posted
Okay, so I'm reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time. It's something I've been meaning to read for a decade now, and I've finally gotten started on it. I haven't seen any of the movies, because I figured that I should have read the books at least once before I watch the movies. So I'm reading them now.
But the awful truth is that I am just . . . so . . . bored. I'm over a hundred pages into the first book, and so far not a single thing has happened that I give a damn about. Right now Frodo and his buddies are visiting with some guy named Tom Bombadil. Tom bored me so much that I set the book down mid-chapter (which I never do), and have now realized, weeks later, that I haven't picked it up since.
Now, I loved The Hobbit. I've read it three or four times, the first time back when I was a young adolescent. I assumed that now that I'm more grown up, I'd enjoy a more grown-up Tolkien work. It's not that I crave action and get impatient when nothing's happening. The proof of that is that I read Orson Scott Card. He can have long segments when nothing much is happening, and I can still be absolutely riveted because I care so much about the characters. So far, there's no one in this book that I care about except Bilbo, and he seems to have pretty well decided that he's not going to be a part of it.
Everyone raves about how brilliant this trilogy is, and it seems everyone who's read it at all has read it multiple times and can remember every detail and has their own unique interpretation of What It All Means. Me, I'm still waiting for it to start getting even remotely interesting. Posts: 1814 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
Well, just to give me a better idea of whether or not you'll like it down the road, what fiction do you enjoy? Who would you say your five or ten favorite authors are? Which books of theirs do you like best?
posted
I couldn't get through tolkein the first couple of times either.
Read it through once and didn't pick it up again for years. He gets so bogged down in his own details. Not unlike Robert Jordan though Jordans's taken the same art to its utmost extreme. The plot moves much quicker in the second two books to me. I wouldn't feel guilty at all.
When I finally got around to reading it again it was much better, I admit I skim a lot of the poetry and some of the dullest parts though. BUt then I knew *where* to skim and where to resume.
posted
Oh, yeah, don't feel guilty. What's the point of feeling guilty about your feelings about a work of art? I mean, there are plenty of revered pieces of art out there that don't do anything for me, I'm sure, and I'm not loosing any sleep over that fact.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
I did not care the the LOTR books. I found them long and boring. I can usually finish a book that I like in a day or two-- it took me months to get through these books. This was one of the rare occasions when I actually liked the movies better than the books. I just can't believe that when these books originally came out they were considered young adult books.
Posts: 295 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
Verily, I had the same problem with the books. I drudged through about half of the first one and finallly decided it wasn't worth it to finish.
However, the movies are wonderful! Absolutely beautiful! In fact, I think part of what I found so boring about Tolkien is that he spent so much time describing things. But the movie fixes that by just letting you see the things- and it is a stunning sight!
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
At any rate, it's kind of comforting to see that I'm not the only one. Lately it seems like LOTR is such a basic part of our culture that being an American and not knowing the story is like being an ancient Greek and not knowing who Odysseus was and why everyone makes such a big deal about his boat trip. Used to be, only fantasy geeks cared about Tolkien. Now that the movies are out, it's part of our heritage. Posts: 1814 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
The Lord of the Rings is the one and only film-adapted book I've seen where I liked the film better. The movie does not meander off into little subplots that do not move the epic along; it does not rely on your wanting to read Elvish, and being willing to check the appendix for every character in a half-page poem that actually carries plot importance; while it gives you the sense that you are seeing the culmination of events with a deep history, it does not rely on that history for its impact.
The fact is, Tolkien is incredibly, vastly, enormously overrated. Because he was the first to write modern fantasy; because he was an academic and wrote works that appeal to academics; and because these things have a momentum of their own, he has a reputation head and shoulders above any other fantasy author, and it is totally undeserved. His characters are (apparently intentionally) one-dimensional. He cannot handle women. The grand scope of his wars and battles are essentially irrelevant to the simple Quest motif of destroying the Ring, though this is not necessarily noticeable since the battle scenes are actually pretty good, if you like saga-inspired prose, and I do. (Incidentally, this is the problem with making LOTR games : You can easily make a wargame to handle all the cool battles and stuff, but since the game is decided by whether Frodo drops the Ring into the Chasm of Doom, the battles are essentially fluff decisionmaking.)
That said : Yes, the books do improve very considerably. Tom Bombadil is an egregious mistake, but once you get past him, there are no further major distractions. (There's a reason the film dropped the old bugger). You might want to skip ahead to the COuncil of Elrond, or so.
I think part of the touble is that Tolkien was breaking new ground. He thought he was writing children's fiction, that no adult could possibly be interested in a fantasy world. (This is especially noticeable at the start of The Hobbit, where the imagery is quite cutesy - case in point, Bilbo running off down the road "without even a handkerchief.") So he borrowed from the boys' fiction of his time, where stuff like Tom Bombadil was happening all the time - isolated episodes, exciting in themselves, but contributing nothing to the plot, often because there wasn't one. As he goes along and hits his stride, however, he forgets that nobody adult could possibly be interested in this, and starts writing for himself - and Tolkien definitely is an adult, with epic tastes. Not cutesy at all. Mind you, he is also an academic with a taste for detailed history at the expense of action, but you can put up with a limited amount of that in exchange for the sheer size of his vision.
