J.R.R. Tolkien

[Azrael]

I first found this on a bookshelf in my best friend's home. His mother let me borrow it, and I literally couldn't put the book down. When I finished the series, it was if I had experienced the loss of good friends. I was devastated.

[Ryan]

Have they novelised the movie? That Peter Jackson knows a money spinner when he sees one.

[Marc-André]

I read it after the LotR trilogy, The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth. I was shocked it was the same author who wrote the Hobbit. The prose felt old and dated. It wasn't nearly has good as the others.

It isn't something I would recommend, unless the person is a diehard Tolkien/LotR fan.

[Matt]

I've just finished reading this to my eight year old. I started off reading it to both my children, but my eldest (9) got bored after chapter one, and wasn't interested in the rest of the book, apart from the fight with Smaug. My youngest remained keen for me to keep reading each chapter, which I was pleasantly surprised by.

I've just started reading The Fellowship of the Ring, and I found it a lot easier, linguistically, than The Hobbit, which surprised me, because I'd always considered The Hobbit to be more like a children's story. The prose does feel old, and I found myself constantly tripping over the language, which I can't remember doing when I read it the first time, thirty odd years ago. Mind you, that's probably because I was reading it out loud this time around.

Still the language in FotR seems less taxing on the tongue, though it is a slow start. I'll be interested to see if it keeps my eight year old's interest.

[Yvonne]

the hobbit and the lotr have and always will be favorites of mine. I can pick up any of them at any time, flip to any page and instantly know both what's going on and be completely immersed in the story. I need to do a full reread of all of these soon.

[Bruce]

I think I first read the Hobbit and LoTR about thirty years ago, and I still distinctly remember that I couldn't put them down. I read from when I got up in the morning until I went to bed at night (it was summer vacation). I finished them all in a matter of days.

[Saurabh]

I read LOTR when two towers came out in theatres...it was the greatest thing i ever read...and it still is after 15 yrs...i was really sad after the book ended...then i found hobbit and finally silmarillion...but lotr is still the best...even now when i feel down or something i pick it up and start reading from whatever page i like...its simply amaxing

[Trike]

I like The Hobbit better than LotR, except for the giant spider part. It's not arachnophobia, I just thought a giant talking spider was dumb. Since his kids were the target audience that's probably why Shelob is there, but even 13-year-old me wasn't impressed.

But overall, yeah, I'm all about Hobbitses in their original form.

[Micah]

Trike wrote: "I like The Hobbit better than LotR, except for the giant spider part."

Tolkien wrote it as and while he was telling the story to his kids. He once said that at different points in each of his kids' childhood the spider part was their favorite. So I think those parts are really more geared toward a particular developmental age and won't work as well once you're past that.

Because it was written first, The Hobbit is a record of his early development of the Middle Earth sagas. As such, it's never going to quite fit into the larger body of work created after the world had been fleshed out. That and of course that it's the only one of those works geared toward children. His publisher wanted a sequel to it, expecting more hobbit adventures in a similar vein. But Tolkien couldn't help expanding on the idea, thank God. As such, I do recommend people read this first. Reading it after much of his other more mythological/epic work would seem kind of odd.

[Azrael]

Micah wrote: "Trike wrote: "I like The Hobbit better than LotR, except for the giant spider part."

Tolkien wrote it as and while he was telling the story to his kids. He once said that at different points in ea..."

Very informative :-) Thank you!

[David]

Micah wrote: "As such, it's never going to quite fit into the larger body of work created after the world had been fleshed out."

I was surprised to learn a while back that after writing LotR, he went and retconned stuff into The Hobbit to make it more consistent with LotR. Mostly related to Gollum and the ring.

