Top 40 Tolkien Quotes

As a generalization, fantasy writing has leaned more on political storytelling the more it’s tried to escape the inevitable influence of Middle-earth, and revise the Eurocentric and Christian tropes that Tolkien’s particular worldview bequeathed.

I have been illustrating Tolkien’s books ever since I first read them, long before illustration became my profession.

Authors as diverse as Rudyard Kipling, E. Nesbit, and J. R. R. Tolkien have shaped modern paganism as greatly as any theological underpinnings.

When you succeed at creating your own world, whether it’s in any realm – like Tolkien was able to do – and people are able to enter that world, it’s a special thing.

One thing Tolkien does incredibly well – and this is from a lay person’s point of view; I am not scholar or anything – is that you don’t have to make an effort to envisage the worlds that he writes about.

Building on the work of George Macdonald, William Morris and Edward Plunkett, what became known as high fantasy was more or less invented by J. R. R. Tolkien.

What’s wonderful about Tolkien and Shakespeare is that they show up your own individual microscope. They’re so infinitely vast. You can reinterpret them in so many ways.

Our daughter’s name Arwynn comes from Arwen in ‘Lord of the Rings’ because my wife and I met for the first time in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used to go to read out their stories to one another.

Tolkien made dwarf sign language because, you know, it’s too loud to talk in the mines.

There’s a very strong force in Tolkien’s characters.

I was a massive Tolkien fan. ‘The Hobbit’ was… my favorite book as a little girl, and the Silvan Elves were my favorite characters in the book.

I feel like my imagination was crafted by Tolkien. He seemed to tap into that childhood intrigue of secret doors and hidden worlds.

Fantasy has had some problems with being too repetitive, in my opinion. I try to read what other people are doing – and say, ‘How can I add to this rather than just recycle it? How can I stand on Tolkien’s shoulders rather than stand tied to his kneecaps?’

When I was a teenager, what I most wanted to read were fantasy novels. Not Tolkien and Malory, but sword-and-sorcery pulp. I craved glowy blue magic, chainmail bikinis, dragons with unpronounceable names.

I don’t steal stories. If I’m a plagiarist, so is Hitchcock. And Tolkien. And Shakespeare.

My wife and I have this discussion all the time. Her primal influences are J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Mine are Rudyard Kipling, Edith Nesbit and T.H. White. So, we have certain structural differences in form and content right off the bat!

I think that when Tolkien created Gollum and the ring, he even expressed in his biography that he never really knew what he created until he went back and looked at it.

I read Tolkien when I was 11. I read ‘The Hobbit’ and the trilogy on a road trip with my family. I identified with the nonhumans in those books, and it never occurred to me why that was.

I’m the first to admit that I can’t be as good as Tolkien, and a movie can never be as good as Tolkien.

I read everything that Tolkien wrote, and also read biographies of him. I was fascinated by his experiences in World War I, which includes the loss of life of some of his very, very close friends. I think he writes about that a lot in ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings.’

I’m a huge fan of Tolkien. I read those books when I was in junior high school and high school, and they had a profound effect on me. I’d read other fantasy before, but none of them that I loved like Tolkien.

Tolkien was quite a religious man, and so is George R.R. Martin. They kind of have this epic quality about them when they write the material.

Peter Jackson has just really earned the right to be Tolkien’s torchbearer on screen.

I thought that there might be something unsatisfying about directing two Tolkien movies after ‘Lord of the Rings.’ I’d be trying to compete with myself and deliberately doing things differently.

Consensus wisdom has it that all modern commercial fantasy novels fall into two camps: those derived from J.R.R. Tolkien and those derived from Mervyn Peake. The ‘Lord of the Rings’ template or the ‘Gormenghast’ mold.

Before my teens, my contemporaries were reading Tolkien and were absorbed by his works, but try as I might, I could not be drawn in, perhaps as something in me resists the epic, medieval-feeling fantasy.

It’s almost like an optical illusion, ‘The Hobbit.’ You look at the book, and it is really thin, and you could make a relatively thin film as well. What I mean by that is that you could race through the story at the speed that Tolkien does.

The whole atmosphere of the book, the tone of ‘The Hobbit,’ is of a kid’s adventure story, told in the first person by Tolkien, who is introducing young people to the notion of Middle-earth. A lot of it is very light-hearted.

When I told my mom I was going to audition for ‘The Hobbit,’ she said, ‘Well, you’ve always loved Tolkien.’ And she was right.

The success that the Tolkien books had redefined modern fantasy.

‘The Lord of the Rings,’ published in the mid-1950s, was intended as a prehistory to our own world. It was perceived by Tolkien to be a small but significant episode in a vast alternate mythology constructed entirely out of his own imagination.

More often than not, however, the person who flatly states ‘Elves aren’t like that!’ is hard pressed to describe how they really look…. as if Tolkien has summoned archetypes from so deep in our minds that we can only recall them incompletely.

Tolkien is as good as Dickens at sketching a scene.

I would love to live in ‘The Lord of the Rings.’ J. R. R. Tolkien’s world is so vivid and rich and sensual. I love the country setting and the routine of the hobbits. Of course, I would like to be a hobbit who goes on small adventures – not huge, horrifying ones like Frodo’s quest.

My first score for ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, ‘The Fellowship of the Ring,’ was the beginning of my journey into the world of Tolkien, and I will always hold a special fondness for the music and the experience.

I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkien’s legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.

When Peter Jackson made the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies, I remember there was a concern that people who didn’t read Tolkien wouldn’t go see the first one. But the films were so good in their own right that the audience grew beyond the readership of the book.

Just think about it: in every shop in the reading world since 1956, there has been two feet of book-space devoted to Tolkien.

Tolkien was, I believe, writing about his experience in the First and Second World Wars, where he would have spent a lot of time without any female contact. He was part of the fellowship of men who went to war, and I think, really, that’s what he’s writing about.

I really respect and admire Tolkien. I think he was the most honest of the Romantics.