Fellowship of the Ring

"The Fellowship of the Ring is the first of three
books in The Lord of the Rings series. It is the tale
of Frodo Baggins, the unwilling heir to the One Ring:
the great Ring of Power. The Ring must be distroyed
before it returns to the hands of it's maker, Sauron.
But Sauron has sent out his Nazgul, the nine Ringwraiths,
to hunt for the Ring. Frodo and a small group of
companions are given the task of taking this Ring to
Orodruin, at the very heart of Sauron's kingdom, to
distroy it."
F.B.-B., Resident J.R.R. Tolkien Scholar

"The Ringwraiths were searching for a hobbit. Frodo
Baggins had to take the Ring Bilbo found and desctoy
it. Otherwise the evil Sauron would destroy all the
good things in Middle-earth. Frodo adn his friends go
on a journey ot the Mount of Doom, the only place the
ring can be destroyed at. "
Irina, Resident J.R.R. Tolkien Scholar

"As LOTR regularly wins polls as the twentieth
century's favorite work of fiction, it is now rather
difficult to say anything new about it, except that
professors of English who appear on highbrow chat
shows to review literature rather reprehensibly still
prefer 'realists' of the Thomas Hardy and George Eliot
ilk. Chronologically (in Middlearth time and in order
of publishing), 'The Fellowship of the Ring' is the
first book of the great Lord of the Rings trilogy and
follows 'The Hobbit'. Of course The Hobbit itself is
largely aimed at children, although the themes mature
as the story matures, whereas LOTR is four-squarely
adult. However, it should be realised that Hobbit is
essentially, as Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis put
it, 'merely a fragment torn from the author's huge
myth'. The inchoate romance of the whole of Middlearth
and its inhabitants came into being over a very long
period, and formed a superlatively coherent whole well
before he thought of publishing. 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... "
Michael JR Jose, Resident J.R.R. Tolkien Scholar

"A group of huminoid friends reluctantly enroll
themselves in the deep plot and politics of a many
aged and large scale epic battle. The outcome is
deeply dependend on the friends choices as they find
themselves the possesor of the one item that will
bring ruin to all the land if possesed by the Enemy.
The one ring."
Oscar Andrews, Resident J.R.R. Tolkien Scholar

As the Sunday Times said :"You have people who read
The Lord of the Rings and people that are going to
read it" and this is the first part of that great
Odyssee .