Book: The Fellowship of the Ring
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
Series: Book #1 of The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
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 into the hands of Bilbo Baggins, as told in The Hobbit.
In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.
It is a daunting thing to write a review of “The Lord of the Rings”. It is a title that hardly anyone is unfamiliar with, and I hope that this amateurish attempt will not meet with disapproval from Tolkien fans. I put off reading it for a long time because my first encounter with epic fantasy was the movies. Even now that I think about it, it was my first encounter with the genre altogether. I remember carefree weekends watching all parts of the movie in one day and never getting bored, I could literally watch it 100 more times.
Now I can proudly say that I have finished the first part “The Fellowship of the Ring”.
I wish I could escape the movie comparison and just talk about the book, but I can not. The movie is very well done and although I found inconsistencies, they did not bother me much.
We learn much about the history of the “Ring” in the book and there are many details about the peoples who inhabit Middle-Earth. “The Fellowship of the Ring” is very descriptive and reads slowly. The prolog had me laughing with its 20 pages of history and descriptions of all the Hobbit clans. There are few battles in the book and I missed the excitement they were able to achieve in the movie.
Why Bilbo is Torbins and not Baggins, I cannot answer. But as a character I like him better in the book. Here he is determined and single-minded, definitely not as dependent on Sam as he seems to me in the movie.
Peregrin Took and Meriadoc Brandybuck, the mischievous hobbits, are actually not that reckless and pleasantly surprised me with their resourcefulness.
