Are The Lord of the Rings books overrated?

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien is written in history as the inception of modern fantasy. But does it stand up to today's standards for fantasy? Was it a good start, and now we've moved past it? Today I'll talk about the most common criticisms I hear against the Lord of the Rings and whether or not I agree with them. Also ignore how sweaty I am...it was like 95 degrees in my house when I filmed this.

[willp]

I read LOTR, for the first time, over the past year as a 25/26 yr old and i loved everything about it. Some of the most beautiful prose and heartfelt story telling I think I will ever read.

[jarltrippin]

Tolkien's prose is some of the best I'll ever read. There's a part where Legolas was describing a tree, and instead of me just dismissively thinking "Well, elves love trees, I guess" I vividly remember nodding my head in excitement and actually said to myself "fuck yeah, I wanna see this tree!" The way he described it was just so beautiful and brimming with love and warmth.

[purplelibraryguy]

Tolkien had one basic advantage over most current fantasy writers: He was an amateur. He wasn't writing a book in a hurry to make a deadline so he could quickly move on to the next one and maybe not starve, he was putting together and carefully refining a whole life's worth of creativity and thought. Even when they can match Tolkien's depth of scholarship (which, really, some can--there are a lot of modern fantasy writers that bring a lot of knowledge to their craft), they don't have time to layer their stories as deeply. They also are more constrained by publisher expectations; if Tolkien wanted to make a deeper story by spending chapters at the beginning writing a sort of almost Jane Austen-like comedy of manners to ground the Shire as a good, desirable place that you'd be sad to see destroyed, he could do that--he didn't need to care that much that a publisher would want a fast-paced start.

[KS-xkso]

Most fantasy worlds, I'd want to go there for a specific reason or action. To fly over a Quidditch pitch, to swing around an awesome lightsaber, to see the majesty of Winterfell.... for Middle Earth... I just want to walk around forever. The world feels so majestic and magical that even a stroll through a random forest would be awe inspiring.

[michaelwills]

Tolkien’s work will be here long after everything else has passed into the ages ✊🏼

[angelcarretero]

I've been reading The Lord of the Rings for 37 years now and I think it's nothing short of brilliant. A true masterpiece from beginning to end.

[SJ-GodofGnomes]

I read LoTR for the first time when I was 14, that's 39 years ago. Over that time I have re-read it four times and not only am I still amazed at the quality of writing, but I always find something new about it, be it some scene I may have forgotten or a philosophical point I'd missed or misunderstood. As far as the films taking all the good parts ... no, infact they left so much out
LoTR is still relevant and still will be in a 100 years from now.

[bigphilly]

I’m 42 and just started reading this today. It’s such a beautiful escape to a world of wonder and goodness. I’m hooked. I’ve never read fantasy before, so it’s especially fresh to me. A welcome change of pace from my regular genres.

[zemirukaiba]

No it is not overrated, sometimes I think it is underrated, so many people have not read it, just like your channel is underrated!

[goosewithagibus]

I'm so glad you mentioned The Scouring of the Shire. That chapter is phenomenal and people frequently miss the point lol

[involunteer]

The Scouring of the Shire is one of my favorite parts, too. Like you said, it shows the character's growth. It also drives home the message of the importance of pity and mercy and (after the world-threatening mystical threat of Sauron) demonstrates that ordinary folk can also do terrible evil.
I first read the series in 2nd grade and re-read it every year for the next dozen years for a reason. We love and care about these characters, and there is just as much of a moral impact in the writing as in Narnia, without it being so blatant.

[robertneal]

Many people do not realize that Tolkien never intended to be an author, certainly not a commercially published one. He was an academic, a professor and a linguist. He wanted to develop languages and felt the best way to do that was to have context for the language to exist in. Many of his first explorations into building this context was through songs and poems and are sometimes referred to as "lays". So they become the bones on which the body of his work is built. It was later in life when his friends (the Inklings) talked him organizing his bedtime stories into what would eventually become the Hobbit. The publisher, Unwin and Associates then wanted more...because...you know...business. The Lord of the Rings, originally published in six volumes, became the first work that Tolkien did that was intended to be published from the start. That start probably does not even exist without those songs and poems.

[captainnolan]

I read LoTR for the first time in 1971 and I loved everything about it. It has some of the most beautiful prose and the most heartfelt story telling I think I will ever read (I agree with Will P below). I have reread it several times since and will continue to do so for years to come. Even asking the question in the way you posed it (... has Fantasy moved on?) displays the hubris of "contemporary mankind" as if those old folks in the past can possibly be as smart, talented, or hip as us wonderful moderns.

[thecontradictorian]

I’ll never understand the people who don’t like the poetry in lotr. That’s the best part, and I’m prepared to fight everyone who disagrees to the death, even if they choose Gregor Clegane as their champion.

Every time I recite “All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost...” in my head, it’s goosebumps all over the place. Always. When I say it ten times in a row, there’s goosebumps ten out of ten. Bugger, now I have to watch the movies again.

[jonrolfson]

Thanks for sharing your reaction to reading the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) and, particularly, for explaining the the expectations you had before your first reading. Your choosing to give yourself the chance to discover the extra details through reading seems to have served you well. Having first read LOTR at 13, in 1965, I was gratified by the general faithfulness of Peter Jackson’s film version. There were, of course, some elisions and some changes that were necessitated by the transfer from page to screen, as well as a couple of unfortunate character modifications. Even more than half a century on, when re-reading LOTR I still suddenly twig to subtle philologist jokes that Professor Tolkien sprinkled through the work: Perhaps the good Professor still cracks a smile when one of us lesser mortals stumbles across his wry witticisms.

[michaelthomas]

i totaly agree with you - i love the Lord of the rings so much - and always crying more and more each time when i read it

[artemusbowdler]

It is not boring. Modern FNs are so enamored with shock and macabre and absurd themes that they do not know how to tell a great story.

[martinstent]

One aspect of LOTR that hardly ever gets mentioned is the level of language competence required. How many modern readers actually know that a combe is a short dry valley, or what a hythe actually IS? Do you want to improve a teenager’s vocabulary, give them LOTR in an e-book where you can just touch a word to get the meaning. It will do wonders for their vocabulary.

[warrenwise]

I think the books are vastly underrated now because of the absolutely unwarranted hate the prose gets.

I noticed BookTube reviewers have been criticizing the prose as being old fashioned. They make it sound like it’s a lot of sentences that read “Thou doth teacheth yonder way” or some equally unreadable language like that. It is not that bad. Here is a passage:

“He loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire.”

Perfectly readable and beautifully written. Any suggestion to the contrary I think is borne out of people jumping on the hate bandwagon without actually reading the books.

[seanmalloy]

The movies were darn near perfect adaptations