The hobbit and the lord of the rings deluxe pocket boxed set

It's long.

Coming to the end of LOTR feels like coming home to a comfortable chair, a warm mug of fine coffee, and a large slab of carrot cake with extra cream cheese frosting. It's rather like an old friend, and I'm positive it is one I will revisit, again and again throughout my life.

This particular time, I felt a deeper connection to the story and the characters, and I was totally immersed in every single chapter. It was difficult to tear myself away, even for a moment.

Gandalf and Éowyn will always have that special space in my heart. Her character often reminds me of myself, in many ways. (I also would have totally delivered that killing blow to The witch king).

Probably one of my favourite excerpts, that has stood the test of time;

"Arise, arise, riders of Rohan!
Fell deeds awake, fire and slaughter!
Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered!
A sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now, ride to Gondor!"

In the final chapter or so, I'm not ashamed to admit that I found it difficult to hold back those bittersweet tears. What a wonderful world Mr John Ronald Reuel Tolkien created for us all to love and enjoy! I am so grateful that my wonderful Dad introduced me to Middle Earth at such a young age. Thank you Dad, you did well.

His writing was chiefly influenced by his familiarity with the mythological traditions of the Norse and Welsh cultures. While he began by writing a fairy story with The Hobbit and other early drafts, his later work became a magical epic along the lines of the Eddas. As a translator, Tolkien was intimately knowledgeable with these stories, the myths behind them, and the languages that underpinned them, and endeavored to recreate their form.

Contrarily, those who have followed in his footsteps since have tended to be inspired by a desire to imitate him. Yet they failed to do what Tolkien did because they did not have a whole world of mythic tradition, culture, and language to draw on. They mimicked his style, but did not understand his purpose, and hence produced merely empty facsimiles.

If they had copied merely the sense of wonder or magnificence, then they might have created perfectly serviceable stories of adventure, but they also copied those parts of Tolkien which do not fit a well-built, exciting story--like his work's sheer length. Tolkien made it 'okay' for writers of fantasy to produce books a thousand pages long, and to write many of them in succession. Yet Tolkien's length had a purpose, it was not merely an affectation.

Tolkien needed this length in order to reproduce myth. The Eddas were long and convoluted because they drew from many different stories and accounts, combined over time by numerous story-tellers and eventually compiled by scribes. The many digressions, conflicts, repetitions, asides, fables, songs, and minutiae of these stories came together organically. Each had a purpose, even if they didn't serve the story, they were part of a grand and strange world. Epics often served as encyclopedias for their age, teaching history, morals, laws, myth, and geography--as may be seen in Homer or The Bible.

This was the purpose of all of Tolkien's long, dull songs, the litany of troop movements, the lines of lineage, the snippets of didactic myths, and side-adventures. To create a realistically deep and complicated world, he felt he needed to include as many diverging views as the original myths had. He was being true to a literary convention--though not a modern one, and not one we would call a 'genre'.

He gave characters similar names to represent other historical traditions: that of common prefixes or suffixes, of a house line adopting similar names for fathers, sons, and brothers. An author who copies this style without that linguistic and cultural meaning just makes for a confusing story, breaking the sensible rule that main characters should not have similar names.

Likewise, in a well-written story, side-characters should be kept to the minimum needed to move the plot and entertain the reader with a variety of personalities. It is another rule Tolkien breaks, because he is not interested in an exciting, driving pace. He wants the wealth of characters to match the number of unimportant side characters one would expect from a historical text.

The only reason he sometimes gets away with breaking such sensible rules of storytelling is that he often has a purpose for breaking them, and is capable of drawing on his wealth of knowledge to instill further depth and richness in his world. Sometimes, when he slowed his story down with such asides, they did not have enough purpose to merit inclusion, a flaw in pacing which has only increased with modern authors.

