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What's the appeal in Lord of the Rings?
I've recently been press ganged by my friends into joining a Lord of the Rings book club and it's one of the more significant Ls I've taken in a long time. We've finished the Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Rings and I'm actually not sure I've ever read fiction this boring. Gargantuan amounts of the plot are just them wandering through the woods. The characterization is borderline nonexistent and the dialogue is so stilted that I have trouble keeping the characters apart - why are there even two characters for Mary and Pippin when as far as I can tell they're the same character? Every page feels like a slog, the only decent part is Tolkien has nice descriptions of scenery.
I'm not trying to be a dick though, I want to enjoy these books, everyone tells me they're great. What am I missing? What should I be looking for / trying to get out of them?
As an unabashed and unrepentant Tolkien superfan, I will say that Fellowship takes off significantly once they get to Bree. If you're not there yet, definitely hold on.
It's a phenomenal tale told with beautiful prose. But really the core of the appeal of fantasy is of being transported to another place; to escape the dull, superficial reality we live in for a world that is suffused with magical unreality. Part of why Tolkien sits at the apex of the genre is that The Lord of the Rings depicts a world much grander than our own, shrunken and withered. There is a sense of longing and nostalgia for a forgotten and irrevocably lost past when we greater than we are now. I think that people very keenly feel some loss of wonder and grandeur in the world, whether that loss be cultural, intellectual, environmental, and Lord of the Rings laments that loss in a very evocative way.
That's a beautiful way to put it and I think that was a feature I noticed but never quite grasped when I first read them.
So much of the world is so inherently 'unimpressive' when viewed objectively. The Mines of Moria are cavernous and extensive... and (almost) completely uninhabited. But through Gimli we understand that they used to be bustling and productive on a scale that would be hard to imagine. And yet in the story's present, they're just some big caves.
The Kingdom of Rohan is legendary for its vast horseback armies. And when we first encounter it it's basically crumbling apart due to the King being decrepit.
Time and time again we encounter some amazing monument to the achievements of a bygone civilization, and the current residents are kind of just milling around in them waiting for... something. Except many of the characters are old enough to remember those bygone civilizations, and indeed have to be reminded why it might be worth fighting to preserve what is left.
It simultaneously makes the world feel extensively 'lived in' and also lends that "sense of longing and nostalgia for a forgotten and irrevocably lost past" as a thematic and atmospheric feature of the story.
This and your point below about the Tom Bombadil chapters did actually add a lot for me, and I'll try to read the books appreciating that perspective
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