Joe and Holly-esque.Which, recall, is fiction.So the reader's model of what men and women are, what men and women say and think, what men and women should do, may at some level owe provenance to what some author imagined human nature to be; and this model may in turn have a real impact on real people.What happens if a reader has read The Lord of the Rings? The work might resonate with the reader, and the reader might feel it altogether right and proper to deal with the world with courage, compassion, honor, and love.I know which danger I prefer.
—Wes
