show me a picture of gollum from lord of the rings

Even if it perplexed certain critics, it gained an immediate foothold with a generation of readers and forever changed the cultural landscape.

Spanning more than 1,100 pages over three volumes, The Lord of the Rings told a far more complicated story, dense with mythology and invented languages, and made for a dazzling read. Tolkien then spent 17 years crafting the sequel, and it proved worth the wait. The tale of a resolute homebody, hobbit Bilbo Baggins, drawn into a quest-involving wizards, dwarves, elves, giant spiders, a fire-breathing dragon, a hoard of gold, and a massive conflict among five armies-immediately captured the public’s imagination and vaulted the novel to best-seller status. His debut, set in his imagined world of Middle-earth, drew on a long-running fascination with fairy tales and Norse myth, creating a high-fantasy world unlike anything ever previously committed to paper. It’s to give an audience an original experience.”īack in 1937, that’s precisely what the fledgling novelist and distinguished Oxford professor had done with The Hobbit. So fantasy is interesting, because there aren’t really any clichés. “For every other genre-Westerns, war-you can name truly amazing films.

“Fantasy has a history of misfires,” filmmaker Peter Jackson told Entertainment Weekly in 2001, just weeks before the release of his first movie based on The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R.

The following is from the introduction to LIFE’s new special issue The Lord of the Rings: The Origins, the Stories, the Extraordinary Adventure, available at newsstands and here, online:

Show me a picture of gollum from lord of the rings