The Lord of the Rings

"Its epic scope and detailed world-building align with Stephen King's own expansive narratives and his exploration of good versus evil on a grand scale. This foundational fantasy also fits his appreciation for immersive storytelling."

"My final choice must be The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. I first read The Lord of the Rings when I was about 17. I loved it because I’d read a lot of Scandinavian mythology and suddenly I found this book which had all those stories incorporated into this very beautifully told and engaging narrative. It drew me in completely. I was living in Middle Earth for quite some time–seeing elves everywhere! It’s not just a novel that you enjoy while you are reading it–it stays with you. I think because he had created an entire world–this allows the readers to do the same. It is an alternative world and mythological system that is totally coherent. It’s a fantastic gift that he has given us. Because I had been so immersed in the Scandinavian stories and perhaps because I have a similar response to landscape and place. And a slightly melancholic approach to landscape–because it does feel as if we are on the point of losing our forests, our pristine wilderness. I tend not to go for the dramatic moments. Most of the time I’m trying to create the atmosphere in which those moments occur. Or the build-up. Because I know that when the author is really communicating directly with the reader, in those moments of heightened drama, I should stay out of the way! So, I try to give some sense of the outside world to colour the atmosphere and that enriches the readers experience of the book. I avoid competing with the author. “I was living in Middle Earth for quite some time–seeing elves everywhere! ” Tolkien didn’t set out to write novels, he set out to create a world. He wrote The Hobbit almost by accident–because he was telling the stories to his children, you see. After that his publishers wanted a follow up to The Hobbit , so he said “Well, I’ve got this thing I’ve been working on”, which was the manuscript of The Silmarillion . They balked at that and asked if he had anything else with more Hobbits in it. So, he set himself to the task of writing a sequel which grew and grew and grew. Like a pebble in a river that is continually rounded into a perfect shape. Each time these stories are handed down they are remoulded for us. Myth is a history of the imagination. I love stories that offer choice for interpretation and myths do exactly this. For children they are so valuable because the fecundity of the stories bleeds into their own lives. I can think of dreams I’ve had as an adult that were based on myths I read as a child."

