Bibliography
Recommend a title for bookclub
Click on a title to buy it, read other users' comments or to post your own comment:
A Good Place To Start
| Title | Votes | |
|---|---|---|
| The Hobbit: or, There and Back Again | 9 | |
| Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring | 3 |
A Bad Place To Start
| Title | Votes | |
|---|---|---|
| The Silmarillion | 6 | |
| Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring | 1 | |
| Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King | 1 |
Genres
Categorization is odious. There is tremendous overlap among genres. These pigeonholes are offered only as a convenience.
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973)
added by ylleks
Comments
Please consider recommending where to begin reading this author, or where not to. A few words about your experiences reading this author and why you make the recommendations you do will be helpful to other users. If you are the author or have studied this author extensively, please say so.
Tolkien was a life-long academic and published lots of books on scholarly subjects ... a translation of Beowulf, studies of Norse mythology, of Middle English...
Go here: http://www.tolkienbooks.net/html/index1.htm
for one list of his publications that is not entirely Hobbit oriented.
tim helck March 11th, 2007 06:11 PM PST
Start with The Hobbit, not because it's a prequel to the extremely popular trilogy, but because it's a better book. It's funnier and the style is more down to earth. In contrast, The Lord of the Rings is a bit stilted at times and takes itself too seriously -- though I admit, that hasn't stopped me from reading it five times!
And...if you love Tolkien, you might enjoy Beowulf. I know, I know ... it's one of those books you think you should read but find it way too intimidating. That's why it took me several decades to get around to it. I recommend the recent translation by Sean Heaney. It's very accessible, there's loads of action and reading it was quite a lot of fun. I really enjoyed seeing how much of Middle Earth was inspired by this ancient tale.
Biography
Please consider entering an additional brief biography here. You can Google this author by clicking here.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE (January 3, 1892 – September 2, 1973) is best known as the author of The Hobbit and its sequel The Lord of the Rings. He was a professor of Anglo-Saxon language at Oxford from 1925 to 1945, and of English language and literature, also at Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. He was a strongly committed Roman Catholic. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, with whom he shared membership in the literary discussion group the Inklings.
In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's published fiction includes The Silmarillion and other posthumously published books about what he called a legendarium, a fictional mythology of the remote past of Earth, called Arda, and Middle-earth (from middangeard, the lands inhabitable by Men) in particular. Most of these works were compiled from Tolkien's notes by his son Christopher Tolkien. The enduring popularity and influence of Tolkien's works have established him as the "father of the modern high fantasy genre".[citation needed] Tolkien's other published fiction includes adaptations of stories originally told to his children and not directly related to the legendarium.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien
Marian October 14th, 2006 09:30 AM PST