An Excerpt from Lord of the Rings: Bombadil's 16th Song

From our newest masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings: Tom Bombadil Edition, we present one of Bombadil's most delightful and whimsical songs.  Feel free to sing along as you read!

As Bombadil took the Hobbits' dinner plates, he began to dance and sing another song, which went as follows: 

Tom’s a merry Bombadil,
His songs are full of laughter.
He sings them all the night and day
Through six or seven chapters.
Ring the dong a dally-o
Six or seven Chapters.

Plate 12: The Hobbits are once again filled with wonder and delight as Bombadil launches into another merry tune.

When the world was first begun,
Tom climbed a mountain top.
He started to sing his gayest songs
And it seems he hasn’t stopped.
Dong the bong the billy bob
It seems he can’t be stopped.

I’ll sing and dance a merry jig,
And prance around and shout,
And do a bunch of other stuff
That you don’t care about.
Hi the ho a dilly-o
You sure don’t care about.

But if you try to skip ahead,
My singing for to quell,
Just wait ‘till you see how many songs
They sing in Rivendell.
Dilly derpy dumpy-o
Just wait ‘till Rivendell.

From The Lord of the Rings, Modern Illustrated Classics Edition. By J.R.R. Tolkien et al.  Ill. by Henry "Soupcan" Sanchez.  Preorder your copy today!

From The Road: Plate 22

In one of The Road's most iconic scenes, the man and the boy discover some ash-covered apples by the side of the road.  Needless to say, in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the sun has not shone in over a decade, where no sign of life has yet appeared other than marauding cannibals, the sudden appearance of fresh, edible fruit does a lot to build the credibility of the setting.

Plate 22 - The man and the boy find an apple.  After all, why wouldn't they?

Its an apple, said the man
Yes, the boy said
We are sure living in a well thought out story that consistently makes sense, said the man
The boy didn't answer.

From The Road, Modern Illustrated Classics Edition. By Cormac McCarthy, et al.  Ill. by John One Tree. Preorder your copy today!

Introducing: The Lord of the Rings

Few works of fiction have left as deep a visual impression as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.  Some of the finest artists and filmmakers have taken Tolkien’s words and transformed them into indelible images.  But somehow, one of the most important and inspirational characters in The Lord of the Rings has been conspicuously absent from most previous adaptations of the work.

At Modern Illustrated Classics, we are taking a long overdue step to fix that oversight.  Introducing the new The Lord of the Rings: Tom Bombadil Edition.

Yes, we have distilled Tolkien’s 6 book, thousand page masterpiece into its very core essence – a handful of pages where a tiny man wearing yellow shoes shouts mystical gibberish at trees. Features of this beautiful new edition include:

•           Tom Bombadil
•           Tom Bombadillo, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing
•           Bright blue jackets
•           And yellow boots
•           Ding dong the dally-o
•           So much unnecessary poetry
•           Guaranteed to contain no elements of plot.
•           Ho dilly dally dong
•           And more!

We hope you preorder The Lord of the Rings: The Tom Bombadil Edition, and also watch New Line Cinema’s 12-part film adaptation of this 50 page novel.