"I was unsure whether I wanted to put Tolkien on this list, because if you’re looking at a list of fantasy classics, you probably already know about The Lord of the Rings . It’s an obvious book to recommend, it starts modern bookshop fantasy. Once it became really popular in the 1960s, publishers started assembling other older books for people who liked Tolkien, producing initiatives such as the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. And then people started producing new works in response – so it’s a generative book. In that sense, anyone who knows fantasy will know it. I wanted to put it on the list regardless, because I think it’s also a really good book in ways that people don’t necessarily recognise. We sometimes forget how accomplished and how strange Tolkien is, because he is such a monument. His classic status can sometimes block us from seeing what he’s actually doing. For example, people often describe The Lord of the Rings as a simple struggle, good versus evil – but while there are definitely evil forces and good forces in Tolkien, it’s not a book where the good guys win uncomplicatedly. There’s a lot of suffering and a lot of loss. It’s a book where certain ways of existing are slowly slipping out of the world and being replaced. And it’s a book that’s pretty sharp on the ways people can delude themselves. Saruman is a good example there: he wants to create an orderly, lawful world guided by right-thinking people. He just thinks that it’s pragmatic and justified to ally with Sauron for a bit to do that, so that you can then overthrow him. So he gets onto that slippery slope of pragmatic, lesser-of-two-evils decision-making. I also think people have a sense that The Lord of the Rings has a single tone – that it’s generic fantasy writing. One of the brilliant things about it is how carefully it guides you into its world. If you read the first couple of chapters and then jump to, say, the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, the language sounds completely different, but you don’t really notice that when you’re reading the book, because Tolkien’s carried you into his world so carefully. Yes. Because Tolkien worked on the books for so long, they have a sense of strangeness, with older ideas that he can’t quite give up remaining in there alongside later influences. The Lord of the Rings has been carefully shaped, but it’s the product of a substantial chunk of Tolkien’s life, and I think that carries across. I don’t think many writers have had the chance to keep something in their head for so long. It’s such a difficult thing to devote time to, but Tolkien’s work really benefits from that commitment and idiosyncrasy. The Lord of the Rings also benefits from the ways that it’s not like certain kinds of earlier romance. Another thing that people sometimes reduce The Lord of the Rings to is Aragorn’s story. But you’re repeatedly told, including by Aragorn himself, that it’s not principally Aragorn’s story: it’s Frodo’s story. It’s the story of the hobbits. Aragorn cannot win against Sauron. The only way you can win is through this weird subterfuge mission done by seemingly entirely unsuitable people. A lot of later fantasies end up bundling Aragorn and Frodo back into the same character in a far less interesting manner. It’s a book about needing a community to assemble, and that’s something that people sometimes neglect about it – it’s about a coalition of diverse peoples coming together, perhaps to try and preserve the world the way they like it, or perhaps to try and make a better world. It has such great set-pieces as well. I always come back to the terrible flowers by the bridge that Frodo and Sam encounter, the Watcher in the Water, the blindfolded journey into Lothlórien, the Barrow-wight scene… There are a lot of really great fantasy moments in The Lord of the Rings. The books that take things up from The Lord of the Rings nearly always change them in various ways. It’s almost inevitable. I don’t believe there are many direct copies in the way that people sometimes suggest. The book that usually gets bashed for being a scene-for-scene imitation is Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara . But The Sword of Shannara is half the length of The Lord of the Rings . If you compress the action like that, you’re making it into an adventure. And there are ways in which Brooks does more interesting things than Tolkien… Brooks doesn’t have wholly evil races, for example, in the way that Tolkien does. Even by that point, authors had picked up that that might not be the best route to go down. A lot of later writers have picked up various things from The Lord of the Rings while rejecting others. There are a lot of positive things that people have drawn from The Lord of the Rings . It’s a resource that you can do all sorts of things with – I mean, it’s slightly disturbing that people love naming arms and surveillance companies after things from Lord of the Rings , for example – but it’s influential in all sorts of directions. But there are also bits of The Lord of the Rings that have been less drawn upon. There’s still a lot there that can be used or productively questioned. It’s created a space for fantasy on bookshelves, but it doesn’t determine everything that can be done in that space. The space it’s opened up is facilitative. I think people could probably do with paying a bit less attention to The Lord of the Rings and a bit more attention to the interesting things that other fantasy writers are doing. But, still, The Lord of the Rings is pretty great, and I don’t think it’s a problem that people build substantial parts of their lives around it. The fact that people find so much in it is a testament to that enabling aspect of its classic status. There are also a lot of great fantasy writers who don’t like The Lord of the Rings very much and who’ve picked other touchstones. We’ll talk about Mervyn Peake later. One of the reasons I put Peake on the list is that he’s often held up by people who don’t like Tolkien very much as an alternative fountain for fantasy to flow from. There’s an assumption that people have inherited from Romanticism that good literary work is made by geniuses doing things that people have never done before. But people are always using existing resources. No one invents language or culture from the ground up when they start writing. A nicer way to think about culture is that we have a common stock of stuff that we’re interested in, that we agree is good, but that we’re also prepared to critique: a toolbox that we take things out of so we can modify them and put them back. We’re able to make old stories and tropes do things that they weren’t doing before, making them new and fresh again. And I think fantasy is the genre that most clearly models that. Perhaps fairy stories are the obvious example: people pick up a fairy story and think, “What about this character who’s been pushed to the side?”, or, “I don’t really like the passivity of this character. Let’s write it with them doing a bit more…”, or, “This character resonates with this experience that I have with my sexuality, or with neurodivergence, or something else… Let’s take the story and play with that”. So stories become facilitative means of talking about our lives, rather than closed systems that you can only look at and say, “Oh, that’s great, but I could never do something like that.” I think the best thing about fantasy is that it teaches you how to construct fantasies of your own, empowering you to tell your own stories."

