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4.0 

The War Of The Ring

By J.R.R. Tolkien
The War Of The Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

The third part of The History of The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien's The War Of The Ring is an enthralling account of the writing of the Book of the Century, which contains many additional scenes and includes the unpublished Epilogue in its entirety.

The War of the Ring takes up the story of The Lord of the Rings with the Battle of Helm’s Deep and the drowning of Isengard by the Ents, continues with the journey of Frodo, Sam and Gollum to the Pass of Cirith Ungol, describes the war in Gondor, and ends with the parley between Gandalf and the ambassador of the Dark Lord before the Black Gate of Mordor.

The book is illustrated with plans and drawings of the changing conceptions of Orthanc, Dunharrow, Minas Tirith and the tunnels of Shelob’s Lair.

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The War Of The Ring Reviews

4.0
“The third book in the history of the writing of The Lord of the Rings covers Helm’s Deep and Isengard; Frodo, Sam and Gollum up to Kirith (Cirith) Ungol; and the Ride of the Rohirrim and the Pelennor Fields up to the Black Gate Opens. For much of the time this is nowhere near as fascinating as the first two books in the history, partly because there are a lot fewer different storylines developed at considerable length before being rejected, but mostly because it gets very bogged down in the beginning and middle with lengthy discussion on different chronologies and debates about distances. Once the Fellowship was split into different parties it obviously became vital that the timelines regarding weather, Nazgûl movements, the moon’s cycle and when the Fellowship members were doing different things were properly synchronised. Christopher goes into extreme detail with the varying timelines between different stories and the changes to distances as JRRT struggled to resolve this problem satisfactorily. Unfortunately this makes for rather dull reading. However, other parts are really quite fascinating as the story and characters develop and the locations of key places change, e.g. the development of the palantir’s role, Frodo originally being held in Minas Morgul, multiple spiders morphing into a single giant one called Ungoliant! before Shelob appears and the changing relationship between Denethor and Faramir. (Originally it was much warmer and some of the re-drafting is quite subtle, such as from “You are weary, my son” becoming “You are weary, I see”.) At the 2/3rds point this book was firmly heading for a reluctant 3 star rating, but from then on the interest level picked up considerably and it became quite as interesting as the first two books. One thing becomes crystal clear reading HoMe LotR - JRRT really had very little idea where each part of his story was going until he started writing each bit in detail. At different times he’d lay out various storylines of how he imagined the story would develop, from which anywhere from about 10% to 50% might eventually make it unchanged to the final version. Ultimately he seems to have become convinced that he wasn’t so much creating the story as relating an actual “real” history - but in the full knowledge it wasn’t actually real, but that there was a “correct” version of the story that was coming to him. For instance, he was absolutely convinced as he started writing it that book V would definitely be the last one and would wrap the whole story up. Inevitably, however, the story would continue to grow in the telling. Hence, it’s now onto book 9 “Sauron Defeated”.”

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