How many words are in lord of the rings

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r/todayilearned

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At least LOTR has an ending

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And sometimes less is more.

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Tolkien didn't have a laptop.

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George writes everything on an old DOS pc with a green monochrome terminal if I remember correctly.

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The Silmarillion has got to add to that total.

Also, if anyone is looking for a really cool LOTR style book that seems to have been much overlooked, try Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock, and the rest of the series.

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It's not exactly part of that story. I mean it does literally add backstory but it's separate. Like how GRRM has stories relevant to ASOIAF but aren't part of the series.

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Thanks for the suggestion, will have to check it out.

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Comment removed by moderator · 3 yr. ago

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An example of quality over quantity.

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Why say lot word, when little word do trick?

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And the entire James Bond series of Ian Fleming has a word count of 925,000 words.

And the Sherlock Holmes series of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has 660,000.

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I think Doyle is the most effective writer out of all 4. He managed to tell 60 interesting and compelling stories and not a single one felt short or like it was missing important info. Compare that to Ian’s 40 books, JRR’s ~12 Middle Earth Books, or George’s 9. Bigger isn’t always better.

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If you just want the longest by word count, it’s a Super Smash Brothers fanfiction titled “Subspace Emissary Worlds Conquest”. It has over 4.1 million words and is continuing to grow.

Edit: Apparently there are even longer ones out there now, and that particular work hasn’t updated since 2018

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the "Wheel of Time" series has 4,410,036!

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Well, G.R.R.M. does like to do a lot of bloviating in his storytelling.

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He likes a lot of things:

Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water.

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This is a big part of what keeps me out of traditional fantasy. If the grand-daddy of modern fantasy can tell a complete story in an evocative and imaginary world in ~1,000 pages, you don't need 10+ books each approaching 1,000 pages to tell your story.

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Not to be "that guy", but LotR is not a trilogy. It was originally meant to be published as one book, but Tolkien's publisher balked. So the book was broken into three parts, as separate volumes. But it is one connected story. A proper trilogy is three books with a connected theme, but each book has a separate story line. Think of The Hitchhiker's Guild to the Galaxy: each book stands on its own, more or less, but has an overall story arc. Another example are the Star Wars movies, a trilogy of trilogies.

The Lord of the Rings is a beloved fantasy novel and film adaptation, written by British author and scholar J.R.R. Tolkien.
The story is divided into four parts, which correspond to four books: The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. When combined, the total word count of the Lord of the Rings series is 550,147 words.

Here are the detailed word counts of the four books:

How many unique words are in Lord of the Rings?

How many words are in Harry Potter 7?

How long does it take to read all The Lord of the Rings?

How many letters are in LOTR?