The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Complete and Unabridged

As an heroic romance, the book was launched into a post-war Britain that largely expected fiction to be a 'slice of reality', as in the Hardy/Eliot tradition. We had turned our back on books of this type. So far as romances of imagined worlds, real heroes, real villains, and epic themes went the science fiction sub-culture of dime novels and cheap comics was the brightest spot on the literary horizon! All the greater the shock then, when this luxuriously and profligately original masterwork, a veritable new Odyssey, re-established the genre at a stroke.

The story starts quietly, and even a little childishly, in the Shire of the hobbits, who are quite English and very much the sort of creation that an Englishman of the Midlands would create, although they are not an allegory of the English (I speak as a Midlander). Events rapidly gather pace and the serious and high nature of the quest becomes apparent, the great master-ring created by Sauron being in the seemingly accidental possession of one Frodo Baggins, hobbit-at-large. The Ring is too terrible a weapon to be mastered for good and used against Sauron, yet the Lord of the Rings is utterly set on claiming it back. Therefore, hard though the thought is, the weapon that is the Ring must be destroyed. A trusty band, a fellowship, of adventurers must be assembled to carry out the quest. There are many subtleties in this book, and the characters are not all they seem. The heroes of the fellowship have mixed motives, Boromir especially. The climax of the Fellowship of the Ring largely revolves around the chaos caused by the Boromir's inner dilemma and his unwise actions. Even Gollum the sneak is not yet entirely bad and has the occasional good impulse. As if the Black Riders and hordes of orcs were not bad enough the story breaks off with a classical cliff-hanger, as the quest must go on even though the fellowship be riven by argument and conflict. As the plots and sub-plots multiply so does the tension. A must read?, to be sure. More than once, certainly. But not before the next two installments...