This is not so much a review of this edition as a review of the work. This is a masterpiece of mastering paradoxes. The paradoxes became so great that once the Fellowship of the Ring started tossing around in the mines of Morya, the book got shelved and I have never been able to find it since. The poetry is intriguing, even beautiful, and inventing an Elfin language is no mean feat. The description of Lorien is magical. So are some of the foreboding passages about the dark riders and Mordor. There is a problem, however, with a wizard coming back from the dead. Even more with the ageless Gollum coming back from the dead none the worse for it to steal the ring. How did all the dwarves perish without Gimli knowing what happened to his race? Arwen offers her immortality to Aragorn but she never dies anyway. A giant spider, a giant squid living in a lake inside a cave, trees that walk. The men of the mountains are ghosts that cannot be killed by Legolas’s arrow but can strike with an all too material sword. Sauron is more like a general commanding from the distance a bizarre army rather than an immaterial eye of fire embodying evil. Just on occasion he remembers his supernatural powers and uses them eg. to turn dead kings into the immortal black riders, the most terrible of whom is the Lord of the Nazgul. So terrible he is, his flying dinosaur gets beheaded with a strike of a sword, he then gets wounded by a hobbit, and is swiftly dispatched to his death by a woman. How did a woman kill the Lord of the Nazgul that no man could kill? Because she is not a “man”, as if when the book talks everywhere else of men, mortal men and of the age of men, it might be referring only to the male of the species. But if you don’t like to argue, whatever is told is told in an impressive way. A perfect example of take care of the sentences and the storyline will make some sense of itself. Obviously what I know past the mines of Morya, I saw it in the film. True to the form, it makes the best out of a bad situation.