^ The fact that they showed the premiere on regular CBS reminded me of the drug dealer's line, "The first one's free."
Celedam wrote:CaptainBerryzGiraffe wrote:Whereas lord of the rings was just three books […]
Care to comment, erilaz?
Oooooh, where to begin?
Technically,
The Lord of the Rings is not three books, but rather one story (in six "books" plus six appendices) that was originally published in three volumes, and is still
usually similarly packaged. But if you're interested, you can add the published draft materials ("The History of
The Lord of the Rings") that make up 3½ of the 10 volumes of "The History of Middle-earth". Of course, Tolkien's
legendarium of that world also extends far beyond that, into
The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, etc. etc., with posthumously published works still appearing. And don't even get me started on what Tolkien wrote about the
languages spoken in that world....
The Hobbit was published in 1937,
The Lord of the Rings in 1954-55. Since then, and especially since the mid-1960s, there has been a very active fandom and voluminous scholarship devoted to these works. Last month I visited a friend who owns what is almost certainly the largest collection of Tolkien-related fanzines in the world, which occupies
at least six meters of shelf space, not counting what's already been donated to Marquette University. And that's just
fanzines. (You can get some idea of what's in his collection
here and
here.)
Then there's the enormous influence that
The Lord of the Rings has had on the way books are marketed. "Fantasy" as a publishing genre didn't exist before Tolkien, and the proliferation of fantasy "trilogies" (which
The Lord of the Rings is not) certainly owes its existence to Tolkien, as well. Tom Shippey writes in
J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (p. 326), "I do not think any modern writer of epic fantasy has managed to escape the mark of Tolkien, no matter how hard many of them have tried."
So it's not just "three books" and "three movies".
