Tracy Oldfield

Hey, there's a preview flick on the Lord of the Rings website, if anyone's interested...  www.lordoftherings.net   Enjoy!!!
 
Tracy

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Since Lord of the Rings has been mentioned several times lately, I thought
I'd ask....does anyone know of good illustrated editions of these books? I
read them in high school (and college and adulthood over and over!) and just
text was fine with me, but my son is 10 and loved Tolkien's illustrations in
the edition of the Hobbit we just finished. I have looked at Barnes and Noble
and other bookstores and also online, but I have yet to find any editions
with illustrations other than the maps. Does anybody know where I can find
illustrated books?? Thanks.

Priss

Tracy Oldfield

Since Lord of the Rings has been mentioned several
times lately, I thought 
I'd ask....does anyone know of good illustrated
editions of these books? I 
read them in high school (and college and adulthood
over and over!) and just 
text was fine with me, but my son is 10 and loved
Tolkien's illustrations in 
the edition of the Hobbit we just finished. I have
looked at Barnes and Noble 
and other bookstores and also online, but I have yet to
find any editions 
with illustrations other than the maps. Does anybody
know where I can find 
illustrated books?? Thanks.

Priss

Don't know about illustrated editions of the books themselves, but
the conceptual artists (who have worked on Tolkein stuff for
years) for the films are Alan Lee and John Howe. We have a
HarperCollins hardback edition of The Hobbit, illustrated by Alan
Lee (ISBN 0-261-10330-x) We got it in with an introductory
offer from a book club. It's beautiful. Don't know where we're
going to keep it!

Have a poke round the HarperCollins website (whatever that is
but I'm sure you'll find it) and see what there is :-)

Tracy

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In a message dated 3/29/01 3:59:35 AM, tracy.oldfield@... writes:

<< I have yet to
find any editions
with illustrations other than the maps. Does anybody
know where I can find
illustrated books?? >>

We have the old calendars from the 1970's (not all of them, but several) with
the Hildebrandt brothers illustrations, and so they're adjunct but not in the
book.

A young friend of mine lately read the Lord of the Rings and told me that
there was nothing original in there. I HOOTED loudly and would've spewed if
I'd been drinking anything, and then realized she was born in the 1980's and
by then Tolkien's universe had spawned hundreds or thousands of copycat
books, games, movies, cartoons, etc. and sure enough, it had been so
thoroughly mined for a dozen years before my friend ever hit the planet, that
there was not a speck of that series that was news to her.

I was apologizing even before I could take another breath, because I realized
that from her point of view it was not only longer than she needed to read to
come to things that others had told more recently, less tediously, etc., but
that taken out of its own temporal and social context, it just wasn't as big
a thrill.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, though, it *was* the thing to be reading,
and although it wasn't designed to do so it aided the cross-cultural social
engineering going on among young people at the time. Steeped in visions of
cooperation between different kinds of beings, and identifying the evil
politicians with the hoard-guarding, smoke-breathing bad guys... well it was
a balm on the already-unfolding socio-political business of the day.

Also, Tolkien was a linguist and loved English folklore, and so for those of
us interested in fairy tales and ballads, there were elements visible, and
the naming of the elves vs. the orcs and others was a model (a charicature,
but with legitimate bases) of western Indo-European linguistic differences.

And for those of us who had been being made to read too much 18th and 19th
century literature, it was nice to read a full-out fantasy which was also so
beautifully composed.
I don't blame kids today if they'd rather see the movie than read the book.
I won't say a word of shame. It's hard going, those books. But there are
passages that make me catch my breath.

An elf rider is scoffing at the idea of "halflings" (hobbits, in this story,
but halflings in English before that) and says to Gimli and Aragorn/Strider:
"Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?"

"A man may do both," said Aragorn, "For not we but those who come after will
make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty
matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!"

There's another passage I was going to look for, hobbits going done a river
in a canyon, with a stunning description, but I already got sucked into the
book again and I have things to do when kids wake up, so must go.

Sandra

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In a message dated 8/30/02 2:21:19 PM Central Daylight Time,
[email protected] writes:

<< "Would the parents or aunt and uncle of
Spiderman please come to the customer service desk. Your child is waiting,"
then after just a few seconds, we heard this "Ummm Your Spiderman is
waiting." <g> Darin couldn't go to the desk, he was laughing too hard. >>

Oh Nancy, thanks for sharing this. I laughed out loud!! You are a fabulous,
funny and wonderful family!

Ren