J. R.R. Tolkien Audiobooks

For most of his working life, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a professional philologist. Born in 1892 and educated at Oxford, he held the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair in Anglo-Saxon there from 1925, then the Merton professorship of English Language and Literature until his retirement in 1959. The invented languages came first; the world was built afterwards, largely to give those languages somewhere to live.

The Hobbit arrived in 1937, almost by accident, out of stories told to his children. The Lord of the Rings followed between 1954 and 1955 and quietly changed publishing. A devout Catholic and a close friend of C. S. Lewis, with whom he shared the Inklings, Tolkien spent his last decades expanding a legendarium that his son Christopher would later edit and publish, The Silmarillion among it.

He was appointed CBE in 1972 and died the following year. Fantasy as a modern genre effectively begins with him, and a great deal of what came afterwards is written in his shadow.

Be clear about which Fellowship of the Ring this is, because the difference is the whole point: it is the celebrated full-cast BBC radio dramatisation, adapted by Brian Sibley, rather than a straight reading. That is why it runs a compact four and a half hours where an unabridged narration would take far longer.

What you gain is a cast. Ian Holm plays Frodo, Michael Hordern is Gandalf, Robert Stephens takes Aragorn and Bill Nighy gives us Sam. It first went out on Radio 4 in 1981 and has been treasured ever since, and it carries a strong listener rating with us. For anyone who knows the book and wants Middle-earth peopled rather than narrated, it is a real pleasure.

Newcomers should still meet the Shire on the page or in a full reading first, then come here for the voices. Everything you need is in the entry below.