The Lord of the Rings

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" There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. "

– John Rogers

The Lord of the Rings, sometimes shortened to LOTR, is the sequel to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. He found that the setting he had built was far too interesting to abandon after a simplistic quest storyline, an experience common to modern GMs, and his publisher thought a new story in Middle-earth would be just as popular as The Hobbit.

The Books

Because of its original publication scheme (the whole thing was too big for '50s era bookbinding techniques), LOTR is commonly, though erroneously, called a trilogy - it's technically six books, just bundled into three:

  • The Fellowship of the Ring
  • The Two Towers
  • The Return of the King

You have, of course, read them. If you haven't, gtfo and read them. And don't you even dare just watch the movies. Although amazing films, they aren't the same experience.

The Story

The original First Edition nerd book

If you're a filthy normie or you've been living on a cave on Mars with your fingers in your ears, here's a brief refresher:

Check The Silmarillion and The Hobbit to go in chronological order.

Bilbo Baggins, the protagonist of The Hobbit, decides upon his 111th birthday to leave home and entrusts his magic ring to his nephew Frodo. Problem is, Gandalf the Grey, Bilbo's wizard friend, has figured out that something's off about the magic ring once he sees how Bilbo can barely bring himself to give it up; it is in fact the One Ring, an artifact created by Sauron, Lord of Mordor (and also Of The Rings), and contains a vast amount of his power. Its continued existence is a threat to the free peoples of Middle-earth and Gandalf exhorts Frodo to come to a meeting in Rivendell, house of the great elven lord Elrond, where a council of all the finest minds that can be brought together will determine what to do with it. Joined by his gardener Samwise and two fellow hobbits, Merry and Pippin, Frodo makes his way to Rivendell but not before running afoul of barrow-wights and Sauron's chief minions, the Nazgul, leading to him getting stabbed with a cursed sword by the lead Nazgul that would make him their wraith minion. Fortunately Elrond is also skilled in healing arts and magic and saves Frodo from the fate worse than death.

At the meeting, it is revealed that no mortal artifice can destroy the One Ring (demonstrated in the movie when Gimli shatters a weapon on the unassuming golden band). The only way to unmake it is to return it to the fires of Mount Doom where Sauron originally forged it. Unfortunately, Mount Doom is smack dab in the middle of Mordor and Gandalf can't ask his great eagle buddies to risk death by arrows, Fellbeasts (seriously, why does everyone forget that the bad guys could fly too?) or deadly volcanic gases to fly the ring to Mount Doom for him. Really though, stealth was the only realistic option, even if that meant hoofing it for months on end. And to make things more complicated, the ring itself is actively trying to get back into Sauron's hands, whether by alerting Sauron to its presence every time someone puts it on, outright manipulating people with promises of power, or just trying to GTFO the Bearer's person at every vaguely-plausible opportunity. Frodo agrees to bear the One Ring on its journey and a group is formed to escort him there. The party for this quest is called the Fellowship of the Ring and consists of:

  • Frodo Baggins, the Ringbearer, hobbit;
  • Samwise Gamgee, Paladin/gardener/Frodo's "best friend", hobbit;
  • Meriadoc "Merry" Brandybuck, rogue, hobbit;
  • Peregrin "Pippin" Took, bard, hobbit;
  • Gandalf the Grey, wizard (one of the Istari, essentially an Angel in human guise, and on the same tier as Saruman, Sauron, and the Balrog);
  • Aragorn, son of Arathorn, ranger, human of Númenorean descent and heir to the thrones of Arnor and Gondor;
  • Boromir, son of Denethor, fighter, human;
  • Legolas Greenleaf, son of Thranduil, archer, elf;
  • Gimli, son of Glóin, fighter, dwarf;

