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Book Home  Books Information Lord of the Rings
Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is an epic fantasy story by J.
R. R. Tolkien, a sequel to his earlier work, The Hobbit. It was published
in three volumes in 1954 and 1955. Three movie productions have been
made, the first, by animator Ralph Bakshi was released in 1978 (as
part one of what was originally to be a two-part adaptation of the
story), the second being a 1980 television special, and the third
being director Peter Jackson's three film trilogy released in 2001,
2002, and 2003.
For more information on the fictional universe the story
takes place in, including lists of characters and locations, see Middle-earth.
The story's titular character is the Dark Lord Sauron
of Mordor. The primary villain of the work, he created the One Ring
to control nineteen other Rings of Power, and is thus the "Lord
of the Rings." Sauron, in turn, was the servant of an earlier
Dark Lord, Morgoth (Melkor), who is prominent in Tolkien's The Silmarillion,
the history of Middle-earth.
Books and volumes
Writing
Tolkien did not originally intend to write a sequel to The Hobbit,
and instead wrote several other children's tales, including Roverandom
and Farmer Giles of Ham. As his main work, Tolkien began to outline
the history of Arda, telling tales of the Silmarils, and many other
stories of how the races and situations that we read about in The
Lord of the Rings trilogy came to be. Tolkien died before he could
complete and put together The Silmarillion, but his son Christopher
Tolkien edited his father's work, filled in gaps and published in
1977.
Tolkien had a deep desire to write a Mythology for England,
especially after his horrific experiences during the First World War.
He was also influenced by the effects of continued industralisation
in England, where he saw much of the England he loved passing away
and became aware of the immense evil in the world. Thus to understand
his writings we must be aware of how Tolkien the scholar influences
Tolkien the author. His writing of this mythology emerges as an Oxford
philologist well acquainted with Northern European Medieval Literature
including the great mythic works such as the Hervarar saga, the Völsunga
saga, the influential Beowulf as well as other Old Norse, Old and
Middle English Texts. He was also inspired by non-Germanic works such
as the Finnish epic Kalevala. For a man who had created his first
language by the age of seven, he was driven by a desire to write a
mythology for England influenced by his exposure and expertise of
these ancient traditions. The need for such a myth was often a topic
of conversation in his meetings with The Inklings, fellow Oxford scholars,
who have been described as Christian Romantics, who would meet weekly
and discuss Icelandic myths and their own unpublished compositions.
Tolkien agreed with one of the other members of the group, C.S. Lewis,
that if there were no adequate myths for England then they would have
to write their own. Tolkien's work has been commonly interpreted in
this light.
Persuaded by his publishers, he started 'a new hobbit'
in December 1937. After several false starts, the story of the One
Ring soon emerged, and the book mutated from being a sequel to the
Hobbit, to being, in theme, more a sequel to the unpublished Silmarillion.
The idea of the first chapter (A Long-Expected Party) arrived fully-formed,
although the reasons behind Bilbo's disappearance, and the significance
of the Ring did not arrive, along with the title The Lord of the Rings
until spring 1938. Originally he was going to write another story
in which Bilbo had used up all his treasure and was looking for another
adventure to gain more; however he remembered the ring and the powers
it had and decided to write about that instead. He started to write
it with Bilbo as the main character but decided that the story was
too serious to use the fun loving Hobbit so Tolkien looked to use
a member of Bilbo's family. He thought about using Bilbo's son but
this generated some difficult questions — Where was his wife?
How could Bilbo let his son go into that kind of danger? — so
he looked for an alternate character to carry the ring. In Greek legend,
it was a hero's nephew that gained the item of power, and so into
existence came the Hobbit Frodo.
Writing was slow due to Tolkien's perfectionism, and
was frequently interrupted by his obligations as an examiner, and
other academic duties. In fact, the first sentence of The Hobbit was
written on a blank page a student had left on an exam paper that Tolkien
was grading — "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit".
He seems to have abandoned the book during most of 1943 and only re-started
it in April 1944. This effort was written as a serial for Christopher
Tolkien and C.S. Lewis — the former would be sent copies of
chapters as they were written while he was serving in Africa in the
Royal Air Force. He made another push in 1946, and showed a copy of
the manuscript to his publishers in 1947. The story was effectively
finished the next year, but Tolkien did not finish revising earlier
parts of the work until 1949.
