|
|
 |
|
The Lord
of the Rings
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Hobbits
and wizards and Sauron--oh, my! Mild-mannered Oxford scholar
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien had little inkling when he published The
Hobbit; Or, There and Back Again
in 1937 that, once hobbits were unleashed upon the world, there would
be no turning back. Hobbits are, of course, small, furry creatures who
love nothing better than a leisurely life quite free from adventure.
But in that first novel and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the hobbits
Bilbo and Frodo and their elfish friends get swept up into a mighty
conflict with the dragon Smaug, the dark lord Sauron (who owes much to
proud Satan in Paradise Lost),
the monstrous Gollum, the Cracks of Doom, and the awful power of the
magical Ring. The characters-- good and evil are
recognizably human, and the realism is deepened by the magnificent
detail of the vast parallel world Tolkien devised, inspired partly by
his influential Anglo-Saxon scholarship and his Christian beliefs. (He
disapproved of the relative sparseness of detail in the comparable
allegorical fantasy his friend C.S. Lewis dreamed up in The
Chronicles of Narnia,
though he knew Lewis had spun a page-turning yarn.) It has been
estimated that one-tenth of all paperbacks sold can trace their
ancestry to J.R.R. Tolkien. But even if we had never gotten Robert
Jordan's The Path of Daggers
and the whole fantasy genre Tolkien inadvertently created by bringing
the hobbits so richly to life, Tolkien's epic about the Ring would have
left our world enhanced by enchantment. |
|
|
|
|
 |
