The Lord of the Rings: 50th Anniversary, One Vol. Edition
by J.R.R. Tolkien
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Book Summary Information
Author: J.R.R. TolkienEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-10-12
ISBN: 0618640150
Number of pages: 1178
Publisher: Mariner Books
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780618640157
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Lord of the Rings: 50th Anniversary, One Vol. Edition
Book Review: Skillful is not the same as easily read
Summary: 5 Stars
I've been running across a fairly unfortunate state of affairs lately, in that apparently very few fantasy fans are actually reading this book (yes, it's "book", not "trilogy": non-fans, Tolkien buffs are kind of rabid on that distinction, so if you're talking with a fan anytime soon, just remember that One Vol. is a gooooood thing for this novel). Oh, they'll talk you a blue streak about how great it is, possibly out of the interest of fantasy solidarity but more likely just because a generation of critics regard LotR as the next best thing to the Second Coming, so they're obligated to like it as well. So laudatory statements are in no short supply, but people aren't actually reading the book, and when you dig a little deeper under the kneejerk reaction of "aha! Yes! Great book!" you find that there's often a deep-seated animosity toward a cultural phenomenon they're not on the inside of, and in a lot of the younger readers today, that comes out as "OMG, it's so BAD!"
So I'd like to take this opportunity to say...no. It's not bad. You just couldn't read it. There's a difference. This is not necessarily an attack on you personally. The idea that each of us has to be some kind of Renaissance Man or Woman who can appreciate fine literature even while slaving away as a med student with no actual time to read or being fairly uninterested in books anyway makes it sound like one, but it's not. What I'm saying is that there is a generation of people provided with alternate means of entertainment than the reading of novels. Television, movies, and video games are far more the go-to cultural touchstones than is literature (seriously, I'm an English major, and when we get together, we do not talk about the latest literary magazines. We talk about Mad Men and Dexter). And yet there is this inherent and evident presumption in modern society that despite the fact that the majority of today's youth does not read more than a dozen good-sized novels a year of their own free will, they should somehow still be good at reading and appreciating what they read by recognition of highly advanced literary tropes.
The fact of the matter is, most people are simply not all that good at reading anymore. Hell, a stunning number of people can't even spell correctly. Yet we expect that if someone can understand the basic mechanics of reading, that individual should be dumped off in the savage eddies of literature as a whole and advised to sink or swim. Most people sink, unless they're met halfway by J.K. Rowling or Brandon Sanderson or James Patterson or Stephen King or another writer who tends to put palatability of prose ahead of complexity of style. Not that any of these people is a bad writer, per se (except Patterson, who in a just world would be arrested for crimes against art on the merit of Alex Cross alone), but they have the trick of being compulsively readable, of providing information in a flashy, dramatic way that keeps the television generation stuck to the page. They're the direction most of literature is going today, or at least the literature that wants to attract an audience rather than sit in the Snobby Corner making toasts to elitism.
The thing is that Tolkien (yes, finally we're getting back to Tolkien) was not the product of an era in which constant competition for readership with a glowing box was much of a concern. Imagine, if you will, a world BEFORE Legend of Zelda. Yes. Yes, it's earth-shattering, I know, but there it was. Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings over the span of about a decade in the thirties and forties, before most of the world even had a television, and movies with sound were still the big new thing. In Tolkien's day, this form of entertainment simply had not had time to become preeminent in the minds of the population, and (you guessed it!) the majority of people were still big readers.
So when Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, his concern was not whether or not his readers could get through it. That was taken as a given. People were still reading freaking Middlemarch for fun back then. Of course they could last through Lord of the Rings. So Tolkien was free to play with the elements he actually wanted in his book, independent of commercialism. In his mind, he was not writing a cultural phenomenon: when LotR first hit bookstores, it was only a modest success, and Tolkien was perfectly satisfied with and probably expected this outcome. I'm sure he was pleased when the hippies got hold of it and people started wearing Gandalf for President t-shirts, but that was emphatically not something he foresaw. Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings primarily for himself. His publishers asked for a book "like the Hobbit", and so his only real job was to pump out another children's faery story starring furry-footed little gnomes bouncing across a cheerful fantasy world. Instead, he gave us Lord of the Rings, tossing in the Gothic Bildungsroman style with language adapted from the heroic literature of the Middle Ages he studied as a professor, and an expression of a personal philosophy in "nature and childlike attitude" versus "modernism and selfishness", all based on what is possibly the richest fantasy universe ever created.
Is Tolkien's novel good? Hell yes it is. It's a triumph of literary ingenuity, a melting pot of styles and influences guided by a master's hand to incredible profundity and depth of emotion. It's a fully realized and idealized world representative of Tolkien's dreams and wishes. On top of that, it's an adventure and a tale of the power of friendship and it's the inspiration for over two generations of fantasy authors. What Tolkien did had never been seen before. The closest we had was freaking Thomas Hardy with his Wessex.