But underneath all of that, Tolkien does have an appealing and exciting story to tell, of war and succession and moral struggles--the same sort of story that has been found in our myths since the very earliest writings of man. He does not create a straight monomyth, because, like Milton, he presents a hero divided. Frodo takes after the Adam, placing strength in humility and piety, not martial might or wit. Aragorn is an attempt to save the warlike, aristocratic hero whom Milton criticized in his portrayal of Satan.

Yet unlike Satan, we do not get an explanation of what makes Strider superior, worthy, or--more importantly--righteous. And in this, Tolkien's attempt to recreate the form of the Eddas is completely at odds with the Christian, romantic moral content with which he fills the story. This central schism makes his work much less true to the tradition than Anderson's The Broken Sword, which was published the same year.

Not only does Tolkien put forth a vision of chaste, humble, 'everyman' heroes who persevere against temptation through piety, he also presents a world of dualistic good and evil, of eternal, personal morality, prototypical of the Christian worldview, particularly the post-Miltonic view. His characters are bloodless, chaste, and noble--and if that nobility is sometimes that of simple, hard-working folk, all the better for his Merrie England analogue.

More interesting than these is his portrayal of Gollum, one of the few characters with a deep psychological contradiction. In some ways, his central, conflicted role resembles Eddison's Lord Gro, whose work inspired Tolkien. But even this internal conflict is dualistic. Unlike Gro, Gollum is not a character with an alternative view of the world, but fluctuates between the hyperbolic highs and lows of Tolkien's morality.

It is unfortunate that both good and evil seem to be external forces at work upon man, because it removes much of the agency and psychological depth of the characters. There is a hint of very alien morality in the out-of-place episode of Tom Bombadil, expressing the separation between man and fairy that Dunsany's work epitomized. Bombadil is the most notorious remainder of the fantastical roots of Tolkien's story which he painstakingly removed in editing in favor of Catholic symbology.

Yet despite internal conflicts, there is something respectable in what he achieved, and no fantasy author has yet been capable of comprehending what Tolkien was trying to do and innovating upon it. The best modern writers of fantasy have instead avoided Tolkien, concentrating on other sources of inspiration. The dullards of fantasy have merely rehashed and reshuffled the old tropes back and forth, imagining that they are creating something.

One cannot entirely blame Tolkien because Jordan, Martin, Goodkind, Paolini, Brooks, and Salvatore have created a genre out of his work which is unoriginal, cloying, escapist, and sexually unpalatable (if often successful). At least when Tolkien is dull, ponderous, and divergent, he is still achieving something.

These authors are mostly trying to fix a Tolkien they don't understand, trying to make him easy to swallow. The uncomfortable sexuality is an attempt to repair the fact that Tolkien wrote a romance where the two lovers are thousands of miles apart for most of the story. Even a libertine like me appreciates Tolkien's chaste, distant, longing romance more than the obsessively fetishistic consummation that has come to define sexuality in the most repressive and escapist genre this side of four-color comic books.

I don't think Tolkien is a great writer, I don't even think he is one of the greater fantasy writers. He was a stodgy old Tory, and the Shire is his false golden age of 'Merrie Olde England'. His romance wasn't romantic, and his dualistic moralizing cheapened the story. His attempt to force Christian theology onto a heroic epic is as problematic and conflicted as monks' additions to Beowulf.

Tolkien's flaws have been well-documented by notable authors, from Moorcock's 'Epic Pooh' to Mieville's adroit analysis, but for all that, he was no slouch. Even if we lament its stolid lack of imagination, The Lord of the Rings is the work of a careful and deliberate scholar of language, style, and culture. It is the result of a lifetime of collecting and applying knowledge, which is a feat to behold.

Each time the moon is mentioned, it is in the proper phase as calculated from the previous instance. Calendar dates and distances are calculated. Every name mentioned has a meaning and a past. I have even heard that each description of a plant or stone was carefully researched to represent the progression of terrain, though I can find no support for this theory.

Yet what good is that to a story? It may be impressive as a thought exercise, but to put that much time and work into the details instead of fixing and streamlining the frame of the story itself seems entirely backwards to me. But for all that The Lord of the Rings may be dull, affected, and moralistic, it is Tolkien's, through and through.

