![]() He would awake as if out of deep water, gasping for air. One Second Age story came out of what Tolkien called his “Atlantis complex.” For as long as he could remember, he had suffered a recurring nightmare of a great wave rolling over green fields. It takes considerable devotion to read the History of Middle-earth, filled with unfolding variations of tales that were often tantalizingly unfinished. Though The Silmarillion is a coherent whole, it is undeniably complex and austere. His son Christopher compiled and edited his father’s First and Second Age writings as The Silmarillion as well as a magisterial 12-volume History of Middle-earth, showing how Tolkien crafted his world across six decades. When he died in 1973, Tolkien left behind a mass of papers. Immortal elves such as Galadriel can recall the First and Second Ages, thousands of years in the past, but the full story remained incomplete during Tolkien’s lifetime. 94 / ©The Tolkien Trust 2015īoth The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place in what Tolkien called the Third Age of Middle-earth, a time when the elves are growing increasingly remote, humans are increasingly dominant, and hobbits-rustic, half-sized humans-emerge as unlikely heroes. The author in his study in 1937, the year he published his first novel, The Hobbit, and a seminal essay on the Old English poem Beowulf. Its final installment alone earned 11 Academy Awards, matching the records set by Ben-Hur and Titanic. It’s still one of the highest-grossing film series of all time, with nearly $3 billion in revenue worldwide. The stories reached a new generation and an even wider audience in 2001, when the director Peter Jackson launched the first installment of his Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. Lewis put it, “Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron.” Others found the books baffling or, as the literary critic Edmund Wilson put it, “juvenile.” By the end of Tolkien’s life, his books were becoming more widely respected for their literary merits and wide-ranging influence. The books enchanted some readers-as Tolkien’s fellow writer C.S. In 1937, he published the adventure story The Hobbit, and in the 1950s, the epic three-volume The Lord of the Rings. ![]() He created the mythology to express his “feeling about good, evil, fair, foul,” he said. He began dreaming up Middle-earth in 1914 as an Oxford undergraduate at the outbreak of World War I, in which he went on to fight as a British Army officer at the Battle of the Somme. And yet his lifeblood went into the books that have since almost eclipsed his academic reputation. In his day job, he was an Oxford professor, an esteemed scholar in Anglo-Saxon and related languages and cultures. Tolkien even invented languages for his elves and other characters to speak, drawing on elements of Northern European tongues such as Finnish and Welsh. Every work of fantasy that came later, from the Harry Potter novels and Star Wars movies to games like Dungeons and Dragons, owes a great debt to Tolkien’s astonishing imagination and pays homage to it. Tolkien mapped out elaborate geographies and built richly detailed civilizations. ![]() Middle-earth, where his famous stories take place, was meant to be a version of our own world in a forgotten past. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.No writer in the English language has ever created a more complete world than John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. After many ages it fell into the hands of Bilbo Baggins, as told in The Hobbit. ![]() But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, The Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. Comes with Boxset slipcase.įellowship Blurb: One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. Price reduced to reflect the condition of Fellowship of the Rings and Boxset box.
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