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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?
Lemme say right at the outset that people like different things, and it's totally fine not to like a piece of art many people find great. If you've found the Hobbit boring, it seems likely that these books just aren't for you, and that's ok. Some people love Proust, some find his books boring (I'm in the latter camp). With a bit of help especially however, even the latter group can still appreciate their genius, even if it's still not their cup of tea, so to speak.
One thing I'd like to say to you right away, though, is that the Lord of the Rings is not really a trilogy - it's one book in three tomes. If you've only read the first, it's like watching the first third of a movie and deciding it's boring. Totally fine too, but you haven't seen the full thing yet. More specifically, for instance, Merry and Pippin get more fleshed out and differentiated later in the story. Characterization is more through actions than words or descriptions, and you need the full story for the picture to be complete.
The slow start, for example, is to provide a contrast and a slow escalation of a camping trip adventure into something much more epic and darker. The hobbits' return to the Shire at the end of the tale, which is one of my favorite parts of the book and mirrors the feeling of a soldier returning home after a terrible war as Tolkien did after WW1 - but this only works in the books because we've become familiar with the Shire during the slow start, so we can appreciate the contrast in the perception of the characters and the change in how the community they return to sees them in turn.
The worldbuilding, sense of wonder, and love of nature the book evokes have been covered in other replies, but I'd add that Tolkien wanted to write a story containing the core elements of Christianity and Nordic mythology, but without allegory or direct counterparts and comparisons. An original, epic tale containing the *essences *of these two views of the world, as he saw them. Even if you find the book a bit boring, this is an aspect you might find intriguing and challenging (what are these core aspects presented in the story?), just like you might find a film kinda boring but appreciate the excellent photography work.
Here's a few non-obvious things I love from the first book:
How Tolkien describes things. When the Balrog appears in Moria, you have no idea what it is and get no real explanation (although Tolkien could have provided a lore explanation in excrutiating detail, there is none). However, Legolas, who has been established as skilled, ageless, and carefree when others despair, upon seeing the Balrog drops the arrow he had been nocking and covers his face in despair. You don't know what's going on and what this new danger is, but you do understand the shit has truly hit the fan. This is an example of worldbuilding and characterization, Tolkien-style, that may not be obvious and appreciated on a first read. Firstly, his incredible restraint in providing lore (imagine building a world in excrutiating detail and then providing basically no information when an important element of it enters your tale), and secondly, how he narrates and explains the relations between mysterious things by setting up characters as being a certain way (note how unafraid Legolas is of the fury of the mountain earlier in the story) and then contrasting this with their reaction in a different situation. The reader's point of view remains that of the hobbits (they are a bit bland for a reason, too), and they/we know almost nothing of this fantastical world, looking to wiser and stronger characters to understand what things mean.
I'm very sad that Legolas' arrow-dropping scene didn't make it into the movies, incidentally.
The escalation of horror. I was incredibly captivated by the whole Moria sequence in the first book, which is when things really get serious. The whole thing is basically Lovecraftian - especially the very vague but terrible Watcher in the Water. Then there's the magnificent ruins of an ancient civilization, the journal detailing the desperate last stand of the heroic dwarves (the "THEY ARE COMING" bit still gives me shivers - and it's written in hasty elvish script, not dwarven runes, a nice bit of worldbuidling even there), the bravery of the hitherto cowardly and meek hobbits in fighting the orcs, mirroring the desperate heroism of the last stand of the dwarves, and the final confrontation between Gandalf and the Balrog, an entity that's so beyond us that even powerful characters like Aragorn and Legolas can't hope to even try to fight it but can only flee as Gandalf looses his own desperate battle against it.
Again, it's totally fine not to like stuff like Lovecraft, journal entries in a destroyed facility (System Shock/Bioshock), or archeological wonder, or if the book's way of handling them just doesn't gel with you, but I found this stuff facinating. Also note in all of this that "heroic but doomed battle against outer monstrosities of Chaos, that is heroic because it is doomed" is one of those core themes of Nordic mythology that Tolkien is incoporating here.
Finally, let's look at the death of Boromir. Boromir has succumbed to the temptation of the Ring, failed in his oaths to protect the Ringbearer and attacked him himself, failed to protect the hobbits he tried to defend against the sudden attack by the orcs, and failed in his overall mission to bring aid to his homeland of Gondor. As he dies, he says to Aragon that he has failed. But Aragorn is one of the wise characters in the books: wise characters pick their words carefully and generally have a deep and correct moral understanding of the world. And Aragorn tells Boromir, as Boromir dies, that no, he has not failed, he has conquered: few have won such a victory.
Why does Aragorn say this, if Boromir has failed utterly in all his goals? I won't go too deep into this, but for Tolkien wordly success or failure is not the main thing. What is truly important is the moral battle within our hearts and conscience, and here Boromir prevailed in the end, in the face of the terrible, insourmoutable temptation of the Ring. Elements of the core ideas of Christianity are here, of course, but also of Nordic mythology where the ultimate defeat of all the gods and heroes during Ragnarok is no repudiation of the rightness of their cause and their moral victory.
Finally, let me offer another avenue of appreciating Tolkien: historical and military realism despite the fantasy setting. Here's a series of excellent and scholarly articles on military and historical accuracy in the books: https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-i-bargaining-for-goods-at-helms-gate/
These may appeal to you even if the books don't, and they show Tolkien's deep understanding of strategy, logistics, and historical battles. The articles also help appreciate things that may not be obvious to a reader immediately - how differently battles work in Tolkien, who went through the horror of WW1, than in basically almost every other author and depiction, fantasy or otherwise. These things are not even close to being spelled out in the book, but morale and cohesion are the true decisive factors in every battle in the books, and once you appreciate how deeply that theme runs despite never being obvious, you also see how computer-gamey many other battles in media actually are (including in the LotR films).
There, I hope I've offered a bit of stuff to help answer your question :)
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