Everything about The Lord Of The Rings totally explained
The Lord of the Rings is an
epic high fantasy novel written by the English academic and
philologist J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as merely a sequel to Tolkien's earlier work,
The Hobbit, but eventually developed into a much larger story. It was written in stages between 1937 and 1949, much of it during World War II. Although intended as a single-volume work, it was originally published in three volumes in 1954 and 1955, and it's in this three-volume form that it's popularly known. It has since been reprinted numerous times and translated into many different languages, becoming one of the most popular and influential works in 20th-century literature.
The story of
The Lord of the Rings takes place in an alternate pre-history, the
Third Age of
Middle-earth. The lands of Middle-earth are populated by
Men (humans) and other
humanoid races (
Hobbits,
Elves,
Dwarves, and
Orcs), as well as many other creatures, both real and fantastic (
Ents,
Wargs,
Balrogs,
Trolls, etc.). The story centres on the
Ring of Power made by the Dark Lord
Sauron in an earlier age. From quiet beginnings in the
Shire the story ranges across Middle-earth following the course of the
War of the Ring through the eyes of its characters, most notably the hobbits,
Frodo Baggins,
Samwise Gamgee,
Meriadoc Brandybuck and
Peregrin Took. The main story is followed in the book by six appendices that provide a wealth of historical and
linguistic background material.
The Lord of the Rings has been subjected to
extensive analysis of its themes and origins, as have all of Tolkien's works. Although a major work in itself, the story is only the last movement of a
mythology that Tolkien had worked on since 1917. Influences on this earlier work, and on the story of
The Lord of the Rings, include
philology,
mythology,
industrialization, and
religion, as well as earlier fantasy works and Tolkien's experiences in
World War I.
The Lord of the Rings in its turn is considered to have had a great effect on modern fantasy, and the impact of Tolkien's works is such that the use of the words "Tolkienian" and "Tolkienesque" has been recorded in the
Oxford English Dictionary.
The great and enduring popularity of
The Lord of the Rings has led to numerous references in popular culture, the founding of many societies by
fans of Tolkien's works, and the publication of many books about Tolkien and his works.
The Lord of the Rings has
inspired, and continues to inspire, artwork, music, films and television,
video games, and subsequent literature.
Adaptations of The Lord of the Rings have been made for radio, theatre, and film. The 2001–2003 release of
Peter Jackson's widely acclaimed
Lord of the Rings film trilogy prompted a new surge of interest in
The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's other works.
Background
The historical background of the story of
The Lord of the Rings is revealed in stages through the story and the Appendices. It is also elaborated upon in
The Silmarillion, published after Tolkien's death. The beginnings of the story stretch back thousands of years before the actual time of the book, with the eponymous Lord of the Rings, the Dark Lord
Sauron, who secretly forged a great
Ring of Power, the
One Ring, to enslave the wearers of the other
Rings of Power. He launched a
war during which he captured 16 of the 19 Elven Rings and distributed them to seven Dwarf Lords and nine Kings of Men. The Men who possessed the Nine were corrupted over time and became the undead
Nazgûl or Ringwraiths, Sauron's most feared servants. The Dwarves were more resilient against the Rings; they didn't fade, and the only effect upon them was an undying lust for Gold. Sauron failed to capture the remaining
Three, which remained in the possession of the Elves. Sauron had made the master ring himself, making a total of 20 Rings of Power.
The Men of the great island-nation of
Númenor helped the hard-pressed Elves, ending the war in a victory against Sauron. About 1500 years later they sent a great force to overthrow Sauron, who surrendered, and was taken to Númenor as a prisoner. Over time, the cunning Sauron poisoned the minds of the Númenóreans against the
Valar (deities on Earth) and deceived them into invading the
Undying Lands. Because of this act Númenor was destroyed, being drowned beneath the sea like
Atlantis. Sauron's spirit escaped to Middle-earth, as did some faithful Númenóreans who had opposed the invasion, led by
Elendil and his sons.
Over 100 years later, Sauron again made war against the Númenóreans who had survived and established themselves in Middle-earth. Elendil formed the
Last Alliance of Elves and Men with the Elven-king
Gil-galad. They marched against Mordor, defeating Sauron's armies and besieging his stronghold
Barad-dûr. After seven years of siege, Sauron himself came forth and engaged in single combat with the leaders of the Last Alliance.
