The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

The Lord of the Rings:The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien, 410 pages

Bilbo Baggins has lived a comfortable, if eccentric, life since returning from his adventures (recounted in The Hobbit), writing his book, adopting his nephew Frodo, having dwarves over for tea – and only occasionally using his magic ring to hide from unwelcome guests. However, the wizard Gandalf has long suspected that this ring might be more than it appeared, and some years after Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday party, when he left the ring to Frodo and vanished from Hobbiton, Gandalf’s suspicions blossom into hard, terrible truths: this ring is the One Ring, receptacle of the greater part of the Dark Lord Sauron’s power. Pursued by the dreaded Ringwraiths, Frodo and his faithful companion Samwise Gamgee, joined by Gandalf and six others of the Free Folk of Middle-Earth, form the Fellowship of the Ring, charged with taking the Ring to the heart of the Enemy’s power, the Fire-Mountain, there to cast it into the Cracks of Doom and destroy it, ridding the world of Sauron forever.

This is, of course, the classic work of high fantasy, the grandfather of the genre. It is a dense read – Tolkien was an obsessive linguist and worldbuilder, and it shows in the attention given to passages in Elvish and lengthy poems about events long-past. However, those who deride The Lord of the Rings for its supposed dryness are, in my opinion, missing the richness of the tapestry Tolkien weaves, the surprising bursts of humor and the beauty and the sadness of his prose. It is a masterful work.