Product Description

In a sleepy village in the Shire, a young hobbit is entrusted with an immense task. He must make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Crack of Doom, there to destroy the Ruling Ring of Power - the only thing that prevents the Dark Lord's evil dominion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #192595 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Review
'The English-speaking world is divided into those who have read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and those who are going to read them.' Sunday Times 'A story magnificently told, with every kind of colour and movement and greatness.' New Statesman 'Masterpiece? Oh yes, I've no doubt about that.' Evening Standard

Evening Standard
'Masterpiece? Oh yes, I've no doubt about that'

From the Publisher
Also availbale on cassette and CD from HarperCollins Audio Books.

Customer Reviews

A good way to enjoy Tolkien's Master-piece
I won't comment on the quality of the Lord of the Rings text as such, because that is well documented elsewhere. What I will say is that Rob Inglis does it justice. It is nice to have the full work presented with prologue; the voices are, whilst not entirely convincing, by no means offensive, the songs are performed in an easy to listen format and are less intrusive than other versions I have heard. All together this is the best recording that I have encountered, and is therefore highly recommended.

The Return of the Heroic Romance
As LOTR regularly wins polls as the twentieth century's favorite work of fiction, it is now rather difficult to say anything new about it, except that professors of English who appear on highbrow chat shows to review literature rather reprehensibly still prefer so-called 'realists' of the Ernest Hemingway and George Eliot ilk. Chronologically (in Middle-Earth time and in order of publishing), 'The Fellowship of the Ring' is the first book of the great Lord of the Rings trilogy, and follows 'The Hobbit'. Of course The Hobbit itself is largely aimed at children, although its themes mature as the story matures, whereas LOTR is four-squarely adult. However, it should be realised that Hobbit is essentially, as Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis put it, 'merely a fragment torn from the author's huge myth'. The inchoate romance of the whole of Middle-Earth and its inhabitants came into being over a very long period of Tolkien's life, and formed a coherent whole well before he thought of publishing.

As an heroic romance, the book was launched into a post-war Britain that largely expected fiction to be a 'slice of reality', as in the Hemingway/Eliot tradition. We had turned our backs on books of this type. So far as romances of imagined worlds, real heroes, real villains, and epic themes went, the science fiction sub-culture of dime novels and cheap comics was the brightest spot on the literary horizon! All the greater the shock then, when this luxuriously and profligately original masterwork, a veritable new Odyssey, re-established the genre at a stroke.

The story starts quietly, and even a little childishly, in the Shire of the hobbits, who are quite English and very much the sort of creation that an Englishman of the Midlands would create, although they are not an allegory of the English (I speak as a Midlander myself). Events rapidly gather pace and the serious and high nature of the quest becomes apparent, the great master-ring created by Sauron being in the seemingly accidental possession of one Frodo Baggins, hobbit-at-large. The Ring is too terrible a weapon to be mastered for good and used against Sauron; yet the Lord of the Rings is utterly set on claiming it back so it cannot be held. Therefore, hard though the thought is, the weapon that is the Ring must be destroyed. A trusty band, a fellowship, of adventurers must be assembled to carry out the quest. There are many subtleties in this book, and the characters are not all they seem. The heroes of the fellowship have mixed motives, Boromir especially. The climax of the Fellowship of the Ring largely revolves around the chaos caused by the Boromir's inner dilemma and his unwise actions. Even Gollum the sneak is not yet entirely bad, and has the occasional good impulse. As if the Black Riders and hordes of orcs were not bad enough, the story breaks off with a classical cliff-hanger: the quest must go on even though the fellowship be riven by argument and conflict. As the plots and sub-plots multiply so does the tension. A must read? - to be sure. More than once? - certainly. But not before the next two installments...

Amazing.
Obviously with the hype of the movies slowing, it's time to really appreciate these books again. I was given the whole trilogy of books a couple of months before the first movie came out, but I didn't start reading them until after the second movie was out on DVD. I now realise what a fool I was.
The books are simply brilliant. I don't think anyone with a slight hint of intelligence could speak badly about Tolkien's work. His books have never ceased to amaze audiences around the world, and they may or may not be more popular after the movies than what they have ever been. I'm now re-reading the trilogy for the forth time now, and I can barely put it down. If you have seen the movies and have not yet read the books, I stronlgy reccommend you do. It tells alot more of the story, and many many pages were left out of the movie. Nothing against Peter Jackson, of course. I worship his movies, but nothing will ever match this amazing work by Tolkien.