The Lord of the Rings

Un genio, un pazzo. Il Signore degli Anelli è un libro talmente complesso che è pressoché impossibile apprezzarlo appieno alla prima lettura. Rileggerlo dopo aver letto lo Hobbit, il Silmarillion, e i vari Racconti della Terra di Mezzo mi ha aperto gli occhi su aspetti prima assolutamante indecifrabili e che sembravano fini a se stessi. Tolkien è stato in grado di creare un universo, niente di meno. Da leggere e rileggere.

And so it came to pass, I now have reached a place where I am rereading The Lord Of The Rings every few years. Impossible though it may be to recapture the aching longing of the first time, I am at least better able to appreciate the writing and the thematic concerns and the evocation of the world and landscape. Or at least I flatter myself that I am. Strangest of all on this reread was finding myself as an outpatient at a clinic in Limerick's Regional Hospital for a few hours - my very first read of the trilogy coincided with a teenage trip to the Regional to have my appendix removed. Roughly the same time of the year as well.

Oh well. Our youthfulness has sailed on into the West, never to return and we stand now in the Middle Age of show more Man. It's nice that this thing that excited our childish mind now consoles our more wearied adulthood, on occasion. It's not a bad ambition, to want to turn more hobbity, and enjoy the finer things in life, like food and dink and good friends and family. Teeangers can go off and be Aragorn. The rest of us can take our ease in the Green Dragon for awhile. show less

When I was nine years old, I came far too close to being a footnote. Double pneumonia had me knocked flat for months, trapped in bed like a prisoner with nothing but homework and my own wheezing to keep me company. My parents — both readers, both wise in the ways of boredom — began ferrying books from their shelves to my bedside. Classics. Adventures. Anything to keep a sick kid’s imagination from turning on itself.

Then one day they brought me The Hobbit… followed by The Lord of the Rings.

And that was it.
The world cracked open.

Tolkien didn’t just give me a story; he gave me a place to live while my lungs slowly remembered their job. His language was deeper than anything I’d ever read, his characters carried more heart than show more most adults I knew, and the sheer scale of Middle-earth made my small room feel suddenly, mercifully enormous.

This was long before Peter Jackson turned the trilogy into a global phenomenon. Back then, loving Tolkien felt like having a secret map folded under your pillow — one only a few strange and lucky souls had discovered.

And the mark it left on me didn’t fade.
Years later, when my own daughter arrived in this world, I didn’t have to think twice about her name. At the end of the saga, Samwise struggles to choose a name for his first daughter until Frodo gently suggests “Elanor,” the little golden flower carpeting Lothlórien. A simple name, rooted in loyalty, beauty, and hope.

I promised myself at nine years old that if I ever had a daughter, that’s what I’d name her.
And I did.

So yes — I owe a lot to these books.
They kept me company when I almost slipped away.
They shaped the way I see story, courage, friendship, and light.
And they even left their fingerprint on my family tree.

Is it a perfect series? Sure… decades later, I still say yes without hesitation.

But more importantly: it was exactly the world I needed when my own was shrinking.

For that, I’ll be grateful as long as I’m reading… which, let’s be honest, is probably until I’m older than Gandalf. show less

how do i review this book? i have read it uncounted times (10? 12? more?) since a friend introduced me to it when i was 12. it has a central place not only in my literature journey but in my philosophy of life and has been a cornerstone of a legacy i hope to have imparted to my children. i find wisdom and uplift and joy in the Lord of the Rings. every time i read it, i find deeper meaning, hidden humor, unexpected insight into human psychology, and more. he was not a seer or oracle or guru, but a world-builder on par with no one and a storyteller unlike anyone else i know of. there are other authors whose stringing of words together transcends to poetry such that i could not care less about what content they intend to convey. not so, show more Tolkien. on occasion, he crafted some of the most beautiful turns of phrase that i have ever read. Like this spoken by Gandalf to Eomer about Eowyn:

“But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in.”

or this simple line when Gandalf tells Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli of his battle with the Balrog:

“I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountain-side where he smote it in his ruin.”

there are several other quotes i could highlight but i have always loved these two.