My Fantasy Book Suggestions

This trilogy is for you if… you possess the stamina and enthusiasm for epic fantasy or simply who want to know the beginnings of the genre

⤐ Overall.
Admittedly, this was not one of my favourite reads, not by a long shot. If it weren't for the giddy excitement of finally discovering the literary roots of one of my favourite film-trilogies, I wouldn't have ever made it through these. The writing style was magnificent, but the story-telling so lengthy at times I didn't know where to put my brainpower.

I was also very unsatisfied that John chose to stell the stories of the individual character(groups) in sets and not according to the timeline, alternating between the different POVs. It made me very impatient, and not in a good way.

The Two Towers was definitely my favourite in the series, it was the most exciting one and also allowed for much needed get-to-know-the-characters-time. You cannot help but really love the bromance between Gimli and Legolas (and Aragorn, to an extent). The introduction of the one and only Shadowfax was another highlight for me, the main reason I was attracted to the films as a kid. The horses in general are a particular beautiful part of the films, except that tons of them died during the making of the movies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

My journey within Middle Earth stated as young teenager - my parents gave me 'The Hobbit' as a Christmas present one year and my father and I decided we'd enjoy it together. I think it was the last book he ever read me as a 'bedtime story', but we embarked on the adventures of Bilbo Baggins together and absolutely loved every minute of it! The Hobbit was a stunning example of fantasy and adventure writing at its best. One event after another, crisis after epic excitement, wonder at the enormity of the main character's daring and courage.

I am only sorry it took me so long to pursue the ongoing tale of the hobbits at Bagend. The Lord of the Rings was definitely a further step up the scale though. I will not deny that The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a difficult read in terms of perseverance (hence 4 stars). I have always been an avid reader and there were a couple of times as I went through my teens that I picked up the Fellowship of the Ring and gave up before I could really get my teeth into it. Indeed, I didn't finish the trilogy until I was in my early 20s and I'm not ashamed to admit that I was actually quite proud of myself for having finally completed this mammoth journey with Frodo and his companions. I read about 2/3rds of the trilogy in one block in the end as I decided to forbid myself to watch the epic films again until I was done with the books because I knew that every time I grew impatient for the story to continue without wanting to spend the time or the energy reading it, I'd watch the films and that would result in me not feeling the need to continue the book for a good while. I say all this to illustrate a point - don't give up! It's totally worth it!

The Lord of the Rings is filled with new troubles and adventures. At first the idea of following several characters quite separately may be quite unusual, even a little daunting. But it truly brings the world of Middle Earth to life! You get a true feel for the scale and even the politics of such a creation by journeying through it with different companions, each with a different purpose. The struggles and hardships are of such importance and value to both the reader and the characters by the end of the journey, Tolkien has spoken volumes about friendship, love, bravery, honour, loyalty, deceit...you name it, its all there.

These books are a must read, wherever you are in your lifetime.

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I love Lord of the Rings. I doubt I can add anything of value to the discussion, that hasn't already been written about LOTR.

I had a one-volume-edition once, like Tolkien intended it. It looked a bit daunting at first. I had meant to read the book for 20 years or so, but never dared to tackle it. Then the first movie came out. I decided to watch it and then read the book as far as the movie went. Then wait for the second movie, read the second part of the book, wait for the third movie... You get the idea.

That plan went down the drain, when (view spoiler)[Gandalf fell into that chasm! As soon as I came home, I grabbed the book and flicked pages to find out, if he was really dead... (hide spoiler)]

I then tried to stick to the plan, but just had to keep reading. It still took me a month to get through it, but I enjoyed it very much. I have never re-read it, because I am a little scared that I wouldn't love it as much anymore. And no, the first 100 pages did not bore me at all, and I mean that.

