Reading ONE STAR Reviews | Lord of the Rings 

Hi. Austin here. I was going to edit out the part at 1:14 where I say "It's the best part of the movies" and then proceed to belch out the Pirates of the Carribean theme instead of a Lord of the Rings song. I deserve the public shame and lambasting 😂. Tolkien, Howard Shore, Frodo, mother, and father. Im sorry.

I've loved LOTR and the Hobbit for as long as I can remember and I've NEVER once thought of orcs as black people. What a weird thing to think!

Not to mention that gimli and legolas have a character change going from to random people whose races hate each other to becoming brothers in arms

Austin went real quiet when Richard said "if you are skipping the songs and poems, stop reading" I see you Austin, you dirty little skipper. 😂

1:16 I’m offended that Austin starts humming what sounds like Pirates of the Caribbean during the LOTR video. 😂😂

Tom Bombadil is the perfect break from the darkness that Frodo knows is going to hit. It’s light. He is love and joy and all the things that the Ring is not. Frodo needed that break and the hospitality that he and Goldberry(I think that is her name-it’s been a while since I read the books) give to four hobbits.

Great video, loved hearing Trichard's thoughts!

Commenting again for the algorithm. Underrated banter and content.

These reviews are kinda wow. Also, the songs are really vital the details included are amazing! I haven't finished reading the books, I am about to finish the second part, but holy hannah these has been so much fun and that is after falling in love with the movies.

You guys keep getting better and better 😂 Big fan from Saudi Arabia ❤

Neat.

I’ve got opinions! The man shouts into the internet rectangle. I’m in the middle of my first LotR read through. I started with The Hobbit because I felt like I just had to even though my dad would read it to me as a kid and I read it sometime in high school. There were moments where I felt like I had to push through that book but only because I know that story pretty well already and I was mainly more excited to get to The Fellowship of the Ring. Now that I’m about halfway through the fellowship, my god I have never wanted to take a stroll through the woods more. It’s so refreshing. It’s like chicken soup for my fantasy soul. The walking is yes walking but it’s the most immersive walking I’ve read so far. Now, I just picked up reading again late last year and since then I have truly rediscovered my love for books, truly in part due to Richie and Austin. I picked up Shadow of the Gods and haven’t turned back since. I say this because if I would have picked up the LotR, I don’t know if I would have gotten through the first couple of chapters because of my attention span. It’s something I truly had to work on consistently pushing myself to read more chapters and redirecting my focus back to the book over and over again. I think TLOTR can come off as drudgery if you are just trying to jump back into books but once you settle in and get comfy, I don’t know if there’s anything more comfy than walking through the woods and going on an adventure with your friends. Seriously, how does that not sound lovely?! Long comment because I rambled but great video guys!

Hi guys! Tolkien essay guy, again! This is how I describe the Lord of the Rings, in as few words as possible: The Lord of the Rings was the most important black ops mission, in the history of Arda/Earth. That makes walking sound WAY cooler!

Randomly came across this video. yall are awesome

"If you keep the camera rolling" I got it 😅😂😂

You guys are lovely. Commenting for the algorithm.

I loved the hobbit but had big issues getting into fellowship of the ring. Took me like 5 start and stops to finish it. Anyways something i really enjoyed was playing clamavi de profundis covers of the songs from the books. It really heightened the experience of the songs for me. (Please check out the far over the misty mountains extended addition its remarkable) They are actually the reason i started reading the books.

Jack Nicholson Departed joke. Love it.

I was about 10 or 11 when I first read The Hobbit, and I absolutely loved it and went on to read it several times. Then I found The Two Towers in a random box one day and seeing that it was also by Tolkien, I decided to give it a go. Little did I know lol. After that I found The Fellowship book in another random box and was able to actually comprehend the story. I did have the third book at the time though, and made the mistake of reading to the end of TTT without having ROTK on hand, hence anguish.