but most of his prose did not rise to those lofty reaches. no, his mastery lay in twining relationships between events, concepts, personalities, and settings that conjured something transcending storytelling. he used oft-simple prose to do this, forcing the reader to see beyond the mere words into the mind of the author, an endlessly layered world projecting backwards into mythic time and reason, relaying archetypical tropes that speak to us on an atavistic level. the reality he brought to life satisfies at the deepest roots of our souls. he takes us back to before the dawn of time to explain magic and power and souls and will and matter all merge into the mind and “music” of Illuvatar who then manifests that music in Arda, the world that is. despite his writing in the fantasy realm, i feel as though he really did tap into deeper truths where the underlying nature of reality has an understanding and an answer.the mythopoeic characters and their plights take us on journeys through the immense geography and cultures of Middle Earth, certainly, but also through archetypical human experiences that Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung described in scholarly fashion. instead of being an overtly Christian construct, as many of its themes indicate and Tolkien might have intended, it ends up more akin to Hindu teachings in the sense of the deeper interconnectedness of all things.

again, he brought this to us through persons, events, places, and how they interrelate. i see the entirety of his Middle-Earth writings as his Arda. he composed a vast symphony in his mind that he sought to bring forth into the world and could only do so through words, through storytelling. so, everything flows and connects and is internally consistent because he began with the utmost inception of all things and spooled everything from there. most authors who build worlds do not do this and so they often write themselves into corners because they lack those deeper, internal consistencies that Tolkien had as the foundations of everything that happened in his world. he said that he loved history rather than allegory and that use of the historian’s tools on fictional myths led him to this tightly woven fabric i described above.

i have heard people over the years complain about Tolkien spending “pages on describing a single leaf” and how that caused them to find it “boring” and not worth their time. their hyperbole has always saddened me in that they miss the point and do not see the ecosystem for the leaves. he wrote a travel log for us to see his Middle Earth from the ground. he took us on a walk in his fair hills and valleys with the characters he loved most. he set the setting with finer description than most, but it truly added to the sense of being with the characters - especially Sam and Frodo as they made their bleak and desperate journey to Mordor. this also provides a sense of what is worth preserving through bitter actions and violent warring. again, he is giving us a deeper meaning to everything done by our characters by grounding it solidly in the beauty and diversity of Middle Earth. ultimately, humans, elves, dwarves, ents, etc. do not fight for glory or hubris but for the preservation of Illuvatar’s song. to wrest it from the discordant notes of the Enemy- Sauron, and before him, Morgoth. to keep the symphonic tapestry from unraveling. so, when the well-being of orcs and trolls and other “fell creatures” is ignored by the WIse, it is because they are instruments of that cacophony seeking to disrupt. stopping them represents an act of preservation rather than that of bloodlust or politics.

ah, but i wax scholarly and philosophical. the adventure that unfolds in the book has merit in and of itself in the shallowest literary sense: a diversity of characters, mysteries, twists, goals, troubles, and ecstasies. we have so many interesting things to watch and participate in by proxy. things of mythic and epic proportion that have us cheering out loud or tearing up but never dull. some of the scenes and characters have become tropes and even cliches in our explicate culture, iconic and metaphorical like Greek, Norse, Hebrew, or even Star Trek myth. it has inspired or spawns innumerable cultural artifacts: RPGs (eg D&D), the fantasy genre itself (including some aggressive “borrowing”), and, of course, movies. of the Peter Jackson movies i will only say this in a book review: while they are themselves masterpieces which capture the feel of Middle Earth, much like Morgoth, they twist and muddle something already created resulting in a lesser, corrupted form. i can list more than a dozen places where they openly rebuke Tolkien’s meaning, missing the point entirely, sacrificing a much more engaging and profound on-screen scene for… what? fans of the book will know what i mean. ah, well, i love them still.

i don’t know if this review will spark anyone to read the Lord of the Rings or think of it differently, but the task of writing a review of the book that has had such a deep and lasting influence on me proved daunting to say the least. i do not think i could ever adequately convey the complexities of my relationship to this book in a short review. show less

The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien
Houghton-Mifflin

I cut class for the first time when I was 9 years old. As my class was marching off to music I slipped out of line and headed to the girl's bathroom. To read a book. I was taken away to Middle-Earth and I have returned once a year every year since, and while how I read the book has changed, my love for it has not. I know that many people simply don't like this book, particularly since the movies came out and brought along a new group of fans who were dismayed to discover that movies and books are entirely different entities. I consider myself lucky that I discovered the book first. I had read The Hobbit and was stoked about continuing the story. I've always been a sucker for a quest, show more whether is was The Phantom Tollbooth, Huckleberry Finn or the Odyssey. Once I started I couldn't put it down. I loved it unreservedly.
One of the strongest complaints about the book has been Tolkien's prose. He loved language and words and his prose reflects this. I pestered my parents and after they had had enough, the school librarian about these new words, words like weregild, bane, dwimmer, abyss, wroth, etc, words that blew my 4th grade mind wide open. And old ones used in new ways, how could something be fell and not lying on the ground for example. There are passages that move me incredibly to this day because of the language used to write them. For example in writing about the arrival of the Rohirrim led by King Theoden to the siege of Gondor: “... the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Orome the Great in the battle of Valar when the world was young. His golden shield was uncovered and lo!it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed. For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them and they fled, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them.”

