Lord of the Rings
Official licenced Chess Sets

Review Comments
( Rings of Power)

Although written before, during and after the second world war Tolkien made it abundantly clear that no allegory should be drawn from England's exhausted plight after the war,  nor was his chapter " The Scouring of the Shire" a reflection of changes to England as a result of the war. He knew some would seek to analyse and expound their own views, and thus parallels drawn were to be recognised as no more than the fancies of the critics. ( how that must have flummoxed and  annoyed them ! ) ed. 

' He has distilled elements of Norse, Teutonic and Celtic myth to make a strange but coherent world of his own, presented with a limpid joy in natural beauty and a constant undertow of embodied terrors. '         The Sunday Times

' The English-speaking world is divided into those who have read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and those who are going to  read them. '   The Sunday Times

' Masterpiece? Oh, yes I've no doubt of that. '        The Sunday Telegraph

' One of the most intense feats of imagination of our times.'     Birmingham Post

' Among the greatest works of imaginative fiction of the mid-20th century. If it is no more than an entertainment, we have seldom been entertained so well. The book in all its great length presents us with the richest profusion of new lands and new creatures, from the beauty of Lothlorien to the horror of Mordor, adventures to hold us spell-bound, and words of beauty and evocation to bring all vividly before us. '           The Sunday Telegraph

' exciting, enchanting and more than a little inspiring '         Oxford Mail

' If Ariosto rivaled it in invention ( in fact he did not ) he would still lack its heroic seriousness.  No imaginary world has been projected which is at once multifarious and so true to it's own inner laws; none so seemingly objective, so disinfected from the taint of an author's merely individual psychology; none so relevant to the actual human situation yet free from allegory. And what fine shading there is in the variations of style to meet the endless diversity of scenes and characters - comic, homely, epic, monstrous, or diabolic. '           C.S. Lewis

' Elf  lords wielding magical rings of power, '            Ripon Gazette

' It is heroic romance....something which has scarcely been attempted on this scale since Spenser's Faerie Queene, so one can't praise the book by comparisons - there is nothing to compare it with. ........ for width of imagination it beggars parallel '       Richard Hughes

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