[Raymond]

I read "The Hobbit" after reading the LOTR's and found it rather childish. The reason for this was simply that it was a story he was telling to his son Christopher (who was very young). It was published in 1939 (I think) When The LOTR's came together it was then the late fifties or early sixties and so his son was much older (I think someone mentioned this earlier) and so the book aged with him. No longer were dwarves, worms and trolls in fashion but epic battle scenes and classic grandeur. When you think about them from an authors point of view these books are actually terrible, there is no cohesion, they jump about all over the place and really should not have been very good. Yet somehow they were. I loved them from beginning to end but only a language professor would write a book in that way. No writer would be guilty of such a crime.

[Philip]

The Hobbit was first published in England in 1937. "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that sentence down on a blank piece of paper while he marking examination papers. After writing it, he wanted to know what hobbits were. So he invented a story about them. That sentence became the first line in his book, The Hobbit. The riddle game between Gollum and Bilbo Baggins and the conversation between Bilbo Baggins and the dragon, Smaug, remain my favourite parts of the book. In his essay On Fairy Stories, part of his book, Tree and Leaf, J.R.R. Tolkien points out that fairy stories are for adults as much as they are for children. The Hobbit can be enjoyed by adults and children alike. The Lord of the Rings, however, was not written for children. I do not think children would want to read or listen to the chapter called The Council of Elrond, for example, the debate would leave them wanting all the talk to end. It is a work of fantasy literature, but that does not mean it is for children. I read both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for the first time when I was sixteen, a good age to read both books, I think.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

It's interesting, too, because Tolkien wrote a lot of it (LoTR, not the Hobbit!) while his son was at war, so a lot of the tone changes and the specific focuses happened because he'd send chapters to his son in the trenches, who would then give feedback and say what he liked. So the trilogy is part epic story, part father's prayer for strength and faith for his child, part gift to the war effort from a former soldier turned codebreaker. That explains some of the tangents and skips for me at least :)

[Saurabh]

Allison wrote: "It's interesting, too, because Tolkien wrote a lot of it (LoTR, not the Hobbit!) while his son was at war, so a lot of the tone changes and the specific focuses happened because he'd send chapters ..."
That's really interesting. And it explains why LOTR gets quite dark sometimes while at others it becomes lighter in tone...

[Matt]

Philip wrote: "I do not think children would want to read or listen to the chapter called The Council of Elrond, for example, the debate would leave them wanting all the talk to end. ..."

Ha ha! I distinctly remember reading LotR in my very early teens, and I did indeed skip over that chapter because of all the talking. (naughty reader)

Allison wrote: "It's interesting, too, because Tolkien wrote a lot of it (LoTR, not the Hobbit!) while his son was at war, so a lot of the tone changes and the specific focuses happened because he'd send chapters to his son in the trenches ..."

Even though Tolkien has denied that there are any direct parallels between LotR and the Second World war, both that, and his own time serving in the First World War must have influenced his writing. The idea of the 'mechanisation' of society and war crops up a couple of times.
One bit that stands out is when Saruman gathers orcs about him for war and 'industrialises' Isengard, chopping down trees to fuel the war effort, and turning the once green valley into a moody, flooded morass.
Sam also has visions of the Shire being ruined by similar industrialisation, and indeed, when the hobbits return, they find that Saruman has been at work in that green and pleasant land.

[Saurabh]

Matt wrote: "Philip wrote: "I do not think children would want to read or listen to the chapter called The Council of Elrond, for example, the debate would leave them wanting all the talk to end. ..."

Ha ha! I..."

Yeah...the whole Saruman stuff seemed so similar to a real war situation in a normal world where natural resources are destroyed to fuel the war effort...it definitely seems to indicate that there was a lot going on in Tolkein's mind at that time and not just a simple fantasy story

[Margaret]

A good book on this: Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth by John Garth.

[Trike]

Peter Graham famously said, "The golden age of Science Fiction is 12," and it sounds like a lot of us discovered Tolkien around that age.

As I mentioned, I was 13 when I first read the books (bedridden due to severe tonsillitis). How old were you guys?

[Bruce]

I was between sixth and seventh grade, so I must have been 12. I was chair-ridden with Hobbititus.

