My husband (who bless him is quite used to my spontaneous flights of fancy) looked up from his paper at my third rant of 'I really wanna watch Lord of the Rings' and simply answered 'don't you have the films on dvd?'
I didn't and that was a huge problem. So great was my need to lose myself in a world of hobbits and wizards and the like that I picked up this.
This is the exact cover of the version that has been sitting in my bedroom for over 10 years, since my father - in - law had lent it to me (borrower? lender? I always get them confused)!
It is an edition from 1971 which cost at the time no more than 60 pence. How I wish books were still that price in the shops! My house would be overflowing!
Come the Saturday morning I rushed out to the nearest charity shop and managed to get all three films for a pound each. Then I could wallow in stories of rings and dragons to my heart's content.
The book was a little harder to venture through, but not as hard as the first time I'd tried it (which was 10 years ago). Older and a little more patient, I quickly became accustomed to the writing style which is very well spoken and on occasion a little superfluous.
Originally published in 1937 it attempts to be conversational, but to me it had more of a feel of being told a bedtime story. There was more than one moment where I'd simply doze off while reading it!
It is a beautiful story and an excellent opener for it's successor 'The Lord of the Rings' though when it was first published it was meant as a stand alone book.
The action is well spilt with periods of restfulness. The theme of greed and it's destructive force rings throughout the story. In fact the very heroes at the start of the story wind up becoming the villians towards the end.
It centres around quiet, mild mannered Bilbo Baggins, a Hobbit who enjoys a life of relative boredom and inaction. Until one day the Wizard Gandalf shows up at his door and invites him to join on a quest with himself and 13 dwarves. Their quest is to reclaim the treasure stolen from the Dwarves' leader Thorin. The theif? A terrible dragon named Smaug who has destroyed the area around the treasure, laid waste to towns full of people and dwarf alike and who sleeps inside of a mountain where the treasure lays in wait.
They give poor Bilbo the task of trying to steal it, but things in the end get turned on their head when the unassuming hobbit goes from burden to carrier of the group, picking up a mystical ring on the journey, but we won't go into that now. That story is for another post.
It is a charming little story with a bitter sweet ending. One that had me thinking 'ahhh bless them'. At 278 pages it was a lot less daunting than I thought it would be. Guess you should never judge a book by it's cover!
I'm halfway through my yearly blog journey! I can't believe it!
This is book 26 of my 52 book list and my book that was published in the 20th century.
To the next 6 months!!!!
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