Not sure how many Lord of the Rings fans are members I’m a huge fan and have read the books and watched the films (even the dodgy 80’s cartoon) many times and so am very excited about the new Amazon Prime series The Rings of Power coming on September 2nd.
J. D. Payne and Patrick McKay used JRR Tolkien’s writings and the Appendices from the Lord of the Rings to create the series set 1000’s of years beforee The Hobbit in the 2nd age of Middle Earth the several trailers look very good obviously things have moved on since the last two trilogy’s where made an the special effects looks exceptional. Here is the latest trailer.
I’ve read LOTR at least once a year since I first read it over 40 years ago. I’ve got all of the History of Middle Earth books curated by Christopher T. I am really looking forward to this.
Like @Eoink I’ve read TLOTR once a year but for the past 50+ years.
I discovered Tolkien through David Davis reading the Hobbit on Children’s Hour back in 1961 and was captivated by the larger work a few years later.
I managed to con the Army and Navy Stores in Victoria Street out of a copy of the Silmarillion before official release and still have that first edition with its proof of purchase. It’s worth a bit now in perfect condition.
I was introduced to The Hobbit at 11 years old by my tweed clad English teacher Miss McNiff who took a shine to me and took the time to introduce me to this wonderful book it took a me until I was 14 to finally read LOR and it’s been with me ever since.
People who read Tolkien are usually hooked for life my partner though she never read the books does love the movies though we both found The Hobbit trilogy a bit stretched and not nearly as good as the LOR Trilolgy it’s actually mad to think that those films are over 20 years old now so we are more than due a follow up/prequel.
I read The Hobbit then LOTR at similar ages. I read them aloud to my daughter, then my son as bedtime stories. I became a literature academic. I enjoyed Old English and Medieval literature, but jobs are scarce in these periods, so I specialised in Victorian and Modern literature. A colleague bought a grammar in Old French to discover it had come from JRRT’s library with annotations and a couple of pages of his notes. We saw the Peter Jackson films. I have a vivid memory of the books, but the films are their own thing. I live in the Shire, am playing Blackmore’s Night and my tweed jacket hangs in the hall. Respect to JRRT.
JRR Tolkien was a Fellow of my College (Merton) at Oxford, and was Regius Professor of English at the University. He would sign copies of his books for members of the College, but he died in 1973, a couple of years before I went up in 1975.
So, I never got to meet the great man, and I don’t possess a signed copy of The Lord Of The Rings, which I regret greatly.
Tolkien isn’t for everyone he is a bit marmite but whatever you think it takes an incredible mind to create a whole other world/Universe with a thousand year history and very, very detailed backgrounds and backdrops.
That is why this new series really intrigues me to see how these modern day writers are going to interpret Tolkien’s worlds.
Tolkien’s writing fosters an interest in ecology years before this was popular. The worst thing I’ve heard about him was that he was hostile to teaching women undergraduates, so he was a man of his time. The head of department at my Redbrick held similar views. Philology was old-fashioned by the 70s and the philologists fought a rear-guard action to keep a first year Old English curriculum at Oxford. China Mieville criticised Tolkien’s brand of fantasy as conservative, but has tempered his views as Tolkien was really formative in creating English fantasy. There are no good Orcs, but intriguingly there is a fascination with Mordor.
LOTR is one of the few adaptations where the film stayed sufficiently true to the book to be valuable in its own right. The Hobbit, on the other hand, would have made a great one- or two-part film but Jackson was (I presume) over-indulged and allowed it to bloat to three of the dullest films I’ve seen.
The other way in which Tolkien was a (now slightly unfortunate) product of his time was his reverence for feudalism, as seen in, for example, the romanticisation of Sam’s devotion to Frodo as his ‘batman’, to put it in the First World War terms that Tolkien knew. The quotation of his that I find hard to swallow is ‘[t]ouching your cap to the squire may be damn bad for the squire, but it’s damn good for you’.
Thankfully there’s plenty of value in his works otherwise that I find I can overlook this.
Yes, in Anglo-Saxon society the man had personal obligation to his lord, there was no modern sense of patriotism or nationhood. Lordship and kinship were important. Tolkien knows that the world is no longer like this and he regrets it. He is a melancholy conservative. But like you, I disregard this. I don’t continually read him though as his books are alive in memory, I don’t need to.
