The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings, sometimes shortened to LOTR, is the sequel to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. He found that the setting he had built was far too interesting to abandon after a simplistic quest storyline, an experience common to modern GMs, and his publisher thought a new story in Middle-earth would be just as popular as The Hobbit.

Because of its original publication scheme (the whole thing was too big for 50's era bookbinding techniques), LOTR is commonly, though erroneously, called a trilogy. Its three volumes are:

• The Fellowship of the Ring
• The Two Towers
• The Return of the King

You have, of course, read them. If you haven't, gtfo and read them. And don't you even dare just watch the movies. Although amazing films, they aren't the same experience.

The Story

If you have read them (which you have) but it's been so long that you've forgotten the details, here's a brief refresher:

Bilbo Baggins, the protagonist of The Hobbit, decides to leave home and entrusts his magic ring to his nephew Frodo. Problem is, Gandalf the Grey, Bilbo's wizard friend, has figured out that the magic ring is the One Ring, an artifact created by Sauron, Lord of Mordor, and contains a vast amount of his power. Its continued existence is a threat to the free peoples of Middle-earth and Gandalf exhorts Frodo to come to a meeting in Rivendell where a council will determine what to do with it. Joined by his gardener Samwise and two fellow hobbits, Merry and Pippin, Frodo makes his way to Rivendell but not before running afoul of barrow-wights and Sauron's chief minions, the Nazgul.

At the meeting, it is revealed that no mortal artifice can destroy the One Ring (demonstrated in the movie when Gimli shatters a weapon on the unassuming golden band). The only way is to return it to the fires of Mount Doom where Sauron originally forged it. Unfortunately, Mount Doom is smack dab in the middle of Mordor and Gandalf can't ask his great eagle buddies to do him a solid and fly the ring into the volcano. Frodo agrees to bear the One Ring on its journey and a group is formed to escort him there. The party for this quest is called the Fellowship of the Ring and consists of:

• Frodo Baggins, the Ringbearer, hobbit;
• Samwise Gamgee, Fighter/gardener/Frodo's BFF, hobbit;
• Meriadoc "Merry" Brandybuck, rogue, hobbit;
• Peregrin "Pippin" Took, bard, hobbit;
• Gandalf the Grey, wizard (one of the Istari, essentially a demigod in human guise);
• Aragorn, son of Arathorn, ranger, human of Numenorian descent and heir to the throne of Gondor;
• Boromir, son of Denethor, fighter, human;
• Legolas Greenleaf, archer, elf;
• Gimli, son of Glóin, fighter, dwarf;

So, off they go. After a few detours and sidetracks, the Fellowship is split into three (even though you should never split the party): Frodo and Sam go off directly to Mordor, as Frodo's the only one who really needs to go and Sam is too much of a bro to abandon him; Pippin and Merry are kidnapped by orcs but escape and wind up in Gondor, a formerly prosperous kingdom, and Rohan, a nation of Vikings on horseback, respectively, after having adventures with Ents; Boromir dies in an ambush but has a pile of corpses to show for his troubles and gets a river funeral; Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli form a Human-Elf-Dwarf triple threat team, ostensibly to find and rescue Merry and Pippin, but end up travelling fucking evil's shit up for the rest of the story, with Gimli as Dennis Rodman.

Despite having their own problems to content with, somehow the members of the divided Fellowship seem to get involved with everyone else's mess and need to sort shit out. Their list of game achievements include, but are not limited to: surviving a dungeon filled with an insane number of goblins and a big motherfucking demon lord; foiling the plans of a wicked wizard and his orc army; saving not one but two human nations (and the entire world for that matter); winning a whole campaign's worth of scenarios and battles; and defeating the big bad evil guy of the setting with enough time to go home for tea and crumpets.

