The Lord of the Rings. 3 Vol. Set
by J.R.R. Tolkien
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Book Reviews of The Lord of the Rings. 3 Vol. Set
Book Review: Lord of the Swedes
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a review of the novel, not this particular edition. Before the LOTR fans eat me alive, Orc style, let me say that I'm not an expert on Tolkien or LOTR, and only read the epic once, in a non-approved Swedish translation. Still, I offer my comments, for all they may be worth.
Here in Sweden, almost everyone reads LOTR. And I really mean, everyone! I met assembly-line workers and dispatch riders who read LOTR. Already in elementary school, all kids read LOTR, and one of our teachers read it aloud during class. It took at least two semesters. Every year in February, Swedish bookstores have a traditional clearence sale. LOTR always sold out the very first day. Imagine growing up in a nation where reading "Lord of the Rings" is considered conventional, almost common knowledge!
As a kind of protest against all this, I decided already as a kid *not* to read LOTR, and I never did, until after I saw Peter Jackson's first movie, and by then I was obviously an adult. I can't say the novel thrilled me. The first part, "The Fellowship of the Ring" smacks of being written for children, and I found it quite silly. By contrast, "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King" are more for adults. Here, Tolkien presumably wanted to write a quasi-historical epic, and inadvertently founded an entirely new literary genre, fantasy. I didn't really like the two concluding books either, however. To me, "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King" are essentially the same story, repeated twice. First, the dark lord Sauron attacks Rohan, and somewhat later he attacks Gondor. The Ents were just plain silly, a kind of throwback to the childishness of "The Fellowship of the Ring".
I readily admit that these impressions of mine are purely subjective. Perhaps I'm just not a fantasy guy. Incidentally, I think Peter Jackson experienced the same problems as I did with the contradiction between children's story and adult epic. He seems to have solved it by turning his movie version of the "Fellowship" into a dark monster movie (adieu, Tom Bombadil).
Why is LOTR so popular, then? Perhaps one of the reasons is that the story can be read on many different levels. The similarities with Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythology (Beowulf) are obvious. Indeed, Tolkien apparently wanted to create a new mythology for our age, and what better place to start than simply re-write the old one? The popularity of LOTR here in Sweden can at least in part be explained by this Norse angle of the work, which the un-authorized Swedish translation apparently strengthened even further.
On another level, LOTR is a political allegory of World War Two and the Cold War, although Tolkien himself denied this. Still, the similarities are pretty obvious: Saruman is Hitler, Sauron is Stalin, the Shire is England. The main part of the story could be read as a Third World War allegory, with the Soviet Union (Mordor) in alliance with the Third World (the pirates from the south) attacking the free nations of the West. While this may appeal to people with bad experiences of Communism, it unfortunately leads to racism at times. The crooks are often black-skinned, have almond eyes and wield scimitars, while many of the heroes are white and fair. Still, it seems few people interpret the story as racist, thank Iluvatar, and many actually see it as anti-racist, since the Fellowship of the Ring consists of both humans, elves, dwarfs and hobbits.
Yet another reason for LOTR's popularity is that the work can be read as environmentalist. A romantic love of nature and hatred for modern industrialized society is a recurring theme in the novel. For some reason, Saruman seems to be the chief culprit in this regard, both in Isengard and later in the Shire. Indeed, it was a great pity that Peter Jackson left out the scourging of the Shire from his movie version of "The Return of the King", since this is obviously an important part of the story.
Here in Sweden, most people have only read LOTR in Åke Ohlmark's translation from 1959-61. Tolkien himself hated this translation, and never authorized it. This lead to a later fall-out between Ohlmarks and Tolkien's son Christopher, who prohibited Ohlmarks from translating "The Silmarillion". Ohlmarks denounced Christopher as a "sociopath" and the Silmarillion as "crap" at a fantasy convention, which didn't exactly endear him to the Tolkien fans. Later, Ohlmarks claimed to have been attacked by a dark-side faction of the Tolkien Society, and wrote a scurrilous book accusing fantasy fans of being Satanists, going so far as to state that he regretted ever having translated LOTR. He even claimed that the real author of LOTR wasn't Tolkien, but C.S. Lewis (!). This entire episode was something of a tragedy, since Ohlmarks, despite being a very well-educated man, was a fantasy freak himself. I believe he was over 70 years old when he agreed to play "Bombur the Fat Dwarf" at a fantasy party organized by the Tolkien Society in Sweden!
It's ironic that generations of Swedes have grown up reading a version of LOTR Tolkien himself discarded. Indeed, the only Swedes who don't read Ohlmark's translation are presumably the members of the Swedish Tolkien Society, who prefer the English original. Yet, it might have been Ohlmark's idiosyncratic translation that made LOTR so popular in Sweden, since he consciously attempted to make the names of places and persons in the epic as "Swedish" as possible.
I have no idea how to rate this work, so I give it three stars out of five. One thing is certain: badly translated or not, LOTR will sure find new readers and new converts in many generations still to come.
Book Review: A subtle genius
Summary: 5 Stars
I shall pretend that there are actually some people reading these reviews who have not already read LotR...