So, off they go. After a few detours and sidetracks, the Fellowship is split into three (even though you should never split the party): Frodo and Sam go off directly to Mordor, as Frodo's the only one who really needs to go and Sam is too much of a bro to abandon him; Gandalf duels a primordial demon to the death (both their deaths, really) since he's the only one there powerful enough to stop it, but since he's a demigod on a divine mission he gets to come back; Pippin and Merry are kidnapped by orcs but escape and wind up in Gondor, a formerly prosperous kingdom, and Rohan, a nation of Anglo-Saxons on horseback, respectively, after having adventures with Ents; Boromir dies in an ambush but has a pile of corpses to show for his troubles and gets a river funeral; Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli form a Human-Elf-Dwarf triple threat team, ostensibly to find and rescue Merry and Pippin, but end up travelling across two different kingdoms and fucking evil's shit up for the rest of the story, with Gimli as Dennis Rodman.

Despite having their own problems to contend with, somehow the members of the divided Fellowship seem to get involved with everyone else's mess and need to sort shit out. Their list of game achievements include, but are not limited to: surviving a ruined dwarf city filled with an insane number of goblins and a big motherfucking demon lord with weapons made of fire (the backstory behind this inspired the aforementioned game); foiling the plans of Gandalf's wicked wizard counterpart and his orc army; saving not one but two human nations (and the entire world for that matter); winning a whole campaign's worth of scenarios and battles; and defeating the big bad evil guy of the setting (that is currently not imprisoned off the edge of the world, his old boss had a bigger resume) with enough time to go home for tea and crumpets.

Finally, after going around the most fuck-me way possible to get into Mordor (partially due to bad directions from Gollum, who was conflicted with his addictive desire for the Ring, and an encounter with the giant spider/spider-demon hybrid Shelob), Frodo reaches Mount Doom and is about to drop the ring into the lava when he can no longer resist the ring's allure. Just as it had done at the end of the Second Age when it stopped Isildur from destroying it, the ring saved its existence from certain doom. But in an ironic twist, the ring's former owner Gollum attacks Frodo for it and bites it off of his finger, dances about happily, and falls into the lava, just as both Frodo and the ring itself had warned what would happen if Gollum betrayed him and tried to take the ring. With the ring destroyed, Sauron's power is all but gone forevermore and his armies scatter. The eagles can swoop in for MEDEVAC, getting Frodo and Sam back to civilization to rest and recover before the hobbits return to the Shire.

But wait! The Shire's under new management, Chief Sharkey. Frodo and company help the hobbits rise up against Sharkey, who turns out to be Saruman, who has committed his greatest evil yet by trying to industrialize The Shire out of spiteful revenge. Frodo allows Saruman to leave the Shire, but his put-upon minion Gríma Wormtongue slits his throat (and is then riddled with arrows, nicely tying up that loose end). After compiling his memoirs and still feeling pain from the Nazgul attack all the way at the beginning of his journey, Frodo travels to the Grey Havens and is allowed to sail into the West, where he may find relief from his pain. The story ends on a bittersweet note as Sam (arguably the story's true protagonist and MVP of the closing chapters) finally settles back home with his family, writing the final pages to the Baggins' family saga.

Final apocrypha detail the fates of the characters, notably Sam goes west following his wife's death as he was a brief ringbearer (leaving the Red Book to his daughter and son-in-law), Merry and Pippin retire after lengthy political careers and witnessing Eomer's death before dying in Gondor, Aragorn cleans up the remaining orcs and makes peace with human servants of Sauron, has a son and some daughters with Arwen and dies of old age, followed by Arwen a year later. Gimli and Legolas go west after Aragorn's death, presumably along with the final few Elves who were getting their affairs in order before leaving Middle Earth, leaving humans as the dominant power of the Fourth Age and the Dwarves apparently peacefully dying out after reclaiming lost homes.

The Expanded Canon

Besides the LOTR trilogy and the Hobbit, there are a few other books about Middle Earth. Many of them were published after Tolkien's death, but were personally edited by his son to make them available to the public. While none of these books are strictly need-to-know material, they can be thought of as great fluff books full of additional stories that flesh out the setting.