Gil-galad and Elendil wrestled with Sauron and were both killed in the battle. Sauron fell also and was vanquished; his spirit fled as he abandoned his damaged body. Elendil's sword
Narsil broke beneath him when he fell, and using the hilt-shard his son
Isildur cut the One Ring from Sauron's hand. Isildur was advised by
Elrond and
Cirdan to destroy the One Ring outright by casting it into the volcanic
Mount Doom where it was forged, but, attracted to its beauty, he refused and kept it as
weregild (compensation) for the deaths of his father and his brother Anárion.
So began the
Third Age of Middle-earth. Two years later, Isildur and his soldiers were ambushed by a band of Orcs at the
Gladden Fields. Isildur tried to escape by putting on the Ring — which made mortal wearers invisible — but the Ring betrayed him and slipped from his finger while he was swimming in the Great River
Anduin. He was seen and shot dead by Orcs, and the Ring was lost for two millennia on the river's bottom.
It was then found by chance by a river
hobbit named
Déagol. His relative and friend The popularity of
The Hobbit led to demands from his publishers for more stories about hobbits and
goblins, and so that same year, at the age of 45, Tolkien began writing the story that would become
The Lord of the Rings. The story wouldn't be finished until 12 years later, in 1949, and it wouldn't be fully published until 1955, by which time Tolkien was 63 years old.
Tolkien didn't originally intend to write a sequel to
The Hobbit, and instead wrote several other children's tales, such as
Roverandom. 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 came to be. Tolkien died before he could complete and put together this work, today known as
The Silmarillion, but his son
Christopher Tolkien edited his father's work, filled in gaps, and published it in 1977. Some Tolkien biographers regard
The Silmarillion as the true "work of his heart", as it provides the historical and linguistic context for the more popular work and for
his constructed languages, and occupied the greater part of Tolkien's time. As a result
The Lord of the Rings ended up as the last movement of Tolkien's legendarium and in his own opinion "much larger, and I hope also in proportion the best, of the entire cycle."
He began with Bilbo as the main character, but decided that the story was too serious to use the fun-loving hobbit. Thus Tolkien looked for an alternate character to carry the ring, and he turned to members of Bilbo's family. According to sources, he seems to have abandoned
The Lord of the Rings during most of 1943 and only re-started it in April 1944.
The books were published under a 'profit-sharing' arrangement, whereby Tolkien wouldn't receive an advance or royalties until the books had broken even, after which he'd take a large share of the profits. An index to the entire three-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, not compiled by Tolkien, were added to
The Return of the King. Because the three-volume binding was so widely distributed, the work is often referred to as the
Lord of the Rings "
trilogy". In a letter to the poet
W. H. Auden (who
famously reviewed the final volume in 1956
), 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 book. It is also often called a
novel; however, Tolkien also objected to this term as he viewed it as a
romance.
A 1999 British (ISBN 0-261-10387-3) seven-volume box set followed Tolkien's original six-book division, with the Appendices from the end of
The Return of the King bound as a separate volume. The individual names for the books were decided based on a combination of suggestions Tolkien had made during his lifetime and the titles of the existing volumes. From Book I to Book VI, these titles were
The Ring Sets Out,
The Ring Goes South,
The Treason of Isengard,
The Ring Goes East,
The War of the Ring, and
The End of the Third Age (External Link). The titles
The Treason of Isengard,
The War of the Ring, and
The End of the Third Age were also used as volume titles by
Christopher Tolkien in
The History of The Lord of the Rings.
The name of the complete work is often abbreviated to LotR, or simply 'LR' (Tolkien himself used 'L.R.'), and the three volumes as FR or FotR (
The Fellowship of the Ring), TT or TTT (
The Two Towers), and RK or RotK (
The Return of the King).
Influences
The Lord of the Rings developed as a personal exploration by Tolkien of his interests in
philology,
religion (particularly
Roman Catholicism),
fairy tales, as well as
Norse mythology, but it was also crucially influenced by the effects of his military service during
World War I. Tolkien created a complete and highly detailed fictional universe (
Eä), in which
The Lord of the Rings was set, and many parts of this world were, as he freely admitted, influenced by other sources.
