Adaptations of The Lord of the Rings

Many adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, an epic by the English author J. R. R. Tolkien, have been made in the media of film, radio, theatre, video games and recorded readings.

Early attempts to adapt Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings were made by Walt Disney, William Snyder, Forrest J. Ackerman, Denis O'Dell (who considered Richard Lester to direct, but approached star directors David Lean, Stanley Kubrick and Michaelangelo Antonioni instead), Peter Shaffer, John Boorman and George Lucas.

The first was The Lord of the Rings by the American animator Ralph Bakshi in 1978, the first part of what was originally intended to be a two-part adaptation of the story.

[4] A Finnish live action television miniseries, Hobitit, was broadcast in 1993 based on the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

[11] The recordings were lost, but in 2022 the original scripts by the producer Terence Tiller, including a sheet with handwritten suggestions by Tolkien, were rediscovered in the BBC archives.

The New York radio station WBAI-FM broadcast a reading from the book in 1972, narrated by Baird Seales; since then, they have rebroadcast it annually.

[22][23] Lifeline Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, produced individual plays of each of the three books, with The Fellowship of the Ring in 1997, The Two Towers in 2000, and The Return of the King in 2001.

It was edited for a production at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London, and ran from May 2007 until July 2008; The Guardian wrote that "at £25m, it was the most costly musical mistake in West End history".

[30] It recorded a third unabridged version of The Lord of the Rings, A trip to Mordor in 1999, narrated by David Palmer, on 4-track tape media.

[31] In 1990, the Australian actor Rob Inglis read and performed an unabridged version for Recorded Books in their New York studio.