Rickey the Rooster writes:
> . . . what Tolkein had in mind when he started them as a series of letters to
> comfort his son who was unhappy at boarding school . . .
No, he didn’t. I don’t know where you got this. His youngest child, Christopher, was in the Royal Air Force in South Africa during World War II as Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien sent him chapters of the book as he wrote them. That’s the only person he sent anything to:
/points at Rickey the Rooster
Not a True Fan™! Not a True Fan™!
I read them once when I was 12 years old. Well, I read the hobbity scenes. The elves and battle scenes were a confusing mess of unpronounceable names and descritions of battle strategy that I didn’t have any interest in (still don’t).
I re-read them before the first film, I think. Or maybe it was after the first film. In any case, this time I read every bit of it. And it was still boring and confusing in those bits I previously left unread, and it didn’t make me want to read any of the other supplemental books (Silmarillion et al) but it was a lot easier to consume when I now had such vivid imagery available to associate with most of it, such as faces to go with names, or a good grasp of the difference between a Goblin, an Orc, and an Uruk-hai.
I seriously hope people keep reading these books.
Here is a link to an article in which one of the points is how much of Tolkien’s descriptions could have been inspired by his experience of the horror of WWI. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100268277/at-easter-in-this-centenary-year-think-of-what-the-word-sacrifice-means/ I don’t think the WWI connection is as clear or powerful in the films.
While the films are quite wonderful & hopefully will continue to be viewed, I think the LOTR books are classics that will continue to stand the test of time.
Ack - I included the wrong link in my comment just above. this is the link that references Tolkien and WWI http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100269164/of-gardeners-jrr-tolkien-the-battle-of-the-somme-and-my-great-uncle-bill/
I don’t really how the WWI connection is clear or powerful in the books, either. If you read them in a vacuum (i.e., not knowing anything about Tolkien) there’s no reason you’d connect the two.
I read The Hobbit when I was in upper elementary school - my older sister was a big Tolkien fan, and got me hooked - but waited to read LOTR until I was in high school. My first copy was a trade paperback with Bakshi art on the cover (a very gloomy illustration of the Nazgul in Bree). I read The Silmarillion the summer before I went to college, and struggled with it, but liked it more and more each time since (up to four now, I think).
I have plenty of nitpicks of the Peter Jackson LOTR movies, but overall love 'em and am glad they’ve brought so many more people to the books. I’m much less impressed with the Hobbit movies, which IMHO are 'way too Hollywood-big and depart 'way too much from the book.
Here’s a question: I haven’t read any of the Hobbit books or seen any of the films (although the matron at my boarding school did attempt to read the first book to us when I was six or so.) Should I read first or watch first?
The Hobbit is quick and breezie. It’s very much a children’s adventure book which you’ll finish long before the bloody movies are done. Read the book as it is, hands down, better.
The Lord of the Rings is longer, slower and epic. The movies are a decent way to be introduced to the work.
Where the dwarf women, where?
Really Not All that Bright - my vote is for reading the books (Hobbit & LOTR) first, if possible. That said, the LOTR movies are MUCH better than the Hobbit movies (which are still kinda fun) and you should watch them first. They are all worthwhile, to this fan’s thinking, and I wouldl be interested to hear what you think of them.
Sorry, that was unclear. I’ve seen the LOTR films (and liked them very much) and read the first two of those books (and didn’t like them much, though I appreciate their contribution to the swords and sorcery genre.)
My first copy was a UK edition with the same artwork! I’d still have it if it hadn’t been for that time it fell in the bath 
The Hobbit is a quick read. It does have some overly-whimsical bits, particularly early on, but it does get really quite dark for a children’s book.
Elendil’s Heir writes:
> I have plenty of nitpicks of the Peter Jackson LOTR movies, but overall love 'em
> and am glad they’ve brought so many more people to the books.
I am not at all convinced that the movies brought that all-fired many people to the books. As I wrote above, The Lord of the Rings was probably the best-selling novel of all time before the Peter Jackson movies came out. I don’t know how one would discover how much the movies increased the book sales. What we’re talking about here is an alternate history scenario. How many books would have been sold in an alternate universe in which the movies didn’t exist?
I read it in 1970 when I was 10. And loved the heck out of it. Not just the story—Appendix F seriously whetted my appetite for linguistics.
It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to detect. Just do a mathematical projection based on the trend before the movie, and compare that with the actual trend line.
I think whether you should consume the books or the movies first depends on if you are primarily a reader or a watcher. Readers will enjoy the movies more having read the books and vice versa. As a reader I was really impressed by the movies. They were much better than I thought they could be. The “Hobbit” movies are less good for me because extending the project from 2 films to three didn’t mean more character development or lore but just longer and less believable action sequences. It’s important to remember that the “Hobbit” movies aren’t really that. Instead they are a mashup of The Hobbit and The Quest of Erebor ( a story written basically as an attempt to fit the events of Bilbo’s personal adventures into the grander scope of LOTR). I think some day we can get a lighthearted (but increasingly less so as things move along) story of Bilbo on the screen but it needs to be completely separate from LOTR so no Peter Jackson
Hah. I had the one-volume copy with no appendix except for “The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen”, so I hadn’t a clue about the Elvish or Dwarvish alphabets (and the Icelandic runes in Journey to the Centre of the Earth were no help at all). I specially bought a copy of RotK a few years later just for the appendices (languages and others; hobbit family trees also fascinated me).
Ranked #2 behind “A Tale of Two Cities”.
OTOH, all three novels are combined into one for the LOTR series to be ranked as high as it is. My problem with this logic is simple: While I understand the authors intent, the fact remains that I had to buy three separate books, and it makes no sense to consider the three LOTR books as “one” when the same standard isn’t applied to any other series (Harry Potter being the obvious example.)
So when I can buy a single copy LOTR for the same price I paid for my single copy of The Stand or A Tale of Two Cities (two other long novels that are single books), then I’ll accept that “LOTR” is the second best-selling “novel”. But as long as I have to pay $8.99*3 for the books (or $25 for a trade paperback) that 150 million figure should honestly be divided by three.