How many characters can a book have before you start to lose track?
The book recommendation site Love Reading has released an infographic that lists 15 books with increasing casts of characters.
There are 43 named characters in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Compare that to 132 characters mentioned in the first Harry Potter book, or the 218 characters created by George R.R. Martin for the first installment of the A Game of Thrones series, which has 2067 named characters (and counting).
Neither compares to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, however, with its 600 characters.
Does anyone know how many characters can be found in The Lord of The Rings?
LoveReading.co.uk blog via eBook Friendly
image by sonstroem
Dostoevsky not Tolstoy for Crime and Punishment.
As for LoTR, do you want an answer including or excluding the appendices?
Fixed it, thanks.
And what is the LoTR character count sans appendices?
There are 982 named characters counting the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, and the books published posthumously by Tolkien’s son.
There must be at least 200 in LotR.
Japanese and Chinese books have thousands of characters.
Ahh, the Internet responds. Also, the popular book “The Unicode® Standard”, which many of us love to read over and over again, has more than 120,00 characters. And the most recent version added a total of 7,716 characters. Nerds win.
I find this information strangely and warmly encouraging, really 🙂