Tolkien describes Hobbits: "I picture a fairly human figure, not a kind of fairy rabbit as some of my British reviewers seem to fancy: fattish in the stomach, shortish in the leg. A round, jovial face; ears only slightly pointed and 'elvish'; hair short and curling (brown). The feet from the ankles down, covered with brown hairy fur. Clothing: green velvet breeches; red or yellow waistcoat; brown or green jacket; gold (or brass) buttons; a dark green hood and cloak (belonging to a dwarf)."

Even Hobbit names are whimsical and bring on a smile.
Bilbo Baggins
Frodo Baggins
Samwise "Sam" Gamgee
Meriadoc "Merry" Brandybuck
Peregrin "Pippin" Took
Fredegar "Fatty" Bolger

Recipe for IRREPRESSIBLE, SPELL-BINDING literary entertainment:

Find featured, always hungry Hobbits in hobbit-holes in a Shire and/or at Birthday celebration. Mix with good & bad Wizards, Elves, Dwarves, a magical gold ring everyone wants, Orcs, terrifying Ringwraiths, a once "of hobbit-kind" creature called Gollum, a demon Balrog, a giant spider named Shelob, tree-like Ents, Humans, huge elephant-like Oliphaunts and Trolls. Then throw in lots of adventures, battles, magic, love, death, humor, loyalty, friendship, tears and fear. Arrange all ingredients to make the reader stay up for days... unwilling to do anything but read the next sentence, next paragraph, next page, next chapter, then next book until you finally wave goodbye to Bilbo, Frodo, Gandolph and the elves as they ... read the books and find out!!

I get more out of them with each re-reading. Tolkien would be one of those guys who, if I could invite any 3 people to have dinner with, would get a seat at the table.

Reading The Lord of the Rings was a really different experience from The Hobbit not only because it's got a more epic scope and deals with more POV characters, but also because I felt like it introduced me to "Mr Tolkien". Tolkien in The Hobbit is writing for an a particular audience (children and families), so he's catering his narrative delivery so hopefully it will resonate with those types of people. In The Lord of the Rings, I felt like the narrative was much less restrained in that way. The Lord of The Rings is much more pure expression of Mr Tolkien's personality and how he sees the world.

Some of his perceptions were really surprising to me. I'm a modern day person and I use a computer and a car on a daily basis and, you know, it's easy to just take it for granted that that's the way the world works. Tolkien, though, is kind of a naturalist: his focus is on stuff like landscapes and plants, and on people being a part of it all. It's a totally different perspective on life than I would normally think of, and it was a treasure to be introduced to it. (view spoiler)[ How do my machines serve me? Or do I serve my machines? Am I using them to live a fuller, more human, life and in accordance with the laws of nature? (hide spoiler)]

There's also this really funny thing he does whenever Aragorn shows up (this is particularly prominent in the first book): Mr Tolkien will drop whatever other narrative weave he's working on and enter fanboy mode and remind us how frikkin' awesome Strider/Aragorn is!

It became a laughing point for me on my first reading; like, obviously "This guy [the writer] wants me to like Aragorn, but you know....I kinda like Boromir better!"

(I was not surprised at all with Boromir's ending, it was actually kind of funny and sad at the same time.)

I also think it's interesting, that he's equally good at writing these big epic-scope sequences as he as at writing really quiet ones. One of the scenes I remember most vividly is when the whole Fellowship is just walking along a road somewhere, and he describes how the footfalls of each race of character sound differently. He just creates these moments and moods, you feel like you could just stay in them forever.

Notes:

I was in the second half of The Two Towers when I found out there were going to be movies about the series. We went to costco one time and they had a trilogy boxed set (along with The Hobbit). that was my first exposure to the movie and merchandise;

(And of course Aragorn's there, right on the front cover, because we KNOW how much MR TOLKIEN LUUURVES him some Aragorn!)

I remember being so surprised,that they made the character who was clearly meant to be Frodo so good looking, and then reading the bit where Sam and Faramir are talking and mention that Frodo kind of looks like an elf. (Like, Mr Tolkien didn't think that this was important enough to mention earlier?! COMON!)

