Adaptations

The Lord of the Rings has been adapted for film, radio and stage multiple times.
The book has been adapted for radio four times. In 1955 and 1956, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) broadcast The Lord of the Rings, a 12-part radio adaptation of the story. In the 1960s radio station WBAI in New York produced a short radio adaptation. A 1979 dramatization of The Lord of the Rings was broadcast in the United States and subsequently issued on tape and CD. In 1981, the BBC broadcast The Lord of the Rings, a new dramatization in 26 half-hour instalments.
Three film adaptations have been made. The first was J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1978), by animator Ralph Bakshi, the first part of what was originally intended to be a two-part adaptation of the story (hence its original title, The Lord of the Rings Part 1). It covers The Fellowship of the Ring and part of The Two Towers. The second, The Return of the King (1980), was an animated television special by Rankin-Bass, who had produced a similar version of The Hobbit (1977). The third was director Peter Jackson's live action The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, produced by New Line Cinema and released in three instalments as The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). The final instalment of this trilogy was only the second film to break the one-billion-dollar barrier, after 1997's Titanic, and, like Titanic, won a total of 11 Oscars, including 'best film' and 'best director'. The live-action film trilogy has done much in recent years to bring the book back into the public consciousness.

A scene from the 2006 Toronto, Canada musical.
In 1990, Recorded Books published an unabridged audio version of the books. They hired British actor Rob Inglis — who had previously starred in one-man stage productions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings — to read. Inglis performs the books verbatim, using distinct voices for each character, and sings all of the songs. Tolkien had written music for some of the songs in the book; for the rest, Inglis, along with director Claudia Howard, wrote additional music. The current ISBN is 1402516274.
There have been several stage productions based on the book. Full-length stage adaptations of each of The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003) were staged in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. A large-scale musical theatre adaptation, The Lord of the Rings was first staged in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 2006 and opened in London in May 2007.