Confession: I'm a LotR virgin

[Willem]

Originally posted by statusperfect


Bombadil is the best part of the trilogy.

Yes, I was rather disapointed that he never made it into the movie.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia


I find LotR fairly boring, to be honest. Everybody else says it's great. What am I missing?

As you've already been told, it picks up as you go along. The first book really is in many ways an introduction.

[Urban Ranger]

LotR is vastly overrated. The story is pretty good, but so are lots of other fantasy stories.

[Drake Tungsten]

I think the backstory is what sets the LOTR apart from other fantasy works. There are better stories out there, but no one can compete with the world that Tolkien created for his books...

[Kassiopeia]

Yeah, well, Tolkien had the time and knowledge to work his arse off and create an entirely new language, and a cohesive back story, but if you only read LOTR, it doesn't make up for any slowness in the story... and the amount of information can be just simply overwhelming.
Sometimes I think people promote LOTR only because it was "the first of it's genre" (which I'm not that fond of anyway) and because "you just have to read it". I'm not even entirely sure LOTR was the first fantasy epic of the modern age...

Of course, who am I to judge, after all I'm promoting a certain television series with equal fanaticism... of course, that's because it really is that good

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
I think the backstory is what sets the LOTR apart from other fantasy works. There are better stories out there, but no one can compete with the world that Tolkien created for his books...

Agreed - it has a complex and almost live-like world, which makes it different from most fantasy stories. The elven language is a nice touch, unfortunately it is just "chrome," so to speak. I rather Tolkien would have spent more time on storytelling and characterisation.

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
I think the backstory is what sets the LOTR apart from other fantasy works. There are better stories out there, but no one can compete with the world that Tolkien created for his books...

Yep,
it may be only comparable to the Cthulhu-Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft

[Alinestra Covelia]

Cthulhu was a pantheon that many authors worked on. In that respect, it's similar to Ravenloft or Dragonlance or any of the AD&D worlds.

LotR is something that one single author fashioned and so it probably has more going for it in terms of continuity and cohesion.

I always get annoyed when I read some hack of an author who decides to write a Star Wars novel that introduces yet another superweapon and yet another supervillain that is Evil To Rival Lord Vader(TM). Kevin J Anderson should be shot.

[FrustratedPoet]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
LotR is vastly overrated.

Almost exactly half of the trilogy is tedious - the rest is great, though.

When I next read the book's I will only read ...
* Second half of FotR
* First half of TTT
* Any bits without Frodo and Sam in RotK
.... those bits kick ass, but I'd rather have my eyes poked out than read any other parts of the trilogy.

I think that anyone who has seen the films could quite happily skip the first 12 chapters of FotR - the Tom Bombadil stuff is utter silliness and nonsense. It bears no relation to the subsequent events in the book and is just a waste of time - the same is also true of the Barrow Wight bit, although to a slightly lesser degree.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I have to agree with your, UR.

The Hobbit (which I just read) was a better book than any of the 3 LOTR books, IMO. However, the parts with Sam, Frodo, and Gollum in TTT and RotK is great stuff.

[Urban Ranger]

Yup. The Hobbit is better. The first time I read Fellowship of the Ring I fell asleep on about the third page. On second try I decided to skip ahead until I found the interesting bits, so that turned out to be pretty good.

What bothers me is the whole black-and-white view:

"You orc, me elf. You bad, me good."

[Zero]

Don't lose ur virginity to a book...





Ugh LotR... theres two recent movies that I can remember falling asleep in. "Loser" and "LotR, fellowship of the ring".

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia
Cthulhu was a pantheon that many authors worked on. In that respect, it's similar to Ravenloft or Dragonlance or any of the AD&D worlds.

LotR is something that one single author fashioned and so it probably has more going for it in terms of continuity and cohesion.

I always get annoyed when I read some hack of an author who decides to write a Star Wars novel that introduces yet another superweapon and yet another supervillain that is Evil To Rival Lord Vader(TM). Kevin J Anderson should be shot.

Thats right, there are a lot of spin-offs, for example the "Dagon"-Cycle of Wolfgang Hohlbein.
But I think the majority of the Cthulhu Mythos (the most important Parts of it, like the great Old ones, the elder Beings) can be accounted to H.P.Lovecraft although Derleth had also a great influence to it.
I have to admit though that Lovecraft wrote primary Short-Stories for Magazines and not whole Books like Tolkien, so I agree, that the LotR-Universe shows more cohesion and continuity.