This is probably petty but ...

I just thought it interesting that the children of Men are obsessed with Gold and Silver! Silver and Gold! (as the claymation song says), and yet the Elves name pretty much every Elf-baby after gold and silver, silver and gold.

They claim it's all about the colors of light, I know. But we don't see a hundred Men name their babies Blue after their favorite color of sky.

The Peter Jackson movies are okay as far as I am concerned, but I like the old radio dramas better since I think they are closer to the books.  The people making the films spend an enormous amount of time and money making the films.  But I wonder if they are something Tolkien would have wanted or liked. But I’m sure he did not did not like technology anyway so how could any film based on his books have pleased him?  Probably it was the same thing with Lewis. But I think movies and adaptations should be made on their books in spite of their dislike for technology. 🙂

I remember reading somewhere that the Led Zeppelin song “The Battle of Evermore” on their fourth album has a connection with The Lord of the Rings.  Perhaps Led Zeppelin was inspired by Tolkien. “Stairway to Heaven” kind of sounds that way too— it is such a beautiful song. It’s kind of odd that a rock album could have medieval connections, but they may indeed be there. I like that Led Zeppelin album the best of all their music. 

Led Zeppelin grew out of the 1960s hippy culture, so they had a lot of English folk influences. And, of course, all or some of the members had read LOTR at some point because that was a counterculture thing back then. (It had not yet hit the mainstream.) The album Led Zeppelin II was almost all folk-oriented songs. In "Ramble On" there's a direct reference to Tolkien in this part of the lyrics:

How years ago in days of old
When magic filled the air
T'was in the darkest depths of Mordor
I met a girl so fair
But Gollum and the evil one
Crept up and slipped away with her

Now of course, there were no fair girls in Mordor AFAIK anyway, nor did Gollum or "the evil one" -- which sounds like Sauron -- kidnap any. But it fit the mood of the song, which is about hitting the road as the Autumn turns to Winter and searching for a lover.

I read LOTR when I was 14; my brother had given me Ballantine's first boxed set of the trilogy for Christmas. The weekend I was reading it my favorite rock music station had a Led Zeppelin A-Z playlist, meaning they played all their songs, in alphabetical order, and I listened to it as I was reading. It was the perfect reading soundtrack! I still associate the trip through the mines of Moria with Jimmy Page's creepy guitar work on "Whole Lotta Love." Other tracks, especially from Physical Graffiti, echo the epic nature of the plot.

@cobalt-jade 

I’m not sure what Tolkien would have thought of the Led Zeppelin reference to his books. He passed away in the early 1970’s, and during his final years he probably didn’t listen much to rock music, being as old fashioned as he was.  I didn’t remember the reference to Middle Earth in the second album (it’s been years since I last heard the record).  I always thought the inside of the cover of the fourth album reminded me of The Lord of the Rings but that’s because it looked so medieval. It showed a man standing on a cliff holding a lantern, which was rather unique artwork. 🙂

That picture was called The Hermit and resembled the one on the tarot card. It was supposedly painted by one Jimmy Page 🙂 

Tolkien must have loved music because he included so much of it in his books. Whether he would have liked Led Zeppelin, I don't know...

When was your first reading of Tolkien’s books?  I think it was when I read The Hobbit in high school. And there was one summer during my college years when I read The Lord of the Rings.  I had always wondered why the book was published in three parts even though it is one long story. I don’t think that there was a one volume edition available at that time. Today authors do not often write such long books, but Tolkien’s works remain popular even though he was a slow paced storyteller. It seems that people still have the patience to read long books.  🙂

Posted by: @narnian78

I had always wondered why the book was published in three parts even though it is one long story.

I've heard it was something to do with continuing paper rationing after the end of WW2 — his publishers weren't willing to print a single volume book of well over 1,000 pages (which might not sell well when people saw the sheer size of it!) for that reason — but I'm not sure how accurate that is. Others may know. It was definitely a very long book for its time, even split into three volumes as it was.

My first reading of The Hobbit was when I was 7, directly after Mum and I finished all the Chronicles of Narnia and I was hungry for more fantasy!! (She and I used to read together at bedtime every night, taking turns to read a chapter each until I was too tired to go on. Mum would help me with the difficult words, if she hadn't fallen asleep herself while I was reading.) As soon as we'd finished The Hobbit, we naturally went straight on to The Lord of the Rings, since it was the sequel and my older sister had already read and recommended it (and unfortunately given away a few spoilers, like Gandalf coming back from the dead, but never mind)!! It wasn't the easiest read and it definitely went on into the following year, but I was absolutely hooked and have been ever since. (And I was thrilled to find out, some time during that year, that the creators of Narnia and Middle-earth actually knew each other and were good friends, apart from the fact that Tolkien was critical of a lot of what Lewis chose to put into Narnia!)

I'm currently still reading The Silmarillion, but slowly... it's incredibly beautiful and deep and I can't take more than a little at a time, reading when I have some quiet time with no major distractions and can just savour it!