First off, LotR is the defining work of fantasy fiction. I think EVERYONE publishing in the genre today owes some kind of debt to Tolkien, consciously or not. Basically, Tolkien is a world-builder and not a mere novelist. He had a very deliberate project of creating a new mythology and he succeeded admirably. The amount of originally unpublished (but now available) background material for this book is truly amazing and reveals the depth of Tolkien's project.
As a writer, however, Tolkien has definite flaws. His style is somewhat antiquated (and British) but I, personally, do not see these as bad things. (IMHO, very little being published in the genre today has any literary merit.) His characters are rather flat and he has a very poor sense of the dramatic: the death of a major character is disposed of in a paragraph; the climactic battles cover only a few pages. (In this regard, the movies did a far superior job).
The beauty of Tolkien, however, is that he's not a "professional" writer; he's not churning out formulaic novels that conform to the "conventional wisdom," i.e., novels that are designed to sell and not to be good. Yes, he "tells" instead of "shows" but his narratives a gracefully crafted and, often, truly beautiful. True, any literary agent today would probably turn Tolkien away, but this is a sad commentary on the publishing business and the low standards of the reading public.
I read Tolkien the same way I read Poe or Shakespeare: to appreciate the use of language in-and-of itself, as well as for the actual story-line. In his own way, I think Tolkien has a subtle brilliance. Even so, I'm sure that LotR is "boring" to some. I can see why they would think this, but, in the end, I think that says more about the standards (and intellectual capabilities?) of the reader than it does about J.R.R. Tolkien.
With the possible (?) exception of the Bible, I think LotR is literally the most-loved book in the world. You owe it to yourself to give it a chance. To never read this book is to miss out on a true pleasure and a gift.
Book Review: Way better than 5 stars, a classic
Summary: 5 Stars
The Lord of the Rings in my opinion is the single greatest piece of literature to be written and conceived by a single man. Tolkien was am absolutely brilliant Philologist and was way ahead of all the scholars back then (when he was at oxford), and still is even after his death. He had a noble heart and was generous with his time to others. And Most of all he loved the natural world as god had created it untainted by industry. He was a lover of trees. He was and still is the greatest English Literary scholar of european and germanic languages, and read more than most people read in a lifetime. On the whole he knew the entire history of English literature, Could speak fluent anglo saxon, German and Greek and Latin. He knew the great tales of men's past not in their modern english translations but as they were originally written and conceived. Like the Iliad anf the odyssey, in greek, the kalevala in finnish, and beowulf in the original saxon. He had also read the Elder Edda and Younger Edda, sometimes known as the poetic edda and the prose edda, in original ancient german. He had read the whole corpus of Icelandic Sagas in their original language, and was a lover of the latin translation of the bible which he recited at catholic mass. Here is a book that should be taught in English classes in middle school and high schools and colleges. But the literary elite does'nt want that to happen because of their preference for post-modernism and reality based fiction. Plus he knew good literature, and not that snobby tripe they shove down our throats in school.Book Review: A ton of faults in this door-stopper!
Summary: 1 Stars
I'll start by saying that I am a huge fan of Fantasy novels, but this 'crux' of Fantasy literature really disappointed me.
This book has a lot of faults. To begin with, it goes against the first basic rule of writing a book: show don't tell. As you start the novel, it tells everything and nothing has been shown. Tolkein has just narrated almost everything, starting from the history to the setting, and this gives the novel a feeling as if a child has written it.
Secondly, the book is just too slow. I mean you just start the 1st chapter and you doze off after a couple of pages. The pace might have been fine for the 50's but it's just too slow for the double Os!
I don't know why other people liked the plot so much, but I think the plot was really really weak. The causality in the story is almost non-existant and that is what makes the difference between a jumble of short stories joined loosely together and a good novel.
Lastly, the characters could have been much developed with more life in them than mere puppets bound to do the author's bidding. The chracters are much more Archetyped than they should have been.
Overall, I think that it has gotten more attention than it deserved, perhaps because of the movies, and that people are liking it because of some trend or the like.
Book Review: One volume to tell the tale, one book to own....
Summary: 5 Stars
When I was a teenager, I bought the Lord of the Rings boxed set -- which included The Hobbit -- and attempted to read the whole Tolkien saga over the summer. My intentions were good, but both the scope of the quest and the tiny type on the standard sized paperback defeated me. I did not so much "read" The Lord of the Rings as "skimmed" through it. Even though I got the gist of Frodo's quest to destroy the One Ring and was astounded by the narrative of the War of the Ring, I could never say with a straight face that I had read The Lord of the Rings completely.That is, until I found this one-volume edition in a trade paperback format. Even though I still had to fight off the temptation to skip through the various poems, songs and other embellishments Tolkien added to the basic "Gandalf-enlists-the-reluctant-but-brave-Hobbit-to-go-on-a-great-Quest" plot, at least with a more eye-friendly page/typeface size I could read The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King in their entirety and in a single book (which, as I found out last year, was Tolkien's intent; it was his British publisher who, for business reasons, divided the gigantic novel in three).
Considering the cost of books these days, this one-volume edition is quite a bargain!