The complete BBC Radio Broadcast of The Lord of the Rings, written by Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell, aired on BBC Radio 4 from March to August 1981. There were 26 half-hour episodes.

Today’s post will focus on the portion of the story considered equivalent to The Fellowship of the Ring.

Several months ago I decided to reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It had been a few years since I last read The Hobbit, and maybe 8-10 since I read LOTR. My memory of the details was getting rusty, and since so many writing websites take their examples from books I haven’t read or movies I haven’t seen, regrounding myself in one of the few popular stories I have read seemed like a good idea.

Now, I don’t have much time to sit down and read, so even though I have all of the books in paperback, my first thought was “I’ll borrow the audiobooks from the library.”

This is where I made a mistake. Instead of looking them up on my library’s website, I looked them up in Overdrive. My library service had access to two versions of each title, a BBC dramatization, and an American dramatization. I placed holds the BBC versions, because Tolkien was English, and English accents are awesome.

So I waited. And waited. And waited. In the meantime, I came up with the idea to write book reviews for this blog. I read The Three Musketeers and The Silmarillion. I wrote their reviews.

When I finally got The Hobbit, it was awesome. It also wasn’t an audiobook. Instead, I had checked out a radio broadcast adaptation, which simply would not do. These are supposed to be book reviews, damn it! But in the end, I thought the broadcast was worth writing about too. So I finished the broadcast, took some notes, and then read my paperback.