A lot of people are also put off by the amount of poetry in the book, this is blasphemy probably but I'd say skip it if that's the only reason to not read it. Tolkien himself slyly recognizes that the poetry could be a slog when he has guests at Bilbo's party sit dreading the possibility that Bilbo would break into verse. I've read all of the poetry and enjoyed it but it's not really necessary to understanding the book. The only possible exception would probably be the poem about Beren and Luthien and even that just deepens the story but wouldn't ruin it if you skipped it.

I've also heard and agree with the complaints about the inherent racism of the books. However I don't think it's as straightforward as it's been made out. It is true that to be noble in Middle-Earth you must be very tall and very pale unless, of course, you are one of the literally down-to earth hobbits and if you were evil you were likely dark skinned, short and from the south. But even while he calls the men of the east and south lesser he admits that they have more sense than the nobility who sit longing for a time that will never come again (the elves) or let themselves dwindle in a search for immortality (the 'high men of the west'). It is no accident that the ring wraiths themselves were 'high men'. But of course many books are filled with racism (and all sorts of other isms) sometimes deliberately and maliciously (Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries) sometimes to make a point (To Kill a Mocking Bird, Harry Potter) and I still read them if only to know my enemy, and despite it's lack of political correctness I still read this one, because the story itself is simply too good to give up.

At it's most basic this is a story about a group of friends who want to save the world. The whole quest rests on friendship. That between the four hobbits themselves and between them and people they meet along the way people that they become willing to die for. Gandalf and Bilbo and Frodo, Merry and Theoden, Aragorn and all four hobbits, Legolas and Gimli, Aragorn and Eomer, the list goes on and on but of course it's the friendship between Sam and Frodo that saves the day. I admit that Sam is my favorite character (along with Merry, Gandalf and Faramir). He manages to get Frodo to the top of Mount Doom and he does it while eating less, drinking less, sleeping less and, to be honest, complaining less. I like Frodo but he does become a little tiresome by the time the ring goes into the fire. This is also a book about just getting on with it and enduring even without hope, even when it would be easier to lay down and die, which is as relevant today, maybe more so, than when it was first published. I can't wait to read it again. show less

It is hard to write a review of a book that means so much to me, so I won't attempt it.
I first read "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" almost exactly twenty years ago, shortly before the first Peter Jackson movie came into cinemas, and they swept me away. I had loved fantasy books - especially Narnia - before, but nothing came remotely close to this.
I was fifteen years old and became what today you would call a total nerd. Since then, the books (and other writings of Tolkien) have provided me with refuge and solace and are one of the few constants in my life, and a huge influence as well.
So what now - what did my sixth read of the book that started it all bring?
Once more I was drawn into the story, was moved and touched, and I show more laughed and cried, admired Tolkien's words, discovered things I hadn't seen before, and, maybe because I am a little older, I enjoyed the language and the literary crafting even more than before. I felt at home and it felt indeed like coming back after a long time.
But much more than this I took hope from the book. Because sometimes I feel like we are going into dark times right now, times that I would never have expected just a short while ago, with a pandemic, right-wing movements on the rise, the climate crisis, so many things changing that I would not have thought possible. And in these times the story of the hobbits gave me courage and brought me light. We have to look at the good that is left in the world. show less

5.0 - this is the first perfect score I’ve given on Goodreads.

The world Tolkien has created (not just with The Lord of the Rings) is stunning. What may nowadays be seen as classical, tropy Fantasy is groundbreaking and stands strong at the forefront of what this genre has grown into today. Tolkien’s prose shows his mastery of language and remains lovely to read. The songs and myths that live and breathe in Middle-Earth enhance the journey of the Fellowship beyond what most other writers are capable of.

And Tom Bombadil is great.

I will happily continue to re-read all of Tolkien’s work every five or so years.