Have you read the books?
>>217280957I've read The Hobbit several times, LOTR I couldn't get into
no I'm not fucking reading 2000 pages of some retarded wizard in the forest
I read The Hobbit and the first two LOTRs but I got like two chapters into RotK and I couldn't take any more. It was just Pippin fucking around with a bunch of newly introduced characters and I couldn't make myself give a fuck.
Yes.They were a wonderful journey too. Man, do you ever FEEL it. You FEEL the weariness, you FEEL the lows and the highs of the adventure, you FEEL the immensity of the world and the sheer long trek across the perils of Middle-earth. The whole premise theme centers around going 'there and back again' and man, do you ever. I still gotta dive into the Silmarillion.
>>217280957Yes. I read the Hobbit in middle school on the advice of a teacher and I read LOTR in high-school.
>>217280957Yes, when I was 10, but I hardly remember any of it other than the tom bombadil part being very long and boring, a chad named prince Imrahil who wasn't even in the movies, and helms deep being less than a chapter long. I remember the book was more about organizing logistics and alliances against incredible odds more than it was about exciting battle scenes like the movies are
>The hobbits looked ahead and saw a road leading to the left on the west and they decided to take it and follow it right until they spotted a small hill shortly ahead to the east. After many hours of traveling they climbed the hill, spiraling around, until they ended up on the east end of the western side to the north of the hill and looked upon the valley in the cliff and saw a spring to the south. They followed the spring north and to the left for a time until they saw a path leading to the south and took it to the east.What the FUCK was Tolkien thinking? Why does it take the characters six hours to walk somewhere described as "near"?
>>217281121Cormac McCarthy mogs
>>217281121It's so funny that it takes like 200 pages in FotR to get to where Bilbo was in chapter 2 of The Hobbit
>>217280957Read? There's movies.
>>217280957Yeah I used to read them annually but over time my attention span has kinda fucked off
It amazes me how all of lotr + the hobbit + the silmarillion is only around 1700 pages longMeanwhile Game of Thrones isn't a finished story despite being 800 pages per book
>>217280957I think I was reading them shortly before or after Fotr came out. I can't remember for sure because I've blocked out large stretches of my childhoodI do distinctly know that I read the hobbit before seeing movie Gollum, and I imagined him to be an amphibious goldfish
>>217281121You think that's bad? He never once discusses Aragorn's tax policy.
I'd rather read Beowulf in Old English again than read a single chapter of Tolkien
>>217280957I tried but dear lord Tolkien I don't need to know the exact geographical layout of every place our characters come across.
>>217280957Yeah, but it was thirty years ago. Also I'm ESL, so kid-me struggled with some of Tolkien's old fashioned vocabulary. He uses weird words like "fortnight" that my dictionary didn't have. The Hobbit isn't too bad, of course, but I completely lost track of what was going on in Lord of the Rings. I didn't really understand the story until the Jackson movies came out a few years later.
>>217280957Yes. Why?
>>217280957NoBut I also haven't watched the movies either
>>217280957Yes of course, I'm a straight white non-virgin male
>>217281323>FotrFag of the rings?>>217281942>fortnightSkibidy
>>217281004Umm he's a very wise wizard in a forest ok?
>>217280957Two towers and return of the king.
>>217280957I've red them in high school and reread them few years after thatmy friend lend the books to me and after reading all the books I bought them all for myself, or should I say, my parents did3 of us in class were discussing them, we watched the movies together etc. but we all relocated after collage and we're just facebook friends now ;(fuck you OP, now you made me nostalgic and sad, I miss my nerdy friends
>>217280957Yeah. Used to be a bigger fan back in the day, Tolkien is a great world-builder but not really a great narrator, he leaves a lot to be desired in that and other regards. Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are fundamental for understanding the modern fantasy genre and I'd recomend it to people wanting to read fantasy, but he's not the end-all be-all that some times he's made up to be.
>>217283234Holy esl
>>217280957The Hobbit is a fun childhood romp. The LOTR trilogy is asking a lot for kids.... Two Towers is a slog, and not many had the patience/attention to push to all the way through 'til the end of RotK. But if they did, there's a nonzero chance they would seek out the Silmarillion, real hardcore nerd shit, basically the Dark Web of the Tolkienverse. I don't think Silmarillion readers are even capable of watching the Jackson films (probably because most are incarcerated in Supermax facilities).