Tolkien once described
The Lord of the Rings to his friend, the English Jesuit Father Robert Murray, as "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision." as well as the Celtic. Names such as "Gandalf", "Gimli" and "Middle-earth" are directly derived from Norse mythology. Gandalf, which means "wand elf" or "magic elf" in Old Norse, appears in the "Catalogue of Dwarves" in the Voluspa, a poem in the Norse epic the Poetic Edda. The figure of Gandalf is particularly influenced by the Germanic deity Odin in his incarnation as "The Wanderer", an old man with one eye, a long white beard, a wide brimmed hat, and a staff; Tolkien stated that he thought of Gandalf as an "Odinic wanderer" in a letter of 1946, nearly a decade after the character was invented. Tolkien may have also borrowed elements from the Völsunga saga (the Old Norse basis of the later German Nibelungenlied and Richard Wagner's opera series, Der Ring des Nibelungen, also called the Ring Cycle), specifically a magical golden ring and a broken sword which is reforged. In the Völsungasaga, these items are respectively Andvarinaut and Gram, and very broadly correspond to the One Ring and Narsil/Andúril. Finnish mythology and more specifically the Finnish national epic Kalevala were also acknowledged by Tolkien as an influence on Middle-earth. In a similar manner to The Lord of the Rings, the Kalevala centres around a magical item of great power, the Sampo, which bestows great fortune on its owner, but never makes its exact nature clear. Like the One Ring, the Sampo is fought over by forces of good and evil, and is ultimately lost to the world as it's destroyed towards the end of the story. In another parallel, the Kalevala's wizard character
Väinämöinen also has many similarities to Gandalf in his immortal origins and wise nature, and both works end with their respective wizard departing on a ship to lands beyond the mortal world. Tolkien also based his
Elvish language Quenya on
Finnish.
Shakespeare's
Macbeth influenced Tolkien in a number of ways. The
Ent attack on
Isengard was inspired by "Birnam Wood coming to
Dunsinane" in the play; Tolkien felt men carrying boughs were not impressive enough, and thus he used actual tree-like creatures. The phrase "
crack of doom" was actually coined by Shakespeare for
Macbeth, with an entirely different meaning.
On a more personal level, some locations and characters were inspired by Tolkien's childhood in
Sarehole and
Birmingham. It has also been suggested that
The Shire and its surroundings were based on the countryside around
Stonyhurst College in
Lancashire where Tolkien frequently stayed during the 1940s.
The Lord of the Rings was crucially influenced by Tolkien's experiences during World War I and his son's during
World War II. The central action of the books — a climactic, age-ending war between good and evil — is the central event of many mythologies, notably the Norse, but it's also a clear reference to the well-known description of World War I, which was commonly referred to as "the war to end all wars".
After the publication of
The Lord of the Rings these influences led to speculation that the One Ring was an
allegory for the
nuclear bomb. Tolkien, however, repeatedly insisted that his works were not an allegory of any kind. He stated in the foreword to
The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories, which he felt imposed the "domination of the author" on the reader. Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.
Nevertheless, a number of the work's themes have modern resonances. There is a strong theme of despair in the face of new mechanized warfare that Tolkien himself had experienced in the trenches of World War I. Some say there's clear evidence that one of the main subtexts of the story — the passing of a mythical "Golden Age" — was influenced not only by
Arthurian legend, but also by Tolkien's contemporary anxieties about the growing encroachment of
urbanisation and
industrialisation into the "traditional" English lifestyle and countryside. The development of a specially bred Orc army, and the destruction of the environment to aid this, also have modern resonances; and the effects of the Ring on its users evoke the modern literature of drug addiction as much as any historic quest literature.
Publishing history
The three parts were first published several months apart, in 1954 and 1955 by
Allen & Unwin. The novel has since been reissued many times by multiple publishers, as one-, three-, six- or seven-volume sets. There were significant changes in the text from the first editions of the three separate parts to the next three-volume print.
In the early 1960s
Donald A. Wollheim,
science fiction editor of the paperback publisher
Ace Books, theorized that
The Lord of the Rings wasn't protected in the United States under
American copyright law because the U.S. hardcover edition had been bound from pages printed in the United Kingdom, with the original intention being for them to be printed in the British edition. Ace Books proceeded to publish an edition, unauthorized by Tolkien and without
royalties to him. Tolkien took issue with this and quickly notified his fans of this objection.
Grass-roots pressure from these fans 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 novel, due to its wide exposure on the American public stage, had become a true cultural phenomenon. Also at this time Tolkien undertook various textual revisions to produce a version of the book that would have an unquestioned US copyright. This would later become the Second Edition of
The Lord of the Rings. Years later the copyright theory advanced by Ace Books was repudiated and their paperback edition found to have been a violation of Tolkien's copyright under US law.
Since the original printings of the 1950s and 1960s, many different editions of
The Lord of the Rings have appeared. In the 1990s (partly in anticipation of the forthcoming
The Lord of the Rings film trilogy) several new editions were released, including a three-volume hardback edition from Houghton-Mifflin, featuring colour illustrations by
Alan Lee. In 2004 a new edition was published for the fiftieth anniversary of the book's original publication.