Also, I hadn't thought of elves as particularly effimate. The hobbit's just focus on how tall they are, and I guess I equated "Tall" with having a larger, more bulky skeletal structure. When you think about it, though, most of the POV characters are really, really short. Everyone is ginormous compared to them. And Mr Tolkien is just as likely to describe the elves as "fair" as he is to describe their height. Most of the time, I just thought he meant "light colored" but it makes sense with all the different races of elves, not all of them have to even be white.

But I just don't have the patience for it. After reading these as a teenager, I've not really been tempted to go back. And each time I try, I'm quickly dissuaded; I'd rather read a new adventure than re-read an adventure I remember quite well. It's different with someone like Philip Pullman, whose writing is some sort of catnip to me. Tolkien just doesn't strike the same chord, so all hail Peter Jackson, and I'm afraid the books have largely been relegated to display-only on my bookshelf.

Enjoyed "The Hobbit" tremendously again. It's amazing, stories, that is. Again and again and again some of them can go round and still delight and enchant.

I appreciated the little beauties in the writing this time, things like "like a patch of midnight that had never been cleared up." And little thoughts like:

"Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterward were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait."

And "Surely you don't disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures, and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit?"

On to "Fellowship."

I love these words from Tolkien's introduction: "Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer." Guffaw. Well said.

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(The following review was from my last reading, Jan 2009)

Tolkien did not like religious allegory, (reportedly including his good friend C.S. Lewis's Narnia series) and says in the introduction to "The Fellowship of the Ring:" "I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other to the purposed domination of the author."

Two of my bookgroup friends chose to co-host these books, with an effort to find the "applicability." How fun!

I have read and absolutely relished these books a number of times, but haven't really put any effort behind understanding rather than just enjoyment. Because I'm a nerd, I found about 20 articles on religious themes, symbolism, applicability etc. by various people on the internet and read those with the books. To say there is more to these books than I previously imagined is a bit of an understatement.

Studying up a bit on other people's theories on Tolkien's writings was fun, but even more was what could be discerned about Tolkien himself from his letters and writings to friends about his books. I love getting to know an author that way and being able to see little bits of their personality come out in their works (like the fact that Tolkien loved smoking a pipe--does all the pipe smoking in the book make more sense now?)

Tolkien was a man very faithful to his religion and his God. I loved picking out the manifestations in that. Although LoftR is a "pagan" story (no religion) it is filled with Christian themes of mercy, free will, divine mission, and hope, individual worth, and salvation.

Our brands of Christianity differ a bit, Tolkien's and mine, and I also found it a good study to see the sameness and differences. Tolkien wrote to a friend once that he saw history as one long disaster and it seemed to me that his faith was more dominated by the idea--you know, "life is pain, highness,--anyone who says differently is selling something." Perhaps that comes from the belief in original sin?

At any rate, I come from a background in which I have come to believe that "man is that he might have joy." Pain and suffering are inevitable, but can successfully exist side by side with hope, joy, and even earthly happiness. We aren't called upon to endure anything we can't handle--with God's help. Frodo's end is a bit sad in that light, I believe we can fulfill our missions and yet still enjoy the fruits.

Anyway, some poet wrote that we are more the same than different, but let's still enjoy our differences. Pure truth.

I'll sign off with a couple of quotations from the articles I read about how Tolkien came to write these books in case anyone has been ever too turned off from either the movies or the genre to want to read the books.

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"Professor J. R. R. Tolkien was grading papers on a summer day in 1928 when he came upon a blank page in an exam book. Something inspired him to scribble a few words: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' The whole thing might have ended there, but it was only a beginning. 'Names always generate a story in my mind,' he explained later. 'Eventually I thought I'd better find out what hobbits were like.'" From "The Truth Beyond Memory, What lies behind the Fellowship" By John J. Miller