Your videos are great! When I read LOTR for the first time, I thought it was extremely boring, but few years later I read it again, and understood that last time the main problem was translation, which is horrible, and at the second time I already learnt English well enough to read whole book in original, and now this is my favourite world. And it is so weird to understand that some time ago I agreed with some of those comments just because in translation "walking" was boring, really boring))

I hate to say it, but I agree with Kristen (second review). 😅 But that said, I absolutely love y’all‘s, RU-vid channel and this was so fun to listen to!

Review #4: Also, the council discusses how Tom wouldn’t be able to travel to destroy the ring because 1. He doesn’t want to leave Goldberry and his home behind and 2. He literally couldn’t care less about the ring, so he would lose it in 2 seconds

It is interesting to compare these with perhaps the original scathing review of Lord of the Rings, Edmund Wilson's 'Oo, Those Awful Orcs!' (April 1956) in the liberal magazine, _The_ _Nation_ . He despises the work for being nothing more than a "hypertrophic" fairy tale, and spends much of his time deriding the critics who find it worthy of adult attention. "Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form. The characters talk a story-book language that might have come out of Howard Pyle, and as personalities they do not impose themselves. At the end of this long romance, I had still no conception of the wizard Gandalph [sic], who is a cardinal figure, had never been able to visualize him at all. For the most part such characterizations as Dr. Tolkien is able to contrive are perfectly stereotyped: Frodo the good little Englishman, Samwise, his dog-like servant, who talks lower-class and respectful, and never deserts his master. These characters who are no characters are involved in interminable adventures the poverty of invention displayed in which is, it seems to me, almost pathetic." While quite wrong-headed (I think that, like many on the old-left, Wilson philosophically disliked fantasy unless it was 'practical' or satirical), at least Wilson gave his review thought. The people you quoted would not have the attention span even to read his review. Too long, and talks about people like Howard Pyla and James Branch Cabell whom thay've never heard of.

there is a book from 2022 by Robert Stuart that analyses the racial features of LOTR and the rest of the legendarium. it is really thorough and well written. basically the conclusion is, tolkien himself might not have been racist (any less than most people during his time), but there are some racist elements in the story. the depiction of the orcs is the most obvious. for one, the whole idea that an entire group of people is evil from the get-go simply due to their nature is in itself already racist, but also some of the things stated about orcs are similar to things said by racists about other races in our world

I love this

Awesome video 🎉🎉🎉😂

I've attempted several times to read The Fellowship of the Ring. Never managed to finish, so when I saw the audio book read by Andy Serkis, I opted for that. Still couldn't finish it. Was it because it was slow. Well, I read Dragonbone Chair after one of my attempts, and that's slow too, but I finished that. Is it the language, it being written so long ago. Well, I love Charles Dickens, so I doubt it. Don't know what it is, but I can't finish the Fellowship of the Ring.

Not Stupid 😊

As a content creator myself, I do try to refrain from leaving my thoughts in the comments. But with you two I make an acception to disagree with you as often as I can, but I'll admit you make it hard to do so ;)

I understood the Jack Nicholson reference and I liked it.

I love the books. I didn’t even notice the walking that people are complaining about. However, the songs and poems could be skipped and you would lose nothing from the story.

I love Lord of the the Rings. I have read it several times, but I have to admit that I skip ahead whenever Legolas starts singing.

The surname Ritchie is spelled thus. And Dennis Ritchie was one of the creators of Unix and of the C programming language, so many people have seen the name.

I make this comment solely to further the Richard conundrum. Solid video.

They must have thought they were posting on the Amazon show. 🤣

I hated Tom Bombadil when I read the books in my teens. Re-reading fellowship last year, I actually found him quite interesting. But leaving him out of the film was the right call…

Ritchie

please tell me the Two Towers and Return of the King are significantly better than Fellowship of the Ring.

is the keep the cameras rolling in reference to matt Damon talking about the departed because if so I got it and laughed if not I'm just high. also its obviously Richie have they not watched Richie rich?

They forgot about the riding though. There's a fair bit of that too.

Great.

If you keep the camara rolling...they go for another walk.

