Any Lord of the Rings fans?

Thank you. I really did enjoy The Hobbit/LotR, the language appendix in the latter tried my patience a bit but I got through it all and am about halfway through The Silmarillion now. As I mentioned in the What Are You Reading Now thread it's MUCH more enjoyable with some actual context and makes sense now. I'm glad because my previous experience left me dreading it. After this I'm going to read Children Of Hurin, that might take a while because I have to read it "with" my girlfriend. In other words I'll read one chapter and wait a week for her to finally get around to it. But she's the big Tokien fan between us and it's one of the few books she hasn't read and I suspect I'm not allowed to read a Middle Earth book that she hasn't. I'm not sure how far I'm going to go in after that, I've been itching to read the Dune series (I read the first book about 20 years ago around the time I first read The Hobbit) and started getting the books together. There are a few more Middle Earth books I'd like to read first while the series is fresh on my mind though.

 

If you'd like a similar experience, try Stephen Donaldson's books his first Trilogy is The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Absolutely loved these books too growing up.

If you'd like a more sci-fi fantasy experience, then Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series....

 

I'm still continuing on with my reading, I finished The Silmarillion then went on to read The Children Of Hurin and now I'm reading Unfinished Tales. After reading Turin's story in both The Silmarillion and The Children Of Hurin I'm a little exhausted seeing that it is told yet again here. Part of me (the part that will probably lose to my OCD) wants to skip it as I don't really feel the need or the desire to read that depressing story a third time. Also I think this version was used for a lot of the material in Children Of Hurin so I feel like there's probably not much there to learn but I'll probably just wait and save it for last.

 

In the past I was a great fan of LOTR. Now not much, even if I i still consider The Lord of the Rings a masterpiece. Maybe my passion with LOTR reduced when The Hobbit movies came out. My favorite movie is The Fellowship of The Ring.

 

I didn't watch those until recently, I didn't hate them but I wasn't that impressed either as it just felt like Sword Porn. It's the only time I've read a Tolkien book prior to seeing the film (and only Tolkien book I had read at the time) but it was like 20 years ago so I just remembered the basic plot and wasn't all like "they got this and that wrong". In fact there were a few things I thought they made up that were actually in the book when I re-read it and vice versa. So I didn't have extremely high expectations or a huge amount of knowledge/nostalgia about the Legendarium, I just don't stay entertained long having my senses bombarded by endless cartoonish action. When they'd stop to actually advance the plot I found it enjoyable usually.

 

That's the problem with The Hobbit. It looks like you are watching a cartoon. Too much computer graphic. At least in LOTR there were great real landscapes. Towns looked real like Minas Tirith, Bree or Rivendell. In The Hobbit you look at Rivendell or Laketown and you realize that everything is made with the computer. Moreover, in LOTR we have Pippin who is funny when in The Hobbit the dwarves (except Thorin) are supposed to be funny but they are just annoying. Not to mention the battles. In LOTR we have great battles like Helm Deep, Minas Tirith and Mordor. In The Hobbit the final battle at the Lonely Mountain is very frustrated and too unbelievable.

 

I have found something for you to enjoy. Peter Pringle is my favourite music historian.

 

I'm currently reading Beren And Luthien and I'm a little disappointed in it but it's still interesting. I was expecting Christopher to have cobbled together a novel-length narrative from his fathers notes like in Children Of Hurin but it's not really that. It's more like a novel length study on the evolution of the story. It begins with the earliest written version of the story where Beren is an Elf (or Gnome) and pretty much every character has a different name, which sucked as I'm terrible with names and it's taken quite a bit of work to get all those old-school Elf names down. Especially since half of them are named Fin-something. Then it went on to include a couple short early sketches of the tale but so far the majority of the book has been extracts from the long form poem. So basically I just keep re-reading the same story over and over in different forms (prose, poetry, summary, unfinished or abandoned) than just getting one really good version of it. I imagine there's a reason for that, perhaps it just couldn't really be done or Christopher felt the story deserved a different treatment than Children Of Hurin. It's not terrible just not really what I was expecting.

 

The last book I read was The Children of Hurin. Not bad but not at the same level as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I also tried to read The Silmarillion but it was too much difficult for me. Unfortunately Christopher is not on the same level as his father. For me the best book is and remains LOTR the fellowship of the ring.
PS: I read on Wikipedia that Christopher recently passed away, less than 2 months ago. I didn't know that. Rest in peace.

 

Seems to be an unpopular opinion, but I thought the Hobbit trilogy was just as good as LotR. Although Fellowship of the Ring is my favourite of all the movies. It's so beautifully made. I love how it ties into the overall story, and yet it feels like a complete movie in itself as well.

As for the books, I definitely want to re-read those soon. It's been so long now. That'll be a summer project for sure. That and Harry Potter.

 

The reading order I've been using suggested that after LotR you could either read The Silmarillion or Children Of Hurin next...up to you. Reading the latter first never would have worked for me, I would have been so confused and full of questions that I probably would have had to read a Silmarillion worth of material via wikis and other resources just to get through it.

For me this was one of the least interesting stories in The Silmarillion though, besides how it tied into the other stories. For instance I enjoy the way that my dislike of Turin makes me like Tuor all the more and the overlap of characters/events. Obviously there's lots of that in The Silmarillion but those two stories in particular are very tied together as they follow the two cousins during the same period of time, meeting many of the same characters and their paths actually cross at one point though Turin never knows it.

But at the same time reading The Silmarillion first sort of spoiled Children Of Hurin. It's sort of like reading the CliffsNotes to a novel before reading it, there aren't going to be all that many surprises since you just read a condensed version of the novel. Children Of Hurin made the characters/events seem more real than they did in The Silmarillion but I was just waiting for the events I already knew to unfold. Actually in a story as depressing as this one I was basically just dreading the inevitable.