A dispute with his publishers, Allen & Unwin, led
to the book being offered to Collins in 1950. He intended the Silmarillion
(itself largely unrevised at this point) to be published along with
The Lord of the Rings, but A&U were unwilling to do this. After
his contact at Collins, Milton Waldman, expressed the belief that
The Lord of the Rings itself 'urgently needed cutting', he eventually
demanded that they publish the book in 1952. They did not do so, and
so Tolkien wrote to Allen and Unwin, saying "I would gladly consider
the publication of any part of the stuff".
Publication
For publication, due largely to post-war paper shortages, but also
to keep the price of the first volume down, the book was divided into
three volumes (The Fellowship of the Ring: Books I and II; The Two
Towers: Books III and IV; and The Return of the King: Books V and
VI, 6 appendices). Delays in producing appendices and maps led to
these being published later than originally hoped — on the 29
July and 11 November 1954 and 20 October 1955 in the United Kingdom,
slightly later in the United States. The Return of the King was especially
delayed. He did not, however, much like the title The Return of the
King, believing it gave away too much of the storyline. He had originally
suggested The War of the Ring which was dismissed by his publishers.
The books were published under a 'profit-sharing' arrangement,
where Tolkien would not receive an advance or royalties until the
books had broken even, but after then take a large share of the profits.
An index to the entire 3-volume set at the end of third
volume was promised in the first volume. However, this proved impractical
to compile in a reasonable timescale. Later, in 1966, four indices
which were not compiled by Tolkien were added to The Return of the
King.
Because the three-volume binding was so widely distributed,
the work is usually referred to as the Lord of the Rings "trilogy".
Tolkien himself made use of the term "trilogy" for the work,
though he did at other times consider this incorrect, as it was written
and conceived as a single novel.
A 1999 (Millennium Edition) British (ISBN 0-262-10399-7)
7-volume box set followed the six-book division authored by Tolkien,
but with the Appendices from the end of Book VI bound as a separate
volume. The letters of Tolkien appear on the spines of the boxed set
which includes a CD. The individual names for books in this series
were decided posthumously, based on a combination of suggestions Tolkien
had made during his lifetime, title of the volumes, and whole cloth
— viz:
T Book I: The Ring Sets Out
O Book II: The Ring Goes South
L Book III: The Treason of Isengard
K Book IV: The Ring Goes East
I Book V: The War of the Ring
E Book VI: The End of the Third Age
N Appendices
The name of the complete work is often abbreviated to 'LotR', 'LOTR',
or simply 'LR', and the three volumes as FR, FOTR, or FotR (The Fellowship
of the Ring), TT or TTT (The Two Towers), and RK, ROTK, or RotK (The
Return of the King).
Note that the three titles The Return of the Shadow,
The Treason of Isengard and The War of the Ring were used by Christopher
Tolkien in The History of The Lord of the Rings.
Some locations and characters were inspired by Tolkien's
childhood in Sarehole, then a Warwickshire village, now part of Birmingham,
and in Birmingham itself.
Publication history
The three parts were first published by Allen & Unwin in 1954–1955
several months apart. They were later reissued many times by multiple
publishers, as one, three, six or seven volumes. Two current printings
are ISBN 0-618-34399-7 (one-volume) and ISBN 0-618-34624-4 (three
volume set).
In the early 1960s, Donald A. Wollheim, science fiction
editor of the paperback publisher Ace Books, realized that The Lord
of the Rings was not protected in the United States under American
copyright law because the US hardcover edition had been bound from
pages printed in the UK for the British edition. Ace Books proceeded
to publish an edition, unauthorized by Tolkien and without compensation
to him. Tolkien made this plain to US fans who wrote to him. Grass-roots
pressure became so great that Ace books withdrew their edition and
made a nominal payment to Tolkien, well below what he might have been
due in an appropriate publication. However, this poor beginning was
overshadowed when an authorized edition followed from Ballantine Books
to tremendous commercial success. By the mid-1960s the books, due
to their wide exposure on the American public stage, had become a
true cultural phenomenon. The Second Edition of the Lord of the Rings
dates from this time - Tolkien undertook various textual revisions
to produce a version of the book that would have a valid U.S. copyright.
The books have been translated, with various degrees
of success, into dozens of other languages. Tolkien, an expert in
philology, examined many of these translations, and had comments on
each that illuminate both the translation process and his work.