Finally, after going around the most fuck-me way possible to get into Mordor, Frodo reaches Mount Doom and is about to drop the ring into the lava when he can no longer resist the ring's allure. Just as it had done at the end of the Second Age when it stopped Isildur from destroying it, the ring saved its existence from certain doom. Unfortunately, its twisted former owner Gollum attacks Frodo for it and bites it off of his finger, dances about happily, and falls into the lava. With the ring destroyed and Sauron's power all but gone, the eagles can swoop in for MEDEVAC, getting Frodo and Sam back to civilization to rest and recover before the hobbits return to the Shire.

But wait! The Shire's under new management, Chief Sharkey. Frodo and company help the hobbits rise up against Sharkey, who turns out to be Saruman (the aforementioned wicked wizard). Frodo allows Saruman to leave the Shire, but his put-upon minion Gríma Wormtongue slits his throat (and is then riddled with arrows, nicely tying up that loose end). After compiling his memoirs and still feeling pain from the Nazgul attack all the way at the beginning of his journey, Frodo travels to the Grey Havens and is allowed to sail into the West, where he may find relief from his pain.

The Movies

Ralph Bakshi made an animated film based off the Fellowship of The Ring and the first half of The Two Towers, which were released in 1978. The resulting film was trippy, to say the least. It has a lot of weird animation with massive amounts of rotoscoping, although it does work from time to time. It also decided to make adjustments and stay faithful to the text in the oddest ways. Many lines of dialogue were taken from the books word for word, with enough cut out so that you don't know what they are talking about; for example, Saruman declares himself Saruman of Many Colors without explaining the name change, but they decide to make a prince of Gondor (the largest and greatest civilization in Middle-earth at the time) dress like a Wagner opera viking. The end result both leaves you both weirded out and bored. Rankin Bass produced a Return of the King animated film in 1980, which traded in some of the trippiness for being more mundanely bad and getting pushed into the animation age ghetto.

But those two movies are footnotes compared to the ones that you have most likely seen, those being Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. By far the most financially successful and critically acclaimed fantasy films of all time, including winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards, which generally go for historical pieces and similar, not fantasy or sci-fi. It helped bring fantasy to mainstream audiences and probably why many of you are you are here now. It has massive battles made possible by groundbreaking special effects technology. The films also have incredible amounts of attention to detail to bring the world of Middle-earth to life. While some changes were made, many of them were for the better such as developing Aragorn as a character rather than just a mythic archetype.

Alas, however, it seems greed got to New Line: apparently a few billion dollars in debt, they needed the profit that a new series of Middle-Earth movies would make and tapped Jackson to direct a trilogy of Hobbit movies. The movies turned out to be a strange mix of The Hobbit, the Silmarillion and various new materials. Neckbeards were in uproar of the changes both big and small: for example Legolas has a significant part in the second and third movie despite not appearing in the books, the inclusion of new character Tauriel who enters a love triangle with Legolas and Kili, the recycling of an Orc warlord who canonically died in a battle before the book, the Major of Laketown having an aide who seems to be a long-lost scion of the Blackadder lineage (which admittetly is a nice little homage, as the Mayor of Laketown is acted by Stephen Fry) and a few other things big and small. Jackson really went overboard with the special effects here: instead of using sets and clever camera tricks a lot of things were CGI. This meant that a lot of actors did not need to be on the set at the same time, which reached its lowest point with Sir Ian McKellen breaking down into tears after having to act against an empty room.

Of course GW couldn't let such a profitable venture pass them by...

Back in the early 2000s, GW made a tabletop game based around this premise and called it The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game. Because they ran out of short titles.

While it let you play out your favourite scenes from the movies (in the way YOU imagined them going), it failed to light the world on fire.

Gallery

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  How the heck did a little hobbit beat this?

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  Actually not a scene from the books. To be fair, though, Shadow of Mordor did have a relevant interpretation of Tolkien, and showed us what Mordor looks like in the daytime.

See also

• The Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game for the tabletop skirmish game.
• Mordor
• J. R. R. Tolkien
• The Last Ringbearer
• The Silmarillion