The Lord of the Rings

From LoveToKnow Sci-Fi

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"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." With those words at the start of The Lord of the Rings, we were all transported to Middle Earth, a strange yet familiar land. Magic happens here, and races other than human share the land, dwarves, elves, and particularly the little hobbits.

J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was strongly influenced by the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon mythos that he taught at Oxford University; the saga that he began with a children's book contains echoes of Beowulf, Norse mythology and classics such as Homer. Yet the overall ambiance, at least of the Shire of the hobbits, was of a bucolic England before the Great War (that's World War I), with its rigid class structure and orderly countryside.

Monsters exist in Tolkien's world, and heroes. Wizards travel with common adventurers, centuries-old elves ally with short-lived men. But the success or failure of the quest to save the world from being enslaved by evil incarnate falls on the smallest, the most insignificant (in the worldly scheme of things), the untravelled, stay-at-home hobbit.

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy was the beginning of many things. For one, it was the beginning of the now-almost-ironclad rule that fantasy must be packaged in trilogies - not a universally positive development. But The Lord of the Rings, called LotR by fans, was the beginning of a collasal boom in fantasy literature that continues to this day.

Now, decades after their publication, movie technology has improved to the point where such a saga can be filmed without doing serious damage to the source, and Peter Jackson's trilogy of Lord of the Rings movies, brought a whole new generation of fans to this landmark work of fiction.

This category celebrates J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings in all its forms.

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