What is there to be said about J.R.R. Tolkien that hasn't already been said? I already know I will never again be so lucky as to read anything as beautiful as the Lord of the Rings in my lifetime.

I admittedly watched the movies before reading the books, so my expectations were already sky-high, but Tolkien surpassed those expectations with flying colors. Never have I felt so immersed in a fictional world as I did in Middle-Earth. Tolkien's prose paints such a vivid picture of Middle-Earth that even I, someone who struggles to picture words in her mind, never for a second felt as if I could not picture the scene I was reading at any given moment.

And the characters—people really do not give Frodo enough credit. Sure, he does not follow a typical hero's journey like someone like Aragorn does, but the Lord of the Rings would not exist without Frodo. Frodo was never meant to be an ultra-heroic protagonist—he was meant to represent the everyman. If Frodo followed the typical hero's journey, he would no longer be Frodo.

There is no perfect way for me to summarize all of the emotions I feel now that I have finished the Lord of the Rings, so I'm just going to end this review with a quote that encapsulates these feelings quite well:

“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”