The Fellowship of the Ring Analysis

The Shire In a 1956 letter, Tolkien commented: "I found that many children have become interested, even engrossed, in The Lord of the Rings, from about 10 onwards. I think it is rather a pity, real...

The narrator of the Lord of the Rings is never a character in its own right (though we do hear a lot of stories from the different characters' perspectives within dialogue). However, we think this...

Lord of the Rings is quest literature at its best. A quest is what happens when a character (or characters) travel to a far off destination with the sole purpose of achieving some goal. Clearly, Fr...

The tone of The Fellowship of the Ring really varies from Book 1 to Book 2. In Book 1, we get plenty of funny dialogue and homey expressions. Take, for example, Tolkien's presentation of Bilbo's bi...

Detailed, Wordy, Culture-SpecificTolkien loves his details. Take, for example, his description of the West Gate of Moria:At the top, as high as Gandalf could reach, was an arch of interlacing lette...

The three novels of the Lord of the Rings all describe a War between Good and Evil. But the title of the first book – The Fellowship of the Ring – doesn’t say anything about grand battles or...

The epigraph of the whole Lord of the Rings series (which appears at the front of each of the three volumes) is Tolkien's own poem:Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,Seven for the Dwarf-...

The last chapter of the first book is called "The Breaking of the Fellowship." But we've just met the Fellowship; why do they have to break up now? There are some pretty obvious plot-based reasons...

The biggest challenge in reading The Fellowship of the Ring is Tolkien's huge amount of name-dropping. It does not take long to get to know Frodo or Sam, but who the heck is Erestor, or Beren One-H...

Odd Hobbit OutAt the start of The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo Baggins receives the Ring from Bilbo, and continues to live happily in the Shire for seventeen years without much trouble. But even a...

Frodo Baggins is quite literally called to the Ring quest: Gandalf finds him in his comfortable home in the Shire and warns him that he must leave right away because servants of the worst evil in M...

Frodo Baggins is a prosperous Hobbit in the peaceful, pleasant land of the Shire (though his neighbors think he's kind of odd). He inherits a golden ring from his uncle, Bilbo Baggins, the famous H...

The first film version of The Fellowship of the Ring was actually an animated production made by artist Ralph Bakshi in 1978. It was just called Lord of the Rings, but it certainly does not cover t...

Nope. We've got nothing. We are engaged in the serious business of war, here, people – get your minds out of the gutter! Apparently, the Fellowship doesn't have time for sex until the Ring is des...

Hilariously, all of Tolkien's shout-outs in the Lord of the Rings are to the tales in his own books, The Hobbit and the Silmarillion. He does not refer overtly to any other works outside of his myt...