If you don’t like The Lord of the Rings, you might hate my blog over the next couple of months because it’s about to get all Gollum up in here for a while.
The Lord of the Rings Read-Along begins today!
Orcs, hobbit feet, angry dwarves, beautiful, mysterious elves—that’s what we’ll be talking about around here. Don’t worry, if you truly don’t like The Lord of the Rings, I’ll still have normal bookish posts unrelated to the novel.
I also want to open the blog up for some guest posts during this period. So touch base with me at [email protected] if you might be interested. I’m thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-5 guest posts, and I already have one lined up, so I’ll only be selecting a few.
Anyway, enough about all that. Let’s take a brief, completely underwhelming look at a few facts about LOTR and its author, J.R.R. Tolkien.
- Tolkien wrote LOTR in stages between 1937 and 1949.
- It is the second best-selling novel ever, with more than 150 million copies sold. Only A Tale of Two Cities has sold more.
- The novel is often thought of as a trilogy, but Tolkien wrote it as one story—the sequel to The Hobbit.
- The original manuscripts of the book, totaling 9,250 pages, are housed at Marquette University in the J.R.R. Tolkien Collection.
- Unless you’ve lived in a hobbit hole (get it??), you’re well aware of the blockbuster film trilogy about the LOTR, released between 2001 and 2003. The films won 11 Oscars.
- Tolkien admitted to the work being influenced by his Catholic upbringing. He said, “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”
Seriously guys, I could write hundreds of hundreds of bullet points about all the cool facts about LOTR. This might be one of the easiest novels I’ve read to find material for blog posts. So much out there.
Anyway, let’s start reading.
My next post about the novel will be on Tuesday, and we’ll talk about some of the novel’s covers over the years.
