Synopses & Reviews
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, The Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages, it fell by chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins.
From his fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor, Sauron's power spread far and wide. He gathered all the Great Rings to him, but always he searched far and wide for the One Ring that would complete his dominion.
On Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday, he disapeared, bequeathing to his young cousin, Frodo, the Ruling Ring and a perilous quest: to journey across Middle-earth, deep into the shadow of the Dark Lord, and destroy the Ring by casting it into the Cracks of Doom.
THE LORD OF THE RINGS tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the Wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin and Sam; Gimli the Dwarf; Legolas the Elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider.
Review
"One of the great fairy-tale quests in modern literature."
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"A masterful story — an epic in its own way—with elements of high adventure, suspense, mystery, poetry and fantasy."
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"One of the very few works of genius in recent literature."
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"Among the greatest works of imaginative fiction of the twentieth century." Sunday Telegraph
"An extraordinary work pure excitement." The New York Times
"One of the great fairy-tale quests in modern literature." Time Magazine
"A remarkable book." Newsweek
"One of the very few works of genius in recent literature." New Republic
"A work of immense narrative power that can sweep the reader up and hold him enthralled for days and weeks." The Nation
"Tolkiens stories take place against a background of measureless depth . . . That background is ever-present in the creators mind and it gives Frodo and company a three-dimensional reality that is seldom found in this kind of writing." The Washington Post
"A masterful story an epic in its own waywith elements of high adventure, suspense, mystery, poetry and fantasy." Boston Herald
About the Author
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973), beloved throughout the world as the creator of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, a fellow of Pembroke College, and a fellow of Merton College until his retirement in 1959. His chief interest was the linguistic aspects of the early English written tradition, but even as he studied these classics he was creating a set of his own.