Lord of the Rings

Did you know?

One long novel, three volumes, and a world built backwards from its own languages — The Lord of the Rings has been rewriting what fantasy can be since 1954. Here's the story behind the Lord of the Rings figures you're collecting.

• It was never written as a trilogy. Tolkien wrote one continuous novel. His publisher split it into three volumes in 1954–55 to spread the cost of paper, still scarce after the war, and Tolkien disliked the word trilogy being applied to it ever after.
• The languages came first. Tolkien was a philologist who invented Elvish for pleasure long before Middle-earth existed. He described the whole work as fundamentally linguistic in inspiration — the world was built to give the languages somewhere to be spoken.
• Barad-dûr simply means “Dark Tower”. It is Sindarin: barad tower, dûr dark. Tolkien named most of Middle-earth this way, in languages he had already finished inventing.
• Eleven nominations, eleven wins. The Return of the King took every Oscar it was nominated for in 2004 — a clean sweep matched only by Ben-Hur and Titanic, and still the only fantasy film to win Best Picture.
• Does the Balrog have wings? Thirty years of argument and no answer. Tolkien writes that its shadow reached out “like two vast wings” — a simile, not a statement — and never settles it. Every sculpt of the creature is somebody taking a side.