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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3365 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 21, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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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 actually brought this up before back on reddit - I was in the same boat as you, I tried reading the series again after reading lore entries in the video games and thinking it deserved another look, but balking before they even leave the shire (the first time I tried reading it was as a child, that time I stopped when they were dancing naked in the forest).

The advice is received then was to just read the silmarillion. It's good advice.

But advice that requires a great deal of discernment to know whether it's applicable.

The first two sections of the Silmarillion I found hard to get through. The rest of the Silmarillion I enjoyed much more. But it definitely requires careful reading—continual consulting of the maps and family trees found at the back of the book so as not to get lost between the many people and keep track of their relationships with one another. If this isn't regularly consulted, you will in all likelihood get lost.

The Silmarillion reads much more like a history textbook than does the Lord of the Rings (not a perfect comparison). The style is very different. It's probably comparable to Appendix A of Lord of the Rings, per my recollection. Both are great.

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