The Main Characters from Sir Peter Jackson’s Film Version

I have decided that I will have a J. R. R. Tolkien summer during which I will re-read the Lord of the Rings trilogy and undertake to read The Silmarillion for the first time. And I will see all three films in Sir Peter Jackson’s masterful film version. (I own all three films on DVD). I have already had the same book/film experience last year with The Hobbit.

Less than half an hour ago, I completed my re-reading of The Fellowship of the Ring, probably my favorite novel of the three, because all nine major characters are interacting with one another during much of the length of the story.

It seems that Tolkien’s trilogy never grows old. I cannot but think that it is one of the great literary accomplishments of the Twentieth Century. It is fantasy, but with an eye cocked at the growth of fascism in Europe during the 1930s and its harvest as the Second World War. I wonder if someone even half so good as Tolkien will chronicle our own uneasy times.