Tolkien Quotes

‘The Lord of the Rings,’ published in the mid-1950s, was intended as a prehistory to our own world. It was perceived by Tolkien to be a small but significant episode in a vast alternate mythology constructed entirely out of his own imagination.

I really respect and admire Tolkien. I think he was the most honest of the Romantics.

What’s wonderful about Tolkien and Shakespeare is that they show up your own individual microscope. They’re so infinitely vast. You can reinterpret them in so many ways.

For a variety of reasons, my books struck the marketplace like a thunderclap; and one of those reasons was that there were so few alternatives available. Readers who loved Tolkien, and who were not satisfied by Terry Brooks, had nowhere else to turn.

One thing Tolkien does incredibly well – and this is from a lay person’s point of view; I am not scholar or anything – is that you don’t have to make an effort to envisage the worlds that he writes about.

I never liked Gandalf the White as much as Gandalf the Grey, and I never liked him coming back. I think it would have been an even stronger story if Tolkien had left him dead.

My wife and I have this discussion all the time. Her primal influences are J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Mine are Rudyard Kipling, Edith Nesbit and T.H. White. So, we have certain structural differences in form and content right off the bat!

I would love to live in ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ J. R. R. Tolkien’s world is so vivid and rich and sensual. I love the country setting and the routine of the hobbits. Of course, I would like to be a hobbit who goes on small adventures – not huge, horrifying ones like Frodo’s quest.

Authors as diverse as Rudyard Kipling, E. Nesbit, and J. R. R. Tolkien have shaped modern paganism as greatly as any theological underpinnings.

Our daughter’s name Arwynn comes from Arwen in ‘Lord of the Rings’ because my wife and I met for the first time in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used to go to read out their stories to one another.

Consensus wisdom has it that all modern commercial fantasy novels fall into two camps: those derived from J.R.R. Tolkien and those derived from Mervyn Peake. The ‘Lord of the Rings’ template or the ‘Gormenghast’ mold.

Tolkien is eminently filmable, I think. ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is intensely… landscaped. But ‘Discworld’ is about dialogue, which is one reason why it might be hard to film.

I didn’t want to write a pure fantasy novel, though I love those and grew up on J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula LeGuin.

Peter Jackson has just really earned the right to be Tolkien’s torchbearer on screen.

When Peter Jackson made the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies, I remember there was a concern that people who didn’t read Tolkien wouldn’t go see the first one. But the films were so good in their own right that the audience grew beyond the readership of the book.

The Tolkien estate owns the writings of Professor Tolkien. ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’ were sold by Professor Tolkien in the late ’60s, the film rights.

The whole atmosphere of the book, the tone of ‘The Hobbit,’ is of a kid’s adventure story, told in the first person by Tolkien, who is introducing young people to the notion of Middle-earth. A lot of it is very light-hearted.

More often than not, however, the person who flatly states ‘Elves aren’t like that!’ is hard pressed to describe how they really look…. as if Tolkien has summoned archetypes from so deep in our minds that we can only recall them incompletely.

I’m the first to admit that I can’t be as good as Tolkien, and a movie can never be as good as Tolkien.

‘The Hobbit’ by J. R. R. Tolkien was the first book I enjoyed. I was 14 and when I finished I started it again.

The Seventies were an interesting time to be a reader or writer of fantasy. Tolkien was the great master. Lin Carter was resurrecting wonders of British and American fantasy from the early twentieth century in his Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.

‘Lord Of The Rings’ fandom was massive, worldwide, entrenched. Generally it had been part of the fans’ life all their life, because they had it read to them as children; they’d become Tolkien students.

I think that when Tolkien created Gollum and the ring, he even expressed in his biography that he never really knew what he created until he went back and looked at it.

I’m a huge fan of Tolkien. I read those books when I was in junior high school and high school, and they had a profound effect on me. I’d read other fantasy before, but none of them that I loved like Tolkien.

I have been illustrating Tolkien’s books ever since I first read them, long before illustration became my profession.

I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I’m ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

The success that the Tolkien books had redefined modern fantasy.

It’s almost like an optical illusion, ‘The Hobbit.’ You look at the book, and it is really thin, and you could make a relatively thin film as well. What I mean by that is that you could race through the story at the speed that Tolkien does.

I read all of the books by Tolkien, including ‘The Hobbit,’ when I was in my twenties, and his deep love of nature and all things green resonates deeply with me.

Tolkien was quite a religious man, and so is George R.R. Martin. They kind of have this epic quality about them when they write the material.

I’d never heard of the ‘Lord of the Rings’, actually. So I went to the bookstore and there it was, three shelves of books about Tolkien and Middle-earth, and I was like, ‘Holy cow, what else am I missing out on?’

My first score for ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, ‘The Fellowship of the Ring,’ was the beginning of my journey into the world of Tolkien, and I will always hold a special fondness for the music and the experience.

When I was a teenager, what I most wanted to read were fantasy novels. Not Tolkien and Malory, but sword-and-sorcery pulp. I craved glowy blue magic, chainmail bikinis, dragons with unpronounceable names.

There’s no doubt that prog rock has an image problem: many musicians hate the label, and too many people associate it with 10-minute drum solos and the weirder bits of JRR Tolkien.

I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkien’s legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.

I thought that there might be something unsatisfying about directing two Tolkien movies after ‘Lord of the Rings.’ I’d be trying to compete with myself and deliberately doing things differently.

I feel like my imagination was crafted by Tolkien. He seemed to tap into that childhood intrigue of secret doors and hidden worlds.

Before my teens, my contemporaries were reading Tolkien and were absorbed by his works, but try as I might, I could not be drawn in, perhaps as something in me resists the epic, medieval-feeling fantasy.

Just think about it: in every shop in the reading world since 1956, there has been two feet of book-space devoted to Tolkien.

I was a massive Tolkien fan. ‘The Hobbit’ was… my favorite book as a little girl, and the Silvan Elves were my favorite characters in the book.