Harper Ellison★ Sage · Lv 7
todayI reread it every few years and always find a corner of Middle-earth I'd forgotten.
Fantasy
The Lord of the Rings
4.7· 927 ratings
Published 19541193 pagesEnglishEpic · Mythic
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
Why read it
A gardener, a walking stick, and the errand that measures every fantasy since: carry the most dangerous object in the world into the heart of the enemy's country, and want nothing for yourself. 150 million copies later, it's still the one they're all compared to.
The premise
The Dark Lord Sauron forged a Ring that holds most of his power; it has surfaced in the pocket of a hobbit. Because every mighty being who wields it becomes a new Sauron, the free peoples' only move is absurd: give it to the small and humble, and walk it to the volcano where it was made. Tolkien's epic is about power that can only be renounced, never used — and the ordinary loyalty that outlasts kings.
The story behind it
Tolkien, an Oxford philologist who survived the Somme, spent 12 years writing it as a single novel (publishers split it into three in 1954–55). He called it 'fundamentally religious and Catholic' in revision, but its engine is his trench experience: the batman-officer bond between Sam and Frodo, the scoured homeland, the wound that never heals.
What awaits inside
- 01
Power as addiction
The Ring works on whoever holds it — Boromir's fall, Gollum's ruin, Frodo's slow fading. Tolkien wrote the definitive fantasy of power's corruption before the genre existed to cliché it.
- 02
Sam is the hero
Tolkien said so himself — the gardener who can't be tempted by grand visions because he only wants a small garden. The book's moral center is its least glamorous character.
- 03
Eucatastrophe
Tolkien coined the word: the sudden joyous turn that arrives when all hope is spent — and earned it with 900 pages of loss leading to Mount Doom.
- 04
The long defeat
Victory costs the victors everything: the Elves fade, the Shire is scoured, Frodo can't come home. No fantasy since has had the nerve to end so sadly.
From the book
At the Council of Elrond, wizard, warrior, and elf-lord all refuse the Ring — and a three-and-a-half-foot hobbit says, 'I will take it, though I do not know the way.' The genre's most quietly devastating volunteer.
On the slopes of Mount Doom, Sam cannot carry the Ring for Frodo — so he carries Frodo. 'I can't carry it for you, but I can carry you.'
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