The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Book: The Lord of the Rings (comprising The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return Of The King)
Author: J. R. R. Tolkien
Rating: *****
Description: Countless accolades have been lauded upon this epic, and justly so. No other modern work I have encountered has presented an alternate world so real and so compelling, steeped in so much of its own lore and history. The different peoples and places, their ancestries and past ages, are interwoven into the very narrative such that the reader feels he is witness to a great fabric of history of which these are merely strands. Coupled with Tolkien’s prose that reads with gravity and grace, the wistful and magical elven songs that hark back to the beauty of lost ages, the wonderful descriptions of nature, and the genius of creating the elven language, you see how the book starts to rise above the ordinary ‘bestseller’, And not forgetting, of course, the grand moving tale of the smallest hobbit destroying the great ring of Mordor.

All in all, it is a book that shows, more than subtle philosophical arguments, or clever rhetoric, what really is wrong with both modernism and post-modernism. For all its ‘backwardness’ and ‘pre-scientific’ concepts, the ancient world, the kind of world described in LOTR, is so much richer and beautiful, because it allows for a larger worldview. One where there is real goodness, truth and beauty, where higher purpose comes calling, where honour and courage and sacrifice really do matter absolutely for victory and glory to come, where one dares to fight for the good, where courage comes from true hope and desire. Reading the book itself is almost a spiritual experience. The reductionists just don’t know what they’ve missed.