I can’t read them. The story might be great, and I do know the gist of the story from the movies, but I don’t like the writing. It seemed slow paced and overly descriptive for my liking. Many obviously disagree and that’s cool, it’s just not my style of book.
For what it’s worth, Tolkien did not start thinking and writing about Middle-earth (that is, the universe of the books) in The Hobbit or in The Lord of the Rings. He spent most of his adult life thinking about Middle-earth and writing various things about it. There’s a piece (really it’s a fragment) he wrote dated September 24, 1914 which is about it. He decided twenty or so years later to write a relatively short book set in Middle-earth. That’s The Hobbit. He then decided to write a long novel about what then happens. That’s The Lord of the Rings. Incidentally, it’s a novel that the publisher insisted should be published in three volumes. Tolkien never meant it to be thought of as three novels.
Agreed - though, sometimes, TOO detailed. It’s an amazingly rich world, but at times it’s frankly hard to slog through, and hard to get sucked into (that “just one more chapter… crap, it’s 5 AM!” just does not happen for me). I have to think that the series, as written, could not be published today - there would be, at best, SUBSTANTIAL editing required.
A very interesting comparison of LOTR and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Sharing Knife series (which notes that Bujold was explicitly inspired by LOTR):
Absent Gods, Absent Catastrophes : The Sharing Knife and The Lord of the Rings - DataHead — LiveJournal
He did? I don’t remember anything like that. I don’t think they had anything bigger than the oliphaunts, which were maybe a bit over done, but certainly not bigger than the walls of Gondor.
I disagree with that- or maybe that is new. When I read that book, Spec Fic was books that didnt quite mess with reality but were not strictly SF or Fantasy . It did nto included any of those and was a genre in of itself.
The extended versions add much of what you listed, its just that the film companies didnt think people would sit thru 4 hour films. Each extended release adds about an hour of good stuff.
Nor did I .
Is 1947 “new?”
Well, I see that. But the only book I have ever seen marketed as Speculative Fiction are not true SF or fantasy. China Mieville write that genre. So I guess i was fooled by the marketing.
What Miéville writes is the Weird Fiction metagenre, in various genres, from traditional Fantasy (Bas Lag books), Urban Fantasy (Kraken, King Rat), Science Fiction (Embassytown),police procedural(The City and The City), KidLit (Railsea, UnLunDun).
They are all amazing. He’s easily in my top 5 writers.
But there’s nothing in the Bas Lag books that isn’t Fantasy, or in Kraken that isn’t Urban Fantasy. They aren’t outside those genres.
In fact, in so far as Tolkien considered it to be broken into parts, he considered it to be a novel with six parts. The three volumes each contain two of the parts. In addition, the third volume contains six appendices.
It’s not that kind of book (a “just one more chapter”) book. It’s the kind of book that’s easy to pick up, read a few pages, put down, pick back up again… Maybe it helped that, when I first read LOTR, they were the books I carried around with me and read a bit of whenever I had a bit of free time during the day.
I think Ursula K. Le Guin has said something similar, but right now I’m not sure where my copy of her The Language of the Night is. The closest I could find online is the following:
“on foot, all the way. And back” - hey, what about the eagles? They got an avian assist for the first leg of the trip back from Mt. Doom!
And for the obvious reason that a lot less is happening on the homeward trip than on the way out, Tolkien is a lot less ‘one, two, left, right’ on the return trip (as far as Bree, anyway), giving details of the high points and skimming lightly over the rest, giving the general tone more than a lot of detail.
There’s a Howard the Duck comic where the cover asks the question, “Where do you go, what do you do, the night after you’ve saved the Universe?” The homeward trip (again, up to Bree) is Tolkien’s answer to that question (two decades or so before it was asked 
), and it’s a satisfying one.
I like the ending portions, but the hill I’ll die on is that the Tom Bombadil stuff should have been cut. I swore to myself next time I read it, I’ll skip it. He’s such a weird character. At least Tolkien realized they better mention him at the Council of the Ring and had them quickly dismiss him as a caretaker of the Ring or it would have been a pretty obvious oversight.
I’m glad the movies cut him completely.
Incidentally, both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are among the best selling books of all time. If one ignores religious texts like The Bible or The Koran and also political texts that were required to be owned by most people in a country like The Quotations of Mao Tse-Tung, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are among the eight books that have sold somewhere between 100 million and 200 million copies. In counting the number of copies of The Lord of the Rings that have been sold, you add together the copies with all three in a single volume to a second number which is the number of copies of the least sold of the three volumes published separately. So if the number sold was (to just make up some numbers which aren’t anywhere close to the real numbers) 86,159,502,897 copies of the volumes containing all three in one volume and 92,034,104,456 of The Return of the King in a separate volume (and slightly more for the other two), the number of copies sold would be 178,193,607,353.
I think there could have been some good explanations for Bombadil but they were never given. Tolkien shot down all fan favorites for some reason and never provided an answer for us.
My best guess is he wanted one thing in there to fuck with us for all time.
Jackson left him out of the movies.
I think he just really loved the character and like a director who loves his movie too much, he didn’t edit out an unnecessary scene if it would move the story along.
Since the rest works so well, I don’t mind.
It may be apocryphal but I think I once read that Tom Bombadil was a doll one of his daughters had so he put it in.
(I really do not know.)
That is actually correct. Tom was based on his son Michael’s Dutch doll.
Also to paraphrase Professor Tolkien, he said a good world has some enigmas, Tom is one of them.
Wiki to the rescue:
The quote I paraphrased from memory:
“even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally)”
For a lot of people, this is Tom in a nutshell: curtesy of Bored of the Rings.
Toke-a-lid! Smoke-a-lid! Pop the mescalino!
Stash the hash! Gonna crash! Make mine methedrino!
Hop a hill! Pop a pill! For Old Tim Benzedrino!
Myself, I always picture him looking a lot like Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull from Songs from the Wood period.
I think the frustration with Tom Bombadil is a great example of how modern readers expect an explanation for everything. There’s little tolerance for unresolved mysteries. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; we all have our preferences. And there’s always some tension between what an author intends to convey and what the reader actually perceives. Tolkien intended to have this piece of his creation be unresolved, and a reader either accepts the author’s intention or rebels against it.
To me it just seems weird that this intricately detailed world had this random enigma tossed in. It’s incongruous with this massive and incredibly finely wrought world.
That is not satisfying to me. Of course, I was not consulted.
No, I don’t need an explanation. I just find his chapter(s) very silly and sidetracking.