Tolkien knew Latin, Old English (His translation of Beawolf is still considered one of the best), Greek, and Icelandic. He read the myths of Europe in the original languages. Many of his character names can be found in these ancient texts.

He and C.S. Lewis were at the same college and were members of a weekly literary club, where they had srong arguements about the role of allegory in fantasy novels. Tolkien wrote a great essay called “On Fairy Stories” which established the basic formula for the genre.

But to spend your whole life building an imaginary world…I haven’t decided yet whether that is wonderfully strange, or really creepy.

Another reason…a third of third book you hold in your hand is the rather lengthy appendicies – purely a scholarly read – that explains many back stories in oh-so-greater-detail. So you’re closer to the end than you think.

For a couple of decades, I read the trilogy every June. An hour or so a day, with a frosty mug and a comfy chair, for a month would get me all the way through the whole thing. Some years I’d follow it up with the Silmarillion, which reveals Tolkien’s word creating brilliance.

As you read this last book, know that it was largely composed as letters to his son serving on the front of WWII. Tolkien himself lost many friends in the Great War of his generation.

Tolkien also is known to have worried a great bit about the timing of celestrial events described by his scenes,(mobius award claimed) making sure the moon was correct from scene to scene.

His lanquage changes through the trilogy, moving from a slightly more mature version of the Hobbit, to the far darker stories of earlier ages of his created world. The tone moves from the sing-song syntax of the encounter with Bombidill to the formalized-myth speech of the climax. He wrote many of his histories as epic poems, and this starts to seep out during the final chapters of Return of the King. I think it is that change of the style of prose that catches new readers and drives them to set the story aside before the arc has reached its end.

So I’d say finish it. Sit on a poach with a cold beverage and let it play out. The movies were great, I’m a big fan, the Hobbit Movie comes out next December, the Hobbiton Set is simply perfect…But they are not the books.

Tolkien’s story is better.

But what can you expect from a collaboration between John Huston, Ray Bradbury, and Gregory Peck?

But you’ll have to have it all put out after the Savoy Truffle.

I also read the (even much better) Lampoon Frank Herbert parody “Doon”.

It starred such notables as Pall Muave’Bib, Duke Lotto, the Lady Jazzica, Baron Hard-Chargin’, Princess Serutan, the Revved-up Mothers (the Boni Maroni), the Schleppin’ Guild, the Noamchomski, the Shutout Mopes, Gurney Halavah, Dr Wellington Oh-Yeah, Drunken Omaha, Safire Halfwit, and the rise of the Kumquat-Hagendasz on the kitchen planet Arruckus.

Best of all, it skewers Herbert’s ponderous prose style perfectly:

This realization focused within him in a sudden sparkflash computation, and in the clear brilliance of that illumination, the boy Pall understood a profoundness. His life, hitherto a child’s plaything, devoid of direction–seemingly! Or had there in fact always been a plan–a plan within a plan within a plan (whatever that meant (whatever that meant (whatever that meant)))?–was now encompassed by a terrible purpose. He knew the meaning of the word terrible, and he knew the meaning of the world purpose. And therefore he understood deeply the meaning of “terrible purpose” Unless he, in the solitude of his deeply brain-filled mind, misunderstood this revelation, and was in fact confronted with a “terrible papoose.” What could that mean?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lampoon's_Doon

Fucking brilliant.

I suspect ER might be in the “Oh God, not another fucking elf” zone.

The Trilogy was big when I was in college, and that’s when I read it. The “authorized” paperback edition, with a note by Tolkein that said “those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it and no other.”

A reviewer on a popular movie review website declared that he had not read any Harry Potter books, and wouldn’t until after he’d seen the movie.

I’m not sure how well that order of things works out. There’s no real way to tell if that’s your problem or not.

It’s hard to think of any example where I saw a movie I liked and then read the book for the first time. “Iron Giant” was one, and to my surprise, the movie was very different and considerably better.

I took a lot of trouble when my kids were young to expose them to the original books of Dr. Doolittle, Mary Poppins, Bambi, and many others, so they wouldn’t grow up thinking of Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews first.

Read it decades ago in realtime. Not only is the title coincidental, it was, as I recall, a respectable condensation of the story down to one slim paperback. The “finely-ground lean Ring” thus distilled made an easy read even for the most impatient.

Typical parody, silly name mappings like “Tom Bombadil” to “Tim Benzedrine”, “Gollum” to “Golly”, and on and on. The foreward said they produced it by ripping out the pages of the original, throwing them up in the air, then hopscotching across the resultant mess. Which must have produced a statistically-significant sample, because I recall that they conveyed a sense of the original story.

I know you’ll enjoy it if you can find a copy somewhere.[Several used on Amazon for cheap...one less, I couldn't help clicking.]