Richard W. Lord of the Rings isn’t so much a story as it is a vacation in narrative form.

Done.

cool.

1:14 that’s pirates of the Caribbean my guy

I honestly don't know why people didn't like the poems and songs. My favourite part was the songs.

Tolkien is meant for more literate readers. There were more of these sort of people before than there are now.

There are a few (very few) things I don’t like about LotR, but I assume it’s because I’m missing something, not that the books are bad.

Went from Stephen King to LOTR and took me 6 months to read but tried everyday to read it

One word

Video👍

As someone who replies to comments on meme videos from 12 years ago, I am offended by Richard's take.

not stupid

20:23 she fell funny

That what mr Adolf used to say

What people don't understand about the Tolkien books is that they expect modern take on novels. The Tolkien books are not novels they are history books written in a distant world not part of ours. The journey is an escape to another world, if you associate the world of Arda to our own then the books have already failed their purpose and you should stop reading. The professor's books show most about its world building, the poems and saga included there in shows the culture of the people living within this created world to understand the characters, their fears, flaws, strengths and hopes. In the end, most people who hate or have limited knowledge about the history of our own world generally don't like the Tolkien Books. Remember, it's not a Novel it's a history book from another world.

Also, even if the ring doesn't affect Tom, it still affects everyone and everything around him. It attracts evil, it wants to be found. So, that's the reason he won't take it.

Isn't Tom Bombadil sent by Valar to tend to the place he is residing, and therefore also restricted to interfere with the mundane world? He simply can't do it, since it is not his purpose. Same argument with the eagles, why couldn't they fly Frodo into Mordor. Well, they would be corrupted by the ring themselves, and they also have restrictions what they are allowed to do, and not what to do.

It's crazy to me how people will project their own delusional psychosis into their hate reviews. Whether they're the type of people who feel the ever present compulsion to make every single thing in their lives about race, or they're the type of people who make a list of all the things they didn't like about a particular book with the overwhelming majority of them being completely false. Then you have the people who, you can clearly tell, never read what they're reviewing, yet they feel the need to spew some hatred, base mainly on ignorance, towards it. It's one thing if you have justified complaints about something you've read, but that's not what's going on here. What we're dealing with here is the dregs of the reading community.

Lol I always skip the songs. Hate them so much

Silly

For Review 5: the first 100 pages are basically hobbit rambling and shenanigans. so are the last 100. the commenter has their priorities straight ngl 😅

Good.

I often skip the longer poems. Especially Bilbo's awful thing with the flammifer. I've read the book 37 times so I don't think you can make "you don't like it" stick.

The problem is too many younger Millennials and Gen Z want to be spoon-fed their entertainment and don't want to put any effort into something.

Duh

Shallow minded people will read a book that can be a dense and difficult read and then declare it as bad, ignoring the fact that it's most likely a skill issue 😂 I will openly admit that it took me several tries to fully read through the Lord of the Rings for the first time. As an 11 year old I just wasn't ready for the level of detail and prose that Tolkien was working with.

Watch Wednesday austin

Smrt

Look, I read these books when I was 16 and even then I found them a tad classist and racist. But that didn't RUIN them for me! It was a book from a certain person from a certain place in a certain time. We either want to A) cancel a person for simply being of a social milieu and time, or B) Deny that there is such a thing as time-specific prejudices and biases. I don't get it, really. One can point out unsettling things in Tolkien without absolutely condemning him for them. Do we discard all of ancient Greek philosophy because ancient Greek society was largely misogynist? It's ridiculous.

Love listening to ignorant people comment on other people’s racism from a position of complete privilege.

LOTR definitely isn't a one star book, but I think while being great it is at the same time the most overrated fantasy book of all time. I actually find myself agreeing with some of these reviews.

The Lord of the Rings is just about getting from one place to another! So boring

Okay LOTR is not 1★ but I will say LOTR is 3★, 3.5★ *at best*. It's just not that good if you didn't read it until after your formative years. I appreciate what it did for culture and publishing but there's MUCH better fantasy out there.