[Ryan]

I read the Hobbit when I was about 10 - it was the same copy my mum read as a child, which is pretty cool. I tried to read LotR at about the same time and couldn't. I tried again right before the first movie came out and just couldn't get past Tom Bombadil. I finally managed to read the trilogy in about 2012. I was in my mid 30s by then.

[Raymond]

I suspect that I was around twelve or thirteen but really cannot say with any surety. Strangely one thing that I can remember is that after reading the first book of LOTR that I thought Alan Garner and Micheal Moorcock were far superior writers. Limited experience, of course, plays a part in that observation of the time.

[Margaret]

I've been known to say that discovering The Lord of the Rings was the only good thing that happened to me the year I was thirteen.* I had read The Hobbit previously, and enjoyed it, but LotR bowled me over so completely that for a while I thought I could never read anything else ever again, because nothing else could be as good. (And I was a voracious reader.) I did eventually get over that particular stile, but I've retained a deep love of all of Tolkien's works.

* That would be 1969, if you're curious.

[Trike]

Margaret wrote: "* That would be 1969, if you're curious. "

Happy 39th birthday!

[Shomeret]

I read LOTR when I was 12 and then read it every summer until I went away to college when I was 18. My mother had read it first as an adult and was a huge fan. I wasn't as huge a fan, but I wanted something that I knew was a good read for those endless summer days on the beach.

[Chris]

Yes, I was about 10 or 11 when I first read The Hobbit (and the LotR series, for that matter). That was right around the time the Rankin & Bass animated movie came out, which actually caused a little mini-craze and brought attention to the book. Whatever, it helped me discover it, so I'll take it :)

[Micah]

Matt wrote: "Even though Tolkien has denied that there are any direct parallels between LotR and the Second World war, both that, and his own time serving in the First World War must have influenced his writing..."

I think what he vehemently denied was that his story was not an allegory to the war:

"The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dur would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves."
~J.R.R. Tolkien, Foreward to The Lord of the Rings.

In other writing he has said that his experiences in WWI did influence The Hobbit, and thereby LotR, especially in the character, simplicity, and unexpected hardiness of Hobbits themselves, which he said he modeled off the common British soldiers in the trenches who bore up to seemingly impossibly harsh conditions.

Also, his anti-mechanization stance was based on what he had seen in his beloved rural England, as well as (I'm sure) the devastation he experienced in WWI.

[Micah]

I think I was about 10 or 11 when I first tried to read The Hobbit. Got it from the library and for some reason couldn't get past the first page or two ... I kept re-reading the same thing and wasn't able to get captivated enough to continue.

It wasn't until I was 15 or 16 that I finally read it all the way through, followed immediately by LotR. I know I was that age because it was around the time that Mike Oldfield released his album Hergest Ridge, which has remained my theme music to these books.

[Silvana]

I was 22 when I first read The Hobbit. Yes not long after the LoTR movies (I am one of those people who got introduced to Tolkien by Peter Jackson). It did not really make a big impression (except for The Riddle in the Dark part) maybe because I read a translated version (the songs become annoying) and I read it either after or at the same time as The Silmarillion.

[Trike]

Micah wrote: "Also, his anti-mechanization stance was based on what he had seen in his beloved rural England, as well as (I'm sure) the devastation he experienced in WWI. "

A lot of people these days either don't know (because they're too young) or don't remember (because memory is fallible), but pollution used to be horrendous in the West before we enacted various environmental protection laws.

Fortunately we now have China to remind us of how horrible it can be. Unfortunately for the Chinese people themselves.

That the dragon with all the gold in The Hobbit is named Smaug is not an accident. The word "smog" (smoke + fog) was coined in the UK a little over a century ago for the peculiar clouds that enveloped London in particular but other cities as well. Nowadays we have romantic notions of "London Fog" but the reality is that the miasma was so thick and loaded with airborne pollution (primarily from coal smoke) that it literally killed people where they stood.

