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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?
I'll have to wholeheartedly agree with the comments of people about the sense of some great past that we now have only remnants of. Tolkien's really good at writing nostalgia. But then that also heightens what remnants we do have. Elrond, who has walked the earth for thousands of years, is lord of Rivendell, and the older still Galadriel of Lothlorien. Gondor still stands, the sons of the men of Numenor, and Aragorn, its heir, we are told is far more like the kings of old than any ruler has been for a long time. The civilizations are fading, a thing of the past, but what is left of them both shows the heights of what the elder days must have been like in middle earth, but also maintain a present dignity of their own. If you eventually decide you like Tolkien's worldbuilding, I can definitely recommend the appendices.
I think the other thing big thing that is a love of the things that are wholesome and honest and good. It is no accident that Tolkien is writing about hobbits, people who live essentially ordinary lives, doing ordinary things, until four of them end up on this journey. And it is no accident that songs occur in the book, even though they might often be seen as a slog by the readers, (and I suppose, often support the previous point), and that the book talks about laughter the way that it does. The hobbits are a homely and a hearty people. The fellowship, being nearly half hobbits, put the humble plainly on a level with the great.
I think it's in light of things of this sort that a lot of the things in Lord of the Rings should be seen. I think the delight in the book is maybe more in the people and peoples who are accomplishing things than in the things they accomplish.
I'm wondering if this could be some of the cause of the stilted dialogue, as you put it. Tolkien is not trying to write the way that we talk. If he were, he would be wretchedly failing. I think he is trying to make it poetic instead, and to give the right feel. Tolkien is attempting to describe characters and a world who delight in friendship and in song and in the good things of life, as they struggle onward with courage and earnestness towards a great danger, and also to portray loftiness, dignity among the great. He's not trying to imitate our world so much as make a better one. (although maybe that's put badly, as I'm quite confident he would think our world better than his.)
I think because of all this, because so much of the value in the book lies in the character of the people and places rather than in the barebones architecture of the plot, that it can be vulnerable to the problems that @OracleOutlook was talking about, and that taking care to not let that happen might help.
Oh, also, I've always found book 4 (the second part of the Two Towers) to be a drag anyway, but it sounds like you're not there yet.
I'll add also that I'm talking about the Lord of the Rings here. The Hobbit is pretty different in tone. There's clearly much less at stake in that—just a quest they're going on vs. a threat to the whole of middle earth.
Let us know if any of our thoughts affects how much you like it once you read a little further!
@Soriek I would definitely underscore this point. When he wrote LOTR, Tolkien was very consciously trying to create an English epic. He wanted something that was comparable to the epics from antiquity he studied, but written in a way that evoked his own country. So if the dialogue seems stilted, I'd say it's because he is deliberately trying to match that tone.
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I appreciate the really fleshed out response here and I’ll definitely try to read it through that angle. I think i had mostly treated the references to the older times as background noise instead of a contrast that helps define the present world, and that’s definitely something i can appreciate more.
I have actually also been trying to understand the dialogue in that same sense - not as how people talk but as sort of an epic poetry. I struggle relating to Shakespeare’s dialogue for the same reason but I can appreciate it from a distance at least.
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