  • The Silmarillion - This was an abridged history of Middle Earth, from its creation to the War of the Ring. Here you'll find more information about Sauron and the creation of the One Ring, as well as epic tales of both elvish and human heroes from the First Age, the sociopathic Elf King Fëanor who played right into Melkor's (Middle-Earth's Satan and Sauron's boss) schemes, the rise and fall of Atlantis Numenor, the War of the Last Alliance, and other things. Many people complain about the Silmarillion being too dry and reading like a history book (which is what it is, to be fair); if you’re looking for a novel - read on.
  • Unfinished Tales - As the name implies, these are narrative scraps which Tolkien hadn't completed before his death. Christopher Tolkien published this mess of notes on his way to completing two of the Tales (which he hadn't dared, himself, at the time). This book includes longer versions of lore mentioned in the trilogy, such as Isildur's death, the origin of the Wizards, and the founding of Rohan. And draughts of those Hurin and Gondolin stories which Chris would fill in, and publish, (much) later. But not Beren.
  • The Adventures of Tom Bombadil - Poetry centered around Tom Bombadil, who is best described as Middle Earth's equivalent of a Monty Python sketch. He's actually in the first LOTR book but is so carefree and oblivious to the War of the Ring that he's not terribly important despite being implied to be powerful enough to kick Sauron in the balls an walk away without a scratch.
  • The History of Middle Earth - A 13 volume series detailing the creation of Tolkien's mythology, includes early drafts and unused stories. Here's where Beren is first floated, as a poem; and the first (maybe best) Fall of Gondolin. While the early material here isn't considered canon, some very interesting revelations appear here:

Legacy

The man himself

It's commonly accepted that the Lord of the Rings invented modern fantasy fiction, as everybody basically used it as a template for most, if not all, future stories that involved anything more than Knights, princesses, and dragons. That being said, most people tend to only pick up the surface elements of the stories without the nuances they originally came with, either to fit their own stories or because they just thought, "hey, orcs are cool, imma add them to my campaign." One example is that despite everyone basing elves on Tolkien's interpretation rather than the more pixie-like versions of previous generations, most stories' elves are universally depicted as arrogant and smug racists who were almost as commonplace as humans, whereas Tolkien hewed closer to the original mythological version of an alien, isolationist, though not outright hostile people, who seldom interacted with mortals (it helped that any racial supremacist tendencies they once had were basically stomped out of them after getting their asses kicked in the First Age, with humans giving them most of their support). On top of that, the books are pretty clear that Elven immortality isn't all sunshine and rainbows, as they are doomed to fade into wraiths unless they travel to the Undying Lands.

Even in his time, while Tolkien maintained a strong correspondence with his fans (he wrote enough letters that they essentially became a supplement on the Lord of the Rings stories), he felt that a lot of people simply didn't get his stories. Hippies declared Frodo to be an anti-establishment hero, despite Tolkien himself being strongly conservative and the story containing an explicitly pro-monarchy plot point in Aragorn's ascension. People would claim it to be an allegory of WWII and nuclear war, despite being based on his own personal experiences during WWI (he also hated allegories in general). And if he were alive today, he'd probably call the travesty that was the Hobbit trilogy (see below) the very "disneyfied" crap that he sought to avoid. Here's a list of fantasy cliches attributed to Tolkien that are actually misrepresentations of what he wrote because the authors would miss the point.

All that being said, the influence of his books can't be denied. The funny thing though, is that despite being a source of inspiration for Dungeons and Dragons (one could argue that DnD codified fantasy tropes moreso than LOTR, but that's for another time), the actual story of the Lord of the Rings wouldn't make for a great roleplaying campaign; rewards for battles are scant, the vast majority of enemies are orcs, orcs, and more orcs with a dash of goblins that's just another term for orcs, the actual fighting done by Aragorn's team is of secondary importance to Frodo's mission to destroy the ring, Sauron never appears in the flesh so there's no final boss, etc. A webcomic called "DM of the Rings" explores this concept quite humorously, as the tension between the player characters (as Aragorn's party) and the DM shows how frustrated they get when the story doesn't meet their hack-and-slash expectations.

