The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings #1) by J.R.R. Tolkien

 

Date finished: 2 March 2014

As a huge fan of the movies, I wanted to enjoy this more than I actually did. The movies are incredible. But the book is not. For someone who is in this fandom and enjoyed The Hobbit, it's hard for me to say this, but: Tolkien just wasn't that great an author. (I'm not saying he wasn't good at writing poems, but he just wasn't very good at writing this novel.) When I first started the book, I loved it. I was in awe of Tolkien's amazing world-building and his writing style. Somewhere along the way, all of that changed.

For a start, his style is so damn hard to read! For the readalong we only read a few chapters each week, but if I were reading it on my own, I couldn't manage much more than that. I read The Council of Elrond in three days, that's how long it took. I have read all of Jane Austen's works and I didn't struggle with them as much as I struggled with this. I don't know how people read the books over and over again - once was hard enough! I'm still going ahead and finishing the trilogy for the Tolkien Readalong, but I won't be reading it again.

Secondly, there are so many unnecessary characters and plot arcs. Don't get me wrong, I love all the members of the fellowship, but then there are the characters we only see once who don't add anything to the plot. Then, there are the unnecessary minor plot points. So many of these just slowed down the plot and made the introductory part too long. A good writer doesn't waste a single word. Tolkien wastes whole characters, chapters, and minor events. I love Middle-earth, but if I had edited Lord of the Rings it would have been so much shorter and more concise. Every word, scene, and character would matter.

Now, characters. There really aren't many relatable characters in Fellowship of the Ring at all. In fact, I can't think of any except a couple of the Hobbits. You get Galadriel and Aragorn talking about themselves in the third person, and no-one in real life does that. I don't care if they're not your average human - they still don't act like proper people. That's not very good, is it, Tolkien? Readers need to be able to relate to the characters and care about them, if they want to enjoy the book.

Then, there's the fact that although the setting is wonderful and intriguing and magical and all that, the story itself is quite boring. It's only when the Hobbits and Strider/Aragorn (I prefer the name Strider for some reason) start making their way towards Rivendell that things get exciting. And that's 250 pages into the book. It's not exactly a thriller.

As for a recommendation, I'm not sure who I would recommend this to. There are fantasy books out there that are a hundred times better than Fellowship of the Ring. I, for one, quite like Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle, Tamora Pierce's Tortall books, Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn Chronicles and LegendSong Series,  and Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices series. Read those instead. Don't waste your time reading The Lord of the Rings when the movies are far superior.