Here are 100 books that The Hobbit Companion fans have personally recommended if you like
The Hobbit Companion.
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I readThe Hobbit when I was in primary school and was immediately captivated by the world of magic, dwarves, and dragons. Perhaps because in the North of England where I grew up, this world seemed often to be just around the next corner! I grew up writing, and as I learned my craft I naturally turned to books on Tolkien to see what inspired and drove him. I found that every writer on Tolkien brings a new and surprising perspective on his work, each revealing a little more of Tolkien’s genius, and inspiring me to demand ever more of myself as a writer.
Professor Tom Shippey is one of the great Tolkien scholars, with the gift of being able to offer deep insight and analysis in an accessible way. In The Road to Middle-Earth he uses Tolkien’s academic life and interests to shed light on the development of his personal mythology, from the foundational History of Middle-Earth works through toLord of The Rings. For me this is a ‘gateway’ book—if you enjoy what Shippey has to say and what he reveals about Tolkien’s work, then I suspect you’ll also like the remaining three books on this list.
“Uniquely qualified to explicate Tolkien’s worldview,” this journey into the roots of the Lord of the Rings is a classic in its own right (Salon.com).
From beloved epic fantasy classic to record-breaking cinematic success, J.R.R. Tolkien's story of four brave hobbits has enraptured the hearts and minds of generations. Now, readers can go deeper into this enchanting lore with a revised edition of Tom Shippey's classic exploration of Middle-earth.
From meditations on Tolkien's inspiration to analyses of the influences of his professional background, The Road to Middle-earth takes a closer look at the novels that made Tolkien a legend. Shippey…
I readThe Hobbit when I was in primary school and was immediately captivated by the world of magic, dwarves, and dragons. Perhaps because in the North of England where I grew up, this world seemed often to be just around the next corner! I grew up writing, and as I learned my craft I naturally turned to books on Tolkien to see what inspired and drove him. I found that every writer on Tolkien brings a new and surprising perspective on his work, each revealing a little more of Tolkien’s genius, and inspiring me to demand ever more of myself as a writer.
This is a great example of what I enjoy about books about Tolkien. Roberts focuses on a tiny element of one of Tolkien’s works (the riddles that Gollum and Bilbo trade in The Hobbit) and uses it as a lens not only to investigate Tolkien’s own love and appreciation of riddles, but to prompt a wider exploration as to the nature and importance of riddles in wider literature, culture, and society. It’s well-written, intriguing, and like all great books on Tolkien, leaves you astonished.
Riddles are threaded through The Hobbit , and are key to Tolkien's creative imagination. The Riddles of The Hobbit situates this novel and the rest of Tolkien's writing in the context of Old English riddling culture, and more modern day examples; it sets out to solve the many riddles of the novel in original and often surprising ways.
I readThe Hobbit when I was in primary school and was immediately captivated by the world of magic, dwarves, and dragons. Perhaps because in the North of England where I grew up, this world seemed often to be just around the next corner! I grew up writing, and as I learned my craft I naturally turned to books on Tolkien to see what inspired and drove him. I found that every writer on Tolkien brings a new and surprising perspective on his work, each revealing a little more of Tolkien’s genius, and inspiring me to demand ever more of myself as a writer.
There’s a paradox at the heart of The Lord of The Rings. Tolkien wrote that it is “a fundamentally religious and Catholic work,” yet Middle-earth is pre-Christian and has little-to-no trace of religion evident within it. So how to reconcile the two? InThe Battle for Middle-earth, Rutledge, a priest, brings his own knowledge and understanding of scripture to bear on TheLord of the Rings, to reveal how Tolkien’s plots, themes, and characters can be understood from a Catholic perspective. One thing shines clear from this book: just what a great storyteller Tolkien is. He never seeks to dictate or persuade (unlike C.S. Lewis in his Narnia series), but allows each reader to discover for themselves the treasures within his stories.
J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings has long been acknowledged as the gold standard for fantasy fiction, and the recent Oscar-winning movie trilogy has brought forth a whole new generation of fans. Many Tolkien enthusiasts, however, are not aware of the profoundly religious dimension of the great Ring saga.