To give a short list, Tolkien basically gave us:

  • Orcs
  • Halflings
  • Ents
  • Dark Lords
  • Half-elves, though they weren't considered a distinct species. There's only a handful of them, and they have to decide whether to have the fate of the elves (immortality, but you have to go to the Undying Lands or become a wraith) or the fate of men (mortality, but you get a super-secret afterlife that not even the Valar know about, and in the meanwhile are free from Fate and able to do what you like with the time you have). This part never seemed to catch on.
  • Elves as beautiful pointy-eared superhumans; while not explicitly codified as of yet, we also got High Elves in the Noldor and Wood Elves in the Sindar. No Dark elves yet though (unless you count those Avari guys who sat by a lake); that would be the Drow.
  • Dwarves as a proud warrior race rather than just short greedy bastards. Note that the Scottish accent wasn't tacked on until the New Line films. Not even then; the most prominent Dwarves in all six films are Gimli, played by John Rhys-Davies, and Thorin, played by Richard Armitage, who speak with their actors' native Welsh and Yorkshire accents respectively. Scottish Dwarves do exist in the franchise, but it's not mainstream - the Dwarven accents are drawn from a wide UK spectrum. Scottish Dwarves are popular in fantasy games, World of Warcraft being perhaps the most prominent example, but even the Tolkien-esque Warhammer Fantasy has Yorkshire Dwarfs (with some exceptions).
  • The Ranger archetype (historical note: actual rangers were just guys hired to keep poachers off a nobleman's land, the idea of an outdoorsy type of tracker/scout/soldier didn't exist until the 17th century.)
  • Mixed race, mixed class adventuring parties.
  • A "Three Age" structure to history, with the earlier ages being more legendary and mythological than the more mundane later ages. (Though Greek mythology had similar ideas).
  • Mithril {NOT Mythril, a name used in various other books and games to avoid copyright infringement}, a super-strong, super-light metal. Like aluminum, if aluminum were also indestructible.

The Movies

Old School

Ralph Bakshi made an animated film based off the Fellowship of The Ring and the first half of The Two Towers, which was released in 1978. The resulting film was trippy, to say the least. It has a lot of weird animation with massive amounts of rotoscoping, although it does work from time to time. It also decided to make adjustments and stay faithful to the text in the oddest ways. Many lines of dialogue were taken from the books word for word, with enough cut out so that you don't know what they are talking about and it does not come across as natural conversation; for example, Saruman declares himself Saruman of Many Colors without explaining the name change, but they decide to make a prince of Gondor (the largest and greatest civilization in Middle-earth at the time) dress like a Wagner opera viking. While it does have some good points here and there the end result both leaves you both weirded out and bored unless you are really into that era of animation.

Rankin Bass produced a Return of the King animated film in 1980, a made for TV movie which didn't have near the budget. It traded in some of the trippiness (even if it does have Orcs transforming into Coutimundis) for being more mundanely bad and getting pushed into the animation age ghetto, since again, it was made for TV not theaters in an age when censorship ran strong. They couldn't even allow for people getting hit with swords onscreen.

If you are curious about the Bakshi film and have an hour to kill, Dan Olson has a pretty good video essay on the subject

The Peter Jackson Trilogy

But those two movies are footnotes compared to the ones that you have most likely seen, those being Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. By far the most financially successful and critically acclaimed fantasy films of all time, including winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards, which generally go for historical pieces and similar, not fantasy or sci-fi. It helped bring fantasy to mainstream audiences and probably why many of you are you are here now. It has massive battles made possible by groundbreaking special effects technology. The films also have incredible amounts of attention to detail to bring the world of Middle-earth to life. While some changes were made (as was inevitable in adaptation), many of them were for the better such as developing Aragorn as a character rather than just a mythic archetype and having Gollum being accidentally thrown into Mount Doom fighting with Frodo over the One Ring. In short what happens when you get a lot of skilled passionate people together to make something they love come to life. Though apparently Tolkien's son really hated the movies for some reason (Probably for personal reasons as the original books were written in part for him. Ostensibly it was because of the films emphasis on action setpieces etc. as opposed to the more “low-key” elements of world-building etc.).