To clear the air, literally, was an uphill battle against rich coal tycoons. The battle against their wealth comprised the better part of 65 years in England and still continues to this day. Tolkien witnessed the worst of it. So he created the thinly-veiled Smaug, who is hoarding all the gold, as an attack against those kinds of people, who were not only polluting the major cities but destroying the countryside in a quest to become ever richer.

For anyone with Netflix, the excellent series The Crown about Queen Elizabeth's early years devotes an entire episode to an especially nasty time of London Smog. It's simplified and fictionalized, of course, but the devastating impact of the event was real. This was not an isolated incident, either, merely the one most people remarked on and remember.

In America we have a similar incident in Cleveland, Ohio, where the Cuyahoga river caught on fire because of all the oil and other flammable liquids dumped into it. But the reality is that the river caught fire dozens of times and the one we remember was merely the last such instance. Ironically, it wasn't even the worst one.

I'm old enough to remember the smog pollution in the 1970s which rivaled anything you see coming out of China these days. The smog was so thick that planes couldn't land, and it was so corrosive it would eat paint right off of cars as if someone poured paint thinner on them. Those are exactly the kind of conditions Tolkien saw with the London Smog events, and the clear-cutting and strip-mining of his boyhood home filled him with despair and anger.

I'm not a fan of the Jackson films, but that stuff about Mordor is spot on.

[colleen the convivial curmudgeon]

My first exposure to The Hobbit was from those old cartoons. My dad showed me that when I was a kid, and I remember it and watching it multiple times - but I never saw the Lord of the Rings one, just the Hobbit.

I didn't read the Hobbit until high school - I believe my junior year, which would've made me 15 or 16.

I didn't read LotR until before the movies came out, because I wanted to read them first.

I prefer the Hobbit, hands down. I find the story of LotR to be good, but the writing to be boring and the story structure annoying (i.e. one whole 'book' following Sam and Frodo and then another 'book' following the others during the same time period. One of the vast improvements that movies made was the intertwine the storylines.)

[Trike]

Age of Discovery

8 - 1
10/11 - 1
12 - 2
13 - 2
15/16 - 3
22 - 1
Mid-30s - 1

ETA Allison and David.

[Allison, Fairy Mod-mother]

Trike wrote: "Age of Discovery

10/11 - 1
12 - 1
13 - 2
15/16 - 3
22 - 1
Mid-30s - 1"

Pls to add me at 12 I think. I (read: my mom) stenciled The Riddle of Strider around the top of my room when I redid it in 8th grade, and it had been my favorite for a year before that!

Oh yeah. Be jealous. I was the coolest nerd. Full stop.

[David]

My mom read The Hobbit to my sister and I when I was 8. We later moved on to LotR but didn't finish it at the time. I tried reading LotR myself when my mom stopped reading it to us, but I mostly ended up just poring over the maps and appendices for hours on end.

I don't actually remember when I actually completed LotR.

[Raymond]

"Hergest Ridge." ah the memories. I will have to look that one out.
There is a new version of Ommadon coming out soon.

[Dj]

Marc-André wrote: "I read it after the LotR trilogy, The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth. I was shocked it was the same author who wrote the Hobbit. The prose fel..."

The later books were written from his notes, not by his own hand. His Son Christopher, found a way to make money on his fathers legacy.

[MARTIN]

Philip wrote: "The Hobbit was first published in England in 1937. "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that sentence down on a blank piece of paper while he marking examination pap..."
I read "The Hobbit" when I was about 8 or 9, and a couple years later read the LotR trilogy. The Council of Elrond indeed taxed my attention span. I have since re-read them all several times. "The Hobbit" appeals to the child in me -- which never has gone away -- and I still consider it one of the best books (for me) ever! LotR is much more grand and "adult", but I enjoy them as much as I do "The Hobbit". And The Council of Elrond became much more pleasant to read as I matured.