Sadly, we are living in a generation of people who are not readily going to understand these things. That is not actively their fault. It becomes their fault, however, when they start claiming that if it doesn't entertain them at every moment, it's somehow failing as a novel, and try to justify this attitude with some sort of half-assed argument along the lines of "Seriously, Tolkien's not all that great. It's all good guys and bad guys, right? The real world isn't like that. That's too simplistic."
So let me say, now and for all time: Tolkien DID NOT WRITE THIS NOVEL FOR YOU. He wrote for a readership that could (by and large) better appreciate what he had done and were not going to be off-put by a bit of imagery and alternate cultural additions alongside the main plot arc. He was also writing long, looong before the Mighty and Awful Gods of Pop Culture had declared that gritty realism must somehow be present even in escapist fantasy (bizarre as that might sound). Is Tolkien writing an idealized world? Yes. But there is nothing wrong with that. It's a stylistic choice more or less carried over from the Heroic lit he was basing a lot of this stuff on, and it also gave him the chance to portray a world he would like to live in. Yeah. Remember when authors used to do that? No, really. It used to be fashionable to portray larger-than-life heroes and villains as representations as icons for the reading public. It's a tradition carried all the way from Shakespeare. Is it a "comfortable" read? Probably. Ultimate good and ultimate evil do provide a framework of moral certainty a lot of us would secretly like in a more complex world, but gritty realism isn't really any more edgy or less of a crowd-pleaser. It's just appealing to a different impulse. Instead of presenting noble heroes we aren't like but wish we were, new fantasy presents people pretty much exactly equivalent to modern society, thus reassuring us that even in Westeros or the Malazan Empire or what-have-you, everyone is the same crowd of selfish twits we see around us, and thus there's nothing wrong with society (or at least realistically changeable) as it currently stands. Neither approach is ultimately the better one, in my view. Both are perfectly legitimate.
So consider the fact, the next time you get irritated that someone is asking you about that boring Fellowship of the Ring, that maybe the problem isn't with the books so much as the fact that you're just a little too removed from them. If you genuinely want to appreciate LotR, start reading other older novels. Believe it or not, people used to like Portrait of a Lady and Wuthering Heights.
If you haven't read and appreciated Lord of the Rings, if you're tempted to pass it off as an overly lionized bit of Mary Sue fantasy, try to recall that this is the novel that kicked off modern fantasy, and a novel that many regard as one of the best of all time.
Summary of The Lord of the Rings: 50th Anniversary, One Vol. Edition
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell by chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins.
From Sauron's fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor, his power spread far and wide. Sauron gathered all the Great Rings to him, but always he searched for the One Ring that would complete his dominion.
When Bilbo reached his eleventy-first birthday he disappeared, bequeathing to his young cousin Frodo the Ruling Ring and a perilous quest: to journey across Middle-earth, deep into the shadow of the Dark Lord, and destroy the Ring by casting it into the Cracks of Doom.
The Lord of the Rings tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the Wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the Dwarf; Legolas the Elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider.
This new edition includes the fiftieth-anniversary fully corrected text setting and, for the first time, an extensive new index.
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), beloved throughout the world as the creator of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, a fellow of Pembroke College, and a fellow of Merton College until his retirement in 1959. His chief interest was the linguistic aspects of the early English written tradition, but while he studied classic works of the past, he was creating a set of his own.
In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell by chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins.
From Sauron's fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor, his power spread far and wide. Sauron gathered all the Great Rings to him, but always he searched for the One Ring that would complete his dominion.
When Bilbo reached his eleventy-first birthday he disappeared, bequeathing to his young cousin Frodo the Ruling Ring and a perilous quest: to journey across Middle-earth, deep into the shadow of the Dark Lord, and destroy the Ring by casting it into the Cracks of Doom.
The Lord of the Rings tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the Wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the Dwarf; Legolas the Elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider.
This new edition includes the fiftieth-anniversary fully corrected text setting and, for the first time, an extensive new index.
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), beloved throughout the world as the creator of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, a fellow of Pembroke College, and a fellow of Merton College until his retirement in 1959. His chief interest was the linguistic aspects of the early English written tradition, but while he studied classic works of the past, he was creating a set of his own.
A Christian can almost be forgiven for not reading the Bible, but there's no salvation for a fantasy fan who hasn't read the gospel of the genre, J.R.R. Tolkien's definitive three-book epic, the Lord of the Rings (encompassing The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King), and its charming precursor, The Hobbit. That many (if not most) fantasy works are in some way derivative of Tolkien is understood, but the influence of the Lord of the Rings is so universal that everybody from George Lucas to Led Zeppelin has appropriated it for one purpose or another.
Not just revolutionary because it was groundbreaking, the Lord of the Rings is timeless because it's the product of a truly top-shelf mind. Tolkien was a distinguished linguist and Oxford scholar of dead languages, with strong ideas about the importance of myth and story and a deep appreciation of nature. His epic, 10 years in the making, recounts the Great War of the Ring and the closing of Middle-Earth's Third Age, a time when magic begins to fade from the world and men rise to dominance. Tolkien carefully details this transition with tremendous skill and love, creating in the Lord of the Rings a universal and all-embracing tale, a justly celebrated classic. --Paul Hughes
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