Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4351 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1216 pages

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Customer Reviews

A perplexing and endlessly strange masterpiece
Before anything else is said about it, it should be noted that in the context of serious 20th century fiction, 'The Lord of the Rings' is a really, really weird book. A lot of people, most notably literary reviewers, literary journalists, public intellectuals and academics, never miss a chance to pour scorn on the book and dismiss it as rubbish. It is, however, enormously popular, and has been so since it was first published in the years after the Second World War. Why does the book inspire such fondness, and such derision?

I myself have a chequered history with it. I first read it aged about 12, and loved it. I became at the time a fully-fledged Tolkien geek, immersing myself in the arcana of writing in Elvish and so on, which is more than most fans of the book do. I grew out of that phase, and forgot about the book. Later on, in my early 20s, I read it again - but this time, I had read and absorbed shelves-full of academic literary criticism of the then dominant Anglo-French persuasion, Marxism-lite with a heady pinch of deconstruction, and I despised the book for being wilfully archaic, not enough strong roles for women, surely there was more than a hint of racism in the depiction of the bad guys as coming from the East and South, the style was sheer fustian...and so on.

Aged 30 I read it again, because the movies were coming out and I wanted to watch them, and I was wondering why I'd liked the book in the first place. Much to my surprise, I enjoyed it. It seemed far more haunted, less triumphant, more ambiguous than I remembered. Subsequent readings have confirmed this assessment. The 'The Lord of the Rings' is a really weird book because, almost alone among serious mid-20th-century fiction in English, it is not at all interested in doing the things that the most critically acclaimed fiction of its era wanted to do. I doubt that any serious writer of Tolkien's level of education was more intellectually independent and single-mindedly focused on his own personal creative mission than he was. Most fiction writers are over-stuffed with ideas about things they want to do, which they put into practice with little or no concern about whether they have much to do with the story they want to tell. (I suppose the nec plus ultra would be a writer such as B.S. Johnson, who went as far as to proclaim that it didn't matter anymore what the story was, the only thing that was important was how it was told - and then defied his own pronouncement by frequently refusing to write about anything that hadn't actually happened to him or to someone he knew.) Tolkien, like very few writers of his generation, doggedly worked and worked until he knew exactly what he wanted to do, and then proceeded to do it.

'The Lord of the Rings' is a yarn. It is a good story; to a certain extent, you could retell it yourself and it would still retain much of its power to move and enthrall a listener. In that respect, it is unlike much great modern fiction. 'Ulysses' is one of my favourite novels of all time, but I am under no illusion that I could persuade someone how great it is by just recounting what happens in it in my own tone of voice.

'The Lord of the Rings' has been criticised as being racist; the usual charge is that blackness is associated with the bad guys. Also, it has been noted that some of the bad guys have crossed 'orcs' (a non-human species) with humans, and this is Not a Good Thing. Elsewhere, journalists have had simple-minded fun with the extremely tenuous links between Tolkien, philology and German romanticism on the one hand, and the Nazi party on the other. This needs to be said: the book is not racist in any recognisable way. Whiteness is equally associated in the book with sterility and barrenness, or else corruption and death. Many of the hobbits are recognised as being of mixed ethnic origin, and one of the main good guys is Elrond, who is of mixed Elf-Human parentage. So much for the charge of racism. What the book's left-wing critics have not noticed is that it is not racist but speciesist; the characters are always ready to reserve sympathy for men who have gone to the bad, but they never bat an eyelid before killing orcs, who are presented as being reasonably rational and sentient beings, albeit of a different species. But since orcs are a fictional species, does it matter? Animal rights campaigners might profit from looking at the book and the way it has been misinterpreted.

The most dismissive and least cogent criticism of the book has been that it glorifies vanquishing a conquered enemy, and that it's in some way an allegory of the second world war. This does not fit. The author once observed that if the book were an allegory of recent history, the Ring (for which read=atomic bomb) would have been used by the most powerful good guy against the main bad guy, and the majority of the population of Middle-Earth would end up falling under the hegemony of whoever had used the Ring in the first place - which, we may note, is exactly what happened in real life.


