The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Yes! I've found the LOTR thread at AW!

Currently, I'm trying to find a copy of Walking With Frodo. Outside of online stores is it tough to find because it's bad or is it that popular?

I will definately read this thread in more detail when I get the chance! I had an avatar of Boromir, but I can't get it back on since the board fritzed. Although my favorite is Faramir....

Teehee!

kristin724 said:

Although my favorite is Faramir....

Click to expand...

Faramir was awesome, so I hated what they did to him in the movie.

Back in 1969 on the 1 train in Manhattan to my school up in Washington Heights, I used to meet to get on at the 86th street station. My friend Eli got on at 96th. Most days we met each other. On that train I found out Janis Joplin died (the night before). It was also one day on that train when Eli told me in that year, about this great book he had been reading. He lent me the first volume. Back then, B&N was a college book store in downtown Manhattan. The book stores were not as popular as they were today. I went with Pop to Brentanos on 47th and Fifth where we finally found a copy of LOTR.

I became a fanatic. A real fanatic. I used to play "Who said to Whom?" with freinds when we werent looking at the girls of course.

Eli, on my wedding day, bought us a Collectors Edition of LOTR which was printed in a limited edition then, and I still have.

I cannot tell you how many times I have read it. Def. over 20. It was and still is a fascinating read and moreso an incredible journey into what I personally consider, very well written literature. Tolkien sometimes has lines that are truly worthy of the greats. LOTR turned me on to fantasy and to literature as a whole.

I think it is an incredible work. I think it deserves every piece of praise it gets. (I also happened to like the movies - which I usually dont) I honestly think Peter Jackson did a fairly decent job.

Ah yes, LOTR is a touchstone for me. It's the reason why I ended up studying medieval literature, including Old Icelandid and Old English. I had hopes of doing graduate work under Tolkien, but he died just as I was starting out the long trip to becoming a scholar. That was the first career I abandoned as a bad idea.

Early in my pregnancy with my first child, I ran into a few problems and my doctor put me to bed for a couple of days. I don't sleep much under the best of conditions, and I certainly don't lie around in bed well for any length of time. The prospect of lying in bed with nothing to do was, well, impossible to contemplate. So I reread ALL of LOTR in 24 hours.

LOTR has been a massive inspiration for me.
I was a bit of a book freak before I read it, but it made the transformation complete.
Many a time have I wondered what it would be like to be in middle-earth....
I have often tried to write un a similar style to Tolkien, but it always seems to be a pale imitation whenever I read it.

K1P1 said:

Ah yes, LOTR is a touchstone for me. It's the reason why I ended up studying medieval literature, including Old Icelandid and Old English.

Click to expand...

That's true of me, to some extent as well, though I think much as I love LOTR, and I do, Tolkien's edition of SGGK, which I've been living with almost daily for, well, a long time now, had a lot to do with my scholarly choices.

So I reread ALL of LOTR in 24 hours

Click to expand...

Pretty sure that isn't possible. It took me well over a month to read it first time and i'm a fast reader and I would read it for hours a day.

kilamangiro said:

Pretty sure that isn't possible. It took me well over a month to read it first time and i'm a fast reader and I would read it for hours a day.

Click to expand...

I did the math as soon as I saw the post. The average reader reads 250 wpm. LotR is right at half a million words. A 24-hour reading is about 350 wpm for the entire time, which isn't unreasonable.

I read most fiction at about 500-600 wpm, depending on the content, so I could theoretically finish it in about 16-17 hours.

There are 3 books I read annually. The Lord of the Rings, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and Ender's Game.

These books shaped my worldview, taught me the elements of story, drama, and character, and other than cinema, were the initial steppingstones of my cultural knowledgebase as I matured into adulthood.

I read the Hobbit for the first time in middle school (for a class) and LotR in high school (on my brother's suggestion--he's also the source of my Weird Al and Orson Scott Card addictions). My boyfriend's in the midst of rereading it to me (just returned from Mordor). He's really good with doing the voices. Has anyone done a LotR reading group before? I haven't, but I've heard of folks doing it before, where a group of people reads it to each other, with each one doing the voices of different characters.

My favorite part is all the mythic lineage incorporated in the story--Arthur, Germanic ring legends, etc.--and how if you know the myths they're plain to see, but if you don't (which I didn't the first few times I read it) the story is still complete so you wouldn't know you're missing anything. I hate it when people say LotR is low brow (which I've heard too many times in writing classes ). I think it's brilliant that this complex mythic history can also be read as a simple adventure story.

Another thing I like is that the story doesn't end in the expected place--that vanquishing the big bad doesn't mean happily ever after.

It's strange. I am and was a huge fantasy fan. But I think because of all the hype of LOTR while I was in high school back during it's resurgence in popularity, and these were the same bozos who listened to the Ohio Players and other disco-type songs, I just refused, REFUSED to even look at it. The old "it's popular, so it must suck" syndrome.

However, 35 years later and I still haven't read it. I finally struggled through The Hobbit, took me 5 or 6 times to get into it, but I finally finished it. It was interesting, but didn't strike me as so earthshattering that it made me want to read LOTR.

One day, before I die.

re: the Hobbit

You can't really gauge LotR by the Hobbit. The Hobbit is more of a simple adventure story--to the extent that it does contain epic elements, you wouldn't know what they are until you've read LotR. LotR has more going on in the way of epic proportions, complex charecters, mythic subtext, etc. They're just different kinds of books, so LotR's worth a read even if you didn't like the Hobbit.

So I've been told. I've tried to start LOTRs many times, but I guess I just don't care for Tolkein's writing style either.

