The Ear Of Mordor!

The Lord of the Rings is a mighty work which has a mighty following over many decades. It's been the subject now of both minor and major motion pictures and truck loads of analysis and scholarly attention. But it remains at its heart a grand epic fairy tale written mostly to give life to languages long dead or having never properly lived. And so to hear it is a fitting way to encounter the tale.

I own the epic many times over. Several paperback sets and even a few hardback sets. It has become a fetish collectible in its own right and I'd be lying if I didn't say I'd love to have a few more of those lovely well-crafted sets. My main personal copy is the red edition seen above, given to me many decades ago now by a friend as a birthday gift. It's at once exceedingly handsome and accessible with a typeface that invites reading (unlike some I've run across for sure).

I've long had a  wooden boxed set of The Lord of the Rings produced by The Mind's Eye for NPR Radio. It's a follow-up and companion to a smaller set giving life to The Hobbit. The Hobbit was given four cassettes to tell its tale and here here each of the volumes are likewise given four cassettes. Four for The Fellowship of the Ring, four for The Two Towers, and finally four for The Return of the King.

It's not  ideal production and to be honest some of the pronunciation of names seems a bit suspect. "Saruman"  and "Legolas" in particular seem to warp in the mouths of the actors. But overall it's a grand entertainment, a relic of a time when Tolkien was awash in the popular culture and only beginning to become a fresh and frisky dynamo of the marketplace, not the perennial somewhat stolid monument of fantasy it has become today.

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