In the book, the Ring (which is a symbol of power and potentially unlimited hegemony) has to be destroyed, so that an unwinnable war can be averted. That is exactly what didn't happen in real life, which is why American soldiers are now dying in a senseless war in Iraq. 'The Lord of the Rings' is a classic novel because, for all its faults (it's long, it's oddly structured, it's sometimes long-winded, there aren't many interesting female characters, and perhaps most importantly it seems to exist a little too aside from the history that engendered it), it has a remarkable capacity to talk to successive generations about the things that worry and beset them - what am I doing here? What is my purpose? Am I really the person who should do this? Why keep going when it looks like I won't live to see the benefit of it all?

Tolkien knew what he was doing. This is his best book, far more gripping and readable than the interesting and sometimes gorgeous but basically sluggish and arcane 'Silmarillion', and readers who have disdained it in the past would do well to come off that high literary horse and give it a go. Not the least thing I got from reading Tolkien was a conviction that nobody can call her- or himself an educated reader without at least a bare acquaintance with Old English literature. Tolkien was saturated in the stuff, and it gives his work essential depth, richness and perspective. (The Riders of Rohan basically speak Old English, slightly modified.)

And in the end, it's perhaps the most haunting and saddest of fantasy novels. Tolkien knew about post-traumatic stress disorder before it was called that. He had served as an Army officer on the Somme in World War One, and knew first-hand the damage and grief that are caused by war, which is a lot more than many of his critics and some of his right-wing fans can say. This book respects his experience and transmutes it into something rich, strange and memorable. Isn't that what we who care about good writing normally call art?

Great
This is a beautiful, 1-volume copy of the LOTR books. A good size and good heft (not a small copy that is too hard to read).

A Classic in Every Way
Full disclosure: I'm a fan that was brought in by the movies. Normally, I try to read a book before seeing it in movie form, but I was actually convinced not to in this case (more on that in a moment). Eventually, though, I watched the Peter Jackson film adaptations, loved them, and decided I'd like to get the full story. As a first-time LOTR reader, this edition looked like the best choice, as opposed to buying a fully-annotated or illustrated edition or the three parts individually (also, books with pictures from the film version on the cover is a pet peeve of mine, so I always avoid those editions). And the price of the 50th Anniversary edition is a true bargain.

Though this isn't the annotated edition, there's no shortage of notes here. A lengthy introduction, footnotes sprinkled throughout the volume, and a series of mostly interesting, at times overwhelming appendices supplement the epic story. The book itself is bound well, using good paper, and is surprisingly manageable for a 1000+ page volume.

But the real attraction here, of course, is the story itself. I had to agree with my friend who had stopped reading the book when she reached the section featuring Tom Bombadil. That character did not have the same substance as the others, and the frequent rhymes and poetry in those early chapters did not appeal to me. It drove my friend away from the book, but I continued on. Some of the poetry is pretty interesting, and I found that it was better in smaller doses, and in fact they do occur less frequently as the book goes on, achieving a better balance with the prose.

The story is divided first by volume (3, like the films), then by book (each volume has 2 books), then manageably-sized chapters. Of the six books into which Lord of the Rings is divided, my favorites were Books III, IV, and VI. I felt that the emotions of the characters and the scope of the story were best realized in these sections, though there is certainly much to sink one's teeth into throughout the novel's entirety. One of the things I like best about the later Books is the way the characters, particularly the Hobbits, grow, the writing style becoming more emotionally real as the characters' conflicts become increasingly amplified.

It's been said that LOTR could be seen as a parable for life in and after World War I, though Tolkien denied it. Still, that seems very much to be the case in the book's final chapters. I don't want to give away any spoilers, so I'll say only that Frodo and Sam provide two very interesting perspectives on this idea.

(Also, though this is not a review of the films, I'd like to point out that I frequently could see images from the films in my mind while reading the book - not because it had tainted my experience of the novel, but because they had so accurately portrayed what had been written. This is a rare case of the films actually rewarding a comparison with the source text.)

Overall, I can say that this book proved itself to me as a true classic, not just in the fantasy genre, but of classic literature. It works on countless levels, and has been a wonderfully rewarding experience. Someday, I hope to convince my friend to pick up the book where she left off - she doesn't know what she's missing!