Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1301 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1500 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
For those who have not read Tolkien's epic fantasy, or for those looking to replace a worn and battered copy, this three-volume The Lord of the Rings box set is a great place to start. Comprising the three novels that make up the Lord of the Rings sequence--The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King--the whole set is presented in matching matt black packaging with embossed runes and coloured rings. Of course, beneath the fancy covers lies a great epic story of good versus evil, perhaps one of the greatest stories ever told. Attractively presented--and at a great price--there really is no excuse not to have this in your collection. So go on, give it a try; once you've entered Tolkien's fantastic imagination, you'll find it hard to leave. --Jonathan Weir

Daily Telegraph
‘An astonishing imaginative tour de force.’

’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Amongst the greatest works of imaginative fiction of the twentieth century.

Customer Reviews

Lord of the Swedes
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 and regulary participated in fantasy re-enacments. At the advanced age of 70, he agreed to play "Bombur the Fat Dwarf" at a party organized by the Swedish Tolkien Society!

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.

DON'T DELUDE YOURSELF: THIS IS A BOOK FOR KIDS
A promising start and then the sheer, tiresome old-skool epic-ness of the thing soon drags things down to a trudge, just before you start screaming to yourself, 'Will anybody actually die in this bleeding thing - especially one or all of those flipping hobbits?'

Too much 'destined-for-greatness', 'goodness-of-the-soul' saccharinity(?). A couple of stars for the scope of the imagination, but none for suspenseful storytelling and the like.

A challenge, but well worth the effort.
This book is a challenge. This is what puts many people off it the first time they open it, especially if they have already seen the movie. The point is, this is not just easy entertainment, like the film was. Yes, they tried in places to put a philosophical gloss on, but took great care to explain this to anyone watching, just in case they missed it.

Yes, there are great long descriptive passages, but they are there for a reason. We are so used to having images presented to us that we no longer seem to find description necessary. This is a pity, because if you give him a chance, Tolkien is one of the best descriptive writers I know. We cannot explore all the detail in a single reading, just as we cannot see all the detail in a good painting in a single quick viewing. The only way to sink yourself into this world is to let the author describe it to you, there would be no point in him writing this book if everyone could just think up their own equally valid version.

The greatest thing about the Lord of the Rings is, like all great art, the fact that we cannot understand and see all in a single reading. People reread it many times, because each new reading reveals something that went unnoticed before. The immense complexity of the characters cannot be shown in a quick and easy way, employed by many fantasy writers of cheap Tolkien-spinoffs, simply by stating something like 'Tom was a very sensitive boy. Having been bullied by his schoolmates, he was constantly on the alert.. blablabla'. Tolkien understood, unlike many of these other authors, that only a very complex combination of deeds, words and thoughts can reveal who and what someone truly is.

If you do struggle reading this, and I can imagine that as I didn't manage to finish it the first time I read it, I strongly recommend an audio book. This may look like cheating as you can simply let it run, and then claim to have read it all. I firmly believe (without reading any experts on this, so I may be eating these words at some later date) that Tolkien was thinking of the great epic poems from the past while writing this. Poems from a completely oral culture. When this is read aloud by a good actor, trees and places appear before your eyes. Passages which may seem dull if you try to tackle them on your own suddenly flow past effortlessly, with your imagination free from fetters to picture the scene.

I don't think this review will ever be read by many people, this has been more of a rant for me than anything else. I do hope more people will be able to find their way to Middle Earth, simply by giving it another chance. It really is worth the effort to see your way past slightly older language than you may be accustomed to, and a style so radically different from usual. But that is something all great art has as well: a unique style, and this work should not be disregarded simply because we are not used to it.