The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship… free

Prior to that, I read the entire trilogy about a dozen times, but that was back in my youth in the 60s and 70s, when I re-read it every summer (yeah, yeah, go ahead and mock me, I'd do the same).

Took several months, reading a handful of pages each night. The last time I 'read' The Fellowship of the Ring, I read it out loud to my daughter at bed time. There's very little in the way of boy-girl romance however and no sex so readers who like plenty of that in their fiction may want to look elsewhere. In short, you can't go wrong with this series, particularly if you like stories about quests or knightly adventures. sometimes I've cringed in sympathetic embarrassment as a narrator, competent in other respects, attempted to sing or chant his/her way through a song with dismal results). Not only is he a superb narrator, but he can sing which is important in a work with such an emphasis on songs and music (not always the case. Rob Inglis is able to do the series full justice. As Norman Cantor has remarked, however, it is the reading public that determines whether a work is great or not and by that standard The Lord of the Rings is now a classic. When I was in college, stating that The Lord of the Rings was a great work of fiction elicited (from my English professors) stares of incomprehension from some and mild contempt from others. Tolkien has a lot to answer for (tongue-in-cheek) but his genius speaks for itself and is recognized today. More than once, I have read some particularly dreadful specimen of the same and thought to myself that J.R.R. Although the fantasy genre predates The Lord of the Rings, it is no exaggeration to say that Tolkien's books inspired the tsunami of fantasy fiction which is with us even today. I read this book over 40 years ago and it has headed up (together with the others in the trilogy) my list of books to be stranded on a desert island with ever since. A daunting task lies ahead for Frodo when he becomes the Ringbearer - to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom where it was forged.This book marks the beginning of Frodo the Hobbit's quest to resolve the question of the Ring of Power which hangs over the fate of Middle Earth like a menacing cloud. But fate has placed it in the hands of a young Hobbit named Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood), who inherits the Ring and steps into legend. Powerful forces are unrelenting in their search for it. The future of civilization rests in the fate of the One Ring, which has been lost for centuries.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship… free