"Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron." - C.S. Lewis
The Lord of the Rings is J.R.R. Tolkien's great three-volume epic set in the imaginary world of the Third Age of Middle-earth - a world inhabited by many strange beings, including hobbits, an ancient people smaller than dwarves, cheerful, peace-loving and shy. Since its original publication, this work has caught the imagination of readers of all ages and walks of life. It is an adventure story, an adult fairy tale, a classic myth, which Michael Straight has called on of the "very few works of genius in recent literature."
In response to the widespread interest and enthusiasm evoked by The Lord of the Rings, Professor Tolkien has prepared this second edition, making a number of emendations in the text and providing a new forward, new appendices and an index.
The Third Age of Middle-earth is a world receptive to poets, scholars, children, and all other people of good will. Donald Barr has described it as "a scrubbed morning world, and a ringing nightmare world... especially sunlit, and shadowed by perils very fundamental, of a peculiarly uncompounded darkness."
The story of this world is one of high and heroic adventure. W. H. Auden has said: "The first thing one asks of an adventure story is that the adventure should be various and exciting... Mr. Tolkien's invention is unflagging." And C. S. Lewis: "If Ariosto rivalled it in invention (in fact he does not) he would still lack its heroic seriousness. No imaginary world has been projected which is at once so multifarious and so true."
Lewis compared The Lord of the Rings to Orlando Furioso. Barr has compared it to Beowulf, Auden to The Thirty-Nine Steps, Naomi Mitchison to the Morte d'Arthur, Richard Hughes to the Faerie Queene. Each reader can find in it something he is looking for, but the book is sui generis - a triumph of imaginative genius, which exists within its own framework and on its own terms.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and a Fellow of Pembroke College from 1925 to 1945, and Professor of English Language and Literature and a Fellow of Merton College from 1945 to his retirement in 1959. His chief interest was in the literary and linguistic tradition of the English West Midlands, especially in Beowulf, the Ancrene Wisse, and Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight; but he is better known to the reading public as the author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, his great posthumous history of Middle-earth.