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"When The Lord of the Rings first appeared in the 1950s, one of Tolkien's greatest disappointments was that Christian periodicals ignored it. He feared they missed the point that the 500,000-word story was to its very core Catholic. To a Jesuit friend he wrote: 'The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously at first, but consciously in the revision.' When Tolkien began writing it in 1937, he merely wanted it to be a sequel to his clever children's story, The Hobbit. God shocked him, as he later believed, when a dark figure, one of the nine Ringwraiths, suddenly appeared in the story. Tolkien was as surprised at the arrival of a servant of the devil as were his fictional, frightened Hobbits. While meditating on this unexpected arrival, Tolkien seems to have focused upon the Lord's Prayer. 'I think rather of the mysterious last petitions of the Lord's Prayer: Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,' Tolkien wrote in 1956. 'A petition against something that cannot happen is unmeaning. There exists the possibility of being placed in position beyond one's power. In which case (as I believe) salvation from ruin will depend on something apparently unconnected: the general sanctity (and humility and mercy) of the sacrificial person.' Tolkien firmly believed that his characters had existed long before he had, that God had given him the story. He believed he merely recorded it. Ultimately, Tolkien claimed, God was the true author of the Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings." From "NOT A HIPPIE CULT FIGURE: The Christian Gifts of J.R.R. Tolkien" by Bradley J. Birzer

I’m not joking. Excluding the whole History of Middle Earth since I’ve just started to read them, I have finished my re-read of Middle Earth including the appendixes and JIRT was a genius in worldbuilding. Why?

The Red Book of Westmarch

This is the reason the main five works: The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, are basically Tolkien playing historian.

Now, unlike his bestie Clive Staples Lewis, Tolkien was a perfectionist and took his sweet time writing his books. I mean he literally went back and changed the Hobbit so as to match up with what he had planned for Lord of the Rings. He was very aware of this part of his personality and so added a certain aspect to deal with any possible plot-holes (like he perfectionist he was).

Basically

The Red Book of Westmarch was written by Bilbo, Frodo and Sam as a recounting of the events during Bilbo’s adventures, the War of the Ring and a translation of history.

In Rivendell, Bilbo translated the events of the Silmarillion and possibly got first hand information from people like Glorfindel. But since it was a translation, there is a possibility of Bilbo having mixed up words and meanings, possibly even names. Not to mention biases or mis-remembering from the narration of elves who were alive during that time.

The Hobbit is a first account narration from Bilbo himself BUT there were earlier editions of the book that had Bilbo and Gollum’s conversation occur differently . So what does old Rolkien Tolkien do? Says that Frodo and Sam later on learned the truth of what happened and made the necessary changes in their narration of Lord of the Rings. I see what you did there, you sneaky sneaky.

Now to the big daddy itself, The Lord of the Rings. The events are narrated by Frodo and Sam. So how did they know what happened when they separated from the fellowship? They had it told to them of course. So who’s to say there weren’t mistakes or exaggerations when telling Frodo and Sam what happened. After the book was finished, it was shared and landed itself in Gondor, where our favourite King resides. The scholars there may have corrected some mistakes made or you know, made a few tweaks to make themselves look better. (Aragorn is literally flawless)

Many corrections and edits are made to our favourite hobbits’ narrations, but as the years go by, copies of the Red Book of Westmarch start disappearing or getting destroyed. Magic has left Middle Earth and as we reach modern (well the 1900s) England, on a walk, Professor Tolkien stumbles upon an old red book in the woods but it is written in a language he can't read. He finally gets an understanding of the language and decides to translate it into English. Kuduk becomes ‘hobbits’ and Maura, Ban, Razar, and Kali become Sam, Frodo, Merry and Pippin (I laughed so hard when I read this) and other words into digestible words in English. Then tragically, the Red Book is destroyed in a fire that starts in his office and all that remains is a charred piece of paper which Tolkien sends to his publisher.

Lord of the Rings is a translation of a translation, of a translation, of a translation and that’s why there’s multiple different accounts of events. Canon could be anything, we don’t know which specifically.

So basically, the books are based on real life events…

Genius!

Now, that’s how you do world building... or write a history book...or fanfiction.