hmmm… you guys really think so? my kid’s bright enough, methinks. but before the hobbit, i’ll test her with “call me Ishmael…” my daughter’s name is matilda, by the way. 
i at least read “the whale” when i was 8. it’s still in me.
I got through them in seventh grade, but didn’t enjoy them - I still don’t. Did understand them, there really isn’t a lot of heavy subtext in LotRs. I’ve read them through twice since then - about every ten years - in a search for “what am I missing?” I’m not a big fantasy reader, but had I gotten my hands on fantasy I enjoyed out of the gate instead of LotRs - who knows? I got through Anna Karenina that year too, which I didn’t understand (I got the plot, not really the subtext) and several other heavy duty classics. Loved the translation I had of Anna Karenina.
My English teacher in seventh grade pointed me at LotRs after I had read Anna Karenina…she thought it might be more understandable (and I think was really afraid I’d reach for Lolita next).
It really depends on the child–not just their “reading level”, but the sort of thing they like and their tolerance with frustration. I read them in middle school and missed tons, but I enjoyed the hell out of them and rereading them each year or so was like a whole new experience each time as I discovered layers I had missed.
Honestly, I think you are probably a bit optimistic to think that you’re going to have all that much influence over her reading habits: unless you plan to outright ban things (which seems like a bad idea to me: why not let a kid try?) or outright demand things (again, good luck by the time she’s a sophomore), at most your can nudge towards or away.
Just to chime in here, that is a truly lovely book. Highly recommended.
I read it at eleven, which was a good age for me.
Yes, that’s one of the major attractions of the book.
I was 9 when I started reading The Hobbit and got a copy of LOTR for my 11th birthday. I started by re-reading The Hobbit and finished LOTR in less than 3 weeks. I had no trouble keeping the characters or the action straight in my head* and thoroughly enjoyed the book.
*I came home from school one day to find my mother holding The Return Of The King in her hands. She opened to the synopsis and started quizzing me about the characters: who’s Gandalf, who’s Aragorn, who’s Minas Morgul ("it’s a ‘what’, Mom"), etc. She had opened the book while I was at school and couldn’t believe I could keep track of so much stuff, so she was quizzing me to make sure I understood what I was reading. Good times!
I read The Hobbit when I was about seven, and the rest of LOTR not long after. I remember being irritated by a lot of it; I’d think, “Jeez, does every tiny little place really need a name of its own?” and, “Man, the whole trip through Mordor is just page after page of ‘I can’t make it, Sam’, ‘But you must, Frodo’, over and over again.” I’d moved on to Stephen King by the time I was 11.
I read it in the 5th grade for the first time. I didn’t have any trouble following it. It has a lot of nouns (people, places and things!) but as stories go, it’s quite a simple one. Tolkein hated subtext.
By college I had probably re-read it 5 or 6 times through.
It’s not so much that I think it was ideal for me to have stumbled across and plunged into the books at 11… it’s that, having done so, I can’t say it was a bad thing, for me. But if I’d not found them until later, that would have been fine. Fourteen or fifteen would have been a good time for me to read them, too, and I can certainly see how for some people some years past that would be better for them.
I’d offer my kids Narnia and Prydain books first, as Chronos said.
I think I was about 11 when I first read it, like several others here. I certainly didn’t get all of it at the time, but every time I reread it I get new things from it. Like a couple of other people have said, that’s about once a year. If your daughter wants to read it, and has read and enjoyed The Hobbit, I can see no reason not to let her.
Thank you for this!
I read LOTR in high school and am sure I wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much out of it if I’d read it sooner. Our 11-year-old has read The Hobbit but I hope and expect it’ll be at least several years yet before he moves on to LOTR.
Well, Tolkien said he hated allegory–one kind of subtext–but some of his readers don’t even believe him at that. But regardless of his intentions, the story is rich enough for people to find a range of subtexts and resonances.
My daughter read LOTR at age 8, before I had let her read HP (she was already familiar with The Hobbit). It was her dad’s suggestion; I was surprised. I was even more surprised that she finished it, since I tried to read it at 13, got bogged down in TTT, and quit. I don’t suppose that she understood more than half of it–if that–but she enjoyed it. After that I let her read HP, figuring that if murderous Uruk-Hai didn’t faze her then Dementors probably wouldn’t either.
Not complex ones vital for really understanding the purpose of the book that would to put it beyond the reach of an intelligent fifth grader, which was my point.
Then “How Lord of the Rings Should Have Ended” might be more to your liking. 
Getting back on topic, I read LOTR at just shy of 14, and loved it. Sure, I didn’t get as much out of it on the first reading as I might’ve if I’d waited, but since I was still seeing new things in it on repeated readings well into my 30s, I don’t exactly see a problem there.
And what Manda JO said about influencing your kid’s reading habits. First, get your kids hooked on books, then let them read what they will.
The Hobbit provided my bedtime stories from as far back as I can remember (3.5ish, maybe earlier).
I had already gotten through Narnia in publication order, then in chronological order before I turned 6. I remember it because my 6th birthday present from my aunt was LoTR, and she had said that I couldn’t have it until I had read Narnia both ways.
So, LoTR started at 6. It was the subject of dinner conversation for a LONG TIME. Mom was big into explaining and relating stuff, and Dad liked the war/peace and industrial/countryside themes. I learned a lot about industrialization and the WWs through Lewis and Tolkien.
I was a little disgruntled about the lack of girls, but none of the scary stuff really bothered me. I don’t think there was anything that I didn’t get, or rather, didn’t get explained to me when I didn’t understand.
The only thing I had trouble with for a long time (I read it through every year because I’m a big dork) is the vast difference in elven lifespans. There are several childishly scrawled “family trees” of Elrond and Aragorn and all the past kings in the family scrapbook where I was obviously not grasping the vast expanses of time involved.
I think the real question is what the **maximum **age is to read LofR.
We went through this at length several years ago. My contention was - and still is - that people who read the book at a maximum of college age tend to love and adore the work and treasure it forever. Those who read it first at older ages tend to wonder what all the fuss is about, or worse, see nothing but the myriad of flaws.
This isn’t universal, but the correlations are extremely high.
It might be that children read the book as a book, the way Tolkien intended, and adults read it as allegory, which adults can’t help but do. As allegory it’s heavy-handed and offputting.
I tried when I was 11 or 12.
I got through Moria, loved it, couldn’t’ put it down. After Moria, I started to get bored. I made it through Fellowship and up to Boromir’s death at the start of Two Towers.
I quit.
During college, I read the whole thing and liked it a lot. I read it again last year(I was 32) and adored it.
Quoth spark240:
Actually, let me amend that: I’d start them on Narnia and Prydain first. But both of those series mature considerably over their courses: Taran Wanderer and The Last Battle are both at a significantly older reading level than Lord of the Rings.
Quoth Lasciel:
That didn’t hit me until I read The Silmarillion, and saw Galadriel. "Huh, I thought that the Elves didn’t reuse names. Oh, wait…
I read them the first time in second grade. I remember I enjoyed them quite a bit, but there were some really tough stretches to get through. I actually skipped the whole council of Elrond, skimming forward until the chapters got back to the action. I also recall enjoying the appendices with all of the runes, language, and family trees.
IMO, you can read them at almost any level, but get vastly different perspectives from what ages you read them.