One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them
In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the
Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring,
filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But
the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout
Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell by
chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins.
From Sauron''s fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor, his power
spread far and wide. Sauron gathered all the Great Rings to him,
but always he searched for the One Ring that would complete his
dominion.
When Bilbo reached his eleventy-first birthday he disappeared,
bequeathing to his young cousin Frodo the Ruling Ring and a
perilous quest: to journey across Middle-earth, deep into the
shadow of the Dark Lord, and destroy the Ring by casting it into
the Cracks of Doom.
The Lord of the Rings tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo
and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the Wizard; the hobbits
Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the Dwarf; Legolas the Elf; Boromir
of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider.
This new edition includes the fiftieth-anniversary fully corrected
text setting and, for the first time, an extensive new index.
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), beloved throughout the world as the
creator of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion,
was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, a fellow of Pembroke
College, and a fellow of Merton College until his retirement in
1959. His chief interest was the linguistic aspects of the early
English writtentradition, but while he studied classic works of the
past, he was creating a set of his own.
Praise for The Lord of the Rings
"An extraordinary work -- pure excitement." -- New York Times Book
Review
"One of the great fairy-tale quests in modern literature." --
Time
"A remarkable book." -- Newsweek
"One of the very few works of genius in recent literature." -- New
Republic
"A work of immense narrative power that can sweep the reader up and
hold him enthralled for days and weeks." -- The Nation
"Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold
iron." -- C. S. Lewis
"The first thing one asks of an adventure story is that the
adventure should be various and exciting . . . Tolkien''s invention
is unflagging." -- W. H. Auden
"J.R.R. Tolkien''s epic trilogy remains the ultimate quest, the
ultimate battle between good and evil, the ultimate chronicle of
stewardship of the earth. Endlessly imitated, it never has been
surpassed." -- Kansas City Star
"A masterful story . . . an epic in its own way . . . with elements
of high adventure, suspense, mystery, poetry, and fantasy." --
Boston Sunday Herald