The enormous popular success of Tolkien's epic saga
greatly expanded the demand for fantasy fiction. Largely thanks to
The Lord of the Rings, the genre flowered throughout the 1960s. Many
well-written books of this genre were published (comparable works
include the Earthsea books of Ursula K. Le Guin, the Thomas Covenant
novels of Stephen R. Donaldson, and in the case of the Gormenghast
books by Mervyn Peake, and The Worm Ourobouros by E. R. Eddison, rediscovered.
It also strongly influenced the role playing game industry that achieved
popularity in the 1970s with Dungeons & Dragons which featured
many creatures that could be found in Tolkien's books.
As in all artistic fields, a great many lesser derivatives
of the more prominent works appeared. The term "Tolkienesque"
is used in the genre to refer to the oft-used and abused storyline
of The Lord of the Rings: a group of adventurers embarking on a quest
to save a magical fantasy world from the armies of an evil "dark
lord", and is a testament to how much the popularity of these
books has increased, since many critics initially decried Lord of
the Rings as being "Wagner for children" (a reference to
the Ring Cycle).
The Books
The Lord of the Rings began as a personal exploration by Tolkien of
his interests in philology, religion particularly Roman Catholicism;
fairy tales, and Norse and Celtic mythology. Tolkien detailed his
creation to an astounding extent; he created a complete mythology
for his realm of Middle-earth, including genealogies of characters,
languages, runes, calendars and histories. Some of this supplementary
material is detailed in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, and
the mythological history was woven into a large, biblically-styled
volume entitled The Silmarillion.
J. R. R. Tolkien once described The Lord of the Rings
as "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work" he wrote
to his friend, the English Jesuit Father Robert Murray, "unconsciously
so at first, but consciously in the revision."(The Letters of
J. R. R. Tolkien, 142). There are many theological themes underlying
the narrative, the battle of good versus evil, the triumph of humility
over pride, the activity of grace, Death and Immortality, Resurrection,
Salvation, Repentance, Self-Sacrifice, Free Will, Humility, Justice,
Fellowship, Authority and Healing. In it the great virtues of Mercy
and Pity (shown by Bilbo and Frodo towards Gollum) win the day and
the message from the Lord's Prayer "And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil" was very much on Tolkien's mind as
Frodo struggled against the power of the One Ring (Letters, 181 and
191).
Religious motifs other than Christian can be discerned
as strong influences in Tolkien's Middle Earth. The pantheon of the
Valar and Maiar (greater and lesser gods/angels) responsible for the
creation and maintenance of everything from skies (Manwe) and seas
(Ulmo), to dreams (Lorien) and dooms (Mandos) suggest a pre-Christian
mythology in style, albeit that these Valar and Maiar are themselves
creations of a monotheistic entity - Illuvatar or Eru, "The One".
Other pre-Christian mythological references can be seen
in the representations of: a "Green Man" - Tom Bombadil,
wise-men - the Istari - commonly referred to as the Wizards, shapechangers
- Beorn, undead spirits - Barrow Wights, Oathbreakers, sentient nonhumans
- Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits, and, of course, Ents. Magic is utilised
freely in Middle Earth, and may be found not only in the incantations
of Wizards, but in the weapons and tools of warriors and craftspeople,
in the perceptions and abilities of heroes, and in the natural world
itself.
Tolkien did repeatedly insist that his works were not
an allegory of any kind, and even though his thoughts on the matter
are mentioned in the introduction of the book, there has been heavy
speculation about the Ruling Ring being an allegory for the atom bomb.
However, these comparisons do not withstand a careful look at the
facts. Before atomic weapons were first detonated on August 6 and
August 9, 1945, Tolkien had already completed most of the book, and
planned the ending in entirety – an atom bomb had certainly
never been the basis for the Ring. However there is a strong theme
of despair in front of new mechanized warfare that Tolkien himself
had experienced in the trenches of World War One. The development
of a specially bred orc army, and the destruction of the environment
to aid this have modern resonances. Nevertheless, the author's own
opinion on the matter of allegories was that he disliked them, and
it would be irresponsible to dismiss such direct statements on these
matters lightly.
The plot of The Lord of the Rings builds from his earlier
book The Hobbit and more obliquely from the history in The Silmarillion,
which contains events to which the characters of The Lord of the Rings
look back upon in the book. The hobbits become embroiled in great
events that threaten their entire world, as Sauron, an evil spirit,
attempts to regain the lost One Ring which will restore him to full
potency.
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