In The Battle for Middle-earth Fleming Rutledge employs a distinctive technique to uncover the theological currents that lie just under the surface of Tolkien's epic tale. Rutledge believes that the best way to understand this powerful "deep narrative" is to examine the story as it unfolds, preserving some of…
The Valor of Valhalla series by Martin Kearns is a pulse-pounding dark urban fantasy trilogy that fuses the raw power of Norse mythology with the grit of modern warfare. Set in a world where ancient gods and mythical creatures clash with secret military organizations and rogue heroes, the series follows…
Today, I teach fantasy at the University of Maryland, but I’ve been hooked on Tolkien from a young age. As a kid, I was wary that serious study of Tolkien might “destroy the magic,” but decades spent in strange corners of Tolkien’s invented universe have only deepened my appreciation for the inexhaustible depth of his sub-creation—it’s simply steeped in a profound sense of untold stories. I hope you enjoy digging in as much as I have.
I love this one because it’s a fitting tribute to Christopher Tolkien’s monumental work of literary archeology. The essays in this collection feel as fresh today as they did 24 years ago. It’s hard to pick favorites from such a strong and wide-ranging collection, but I often return to the essays by the late scholars Charles E. Noad and Richard C. West on the making of the Silmarillion and on the concept of ofermod, respectively.
As a scholar of medieval languages and literature, J.R.R. Tolkien brought to his fiction an intense interest in myth and legend. When he died in 1973, he left behind a vast body of unpublished material related to his fictive mythology. Now edited and published as The History of Middle-earth by his son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, these 12 volumes provide a record of the growth of J.R.R. Tolkien's mythology from its beginnings in 1917 to the time of his death more than 50 years later. The material in these volumes offers an unparalleled insight into Tolkien's process of myth-making…
I love Aotearoa New Zealand books! Our writers are brave, feisty, original - and living in ‘the land of the long white cloud’ at the bottom of the globe gives us a unique take on the world that permeates through everything we write. But we struggle to get our voices heard internationally, so far from the rest of you! This is your chance to push out your boundaries and explore stories that derive from a culture very different from your own, while sharing the same human emotions that bring us all together. As one of these writers, I challenge you to check us out – you won’t be disappointed!
This gripping psychological thriller centers around a girl who is caught up in a religious cult, her name changed and all her supports ripped away. How will she survive this? Will she be able to escape? Still in print after 20 years, this book won the Storylines Gaelyn Gordon Award for a Much-loved Book 2009.
A classic bestseller that's been in print for over 20 years, this gripping YA thriller follows a teenage girl caught in a religious cult.
Imagine that your mother tells you she's going away. She is going to leave you with relatives you've never heard of - and they are members of a strict religious cult. Your name is changed, and you are forced to follow the severe set of social standards set by the cult. There is no television, no radio, no newspaper. No mirrors. You must wear long, modest clothes. You don't know where your mother is, and you…
I love character-driven, roller coaster ride stories. As a young reader, I gravitated to the “choose your own adventure” books which relied on invoking knotted stomachs, and cold sweats in children as they struggled to make the right decision before reading on; turn to page 105 if you want to face the ravenous bear or page 23 if you wish to flee. Thus, the love of reading emerged and, eventually, the joy of writing followed. These books are just some of the stories that bring similar nostalgic tones when I delve into their pages. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Whilst the Lord of the Rings trilogy should be read as one story, my favourite of the series is the second book, The Two Towers.
I loved the separation of our characters and the focus on one narrative concerning one group in its entirety before we see what happens to the other group. It was a new way of reading when I first read The Two Towers.
Prior, my encounter with books containing multiple storylines saw intercut sections, switching from one set of characters to the other.
I particularly enjoyed the overarching dread surrounding the story of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum. For me, there were many gut-wrenching moments when hope fizzled away. The character building in these moments is exquisite.
This brand-new unabridged audio book of The Two Towers, the second part of J. R. R. Tolkien's epic adventure, The Lord of the Rings, is read by the BAFTA award-winning actor, director and author, Andy Serkis.
The company of the Ring is torn asunder. Frodo and Sam continue their journey alone down the great River Anduin - alone, that is, save for the mysterious creeping figure that follows wherever they go.
This continues the classic tale begun in The Fellowship of the Ring, which reaches its awesome climax in The Return of the King.
In Svetlana's country, it’s a felony to break a mirror. Mirrors are conduits of the Voice, the deity worshiped by all who follow Light. The Voice protects humans of MotherLand from the dangers that beset them on all sides: an invading…
I’m an award-winning and USA Today Best-Selling author whose work includes everything from short stories in school journals to horror and epic fantasy. But I’ve long been obsessed with books that work as well for adults as they do for children. The prose must be beautiful and designed to read aloud; the plot must be on point, and the characters must be compelling. And all of this with a PG rating. A tricky ask, even when the authors haven’t added Easter egg extras for adults. It’s because of this that I believe these are some of the best fantasy books ever written. So, enjoy!