PJ followed this up with a series on The Hobbit, which we handle in its own totally unbiased and sober page here.

Amazon's Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

"The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own."

– Frodo, The Return of the King.

A few years after the questionable reception of the Hobbit trilogy, Amazon dropped the news one day that they were planning on making a LOTR series based on the Second Age. The reaction was at first cautious interest, but as more tidbits were made known, this changed to wariness, and then into seething irritation and rage. The first major warning sign was that shortly after the death of Christopher Tolkien - the one person in the Tolkien estate who was still protective of his father's work - Amazon fired their resident Tolkien consultant Tom Shippey, (a British medievalist who has written six books and several academic papers on Tolkien's work), and replaced him with a Tumblrina diversity officer from Glasgow Uni who's so-called "academic career" includes such gems like "Tolkien's work is Eurocentric and problematic". Subsequently they began to take more drastic "liberties" with the work.

Worse, it didn't come to light until way later in production that Amazon didn't even have the rights to The Silmarillion or the Unfinished Tales (the primary source material for the Second Age), instead having to depend on the Appendices from Return of the King and whatever they could pull from the original books. In other words, this show was never going to be faithful to canon from the very outset. Amazon is taking the typical corporate route of avoiding criticism by claiming or insinuating that anyone who dislikes their changes are racists. Which works great for getting a bunch of unthinking websites like Kotaku or The Mary Sue to take your side, but all it does is alienate people who were on the fence but somewhat cautious to "Why bother if they're gonna insult me for disagreeing?" and galvanize those who were already opposed.

Y'see, the new management wants to adapt and ˝modernize˝ the lore to make it inclusive and diverse or a bastardization of Tolkien's work, depending who you ask. There's black elves, black Numenoreans (here referring to their ethnicity rather than their attire when serving Sauron), black and beardless dwarf women, black AND MAORI hobbits (how in the Morgoth-cursed fuck does that even work!?), all of the above sporting glaringly modern haircuts and a whole lotta other dicking with the canon and lore including gratuitous sex and low-effort concealed attempt to turn the thing into the next Game of Thrones.

The previously established characters that do appear are barely recognizable. Arguably the worst example is Galadriel, who is changed from a magical sage to a warrior, wears Fëanor's plate armor despite her utterly hating Fëanor and she gets flirty with a human castaway despite being married to Celeborn. They even invented a new backstory for her that skips over the Simarils, Fëanor’s oath of vengeance, the Kin-slaying, and the Doom of the Noldor - all of which are important character-building moments for Galadriel - to fit their Stwong Independent Wahmen mold. Brand new characters were invented whole cloth that look out of place even not considering the above points, and major plot details have been completely changed (ie. Tar-Miriel is now the ruler of Numenor instead of Ar-Pharazon? That will take a lot of explaining away, but then we gotta have GRRRRL POWAH!). Finally, they’re mucking around with the timeline; it wouldn’t be so bad if they simply compressed the events of the Second Age into a reasonable time span since you’d have to reintroduce characters every season, but that's still a tall order since the Second Age spanned millennia. As if skipping directly from Morgoth destroying the Two Trees to the War of Wrath wasn't enough, we have Harfoots (the aforementioned black and maori hobbits), Hobbits living in the Shire and Gandalf the Grey... none of whom should be around in the Second Age.