Only two words can ever describe LOTR. "EPIC" and "CLASSIC." And unlike most rants I write about film adaptations, in my mind Peter Jackson got it right, big time! The cast was flawless, though I admit that my favorite was by far Sean Bean as Boromir, the special effects looked realistic, and it actually followed the books. . .for the most part. The parts where it deviated a bit (like the elves showing up at Helms Deep) didn't really bother me, and I think in some ways added to the story.

Question: Has anyone ever read The Silmarilion? Not sure if there's a thread on it already. If there is, I appologize. Think of it as the prequel to LOTR. Tolkein actually started writing in back in 1916, I believe, when he was in the trenches with the British Army during World War I. You won't see any really familiar faces in The Silmarillion, except Gandalf and Galadriel, and they only have bit parts towards the end. You find out that Sauron was preceeded by the Dark Lord Morgoth (who Orlando Bloom actually mentions once in the movies). The only thing is, it is an absolute nightmare to read. You have to go slow and have lots of patience when reading it. This is because Tolkein taps into all the different languages and varies between them, ie there are three different names for God, and he switches back and forth between them. Not only that, but it covers the span of thousands of years, and so the cast is quite large. Still, I found it to be an enjoyable read, and would recommend it to anyone who's a fan of Middle Earth.

Incidentally, there's a CD out by the German Power Metal Band, Blind Guardian, called "Nightfall in Middle Earth," which is based on The Silmarillion.

Yep; read the Silmarillion, several times, and the History of Middle Earth, all the way through, once, and various volumes a couple times.

Can't recall when I read the set. I found the writing style hard going, but I'd finally given in to the hype, so slugged it out. I'm glad I did. Gandalf enthralled me. Frodo and Sam's plight kept me on the edge. The world-building and dialogue made my toes curl. It was enough to keep me going. I thought; I'll just read the first.

Yeah, right. I get to the end, and bang! Tolkein leaves threads dangling. Arrhghh! So the second book I read. Then the second book leaves a cliffhanger. So the third book I read. I wanted to thump Tolkein with a dragon-firecracker, but in the end, I was loving it.

Gandalf rocks!

When I heard they were making a movie, I was half excited, half apprehensive. They're gonna stuff it, I thought. Hollywood always does. But Jackson's love of the series shone through, and the result is a stoy-telling, cinematic feast.

I was eleven in 2001, when the previews for the first movie were released. I suppose that's what got me interested in the books -- and I couldn't put them down. The Lord of the Rings is what got me interesting in writing in the first place. Thanks, Mr. Tolkien.

Edit: My favorite scene in both the movie and the book was Boromir's death scene. He's always been my favorite character, and one, I felt, that was highly underrated.

Deadbeat, good scene choice with the departure of Boromir. When, just before, Boromir tries to take the Ring from Frodo...I was blown away in the theater. Sean Bean was Boromir. Perfect right down to his falling on his face. I get chills from that scene.

LotR is my favorite book and I know we aren't really discussing the film...but if there has been a better all around casting job done for a film in the last twenty years I can't think of it.

Lord of the Rings Insight

Quite often, people suggest to me that The Lord of the Rings is "an obvious re-telling of WWII."

I overheard it again today from a complete stranger.

Did any one else read it that way? I didn't, but I don't know much about World War II, so I'd love to hear a comparison.

Lord of the Rings incorporated elements of so much of Christian belief, the folklore & mythology of various Northern European cultures, linguistics, and other reference points that there's not much you can't read into it if you try hard enough.

Somebody is probably parroting something they heard once. Solicit details. So is Sauron supposed to be Hitler? You know, the fallen demi-god from the west, formerly servant to a greater evil? How does that compare to a biography of Hitler? Are the Ringwraiths the Luftwaffe? Then what would be the Battle of Britain in your friend's analogy? How about the occupation of France? Where would the Vichy government be?

It breaks down pretty quickly.

You might find this of interest

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngbeyond/rings/influences.html

A quote from the article:
"An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience," Tolkien acknowledged, but he strongly denied that his story was an allegory for World War I or II.* Although The Lord of the Rings was written during World War II and follows the rise of a great evil threatening to envelop the world, the ring was not meant to symbolize the atomic bomb. Likewise, the characters Sauron and Saruman, although both tyrants, are imaginary characters and are not meant to represent Hitler or Stalin.

Yeah, whoever told you this was simply telling you that he hadn't read the books, and probably didn't see the movies either.

It's a common reading

josephwise said:

Quite often, people suggest to me that The Lord of the Rings is "an obvious re-telling of WWII."

I overheard it again today from a complete stranger.

Did any one else read it that way? I didn't, but I don't know much about World War II, so I'd love to hear a comparison.

Click to expand...

This is a common reading of Tolkien, though it's also "wrong," insofar as it's neither what the author intended nor a terribly good argument. There are similarities--WW2 was seen as "total war" and was considered by many, essentially, to be a war against a terrible and evil adversary. Churchill's rhetoric during the years after Dunkirk definitely had that determined and valiant underdog quality to it, as well, which is something the protagonists in LOTR had going for them. Essentially, in both WW2 and the book, you have a theoretically peaceful people who don't like war, who really prefer to be playing in their peaceful shires, who are called upon in a dark hour to take up arms in a great and desperate struggle against a major external evil. It's a very western POV, as the Russians had... a rather different experience.

But Tolkien wasn't talking about the war--he says in one of his introductions something to the effect of "surely, had this been about the war, the ring would have been used against Sauron and his armies; there would have been little place for Hobbits in the world that followed." He was referring, I believe, to the dropping of the atomic bomb, though perhaps also to the massive allied apparatus for war and for total war. (The fire-bombing of Dresden and such come to mind.)

Some MacBeth references are interesting, though.

Tolkein survived the Sommne. Most of his class mates did not. It permanently changed him. The marshes of Moria are in part based on those memories.