Posted by bookofjoe 1/7/2026
Zip file with mp3 in it:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b2aPKgVVguOKMOOqWskaliOviYr...
Best enjoyed on a rainy afternoon in an armchair with a cup of tea.
Impressive, very nice. Let's see Paul Allen's recording.
My Tolkien audio of choice will always be the BBC production of LOTR:
https://archive.org/details/lord-of-the-rings-10_202401
Fantastic cast, including Ian Holm—Bilbo in the Jackson films—as Frodo.
Reserve audio versions for when you genuinely can’t look at the book because you’re doing something else.
Would you also suggest to the families in the 30s & 40s that listening to the popular radio shows while sitting in the living room could have been a better experience if they had just read the transcript, instead? Or that they should have been multitasking during the shows, else it was a waste of their time?
For me, that's exactly the sort of "something else" I interpreted the previous comment to refer to.
Especially with a work like LotR it can be very tempting to skim parts; the audiobook will just continue on, which can help you encounter passages you’d normally have skipped over.
It wasn't until I had an audiobook version that I "sat through" all the poetry and tree-descriptions, and it was worth it.
The times I have just sat and listened to a well-told, well-paced story have been magical.
But the dopamine hit of reading -too quickly- competes; the pressure to "be busy" wins and makes me impatient for the spoken word by default.
The defaults are too high. I'd be better off reading less but reading more slowly, and listening sometimes.
But this is not the highest priority problem to fix, either, and I can't fix everything.
My memory works much better when I hear something than if I read it, when it comes to non technical stuff.
(see what I did there?)
There is a Lord of the Rings MMO (like World of Warcraft) and a guy made a video recording a walk from the Shire to Mordor. Like you can just walk from the Shire to Mordor in the game. And it's almost 10 hours long in real world time to do that! But on top of that the whole journey is narrated by the Lord of the Rings audio book, with the relevant parts of the journey.
Incredibly relaxing
I don't have experience with the LotR Online outside of small clips here and there, but for the past 5 years or so I have been enjoying a bit more retro LotR "mmorpg", a free-to-play MUD that has been in development since 1991 or something: https://mume.org/
In MUME (Multi-Users in Middle Earth) getting from Bree to Mordor by walking won't take you 10 hours, but maybe 10 minutes at most. However, the trip and the destination will be full of dangers, whether it's from pve or pvp side of things.
As a side note, MUME is being developed by volunteers, and I believe the game itself is still ran on some Swiss University servers, where it all began, heh.
It was simply magical and I have many good memories venturing through middle-earth and meeting fellow chars.
I literally guffawed and thought, "Well, that's one good way of avoiding the dark riders." Makes that dramatic jump to the barge a little less intense. ;-)
Do you happen to know where does the narration by Andy Serkis come from? Is it a game? An audiobook?
Some are definitive, however. If you haven't heard Douglas Adams read all his books [1], you're definitely missing out. They're harder to track down, and not the best quality as most are copied from old tape cassettes, but I love listening to the genius at work.
Yahtzee Croshaw reading his books is fantastic [2]. As is Patrick Rothfuss reading The Slow Regard of Silent Things [3].
A more recent author I listened to was Adrian Tchaikovsky reading Service Model [4]. He was so good, I checked to see if he had theater training! Really great.
1. https://youtu.be/F_tcznHREXE
2. https://www.youtube.com/live/NNpQROC7dWA