My advice : Skip the garden party, Tom Bombadil, and everything before the Council of Elrond. While the books aren't the uber-fantastic prodigy they are often portrayed as, they are quite worth reading once you get past the children's-book beginning.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
I like a limited degree of the academic stuff. The pretentiousness of full-blown academics irritates me, but I'm still enough of a fan of learning that I do like having some background, even if it's not necessary to understanding the story. For example, my only complaint with the Tales of Alvin Maker is that I feel OSC doesn't explain enough of the history. How did Cromwell's faction maintain control of England? How did the Dutch hold on to New Amsterdam? How did the Aztecs shake off Spanish domination? How did New England and the United States become separate countries? These are things I desperately want to know, but OSC never really gets into it, presumably because it's not important and would distract from the story. I have enough historical interest to be intensely curious about it, though. So I don't mind a little history in my fiction.
The problem so far, I think, is characterization. OSC is a master at it. He could write a phone book and make me care about the characters. But Tolkien characterizes so little that I can't even distinguish between Frodo's friends, and they've been part of the story the whole time. If I don't care about the characters, why should I care what they do or what happens to them? Supposedly a lot of grand, amazing events will be happening later, but that doesn't do me any good if I can't wade through the bog to find them.
Posts: 1814 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
Well, the cardboard characters are undeniably the weakest spot. The hobbits do have some distinguishing characteristcs, though they can be a bit hard to spot :
Frodo is the darkly handsome, brooding one.
Sam is the Loyal one. He will stay by his Master through thick and thin. If Frodo said "Frog," Sam would instantly go green and croak, not that he's very articulate at the best of times.
Merry is, um, the merry one. I think Tolkien was running out of creativity here; names are undeniably the hardest part of good ficton.
Pippin is the cheerful one, as in "Pip-pip, Jeeves!"
But essentially, you can't read Tolkien for the characters, only for the history and story.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
after my first time, I always skipped the first half of Fellowship, right into the middle. My sister hated it, but after watching the movie, she read TTT and enjoyed it, and went on to RotK and enjoyed that, then went BACK to FotR. It gets better. Really. 2nd and third books are way better, and FotR does get more interesting later on.
Posts: 3493 | Registered: Jul 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
I could never get past the Council of Elrond. What I did was watch the movie of FotR, and then I just read the second two, and I went back and read the first one later. Worked for me!
posted
As much as I enjoyed LOTR - and I did - I will say this much.
I skipped parts that bored me to tears. And I'm of the opinion that, were he to submit his novels for publication now, if they were published, any sane editor (imnsho) would cut probably half his books because they're irrelevant, boring, and add absolutely nothing to the story whatsoever. He obviously knew nothing about cutting the fat.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Have to agree with Tom. I read LOTR one summer the year I got married, and was absolutely blown away. The depth of history tantalisingly glimpsed, the undeniable strength and beauty of some of Tolkien's 'boring' descriptive passages, the amazingly powerful climax at Mt Doom (so much better than the over done version in the movie), along with the scene at the Ford of Bruinen in Book 1 (amongst a lot of others), the mind-blowing creative act of Middle Earth, and the story, the story, the story! I read it every summer for the next 5 years, and I still love it. It appeals so much to the romantic in me, the history lover. Yes some parts are slow, but so what, how long is your attention span anyway?? And they allow you to enjoy the parts where the action is intense even more. And Tolkien writes some intensely dark passages and events with real depth. He knows how to write about ugliness. Don't give up on it, just savour it and allow it time. It's not flashy, it was written for an audience that had the time to allow magic to work, that didn't live in a world of sound bites and instant-gratification-or-I'm-changing-the-channel. Stick with it.
Posts: 867 | Registered: Dec 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
As I recall from my far-from-complete reading of background material on Tolkien, and watching the extras on the first two extended edition DVDs of the movies, Tolkien wasn't looking to create a modern fantasy. Quite the opposite, really. He was a scholar and lover of ancient texts and a linguist who mourned the lack of an English ancient literary history - the English are somewhat rootless in this area. Much of the literary tradition the English have is borrowed from outsiders - even the Arthurian legends are French in origin, to a greater degree.
I think Tolkien tried to make the Lord of the Rings as old-fashioned as possible, which meant using certain stylistic elements you wouldn't see in modern works. Beowulf, the Ring Cycle, and most of the ancient epics come from an oral tradition. They are full of tangents, repetition, long blocks of songs and poetry - all things you find in oral storytelling. These are all of the things modern authors avoid, because for their stories, the audience has always been a modern, reading audience. We don't have long, dark winter nights to interrupt work and allow/force us to entertain ourselves with long stories - modern conveniences have "liberated" us from all that.
The one thing that really blows me away about the Lord of the Rings (as much as I love the story itself) is the authorship. It's one scholarly Englishman's dream of what a purely English mythology might have included. It's his attempt to write it as it would have come down to us - complete with the stylistic "stamp" of an oral tradition.
So, I'd say stick with it, but stop looking for a modern work. You won't find it. The Lord of the Rings launched modern fantasy, but is not a part of that genre. Read it as you would the Odyssey, or Beowulf, or another ancient saga. Pretend you've never read a book in your life, that there are no books, and you've begged your grandfather to tell you the story of Frodo and the Ring.
(Can you tell my college major was entirely impractical? )
Posts: 54 | Registered: Sep 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
Verily, I started the trilogy twice, and stopped both times... I couldn't push my way through them, it was too boring. So I hear ya.
Posts: 7877 | Registered: Feb 2003
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Grumble]](graemlins/grumble.gif)
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
)
