BBC Radio 4's Dramatised 'The Lord of the Rings' Review

Last updated on 6 June 2018

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If you follow along with Blogger’s Bookshelf, then you may have seen me talking about how I have recently started listening to audio books (and/or dramatised versions of books) in order to fill the silence while doing mindless jobs at work. I listened to the BBC Dramatised version of Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman, and you can read about that here on BB.

In 1981, BBC Radio 4 did a dramatised version of all three Lord of the Rings books, and a friend suggested I listen to them. They were so awesome. I listened to one a day for a week (perfect, because I only work three days), and while they got shorted in length, it felt kind of like sitting down and watching all 9ish hours of LOTR in a row (or 11.5 hours if you’re watching the extended editions).

Each character is played by a different person (even the minor ones), and so by the end of the first one you could easily tell who was who without the characters having to say their names, or the narrator pointing it out. My favourite voices were Samwise Gamgee, who was voiced wonderfully by Bill Nighy, and also Gandalf, who was voiced by Michael Hordern. The rest of the voices were great too, though I didn’t like Aragon’s voice at all. Even without seeing the movies and just picturing Viggo Mortensen, the voice in the audio book didn’t match what I had pictured when I read them when I was younger (before the movies). But other than that! All good!

They kept a lot of the main events in, though they left out Tom Bombadil (and if you’re familiar with the movies, they left him out in that too. Poor Tom. Always being left behind), but kept in Radagast (who isn’t in Peter Jackson’s movies…but is in the Hobbit films). Being an audio version, the fight scenes and battles were very short, because, as you can imagine, it would be hard in a dramatised version to describe what was going on without the characters constantly saying things like ‘I just killed an orc!’ and ‘I’ve been hit!’.

Anyway! It was very good, and if you liked the books, have a listen. If you liked the movies, but not the books, perhaps give it a miss? I don’t know. Make up your own mind. But it was very cool, and I’m glad I listened to it.

What about you? Have you listened to this before? What did you think?