It's the Lord of the Rings
4 stars
Well worth a read
The obvious criticisms of Tolkein are that he has political ideas that are prone to fascism - the right of Kings, the romance of Anglo-Saxon/Nordic nationalism etc. I don't think that this is helped by the fact that the world is very two-dimensional and the whole story is framed in a context of Good vs Evil. Especially working class characters in this book seem to "know their place" which is a bit dull, and the men of Harad and Rhûn are often portrayed as self-evidently inferior to the men of the West.
Having said that those aspects could have been so much more, all of the rest of it is just an excuse anyway to bring a handful of Hobbits and their companions halfway across a world which is rich in language, history and culture - to have these wholesome halflings make relationships with the Great …
Well worth a read
The obvious criticisms of Tolkein are that he has political ideas that are prone to fascism - the right of Kings, the romance of Anglo-Saxon/Nordic nationalism etc. I don't think that this is helped by the fact that the world is very two-dimensional and the whole story is framed in a context of Good vs Evil. Especially working class characters in this book seem to "know their place" which is a bit dull, and the men of Harad and Rhûn are often portrayed as self-evidently inferior to the men of the West.
Having said that those aspects could have been so much more, all of the rest of it is just an excuse anyway to bring a handful of Hobbits and their companions halfway across a world which is rich in language, history and culture - to have these wholesome halflings make relationships with the Great and the Terrible and continually astound everyone with the surprising and hidden Greatness of their kindness and loyalty to living things, to bounce into everything. The sheer number of conversations that are basically "you are foreign to me and I to you and let us go over why we're foreign to each other" and honestly they never get old. The languages included are incredible and it's such a joy to have access to an incredible linguists experience through the languages and the world he created (borrowing a lot of things from the ancient languages he studied)
People have been reading this for almost a hundred years and they'll be reading it for at least a hundred more