@courtenay yes, that is the official explanation, and I believe it.

Even five to ten years after the war, there were lots of shortages.

There's a new book out, The Fall of Numenor, edited by Patrick Silbey, with illustrations by Alan Lee. I snagged a copy for myself and for my cousin's Christmas gift!

There are many people who prefer the three volume editions of The Lord of the Rings for easy reading.  But I don’t think the one volume edition is too bad either since it is kind of nice to have the whole story in one book. Some people prefer smaller books, but I like the large size for certain novels and fantasy stories.  They are real bargains for the money, and many of them are in very attractive bindings. You feel like you are getting lot of story in just one volume as with the one volume editions of Jules Verne and Rudyard Kipling.  🙂

Do people here like Tolkien's slower pace or do you wish that Tolkien would have taken less time to tell his stories?   He was a slow author like Dickens was (or perhaps not quite that slow). But some people don't mind the time it takes to read his books.  I don't think it makes much difference in his popularity, although there are some people have said they were "bored with the rings". Maybe they don't have the patience required.  I would say just take more time with the books and you might enjoy them more. Don't rush with reading Tolkien.  I learned to like long books many years ago. 🙂

I do enjoy Tolkien's slow pace, but then I got used to it a long time ago!! (I do remember being bored to tears by "The Council of Elrond" when I first read it, but now of course I understand it's a very important exposition chapter before the next phase of the journey begins, even if it is a bit of an info-dump.) His stories aren't just about the action — although there's plenty of excitement when things do eventually hot up! — but about the whole atmosphere he creates. This is an author who spent decades of his life creating a world in remarkable detail, and a big part of the enjoyment for me as a reader is just immersing myself in it. I can understand why readers who prefer a lot more action probably won't like it, and I don't blame them for not liking it if it's really not their kind of thing. But for me, I wouldn't have it any way, or it just wouldn't be Tolkien!

Meanwhile, The Silmarillion is definitely picking up now, as Melkor — now officially Morgoth — has destroyed the Two Trees and stolen the Silmarils and the Noldor are on the warpath to find him, but they themselves have been so heavily influenced by Morgoth's lies that they don't realise how many wrong assumptions they are making about the Valar and the future of Arda and their own place in it... what was motoring along at a fairly slow pace till now has just become gripping. And it's abundantly clear that anyone who thinks Tolkien's Elves are "perfect" and always benevolent and wise and they never do any wrong... obviously hasn't read this book.  

(It does, incidentally, put paid to some nasty arguments I came across a while ago, to the effect that Tolkien was racist and his Elves are Exhibit A for white supremacy, because (of course) they're the pale-skinned, fair-haired, pure, perfect master race. Ummm... so far I haven't seen any reference to what skin colour(s) Elves have; Tolkien himself may have imagined them as all or mostly white (he's drawing on Northern European legends for a fair bit of his inspiration, after all), but there's no canonical statement on that and no crucial-to-the-plot reason why they should or shouldn't be any particular colour. And very clearly, they have a great variety of hair colours; Fëanor is described as having "raven-dark" hair, while Galadriel's is "lit with gold as though it had caught in a mesh the radiance of Laurelin" (the very fact that Tolkien remarks on this suggests that such hair isn't noticeably common among Elves, let alone their standard colouring). And yes, as for the Elves supposedly being a perfect master race... again, nobody could think that after reading even the first quarter or so of The Silmarillion. So anyone who interprets the Elves as a "white supremacist" trope is clearly not actually reading Tolkien, but just projecting their own silly ideas and assumptions onto his work. )

@courtenay 

I would take the Ents’ advice in reading Tolkien and not be hasty about anything.  And people who consider Tolkien to be racist aren’t seeing that he loved many different races in his books. There were good and bad wizards like Gandalf and Saruman as good and bad hobbits like Frodo and Gollum. So Tolkien had no racial prejudice in Middle Earth and I don’t think he had it in real life. There is no evidence for him having it.  He was old fashioned like Lewis, but it was love for vintage things in the medieval world, which was a good thing. He wanted us to live life at a slower pace without rushing. 🙂

Do you like the Tolkien calendars? I think there is one for each year, and I just ordered mine for 2023 a few days ago.  I often wondered why there are any Narnia calendars anymore, although there was one for 2006, which was released soon after the first Walden movie. The Tolkien calendars are very beautiful and are based on The Hobbit  and The Lord of the Rings. It would be nice if something like that were made for the Narnia books.  🙂

I've got some old Hobbit illustrations by Tolkien that were once a calendar decades ago. I want to frame them or turn them into a calendar by adding the number pages of a  calendar below, and a selection of pictures above.
This year I was also given some large pictures by other artists, and I want to display them in my larger bedroom. They had been calendar pictures, and I thought of converting them back to a calendar in the same way.

The giver used to run an English language school, and these were laminated to use as a resource for a unit on LOTR with students. It was still popular 15 years ago, and of course it was filmed in our country; one of the teachers would take his adult class up to the location where Edoras was filmed!