This is me. I can (and have) read The Hobbit over and over, and I absolutely love it. The rest of the saga, however, I’ve been able to read exactly once. They’re bloated, meandering, too many names are vaguely similar enough to confuse me, and I just happen to agree with Kevin Smith (no stranger to bloated dialogue and movies himself), and his very NSFW take on the trilogy.
Could you summarize for those of us who do not want to watch a 10-minute video (NSFW or otherwise) that seems to touch on a range of related topics?
Sure. Basically, he says that it’s three books/movies of people walking. There was so much walking, that even the trees walked in the last movie. And that Peter Jackson should have ended the last film after the logical conclusion, when Frodo wakes up from his coma, rather than the 40+ endings that came after that.
(He then goes off on a rant about how Frodo and Sam should have had a big, graphic oral sex scene, just to surprise the audience and the Academy, but my agreement with him ends before he reaches this point)
Thanks. FWIW, I like sailing off to the undying lands (in the movie, not sure what the book has).
Well, we need it.
I got that but calling your , umm, err- “employer” “Master” was common long before 20th century oxford. But I get the reluctance.
The town is so well described and so well done by Jackson, that I get a little homesick over a place that not only have I never been, but only exists as a copy.
In RivenDell?
Exactly. As the saying goes, “The golden age of science fiction is 12”. (Should apply to fantasy, too.) When I bounced hard off the LotR books I was I guess early 40s.
I was over 60 the first time I tried to read them. That may have been a factor in my dislike.
To be honest, I was never a big science fiction fan even as a teenager. What I loved were mysteries, especially Agatha Christie.
TL;DR (the book, not the post.)
OTOH, The Hobbit, the Narnia series (all of them), and Dr. Dolittle (most of them) were my absolute favorites as an age-appropriate child. But when my friendly neighborhood bookseller introduced me to LOTR, I could only say MEGO.
BOTR, FWIW, was delightful!
(Enough with the internet acronyms already?)
LOTR is a great epic read. Not so original. I took the Hobbit on one backpacking trip to Tibet, and LOTR on a longer trip out with Tibetan nomads that could have been straight out of Riders of Rohan. Add in Tibetan mysticism, huge mountains, etc. It was magical to read in such a setting by candlelight out on the grasslands surrounded by 20,000 foot mountains.
The movies were meh. Binge watched them on a transpacific flight and will never get those lost 9 hours of my life back. So off. Oliphants and the Urak Hai origin story. Puh-leeze
I really like LOTR, definitely one of the best stories IMHO.
I read the Hobbit in early high school in the 1980’s when it was introduced to us by a sub teacher, and loved it. When I spied LOTR in a bookshop as a young adult, I bought it and have read it several times over the decades.
The Silmarillion I can’t get through, it just doesn’t hold my attention.
I’ll agree he influenced a lot of modern fantasy, but I just don’t like the books. Tedious and I don’t care for the trilogy being so heavily male. Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah blah blah style of the day, but The Silmarillion!, not every book needs women, etc., etc. And I just don’t care.
I like the books, I like the movies but I see them as separate entities. The movies, of course, left a lot out that was in the books (I’m lookin’ at you Tom Bombadil) because they had to. At, roughly, one minute per page even the three extended versions would fall short and probably bore the non-reader audience to tears. Most of the changes made were for solid cinematic reasons. Example: Arwen taking the wounded Frodo to Rivendell instead of Glorfindel. It eliminates a character that appears out of nowhere and is never seen again, and introduces Aragorn’s squeeze a lot earlier than she would have been.
That’s the LOTR movies. The Hobbit not so much.
I think I was 13 or so when I was given a box set of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, by a family friend who knew I loved to read and was into geeky things. I enjoyed The Hobbit immensely. I went on to Fellowship eagerly–and I just couldn’t do it. The first couple of chapters still had that Hobbit charm. But then it just got so dry and dreary, with all those endless descriptions of landscape and diversions about what things were called in five different languages.
As I got older, it frustrated me, because it seemed like something that I should enjoy. People whose opinions I trusted loved it, I liked other fantasy that it had obviously influenced, and I was intrigued by some of the ancillary LOTR stuff (like the Hildebrandt brothers’ art, and the occasional cosplay that I ran into here and there).