As for Christopher not being on the same level as his dad, few are probably but did he ever try? It's not like he tried to write more Middle-Earth stories or anything did he? I thought he just compiled the writing his father left behind.

 

Also...

Frodo: "I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened."
Gandalf: "So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

...is my favourite movie exchange of all time.

 

@StardustSoldier Superb! Thanks for sharing.....yes that was an amazing line. Although it didn't make it into the movie, my favorite lines of Tolkien are in "The Voices of Saruman" as Gandalf the White and Saruman go back and forth. Showed the true power of Gandalf....

 

Great line, but to be honest Ian could recite the lyrics of a Limp Bizkit song and I'd think he'd just said something profound.

 

I would like a version of LOTR where you can point/click/tap on any item on screen, and Legolas breathlessly shouts its name at you.

 

I've been meaning to read these for years. But I read comics mainly (not counting novels for school), so when I decide to read a book on my own time I feel like I should be reading Shakespeare, not a high fantasy story lol.

 

I think LOTR is a worthwhile read though. It's not just genre tripe like a lot of fantasy on the shelves. It's actually quite a profound, literary story couched in themes from Tolkien's real-world philological studies.

 

If not for the art of Alan Lee, I'm not sure how I would feel about Lord of the Rings. I only know the film's based on it and they are abundantly charming. But the acting is often stilted, despite being cast by A-list actors, which I blame the director for, and the script is kinda thin, throughout the franchise.

As well, much of the CGI was not very good. Many outside environments appear semi-desaturated, color-wise, making them seem unfinished. And Gollum looks pattently fake, as do most creatures in these film's. In many ways, I'm reminded of the Star Wars prequels, actually.

But I'm quite taken by the earthy, rustic set and costume designs, by the imagination of it all and the underlying sense of hope as the worst of people and the forces in power produce threat after threat in these films. Fellowship of the Ring remains the best of all of them, though. The quality of the series just kept sliding after that, all the way to the end of the Hobbit trilogy.

I adore Éowyn. Boromir is very likable to me ... Gandolf is OK, as is Aragon and Elrond. Galadriel, though, is particularly cringe-worthy. Her dialogue, Cate's stilted performance ... wow. The Hobbits aren't presented as being interesting enough to drive the story, though. Kind of safe, sexless and passionless ... except for Chow Time.

But the film's bend over backwards in an attempt to charm the living hell of you, despite its clunky dialogue. The artistry, though, is what charms me most. I would want to at least have access to a town, or community, that is as visually stunning as some of these places in the movies. Places that are, indeed, worth saving!

 

After a little over 3 months I think I'm going to end my little Tolkien journey here...



I may return some day and dig a little deeper but for now I think I get the idea. I concentrated as much as I could, wore that Complete Guide to Middle Earth out and spent a lot of time on Tolkien Gateway and the interactive maps on lotrproject.com. I could draw a map of Middle-Earth...if I could draw. I really enjoyed it but by the end I was ready to move on, a lot of this was due to the repetitiveness of reading The Silmarillion (which does benefit from repetition as it helps to learn all the stuff), then some of those stories again in Unfinished Tales and then yet again in The Children Of Hurin/Beren And Luthien/The Fall Of Gondolin. The latter 2, and the last 2 that I read, went so far as to tell the same story over and over again in different versions to illustrate how they evolved. Not just different versions of the same story but the same manuscript sometimes as the versions put in Unfinished Tales were later placed into the Great Tales Of Middle-Earth books. The repetition helped me learn everything and organize it all in my head but by the end, in part because of this and also just because of the painstaking way in which I was reading and cross-referencing everything with maps and reference material, my brain felt like pudding and I was too exhausted to go on. But at this point I don't know how much more there is that would interest me, I think it's just diving deeper into the details of the stories I already know well enough for my satisfaction.

I think I'm going to need a little break before jumping into Dune and filling my brain with more endless details, just to have something "easy" to read to ease my brain out of Middle-Earth I'm reading the Stargate film novelization. It's surprisingly good. . I wish I had read these sooner but I'm glad I waited until I was old enough to do it with the patience I always felt like it would need to be given. Not to mention at a time when there are plenty of Tolkien resources online, in print and film.

 

I love Middle Earth!

I read The Hobbit about the time Star Wars came out so I'm about as deep in and went on to churn through The Lord of the Rings soon after and generally every year until I was 40 or so.

The Extended LOTR films are among my favorites in the medium, the theatrical versions were good but bugged me pretty bad too. I still have problems but the extended versions really helped especially with Two Towers which I like almost as much as Fellowship but wasn't close before.

While I like The Hobbit films okay they are insanely bloated productions particularly considering the the source material is a 278 page children's story and this is magnified because the Smaug is bordering on bad without the extended version. Making additional bloat required to properly balance the other bloat.
The other two extended versions I can take or leave, I feel like Unexpected Journey flows a little better on re-edit but there is little new material, maybe 5 minutes here and there.
Five Armies could be cut down to 30 or 40 minutes at the end of Smaug really as far as the content needed to convey the story but it is largely entertaining so I don't complain too much.

The best thing about the Hobbit movies is they are native 3D. It adds a little extra immersion into the Middle Earth.

The Hobbit should have been one movie or two tops and it would have been tighter and possibly more epic.
There is nothing wrong with trilogies unless you have only one or two movies worth of tale to tell or you have more material than three can cover.

Make the number of films your story dictates rather than force a structure that doesn't fit what you have to present.