"You can’t talk about epic fantasy without talking about The Lord of the Rings , since a good chunk of modern epic fantasy wouldn’t exist without Tolkien, if not all of it. So, both the first book and the series as a whole are about the characters, including the hobbit Frodo, the wizard Gandalf and all of their friends and allies, setting off to help destroy the “One Ring to rule them all”, the magic ring. And they experience various misadventures along the way. That’s the story – I’ve horrendously simplified it. Of course, everything has been said about Tolkien, I can’t say anything new… If you’re coming to the books having only seen the movies, you may be in for a bit of a shock about how much walking there is, and how much description there is. If Tolkien were getting published nowadays, an editor would go in and drastically downsize quite a bit, especially in the first one or two hundred pages of the first book – downsizing the description of the landscape and the setting and so forth and so on. But that was a large part of the mood that Tolkien was attempting to convey. He had a very specific sense of place, and he was pursuing that, and there’s a gentleness and a beauty. Of course, the setting of the series is Middle-earth, and it has a history that’s nearly as rich as the history of the real world. That was a deliberate effort on Tolkien’s part to essentially create a mythology for the modern-day UK, in a way that didn’t exist prior to Tolkien. I’d say it has expanded worldwide at this point. He did a wonderful job of it, and the characters are memorable. The story is, of course, deep and meaningful, because Tolkien was trying to say something about the nature of power and evil. When I think of the series, I think of so many wonderful scenes – whether or not there was danger involved, it’s about how evocative the mood and Middle-earth is. I’m not the first reader to say it would have been wonderful to visit Middle-earth. On a technical level, because Tolkien was a linguist and was incredibly proficient with that, he was able to create a reality to his languages and his world that few authors can come close to. On a storytelling level, Tolkien also did something that is really rare to see: he wrote a series which is essentially one giant book published as three volumes, but each volume is shorter than the last . Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another author that’s done that. One of the difficulties with epics is that they tend to sprawl. The longer you spend with the world, the longer you spend with the characters, the more you learn about them, and the more things you think about in the world. And so there’s a temptation to keep adding more and more, and there’s a temptation to answer more and more questions. Tolkien corralled a lot of his world-building into the appendices, just like Frank Herbert did with Dune , even though there’s still a ton of world-building in the books themselves. You can read it or not as you like, but as is right and proper, with each book the pacing pushes faster and faster toward the end of the story, the final confrontation. He’s not going to spend ten pages at the beginning of book three telling you what a hobbit is; he did that back in the first book. And there’s no need to reiterate all of this extra description or world-building or exposition. I think it’s a really admirable thing, and all of us authors should pay a little more attention to that at times. There is a difference between writers who plot heavily before writing, and writers who discover the world and the characters as they write. My understanding is that Tolkien was kind of in-between; he did a lot of discovery as he was writing, and had a lot of false starts along the way with The Fellowship of the Ring . But at the end, he was able to maintain control of that structure. The world-building is wonderful, but the point is the story itself and the characters, they stick with you. The world itself feels incredibly real, and there’s a real sense of magic there. One of my great complaints with so many fantasy television shows and films is that they don’t usually succeed in evoking a sense of wonder and awe. That may be easier to do in a book than in film and television, where we can watch someone and say, ‘He’s got a New York accent and he’s supposed to be an elf from a thousand years ago’ or whatever. Fantasy is very hard. It’s hard to create that sense of another place and another time, especially if you’re going for high fantasy versus a more gritty, low-fantasy feeling. But The Lord of the Rings books do it in spades, and that is one of the things that is truly wonderful about them. I’ll end by referencing a quote that I used in the afterword for my science fiction epic, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars . I have a translation of The Aeneid sitting here somewhere in my office, translated by a professor named Rolfe Humphries. Virgil worked on The Aeneid for ages and ages, and felt that it was still terribly unfinished; it was supposed to be burned when he died, and fortunately for us, it wasn’t. And Rolfe Humphries made the point in his notes on his translation, talking both about The Aeneid and his own translation: you can have a perfect sentence, you can have a perfect couple of lines, a perfect stanza. You can have a small perfect something. But you can never have a perfect epic. It’s too little energy spread over too much material. All epics are flawed in one way or another. I really like that thought, actually, because all of the books we’ve discussed today have their own idiosyncrasies. They all have their own wonky little features, The Lord of the Rings being no exception. I think I love all of them because of that, not in spite of that. It’s what makes things unique and human, and in an era of AI , that’s all the more important."

"The Lord of the Rings , I suppose, would be the one to start with because that would be the earliest one. It wasn’t my first great love of a book, but I was quite young when I encountered it. I must’ve been eight or nine, I think, when my mum and dad read that to me – and it was incredibly influential because of the notion of creating a world. I guess I’d already come across that with Narnia . I loved the CS Lewis books when I was seven or eight, and then coming to Tolkien, he just sort of does the same thing in so much more detail and so much more depth and breadth that it was just completely awe-inspiring. The versions I would have first encountered would have been the hardbacks that my parents borrowed from the library. They had these great, crinkly maps that unfolded from inside the back cover – you could spread them out on the living room carpet and study them for hours. There were all these little places that only get mentioned in passing in the story but there they all are, mapped and visitable. It was that sense of scale, as well – that sense of this vast world going on, then a vast story being set inside it. It was all very inspiring to a small lad. I read it several times while growing up and each time I got something different from it. I wouldn’t say it’s what inspired me to write because I was already writing by then, but it certainly influenced the sort of things that I do write. It’s how I’ve made my living – I make up worlds. As an adult, there are things about the story that I don’t like so much, but as a creation of an imaginary world, I still think it’s the gold standard. Alan Lee is another hero of mine, actually. He’s one of my illustrator heroes from when I was younger. I think that’s another thing for me, another influence that The Lord of the Rings had on me, because I lived in town growing up. I lived in Brighton, in a very ordinary housing estate there, but my parents would take us away on holidays to the Lake District or Wales or Dartmoor and Cornwall and places like that, and I think that The Lord of the Rings gave me a context to see these landscapes in. I was always very drawn to these western upland, granitic landscapes, and yes, I think it’s partly because they provided the scenery for me for when I was reading The Lord of the Rings . Dartmoor is extraordinarily Tolkien-esque. It’s covered in old stone circles and abandoned buildings and things. It’s wonderful. I don’t know if Tolkien knew Devon at all, but the early parts of The Lord of the Rings , the Shire, and the Barrow-downs – are basically Dartmoor. So I’m going to claim it as the great Dartmoor book. Yes, yes, yes. I remember doing that. Looking at the landscape and imagining a giant or something slumbering under it. It’s a two-way street as well, because I think I already had this fascination with the landscape. As a smaller child I didn’t really have a frame to view it through, and then The Lord of the Rings provided that. I think it’s about the English landscape, really. One of the things you notice as you read it, or I notice now as I read it, is that everywhere in it has at least three names. Everywhere they go, it has the name that’s used now, and the name in Old Elvish, and then a dwarf name or something. So it has this deep sense of history in the landscape which is so very important to me."