Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
alt title(s): Lord Of The Rings 
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the Darkness bind them.
With those words, Sauron forged the One Ring, the vessel of his power and the pivot on which the fate of Middle-earth would turn for five thousand years — until the most unlikely of heroes did the one thing Sauron could never have imagined, and brought his dark tower tumbling down.
The story was originally intended as a shorter sequel to The Hobbit, but as its author famously remarked, "the tale grew in the telling." The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien is too well-known, and too complex, to be summarised in full, but in brief, Frodo Baggins, one of the hobbit gentry, learns that the magical trinket he inherited from his uncle Bilbo is actually the One Ring, Sauron's masterpiece. While it exists, Sauron cannot truly be destroyed; should Sauron ever regain it, ultimate victory will be his.
Frodo, his cousins Merry and Pippin, and his gardener Sam take the Ring to the Elves of Rivendell, where the elven-lord Elrond fills in the rest of the Back Story. There it was decided that the Ring cannot be kept there since Sauron would stop at nothing to reclaim it and its malignant influence would threaten to corrupt all who would attempt to guard it and especially those who would attempt to wield it. However, it was decided that one thing Sauron would not expect would be for his enemies to destroy it in the only way possible: in the fiery bowels of Mount Doom in the Land of Mordor, the Dark Lord's province.
The hobbits are joined by five more characters, that represent the races of Middle-earth: Legolas, an elven archer from Mirkwood; Gimli son of Glóin, a dwarf of Erebor; Aragorn, a Ranger of Eriador and heir to the throne of the human kingdom of Gondor; Boromir, heir to the Steward of Gondor; and the wizard, Gandalf the Grey.
Before long, Gandalf is lost in combat against an ancient evil, leaving the Fellowship following Aragorn. When Boromir succumbs to the lure of the Ring, Frodo decides to complete the quest alone. Sam manages to catch up with him, but the others are unable to, due to being embroiled in a battle with the minions of Saruman, the first among wizards — and traitor to the forces of good. Boromir dies a Karmic Death.
Guided by Gollum, a previous victim of the Ring, Frodo and Sam sneak into Mordor, Sauron's realm, making their way towards the only place where the Ring can be destroyed: the volcanic fire in which it was originally created. Meanwhile, Gandalf has returned from the dead as Gandalf the White and leads Aragorn and the Fellowship in a series of epic battles which keep Sauron distracted from the real threat until it's too late.
When the hobbits return home, they find that Saruman has taken over their homeland, but after they defeat his minions, Saruman is killed by his Renfield, Gríma.
There have been several adaptations. Among them:
In addition, there has been a BBC radio adaptation, two Tabletop RPGs set in Middle-earth, and several video games, from early text adventures to the latest Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.
The first attempt to make a screen version was made in 1958 by a certain Zimmerman, who wrote a film script for “The Lord of the Rings”. J.R.R. Tolkien looked through it and in his letter to Forrest Ackerman heavily criticized this feeble attempt. It turned out that the script didn’t reflect many of Tolkien’s thoughts and some of the characters lost their appeal.
There was another aborted attempt by John Boorman to adapt the books in the 70's. It would've been live action and the notes from it might have suggested that adaptation might have looked like Zardoz. The Harvard Lampoon published a parody titled Bored Of The Rings in 1969, which manages to cover the entire journey in under 200 pages.
The majority of tropes used in LotR are well-explained, unlike in the majority of its imitators. Mordor, for example, has large fertile areas, and the Ring is more than just a convenient MacGuffin — its effects matter too much for that. This is largely due to the immensely elaborated Back Story and his life-defining experiences in The Great War.
There were, though, some tropes JRR Tolkien couldn't justify to his satisfaction. He spent years trying to decide how orcs could be Always Chaotic Evil without being born evil or soulless (options he didn't think Morgoth, their corrupter, had the power to achieve), but never found any answer he liked. It was philosophical niggles like this that stopped him publishing the The Silmarillion in his lifetime. His son Christopher did it anyway.
Provides Examples Of:
|
|
