The Return of the King

(This is not so much a review of Return of the King, more of a review of LotR as a whole and of the andy serkis audiobooks)

I am very glad to revisit these! I have to say though, among my recent forays into to Tolkien's work, I think I rank LotR lower than The Silmarillion and The Hobbit. Generally I think my biggest problem with LotR is that most of the stuff in Rohan and Gondor is not that interesting to me, which means books 3 and 5 are kind of a slog. In general when we are reading about characters directly connected to the ring, like Frodo, Sam, Bilbo, and Gollum, that's when the book is at its best.

As for Serkis's reading, it's fantastic, for the most part. I do think his reading of Gollum, a full-on recreation of his voice from the film, fits a little weirdly into the tone and style of the novel, but I mean it's a great performance on its own merits. Also I feel like any time we get lines from "monstrous" characters like the nazgûl, orcs, uruks, the mouth of sauron, etc, I feel like he makes big swings at monster voices that don't feel quite right for the text. But that's relatively rare. I am particularly fond of his singing throughout the book. I'd forgotten how much singing there is in LotR, probably because it's mostly eliminated from the films and reading songs on the page never really does much for me, so the songs never made much of an impact on me. But Serkis really brings them to life. He is not a virtuoso singer which is all the better, it makes the songs feel characterful and part of the world.

Overall, LotR is good and the Serkis audiobook is a great way to revisit it!

When I first tried to read “Lord of the Rings” I was only a kid, perhaps twelve years old, and I got very bored during the first half of volume two, so I didn’t read any further and forgot about it for a while. Looking back now, I was maybe a little bit too young back then. So now, forty years later, being someone who just can’t stand having only read half of a famous book, I’m back again at it; but I must say, it is still quite boring at times. Even though it’s considered “High Fantasy”, there’s still a lot of Sword & Sorcery in it (which I usually don’t like very much), there are endless descriptions of walking through landscapes and of military operations, and there is, to my taste at least, still too much glorification of heroism. I will definitely finish it this time, but it is straining and less fun than I thought. Still, what’s impressing to it, and that’s what I think made it so famous, is Tolkien’s love for details in imagining middle earth, his verbose world building; his storytelling however I find rather lengthy and mediocre. (Disclaimer: Written by a non-native speaker without any use of AI – may contain mistakes and awkward formulations)