This book was my favorite book for most of my life, so it holds a special place in my heart. It was only bumped by Well Witched (Verdigris Deep).
This is the book I read over and over to my two children. One of whom loved to act out being the indomitable Bilbo Baggins. The prose is beautiful, the plot is tight, the adventure is fun, the wonder is wondrous. Who doesn’t love forest elves? And the world-building is amazing. I guess we all know that was Tolkien’s specialty!
I will argue with anyone that this is the best story Tolkien ever wrote. The prose is beautiful to read. It doesn’t wander, it doesn’t get off track, there’s a humor, and let’s not forget the dragon, and all packed into 310 pages!
Special collector's film tie-in hardback of the best-selling classic, featuring the complete story with a sumptuous cover design inspired by THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY and brand new reproductions of all the drawings and maps by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely travelling further than the pantry of his hobbit-hole in Bag End.
But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard, Gandalf, and a company of thirteen dwarves arrive on his doorstep one day to whisk him away on an unexpected journey 'there and back again'. They have a plot to raid…
Today, I teach fantasy at the University of Maryland, but I’ve been hooked on Tolkien from a young age. As a kid, I was wary that serious study of Tolkien might “destroy the magic,” but decades spent in strange corners of Tolkien’s invented universe have only deepened my appreciation for the inexhaustible depth of his sub-creation—it’s simply steeped in a profound sense of untold stories. I hope you enjoy digging in as much as I have.
I love this book for its gloriously unfinished glimpses into three Ages of Tolkien’s sub-creation. It taught me just how important Túrin Turambar was to his author, took me to parts of Númenor I’d not dreamt of, and showed me Gandalf blowing smoke rings in Saruman’s face.
It also showed me Christopher Tolkien’s care as an editor and served as a first step towards the rich and unabashedly scholarly studies of The History of Middle-earth.
A New York Times bestseller for twenty-one weeks upon publication, J.R.R. Tolkien's Unfinished Tales is a collection of short stories ranging in time from the Elder Days of Middle-earth to the end of the War of the Ring, and further relates events as told in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.
The book concentrates on the lands of Middle-earth and comprises Gandalf's lively account of how he came to send the Dwarves to the celebrated party at Bag-End, the story of the emergence of the sea-god Ulmo before the eyes of Tuor on the coast of Beleriand, and…
Today, I teach fantasy at the University of Maryland, but I’ve been hooked on Tolkien from a young age. As a kid, I was wary that serious study of Tolkien might “destroy the magic,” but decades spent in strange corners of Tolkien’s invented universe have only deepened my appreciation for the inexhaustible depth of his sub-creation—it’s simply steeped in a profound sense of untold stories. I hope you enjoy digging in as much as I have.
I love it for taking me on a wild ride through Frodo’s dreams and along the lost road back to Númenor. Flieger’s study of Tolkien’s abandoned time travel stories is particularly effective; it made me want to explore every nook and cranny of The History of Middle-earth.
Much of her work on Tolkien is justly famous, but this one in particular showed me that Tolkien criticism could be a work of art in its own right.
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Silmarillion have long been recognized as among the most popular fiction of the twentieth century, and most critical analysis of Tolkien has centered on these novels. Granted access by the Tolkien estate and the Bodleian Library in Oxford to Tolkien's unpublished writings, Verlyn Flieger uses them here to shed new light on his better known works, revealing a new dimension of his fictive vision and giving added depth of meaning to his writing.
Tolkien's concern with time-past and present, real and "faerie"-captures the wonder and peril of travel into other…
Curiosity is certain she saw fairies at the bottom of the garden. Little does she know . . . they saw her first.
Emotionally abandoned by her mother and infatuated by a figurine of a fairy ballerina she discovers in an old toy shop, eight-year-old Curiosity Portland steals the figurine,…
I’ve been reading Tolkien since I was seven years old, mumblety-mumble years in the distant past, but it wasn’t till much later that I got serious about reading critical works on Tolkien, and then turned to writing about him, myself. Twenty years ago, I published my first book on Tolkien. Since then, I’ve edited a number of essay collections, published many papers, consulted on the Hobbit movies, amassed a respectable personal library, and edited Mythlore, one of the major journals in the field of Tolkien studies, since 2006. My love of Tolkien has led me on many adventures and to deep and abiding friendships around the world!
I am fascinated by the contradictions of Tolkien’s women and by the tension between Christian and pagan in his writing.
This book is particularly valuable for its explication of Tolkien’s integration of Marian and Valkyrie imagery, resulting in female characters of transcendental beauty and heroism. And the writing is absorbing and informative.
