Why walk all that fucking way through orc infested lands when you could have flown across it on sodding eagles and dive-bombed Frodo into mount doom?īy the way I also play Lord of the Rings Online and after 4 years play we've still only got as far as Lothlorien, ie end of Vol 1!! Later this year we get Isengard. so you spend half a book building up the "Its SO EVIL that none can withstand it!" and then introduce a character almost immediately it has NO EFFECT on! Bang, narrative tension utterly destroyed.įinally. The pointless distractions of "and then they came to xyz which in elvish was named abc, the Numenrorians called 123 and the dwarfs called "gimmemorebeer"" YAWN!! yes I know he was a professor of Medieval English etc but give me a sodding break!Īs for Tom Bombadil, I remember hearing the BBC radio adaptation when it first came out in the early 80s while at University and we all rejoiced that they had skipped Tom Bombadil! What a twat! Its a pointless diversion in the book AND its a plot destroyer. The blandness of the descriptive passages gets tedious - everything "good" is "silvery" or "golden", everything bad is "black" and "dark".
The very device of splitting the story into two sections then following each section exclusively as in Tow towers and Return of the King is deeply annoying. There is very little attempt at pacing, proper narrative structure and dramatic tension. Tolkien wrote them in the way that sagas were written 500 years ago.
I read them again when the first movie came out and it reminded me just how bad they are. I've read and re-read them many times when I was younger and then put them aside for decently written books.