The Lord of the Rings Tarot Deck & Card Game

Above: The front of the box.

Fanciful characters and scenes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit.

The first thing to say about this pack is that it was clearly a collaborative effort involving many different contributors, notably Terry Donaldson who developed the idea and Peter Pracownik who created the artwork. The designs combine traditional aspects of the tarot (e.g., standard titles, down the left-hand side of each card) with the world of folklore and fairy tales as found in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Each image has a description at the foot and all the cards have black borders. Added to this, Mike Fitzgerald has come up with rules for a special card game for 2 to 6 players using the same cards. The game rules are included in the booklet.

The interpretations in the booklet are pretty standard, with no direct mention of the Lord of the Rings anywhere. Upright and reversed meanings are given for the major arcana, upright only for the minor arcana. There is also a small section in the booklet about using the cards for meditation. Here, there is emphasis on the symbolism found in Tolkien's world. In the card game rules, the four symbols in the upper right-hand corner of each card (Free Peoples, Dark Forces, Neutral, and One Ring) have considerable significance.

78 cards + 2 extra cards + 44-page booklet in tuck box. Size: 70 x 120 mm.

Printed by Carta Mundi, Turnhout, Belgium, for U.S. Games Systems, Inc., Stamford, CT, USA, 1997. See the back of box►