Prior to release there was barely a teaser released despite being in production for 2+ years with literally a billion dollars spent so far. From the fact of all the skub it caused beforehand, at best it seemed a trashy cash grab and franchise milking, and at worst woke propaganda wearing the bastardized mask of a beloved franchise that would split the fandom akin to how The Last Jedi did with Star Wars. Tolkien supporters have been watching this along with Star Wars and Star Trek closely over the past decade and have been holding the line. A particular moment of hilarity and rage was the now infamous "super-fans clip", a totally-unscripted interview with supposed fans of the show (that turned out to be paid actors) who were so incredibly cringey and uninformed that Amazon ended up burying the video in the face of the overwhelming and justified backlash. This, Amazon not owning the rights to the appropriate source material and their purchase of the film and gaming rights to LOTR has lead people to believe that Amazon's true goal is not to stick to canon but reboot it entirely in their image. Upon release, audience reception of the show was quite tepid and the gap between most critic and audience reviews is vast. And yet, critics of all stripes are somewhat puzzled about it too. The series currently sits at a Metacritic rating of 71, which is atrocious for a production of this size. Common complaints from the critics side of things are dull and uninteresting charactization, the dialogue being overwritten in order to churn out as much quoteable material for trailers as possible (which, ironically, makes it feel hollow and tedious) and some odd choices regarding the story.

On the positive side, it is beautiful. Scenery, sets, creatures and costumes are all lovingly rendered (if you're blind).

MERP(S)

Over the 1980s immigration-control Iron Crown Enterprises put out the Middle-Earth Role Playing (System). Lots of sourcebooks for the setting. Generally considered good if quite crunchy (unsurprising, since it was based off Rolemaster). Sadly enough no longer in print.

Unwin did a massive map extending Middle-Earth east and south. Here we got the Stormshadow Mountain Kingdoms, Lands of the Broken Moon, Kingdoms of the Cloud Forests and other hippie bullshit that northern Californians think up after huffing the bong. Nobody considers this map to be canon.

Of course GW couldn't let such a profitable venture pass them by...

Back in the early 2000s, GW made a tabletop game based around this premise and called it The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game. Because they ran out of short titles.

In a peculiar way, this was GW coming full circle. They began by making miniatures for D&D (which as stated above, heavily borrowed from LOTR) before morphing into Warhammer.

While it let you play out your favorite scenes from the movies (in the way YOU imagined them going), it failed to light the world on fire. Likely because it lacks any of the batshit awesome insanity of their own IPs. However, GeeDubs has kept on truckin' with this line regardless of cost, eventually offloading it onto Forge World to work on in between releases for Blood Bowl and Necromunda.

The Last Ringbearer

Of course, there is always some weird thing people will do with an original work of an author. If we're to believe the fan fiction authors, all the characters of the novel were fucking each other so hard it's a wonder they were able to waddle out of Rivendell.

Some of them, for various reasons, even flip the script by changing the villains to heroes and/or the heroes to villains. Such is the nature of The Last Ringbearer, a book written by this Russian named Kirill Eskov. Its supposed to be an alternate take on LOTR, and has plot points ranging from The One Ring being a red herring, the Nazgul being enlightened philosopher scientists, and Mordor being an industrialized society torn apart by unsophisticated luddites for no reason other than elf bigotry. We hear that pirate translations exist, including into English. But we could never condone reading such trash, especially when they suck as bad as this did. LotR copyright expires 2043 which may be just long enough for this abortion of a "book" to fall into the pages of obscurity.

The Last Ringbearer was officially published in the legal vacuum that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, which also allowed assorted other unauthorized revisions and sequels to be published. Making it either a cash-grab or an attempt to make LOTR-based Soviet propaganda. Among those are the Ring of Darkness by Nick Perumov (a Fourth Age story where the Big Bad Evil Guy collects the rings of the Nazgul to become a great conqueror, and a Hobbit fighter clad in mithril armor endeavors to stop him) and the Black Book of Arda by Natalia Vasilieva (an alternate take on the Silmarillion where the original evil Melkor is a nice guy).

... so. How about An Archive Of Our Own.

Gallery

  • How the heck did a little hobbit beat this?

    How the heck did a little hobbit beat this?

  • Actually not a scene from the books. To be fair, though, Shadow of Mordor showed us what Mordor looks like in the daytime.

    Actually not a scene from the books. To be fair, though, Shadow of Mordor showed us what Mordor looks like in the daytime.

  • Knowing is half the battle. The other half is rings.

    Knowing is half the battle. The other half is rings.

See also

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