The Lord of the Rings

J. R. R Tolkien

It was the success of The Hobbit in 1938 that Tolkien was warned from his publishers that public wants to hear more from him about Hobbits. In 1950 Tolkien wrote back to his publisher "My work has escaped from my control, and I have produced a monster . . .

The Lord of the Rings covers a number of themes related to theology like the battle between good and evil, death and immortality, resurrection, salvation, repentance, self-sacrifice, the victory of humility over pride, justice, fellowship and authority. The plot for The Lord of the Rings began from Tolkien’s earlier work The Hobbit and from The Silmarillion.

Adaptation                                                        

The Lord of the Rings has been adapted to different mediums like film, television, stage, Video Games. Thus these various adaptations have attracted a large number of audiences towards The Lord of the Rings. Three film adaptations are made till now. At first animator Ralph Bakshi adapted the novel for film for a minimal budget of $8 million dollars however the film earned $30 million dollars at the box office. United Artists regarded the film a flop.

Then The Return of the King was a television special by Rankin-Bass and made the film from the beginning of the book. This film was targeted to younger audience adults complained that much of the depth of the book was discarded.  Third adaptation was done by Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. A miniseries of The Lord of the Rings was broadcasted in 1993. The Lord of the Rings also got several musical theater adaptations as well.
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Awards                                       

The Lord of the Rings trilogy won Hugo Award for Best Dramatic presentation in their particular years. The Return of the King receives 11 Oscars at the 76^th Annual Awards ceremony of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Same book wins Empire Award for the best film of the Year. The Return of the King also wins Four Golden Globe Awards in 2004 during the HFPA’s 61^st Annual Awards Ceremony at the Beverly Hilton. It was awarded Best Motion Picture, Drama, Best Director, Best Original Song and Best Original Score. The Return of the King became second movie in history after Titanic which earned over 1 billion $US worldwide. The trilogy became the first film of the fantasy genre, which has the most nominations in the Academy’s history, going beyond the Godfather series’ 28 nominations.

TV Guide celebrated the release of “The Return of the King” with four hologram covers, each featured significant character of the book. Best Internet Advertisement earned this award for The Lord of the Rings. This site got Online Voter’s Choice award for Best Internet Advertising.

The official website for The Lord of the Rings; The Two Towers got two awards at the annual Key Art Awards hosted by The Hollywood Reporter. The Lord of the Rings; The Two Towers won MTV Movie Awards in 2003. 

Achievements of the Novel

• The Lord of the Rings was awarded International Fantasy Award in 1957.
• BBC conducted a “Big Read” survey in 2003 and The Lord of the Rings was got “Nation’s Best-loved Book.” 
• Another survey was conducted by Australian ABC in 2004, in which Australians voted The Lord of the Rings “My Favourite Book”, Germans found the same as well.
• Customers judged The Lord of the Rings as favorite “book of the millennium” in a 1999 poll of Amazon.com.
• The Lord of the Rings stood 3rd in the Librarians’ poll.

 Criticism

New York Times Book Review writes "A unique, wholly realized other world, evoked from deep in the well of time, massively detailed, absorbingly entertaining, profound in meaning." Many critics criticized The Lord of the Rings as being “wagner for children.” American critic Edmund Wilson characterized The Lord of the Rings as “Juvenile balderdash” in his essay “Oo, those awful Orcs”.  W. H. Auden criticized The Lord of the Rings in 1968 objecting to Tolkien’s conception of animate species that are basically evil without possibility of redemption. But in 1956, New York Times book review Auden called it “a masterpiece of its genre” that succeeded where Milton failed” in showing an epic battle between good and evil. He also included that it “never violated” the reader’s sense of the credible.” Like most of the fantasy books, The Lord of the Rings is also criticised by Evangelicals for its references to quasi-pagan elements and “occultism”.

Michael Moorcock, another notable science fiction writer wrote a detailed critique of the book under the title Epic Pooh preceding the thesis that The Lord of the Rings was simply a child’s tale written in the language of epic myth.
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Publication History           

First edition of The Fellowship of the Ring came in the year July 29, 1954. George Allen & Unwin published it.  The Fellowship of the Ring had 531 pages. The publisher decided to split the whole work in three parts however Tolkien thought it as a multiple volume with six sections. Tolkien proposed six titles for the six sections. The Fellowship of the Ring got two out of the six titles; first section had title: The Ring Sets Out or The First Journey and second section titled as The Ring Sets South or The Ring Goes South in the Millennium edition. The Two Towers was published in November 11, 1954 and it had 416 pages in total, it was followed by The Return of the King October 20, 1955 and had 624 pages.

The six titles were as follow:

T Book I: The Ring Sets Out

O Book II: The Ring Goes South

L Book III: The Treason of Isengard

K Book IV: The Ring Goes East

I Book V: The War of the Ring

E Book VI: The End of the Third Age    

The Lord of the Rings has been translated in dozens of languages due to its success. Tolkien himself checked many translation of the novel. His comments improved the translation process as well as his work. It was The Lord of the Rings which increased the demand for fantasy fiction.

Book Rating

• The Lord of the Rings is rated as 4.4 and 96% people liked it on Good reads. 
• The Lord of the Rings is rated 5/5 on foliosociety.
• Amazon has 4.6 rating for The Lord of the Rings.
• Google book has 4.5 rating for The Lord of the Rings