Translations
The novel has 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 reflect both the translation process and his work. To aid translators, and because he was unhappy with some choices made by early translators such as Åke Ohlmarks, Tolkien wrote his "
Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings" (1967). Because it purports to be a translation of the
Red Book of Westmarch, with the English language in the original purporting to represent the
Westron of the original, translators need to imitate the complex interplay between English and non-English (Elvish) nomenclature in the book.
Critical response
The Lord of the Rings has received mixed reviews since its inception, ranging from terrible to excellent. Recent reviews in various media have been, in a majority, highly positive and Tolkien's literary achievement is slowly being acknowledged as a significant one. On its initial review the
Sunday Telegraph felt it was "among the greatest works of imaginative fiction of the twentieth century." The
Sunday Times seemed to echo these sentiments when in its review it was stated that "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." The
New York Herald Tribune also seemed to have an idea of how popular the books would become, writing in its review that they were "destined to outlast our time." W. H. Auden, a huge admirer of Tolkien's writings, regarded 'The Lord of the Rings' as a 'masterpiece,' furthermore stating that in some cases it outdid the achievement of Milton's
Paradise Lost. Other supporters of the book from the literary world included
Iris Murdoch,
Naomi Mitchison,
Richard Hughes and
C.S. Lewis.
Not all original reviews, however, were so kind.
New York Times reviewer Judith Shulevitz criticized the "pedantry" of Tolkien's literary style, saying that he "formulated a high-minded belief in the importance of his mission as a literary preservationist, which turns out to be death to literature itself." Critic Richard Jenkyns, writing in
The New Republic, criticized a perceived lack of psychological depth. Both the characters and the work itself are, according to Jenkyns, "anemic, and lacking in fiber." Even within Tolkien's literary group,
The Inklings, reviews were mixed.
Hugo Dyson complained loudly at its readings, and
Christopher Tolkien records Dyson as "lying on the couch, and lolling and shouting and saying, 'Oh God, no more Elves.'" However, another Inkling,
C. S. Lewis, had very different feelings, writing, "here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron. Here is a book which will break your heart." Despite these reviews and its lack of paperback printing until the 1960s,
The Lord of the Rings initially sold well in hardback.
Several other authors in the genre, however, seemed to agree more with Dyson than Lewis. Science-fiction author
David Brin criticized the book for what he perceived to be its unquestioning devotion to a traditional
elitist social structure, its positive depiction of the slaughter of the opposing forces, and its
romantic backward-looking worldview.
Michael Moorcock, another famous science fiction and fantasy author, is also critical of
The Lord of the Rings. In his essay, "
Epic Pooh", he equates Tolkien's work to
Winnie-the-Pooh and criticizes it and similar works for their perceived
Merry England point of view. Incidentally, Moorcock met both Tolkien and Lewis in his teens and claims to have liked them personally, even though he doesn't admire them on artistic grounds.
In 1957, it was awarded the
International Fantasy Award. Despite its numerous detractors, the publication of the
Ace Books and
Ballantine paperbacks helped
The Lord of the Rings become immensely popular in the 1960s. The book has remained so ever since, ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the twentieth century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. In the 2003 "
Big Read" survey conducted by the
BBC,
The Lord of the Rings was found to be the "Nation's best-loved book." In similar 2004 polls both Germany and Australia also found
The Lord of the Rings to be their favourite book. In a 1999 poll of
Amazon.com customers,
The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium."
Some recent analysis has focused on criticisms within
The Lord of the Rings held by minority groups. One criticism holds that the book displays
racism in its portrayal of white-skinned
Men,
Elves,
Dwarves, and
Hobbits as
protagonists and dark-skinned
Orcs and Men as
antagonists. The book also mentions that the Númenóreans became weak when they mingled with 'lesser Men'. Critics have held that this amounts to a declaration that foreigners destroy culture, especially those of another ethnicity. Among other counter-criticisms, skin colour being somewhat diverse among the Free Peoples - for example, some Hobbits were brown-skinned, and dark-skinned allied men help defend Minas Tirith. Tolkien also elicits sympathy for the Men serving Sauron; seeing a corpse of one such Man, Sam Gamgee contemplates whether he was "really evil of heart", or rather enslaved and deceived. The decline of the Númenóreans is also stated to be due to many factors, such as their own pride and lust for power. This racist interpretation is also seen as inconsistent with Tolkien's personal beliefs. In private letters, Tolkien called
Nazi "race-doctrine" and
antisemitism "wholly pernicious and unscientific", and South African
racial segregation, "horrifying". He also denounced the latter in his valedictory address to the University of Oxford in 1959.
