The Lord of the Rings: 50th Anniversary, One Vol. Edition (original 1954; edition 2005)

I spent so long feeling bad that I'd never read this as a kid. And then I read it, and I know that as a kid I would in no way have enjoyed and appreciated it as much as I did reading it as an adult. Having had it hyped so much as a part of 'nerd' culture I was wary of bringing a bunch of preconceived notions of 'goodness' into it and tried to just enjoy it as a book - and as a book it's thoroughly lovely and magical and just what I hoped it would be. ( )

I never read this (or The Hobbit) as a kid, but when all the movies started coming out a few years ago, I read in preparation for them. I've since read The Lord of the Rings at least twice more, aloud to my family. So this was probably my third time through the books. I really enjoyed it this time through. There's a lot of lyricism in the book, and I especially enjoyed finding sort of hidden rhythms or other poetry even in the prose. I also liked the songs and poems that followed sort of the old Anglo Saxon poetic mode (alliterative verse with caesuras). The variety of landscape words and descriptions can seem tedious but also makes the books pretty richly described. There's heroism here, and courtliness, and admiration of beauty (Gimli's description of the caverns in Rohan is dazzling, for example). It's long, and at times a little slow, and Frodo is a pill, but this to me really is a delight to revisit. I started rereading The Hobbit right afterward, and the quality of the books is markedly different (The Hobbit being the lesser book). ( )

Un libro que me obsesiono por meses o años.
Todo el dinero que habia ahorrado desde pequeño lo use en comprarme una copia y bien gastado que fue. ( )

After many years, still my favourite epic.

I read this for the first time in Italian when I was about 14. Through the years I have picked it up several times again, both in Italian and English to read different passages, but never the whole book again.
Now, over thirty years after the first time, I’ve read the whole thing again, this time in English (which made appreciate a writing richness that was missing from the translation).
Still a masterpiece, still my favourite epic ever. A life changing book. ( )

This was my second time reading "The Lord of the Rings." My first time was in middle school, when my dad read it aloud. That said, the only thing that stands out to me from my memory of the books is Tom Bombadil. Otherwise, all my memories about the series are sourced from the films, which I saw once in theaters, and then once in extended form eight years ago.

There's so much lore around Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings, it is almost impossible to say anything original about the series. In the introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition, they note some interesting tidbits, such as that it was a student that encouraged Tolkien to finish the manuscript for the Lord of the Rings, that the story of the publishing of the series is a story of eternal typographical errors (in part, due to Tolkien's use of archaic and uncommon language), and that much of this republishing occurred because the US didn't respect Tolkien's Brittish copyright to the manuscript, so there were prolific bootlegs.

In my recent study of myth, I've been wondering, when is it appropriate to attempt to craft a new myth? As Disney has made clear, it is often more profitable to desecrate an old myth than try to tell a new one. Martin Shaw, in his teachings on myth, articulates that myths are living beings, and evolve and change over time, and yet, as a steward of a myth, we should never alter the bones of the story, but rather only adapt a myth to our own landscape. How much of Tolkien's story, in the words of media theorist Kirby Ferguson, is a "remix," and how much is original? Possible more importantly, what values do these themes espouse?

Right near the end of the book, Frodo says to Sam, “It must often be so...when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.” There's a way in which the book is about service.

Although it feels as though we too are at the turning of an age, I don't think it is anything like the monolithic arc portrayed in the Lord of the Rings. To attempt an analogy, it might be said that the Ring of Power is like climate change. And yet, I can't see civilization coherently interacting with climate change on a faster cadence than generations (certainly not in the year that the Lord of the Rings occurs during). The Lord of the Rings is about war, and although Bill McKibben has likened climate change to war, they are fundamentally different, in that, if we have an adversary in climate change, it is ourselves rather than the other.

Getting back to some differences between the films and the movies (there's also a thorough Wikipedia article on the subject), I was struck by the difference in the character of Aragorn. In the book he's rougher around the edges than in the film. Their personalities also have different qualities.

The book has a pacing from another era. To the modern reader of fiction, at times, it feels slow going. It took me maybe four months to get through, although it is quite long. I remember checking out an audio edition of "The Children of Hurin" from the library a few years ago, and it was unpalatably dry, so I quickly returned it. "The Lord of the Rings," tends to stay on this side of readability, but sometimes crosses the threshold. I pages through the appendices, but wasn't tempted to get into them because of this trend in Tolkien's writing.

Inevitably, we come around to the topic of the influence of Tolkien on the fantasy genre. Some may claim modern fantasy originates with Tolkien, and they wouldn't be all wrong. Series such as the Wheel of Time and the Stormlight Archive, as well as games like Diablo, draw heavily from the Lord of the Rings. On the other hand, you could say that much of folklore, with all of its stories of fairies, magic, and dark powers, gave Tolkien all of his fundamentals, and he just put them together in a pretty package.

There is something charming about the craftsman-like qualities of Tolkien's artistry. He drew countless sketches and illustration to accompany his work. He developed a language (elvish). He wrote numerous songs and poetry. Tolkien was a lot more than a writer, and many contemporary writers could learn much from the versatility of Tolkien's creativity. ( )