Product Description:

Hobbits and wizards and Sauron--oh, my! Mild-mannered Oxford scholar John Ronald Reuel Tolkien had little inkling when he published The Hobbit; Or, There and Back Again in 1937 that, once hobbits were unleashed upon the world, there would be no turning back. Hobbits are, of course, small, furry creatures who love nothing better than a leisurely life quite free from adventure. But in that first novel and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo and their elfish friends get swept up into a mighty conflict with the dragon Smaug, the dark lord Sauron (who owes much to proud Satan in Paradise Lost), the monstrous Gollum, the Cracks of Doom, and the awful power of the magical Ring. The four books' characters--good and evil--are recognizably human, and the realism is deepened by the magnificent detail of the vast parallel world Tolkien devised, inspired partly by his influential Anglo-Saxon scholarship and his Christian beliefs. (He disapproved of the relative sparseness of detail in the comparable allegorical fantasy his friend C.S. Lewis dreamed up in The Chronicles of Narnia, though he knew Lewis had spun a page-turning yarn.) It has been estimated that one-tenth of all paperbacks sold can trace their ancestry to J.R.R. Tolkien. But even if we had never gotten Robert Jordan's The Path of Daggers and the whole fantasy genre Tolkien inadvertently created by bringing the hobbits so richly to life, Tolkien's epic about the Ring would have left our world enhanced by enchantment. --Tim Appelo

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: 4.70 out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Childhood Fantasies
These books captured my imagination like no other books ever have. Tolkien's vision is astounding. His ability to use words to paint such an enormous and vivid picture is without equal. I cannot get enough of Middle Earth. Although these are fantasy novels, everything is so real. There is no way I can do justice to Tolkien's masterpeice with these few words. Middle Earth is a place where childhood dreams, nightmares, and fantasies all come true in bright, vivid colors.

Rating:

- Startling, like lightning from a clear sky.
I've just finished reading the Lord Of The Rings for the second time. My first reading of it was about three years ago. Amazingly, (and I think this says something of the quality of the story itself) I would say I enjoyed it even more this second time around. It is so sweeping and wide that it still thrills, never losing any of its unpredictablity even if one is already familiar with the ending. Tolkien's Middle Earth is so immense, such an entire "sub-creation" (as the author himself referred to it)... complete with its own creatures, history, languages, and breathtaking landscapes... I believe it is without parallel in fantasy literature of any era. This book is myth, rather than allegory. By that I mean that there is not really meant to be any strict one-to-one correspondence to specifically ... Read More

Rating:

- A book to hold close.
I've read it over a year ago and it's still in my mind. I plan to read it again before the end of the year. It's a work to behold, and I can't think of another book like it in the way it transports you to a world you wish was real. It feels real in your heart as you read from the Hobbit down to the third part of Lord of the Rings(Return of the King)and you become exhausted because it felt like you went on an adventure with the characters and now you don't want to go. The full beauty of Middle-Earth became a picture in my mind, fully realized before the movies came out. There's so much that can be taken from this book if one is willing to look into it with respect for the way it has enchanted readers for decades. Read this, but also check out George R.R. Martin A Song of Fire & Ice(he knows how ... Read More

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Book-Store-1.com - The Online Book Store
In Association With Amazon.com