Adaptations
The Lord of the Rings has been adapted for film, radio and stage multiple times.
The book has been adapted for radio four times.
In 1955 and 1956, the
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) broadcast
The Lord of the Rings, a 12-part radio adaptation of the story.
In the 1960s radio station
WBAI in New York produced a short
radio adaptation.
A 1979 dramatization of
The Lord of the Rings was broadcast in the United States and subsequently issued on tape and CD.
In 1981, the BBC broadcast
The Lord of the Rings, a new dramatization in 26 half-hour instalments.
Three film adaptations have been made. The first was
J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1978), by animator
Ralph Bakshi, the first part of what was originally intended to be a two-part adaptation of the story (hence its original title,
The Lord of the Rings Part 1). It covers
The Fellowship of the Ring and part of
The Two Towers. The second,
The Return of the King (1980), was an animated television special by
Rankin-Bass, who had produced a similar version of
The Hobbit (1977). The third was director
Peter Jackson's live action
The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, produced by
New Line Cinema and released in three instalments as (2001), (2002), and (2003). The final instalment of this trilogy was only the second film to break the one-billion-dollar barrier, after 1997's
Titanic, and, like
Titanic, won a total of 11 Oscars, including 'best motion picture' and 'best director'. The live-action film trilogy has done much in recent years to bring the novel back into the public consciousness. and filmmakers such as
George Lucas.
It strongly influenced the
role playing game industry which achieved popularity in the 1970s with
Dungeons & Dragons, a game which features many races found in
The Lord of the Rings, most notably
halflings (another term for hobbits), elves, dwarves,
half-elves,
orcs, and dragons. However,
Gary Gygax, lead designer of the game, maintained that he was influenced very little by
The Lord of the Rings, stating that he included these elements as a marketing move to draw on the popularity the work enjoyed at the time he was developing the game. The video game industry has also been influenced by the legacy of
The Lord of the Rings, with titles such as
Ultima,
EverQuest, and the
Warcraft series, as well as, quite naturally,
video games set in Middle-earth itself.
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 it as being "
Wagner for children" (a reference to
Der Ring des Nibelungen) — an especially interesting commentary in light of a possible interpretation of the books as a Christian response to Wagner. The book also helped popularize alternative spellings for the plurals of
elf and
dwarf (using -
ves instead of -
fs).
Impact on popular culture
The Lord of the Rings has had a profound and wide-ranging impact on
popular culture, from its publication in the 1950s, but especially throughout the 1960s and 1970s, where young people embraced it as a
countercultural saga - "
Frodo Lives!" and "Gandalf for President" were two phrases popular among American
Tolkien fans during this time. More recent examples include
The Lord of the Rings-themed editions of popular board games (for example,,
chess and
Monopoly); and parodies such as
Bored of the Rings,
Lord of the Beans, the
South Park episode
The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers, the
Mad Magazine musical send-up titled "The Ring And I," and
The Very Secret Diaries. The relatively new HBO series
The Flight of the Conchords also has band members singing a spoof song entitled "Frodo." Its influence has been vastly extended in the present day, largely due to the
Peter Jackson-directed live-action films.
The book, along with Tolkien's other writings, has influenced many musicians. Rock bands of the 1970s were musically and lyrically inspired by the major fantasy counter-culture of the time; British 70s rock band
Led Zeppelin is arguably the most well-known group to be directly inspired by Tolkien, and have four songs that contain explicit references to
The Lord of the Rings. Later, from the 1980s to the present day, several (mostly Northern European)
metal bands have drawn inspiration from Tolkien, often with a focus on the 'dark' or evil characters and forces in Tolkien's Middle-earth. Furthermore, several bands from this metal subgenre have taken their names from Tolkien's story (
Burzum,
Gorgoroth,
Amon Amarth,
Ephel Duath and
Cirith Ungol for example), and even band members have adopted stage names borrowed from the story, such as
Count Grishnackh and Shagrath.
Outside of rock music, a number of
classical and
New Age music artists have also been influenced by Tolkien's work. The New Age artist
Enya wrote an instrumental piece called "Lothlórien" in 1991, and composed two songs for the film - "May It Be" (sung in English and
Quenya) and "Aníron" (sung in
Sindarin). Swedish keyboardist
Bo Hansson released an instrumental album entitled "Music Inspired by Lord of the Rings" in 1970. The Danish
Tolkien Ensemble have released a number of albums that have set the complete poems and songs of
The Lord of the Rings to music, with some featuring recitation by
Christopher Lee.
Current Editions
Further Information
Get more info on 'The Lord Of The Rings'.
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