Around college, I tried it again. I tried to read it, I think, 3 different times. And I failed each time, mainly because of Tom Bombadil. Smartest decision Peter Jackson ever made was to eliminate that character entirely. Dear God, he’s irritating. And they seemed to stay at his house, eating and drinking and reciting poetry and crushing on Goldberry, for ages. Again, I just couldn’t do it.
Finally, shortly before the movies came out, I made one more attempt. This time I resolved to power through the Tom Bombadil scene. Finally, blessedly, they left his house. I almost quit a fourth time when, not much later, they were captured by the Barrow Wights, and Frodo called in Bombadil to save them. Holy shit, I thought, he’s a fucking recurring character. For all three volumes, every time Frodo gets in trouble, he’s going to whistle up Tom Bombadil to come and save his sorry ass like the omnipotent deus ex machina he clearly is.
I went on reluctantly, and fortunately this proved not to be the case. I did manage to get through the whole thing, but it was a slog. And I’ll confess, I only did it by skipping the poetry, and skimming the descriptions and the lessons about what this or that common object is called by the Elves, the Dwarves, the nations of Men, in the Black Speech of Mordor, etc., etc.
There are some good moments buried in all that dry academic prose–the final sentence of The Two Towers is one of the great clifflhangers in all of literature, and Sam’s “it’s like in the great stories” monologue is delightful. And on the whole, I can respect the scope of Tolkien’s creation, and the groundwork it laid for later fantasy. But I will probably not read it again.
I have read not nearly enough books, even as an English teacher, to call myself and expert, but if I were to handpick the best novels of the 20th century, it would look like this:
Lord of the Rings <–number one, I think. I can’t think of any achievment like that.
The Book of the New Sun <–more in terms of achievement than enjoyability. I find it less confusing than Finegans Wake, but I still can not say for sure I understand Gene Wolfe. I stand in awe, though, and quote him often. Gene Wolfe was probably the smartest person I’d ever heard of.
The Westing Game - that’s right, a middle-school book, but I do love it so
Small Gods <–A Discworld book and man, if it isn’t just amazing. “I’m still me” is a line that hits like a ton of bricks if you’ve read it.
Those are four that just spring to my mind. I would include Harry Potter 1-7, but it isn’t one text split up; it is truly 7 novels. I’d still list it if allowed, though. Shame JK Rowling has some views that are quite bad and as of yesterday or the day before, even a bit racist. Potter is a great, great series.
Yes! I liked The Hobbit fine, looked forward to LOTR…but no. I made myself get all the way through it just be be sure, but it’s on the long list of things I just don’t get. I couldn’t even hack the movie versions.
I have not read this, and liked other books by that author. Thanks for the recommendation.
This. And that’s why i think it’s one of the most influential books of its time. I also deeply love both the story and the world. But i think it’s an objectively important book for creating a new genre of literature.
I know this wasn’t addressed at me, but while i looked the movies, i don’t think they are nearly as good as the book.
Yeah, that was really upsetting. I was also annoyed that they used Gimli as comic relief, and replaced him with Aragorn in the Legolas-Gimli relationship.
That was actually my emotional reaction the first time i saw Hamlet. I knew it was the source, but damn, it felt hackneyed.
I read LotR when i was 7 or 8, so I’d never seen anything at all like it.
Terrific. Better than should be expected for an adapation of a nearly unfilmable work.
This is the only way to get through, and even then it doesn’t work all the time. Like I give a shit about what the dwarves called the River 500 years ago.
The same applied to Tom Clancy back in the day. “The Sum of All Fears” is a novella after you strip out the never-ending weapons porn.
I never found LotR too hard. I inevitably found it too boring. YMMV.
Did your students read The Chrysalids in grade six? It was the book that propelled me into becoming a life long avid reader and remains one of my favourites to this day.
When I first started reading LOTR I found Tom Bombadil to be super annoying and would skip parts with him. As I got older and, due to the magic of the internet, studied him more and listened to podcasts discussing who/what he is, he became one of my favourite characters. He’s actually super interesting. He can put on the ring and nothing happens!
I have my own opinions about him. I think he’s the yin to Ungoliant’s yang. She is the personification of dark and evil and he is light and good.