>>217283234>collageThey had one job...
Yes but the Silmarillion is better.
>>217280957They’re the reason I can’t watch or enjoy the films anymore, knowing how inferior the films are to the real thing. Jackson is a hack, but in his defense, Tolkien warned that LOTR was unadaptable.
>>217280957Yes, and as usual the books brutally mog the movies. Everything good about the movies is straight out of the books and the worst parts of the movies are all the parts where they deviated from the books. That's why the Hobbit films sucked so bad, Jackson's wife was feeling herself and shat out scripts that were 80% her either fleshing out minimal plot points or just making shit up that was never there. The OT worked because 90% of it was out of the book and she wasn't allowed to do too much damage. But the book is 100% out of the book.And specifically, the book has two advantages:1) It can be as long as it needs to be and isn't obliged to omit or rush through anything to meet a studio-mandated runtime or concerns about muh pacing. You get all the details. A conversation with Farmer Maggot. Bill the Pony's backstory. The council of Elrond that decides the fate of middle earth isn't three minutes long. Everyone gets more dialogue. Everything gets more context. Galadriel's character actually makes sense and isn't just some weird chick who shows up for a scene and does weird shit for vague reasons. I could go on but you get the point. The books are the complete version. Everything else is cliffs notes.2) The books were not written with an eye towards mass appeal and thus there is no attempt at modernization of pandering or accessibility. They're long and they're weird and the characters speak and act like people who actually lived in a pre-industrial fantasyland thousands of years ago. There's no contrived Legolas action scenes, no dwarf tossing jokes, no painfully anachronistic dialogue. The books have a versimilitude the movies could never possess. The characters feel real and fleshed out and 100% part of the world, not just the simplified one-note versions the movie had to turn them into. Especially Frodo. Book Frodo is a got damn fucking hero, movie Frodo was a twink who just had bad shit happen to him while he whined about it. Read the books
>>217283981It's a shame he never got flesh out the best parts of the Silmarillion because there's some amazing shit going on in there. But it's almost an impossible task. LOTR covers a time period of about one year and it was 1,000 pages. If he'd fleshed out the Silmarillion in the same way it'd be a fucking encyclopedia and he'd never have come anywhere near finishing it.
>>217281121>he doesnt like forestsbrownoid spotted
>>217284483It was surprising so it was hard to be disappointed but Rings of Power, which I didn't both watching, was such a bummer.
>>217280957Yes.
>>217284555wasn't*
>>217284483Read Unfinished Tales. It fleshes out the bits about Turin Turambar a bit and gives some added background stuff. Also there are The Children of Hurin, The Fall of Gondolin and The Fall of Numenor novels that were edited by Christopher Tolkien but I’m not sure how much of it directly came from JRR Tolkien as a completed or partially completed narrative.
>>217280957Yes, I read all six of these
>>217284555There was a 0% chance that was ever going to work because it has the same problem the Hobbit movies did but to an even more extreme extent. It's based off canon plot points but so much of the content is completely invented and so it's only as good as the writers who invented it. And nobody working on that show has the right to sniff Tolkien's jock. It's like taking a barely legible sketch by Michaelangelo, handing it off to a committee of barely competent DEI hires and expecting them to produce the Sistine Chapel. The only guy who could do it right is the guy who did it to begin with, and he's dead. All the middle-earth content that was actually fleshed out by Tolkien has been done, and they fucked up half of it. Nothing can happen now but more disappointment.
>>217280957I've only read the Rings of Power
reading it now. liv tyler's character's barely in it at all. fucking elrond casted the river horses, not her. battle of helms deep is all different too. this is some bullshit. good thing the movie cut out that tom bombawhatever, that dude was pointless
>>217280957Read the hobbit multiple times growing up and I thought it was fantastic.>>217284033but this is why I'm still holding off reading Lotr. I don't want to tarnish my opinion of the films.
>>217286848Liv taking that role was a godsend.
>>217281004>ayo deez wizards wuz wilin n sheeit I see a massive opportunity
>>217280957My 10th grade English teacher was a massive fan so we read all 4 + passages from the Silmarillion in his class.
>>217280957Yes, all 4
