{"id":12764,"date":"2020-12-02T22:18:03","date_gmt":"2020-12-03T03:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=12764"},"modified":"2020-12-05T23:35:10","modified_gmt":"2020-12-06T04:35:10","slug":"the-lord-of-the-rings-a-book-review-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2020\/12\/02\/the-lord-of-the-rings-a-book-review-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lord of the Rings \u2013 A Book Review \u2013 Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tonight, I was looking through my old posts to see if I had any unfinished series that I should continue on.\u00a0 About three and a half years ago I wrote the first part of a review of Peter Jackson\u2019s Lord of the Rings movie series.\u00a0 I called it \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2017\/05\/11\/tolkien-a-very-very-long-story-part-1-on-the-screen-vs-the-minds-eye\/\">Tolkien: A Very, Very Long Story \u2013 Part 1 \u2013 On the Screen vs. the Mind\u2019s Eye<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s a good name for a review of the Jackson films.\u00a0 But going over it, I realized that starting with the films would short circuit an enormous amount of material in the books that I would much rather discuss first.\u00a0 So that is what I\u2019m going to do.\u00a0 When I get back to the movies, I\u2019ll reference these posts on the books as a baseline for my opinions on Tolkien and his remarkable creation.<\/p>\n<p>As I\u2019ve mentioned elsewhere, I read the Lord of the Rings over fifty years ago.\u00a0 Over time some of my opinions of the work have changed somewhat.\u00a0 But my enjoyment of the story remains intact.\u00a0 The world building that Tolkien did provides the reader with depth and scope to enjoy the story on several levels.\u00a0 There is the quest for the destruction of the Ring.\u00a0 There is the story of Aragorn.\u00a0 There is the fading of the elves and the other non-human beings.\u00a0 There is the mission of the wizards.\u00a0 There is the Shire.\u00a0 And most of all there is the War of the Ring.\u00a0 And under all these themes we have the panorama of Middle Earth.\u00a0 The quaint Shire, the lonely wilds of Eriador, the harrowing heights and abysmal depths of the Misty Mountains.\u00a0 The grassland of Rohan, the grandeur of Gondor and the shadowy horror of Mordor.\u00a0 Tolkien brings all these things alive in our minds.\u00a0 And he populates this world with a crowd of characters of all manner of creatures.\u00a0 We have several kinds of men and we have several kinds of elves.\u00a0 We have dwarves and hobbits.\u00a0 There are wizards and orcs and trolls and ents.\u00a0 There are undead creatures and intelligent animals of several types; wargs (a kind of wolf), eagles and even an ancient and giant spider.<\/p>\n<p>All of these creatures, wizards, elves, dwarves and orcs are now common characters in all the fantasy books and movies around.\u00a0 But people forget that Tolkien was the one who resurrected these creatures from fairy tales and returned them to the level of mythical creatures full of menace and wonder.\u00a0 The Lord of the Rings was the template for every epic fantasy, both well-written or awful that has emerged in the last half century.\u00a0 And not taking anything away from some well-crafted creations that some talented writers have produced, none of them has displaced Middle Earth as the touchstone of this particular type of fantasy world.\u00a0 Because Middle Earth is the creation of a worldview that incorporates the myths of northwest Europe and imbues them with the moral philosophy inherited from medieval Christianity.\u00a0 The Shire is Britain.\u00a0 Rohan is the Germanic Tribes.\u00a0 Gondor is the legendary Roman Empire, once spanning Middle Earth from Britain to the Near East now ceding territory to younger tribes and hedged in by Eastern and Southern foes.\u00a0 Mordor is the infidel barbarism at the edges of the world.\u00a0 Tolkien was a gifted philologist and historian of medieval Europe with a deep and wide knowledge of its literature and folklore.\u00a0 And he was a devout Christian.<\/p>\n<p>This re-imagining of European history with the non-human peoples and the angelic and demonic creatures that are analogs of Christian theology make a very powerful mythic background to fill out the story of Frodo and his friends.\u00a0 And that is the point I want to make in this introduction.\u00a0 In future installments I\u2019ll give my thoughts on various aspects of Tolkien\u2019s story.\u00a0 Since they\u2019re my opinions I won\u2019t apologize if I commit any sins against the Tolkien orthodoxies.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been thinking about this stuff for a very long time so I feel I have the right to have my say.\u00a0 But I also welcome comments both agreeing and disagreeing with my opinions.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2020\/12\/04\/the-lord-of-the-rings-a-book-review-part-2-tolkiens-creation-story\/\">The Lord of the Rings \u2013 A Book Review \u2013 Part 2 \u2013 Tolkien\u2019s Creation Story<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tonight, I was looking through my old posts to see if I had any unfinished series that I should continue on.\u00a0 About three and a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,237,4,242],"tags":[2757,2753,400,2752,2756,2754,2755,186],"class_list":["post-12764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-book-reviews","tag-eriador","tag-gondor","tag-lord-of-the-rings","tag-middle-earth","tag-mordor","tag-rohan","tag-the-shire","tag-tolkien"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Lord of the Rings \u2013 A Book Review \u2013 Part 1 - Orion&#039;s Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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